by Alex Irvine
The cacklefiend kept coming at Remy. He met it head-on, sword thrust out at its chest. The blade went deep and Remy planted his feet, keeping the cacklefiend’s jaws away from him. From the corner of his eye he saw Biri-Daar hacking down on its back, twice before Keverel caved in its ribs with his mace. It slumped to the ground, the awful giggle dying in its throat as the Abyssal light went out in its eyes.
Remy walked to the nearest dead gnoll and wiped the blade of his sword on its fur. The cacklefiend’s blood ate into the flesh. Before sheathing his sword, Remy scrubbed it down with sand. The other members of the party did the same, not talking for the moment as each of them came slowly down from the pitch of battle. Keverel broke the silence, murmuring healing charms over Lucan’s wounds and then ministering to Kithri as she stirred and wakened. The unscathed members of the party dragged the bodies of gnoll and cacklefiend far enough away from the campsite that the night’s scavengers wouldn’t be tempted to add adventurer to their menu.
It was some time before anyone said anything to Remy, and when the words came he wished they hadn’t. He had just finished cleaning his sword and was oiling it and wiping it down, looking forward to a few hours’ sleep before the sun would come up and the wastes breed new monstrosities for them to face. He heard someone approach and stop. It was Lucan, fresh bandages showing through the holes in his tunic and jerkin.
“How come the cacklefiend wanted you so badly?” the elf asked him. “It fought its way through us to get to you. What is it you have there in your little box? Care to show us?”
“I told you I can’t.”
“Perhaps I can.” Lucan nudged Remy’s pack with the toe of his boot. “Come on. Let’s have a look.”
Remy knew bullying when he saw it, and he knew that if he didn’t put a stop to it now it would grow into something far worse. He stood. “We just fought together,” he said. “I don’t want to fight against you now.”
Lucan was taller than he was, but Remy was broader and had one other advantage. He was ready to fight, and he didn’t think Lucan was.
Biri-Daar stepped in before things could get any more tense. “Lucan,” she said. “Remy swore an oath. Would you have him break it?”
Lucan didn’t answer. His gaze remained on Remy, who looked back.
“Lucan,” Biri-Daar added. “Even if we wanted to open the box, would you do it without knowing what those charms on its lid might unleash?”
There was a pause. After a delay, the common sense approach appeared to work. Lucan looked away from Remy at the group’s dragonborn leader. “The cacklefiend was looking for him,” he said to her, pointing at Remy. “Because of what he carries. That endangers all of us.”
“Perhaps,” Biri-Daar said.
Remy was suddenly and uncomfortably conscious of the fact that the entire group was looking at him. Something permanent was being decided about his status within the party, and how it affected their mission.
“What endangers us is you breaking away from the group when the gnolls had us surrounded,” Remy said before he could stop himself. He was a stranger to the group, perhaps, but he was damned if he was going to be made a scapegoat.
“You dare,” Lucan growled. A dagger appeared in his hand, the motion too fast for Remy to follow.
“Hold,” Biri-Daar commanded. “Remy, you will not question Lucan’s stomach for a fight while I am here. He and I have faced down creatures the like of which you cannot imagine. And Lucan, the gods have brought Remy into our group. We will not cast him out while their reasons are still unclear to us.”
“If the creations of the Abyss are following him,” Keverel said quietly, “I’m inclined to think he’s on the right side.”
“Enemy of the enemy is my friend, is that it?” Iriani said.
“Something like that,” Keverel said. “Remy, would you mind if Iriani and I took a closer look at that box? The sigils might tell us something that we need to know the next time creatures come out of the dark looking for it.”
“If we just left him here, we wouldn’t have to worry about it,” Lucan grumbled. His good-natured, jousting demeanor was utterly gone, as if the brief battle had killed off his sense of humor and left him with an inexplicable hostility toward Remy. For his part, Remy could only wonder whether Lucan was ashamed of how he had reacted in the fight or something else was happening that Remy couldn’t detect.
“True,” Kithri said from a little distance away. “But if he’s not around and horrible monstrosities stop following us, we are going to have a lot less of this.”
Everyone turned to look as she came back into the firelight. “I know they’re only gnolls,” she said, “but all of you need to sharpen up your looting instincts. Look what we have.”
On a flat rock near the campfire, she spilled a number of objects she had bound up in a cloth.
“Trust Kithri to distract us with gnoll trinkets and trash,” Lucan said—but he went right along with the rest of them. “What wonders have you found? And which ones went into your pockets before you told us about the rest?”
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” Kithri said as she spread her findings out on the rock. There was nothing in the way of coins—gnolls had no use for them—but there were four things of interest. An armband worked from silver in the shape of entwined snakes, with tiny jewels as their eyes; a human jawbone with its teeth replaced by cut gems; a gold ring set with a square green stone; and a pearl, a single pearl, worked into an earring with gold wire.
“And this was tied around the cacklefiend’s neck,” Kithri said, drawing a pendant from her pocket. “I thought I would save it for last.”
Biri-Daar took it and handed it to Keverel. “Do you see what I see?”
“Demon’s workmanship,” Keverel said with a nod. “I can feel it even if I can’t see it. Erathis knows.” The god’s name brought a pale gleam from the pendant and Remy realized that gleam was what had first alerted him to the presence of something beyond the firelight.
“This pendant is a demon’s eye,” Biri-Daar said. “It guided the cacklefiend and the gnolls to us.”
“Or to him,” Lucan said, pointing at Remy with the dagger he had not yet put away. Remy began to feel that a fight between him and the elf was inevitable, and he did not feel confident of winning it.
Biri-Daar’s response made him even more uncertain. “Or to him,” she echoed. “Which means that we need to know more about what he carries, and why. But the wilderness is no place for such investigations. Lucan, we didn’t rescue this boy just to kill him. Put the blade away.”
Lucan did, with a last cold glance at Remy, who was a bit nettled at being called a boy. Yet now was not the time to challenge the group any more than he already had. He bit his tongue. Biri-Daar swept all of the treasures into cupped hands. “We’ll sell this, or have it appraised at least, when we get to Crow Fork Market,” she said, holding her hands out to Iriani. “Iriani, is any of it of use to you?”
The mage floated a palm over the items and closed his eyes. “There is some power in the jawbone,” he said after a moment. “But nothing I would dare use. Corellon would turn his back on me, and for good reason. There is evil in it.”
“Then we must be careful who we sell it to,” Biri-Daar said. “But maybe we can wring some good from it.”
Everything went into a pouch at her belt. “We ought to sleep now,” she said. “First watch to the unwounded. That means me and Remy.”
“For someone without much experience fighting in a group,” Biri-Daar said after everyone else was asleep, “you did well.”
Remy nodded, accepting the compliment.
“And it’s a good thing you can fight,” the paladin went on. She looked from the campfire to Remy. “Even though you should maybe have been more careful about picking a fight with Lucan. He was right that the cacklefiend was looking for you. That’s what the demon’s eye was for.”
The fire was burning low. Remy poked at it and watched the swirl of the
glow in the embers. “I understand if you’re not sure what to say,” Biri-Daar said.
“I said everything I know,” Remy said. “I don’t know what’s in the box. I only know that Philomen wanted me to take it to Toradan.”
“So you don’t know what it is and you don’t know why Philomen gave it to you. Let me ask you this: what do you know about Philomen?”
“That he’s the vizier in Avankil, and has been since well before I was born.” Remy said nothing about the darker rumors of sorcery that Philomen’s enemies propagated throughout the city.
“Do the people of Avankil trust him?”
“If they don’t, they’re shy about saying so,” Remy said.
“With good reason.” Both of them watched the fire for a few minutes. Remy wondered what Biri-Daar was thinking behind the roundabout questions about the vizier.
Out in the darkness, something growled and there came the sound of tearing flesh. “Scavengers are out,” Remy commented.
“Worried?” Biri-Daar looked at him and he shook his head. A bone cracked. “Why do you think Philomen gave you something so important?” she asked.
Remy bristled. “Because I’ve carried things for him before. I’ve never failed him.”
“And you don’t ask questions,” Biri-Daar added. Remy didn’t challenge this. “Because if you did,” the dragonborn added, “you wouldn’t be here.” She lapsed into thought again until Remy broke the silence.
“What are you getting at?”
Still the silence went on. Remy yawned. Finally Biri-Daar said, “If someone is looking for what you carry, and that someone is powerful enough to make a demon’s eye, then you ought to ask yourself what the vizier thought was going to happen to you out here.”
Now it was Remy’s turn to fall silent.
“There are two possibilities, Remy,” Biri-Daar said after some time. “Either Philomen has enemies who are after what you carry, or the vizier himself is using you to get the box out of Avankil and he planned to have you killed in the wastes. Either way, more is going on than you or I understand. And either way, someone wanted you dead. That means that what you carry is important.” The dragonborn shifted her weight, her armor creaking. “And now you should sleep. One thing you learn when you leave the cities is that when a chance for sleep comes, you take it. No questions asked.”
Remy knew he should keep watch with Biri-Daar, but he was too tired to argue with this small kindness and too confused to assess everything she had said. He lay down where he was and was asleep so fast he couldn’t even remember touching the ground. He dreamed of fighting a battle and winning, only to find that another battle awaited and another victory, and another, and another …
In the morning, the bodies of the gnolls were gone but the cacklefiend lay untouched except by flies that appeared as the sun rose.
The next morning passed uneventfully except for minor bickering among members of the group who wanted to spend a few days in Crow Fork Market and those who wanted to stop just long enough to replenish their supplies and then get on with the trip to Karga Kul. Lucan and Kithri wanted to delay, Lucan for the gaming and Kithri for the possibilities of a little recreational purse-cutting; everyone else wanted to get on with it. “You two are agreeing on something?” Remy needled them, seeing a chance to perhaps mend some of the fences broken in the aftermath of the previous night’s battle.
Kithri laughed, a high pure bell of a laugh slightly at odds with her fundamentally larcenous nature. Lucan, by contrast, didn’t crack a smile. Remy had the feeling that the elf still bore him a grudge; his ready wit seemed to appear at all occasions and conversations save those involving Remy. This preoccupied Remy as he backtracked along the section of the Toradan Road he had followed in the last day before the scorpions had found him. He found he had few memories of that day; between passing Crow Fork and waking up in the care of Keverel, all Remy remembered were general sensations of heat and dust and endless broken landscapes where no living thing moved. There was a dreamlike quality to those sensations, and Remy lapsed into that dream. His task was going unfulfilled, Biri-Daar had raised troubling questions about Philomen … Remy had to wonder what he was getting himself into.
Perhaps the thing to do was take his share of the spoils from the gnolls, buy a horse, and traverse that stretch of the Toradan Road for a third time. He owed them a debt for saving his life, but he didn’t think it was a debt any of them were especially interested in collecting.
And either way, he would finally make his first trip inside the walls of Crow Fork Market.
Its walls reared up just then like a mirage on the horizon, shimmering and flickering with the promise of everything civilization had to offer in the midst of the endless empty wastelands. A sandstorm had prevented Remy from seeing those walls on his way east toward Toradan; he enjoyed the fine clear day not least because it showed him the sight of the market, resolving and solidifying as if it were actually becoming real.
Remy knew part of the story, the part that any child who grew up along the Dragondown Coast would know: In an age forgotten even by the time of Arkhosia and Bael Turath, a market had sprung up around an oasis at the intersection of two roads. Perhaps it had sprung up because a freak desert rainstorm had bogged a caravan down in mud so deep that when it dried, the merchant could not dig his wagons out and all of his beasts had died. So he stayed, never arriving at his destination—which might have been any of the ancient cities that since lay in ruins along the shores of the Gulf. It might even have been the ancient city that lay below Karga Kul.
At first it was a collection of tents, a way station for caravans skirting the edge of the desert but wary of coming too close to the bandits and worse that haunted the Blackfall’s banks. There was water there, and safety in numbers.
Over the centuries, the market had grown. Walls had sprung up around it, and earthen berms. Cisterns had been dug, and cellars to store goods that would not survive long in the Fork area’s heat and dust. As Remy walked through its road gate, it was larger than any town he had ever been in except Avankil. Above the ground, awnings and tents that had once stood by themselves now fronted permanent stalls and rows of wood-frame houses. Remy wondered how much the builders had paid to get that much wood all the way out here. The nearest tree was forty miles away. At the center of the market stood a citadel built of sandstone. “More than once,” Keverel said, “Crow Fork Market has stood against an army. Below that keep, there are cellars. Below the cellars, dungeons. Below the dungeons …” He trailed off. “One hears stories.”
“Who invades a place out in the middle of a waste?” Remy asked.
“Recently?” Kevel said. “The hobgoblin warlords who ravage these wastes have had their eyes on this market since before you were born.”
Around them surged the activities of commerce, a storm of getting and spending. Crow Fork Market stood at the crossroads of the southern Dragondown. Any land route between Toradan, Avankil, and Karga Kul passed the Crow Fork.
Iriani stopped a passing fruit seller and spent a piece of silver on a basket of apples. Holding them up to everyone, he said, “Apples in the wastes. Who wouldn’t fight to control this place?”
“Me,” Biri-Daar said. “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t waste a goblin’s life on this place.”
Keverel looked around, taking in the chaos. He had mentioned to Remy that morning that he, like Remy, had never been inside the market’s walls. “History is long. One imagines that the actions we find baffling made sense at the time,” he mused.
“Or that people were just as stupid then as we can expect them to be now,” Lucan countered dryly.
“At least once, it was an elf army that marched on the market,” Biri-Daar reminded him. “Which by your formulation would mean that elves can be stupid just as humans can. Or halflings.”
“Or dragonborn,” Kithri added cheerfully.
“The propensity for foolishness knows no racial boundaries,” Keverel commented. “Shall we eat?”
>
The area immediately inside the gates of Crow Fork Market was reserved for the staging of caravans and merchant missions. From there, grooms took their horses and walked them along the wall toward the stables that were set away from the main bazaar spaces. To the left and right were rows of stalls offering every kind of foodstuff found within three months’ journey. These stalls were hotly contested, and handed down across generations. Few things in commerce were certain, but one of those few certainties was that a caravan arriving was hungry and a caravan leaving thought it might be. In both cases, food was desirable.
Remy ate skewers of fried squid from the Furia coast, where the waters were deep and wracked with storms. He washed them down with a strong tea chilled by ice brought down from the glaciers high in the Draco Serrata. It was said that some of those glaciers contained the preserved bodies of warriors and mages from the age of Arkhosia, and that so powerful was their magic that when the ice melted from around them they walked and breathed as if they had never spent frozen millennia beneath the alpine stars. There were those who believed that ice from those glaciers had healing properties, as did the water that remained when the ice melted. Remy didn’t know about that, but he would willingly have stated that the tea itself had restorative properties after ten days spent in the wastes.
Tieflings down from the mountains mixed with their ancient adversaries, the dragonborn; members of warring nations and clans haggled over the same goods; zealot and unbeliever poured and drank from the same tankards. Crow Fork Market, by tradition and decree, was a place where the only permissible violence was that done to a customer’s purse.
Spiretop drakes flitted from the gate towers and nestled under the eaves of the keep at the center of the market. They were an irritating scourge of some cities, threatening unlucky citizens and stealing anything shiny that caught their attention. In Avankil, Remy had earned bounties from the Quayside neighborhood constabulary for killing spiretops. It was how he had learned to use a sling. They were the rats of the air, only smarter and more vicious than rats. Remy was tempted to take a shot at them now. Instead he sipped his tea and crunched the last of the fried squid, spitting their beaks onto the stones. “All of this came from somewhere else,” he marveled.
