by Kate Novak
“The Night Mask agents shouted that Jamal was marked,” the paladin reminded her. “Do you think he is Jamal? Or the old woman is?”
“Well, it’s hard to imagine they had it in for the halflings. The old woman—” Alias hesitated. She switched to the Saurial tongue. “She’s my mother. Finder left me a memory that she’s my mother, but I don’t know her name. She must have thought I was nuts, calling her mama.” Alias kicked furiously at a hunk of smoking timber that had fallen from the shop, spraying sparks through the alley.
Dragonbait plucked her cape from the ground. It was scorched and smoke-drenched, but he hoped she would take comfort in the feel of its weight on her shoulders. “We should leave this ghost home. There is nothing for you here.”
The roof of the shop crashed through the second story to the ground. Now that it was down, the bucket brigade turned its attention to the ruined shop.
“Why did Finder choose this place as my home?” Alias wondered aloud.
“He didn’t need a reason, Alias,” the paladin said. “It was just a game to him, giving you memories. It never occurred to him that your feelings would be hurt when you learned those memories were false.” It never occurred to Finder to worry about anyone’s feelings, he added to himself.
Alias shook her head. “No. There was a reason. He had to have a reason.”
Dragonbait remained silent as Alias stood staring into the flames of her memory home. Just as he was beginning to worry how long she would dwell on the unreasonable, she suddenly returned to the original task at hand. “Let’s find this Mintassan and get him the staff,” she said. “Then we need a room in an inn—preferably one made of stone.”
Dragonbait nodded in agreement. “I hope you know where we are,” he said, “because I lost my map in the flames.”
Alias smiled grimly. “Yeah,” she said. “It should be right around the corner here.”
Three
The Actress and the Sage
This time it was around four corners and about a half-mile away, through empty streets and past bustling bars, past groups of young toughs who gave the smoky warriors a few catcalls and older, more grizzled veterans who gave them a wide berth.
At the last corner, the appearance of the neighborhood improved markedly. The pavement stone was uniform and unvandalized. The buildings were constructed from more brick and stone than wood. The oil in the steetlamps burned more brightly and smoked less. The streets and thresholds of every building had been swept within the last week. There was no visible sewage.
Mintassan’s townhouse was constructed of brick in the Sembian style—the first story was half underground, its door at the bottom of a narrow, descending stairway surrounded by a brick retaining wall, and the second story was raised several feet, its door atop a broad stone staircase. The lower quarters, usually reserved for servants, were where Mintassan had set up his shop. A sign mounted over the lower door displayed the sage’s sigil, the Beastlands symbol topped by a waxing crescent moon and surrounded by a circle. The sign read, “Mintassan’s Mysteries—Curios from Very Faraway Places.” The door itself was divided horizontally, and the top half stood wide open. They could see there was a light blazing in the shop within.
Just as Alias and Dragonbait approached the stairs, a high-pitched shriek came from the room below. Alias and Dragonbait exchanged glances. There could be a completely innocuous reason for a scream to be coming from the sage’s shop, but after all their other evening adventures, caution did not seem out of place. They crept down the staircase and hovered at the doorway, peering in and listening.
Magically glowing stones in glass globes hung from the ceiling, illuminating the shop. Shelves and tables within were covered with the curios from very faraway places. Most of the items were creatures that had once been alive but were now pelts, skeletons or stuffed trophies. Most were creatures Alias had never seen before, but a few she’d heard of in bards’ tales. Mixed in among the trophies were a few sculptures of strange creatures and vases and bowls depicting mythic beasts.
In the center of the room, a big man sat on the arm of a red velvet sofa directly beneath a globe. He wore a billowing cotton shirt and baggy pants, both white, and a powder-blue vest embroidered in gold thread. His long chestnut-brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a leather thong. His back was turned to the door, so Alias could not see his face. In one large hand he held up the bare, shapely leg of someone lying on the sofa, and was currently rubbing something on the sole of the foot belonging to the leg. The high back of the sofa also blocked Alias’s view of whoever was lying there, but whoever it was was no doubt the source of the first shriek, for a moment later a second shriek rose from the sofa, followed by a woman’s voice crying, “Ow, ow, ow.”
“The pain’ll be good for you,” the man said. “Remind you not to go fire-walking without both your slippers. Personally I prefer heavy boots when I run around burning buildings. Now don’t fidget. It takes a moment for the salve to work.”
“It wasn’t my idea to go barefoot,” a woman’s voice argued from the sofa. “It was that witch. I told you, the slipper came off when she grabbed my leg. She nearly had me. I was lucky to escape with my skin still on.”
Even if Alias hadn’t recognized the situation described, she would have recognized the voice. It was a little sharper and more nasal than her memory recalled, but it sounded like her mother, the phony mother Finder had given her.
“Jamal, be reasonable,” the man requested. “She’s dead. She’s been dead for years.”
“Since when’s being dead slowed down a wizard?” the voice on the couch argued. “I’m telling you, Mintassan, Cassana’s come after me. The Night Masks set the fire, of course, but she was there, too. She’s trying to kill me for that rude skit we did about her and that lich-boytoy of hers.”
Mintassan gave a long-suffering sigh and insisted, “Cassana’s dead, Jamal.”
No, she isn’t,” Jamal retorted, sitting up straight on the sofa and waving her finger in Mintassan’s face.
“Well, actually, yes, she is,” Alias said, turning the handle of the lower half of the door and letting herself into the shop. “I cut through her staff of power myself up on the Hill of Fangs ten years ago. I survived the blast that killed her only because I was half standing in another plane. Cassana was burned to ash. And if she came back by some fell sorcery, I’d know immediately, but she hasn’t. She’s still dead.”
Jamal’s complexion went as white as an underfed vampire’s as she stared wordlessly at the newcomers, one a dead ringer for the sorceress Cassana, the other a lizard creature resembling a monster from a tale of darkest evil.
“Cassana was a distant relation,” the swordswoman explained as she circled the sofa and stood before Jamal and Mintassan. “Alias the Sell-Sword, at your service,” she introduced herself with a sweeping bow, “and this, I believe, is yours,” she added, holding out the slipper she’d taken from the woman in the burning building.
Mintassan shook his look of surprise at Alias’s self-announced entrance and smiled broadly. “There, Jamal, see. There was a perfectly rational explanation. Pleased to meet you, Alias. I’m Mintassan the Magnificent, though my friends call me Mintassan the Mad.” Mintassan offered his hand, and Alias accepted it in her own.
Mintassan was tall with broad shoulders, but somewhat overweight—his gut parted the center of his vest. Nothing, Alias thought, that a few laps around the Sea of Fallen Stars couldn’t take care of. Perched on the sage’s nose was a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles made with glass as thin as soap bubbles. Alias wondered if the spectacles were magical or if Mintassan wore them to give himself a look of erudition. In his baggy white pants, billowing shirt, and bright-colored vest, he really looked more like a merchant than a sage. Aside from the glasses, the only other clues to his scholarly interests came from the sigils embroidered in his vest and a tiny ornament fastened to the vest’s lapel—what appeared to be the skull of a tiny mammal.
As Alias shook hands with the sa
ge she realized his eyes lingered over the azure tattoo emblazoned on her right arm. Alias pulled her hand away self-consciously and turned her attention back to Jamal.
Jamal remained frozen, staring at the swordswoman, trying, as she fought off her obvious terror of a long-dead sorceress, to take in all of Alias’s and Mintassan’s words.
Alias set the slipper down on the floor in front of the sofa and stared back at the other woman. Jamal was older than the “memory” that Finder had given the swordswoman, with wrinkles etched about her eyes and her neck, but she looked almost regal with her posture straighter than a schoolgirl’s and her flowery housecoat draped dramatically over the sofa. She remained unbowed by the pressures of Westgate life or the sordid attacks of its underworld. Yet there remained something comic about her appearance, the frayed sleeve of the housecoat, the singed hem, the scarf half falling off, the missing slipper. Alias was reminded of meeting an artist’s model once. The painting looked just like the woman, but the woman was nothing like the painting; without the brush strokes, she was less romanticized, but much more real.
“I’m nobody, also at your service,” Dragonbait whispered in Saurial.
Alias shook herself from her reverie. “Oh, and this is my companion, Dragonbait,” she said, indicating the saurial with a wave of her hand.
“Yes, of course,” Mintassan said, nodding and offering the paladin his hand as well. “Dragonbait the Saurial Paladin. Companion to Alias of the Magic Arm. We’ve heard a halfling bard tell of your exploits down at the Empty Fish. Haven’t we, Jamal?” the sage asked, nudging the older woman.
Alias fidgeted slightly, but kept her agitation in check. The only thing she disliked more than strangers knowing details of her life was when the strangers were spellcasting sages like Mintassan.
Jamal finally overcame the shock of Alias’s resemblance to the sorceress Cassana and was able to concentrate on Mintassan’s words. “Ruskettle,” Jamal said. “Milil’s Mouth, can that woman ramble.”
“Exactly,” Mintassan agreed. He turned back to Alias. “The tales, however, do not do justice to your loveliness.”
Alias fidgeted again under Mintassan’s appraising eyes. He had a bold gaze that she found rather forward.
Jamal sighed and slapped the mage’s leg. “Mind your manners,” she reprimanded.
Mintassan grinned and asked, “Please, allow me to present to you my current charge, a patient singularly lacking in patience, that talented and fearless righter of wrongs, Jamal the Thespian, Jamal the Lady of Cheap Heroes and Cheaper Theatrics—”
“Jamal the Slightly Parboiled,” Jamal finished, as she picked up her recovered slipper and slid it gingerly over her wounded foot. “So what were you doing in my burning house?” the woman asked, her distrust obviously not completely allayed by the fact that the swordswoman was a character in the halfling Ruskettle’s tales.
“Um—We just happened to be passing by when we saw the Night Masks run out of the building and toss a torch back in,” Alias explained.
“And then you followed me here just to return my slipper?” Jamal asked suspiciously.
“Well, no. We have business with Mintassan,” Alias said defensively.
“What business?” Jamal insisted.
“Grypht’s business,” the sage replied with a theatrical grimness. “And for such dark work we should retire to the back room.” Mintassan strode off behind the shop’s counter and through a doorway hung with a curtain of glass beads. “You might as well join us, Jamal,” the sage called back over his shoulder. “I’ll make tea. You can be mother and pour. You can serve as a witness to our transaction, too.”
Jamal rose slowly and motioned for Alias and Dragonbait to go before her. Alias suspected she did so more out of caution than courtesy. Jamal did not want them at her back.
Alias moved cautiously through the curtain, into an extraplanar graveyard. While the trophies in the front of the shop had an air of respectability by virtue of their mounted settings, the remains of the dead in the back room gave the place a grisly appearance.
Fur and hide pelts of every color hung from the ceiling. Work tables all along one long wall were covered with boxes of bones and skeletons in various stages of being pieced together with pins and wires. Pickled internal organs filled jars on the shelves over the work tables. The ceiling was covered with strange insects stuck there with pins in their thoraxes. A box at Alias’s elbow contained red eggshells and the remains of three baby birds. Snake skins and feathers lay out on the writing table beside a sketchbook. There were piles of boxes and crates beneath all the tables and all around the perimeters of the room. Alias did not want to know what was inside any of them.
“Wonderful what he’s done with the place, isn’t it?” Jamal said with sarcasm as she noted Alias’s discomfort. “Early Abattoir—a Sembian style you don’t see displayed much in the finer homes of Westgate.”
“Grypht gave us to understand that your specialty was transmutation, which, if I recall, excludes the necromantic arts,” Alias said, treading as politely as she could into what Mintassan’s business was with so many dead things.
The sage looked back at the swordswoman with a gleam of curiosity in his eye. “My, my. Heroism, sword skill, beauty, and brains all in one. Where, I wonder, did you learn about the art?”
Alias flushed, but did not reply. Finder had filled his creation with everything he’d known, and she could forget none of it. It wasn’t the first time she’d embarrassed herself with a demonstration of more knowledge than she ought to have.
“Yes,” Mintassan replied to the swordswoman’s comment when he realized she wasn’t going to reply to his query, “you’re quite right. Specializing in transmutation does exclude necromantic studies. But while other transmuters choose to study the more mundane and commercially lucrative transmutations, straw to gold, salt water to fresh, sow’s ears to silk purses, and so on, I prefer investigating the mutation of nature itself—or herself, as your religion requires.”
Mintassan stood beside a massive table, which dominated the center of the room. The table, some castoff from a Westgate festhall, judging by its thick legs and velvet-covered sides, was littered with various scholarly debris: maps of the inner and outer planes, tomes with mildewing leather covers, diagrams and sketches of creatures, calipers, rulers, magnifying lenses. The sage picked up a hunk of amber larger than his fist and held it out for Alias to see.
“I am seeking the secret,” Mintassan said, “of how the descendants of a creature like this—”
Alias peered into the amber and could see an animal that resembled a bat embedded within.
“—become a creature like this.” With a flourish the sage yanked a black cloth cover off a second specimen—the mounted, mummified head of a tanar’ri, a powerful denizen of the Abyss.
Alias and Dragonbait drew back, startled. The next moment, though, Alias’s eyes squinted in disbelief. Mintassan was teasing them, or testing them somehow. “And whose ancestor is that little fellow?” she asked, pointing to the tiny mammal skull Mintassan displayed on his vest lapel.
Mintassan stroked the tiny skull almost reverently. “My own,” he declared, but a moment later he looked just a little doubtful, “I think,” he amended. The sage picked up the tanar’ri head, looked around with a frown for another empty flat space, and finally set the grisly trophy in an empty crate labeled, “Spell keys and other darks.” From Finder, who had traveled in other planes, Alias knew those were planar slang for magic components and mysteries.
“Please, have a seat,” the sage said as he pushed all the remaining junk on the table to one side. “Excuse me while I get the tea things together.” He disappeared into a side alcove, leaving Alias and Dragonbait alone with Jamal.
“Planar travel has scrambled his wits, but he’s really sweet and harmless,” Jamal said matter-of-factly. There were eight completely mismatched chairs set about the table. The actress flopped into an overstuffed chair of worn and tattered brocade and put
her feet up on a rocker of woven cane.
Alias settled into a wooden chair with a wolf skull mounted atop its straight, high back. Dragonbait’s choice was limited by his massive tail, so he perched on a three-legged stool carved from ruby quartz.
From the alcove came the sound of rattling pots, the squeak of a hand pump, and a magical cantrip, followed by the whoosh of an enchanted flame igniting. Mintassan was singing a bawdy version of “Lie Down, Ye Ladies” in a passable baritone.
An uneasy silence had settled over the occupants at the table. Jamal watched Alias with the attention of a fox watching a wolf. Alias held her smile until it felt like a brittle, dried leaf.
Jamal tilted her head from side to side, studying Alias. Finally, she said, “I remember you now.”
Alias felt her chest tighten. “You do?”
“According to Ruskettle’s tale, you’re the one who popped in over Westgate with the mad god Moander, chased by your friends, riding a red dragon.”
Alias felt her heartbeat slow to its normal rhythm.
“I saw that battle,” Jamal declared. “Moander puffed up like an overproofed loaf of bread. The dragon spat flame at it. Boooom! Fried dragon and chunks of rotting god rained on the city. Took out a piece of the city wall, the Dhostar warehouses, and a lot of the northwestern slums.”
Alias felt the heat return to her face. “It was an accident. If there was something we could have done to avoid damaging your fair city, we would have. Cassana and her crew jumped us right afterward, and after we killed Cassana, we ended up in another plane, so we never got a chance to apologize.”
Jamal laughed raucously. “Apologize? Whatever for? That crash shook out this town like a dirty rug. The town’s merchant nobles thought a new Flight of Dragons had arrived! There was total chaos while they all tried to save themselves and, of course, their merchandise. All of them had egg on their faces when the furor died down, especially Ssentar Urdo. Family Urdo called in a marker with some old Thayan necromancer to protect its docks. The necromancer was inebriated at the time, centered his spell too low, and teleported a squad of skeletons into the dock itself. Little rib cages and arms and skulls waving around, trying to pull the rest of their bodies through the wood. Mintassan collected a specimen as I recall. He really wanted the dragon’s skull, but someone else snatched it up before he reached the scene of the crash. He was so disappointed.”
