War in Tethyr

12

Unseasonable overcast trailed tendrils down into Zazesspur like arms clad in dirty, wet wool sleeves. They brushed Zaranda's face with clammy familiarity as she hustled along narrow Hostler Alley to her early morning appointment. The air was given added presence by the smells of last night's grease, this morning's breakfast, and fresh horse dung.

The buildings' upper stories cantilevered over the already narrow alley so that they threatened to pinch off the dangling arms of cloud. This was a district given over to hostelries of the middle grade and lower and served the Other needs of travelers: stables, provisioners, and taverns. There was also the inevitable water-fluid population of demimondaines, barkeeps, scullery maids, back-alley bones-rollers, charm-vendors, cutpurses, rogues, bards, alley-bashers, and joy-girls and — boys, few of whom could be found abroad at this hour. The visitor to Zazesspur must seek elsewhere for fixed places of entertainment. There were theaters of various sorts in the Players' Quarter, and gambling palaces and brothels in their own discreetly fortified precincts. There, well-paid sworders and the odd mage kept at bay the riffraff, whether jack-rollers and strong-armers, social activists who followed the brothers Hedgeblossom and Earl Ravenak, or even the individual city councilors' uniformed goon squads. The very lowest ranks of such establishments were to be found in Bayside, the waterfront district, where the genuine riffraff held sway.

Tourists were at something of a premium these days. The harbor traffic, which was all that kept the city alive and reasonably prosperous, provided some custom for the inns, but nothing like what they had been accustomed to before the troubles began. Some hostelries had simply converted themselves into apartment blocks serving those displaced by the nomad invasions or the discord in the countryside, but it was still a buyers' market for short-term accommodations. Which was how Zaranda was able to keep herself and her comrades quartered in reasonable comfort despite the state of her finances, which were eroding like an arroyo bank in a heavy rain.

Preoccupation and a poor night's sleep dragged Zaranda's head forward and down from its customary proud carriage. As a result, she almost bumped into a man who came boiling out of a gate to her left. Or rather, smoking; he was trailing smoke and sparks from hair and clothing, and caterwauling like a man whose hair and clothes were on fire.

He pitched himself headfirst into a stone horse trough, raising a substantial hiss of steam and an even more substantial reek.

"What seems to be the problem?" Zaranda asked mildly as he reared up with algae hanging about his face and ears like green dreadlocks.

He pointed a dripping, still-steaming arm back through the gate into the stableyard. "Th-that witch," he said, sputtering spray. "She put fire to me."

Zaranda felt her brows knit in a frown. Her own experience told her "witch" usually referred to a female, and in no complimentary way. Best move along right now, the cautionary voice within her said. You've an appointment to keep, and this affair is none of yours.

She hitched her belt around to bring Crackletongue's hilt more closely to hand. "What witch?" she asked.

Faces were beginning to poke out of windows. Some were sleep-blurred and reluctant, others open and awake, but all showed some degree of eagerness. This was a district of honest working folk who rose and set with the sun, as well as others who lived to different schedules, morally and chronologically, but Zazesspurians of all stripes relished little more than a good civic disturbance. A small but brisk disturbance brewed in the stable-yard. Angry voices muttered. There came thumps and foot-scuffles and a squall like an angry badger. Then into the alley came a knot of rough-hand laborers and stable-boys, dragging with them what appeared to be an animated bundle of pale sticks and dirty burlap. The bundle was kicking and flailing and emitting the angry noise.

As they cleared the open gate, there was a sharp crack! a fat blue spark, and a smell of ozone. At the same instant the whine resolved itself into "… let me go? The bundle's captors instantly obeyed, with yelps of dismay. "What," Zaranda asked mildly, "is going on?" A gap-toothed stableboy wearing a badly stitched leather hood was waving his hands in the air as if to cool them. "The creature shocked us!"

The creature in question reached a thin, dirty hand to part tentacles of dirty red hair. An amber eye peered forth from a grimy, snub-nosed face. It took in Zaranda with a wild adolescent mix of defiance, hope, and fear.

"Why were you holding, um, her in the first place?" asked Zaranda, concluding mainly from intuition that the captive was female. She made her hand slide along her belt away from the saber's hilt. She felt she had lost points yesterday by drawing blade on Earl Ravenak's earnest young ravers. Surely she could handle a random handful of louts without recourse to arms. Particularly since this is no business of yours.

"She witched Zoltan!" another lout exclaimed. He was a pinch-faced lad with curly, dirty blond hair and soiled apron, who was waving a butter paddle with as much menace as such an implement could muster. Unlike most of the others, who wore the blue and green of the Hostlers amp; Stablehands Guild, he had a green and brown rag knotted about one skinny biceps, signifying his affiliation with the Taverners, Innkeepers, amp; Provisioners.

"She's always up to tricks," a third said. "She soured a pail of cream Luko was carrying to the buttery of Bustamante's Excellent Hostelry."

"I did not," the redheaded girl said heatedly. She was even dirtier than her tormentors, Zaranda noted. "At, least, I don't think I did."

"Did too!" blond Luko declared, brandishing his paddle for emphasis. "And now she set Zoltan all aflame."

"He didn't look all aflame to me when he hit the horse trough," Zaranda said. "More smoldering around the edges."

"She made me get all tingly all over my body!" Zoltan announced. The way the slime-tendrils hung down over, his ears and between his wildly rolling eyes made him re-semble some kind of exotic and unsavory sea creature that had crawled up the pilings in the harbor. "Then my hair caught fire! And my clothes, too. I was burning up!"

Zaranda stared at him.

He dropped his eyes. "Well," he said, "I was smoking pretty good. Feh." He spat out muck.

"It's time we paid her back for her tricks!" cried somebody from the back of the small mob. The others growled assent-an ugly sound, though without any perceptible move to put it into effect.

"What's your name, girl?" Zaranda asked.

"Scab."

"How attractive. Did you really do that to him?"

She nodded. "I woke up to find him pawing me as I slept in the a-s-straw!" The dam of her defiance burst, and her face flooded with tears.

Beyond her sobbing, the silence in the alley grew even thicker than the fog.

"No, child," Zaranda Star said for what felt like the hundredth time. "I don't need an apprentice. Besides, it's not exactly healthy to be in my vicinity at the best of times, and these are far from that."

Scab stuck out her underlip in a truly impressive pout. Zaranda said nothing. The girl produced a tremor in the projecting lip, and when that elicited no more response, a shine of moisture appeared in an eye visible between clumps of dirty hair.

They sat on the steps of what had once been a fine residence of green granite blocks, between a pair of stone guardian beasts that had long since weathered to couch-shaped lumps. The building had been converted to a carpet warehouse; the arched doorway at her back was bricked over. Zaranda had her long trouser-clad legs drawn up before her and her arms around her knees, and, still ignoring her companion, gazed off across the Carpet Mart.

The sun was high in the sky. The broad plaza, flagged in yellow sandstone worn to a shiny and treacherous polish by generations of feet, was dotted with the rug merchants' kiosks, hung like flags with their colorful wares. Despite the troubles, buyers still flocked to Zazesspur from the north of Faerun to purchase excellent Tethyrian wool carpets, as they did to buy the finely finished furniture and cabinetry for which Zaz itself was famous. Myratma was better known for other textiles; but Zazesspur was the place for rugs.

Of course, the buyers would go back home with lurid tales of having purchased their wares from camelback, from hawk-faced bearded men with flowing robes and headcloths, and would sell them as "Calimshite" rugs. In fact Calimshite silk rugs, though pretty, were inferior in craftsmanship and durability to Tethyrian wool carpets; the real gems of the great bazaar in Calimport were silken rugs from far Zakhara-wondrous indeed, if of the nonflying variety, since the Zakharans exported few of their magic carpets willingly. Still, to most of the folk of the Heartlands and farther north, all fine rugs from the South were Calimshite, and that was that, just as Amn and Tethyr were called Empires of the Sands, in spite of not having any sand to speak of. People are like that, and not just on Toril.

Still avoiding Scab's piteous gaze, Zaranda sighed and stretched. It had been an eventful morning.

When Zaranda and her self-proclaimed charge arrived, a brief but vigorous skirmish had been in progress between some of Earl Ravenak's bullyboys and a patrol of civic guard blue-and-bronzes armed with iron-shod cudgels, evidently bribed by the carpet merchants to take an interest in Hairhead doings, which they were notorious for overlooking. The square had subsequently hosted two outbreaks, a jostling, and a battle royal among the colorfully caparisoned retainers of the various city council members. The last of these, from which the rug merchants were just finished righting kiosks and dusting off rugs knocked sprawling by the festivities, had pitted the minions of Anakul the Just against the goons of Jinjivar the Sorcerer.

Anakul was something of an oddity: a professed devotee of evil who, though he wore the silver wrist-chains of Cyric, used as his personal symbol the black hand on red field of dead Bane. Even for Zazesspur in the years after the monarchy's overthrow, it might seem a little much to have a man who was openly nostalgic for Bane on the ruling council, but so obsessive was Anakul in his zeal for order and the rule of law that he was widely known as one of the most honest men in the city. It was said that he only cheated you if he had the full force of law on his side, justifying his only half-sardonic nickname. Of course, not even his passion for order prevented him from employing a robust corps of head-knockers. That was sheer survival.

Jinjivar the Sorcerer didn't hire head-knockers, as far as anyone knew, though he paid claques to spread rumors in the streets about his magic prowess. The son of a Calim Desert chieftain and-again, he claimed- the pasha's daughter by a concubine, Jinjivar had grown to adulthood among the nomads. He still maintained many contacts in his homeland, and though Tethyrians tended to disdain handiwork other than their own, had grown rich selling them magical and fanciful doodads for which their neighbors to the south, were known, such as sand-clocks that turned themselves and brooms that swept of their own accord. Since his men wore blue and purple while Anakul's livery was the black and red of Bane, the latter conflict had been particularly trying for Zaranda's eyes.

The one thing Zaranda hadn't seen was any sign of the one-armed man. You've done it this time, her internal voice chided. You stuck your nose where it didn't belong and went saving the world again, and now you've lost your chance to regain your goods.

Scab emitted a sigh so gusty that she must have almost burst herself drawing in the air for it. "That's it, then," she announced in doom-filled tones. "If you won't take me as your apprentice, I shall stop eating and starve myself to death. Quicker in the long run."

Despite growing disappointment and desperation, Zaranda had to press her lips hard together to keep from smiling. "Come, now. Surely it's not so bad as that."

"Yes, it is. I'm an orphan. I have no home. I can't work or sleep at the stable anymore, and no one will apprentice me. Death is all that remains."

Zaranda frowned and rubbed her chin. To be sure, the girl was in a hard way. It's no concern of yours, the voice inside her said. Sometimes that voice seemed to represent good sense-sounding not unlike Goldie, in fact-and other times something darker. Just now she had to admit the truth of what it said. Yet there was something about this girl that drew her.

"Why can't you keep an apprenticeship?" she asked.

The girl drew her head down between the shoulders of her burlap smock, which seemed to have as much filth and grease in it as jute. It had taken all of Zaranda's skill at maneuvering to get the girl to sit downwind of her, and the occasional shift in the wind's direction still made her wince.

"Come now," Zaranda said in response to Scab's mumble. "You can't expect me to consider taking you on if you won't be candid with me."

"Things… happen," the girl said, as if the words were being drawn from her on a rope knotted bigger than her throat.

"'Things'?"

"Like what happened at the stable. Strange things… magic things, I guess."

"Like spells?"

The girl shook her head. She had lowered her face, and tears dripped from beneath the obscuring curtain of her hair. "No. I only know one or two spells, little things. That's all I've ever had time to learn."

"Then what?"

"I don't know. I get worried, or scared, or mad, and things just happen. Then I get sent away again. I can't control it. That's why I want to study magic. So I can figure out what's happening to me."

She raised her head and looked at Zaranda through lakes of tears. "It's just as well this way. You'd just get mad and send me away too!"

No, girl! the voice in Zaranda's head cried. Not a challenge!

She surveyed the square a final time. No sign of a one-armed man or anyone taking interest, undue or otherwise, in the tall swordswoman and her scruffy companion. She had missed the one-armed man-if indeed he ever existed.

From an alley debouching onto the north side of the square issued a party of shaggy youths in black and brown: Earl Ravenak's toughs. Merchants and buyers scattered as the youths marched determinedly upon a Hedgeblossom crowd, brandishing cudgels and steel-singing lengths of chain.

Zaranda stood. It was time to admit she had come on a fool's errand and get on with her business. Indeed, the vague outlines of a plan were taking shape in her mind. She would still take what steps she could to regain her lost fortune here in Zaz. But if that didn't work, she was already working on an alternative.

That was her way: ofttimes the physical, impetuous side of her nature got her into trouble, but she had a keen eye and a quick wit, and she had long learned to rely on those faculties to get her out of whatever tight places she found herself in. Her current situation looked hopeless-but that was when she did her best work.

The Hedgeblossom orator-who did not appear to be a halfling himself-had hopped down from his wagon-seat podium. Now he threw off the canvas covering the bed, revealing a pile of makeshift shields and weapons: nail-studded staves, iron bars, a few rude short swords. Snatching these up, his listeners fell eagerly upon the surprised Hairheads and commenced to whale on them. "Have you a name?" Zaranda asked the girl crouching at her feet. "What?"

"A name. Surely you weren't born Scab." "Chenowyn," the girl said sullenly. "That's a lovely name. Chenowyn." "I don't feel lovely."

"Start using your proper name, rather than 'Scab,' and who knows? That may yet change."

"What's the good of being lovely if you're a mage?" the girl demanded. Abruptly she clouded up again. "Not that that matters anymore. Not that anything matters…"

"Oh, stand up," Zaranda said. "It's time to go." Chenowyn stared up at her in astonishment. "You mean you'll take me as your apprentice?"

"No, I'm out of the magic business. But I won't leave you wandering to starve in a gutter-or get yourself lynched, more likely."

The girl stuck out her underlip. Zaranda stretched forth her hand. "Now come, if you're going to. Or stay: your choice."

Hesitantly the girl took her hand and pulled herself upright. Zaranda grinned and ruffled her hair. "That's the girl, Chen. And who knows? I may be able to use those wild talents of yours."

"Don't look now," Goldie said as Zaranda came into the dusty day-warmed gloom of the stable. The mare had the place all to herself. "There's a nasty derelict kobold sneaking up behind you."

Chenowyn drew herself up to all her not-slight height. "I'm not a kobold," she said. "I'm a girl."

"You could have fooled me," the mare said. "In fact you did."

Chen's eyes bulged as it struck her that she'd just been addressed by a horse. "It talks!"

"Goldie, meet Chenowyn," Zaranda said. "She'll be staying with us for a while. I just know you two are going to get along."

Goldie rolled an eye at the girl, then peeled her upper lip away from her front teeth and bobbed her head in the universal horse gesture for you stink. "Goldie!" Zaranda said sharply. Then to Chen: "Don't take it to heart. She's not civilized this hour of the morning."

Chen was staring at Goldie, with the expression one would wear looking at a captive Hook Horror. "It's sunset," she said.

"That's Goldie for you."

Goldie produced a gusty horse sigh. "I can see you've been terribly busy out hunting up strays to adopt. I suppose it's no great surprise you haven't been by earlier to find out that a patrol had come round to arrest your pet orc."