Azure Bonds

26 Reunion at The Rising Raven

Alias reached Westgate well ahead of her friends and, of course, Giogi, only to find the city sealed. Persons without residence or official business within were turned away from the gates by squads of guards, backed by crossbowmen on the walls. She did manage to convince a guard to take Daiseyeye to The Jolly Warrior and board her for, as she explained it, “a warrior who will arrive from Cormyr on official business.” She trusted the purple-sealed document would get the young Wyvernspur past the guards.

As she stood by the gate, Alias could see smoke rising from the northwestern section of the city. Other travelers told her that a dragon had crashed within the city, smashing into a portion of the city wall, damaging some buildings in the slums just outside the city and several of the Dhostar warehouses within. The Dhostars, one of the powerful merchant families that ruled the city, convinced the others to slam a seal down on the city’s gates until the matter was cleaned up.

Alias considered circling around to survey the damage from the outside, but she was feeling worn from fighting and riding and dragging around the chain attached to her arm. Besides, the inns outside the city wall would soon be filling up with other travelers banned from the city. She decided she’d better get a place to stay.

She remembered an old inn near the south gate: The Rising Raven. Perhaps she could hock her eagle barrette as an artifact in order to pay for a room and a bath. Used in battle against a god, she thought, holding the slightly melted piece of silver up to the sun.

Her cheer faded some since she had no one with whom she could share her joke. Even if Moander had lied and her friends were still alive, they were still up north, hundreds of miles away—she would not see them for a long time, if ever again. Already she missed them and felt lonely.

She was rounding the merchant yards of the Guldar family, when a familiar but very hoarse voice bellowed her name. She turned and peered down the road behind her. Three mud-spattered, bedraggled figures were waving their arms to attract her attention.

“Akabar!” she shouted. The weariness dropped from her and she ran to them, hugging first the mage, then the lizard, and finally even the halfling. Olive bridled some, drawing back, more concerned with brushing hardened mud from the front of her outfit.

“You’re alive!” Alias blurted, beaming at them. Olive looked as though she’d been swimming in a swamp, Akabar was dressed in a ragged kilt, and Dragonbait leaned heavily on his sword.

“You noticed,” Olive grumbled. “We just chased you from one side of the Realms to the other. Now we can’t even get in the gates. Damned forces of law and order.”

“It’s all right,” Alias assured her. “I know a place outside the city walls. They …” She almost said, “They know me there,” but she realized that they, like Jhaele of Shadowdale, would remember nothing about her. “They have good food,” she finished.

“I don’t care about eating,” Olive retorted. “I just want to get clean. I feel like I’ve been swimming in a sewer.”

Alias looked up at Akabar, wanting to apologize again for all the horror he’d gone through because of her.

As if reading her thoughts, the mage said, “We can talk when we get where we’re going.”

The swordswoman nodded. “Here, Dragonbait, give your sword a break and lean on me for a while,” she insisted, slipping herself beneath one of the lizard’s scaly arms and taking his sword in her other hand.

Akabar expected the proud saurial to refuse her help, but he accepted Alias’s close proximity and fussing like a cheerful child. Is it only the identical markings that bond them together? Akabar wondered. Or something more?

Alias did not recognize the innkeeper from her previously “remembered” stays at The Rising Raven. The inn was packed with traders and adventurers. Even if it hadn’t been so crowded, the innkeeper needed only one look at the ragtag crew before he began shaking his head vigorously, denying the existence of any vacancies.

Olive was the one who came to the rescue. Following the man across the tavern room, she whispered something to him that Alias and Akabar could not catch. Then she slipped him a coin. The innkeeper’s hospitality brightened. He led them from the inn, past the stable, to a warehouse with a small apartment within. The quarters were cramped but clean, and the innkeeper promised to send them hot water as soon as possible. Then he left them.

Dragonbait began to lay a fire in the stove, and Olive sat down in a corner, resting her head on her knees, exhausted. Alias examined Akabar’s shoulder and grimaced.

“You’ve dislocated it, all right. How’d you do it?”

“Ran into an old friend,” Akabar joked and tried to shrug. He winced at the pain.

“I wonder what Olive said to the innkeep when she bribed him,” Alias said softly.

“I wonder,” Akabar replied in an equally soft voice, “where she got the platinum coin she bribed him with.”

Olive moved over to the whisperers. “You want to wear that to bed tonight?” she asked Alias, nodding to the shackle about her arm. “Or do you want me to pick the lock?”

While Olive was working on the iron bracelet, two foot-boys arrived at their doorstep, one bearing a large copper tub, the other an ornate screen. They set these down, scurried out, and then returned with a pair of buckets and an oversized kettle. After setting the kettle on the stove and the buckets on the floor, they pointed out the location of the well, should the adventurers desire more water.

Olive declared the honor of the first bath and began setting up the screen to block the tub from view. “I’m sure I won’t be able to reach into that well,” she said to Alias. “Would you mind?”

“As soon as you get me out of this chain,” the swordswoman insisted.

“Oh, bother,” the halfling grumbled. She banged the manacle once with the end of the chain, and it sprang open.

“You have a really light touch,” Alias teased. She grabbed the two pails and set out for the water. Akabar followed.

“You won’t be much good for hauling with a bad arm,” the swordswoman said as she poured water from the well bucket into one of the pails she had brought.

“I am good for other things,” said Akabar, unsmiling. “I am a spell-caster as well as a merchant.”

“We’ll have to get a healer for that shoulder,” she continued, not understanding that she’d offended him.

“We’ve developed our own methods in your absence,” Akabar added, leaving Alias completely confused. His coolness hurt her. She realized that even though she’d come to terms with not being human, accepted it, and was now prepared to go on living, Akabar might not feel the same way about her. And if her friends didn’t accept her, who would?

An awkward silence fell between them.

Finally, Akabar overcame his pride—his usefulness was no longer at issue, and they had more important things to discuss. “Alias, what Moander said, what it made me tell you, what it made me do, the way it used me—I think I understand how you must feel.”

Alias finished filling the second pail and set it down beside the first. She shook her auburn hair and stared at the ground. “It told me you were all dead,” she said, swallowing back the memory of the grief and horror that had accompanied that moment. “It was lying then. It could have been lying before.”

Akabar was silent.

“What is it?” Alias asked. “Tell me,” she demanded.

“I was in its mind, as well,” the mage explained. “As far as it knew, it was telling the truth.”

“I see.” She looked down into the well. Her reflection in the water mocked her. Golem, homonculus, made-thing, that’s how the mage saw her now.

“It changes nothing, though,” the Turmishman said. “You are my friend, and I mean to help you, no matter how many gates we must pass through.”

Alias stretched out a hand and laid it on his good right shoulder, prepared to tell him he must leave, that she would not have him facing any more danger on her behalf, for the very same reason: he was her friend.

Before she could open her mouth, though, Olive, wrapped in a towel, called out from the doorway, “Are you getting water or what out there? I’m getting chilled, and the kettle’s already boiling.”

Alias grabbed both bucket straps and duck-walked the full buckets back to their apartment. Akabar followed, cradling his bad arm and quietly cursing the small, dirty halfling. She had been a nuisance since the day they’d met.

Once the bard was settled in her bath, soaking, and half-humming, half-singing some obscene ditty to herself in the tub, Alias turned her attention to Dragonbait’s wounds.

The sigil of Moander had faded from the lizard’s tattoo just as it had from hers. Her glee at discovering this was soon squelched by the sight of his wounds. There was a bloody half-healed gash on his hip, and he flinched when she touched an ugly greenish bruise on his side, indicating a possible broken rib. She offered him some warm compresses for the pain.

“We’re going to have to get a cleric,” she said again. “I wonder if one will be available after the dragon’s crash. Every time I turn around, Mist’s victims seem to be sucking up all the available healers. This’ll be the last time, though. How did you ever come to team up with her?”

Akabar sat down beside Dragonbait and gave him a gentle nudge with his good arm. “Do you want to tell her, or should I?” Dragonbait made an amused snorting sound.

“Listen closely. Mist followed us from Cormyr. She ambushed Ruskettle while we were in Yulash, but Dragonbait subdued the dragon and convinced her to work alongside them to rescue us. They rescued me first only because Moander thought me more expendable. The god opened some type of magical gate from the Elven Wood to here, and we followed the creature through it with the help of your finder’s stone. I think we lost that, didn’t we?”

Dragonbait nodded and looked down at the ground, apparently ashamed at having mislaid Alias’s property.

“Then Mist shook us loose, whether intentionally or not I could not tell. She died fighting the old god.”

Alias held up a hand. “You said Dragonbait subdued Mist and convinced her to help. You mean Olive …”

“Not the halfling. Dragonbait. He can talk, but not in ways that we can understand. He uses—”

“Smells,” Alias guessed, remembering the heavy odor of violets she had detected in Moander’s temple in Yulash.

Akabar nodded. “Mist understood him. And he has no trouble understanding us. You know from Moander, of course, that his people are called saurials.”

“Yes,” Alias said, remembering. “It also said something about him being a pure soul—he was intended as a sacrifice to enslave me somehow.”

“He’s more than that,” Akabar explained. “He’s a paladin in his own world, much like the ones you have up north. He can heal in the same fashion. So you see, we need only wait a few days and he can make both of us good as new.”

Alias looked into the lizard’s yellow eyes. “You healed me when I came out of Mist’s cave with my chain mail fused?”

Dragonbait nodded without expression.

“And when I hurt my arm smashing the crystal elemental with your sword?”

Again the saurial nodded.

“You sneaky devil,” Alias said with a grin.

My feelings precisely, Olive thought behind the screen, but she did not give away her eavesdropping.

Alias, however, meant the words as a compliment. Dragonbait hung his head, though, ashamed of his deception.

“You had no idea, did you?” Akabar asked.

“No,”

“You don’t seem very surprised.”

Alias shrugged. “I have evil assassins, evil mages, evil gods, and evil who-knows-what-all chasing me. Why shouldn’t I have a guardian paladin?”

Then it occurred to her why not. So far, Moander’s words were a secret between her and Akabar. She did not think Dragonbait knew. Akabar would not give her away, but it would not be right to keep Dragonbait with her, risking his life for her. She was just a thing. She was fully intent on sending her companions away, out of danger, and now she had the means of driving the faithful lizard from her side.

The idea of losing Dragonbait’s tender concern left an ache in her heart, and the thought of losing his protection left her more than a little afraid. Don’t be stupid, she tried to convince herself. You’ve taken care of yourself all of your life. You can do it.

Then she remembered that that just wasn’t true. She’d only been born last month, and all that time she’d had the lizard as a nanny. How could he not know? But if he knew, why did he stay? No doubt he’d been fooled like Akabar into having pity for her.

I’ll have to leave them, and I’ll have to leave without telling them, she thought. She ran her hand down the smooth, pebbly scales of Dragonbait’s arm. Aloud, she said, “I just want you to know how much I appreciate you. Everything you’ve done.” She could not resist—she hugged the lizard again and then turned and hugged Akabar. “Both of you.”

“Well,” Olive said, stepping out from behind the screen. “Nice to know you’re safe and appreciated, isn’t it?” The bard was dressed in a pink robe, with scarlet pants beneath. Her yarting was strung across her back, and a pouch hung on her belt. The expression on her face was a mixture of jealousy and disapproval.

“I appreciate your friendship, too, Olive,” Alias assured her as she walked toward the screen. She knelt before the halfling and reached out to hug her as well.

The bard stepped backward, almost toppling the iron tools stacked by the stove. “Please, don’t,” she snarled, holding up a hand. “You’re filthy dirty, and this is my last clean outfit. And halflings don’t hug. Hugging is a problem when you’re the size of most human children. So no hugs.”

“I’m sorry, Olive,” Alias whispered.

Ruskettle glared at her for a moment, then announced, “I’m going to try to get into town. Get some gear for us, see what rumors I can pick up about Moander’s people and all your other ‘pals’ down here.”

Akabar broke in, “I’ve been to Westgate before. I think I might have better luck getting past the gate guards.”

“You’re decked out in borrowed halfling gear,” countered Ruskettle. “They won’t take you seriously. I’ll get something suitable for you to wear. And, no,” she waved aside Alias and Dragonbait, “I work better alone. Especially considering you two are probably wanted by someone or something in Westgate.” She strode to the door and then turned back, looking at Akabar.

“One more thing. If I can get a healer to come out here, I will. There’s no sense in you living with the pain until he gets enough beauty sleep to fix you up.”

She left the room, slamming the door behind her.

“Was it something I said?” Alias asked Akabar. “What’s gotten into her?”

Akabar remembered how annoyed Ruskettle had been by the saurial’s deception. Apparently, it would take the halfling longer to overcome her anxiety.

Dragonbait hissed at the closed door, and the scent of freshly baked bread wafted from his body.

Ruskettle strode east from The Rising Raven, her short legs still complaining about the earlier long walk to the city. If the dragon had crashed to the north and west, then the guards would be at their weakest at the south and east. The river gate would be her best bet.

The halfling’s ears burned, and she was positive that her “friends” were talking about her in the warmth of their warehouse apartment. She had been the one to provide their shelter, yet everyone still fawned over Alias, fought for Alias, and chased through the nine hells for Alias, while she, Olive, had been abandoned with a dragon. And for what? It wasn’t like they got any money for what they did.

And to top it off, Alias was so bloody perfect. Like a doll. You wound her up and she rescued people or slew monsters or sang perfectly beautiful songs. And her luck was incredible. Not even a halfling had that kind of luck. She’d been kidnapped by a god—a god, for god’s sake!—and she’d escaped, and Akabar and Dragonbait and the dragon had slain the god for her.

The lizard-paladin was another problem completely. The halfling’s thoughts wandered back a number of years to an ugly incident in the Living City. She’d been at a bar when some holy fighter, a human paladin, rose unsteadily to his feet, pointed a worn knuckle at her, and shouted, “Thief!” No one doubted him; no one believed her. The fact that she had another’s purse in her hands did not help her situation, but she had managed to escape. Since then, she walked carefully around such beings, beings who could look into a person’s soul and tell if he was good or evil. That scared Ruskettle. It wasn’t fair. And now it turned out that one of these snooty law-and-order types was a member of their party. She felt the saurial’s eyes on her all the time, judging her and weighing her worth.

Olive ground her teeth. Now she was going shopping for the warrior-woman, her pet paladin, and the mage. Even Akabar had a tendency to treat her like a child or a thief. He was the hero of Alias’s rescue, his spells made the difference, while it had been the lizard’s skill in battle that had recruited Mist in the first place. But she, Olive, had been useless. And Akabar would have left her on Mist’s back, left her to die, when he flew off to rescue the paladin.

Part of her mind refused this interpretation, knowing full well that everyone had good reasons for doing what they did. But the small part of her mind was easily ignored. What difference does it make? she thought. Sooner or later, Phalse’s friends were going to show up and take Alias away.

“I could use a drink,” she muttered. “Better yet, several drinks.”

She was just passing the Vhammos yards, its paddocks jammed with horses and caravan oxen, when suddenly someone addressed her. “Hello, Lady Olive.”

Ruskettle was startled. Perched on a fence post was a short, familiar figure. He was dressed in sunburst yellow taffeta, fashioned into the costume of a Vilhon Reach merchant. His smile stretched nearly ear to ear in an inhuman mockery of the humanoid form.

“Phalse!” Olive wondered if the pseudo-halfling could read minds. “A Fortune. Well met.”

“A fortune and well met to you, dear lady. You’ve surprised me. I did not know you were bound for Westgate. May I accompany you into the city?”

Ruskettle nodded, and Phalse hopped down from his perch. He paced the halfling as she walked. “The river gate?” he asked.

“However did you know?” Olive grinned pleasantly.

“Thinking like a halfling, my lady,” he answered. “I must repeat, I am astonished to see you here so soon. Were you involved with the sky display earlier?” He waved an arm toward the seven mounds south of the city.

Olive’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe,” she replied coyly, but she wondered how he could possibly know that.

“Maybe—that’s a straight answer from a halfling. I take it the human woman is with you?”

Ruskettle shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe.” She had the uncomfortable feeling that her time with Alias was going to end much sooner than she’d expected.

Phalse smiled. “I see. Will ‘maybe’ be the answer to my inquiries about your other traveling companions, the mage and the lizard?”

“Maybe.” She wondered what the pseudo-halfling’s interest was in Akabar and Dragonbait.

“I think you and I should have a drink,” he said. “Several drinks.”

The small couple approached the gates, where a squad of soldiers was posted, checking credentials. Phalse took Ruskettle’s arm gently, and they strolled through gates, into the city, completely unchallenged.

“I’m impressed,” the bard said, jerking her head back at the gate guard. “What’s your secret?”

Phalse winked one of his peculiar blue eyes. “Clean living. Let’s find a nice, quiet bar with private booths and low ceilings. I have a deal that I am certain will interest you.”

“As long as you’re buying, I’m all ears.” Olive moved a little closer to Phalse, and he tightened his grip on her arms.

“Well?” Alias said, pursing her lips.

“Gone,” Akabar replied. He’d been peering at the swordswoman’s arm and the saurial’s chest with a tiny magnifying glass. “The surrounding pattern hasn’t just covered up its sigil, the sigil has disappeared completely.”

“Do you think the sigil might return if Moander gets another body in the Realms?”

“I’m afraid that’s a possibility,” the mage sighed.

They were all cleaned up now, wrapped in towels and blankets while their clothes dried in the late afternoon sunshine. Dragonbait had played nurse, helping Akabar with his bath, a service that had made the Turmishman mildly uncomfortable, but which he had accepted gratefully since his only alternative was Alias’s help. In the meantime, Alias had fashioned him a cushioned sling to cradle his arm until Dragonbait could repair it properly.

Akabar leaned back on the room’s lower bunk. “So where does this development lead us?”

“Into more hot water. We’re just outside the city where Cassana and the Fire Knives are supposed to reside. I have a hunch that our mystery bull’s eye sigil owner resides here as well. And now that we’ve exploded a very large calling card over their city, odds are they know we’re in the area.”

“Maybe they’ll reconsider their actions and leave us alone. We destroyed one of their partners already—the god.”

Alias shook her head. “No. They’ll just become more ruthless. Akabar, I want you to go home to Turmish—take Olive and Dragonbait with you. Being near me is too dangerous.”

Akabar asked, “What good do you think you can accomplish alone?”

“Find these people,” said Alias, “Talk to them. They need Dragonbait to put their plans into motion, so they won’t be able to control me as long as he’s safely hidden somewhere.”

“They could always just brand another victim to sacrifice.”

Alias shook her head again. “I don’t think that would work. Remember, Moander said I drew my independence from Dragonbait, that we’re linked until his death. They won’t kill me; they’ve even taken precautions to see that I’m not injured. But all the rest of you are targets.”

Akabar harumphed. “They haven’t shown a tendency to talk before. Bully, threaten, and battle, yes, but never talk. They won’t negotiate with you. As far as they’re concerned, you’re no better than a horse, to be owned and ridden and slain as need be. If they already have you in their sights, it will be that much easier for them to accomplish their ends. All they’ll have to do is search out Dragonbait. Running and hiding won’t do us any good.”

“Maybe not, but if you stay here you’re at risk. Please, Akabar,” Alias pleaded. “I don’t want to see you killed.”

“There are worse fates. You and I both know that.”

Dragonbait knocked on the side of the bed, summoning their attention. Using a charred stick, he drew on the flagstones the four sigils he and Alias both wore and also the unholy symbol of Moander.

“Yes?” Alias prompted.

Dragonbait pointed to Alias and himself and then scuffed out the flaming dagger—the mark of the Fire Knives.

“Yes, we beat the assassins,” Alias agreed. “They weren’t very tough, were they?”

He pointed to Alias and himself and Akabar and then scuffed out the sigil that might or might not still belong to Zrie Prakis, the sigil of interlocking circles. Then he pointed again to himself and Alias, drew an inverted tear drop with a mouth and scuffed it out along with the insect-squiggle of Cassana’s mark.

“We beat the crystal elemental and the kalmari. The kalmari belonged to Cassana?” the mage asked.

Alias nodded. “She told me in a dream. You dreamed the same thing, didn’t you?” she asked the saurial.

Dragonbait nodded. He pointed to Akabar and rubbed out the unholy symbol of Moander like he was squishing a bug. Alias noted that the paladin gave all the credit for the god’s death to the mage. Then he pointed at the three of them and splashed water from the kettle onto the flagstone.

Akabar laughed. “He’s right, you know. Between the four of us we’ve defeated everything your would-be masters have thrown at us. If we remain together, we can defeat the lot of them.”

“Only if you continue to cooperate,” a sharp female voice said from the doorway, “and if we do not. But your little demonstration this afternoon persuaded us to unite.”

Alias, Akabar, and Dragonbait leaped to their feet, their eyes fixed on four people who had entered their cottage apartment. Three men, dressed in black leather, and the woman from Alias’s dream in Shadow Gap.

“Cassana” Alias breathed.

The woman lowered her hood. Her chin was sharper, her features older, her hair longer and better tended, but her features were Alias’s. She might have been her mother. “Yes, Cassana. I’ve come to take you home, Puppet.”

Favoring his good leg, Dragonbait sprang for the upper bunk bed for his sword, and Akabar began chanting a spell. Alias grabbed a poker from the stove tools.

Cassana laughed.

Akabar’s spell was disrupted as the floorboards beneath him erupted and skeletal hands grabbed him from the hole and pulled him through the floor. He disappeared with a scream.

A trio of daggers arched from the black-clad assassins, embedding themselves unerringly in Dragonbait’s hide. The weapons could not have caused much damage—they were small and had struck only his shoulder, his arm, and his tail—yet the saurial dropped like a sack of laundry. Poison blades! the swordswoman realized.

With a cry of anguish, Alias charged the Fire Knives. She cracked one assassin in the head with the handle of the poker, then rammed the tip into the throat of a second. Snatching the sword from the scabbard of the third one, she turned it on him instantly. He fell over the bodies of his brothers, staining them with his blood.

Only Cassana stood between Alias and the doorway. She muttered no spell, nor did she look alarmed. Alias hesitated uncertainly. Cassana applauded the swordswoman’s performance briefly.

“Very good, Puppet. Welcome home,” the sorceress said, slipping a slender, blue wand from her sleeve into her hand. “Now sleep.”

Alias lunged at her foe. Cassana, the puppeteer, waved the wand, and Alias collapsed at her feet.