by Victor Milán
"Where's Stillhawk?"
"So far as I know, he's up there too. But then, of course, no one tells me anything; I'm only a beast of burden."
"How did you know," Chenowyn asked with disarming innocence, "that when the guardsmen said they were looking for 'an unnatural monster,' they didn't mean you?"
Goldie opened her mouth. Then she shut it, and her eyes popped wide open.
"Congratulations," Zaranda told the girl. "You must have magic: that's the first time I've seen her rendered speechless." Then she was racing for the stairs.
Stoic as a statue, Shield of Innocence sat cross-legged with claws on thighs as Zaranda applied a fragrant white balm compounded of certain soothing herbs to the blisters that made up most of his face. "I can't believe you just sat there in the sun all day," she said. "Paladin of Torm or not, you're still an orc. You're allergic to the sun."
Sitting with his back against a dormer and his booted feet braced on the red hemicylindrical roofing tiles, Stillhawk furrowed his brow, his equivalent of an angry outburst. Like Farlorn, he still doubted the orog, and it in particular troubled him to hear an evil being referred to as paladin. Though the paladin's path was in many ways as inaccessible to a man of the ranger's character as it was to an orc of unrepentant stripe, he served the same ideals.
Shield's massive shoulders shrugged. "How can one serve Light if one fears the Burning Face?" he asked, using a common orcish name for the sun.
"Easily," Zaranda said. "Don't you think good deeds need doing at night? Besides, you can wear a cowl."
"Have you ever seen a cowled gargoyle?"
Zaranda stopped with a gob of ointment on her fingertips. "Was that humor? That was humor, right?"
"I did what must be done. If I suffer, it is no more than my sins have earned." He frowned. "Though it gripes my soul to have fled from minions of the law. Did I do wrong? May Great Torm judge me harshly."
"May Great Torm not be such an ass!" Zaranda burst out. "Those men intended you harm, and it had nothing to do with anything you've done, or even who you are. It was what they thought you were, and your innocence would have meant nothing to them. Is that what the law is all about?"
"Still, laws are laws," the great orc said with childlike conviction. "We must obey."
"It is against no law in Tethyr to be an orc," Zaranda said. Of course, that was because for Tethyrians, such a law would be like outlawing venomous serpents or spiders. This didn't seem the time to mention that fact. "And besides, those weren't minions of the law; they were the servants of the city council. The city police serve the law of Zazesspur. The guard is something else again."
"Oh," Shield said.
Zaranda drew in a deep breath, released it in a soundless sigh. She glanced aside at Stillhawk. The ranger was rubbing the dark bristle that covered his chin if he went more than four hours without shaving. He shook his head. Well, sophistication wasn't his strength either.
"There," she said, putting the finishing touches on the orog. The white ointment made Shield's face, a great pitted, tusked, and snouted moon, a truly terrifying sight, like a mask Dalelands children might put on to frighten homeowners into giving them treats at Highharvestide. "That's done. And now-"
She turned to look at Stillhawk. "Now the two of you must leave. Right this minute. Get outside the walls and make yourselves scarce in the countryside. The scullions have packed food for you, and in the unlikely event that it runs out before I come to join you, there's no better huntsman in Tethyr than Vander Stillhawk of the Elven Woods."
Both her companions spoke at once, which was at least quieter than most such multiple outbursts. "I serve you," Shield of Innocence said. "I will not leave." For once in accord with the great orc, Stillhawk signed to the same effect.
"You cannot serve me here, Shield. What can you do for me if you're rotting in the dungeons that surely lie beneath that vast ugly slab of a palace Baron Hardisty has built? All you can do here is increase the risks for me. So indulge my cowardice and go."
She reached out to touch a scarred and pitted cheek. Her flesh still quailed from the contact, but only a little. "For me, Shield. Please."
Pouting-which his tusks made a truly alarming sight-he nodded his huge head. Zaranda stood and faced the ranger.
Why-? he started to sign.
"Because someone has to keep Shield of Innocence out of trouble," she said. "The countryside's less risky for him, but only just. Something's going to break soon, old friend, and whichever way it falls, I'll have need of all the help I can get. His as well as yours."
Stillhawk raised his head and managed somehow to look even more grimly stoic than usual-his form of outraged protest and reproach. I cannot tell you the real reason, old friend, Zaranda thought. In my selfishness I brought you here among these gray stone walls you hate. And here you can do nothing but pace like a wilderness beast condemned to a cage, feeling the pressure of those walls like acid on the skin. The least I can do is redeem my misdeed. But of course she could not say she did this for his benefit, or he would refuse to go.
"Please, I ask that you do this for me. If you would help me, this is the best way."
Stillhawk's brown eyes gazed deep into Zaranda's smoke-gray ones. Then he nodded and turned to pick up his bow, which leaned against a chimney with a beaten-tin cover shaped like a wizard's peaked hat. Shield resumed his cowled robe and strapped on the harness that held his scimitars crossed over his back. After a moment's debate by eye, he slithered over the edge of the roof and swung in through the hallway window Zaranda had left open and under Chen's guard. Stillhawk followed.
Zaranda stood, stretched, gazed up at the stars, treasuring an evanescent moment alone with them. The sullen light-froth from tens of thousands of candles and lanterns, the smokes of the city, and high tattered clouds skidding across the sky from the Trackless Sea hid most of them from her sight. She wished she were alone in her tower at Morninggold, with nothing to impair her intimacy with the stars, neither in the sky nor in her future.
I'll be doing well to keep my freedom out of all this, she thought, much less Morninggold and my astronomy tower.
But she wasn't yet dead, which meant, on principle, that she refused to give up. She turned and made her cautious way down.
"Zaranda!" A familiar call-as clear and beautiful as the cry of a soaring eagle-made her turn from the entrance to her chamber on the Winsome Repose's third floor.
"Farlorn," she said, shifting without thought to interpose herself between the half-elf and Chenowyn. "Where have you been?"
He caught her in an embrace that lifted her off the floor-though he'd inherited the delicate appearance of his mother's people, he also had the strength of his father's. "Zaranda! I'm terribly sorry. I came as soon as I heard."
"About what?" Zaranda said. It took her a moment to make the decision to disengage herself from his arms after he had set her down again. Damn him! she thought. Or, perhaps, damn me.
"About the orc and Stillhawk! How the guard arrested them."
"Stillhawk?"
He shrugged. "I know the ranger well. He cared as little for the beast as I, but he'd die before he'd fail your trust. They cannot have taken the orc without having him as well."
"They took neither," Zaranda said. "Both hid. I've sent them outside the city."
The half-elf's huge hazel eyes blinked. "But that's wonderful news," he said, "at least so far as Vander Stillhawk's concerned, though I cannot say the same for the evil creature you insisted on adopting."
As Zaranda wound up to unload on him, he lifted his head so that his pointed ears made him resemble a wary forest creature, sniffed the air in the hallway, lit amber by an a single ancient fly-specked lantern hung on the wall. "Whatever is that smell?" he asked before Zaranda could speak. "It's truly prodigious. You must ask for new quarters, Zaranda; a rat-a giant one, by the whiff-has crept among the rafters and expired."
The hair at the back of Zaranda's neck rose. Something was gathering behind her. It
reminded her of the first time she had ever felt dweomer, mustering her first halting spell under the gentle but exacting eye of Alshayn, her mentor. This was similar, yet not the same. It was power, and it was menace.
"Farlorn," she said, taking her new charge by the arm and feeling the hairs on her own arm rise in response, "I'd like you to meet Chenowyn. She'll be staying with us for a while. Chen, this is Farlorn Half-Elven, called the Handsome."
Farlorn shied back, a look of distaste on his face. "Indeed? This ragamuffin's the source of the smell, I warrant. Have you decided to open your own museum of grotesques, Zaranda?"
"Don't take what he says to heart, Chen," Zaranda said. "He's a bard, and bards love the sound of their own voices too well. He doesn't mean anything by it." "I don't like him," the girl said. "Where have you been the past few days?" Zaranda asked, interposing herself between the two.
"I was visiting among my mother's people. Do you know, that darkling I slew the other night matched the description of a Moon Elf maid from Tethir Forest who vanished six weeks ago? Her people were much grieved to learn of her fate."
"Did they say where she'd vanished, or what she was doing at the time?"
"All they knew was that she went abroad on the streets at night upon some errand, and was seen no more."
"So the darklings enslave their victims somehow?"
"That was no slave I fought. Her thirst for my blood was genuine. Would a slave fight with such will?"
"Enchanted, then. Perhaps." She shrugged. "Well, we've troubles enough of our own. Good night to you, Farlorn, and I'm glad to see you well."
"Need you rush away?" He took her shoulders in his hands and began to knead her neck muscles with fine, strong fingers. "I was thinking we might share a bottle of wine together. Perhaps I could sing you a song to soothe your cares."
She disengaged herself deftly from his grasp. "Just now I need a balm more powerful even than your words, and that's sleep. Good night." She undid the lock, guided Chen inside, and shut the heavy wooden door on his frustration.
She turned then, slumped against the wall, allowed herself to slide down until her rump touched the rush-strewn floor. "Damn him."
Chen stood to one side, looking as out of place as a dragon in the tidy if threadbare chamber, with its modest furnishings, its whitewashed walls and dark-stained wood trim. "Why do you curse him?"
Zaranda shook her head. "To keep from cursing myself." She picked herself up. "Now what we need to do is summon the help and have them bring round a straw pallet and some bedding for you. Also a tub and plenty of hot water."
"Why?"
"Because you're long overdue for a bath, my fine young friend."
Chen straightened and in defiance shook back her clotted strands of hair. When she did that, she looked as if she might conceivably be pretty beneath that coat of grime.
"Why should a mage be concerned with such matters?"
"A mage may do whatever she wishes," Zaranda said. "And so can you. But, if you wish to stay with me-much less become my apprentice-you'll have to be less a burden on my nose. Farlorn was right about the state of your hygiene."
Chen scowled thunderously. Angry lights danced at the backs of her amber eyes, and sparks seemed to gather at the roots of her hair. Zaranda felt that ominous force gathering itself again. She crossed her arms. "Go ahead, strike me to a cinder," she said. "I won't stop you. But you'll never master magic if you can't first master yourself."
Chen glared at her with wild fury in her eyes, and for a moment Zaranda thought she had overplayed her hand. What alarmed her most was that she wasn't alarmed.
Then Chen exhaled explosively, and it seemed her anger passed forth as well as her breath, leaving her small, wilted, and vulnerable. "I'm sorry," she said, then began to cry.
"Poor dear," Zaranda said. She opened the door to call for a servant.
Naked but for a skin of sweat, the top sheet discarded on the floor and the bottom rumpled into a damp relief map of the mountainous Starspire Peninsula, which guarded the harbor at Zazesspur from storms-Zaranda Star writhed in the grip of nightmare.
A score and more of hands reached out, it seemed, from the bed itself to seize her, pin her down despite her struggles, and caress her with obscene and unwelcome fervor. From somewhere immeasurably far below, that insidious Whisper came: Surrender, Zaranda. Give in. Your struggles are futile, your quest doomed. Give in, and you will reap greater rewards than that paltry scrap of nothing that you seek-greater than you can imagine.
Zaranda moaned low in her throat. What she found most hateful was that she was responding-not to the hissing insinuations of the Voice, but, in her loneliness and hunger, to the touch of phantom hands.
Hungry. Tired. Alone. Give in to Me, Zaranda Star, and you shall know satiation of every appetite, surcease sweet beyond imagining, and the comfort of Unity with something greater than yourself. Yield to Me, Zaranda; pure pleasure awaits…
A scratching came at the bars that covered the opened windows; no innkeeper in Zazesspur was ingenuous enough to believe the mere fact that a room lay on an upper story offered any insuperable barrier to the city's enterprising thieves. Zaranda snapped awake with the jarring suddenness of a catapult arm slamming into the stop. She had a woozy, disoriented moment, and a lingering hallucination of arms and hands, gray-fleshed and black-nailed, withdrawing into the wadded sheet.
She looked toward the window to see a hunched and winged black shadow crouching on the sill.
14
The great house looked as if it had been assembled out of bits and pieces of many architectural epochs, not all of them of this world. Zaranda paused in the midst of darkened Love Street to admire its many dubious splendors, though she had seen them before. Its facade was a riot of pilasters, friezes, a colonnaded portico with a single sapphire-blue lantern on top, windows wide, windows narrow, windows little more than slits, set without apparent regard for story, some lit, some not. The roof was a composite of planes and angles, chimneys and dormers of sundry styles and shapes; among forests of finials, gargoyles disported with caryatids, or perhaps menaced them.
Perhaps the oddest feature was that, taken whole, the effect was not of chaos-or rather, not pure chaos, but chaos with order imposed upon it, chaos channeled and restrained but not overmastered, leading to an effect both of harmony and tension. It seemed a natural thing, grown not built.
From all around her came rustlings and small murmurs from the shadows, skirting the edge of intelligibility without ever misstepping and falling into it. Zaranda felt no alarm. Wizard's houses were that way, this one more than most.
Let's get it done, she told herself. She squared her shoulders and marched up beneath the portico to double doors with stained-glass panels in their upper halves: on the left, the occupant's rune, on the right a stylized balance scale. The glass doors announced that this was the residence of a powerful mage no less than the rune; no one else would dare offer thieves so alluring a target.
A tug on the golden chain of the bellpull produced not chimes, but a thin eldritch cry, which seemed to echo in distant corridors of time and space rather than the hallways of a house. Then it produced a wait, stretching itself into what seemed to Zaranda's growing impatience like infinity before the doors were opened by a human footman, yawning and scratching himself through an indigo velvet waistcoat starred with a galaxy of diamond studs.
"Something?'' he drawled, all indolence and insolence.
Zaranda set her lips and handed him the object that the winged black faceless being hunkered on her win-dowsill had pressed into her palm not an hour before- a glazed tile, palm-sized, displaying the selfsame sigil as the left door: a dragon's eye in black, with what seemed a genuine star sapphire inset as the pupil.
"Huh," he said, and ushered her in with a perfunctory bow. "Down the hall to the end, then past the stairs to the chamber with the open door. Can't miss it." He reseated himself on a stool with a red velour cushion, and subsided instantly to snores.
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Entertaining but briefly the notion of kicking the stool from beneath him, Zaranda followed his directions. The hallway was brightly lit, with white walls and gilt trim. Doors opened left and right, giving glimpses of emphatically decorated parlors in which strange and richly clad hunched beings, of a generally humanoid cast, stood with heads together in apparent conversation. Only a few favored Zaranda with so much as a glance as she passed. Nonetheless, she had the sense of eyes following her-given the existence of such creatures as beholders, not a comfortable feeling.
The hallway debouched into an open space or shaft. A quick eye flick showed galleries mounting upward until they blurred into shadow at a seemingly higher level than the house's highest point visible from without. Stairs from the floor immediately above, balustraded with obsidian, descended to the left and right. Zaranda turned left, availing herself of the chance to peek back the way she had come. As expected, she saw nothing but the dozing doorman.
Proceeding, she came into a chamber. The walls were panels of quartz, milky white, and running through them sparkling veins that might have been gold. A soft, diffuse light shone from them. There was no furniture as such, only stands and cases and pedestals, likewise all of polished stone: jadeite, nephrite, agate, feldspar and onyx, glabrous gray chalcedony. Like the walls, some of them glowed gently. They held gems and semiprecious stones in fabulous array, some polished, some rough, turquoises, amethysts, topazes, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and everywhere sapphires. There were sapphires of yellow and gray and orange, sour-pallid green and faint pink; sapphires of every hue of blue, from the pale, heartless blue of the sky in the Savage North at high noon on Midwinter Day, to stones of indigo so rich as to appear black.
The only item in the room not stone was its occupant. A woman stood with her back to Zaranda Star. She was a few fingers shorter than Zaranda and slen-der as a kobold's hope of redemption. Raven hair hung straight down the back of a gown of velvet the same shade as the midnight-blue star sapphire globe, as large as an orange, which she held contemplatively in one slim-fingered hand.