War in Tethyr n-2

by Victor Milán

  She let herself savor the sensations for a moment. Then she reached for her inkpot, her pen made from a sahuagin spine with steel nib from Kara-Tur, and a clean sheet of papyrus. It was time to begin drafting a contract proposal.

  She wrote a little. Then, feeling the weariness of the day's events clamp a heavy hand on the back of her neck, she picked up the tumbler, sipped again, rolled the brandy around in her mouth.

  I wonder where Chen and Farlorn are, she thought, feeling concern stir. Yet she could muster no great urgency. Nor could she readily drag her attention back to the lines on the papyrus sheet.

  Instead her attention wandered out the window. Away in the distance, over the river perhaps, a single amber light burned. It seemed both poignantly lonely and jewel-beautiful, and Zaranda found herself staring at it. As she stared, her vision wandered further and further out of focus, and the amber light grew steadily larger and fuzzier, until it became huge, became a sun, and swallowed her altogether.

  23

  With a several-voiced whistle and a resounding smack, the knotted rawhide thongs bit into Zaranda's bare flesh. Clenched teeth barred a scream, but a groan escaped her throat. Her body twisted clockwise from the force of the blow, then turned widdershins, toes dangling two inches from a drain set in the slimy stone floor. Her whole weight depended from her arms, chained to a hook in the low, round-vaulted ceiling. Manacles bit her wrists like the pincers of a giant scorpion; her shoulders burned from unnatural strain.

  When she could trust herself to speak more or less steadily, she moistened her lips and said, "I hate to disappoint you, but I don't really have any vital secrets to withhold from you. So there's not… much point… to this exercise."

  Shaveli Sword-Master laughed hoarsely. He swung his cat-o'-nine-tails so its thongs sang savagely. Zaranda shut her eyes and clamped her jaw, then winced as the lash struck stone flagging with a crack.

  "Clearly you don't understand, Countess," he said cheerfully. The glare from a brazier, in which various iron implements nestled yellow-glowing heads among the coals, cast entirely redundant, fiendish highlights over his face. The dungeon stank of mold and hot metal and all the scents of fear. "You know nothing that could possibly be of the slightest use to my master-only how to inconvenience him, which I fancy you'll not be doing any more. As to-"

  Not looking at him, Zaranda had begun to move her lips soundlessly. Shaveli's rat face twisted in rage, and he lashed her so cruelly that she could not help crying out.

  He laid the whip's handle to her cheek and forced her face toward his. "Casting spells, were we, witch?"

  "I was merely… sending a prayer to Lliira,". Zaranda said. "I don't feel as if my life has enough… joy… in it right now."

  The Sword-Master put his head back and laughed. Then he struck again. "Very clever. Very clever, indeed. I can tell we're going to have a most diverting relationship."

  He tapped the handle against her cheek. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth where she had bitten her lip. "You should know, though, that none of your magic will help you now. Into the very mortar of these dungeon walls was worked powdered fragments of the bones of the gods who exploded in the magic-dead realm of far Tantras. No dweomer can penetrate here, so chant away at your futile spells-it pleases me to punish you for doing so."

  That would account for the dull but constant throb between Zaranda's temples; she had heard of such an effect from others who had passed through the rare dead-magic reaches of Toril. Magic was woven into the very fabric of the world, in all the creatures who walked upon it, swam its seas, flew above it or delved the Underdark below. To be cut off from sorcery, from dweomer, was an unnatural condition. Those steeped in the arts magical were so sensitive to such isolation that it caused them pain.

  And here I thought it was that cursed brandy, she thought.

  "No, it's not information I seek," he said, pushing her to set her rotating in her chains, sending pain flashes down from torn wrists to tortured shoulders. "It's merely that whiling away the hours with you is the re-ward my stalwart service has won me from my just and generous master."

  "It's true what they say in the markets, then." Zaranda said. "That the only pleasure Shaveli can take from a woman is what he can get with whips and chains."

  Still spinning, she caught a glimpse of his features, a fiendish mask of fury. Her world became pain and screams.

  The stone cell floor was cold and slimy beneath her as she lay in uttermost dark. At least it had the effect of soothing her welts. Best not mention that, or they'll come scatter salt.

  She could see nothing. On first waking in the dungeon, she had felt her way all around her cell. It had not been a lengthy process. The room appeared to be about ten feet in every dimension; by holding arms outstretched above her head and leaping as high as she could, she could just brush the ceiling with her finger tips. There was a heavy, metal-shod wooden door, a good hand thick to judge by the sound when she rapped it with her knuckles, with an armored judas gate set into it, currently shut. A drain was sunk in the center of the chamber, about half again as big as her palm and covered with a metal grate.

  Though the traditional dungeon dampness had en-gendered a coating of slime on the stones, they were well cut and fitted, so that she could barely feel the seams when she ran hands across them. Their smoothness was the smoothness of careful dressing by stonemasons with a Tethyrian concern for craft, not of generations of pris-oners' hands running over them in the vain hope that a portal to freedom would suddenly open up. Moreover the place smelled, well, clean. For a dungeon.

  So she was captive in Zazesspur's new Palace of Governance.

  She tasted agony raw. Shaveli had a fine hand with a whip; she had to grant him that. Though her body felt as if it were wrapped in nets of live fire, as far as she could ascertain, he had not broken the skin once. Which had certain implications, not necessarily soothing. It was just possible that Hardisty was dim enough to imagine she might be broken to his will through physical abuse. The problem was, he had known her as a war leader with no scruples about using ruses to win the day. He must know he could trust no compact she gave under duress.

  And if he didn't realize it, surely Armenides would.

  There was more to the self-proclaimed archpriest of Ao than his apple-cheeked smile and halo of hair suggested. During their interview a year ago, he stayed in the background uttering homilies, but all the same Zaranda could practically see the strings running from his hands to Hardisty.

  She took it as an ominous sign that, as far as she knew, the baron had not paid her a visit. That implied a reluctance to look an old comrade-in-arms in the eye.

  So the odds were good that she was being kept relatively intact for public execution-with first, perhaps, a public show trial.

  She shifted, rolled over, cradled her cheek on her other hand. A bale of hay had thoughtfully been tossed in the cell with her to serve as a bed-it wouldn't do to have her body a mass of sores when she mounted the gibbet. The prickly straw was small use at present. She would have been uncomfortable on the finest feather bed in Waterdeep, but she could at least redistribute aches.

  She remembered… what? The taste of Tintoram's Select-was there an odd dissonance, like the forty-fifth cherub from the left in the eighteenth row striking a sour note in the midst of an angelic chorus? She wasn't familiar enough with exotic liqueurs to tell. It had to be the brandy, though-she would have tasted something amiss in the candied orange.

  After that, remembered impressions: the thump, as of an ancient tome slipping from its shelf far off in a vast, dusty, drafty castle, which was her face striking the tabletop. The door opening, a voice distorted to unrecognizability saying, gruffly, "Take her." Men dressed as artisans, plain everyday Tethyrian tradesmen whom none would suspect, rolling her up in a rug and bundling her onto their shoulders. They would have left openly but discreetly by a back exit-it was far from unusual for Faerun hostelries to desire to have a carpet cleaned or replaced at od
d hours of the night, and with as little fanfare as possible.

  And after that — jostling, horse smell, harness jingle. Then nothing until she woke here in the dark, with only furtive, fugitive scurrying sounds and the dripping of water to remind her she yet lived.

  She rolled onto her back-no, that was a mistake-onto her belly, laid cheek against chill stone. Who betrayed me? The thought was like mice gnawing her belly from the inside.

  The Ithmong town council-no. Ithmongs were known for being unsubtle by Tethyrian standards, but she found it hard to believe any Tethyrian could be quite that blatant. And to what end? Ithmong didn't distrust Zazesspur as sorely as it did Myratma, but would never happily see its rival rule all Tethyr. That was a major reason the town council was treating with Zaranda in the first place: Star Protectives offered a means of slowing or reversing the death by strangulation that was overtaking Tethyr without bending the knee to Zazesspur and the man who would be its lord.

  As it was, suspicion would fall at once on Ithmong. Zaranda's young cadre were bright, but villagers and countryfolk, not necessarily sophisticated. They might leap to the obvious conclusion and blame the town council. Farlorn would know better; Stillhawk had no more taste for intrigue than he had for wearing makeup, but he had been about in the world enough to realize how unlikely Ithmong was to be culpable. But would the man-the creature-who was her second-in-command?

  Shield. The name tolled like a cracked bell in her brain. Someone had betrayed her when she was smuggling her caravan into Zazesspur. Someone had betrayed her inside Zazesspur. And someone had betrayed her in Ithmong.

  Of course, what she had been betrayed for in Zazesspur was harboring the great orc. But what did that tell her, really? The searchers had missed him, after all. Maybe his presence had been used as pretext for searching Zaranda's quarters precisely because it would divert suspicion from him. Such a convolution would almost certainly be beyond his means-but it was a typically Tethyrian, and Zazesspurian, bit of nastiness. And Shield was ever-so-good at carrying out plans that others drew up

  He had plenty of other opportunities to harm you, she tried to tell herself. But it was meager solace: so did anyone else who would have been in position to betray her on those occasions. That meant only the orog, Farlorn, and Stillhawk. Chen had come into the game too late, Balmeric had left too early, and the several mercenaries who had accompanied her both into and out of Zazesspur were scattered across Tethyr teaching plow-. boys and shepherd girls how to fight.

  But why? Well, on other worlds evil was a choice, but here on Toril it was also a thing. Perhaps, as Farlorn and Stillhawk averred, it left an indelible mark on those who had been born to it.

  And how? How could a servitor of evil pass himself as a paladin?

  "Too easily, perhaps," she answered herself in a bitter whisper. Who had ever heard of an orcish paladin? For that matter, who'd ever heard of a nonhuman paladin? Not Zaranda, nor anyone she'd ever spoken to about it. Perhaps Nyadnar had, but the sorceress would never have deigned to answer such a question, unless it served her highly idiosyncratic conception of the balance of forces necessary to sustain the universe-or her whim, which Zaranda suspected she found hard to tell from each other.

  Still, still… Shield, can it be? She could not know for sure. All she truly knew was that someone she had accepted into her confidence had turned on her.

  Which meant,' ultimately, that the one who had betrayed her was herself.

  She could no longer help herself. The weeping started as a bubbling forth from eyes and mouth, like water through the hull of a boat holed by a reef. Then it truly tore loose, gushing now, a torrent. Her body convulsed to strident macaw cries of grief and anger a fear and pain and humiliation, interspersed with hoarse, panting breaths as of one who has run until her heart is about to burst.

  Finally, exhausted, she fell into a state that, by comparison to her previous condition, was sleep.

  A scratching sound brought her instantly awake. Her fingers clutched for Crackletongue. Then she felt again the whip marks that clothed her, felt hard stone, smelled moist stone and foulness.

  Again it came, the scrape of tiny claws on rock, hard nearby. Zaranda's muscles tensed. There were any number of candidates for making such a sound, and under the circumstances it seemed unlikely to be anything pleasant.

  Scritch, scritch. A slight hint of echo. Her visitor was in the drain, then. Well, that made it less likely it would be crawling over her face as soon as she fell back to sleep.

  More scratching, of subtly different timbre, as if the unseen creature were testing the grate. Zaranda found herself oddly torn by hoping it would not somehow find a way through and at the same time hoping it would. Am I really so afraid of isolation, she wondered, that I'd prefer loathsome company to no company at all?

  Silence now. She had an irrational sense that her hidden guest was waiting.

  "What are you?" she whispered. Then she laughed; the stones from the dead-magic land would prevent eavesdropping by mystic means. She had encountered arrangements of tubes and funnels-miracles of design, not dweomer-craft-that enabled someone in one part of a building to listen in on what transpired in a room in an entirely different part. It was possible Hardisty had such a system built into his palace. And what of it? She was talking to a rat or an insect or a doubtless loathly whatever; let whoever wanted to listen in. Much good might it do them. "What are you?" she asked again aloud. No response, which was no surprise; only that curious sense of expectation.

  "I guess it doesn't matter, does it? You can't answer me, and it isn't very likely you understand. I'm merely talking to you because I'll go mad if I don't hear something besides my own breathing and the sound of water dripping; and if I talk to myself too much I'll fear I've gone mad anyway."

  She had dragged herself over the floor until she lay with her cheek on the floor beside the grate. "You're a patient one, aren't you? What do you wait for?"

  More silence, measured in many painful breaths. "Well, whatever you want, I guess I've not provided it yet. Please forgive my failings as hostess, but I wasn't expecting to do much entertaining. I'm sure the place looks a fright."

  She turned her face toward the ceiling. The blackness hung above her with all the weight of the tons of stone overhead. "You know," she said, "I've often heard that there is one who converses even with the rats and the roaches of Zazesspur. Certainly I've seen her in the company of beings stranger than that. If that's true, tell her Zaranda Star is here."

  She rolled onto her belly, put her mouth close to the grate, and spoke in a fierce whisper. "She had some plan for me. I can't carry it out if I rot down here, or if Baron Hardisty decides to have me discreetly strangled and dumped in the harbor. If you can hear me, bear word of me to Nyadnar."

  Nyadnar. Nyadnar. The name echoed down the sewer pipe. Through it Zaranda heard the skitter-scratch of tiny claws, dwindling. Nyadnar.

  I am going mad, she decided. Doubtless, it's for the best.

  The clatter of massive bolts roused her. This wasn't the latch on the food slot at the bottom of the door, through which bowls of water and gruel were thrust at what she was certain were calculatedly random intervals; the door itself was being opened. She gathered herself into a crouch. It wasn't that she expected to be able to break past her jailers or overpower them. It was that, if they came to bear her to more torture, she would not suffer them to find her supine.

  The door opened. The light from a single hand-held torch flooded through like noonday. Zaranda cringed and shielded her eyes like a vampire caught abroad by the rising sun.

  In the torchlight stood silhouetted a tall figure in a robe and a square hat. "Zaranda Star?" it said. "Countess Morninggold?"

  It was the voice of Duke Hembreon.

  24

  "You have held this captive in secret from the city council," Duke Hembreon said. "This is illegal. You will surrender her to me forthwith, in the council's name."

  Zaranda had clad herself in a white sm
ock that one of the duke's escorts had thrown at her. It was already much worse for wear, and she hadn't taken a dozen steps in it. It took all her willpower to keep from simply letting herself hang in the grip of the two Zazesspurian city policemen who stood flanking her. She forced her-self to stand upright, albeit swaying like a sapling in a squall, and listened to the white-haired duke and Shaveli debate her fate.

  The Sword-Master tipped back his head and brayed laughter through his nose.

  "It's time to decide, old man," he said in a challenging voice, hand on rapier hilt. The two blue-and-bronzes behind him wore unhappy looks beneath their morions.

  "Decide what?" the duke demanded, visibly bristling at the other's impertinence. His escorts, in the blackenameled boiled-leather helmets and cuirasses of the constabulary, glared at the civic guardsmen with frank hostility. The police had no love for these Johnny-come-lately paramilitaries.

  "Whether you're serious about the getting and keeping of power. Here's an enemy to the state, an obstacle to your plans as well as ours. We had the situation under control. Why interfere?''

  "The rule of law is paramount, and must be maintained."

  "Law?" The swordsman flicked dismissive fingers. "What is law? A means to an end. Law's a fine tool; power's better. But to use the power, one must have the will."

  "Power without law is corrupt, and soon turns to evil," the duke said acerbically. "Sooner, rather than later, for the application of will."

  "Words," Shaveli said. He gestured around the torch-lit corridor. "Around you is stone." He slapped his rapier hilt. "And steel. Here are facts. Pit your words against them: which prevails?"

  "The will of the council that your master has petitioned to make him master first of Zazesspur, and then of all Tethyr, will prevail," the duke said. "For that is the law."