by Victor Milán
“What of the darklings? Many speak of them as the greatest menace, yet you’ve not mentioned them.”
“The darklings are a fell lot, no question, and I fear they are harbingers of worse times to come. Yet they prey mainly on the weak and unarmed. They fall readily enough to swords wielded with will and skill, so I am told.”
“So much is true,” Zaranda said.
He looked at her a moment under lowered brows and laughed. “So! I should’ve known the redoubtable Captain Star could not pass a night in Zazesspur without crossing swords with our local plague. You ever drew trouble to you like a lodestone!”
“Thank you so much for reminding me.”
With his hook, he reached into the forge and drew forth a crucible of molten steel, glowing white. This he poured into a dagger mold.
“I don’t doubt this civic guard could clean the devils out with one concerted push,” he said as he poured, “if there were anything to them but swagger. Still—” he set the empty crucible aside “—the darklings pose little enough threat to us, so long as we’re allowed to keep our swords.”
Having learned as much as she felt she could, Zaranda bade her old comrade farewell. When she started out the gate, a symbol painted in the mouth of the alley caught her attention: a stylized eye with a brow slanting to meet it from above and two lines descending from it below.
“Artalos,” she called. “A moment more of your time, if you will.”
The armorer emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. “Always for you, Captain. What be your wish?”
“That sign there—you know it?”
He snorted. “Who does not know the dragon’s-eye symbol of Nyadnar the Sorceress? Powerful she must be indeed to dare the wrath of those creatures by using such a sign. Yet you’d think so powerful a wizard would have better things to do than creep about the city scrawling on walls.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t do it herself.”
“Who’d dare without her permission? I’d as lief scrawl Elminster’s mark in a public urinal. Nyadnar’s not his match, so it’s said and so I believe; but there’s something fell about her. I wonder if she’s not a thing of evil, after all.”
“She thinks herself above such concerns,” Zaranda murmured. “So she’s in residence currently?”
“In her house on Love Street,” the armorer said with a nod, “or so it would seem. That mark was not there yesterday when the sun went down.”
“Strange,” Zaranda Star said, and took her leave.
From curiosity she wandered down Anvil Road to where it crossed Tinsmith Way, where the halfling firebrand addressed his followers from his wagonbed. Even here, in a predominantly grimy mechanical district, the upper floors where craftsfolk lived were alive with bright flowers in window boxes. The people of Tethyr, “wicked” Zazesspurians no less than the olive-growers and sheepherders of the countryside, loved their gardens.
The flowers’ brisk beauty was not mirrored in the street, where most of Toby Hedgeblossom’s hearers were roughly dressed. That was nothing uncommon in Zazesspur these days. What was uncommon in this crowd were the thick calluses of workingmen’s hands and the colored-cloth brassards of the guilds. Hedgeblossom addressed his spiels to the laborer, but it mainly seemed idlers who were drawn by his promises of free wealth.
Perhaps, Zaranda thought, the real workers of Zazesspur realize who’d have to pay for Toby’s schemes. But no; likely the real laborers were occupied at their labors. The lure of money for nothing was hard to resist; why, after all, did so many follow the hazardous but not particularly labor-intensive road of the adventurer?
She smiled a taut smile, sliding through the crowd and turning her hips this way and that to avoid brushing anybody in a suggestive way. You’re going to start having cynical thoughts about yourself if you aren’t careful, girl, she realized.
Something brushed her left hand. Pickpockets were as common as potholes in Zazesspur. Zaranda was always alert, and her senses and reflexes both were fine. She spun, clapping her hand to Crackletongue’s hilt, thankful she secreted her coin at various strategic points of her person rather than leaving it to dangle from her belt like ripe fruit for the magpies.
A figure clad in a stained linen jerkin was moving purposefully but not hastily away from her. She could not pursue without jostling members of Hedgeblossom’s audience, who were beginning to work themselves into an enthusiastic state. Nothing seemed missing; no point in giving chase—
Then she realized that, far from taking anything from her, the mysterious figure had slipped something into her hand, a papyrus scrap half-crumpled so that the coarse fibers were beginning to part. The words inked in it in a half-literate Common scrawl were legible enough: If you want get back whats yurs, look fer the one-arm man at the Carpet Mart tomorro, wun bell past daybrek.
She looked up sharply. The linen-clad man had vanished. Zaranda shrugged and stuffed the scrap in her belt. Separating herself from the mob—now being led in a chant of “share the wealth!” by Toby Hedgeblossom—she set out with long-legged strides down the Way, toward the Exotic Quarter.
The wizard’s face was a twisted red mask glaring forth from white hair and disorder. “That’s it,” he said in a voice wound tight as a crossbow string. “Enough. Begone with you and your eerie pranks.”
The girl could barely see him through her tears of hurt and anger and the red-hair tangles that hung unwashed before her eyes. “It was an accident,” she said. Her lower lip jutted in what looked like sullen defiance, but was more an attempt to hold back full-blown sobs.
His self-control snapped like a crystal goblet dropped on pavement from great height. “Accident?” he screeched. He flung out a skinny arm in a gesture that encompassed the wreckage of his shop and made his voluminous sleeve flap most alarmingly. “Accident! You summon up a whirlwind to devastate my shop, and try to pass it off as accident?”
The walls of her own control gave way. “But I can’t help it!” she wailed through a sudden flood of tears. “I don’t know how to control the magic. That’s why I want to learn!”
“Magic? This is no magic! Did you speak an incantation?” He was so close to her now that his spittle blended with the tears, making shiny runnels down her cheek and further matting the ends of her hair. “No! Did you use spell components?” He scooped a pinch of spilled parti-colored powder from a bench whose marble-slab top had proven too massive to be toppled by the whirlwind.
He threw the powder in the air and blew on it. It puffed into a tiny cloud, then each mote became a brief bright spark of a different color that dispersed and drifted off into the gloom.
“No! One moment there was nothing but a thumb-fingered aspirant to be my apprentice making poor work of sweeping the floor. The next—chaos!” He shook his head. His gray hair stood out on both sides of his balding skull like dispirited static discharges. “This was no magic. Magic is orderly and disciplined. Magic is something learned, something labored for, something won.”
He seized her by the elbow and marched her toward the door. “What you did wasn’t magic. It was madness, or possession, or I-know-not-what. But it’s not something I’ll suffer near me!”
He threw open the door. From the afternoon street, the sunlight poured in like scalding water.
“Now get you gone,” the magician declared, gripping the girl’s arms both-handed to eject her. “And never let me see you again. Or I’ll show you what magic really is ab—ouch!”
The last came out in a squall as light flashed and sharp thunder cracked. The mage jumped back, waving singed palms in the air. His dark eyes were wide with shock and terror.
She stuck her tongue out at him and ran away down the Street of Misfortune Tellers.
“Milady,” a young voice called, clear and fresh as springwater. “A moment of your time?”
Zaranda’s long-legged impatient strides had carried her into a district where the upper stories of buildings jutted out to overhang already narrow, twisty streets, so that it seeme
d they leaned their heads together to conspire against the traffic bustling below. She stopped and turned, dropping her hand inside the knuckle-bow that guarded Crackletongue’s hilt. The voice had sounded fair, but Zaranda had little reason to take for granted the friendliness of anyone she encountered.
Two young people were approaching her, a youth and a maid, he with hair as bright and yellow as summer sun, she with hair of lustrous pale brown falling in kinky waves down over her shoulders. Both were dressed as simply as the poorest peasant or artisan or mendicant, in white smocks belted at the waist with knotted rope. Yet the fabric of the smocks was shimmery stuff, white and evidently expensive to Zaranda’s merchant eye; their hands were soft and pale, and she doubted the girl had been born with that delicate wave in her carefully tended hair. These, then, were children of wealth.
Such seldom had much use for rough-garbed adventuresses of Zaranda’s ilk, her purchased patent of nobility notwithstanding—and naturally she did not walk the streets with an imp mincing after her, announcing to the world that she was Countess Morninggold. But their smiles were so friendly and open that Zaranda felt an urge to bundle them off the street before anyone saw them and took advantage of them.
“How may I help you?” she asked.
“We’d like to give you this flower,” said the girl, holding forth a blossom as brilliantly blue as a civic guardsman’s drawers.
“And what do you wish in exchange?”
The girl’s face fell as if Zaranda had said something cruel. But her companion laughed a musical laugh. Like the girl, he wore a plain gold torque around his neck.
“You needn’t speak that way,” he said. “There’s no necessity for payment. Please, lady, accept it as our love-offering.”
“I’ve often found,” Zaranda said, “that things called free often cost the dearest.” But she suffered the white-clad girl to fasten the flower behind her ear.
“There,” the girl said, stepping back with a smile. “You are even lovelier than before.”
“Who are you people?” Zaranda asked.
“We are All-Friends,” the boy said. “We serve and worship Ao the Universal.”
“Ao?” Zaranda repeated, thunderstruck.
“We house the homeless and feed the hungry and go abroad spreading the message of Ao’s universal love,” the boy said.
“If you feel you must, you may make a contribution to our ministry,” said the girl. “But we work and pray for a day when the needs of all are met by sharing, and no longer is there talk of buying and selling.”
“I take it you’ve not heard of Armenides, then?” the old gnome said.
“No.” Zaranda stood on tiptoe to study her reflection in an ancient warrior’s mirror-polished basilisk-hunting shield, hung on the wall of the cluttered shop. “The flower looks good on me, does it not?”
“It does,” the gnome agreed, blowing smoke from his pipe. He was dressed in a simple gown of emerald-green silk, with a stand-up black collar on which were embroidered dragons rampant in gold. He smoked a long, thin clay pipe. All his hair was white, including both of his bushy eyebrows, which was a pity, since it left no apparent sense to his name, White Eyebrow. In fact, when all his hair was black, his right eyebrow had been turned snowy-white by a brush with magic. “And the flower allows me to glimpse Zaranda Star’s vanity, hitherto unsuspected.”
She laughed without self-consciousness, examined herself a moment longer. “I’m vain enough,” she said. “I can’t always afford to indulge it, that’s all.”
She turned and propped her rump on a table in the clear space beside an ormolu clock. She paid it only cursory attention; though it was like nothing else she had seen on Toril, it was standard fare for the Curiosity Shop. Though White Eyebrow was no magician and scrupulously avoided trafficking in magic items, he cultivated extensive contacts among the better-intentioned of those who plied the dimensions in spelljamming ships. After all, to impress an inhabitant of Faerûn as a curiosity, an object had to be curious indeed.
“So why this sudden fad for Ao?” she asked. “He’s the preeminent god, I know, maybe the god the gods worship. But we mortals would be as well off venerating a tree stump, for all the interest he takes in us. He performs no miracles; he conveys no powers upon his priests.”
White Eyebrow raised a scholarly finger. “And thus the tale leads us to Armenides the Compassionate, or the Pure, as he is sometimes called. He is spiritual advisor to our young Baron Hardisty. He came to Zazesspur a twelvemonth ago, claiming to bring a new dispensation from Ao. Ao has decided to take a more active role in the affairs of this world, Armenides avers. And he seems to have invested certain followers with the usual array of priestly powers.”
“These All-Friends are priests of Ao, then?”
“Indeed not. Merely devotees who do good works in the god’s name. Drawn from among the children of Zazesspur’s first families, by and large, which I find good in and of itself. It gives the spoiled darlings something to occupy themselves with beyond their own selfish pleasure. But here, I forgot my manners.” He hobbled to the rear of the shop, where despite the day’s warmth he kept coals aglow in a small black brazier.
“I regret your loss, Zaranda,” he said, setting a grille on the brazier and putting a copper kettle on to boil. “Yet perhaps it would be no bad thing, were magic banished from Zazesspur. It has brought much sorrow to the world. Perhaps it is best put away or reserved to wiser hands.”
Zaranda frowned. Here was the heartmeat of a debate she and her old friend had often held before. “Put away all magic?” she contented herself with saying. “On a world such as Faerûn? Easier to put away air.”
He laughed. He had a merry, ready laugh, and round cheeks like apples tied up in the laugh lines of his face. “Our old dispute rears its head again. Some things never change, or do so but slowly.” Turning from the kettle, he puffed his pipe and blew three smoke rings of descending size. The middle one drifted upward through the largest, and then the smaller floated up through both so their order was reversed.
“I wish I knew how you did that,” Zaranda said.
“First you have to smoke,” White Eyebrow said, “pipeweed or this new Maztican herb, tabacco. Plus it helps to have a gnome’s lifespan to practice over.” He puffed again, more conventionally.
“What of this Baron Hardisty? Is he the same Faneuil Hardisty who fought as a captain in the Tuigan War?”
The gnome nodded. “Just so.”
Zaranda looked thoughtful. “He was a good man in those days. A brave warrior, though perhaps too much inclined to trust in bravery and luck.”
“Why do you say was? He seems a good man still. He refuses a seat on the city council, and so holds himself above the infighting that disfigures the politics of this city. Many people are heard to say he’s just what the city needs—aye, and Tethyr as well. A strong man to take it all in hand again.”
He laughed and shook his head. “I see you looking skeptical, Zaranda. Ever the rebel! Authority is not always the monster you believe it to be.”
There came a rustle from the rear of the shop, and a musical tinkling. A gnome woman came through the hanging strands of silver bells that covered the doorway to the back rooms and the stair to the apartment above. She was small and slim by gnomish standards, and beautiful by the standards of human and gnome alike, though they did not often overlap. Her raven’s-wing hair was parted in the middle and confined by a circlet of silver, on the front of which was fixed a tiny toothed wheel. She wore a saffron robe, and the brown sash around her narrow waist bulged as if packed with small hard objects of various shapes, marking her as a priestess of Gond Wonderbringer.
“Ah!” White Eyebrow said cheerfully. “The pot’s just begun to whistle. Perhaps you could make tea for us, Simonne.”
The gnome woman looked at him a moment, then moved to obey. “Greetings, Zaranda Star.”
“Simonne!” Zaranda exclaimed. “It’s good to see you. The last time we met you were scarcely
more than a child.”
“She’s no more than a child still,” the old gnome said, frowning slightly, “though she has given herself much to the doings of this new sect of Gond Thunderblunder, or whatever he is called, who seek to better the world by tinkering with it.”
“We hope to make the world better by gaining knowledge of it,” Simonne said, pouring tea into dainty porcelain cups with flowers painted on them. “We don’t presume to tinker with that of which we know too little; that’s why we seek knowledge. And surely nothing is gained by turning our faces from the truth!”
She distributed the cups from a tray. “Our folk are pressed hard. You who have long been our friend should be warned that you’ll do yourself no good in this city by associating with us.”
“That’s strange news indeed,” Zaranda said, sipping, “for though it has its share of vices, Zazesspur has never been an intolerant place.”
“There is some new evil that invades our dreams and robs us of our sleep. Many blame us for that—not to mention more earthly ills.”
“What’s this about dreams?” Zaranda asked sharply through the steam.
“Nonsense, is what it is,” White Eyebrow said, puffing furiously. “A shared fancy, a passing fad. Folk have nightmares betimes, which they always have and always will; only the notion is abroad that there’s some fell design behind it all, so that anyone who suffers troubled sleep must tell all his friends, and they too remember they have at some time known bad dreams; and so it all gets built up into some dark conspiracy of sleep.”
With a tinkle of a different timbre, the larger bells affixed to the front door announced the entrance of customers. Though perhaps customers was the wrong word. Zaranda’s fine nose wrinkled to a whiff of dirty hair and stale sweat as two young male humans came into the shop, shabbily dressed in black and gray, with hair hanging in their eyes in great unwashed clots. Short, dark-stained wooden cudgels hung from their belts.