War in Tethyr

by Victor Milán

  A retainer in the duke’s blue-and-white livery approached, discreetly clearing his throat for attention. “If His Grace will pardon the intrusion—”

  “Yes? Very well, Strakes, what is it?”

  Two more footmen with breeches clasped at the knees by silver broaches ushered a blonde girl in by the arms. Her face had a sulky snub-nosed beauty, contorted at the moment by angry hauteur. She wore a simple white robe. A torque of gold encompassed her slender neck.

  “I regret to report that we discovered your daughter rifling Your Grace’s purse,” Strakes said, holding up a black velvet pouch. He had thinning black hair combed over the dome of his head, long, lugubrious features, a button nose, and a gift of speaking without moving his lips.

  “Let me go!” the girl exclaimed, wrenching her elbows free of the footmen’s grasp. She shook back her hair and held her chin high.

  “Tatrina, Tatrina,” the old duke said in a tone of half-hearted severity, “what am I to do with you?”

  “You have more than you need!” she declared. “The poor children of Zazesspur need help. I was merely trying to do the right thing, since you will not!” She had the habit of speaking with almost visible exclamation marks.

  “I devote the waking hours of every day to the welfare of the people of Zazesspur,” Hembreon said, “especially the children.”

  “There must be more! Ao must reign triumphant!”

  “I will not countenance your stealing from me for whatever purposes, however noble.” He held out his hand. Strakes deposited the purse in it. The duke dug inside and produced a gold Zazesspur gulder. “Here, my child. Be at peace, and leave me in peace. I am a busy man.”

  The girl scowled. “This is not—”

  “Enough!” the old man snapped. “You’ve taxed my purse; do not tax my patience. And if I catch you filching from me again, you’ll be restricted to your chambers for a month!”

  She sniffed, did another hair-flip, pivoted, and stalked from the garden. The servitors followed. Duke Hembreon sighed.

  “Or at least a week.” He shook his head. “Isn’t that ever the way of it? No matter how much power one wields in the world, it’s always hardest to rule one’s home.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,” Zaranda said. “I have no children.”

  “Perhaps you should bear some, Countess Morninggold. It would greatly enhance your sense of responsibility. Now, if you have no further matters to discuss, I crave your leave. The city’s business presses.”

  There was a blue-and-bronze patrol standing in the street when Zaranda stepped out of the duke’s gabled front door. At her appearance the leader swept off a purple velvet bladder hat with a long pheasant tail feather stuck in it and performed a sardonic bow.

  “The Countess Morninggold, I presume?” he said with a sneer. He was a man of middle height or a shade beneath, whose expensive doublet—purple velvet slashed to display gold satin lining—and orange pantaloons augmented rather than concealed a bandy-legged, ungraceful figure. His face and voice were well suited to sneering, the former being dominated by a large nose with a wart prominent on the side of it, and a ginger-colored goatee surrounding full lips below. An unprepossessing apparition, withal, yet Zaranda marked a lightness on his feet and a fluidity to his bow that belied his unhandy form. His codpiece was wrought in the face of a leering fiend with pointed tongue protruding.

  “Indeed you do presume, I think,” Zaranda said. “And whom have I the … honor … of addressing?”

  The man’s head was perfectly bald on top, with tufts of wiry reddish hair jutting to the sides. He made haste to replace his cap. “I am Shaveli, captain of the civic guard, though better known to the admiring multitudes as Shaveli Sword-Master.” And he caressed the diamond-inset gold pommel of the swept-hilted rapier hung from a leather baldric.

  He was known as a few other things, Zaranda’s street contacts had told her over the last few days, including the commander of a well-feared secret detail of the guard known as the Specials. A brutal man, who had been a professional duelist before the reformers had offered him rank in the civic guard, he was rumored to make use of the office to indulge certain dark tastes. Men in such positions, and women also, were always rumored to do so. Looking at the man for the first time, though, Zaranda was minded to give the rumors credence.

  “Am I to be arrested, then?” she asked. Behind the Sword-Master, his guardsmen shuffled their feet and shifted grips on their halberds uneasily as they eyed her with a mixture of desire and fear. Zaranda had a reputation of her own.

  “The choice is yours, Countess,” Shaveli said, saying the title as he might say whore.

  “Then I choose not to be arrested. Good day.” She started to walk past.

  Two guards sprang forward to cross their halberds before her. “Ah, but there’s the rub, Countess,” Shaveli said. “If you choose not to be arrested, you must choose to come with us.”

  “Ah,” she said with an acid-dipped smile. “I see. Our noble city council has seen fit to reform the language as well as the laws, so that choice means doing what the government compels one to do.”

  “You have said it,” the Sword-Master said with a flourish and a bow. “And now, if you will follow me—”

  “I have heard much about you, Countess Morninggold,” the tall man said. He placed the dome back on the rotunda of a miniature building in his model city. He turned from the table to face Zaranda. His face was long and heavily handsome, shaven clean and just beginning to show the marks of weathering, age, and care, particularly in the lines around the mouth and the intense brown eyes. His square-cut hair was dark brown, heavily salted with gray. The simple severity of a gold-trimmed green tabard of rich fabric worn over brown blouse and golden hose minimized the visible effects of prolonged inactivity on a once-athletic frame. “I am honored to make your acquaintance.”

  He took Zaranda’s hand, bowed over it, and pressed it to his lips. From below and around them in the vast half-completed Palace of Governance came the woodpecker and cicada sounds of artisans at work. The air in the chamber was still, warm, and charged.

  “Your lordship’s gallantry is impeccable, but I fear it outstrips your memory,” Zaranda said. “We’ve met before.”

  He straightened and showed her a grin that stripped years from his countenance. “Ah, but that was Zaranda Star, the dashing war captain, not Countess Morninggold.”

  “And I have long been denied the pleasure of meeting either one,” a voice said. From an archway a white-robed man emerged into the octagonal hall on the Palace of Governance’s uppermost story. Civic guards lurked in the shadows without. Zaranda had not been disarmed before Shaveli bowed her mockingly into the baron’s chamber, but Hardisty took few chances.

  The newcomer was a spry elderly man with marmoset tufts of white hair surrounding a gleaming dome of head, a beak of a nose, bright blue eyes nestled among laughter lines above apple cheeks. A plain white robe hung on a spare frame. Sandals gently slapped the green marble floor as he strode toward Zaranda with hand extended.

  “Countess, my chief advisor and friend, Armenides the Compassionate,” Baron Hardisty said.

  Zaranda presented her hand and was relieved when the cleric settled for shaking it rather than emulating Hardisty. She noted that his neck was bare.

  “The honor’s mine,” she said, “especially considering high priests of Ao are far rarer in this world than captains or countesses. And please, my name is Zaranda Star.”

  Armenides beamed and nodded. “Just so, just so, good Mistress Star. And, the All-Father willing, his high priests shall not long remain a rarity in Faerûn.”

  “My lifetime has seen the flight of dragons and the death of gods,” Zaranda said. “Perhaps it shall be as you say, Excellency.”

  “If you can forgo titles, so can I. Armenides will suffice, or simply Father.”

  “As you wish.”

  “For my part please call me Faneuil, as once you did,” Hardisty said. He gestured at
the model city. “Do you like it?”

  Zaranda walked round the model, leaning and stooping to study it with genuine interest. Elaborate and clever constructs had always appealed to her. The buildings were carved of wood to exquisite detail, and so placed that the noonday sun shone down through the octagonal skylight overhead and made them seem a real city somehow reduced and captured on a magician’s table.

  “It’s wonderfully wrought, Faneuil. Did you build it yourself?”

  He laughed. “Ah, but that I had the hand skill—or the time. I should more readily win the trust I need from our good people; you know how Tethyrians admire craftsmanship. No, only the vision’s mine, guided by the clear eyes of Father Armenides.” He held forth a hand. “Behold the Zazesspur of the future!”

  Zaranda looked up in amazement. “Zazesspur?”

  Hardisty smiled fit to split his head in half. “Indeed.”

  “You’d raze the city and rebuild it from earth upward?” she asked, straightening.

  “An audacious plan, but one I hope to see completed before I pass on.”

  “But where are the houses and shops? All I see are blockish things like, ahh—”

  “Like the palace itself, though smaller. Except for the Temple of Ao and All Faiths there across from it.”

  Armenides spread hands above the miniature city as if bestowing a benediction. “All parts of daily life shall be drawn together, even as over time the worship of the sundry gods, which is none other than worship of Ao in his myriad aspects, shall be reabsorbed into the body of the All-Faith. In these times of uncertainty and peril, compassion demands that we draw our flock close together where we can most efficiently watch over it.”

  “I’m uncomfortable thinking of people as sheep,” Zaranda said. “But surely you didn’t bring me here to discuss rebuilding Zazesspur, Faneuil.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” the baron said, “yes. Specifically, that part you might play in the remaking of Zazesspur—and all Tethyr.”

  “And what might that be? I’m not much for stone-masonry, nor religion, for that matter,”

  The baron goggled slightly, then recovered and emitted a hearty laugh. “Ah, a joke. You were ever the sly wit, Zaranda. No, the greatest part of the task that confronts us requires neither trowel nor chisel nor level. It will require the skills of the tongue, and when they fail, the sword. You are remarkably adept with both.”

  “We do not overlook your skill in matters magical,” the cleric added.

  “I thought you were trying to clamp down on the mystic arts,” Zaranda said. “Swordsmanship too, for that matter.”

  “Those are actions the council is contemplating,” Hardisty said smoothly. “I have no official standing with that body.”

  “You did get them to build this palace and let you live in it.”

  “They recognize the beauty and strength of our ideas,” Armenides said, “and indeed, their inevitability.”

  He paused to engage her gaze fixedly with his own. She felt a moment’s jarring dislocation, a passing loss of balance as if a chasm had opened suddenly at her feet. She rocked back, trying to keep surprise from showing in her face.

  “—certainly see the benefits of such a program,” the priest was saying. His eyes were only eyes now, not spiritual hammers. “Magic and the sword do much grievous harm. For the sake of all, is it not wisest to restrict their usage to those with the training, wisdom, and moral perspective to use them properly?”

  “Meaning us,” Zaranda managed to croak.

  Baron Hardisty leaned forward on the balls of his feet. “The you’ll join us?”

  “What exactly—beyond the satisfaction of a job well done—is in it for me?”

  “You would have a voice in restructuring our anarchic society,” Hardisty said, “as well, obviously, as a hand in running it. Confirmation of your title as Countess Morninggold, as well as a grant-in-aid to secure your possession of it.”

  “Isn’t that a bit ambitious, seeing as you don’t yet control even Zazesspur?”

  The two men laughed. “Have you never heard the saying that one doesn’t hit what one doesn’t aim at?” the cleric asked.

  “You would certainly not want for material reward,” Hardisty said. “During the Tuigan War you displayed considerable waywardness of thought and spirit. Yet always you fought for what you thought was right. Your greatest reward, I warrant, would be the power to help people.”

  To keep my house, she thought, and win the power to do unlimited good: what more could I ask for? She could think of a thing or two, certainly, such as the companionship of men who bathed and didn’t have biceps bigger than their brains; but she suspected such amenities would be included in the bargain. All he’s offering me is everything I’ve striven for all my life.

  And then, in what seemed a different mental voice: And all it will cost me is my soul.

  “What do you ask of me?”

  “Your loyalty,” Hardisty said. “Your support. Swear yourself to my service, and you shall have all we’ve spoken of and more. How say you?”

  Zaranda laughed and held up a hand. “I say things are moving rather rapidly for me. I have some friends who depend on me for their livelihoods, just now What of them?”

  “Certainly you can employ whatever retainers you choose,” the baron said, “provided they pass a minor investigation.”

  “Investigation?”

  “A trifle of magic,” Armenides said heartily, “to ensure the purity of their minds and motives. It is a sad truth that many minions of evil move at large through our chaotic world, and we cannot always know them by surface appearance.”

  “Indeed,” Zaranda said. She drew a deep breath and expelled it through pursed lips. “Gentlemen, your offers are most kind. But I need time to assimilate all you’ve told me, and what you have proposed.”

  Hardisty gave an airy wave of his big square hand. “I should doubt your wisdom did you not want time to contemplate—may I now call you Countess?”

  “Take all the time you need,” Armenides said. His forefingers each traced a semicircle in the air before his face, completing the circle at the bottom. “And may the blessings of Ao the Universal follow wherever you walk in this wide world.”

  The six half-hour bells of midafternoon were still reverberating through the streets of Zazesspur when a company of civic guardsmen entered from either end of the block of the Winsome Repose and took up blocking positions. A squad of ten men in morions and breastplates, under the command of a young lieutenant and his sergeant, marched up to the front door of the inn.

  The innkeeper, a small weasel-sleek, dark-haired man whose name was Quarlo, met them on the steps. The lieutenant, whose hair hung in black pomaded ringlets to the shoulders, wore a bronze breastplate gorgeously wrought in the likeness of impressive chest and belly muscles, which surely were not mirrored by anything beneath. From the hilt of his rapier hung a scented ball as big as his fist, to help shield his nostrils from assault from the nearby stables. He unrolled a parchment scroll and read aloud “—therefore require you to deliver unto arrest and sequestration the persons of one Zaranda Star, self-styled Countess Morninggold, as well as all companions and chattels. In the name of the city council of Zazesspur, herewith attached the seal of Shaveli, captain of the guard.”

  Scrubbing his hands compulsively in his apron and rolling his beady eyes, Quarlo listened to the peroration. Then he said, “But, Excellent One, I cannot!”

  The youthful lieutenant gave him a terrible eye, which he had devoted much mirror time to perfecting. “And why not?” he asked, in rage that was meant to thunder but squeaked instead.

  “They’re gone.”

  The lieutenant opened his mouth to pronounce doom upon the contumacious innkeeper. Then his eyes stood out from his olive-skinned face. “Gone?”

  Quarlo nodded. “She paid her reckoning not an hour ago, for herself and her whole menagerie, and went trooping off to the harbor. She spoke of taking ship for Halruaa, or Zakhara e
ven. Said she felt the climate here wasn’t warm enough.”

  “Too warm for her, more like,” rasped a voice from the patrol at the lieutenant’s back. The other guards laughed, until a hard look from their sergeant—whose face looked as if it could be used to hammer nails, and had been—quelled them.

  The lieutenant turned green. “Search the building!” he commanded in a voice strangled to a bat’s ranging cry.

  The patrol did, with sufficient thoroughness that more than one guest afterward had words with Quarlo about valuable but readily concealable personal effects that had turned up missing. The only sign they turned up that Zaranda and company had ever been there was a series of complaints from the grooms that her war mare used loaded dice, which the lieutenant could not make heads or tails of.

  “To the harbor!” the lieutenant commanded in a more robust voice than he’d been able to muster earlier. The sergeant bellowed orders, and the little patrol set out past the puzzled cordon at double-time toward the harbor.

  In the rear marched the grizzled sergeant, looking grimmer than usual. He secretly believed the rest of the little unit—Lieutenant Flower Petal in particular—had missed their calling when they took up the blue and gold of the civic guard instead of the motley of the Jesters, Fools, & Harlequins Guild. If you asked him, this tale of taking ship for exotic lands was thinner than beer would be if that blue-nosed old grassquit Armenides had his way with Zazesspur. If Zaranda was at the harbor, he himself was the Simbul, Queen of Aglarond.

  On the other hand, the patrol had been most particularly warned that Countess Morninggold and her accomplices were clever as dragons and about as tractable. And there was that which his wife had never understood, back when he served in the army of Ithmong before Ernest Gallowglass was deposed by do-gooders, which lay behind what she chose to regard as his slovenly lack of ambition: that while sergeants never stood first in line when spoils were doled out, neither did they when it came time to apportion blame. In this present case, Shaveli had hinted that, should the fugitives not be apprehended, someone’s head and neck might soon come to a parting of the ways.