Azure Bonds

by Kate Novak

  “Giogi?” Alias remembered, whispering the name aloud.

  Giogi Wyvernspur leaped three feet, spinning around as he did so. A silver flask flew from his hand, and amber liquid arched through the air.

  “You!” he gasped. “The madwoman! I mean, the bard’s friend!” He dived behind his horse. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just dropped in to borrow your horse,” Alias replied with a grin. She advanced carefully, looking to each side to make sure the young noble was alone.

  “My …” the young man’s throat went dry, “horse?”

  Alias nodded and swung the chain manacled to her arm. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No! I mean, no problem. You probably have a good reason that I don’t need to know. Honest!”

  “Don’t fret,” said Alias. “I’m not dangerous, just in a hurry to get into the city.” She patted the skittish Daisyeye’s front haunch and slipped her foot into the stirrup. “Just out of curiosity, what brings you to Westgate?”

  “Diplomatic mission,” the Cormyrian noble lied. “Nothing important. Just trade agreements. That sort of thing.”

  The warrior woman swung herself into the saddle. “You want your gear?” she asked.

  “No!” Giogi answered. “I mean, no thanks. If you’re heading to Westgate, maybe you could … uh … drop off my things. At The Jolly Warrior. Just let me get …” He summoned all his courage to approach, then fumbled in a saddlebag. Pulling out a large, official-looking document bearing the purple dragon of Cormyr, he stepped back. “There,” he said. “All yours.”

  Alias looked down at him. He wasn’t really dressed for hiking. “You know,” she said with a smile, trying to show no ill will, “two can ride as well on a horse as one.”

  Giogi gulped. “No. I mean … that is, you said you were in a hurry, and I need the exercise, anyway.”

  “As you wish.” She couldn’t blame him. “I’ll drop your gear at The Jolly Warrior. I’ll even make sure I don’t stay there. Oh, and Giogi, thanks. I’ll make it up to you when I get the chance.” With that, she wheeled the horse around and set it trotting toward the road.

  Giogi frowned after her. He’d come here at Azoun’s request for the express purpose of finding her, but he’d panicked when actually confronted with her presence. Now I’ll probably never see her again, he thought. Or poor Daisyeye.

  He sighed and cursed his bad luck. Giogi began walking, head down, kicking stones, and talking to himself.

  “Yes, I’ll let you ride with me, provided you behave. If you don’t, I shall be very cross. That’s what I should have said.”

  He kicked a particularly large rock, which glittered as it danced away. Curious, he chased after it. When it had stopped rolling, he lifted the great yellow gem out of the high grass and marveled at it. Maybe his luck was changing, he thought.

  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?”