Steel and Stone

by Ellen Porath

  “There was a fair lady of old Daltigoth,

  Was scorned by her lover, alone left to weep …”

  Her voice was as rich as spring earth, and the portly man next to Tanis shivered. “ ‘The Fair Lady of Daltigoth,’ ” the man said in an undertone. “I love that song.”

  The crowd settled down to listen. Dusk had given way to evening. Solinari was high in the sky above the courtyard, and Lunitari, the red moon, was beginning to rise. The torches focused attention on the stage, but the half-elf could see spectators leaving through arched doors to the inn’s tavern, then returning with foaming mugs of beer. Kitiara had also noticed, he saw. “Would you like some ale?” she asked.

  Tanis had barely nodded when the swordswoman was on her feet, moving toward the adjoining tavern. Suddenly her way was blocked by a muscular man with black hair, black eyes, and a set expression. He wore ebony breeches and boots, white shirt, and a scarlet cape, and he stood before Kitiara with an air of self-assurance. “Kitiara Uth Matar!” the man said quietly.

  “Caven Mackid.” Her tone was chilly. She didn’t introduce the man to Tanis, who’d risen silently from the bench and approached the two. A slender teen-ager with emerald green eyes sidled next to the half-elf, gazing on with interest.

  Caven looked neither to the right nor left. “You don’t take many straight lines in your travels, woman,” he said. “It took me a week to pick up your trail, and more than a month to track you here.” Caven seemed to notice Tanis for the first time. “Fortunately,” he said to the half-elf, raising his voice, “Kitiara is the kind of woman that people pay heed to as she passes through. As I’m sure you’ve noticed.” Caven looked back at Kitiara. “A suspicious man might think you’d been avoiding him, my love,” he said.

  Kitiara pulled herself up straight, but she was still came up only to Caven Mackid’s shoulder. “I’m still your superior officer, soldier. Watch yourself.” Her tone was bantering, but her eyes showed no warmth.

  The minstrels’ tune continued, but several onlookers, sensing a possibly greater show in the making, gaped instead at Kitiara and Caven.

  At Kitiara’s words, Caven’s hands dropped to his sides, and the friendliness faded from his face. The big man gazed at Kitiara with a strange light in his eyes—anger mixed with something else. Something was afoot that the half-elf wasn’t privy to, but he was experienced enough with women to realize that Kitiara at one time had been much more than a commanding officer to this man.

  “I believe you have something of mine, Captain Uth Matar,” Mackid said silkily. “A money pouch, perhaps? No doubt an oversight on your part; our personal belongings did get a bit mingled there for a while, as I recall.”

  The slim teen-ager snickered. “I’ll say,” he said with a leer at Tanis.

  “And as I recall,” Caven Mackid went on, disregarding the youth, “you left in quite a hurry, my dear—too hasty even to leave a message. Pursued by ogres, no doubt. But I trust you’ve kept my money safe and have it now.”

  The teen-aged boy leaned toward Tanis. “Took off while he was out hunting, she did, and nipped most of his savings,” he whispered. “If she’d just took off, I don’t think he would’ve minded much. But it was the filching that stuck in Caven’s craw.”

  “Wode!” Caven gently reprimanded the boy. “Good squires keep their mouths shut around strangers.”

  Behind Kitiara, the minstrels finished the ballad and launched into a reel. The swordswoman finally noticed the half-elf. “Tanis, this is Caven Mackid, one of my subordinates in my last campaign.”

  Caven smiled in an almost friendly fashion at Tanis, but he addressed his words to Kitiara. “A half-elf, Kitiara? Lowered your standards a bit, haven’t you?” His squire snickered again, but the man quelled the outburst with a look. Instead, Caven gazed directly at Kitiara. His next words were an order. “My money. Now.”

  * * * * *

  Off to one side, unnoticed by any of the four, a woman with skin the umber of burnished oak pulled back warily into a shadowed portal. A soft woolen robe, the color of a dove, set off her dark features. Her gaze was direct, her eyes azure around pupils of surprising darkness. Her straight, blue-black hair poured over her shoulders, over the crumpled hood of her robe, and down her back.

  “Kitiara Uth Matar,” she murmured softly to herself. “And that dark-haired soldier … I know him, too.”

  Eyes narrow, slim fingers fondling the silk pouches that dangled from her waist, she continued to watch wordlessly from the shadows.

  Chapter 4

  Double Trouble

  THE WHINING OF A THOUSAND MOSQUITOES couldn’t mask the thud of the monster’s footsteps or the complaints of the beast’s two heads in the darkness.

  “Res hot!”

  “Lacua hungry.”

  “Dumb bugs. Want snow. Why hot?”

  “Spring. You stupid.”

  Pause. “Res go home now.”

  “No!”

  In a small prairie south of Haven, the thirteen-foot ettin faced off with itself—no mean feat for a creature with such short, fat necks. The ettin’s watery eyes were tiny, like a pig’s, and at the moment, bloodshot with anger. Each hamlike hand, controlled by the head on that side of the body, waved a spiked club. The argument came in a mishmash of orcish, goblin, and giant tongues.

  “Quit time,” Res, the right head, roared. “Res go home now!”

  “Mage say not! Find soldier lady,” Lacua, the left head, insisted.

  “On trail long. Too much long. No soldier lady. Gone, gone.” It might have been the longest speech Res had ever made. He stopped for breath, then, brow furrowing, struggled to remember where he’d started. “What Res say?” he asked Lacua.

  The left head thought hard. Lacua’s piglike snout curved in concentration. “Think, think,” he mused. The heads of the carnivore were balding at the top, but each sported a ponytail of stringy hair, which swung greasily now as Lacua searched his brain. No use. Res-Lacua shrugged and continued walking. Neither Res nor Lacua could keep the subject of a new discussion in mind long enough to get into a major battle.

  Janusz had taken the precaution of equipping Lacua with a magical device that allowed the spell-caster to keep tabs on the beast from Janusz’s new home in the Icereach, half a continent south of Haven. The ettin had been successful in the past for the mage—proof more of his loyalty and stubbornness than his thinking ability. The ettin’s left head, Lacua, while barely beyond a rabbit in raw intelligence, was leagues ahead of the right head, Res. Thus Janusz, anticipating frequent ettin tiffs on a mission so far from home, had appointed Lacua the leader of the expedition and the final arbiter of all disputes.

  This would have annoyed Res, had he been able to concentrate on it.

  Suddenly a skunk darted from a hollow log, and the ettin’s right hand flashed through the darkness and slammed the animal senseless with its club. Ignoring the cloud of stinging spray, the right head devoured the skunk in three bites while Lacua watched, salivating.

  Skunk musk, added to the coat of filth that clung to the hide of the ettin, did little to change the intensity of Res-Lacua’s stench. “Cleanliness,” like most words of more than two syllables, was not in the ettin vocabulary. An ice bear skin, untanned, covered the creature’s ample midsection. A constellation of fleas inhabited the fur.

  Between the heat and the bugs, the ettin scratched a lot. The spiked clubs came in handy for that.

  “Hot,” Res muttered again. “No snow.”

  “Spring, stupid,” Lacua repeated.

  “Snow,” Res moaned. Lacua looked over irritably. Mosquito bites peppered both heads like pox. Res had scratched his until they bled.

  “Snow?” Lacua repeated. “Where?”

  “Want snow.”

  “No snow here. Nope.”

  “Go home?”

  “Soon.”

  “Now?”

  “No. Later. Maybe.”

  Res-Lacua shoved north through the purple hestaflowers and other
prairie plants. Weed seeds clung to the beast like lint. Before the ettin, plant stalks stood up from the ground like exclamation points. Behind the creature, vegetation lay flattened in a swath as wide as a human man was tall.

  Infravision helped the ettin see up to ninety feet in the dark, but Res-Lacua’s nightvision had done little so far to help ease the creature’s prodigious appetite. The two-headed troll had managed a small snack of two goats and a cow at sunset, but that had been hours ago.

  Lacua suddenly stopped, dropped his club, and thrust his left hand into his tunic.

  “Flea?” asked Res, face creased with sympathy.

  Lacua didn’t reply. He pulled two items from a pocket that Janusz had had sewn into the ice bear hide—a jewel that cast an amethyst glow on the twin faces above it, and a second stone, which looked like an ordinary flat, gray pebble. But Lacua handled them both with the ettin version of reverence.

  “Not lose talk stone,” he chanted. “Not lose purple rock.”

  “Not, not, not,” Res chimed in.

  “Dead ettin, if.”

  Both heads nodded sagely.

  The sound of sheep came now to the ettin, who shoved both stones back into his tunic. He scanned the darkness. Then, from behind a rise in the terrain, his four ears caught the sounds of barking and a shouted command. And more sheep sounds.

  “Baaa?” asked Res. “Baaaaaa?”

  “Baa food,” Lacua answered knowingly.

  “Ah.”

  The ettin eagerly moved toward shepherd and flock.

  Chapter 5

  The Triangle

  “WELL? DID YOU STEAL HIS MONEY, KIT?” TANIS demanded.

  “No,” she replied with a glare at Caven Mackid. “I won it from him fair and square. And it’s too late now, anyway. I spent it.”

  “Fair?” Caven spat on the courtyard floor. The minstrels were playing loudly, but the arguing voices sounded over the music. “Ten steel she takes from me,” he shouted. “She wins the money from me at faro. Then I catch her cheating and take it back.”

  “At knifepoint,” Kitiara insisted.

  Caven and Kitiara were nose to nose with each other, hands clenched, but they addressed their remarks to Tanis. Wode grinned from earlobe to earlobe at the building tension.

  “I didn’t give it back to him willingly,” Kitiara said. “I conceded no guilt; thus the money was still mine.”

  Caven’s face grew redder. “And then, when my back is turned, she goes through my things, steals the money back, and sneaks off like the lying cheat she is!”

  Tanis put a rough hand on Kitiara’s shoulder. “Did you cheat the man at faro?”

  “I never cheat, at faro or any other card game,” she said loftily. “I don’t have to.” When Tanis continued to gaze doubtfully at her, the swordswoman flushed and glared at the two men.

  The half-elf turned to Caven Mackid. “You’ve been tracking her for more than a month for only ten steel?”

  The swordsman was silent for a moment. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he said finally.

  In the quiet that followed, Tanis realized the minstrels had stopped playing. Four of the innkeeper’s servants, dressed in sandals, breechcloths, and a mountain range of rippling muscles, were heading toward the quartet with disapproving faces.

  “We’re leaving,” Tanis called, and hauled a protesting Kitiara into the street. Wode slipped through the door just ahead of them. Caven looked as though he were considering making a stand, then he took stock of his reinforcements, found himself alone, and dogged the half-elf and Kitiara into the night. The inn’s door guards stopped at the portal and folded their arms across their considerable chests.

  Solinari and Lunitari had vanished behind a blanket of clouds. Tanis glowered like a thundercloud himself as he faced Kitiara. “Pay him, Kit.”

  “The money was mine.”

  “Pay him!”

  “No!”

  Tanis’s scowl grew deeper. “Then I will—just to get rid of him. Give me my half of the will-o’-the-wisp money.” He put out his palm. Kitiara in turn placed a hand on her belt, where she’d hung the pouch with the captured money. At first surprised and then increasingly frantic, she checked around her.

  “Tanis! The pouch is gone! Why didn’t we divide the money when we said we would?”

  Caven laughed. “She stole it, half-elf. Kitiara nicked you, too.”

  “Drizzleneff Gatehop!” Kitiara exclaimed. “It was the kender. I know it!” She moaned. “And she’s probably far from Haven by now, thanks to me. By the shadowless Abyss, we’ll never catch her.”

  Caven’s smooth voice continued. “Take care, half-elf. Kitiara was probably going to run off with your money tonight anyway. No one turns his back on Kitiara Uth Matar.”

  Suddenly Kitiara cried out. Even in the yellow light of the torches around the inn door, her face looked white. “By the gods, my pack! If that kender …” She twisted around to drop to the cobblestones the pack she’d insisted on carrying with her all day. Kitiara dug into the worn baggage, shoved something aside, then sighed. “Thank the gods.”

  “Our money?” Tanis asked, throwing a triumphant look at Caven Mackid as Kitiara replaced the items in her pack.

  But Kitiara shook her head. “Something more valuable. The … things for Raistlin.”

  “Ha!” Caven snickered. “She’s got your money in there, half-elf. Let me check.” He bustled toward Kitiara, reached for her pack—and found himself backpedaling away from her new dagger.

  “You can’t value your life much, Mackid,” she drawled, “to try something like that.”

  “She has your money, half-elf,” Caven protested. “And mine, too, probably. Go ahead and look.”

  Tanis put out a resolute hand. “Let me see, Kit.”

  Kitiara gazed at Tanis for a long time, her expression unreadable. Caven whispered, “Don’t let her snooker you, half-elf. She’s lying.”

  The swordswoman, still looking at Tanis, came to some decision. “I’ll show you, half-elf.” She told Caven over her shoulder, “But you can go to the Abyss, Mackid.” Kitiara opened the top of the canvas pack and held the opening wide toward the half-elf. “Look inside,” she urged.

  After some hesitation, Tanis placed a hand within the pack. His fingers touched clothes, crumbs of provisions left over from weeks on the road, and a small-bladed knife in a wooden case. No money pouch. He pulled his hand back. “Nothing,” he said to Caven.

  “I told you,” Kitiara said. She gathered up the pack and slung it over a shoulder.

  For a moment, Caven looked as though he thought Kitiara and Tanis might be in consort against him, but a glance at the half-elf seemed to change his mind. He kicked a booted toe against a cobblestone. “Ten steel,” he muttered. “I follow the woman for a month for ten lousy steel, and she doesn’t have the money anymore. And I have one steel left to my name.” He looked up. His tone was suddenly hopeful. “How much money do you two have?”

  Tanis and Kitiara looked at each other. Kitiara seemed unperturbed by her fellow mercenary’s mercurial change of mood. “I’m broke, Mackid. Give it up.”

  “I have a few coins,” the half-elf said. “Enough for supper and drink for Kitiara and me.” He emphasized the latter words.

  “And I have one steel coin,” Caven finished. “Let’s find another tavern and discuss our situation over some ale.”

  Tanis felt the lines of his face settle into hardness—what Flint Fireforge called his “infernal mulish elven look.” “Our situation?” he repeated.

  Caven nodded. “The situation,” he explained, “in which the two of you are going to find ten steel to replace the ones Kitiara stole or risk having me go to the Haven city guards, who will take you in custody for thievery.”

  With a cry, Kitiara, dagger drawn, flung herself across the cobblestones at Caven. She narrowly missed impaling the big man before Tanis dragged her off. Wode’s look of fascination had changed to one of utter glee. “Half-elf, let me go!” Kitiara
shrieked. “I’ll disembowel him and his scrawny squire both, I swear it! Mackid have me thrown in prison? It was my money, I tell you!”

  “It might take some time to prove that, Kit,” Caven said, smiling gently. “Weeks, maybe months—if you can do it at all. How will you prove it from a Haven dungeon, my dear?”

  Kitiara stopped struggling to consider his words. The anger seemed to seep from her body into the stones at their feet. After a slight hesitation, Tanis released her. The swordswoman straightened her clothing and headed down the street away from the Masked Dragon. “Come on then, you two,” she called back irritably.

  “Come on?” Caven repeated. He looked from Kitiara to the half-elf.

  “To an alehouse,” she shouted. “To talk. You invited us for a drink, Caven, after all.”

  Caven Mackid stood motionless, but Tanis, smiling despite himself, hastened to catch up with the swordswoman. Finally, after a short hike, Kitiara paused before a smoky den from which torchlight spilled. A hand-lettered sign, exuberantly misspelled, had been nailed above the door. It read “The Happee Ohgr” and was decorated with a drawing of an obviously drunken ogre. “This place looks appropriate for this type of discussion,” Kitiara said and pushed down the steps into the crowded tavern. Tanis, shrugging, followed with Wode, and Caven brought up the rear.

  They found a table by evicting three torpid traders who were too drunk to protest. The barkeep didn’t argue; clearly these new customers had more room for ale than did the sodden trio that now sat propped, forgotten and snoring, against a wall.

  Wode said nothing, but Tanis, Caven, and Kitiara had to shout over the din of arguments and occasional fistfights.

  “Where’d you get the money the kender stole?” Caven yelled, taking one swig of ale and then another. He now seemed inclined to believe Kitiara’s tale about Drizzleneff Gatehop. The swordswoman, using gestures almost as much as shouted phrases, sketched out the details of the previous night’s battle with the will-o’-the-wisp. Then Caven launched into ideas for the three of them to band together and make some real money. Grandiose ideas, Tanis thought with a yawn. But he listened politely, realizing that Kitiara took Caven more seriously.