Taking Flight

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Oh," Kelder said, looking out over the gleaming sands again.

  Far away, on the horizon, he thought he could see some­thing glistening. He wondered if it was their destination, the fabulous city of Shan on the Desert.

  Were they really going there? Was he really going to see someplace that exotic?

  Vast plains, great cities, and beside him the bright and beautiful girl he intended to marry—even if the prophecy somehow didn't all come true in every word, he was already sincerely grateful to Zindré. Her words had at least given him the impetus to make this journey, and despite his sore feet and empty purse, that was something he wouldn't want to have missed.

  Especially since meeting Irith had been a part of the jour­ney.

  "How big is the piece that sticks out to the west?" he asked. "It must be pretty big if we can't see across it."

  Irith shrugged. "Oh, maybe ten leagues across," she said. "Not all that big."

  "Ten leagues isn't big?" Kelder threw her a startled glance.

  "Not compared to the whole thing," Irith replied. "I mean, they don't call it the Great Eastern Desert for a joke, Kelder— it's huge. Covers one entire side of the World."

  "What's on the other side?"

  "Of the World?" Irith stared at him as if he were quite thor­oughly mad.

  "No, no," Kelder explained hastily, "I mean the other side of the ten leagues!"

  She shrugged again. "Empty grassland. Lots and lots of it."

  He nodded. "And Shan's about three or four leagues from here?"

  "About that," she agreed.

  Kelder looked down the escarpment, down at the empty sands, and asked, "How do we get there?"

  "Walk," Irith said, pointing.

  Kelder followed her finger and discovered that the road did not vanish at the top of the cliff, as he had first thought; it turned a sharp angle to the right and wound its way slowly and torturously down the slope, to disappear into the sand at the bottom.

  "The sand blows onto the highway, but there are markers every half mile or so," Irith explained. "It's paved, really, but the sand covers it."

  Kelder sighed and looked up. The sun was slightly past its zenith.

  "I guess we had better get going," he said.

  Irith nodded. "Asha," she said, turning to the girl, "can you walk for a while? It's sort of steep along here, and it's not good for horses, and besides, I'm getting tired of being a horse."

  "All right," Asha agreed. She immediately started walking on ahead, picking her way carefully down the rather abrupt drop that took the road over the edge of the escarpment and down the first five or six feet.

  Kelder and Irith followed.

  "Is it uncomfortable, being a horse?" Kelder asked, genu­inely curious, as they made the turn and the road leveled out somewhat as it cut sideways across the face of the slope.

  "No, of course not," Irith answered. She giggled at the idea. "It's sort of nice, being big and strong like that. But I get tired of not seeing any colors and not being able to talk, and my fingers that aren't there get stiff, sort of, from being hooves and being walked on."

  "Not seeing colors?" Kelder asked, startled.

  "That's right," Irith said with a nod. "Horses don't see col­ors, just grays and black and white. Sort of like in the eve­ning, when it's mostly dark? Except that it's not dark, there just isn't any color." She hesitated, then amended that to "At least, when I'm a horse, I don't see colors. I don't know about natural horses, really."

  "Oh," Kelder said.

  A moment later he said, "Could you ask them?"

  "Ask who?" Irith asked, startled.

  "Natural horses. Can you talk to them, when you're a horse?"

  "No, silly!" she said. "Horses don't talk!"

  "Not even among themselves?" Kelder asked. "I mean, I know they don't speak any of our languages, but don't they have languages of their own?"

  Irith giggled again.

  "Well," Kelder said defensively, "they do in all the old sto­ries."

  "Oh, Kelder," Irith said, "those are just stories! Hardly any of them are true!"

  "Well, how should I know that?" he asked.

  "Because it's foolish! Horses can't talk unless they're mag­ical, somehow. The gods taught people to speak, not ani­mals!"

  Kelder marched on half a dozen steps in silence, then said, "What about the other things you can turn into?"

  "What other things?" Irith asked, not looking at him.

  "You said you could change into seven different shapes," he said. "Can the others see color? Can they talk?"

  "Well, it doesn't matter whether I have wings or not," Irith said, "I'm still me, and I can still see colors and still talk."

  "What about the others, though?"

  Irith sighed. "Which others?"

  "All four of them!"

  "I can't talk in any of the others. I can see colors in two of them."

  "Which ones?"

  "None of your business."

  That effectively ended the conversation, and they trudged on down the escarpment in silence.

  The silence continued for the entire descent, and well out onto the sands. Kelder simply didn't have anything to say ex­cept questions that Irith didn't want to answer, Asha was con­centrating on walking, and Irith's thoughts were her own.

  It was finally broken when Asha wailed, "This sand gets into everything! Irith, could you be a horse again?"

  "No," Irith snapped. She marched on.

  "Here," Kelder said, "You can ride on my shoulders for a little while, until you get the sand out from between your toes." He reached out his arms.

  Asha looked up at him, considering, then shook her head.

  "No, Kelder, but thank you all the same," she said. "I'll walk." She turned and trudged onward, slogging through the drifting sand.

  Kelder dropped his arms, then shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, a little annoyed. Was that any way for a person to treat her champion?

  He marched on, frustrated and resentful. Fulfilling a proph­ecy wasn't turning out to be as much fun as he hoped.

  He glanced over at Irith, at her flowing golden hair and the curves that showed through her garments as she walked.

  On the other hand, he told himself, it did have its points.

  He trudged on, thinking about the future.

  Chapter 13

  They covered the last mile or so largely by the glow that spilled out over the walls of Shan on the Desert; the sun was down, the greater moon not yet up, and the lesser moon not enough to help.

  Shan, though, blazed like a fire before them, lighting the sky orange.

  Asha was staggering with exhaustion, and in the end she gave up and let Kelder carry her the last hundred yards, through the city gates and into the Bazaar.

  They had not caught up with the caravan; Kelder had se­cretly hoped they would, but they had seen no sign of it.

  He hoped that they hadn't passed it, perhaps safely tucked away at Dhwerra. It should be waiting for them in Shan, Kelder told himself.

  Once inside Asha stared about, wide-eyed, as Kelder low­ered her to the ground. They were in the central square of the Bazaar, and Kelder and Asha both looked about in wonder. Irith waited impatiently for them to get over their awe.

  The Bazaar at Shan was unique among all the markets Kelder had ever seen in that it was built on two levels—at least two levels, perhaps more. The ordinary open market was surrounded not by the usual taverns and inns and shops, but by a maze of galleries and arcades, alight with torches and lamps of a dozen varieties, with merchants of every descrip­tion lining every side, displaying their wares to crowds of eager customers.

  And atop the galleries and arcades, on their flat roofs, there were still more merchants, still more customers, to be reached by innumerable staircases.

  Most of the upper level was unroofed, or covered only by tents and awnings, but in a few places the upper tier, too, was partially enclosed by more substantial structures. Kelder could not see, in
the tangle of firelight and shadow, whether there were still more merchants up on a third level.

  Where there were no permanent stalls, there were blankets heaped with goods, or blankets covering momentarily un­tended goods, or wagons or carts or other vehicles. Entire car­avans had set up shop under the colonnades around the market square; some of them had obviously been there for quite some time.

  Nor was the Bazaar simply a single square. Oh, there was a central square, and a larger one than Kelder had ever seen before, but the galleries and arcades, colonnades and court­yards, stairways and stalls all extended for blocks, to left and right and straight ahead, inward from the city walls. Kelder could see no end to the labyrinth of buyers and sellers and goods.

  It seemed to him that the Bazaar must surely occupy the entire interior of the city walls—but that was absurd.

  Wasn't it?

  "I don't understand," he said. "Where do they all come from?"

  "Where do all what come from?" Irith asked, startled. That was not the question she had been expecting.

  "The merchants," Kelder said, with a wave of his hand. "Look at them all! Where do they live? And where did all these people buying things come from? We didn't see that many on the road, certainly. And we're in the middle of the desert, and I don't see any farmers here with their crops— what do they all eat? Where do they get all those things they're selling?"

  "Oh, don't you know?" Irith replied, startled. She giggled. "Really, Kelder, sometimes it seems like you don't know any­thing!"

  Slightly resentful, but too awed and curious to worry about it, Kelder asked, "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, it's all done by magic, of course! We aren't in the Small Kingdoms anymore, you know—they take their magic seriously here."

  "What sort of magic?" he asked, eyeing her cautiously. Magic, after all, was something she knew far more about than he did—and while he wanted to know more, he had a fair ap­preciation of how dangerous it could be. In fact, the thought of unfamiliar and perhaps hostile magic made him distinctly uneasy, especially after what had happened to those bandits back in Angarossa.

  "Oh, I guess wizardry, mostly, these days," Irith said, "but a lot of sorcery, too—it used to be mostly sorcery, but these days sorcerers aren't what they used to be . . ."

  "What are you talking about?" Kelder demanded. "What do sorcerers have to do with all this?"

  Irith put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

  "I am talking," she said, "about this place—about Shan on the Desert!"

  Kelder glared back, waiting for her to continue. Some­where in the back of his mind he remembered that she had told him that the Bazaar specialized in sorcery, but he was in no mood to admit it.

  She threw up her hands in disgust.

  "Aah! Don't you know anything about Shan?" she shouted.

  "No," Kelder answered, "I don't. Except that it's at the end of the Great Highway and is supposed to be the best place in the World to buy certain things." He glanced around at the Bazaar and added, "Which I can believe."

  "All right, then," Irith said, "I'll explain." She took a deep breath and began, "Shan isn't part of the Small Kingdoms—it wasn't part of Old Ethshar. What it is, is the last bit of the old Eastern Command, that fought under General Terrek in the Great War. You know about that?"

  "A little," Kelder said. "I mean, of course I know about the war, and I've heard of General Terrek, I think. He got killed by a demon, didn't he?"

  Irith nodded. "A whole bunch of demons, actually. His whole command got wiped out, pretty much—all the demons of Hell got loose at once and went running all over the east, blasting everything. That's where the Great Eastern Desert came from—it wasn't desert before that."

  "Oh," Kelder said, thinking about the vast, empty waste­land that surrounded Shan and trying to imagine what could have caused it. By comparison, the demons who wiped out the bandits looked pretty trivial.

  That reminded him of the caravan they had come to find; he glanced around but recognized none of the wagons in sight.

  A few did have heads on pikes, as it happened, but none of them were recent. Two were actually just skulls, rather than heads, and the others were approaching a similar state.

  Irith continued, "Right, the demons did all that, and they were going to go on and destroy everything else, but the gods themselves came down from Heaven and fought the demons and defeated them."

  Kelder nodded, partly listening and partly still looking for the caravan; that part, about the gods coming and stopping the demons, he had heard before.

  "But it was too late for General Terrek, of course, and all of his people—except for Shan." She made a sweeping ges­ture, taking in the entire Bazaar. "See, this was Terrek's main supply depot, and he had all his magicians here at the time, and they had all their protective spells up and everything, and they were able to hold the demons off until the gods came and rescued them."

  "Oh," Kelder said again, still looking around.

  "Anyway," Irith continued, "after the war ended, there were all these people here, magicians and supply clerks and quartermasters and people like that, and they had all these supplies intended for General Terrek's army, but the army was gone, so they just kept all the stuff themselves and started selling it."

  Kelder nodded, turning his whole attention back to Irith.

  The whole thing made sense, so far, except for one little de­tail.

  "That was more than two hundred years ago, though," he said. "They must have sold it all off long ago!"

  "Well, of course they did, silly!" Irith agreed. "But they bought other stuff, or made it, and they're all still buying and selling. And since this was the biggest cache of magical sup­plies in the entire World for so long, it's still where magicians come to buy and sell, a lot of the time. Not just magicians, ei­ther. And the people here make things, too—they make glass here better than anywhere else, better even than Ethshar of the Sands. There are miners who bring in jewels from the desert to sell here, too. Let's see . . ." She paused to think.

  Kelder waited.

  "Well, glass," she said, "I said that. And sorcerers' stuff, and supplies for wizards except you can get most of those in Ethshar just as well now, and medicines, I think—some of them—and perfumes, they make wonderful perfumes here, and there are dyes—all kinds of stuff." She shrugged. "It used to be nicer, actually. Business has dropped off a lot since I first came here."

  "They must be expensive," Kelder said. "I mean, it's a long way to come, all the way out here." He remembered an­other unexplained detail and asked, "So where did all the buyers come from, anyway? We didn't see anywhere near this many people on the way . . ."

  "It's the off season," Irith said. "It's much more crowded than this sometimes!"

  Kelder looked about at what must have been several hun­dreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

  "A lot of people don't come by the highway," Irith contin­ued. "The wizards fly, or use some other kind of magic to get here. People from all over the eastern Small Kingdoms come overland to Dhwerra and get the highway from there, and they would all have gotten here hours ago, so we wouldn't have seen them on the road. And there are other ways, mag­ical ways, I think—I've heard stories about tunnels under the desert."

  "Oh," Kelder said. "But what do they all eat? Where do they stay?"

  "Oh, there are places to stay," Irith said. "Inns for the cus­tomers, tenements for the natives. And they get their food by magic, mostly."

  While this discussion had been taking place, Asha had rather blearily wandered over toward a nearby merchant's stall.

  "Oooh!" she exclaimed, distracting Kelder and Irith. "Look!"

  The two looked.

  Asha had lifted the velvet cover from a glass sculpture of a dragon; the creature sparkled vivid gold in the yellow lamp­light. Its jaws were open in silent rage, crystal fangs glitter­ing; it stood crouching on three taloned feet, the fourth raised to strike, claws outstretched. Its tail wound graceful
ly to a needle-sharp point, and its wings, like sheets of ice, swept up and back, ready to bear it instantly aloft.

  Kelder found himself drawn to it.

  Irith looked but called, "It's getting late, and I'm really hungry; can we get some dinner now? And find somewhere to sleep?"

  Kelder and Asha stared at the glass dragon.

  "Kelder?" Irith called. "Come on, let's get something to eat!"

  Kelder reluctantly tore himself away. "Did you see this thing, Irith?" he called.

  She shrugged. "Not that one," she said, "but I've seen oth­ers. I've been here before, Kelder, lots of times. You can make lots of nice things out of glass."

  "Nice things" seemed a rather inadequate description, to Kelder—he thought the dragon was quite spectacular. He didn't argue, though.

  He did hesitate.

  "It will still be there after we eat," Irith pointed out, and Kelder tore himself away.

  "Come on, Asha," he called. "Let's get dinner."

  The little girl hesitated, as Kelder had. He reached out and took her hand and led her away.

  Following Irith's lead, they headed out of the square to the northwest, pushing their way through the wall of traders under the first ring of columns.

  Once they had pierced that veil, Kelder suddenly saw what Irith had meant about the off season and a decline in business.

  The arcades and merchants' stalls still continued as far as Kelder could make out, but now he could see that many of them were empty. Some of the merchants who were there were sitting alone and ignored, without a patron in sight.

  And many of them did not look at all prosperous; Kelder could see men and women who were dirty and unkempt and tired. Some were slouched against pillars, or curled up on the ground asleep, not even pretending to look for customers any­more. All this had been hidden by the crowd in the central square.

  It struck him as odd that so many people should be clus­tered there, rather than spread more evenly throughout the market; he said as much to Irith.

  She shrugged. "Well, the galleries around the square are where those new caravans are—probably a lot of the people doing the buying are really the merchants from these other places." She waved a hand at the largely vacant inner arcades.