Leena thought she knew one important thing, though. The brat’s presence seemed to have something to do with her being able to continue to stay alive… at least, as long as she was inclined to do so. Some benefactor of the little bastard must watch over the place they lived in. Sometimes when Leena returned from one of her forays, when the hovel she and the runt shared had been empty for a while, she found evidence of that. One time a small sack of meal would appear, another time a pot of soup, and sometimes even a few small coins or a nice piece of woolen cloth.
“Stay out of here, witch-crone!” The warning came from a stick-thin drab who had taken up residence near the Slum Quarter’s refuse dump. Leena didn’t see the woman’s old man around, so instead of trying to avoid trouble, she stopped and stared at her.
“Shrivel your teats!” Leena shouted, and then she cackled loudly as she continued to glare at the drab. The whole display wasn’t much of a threat, but it did seem to have the desired effect, for the skinny woman covered her face and ducked inside the decaying old structure that housed her and the hairy old ragpicker who lived with her. A rock came sailing out of the doorway, but landed ineffectually a few feet away from where Leena stood.
Still cackling, Leena shuffled on her way. Being old and ugly had its advantages, yes indeed. When had she been young? Lovely? Leena knew that there must have been such a time. Deep inside herself she was sure of it. But she had no conscious memory of being anything other than Leena the Crone, no recollection of a time when she had done anything other than care for the skinny brat who shared her slovenly home.
The gangs of boys from the Labor Quarter and the Beggars Quarter were her worst nightmare. Sometimes Leena dreamed about them, and they took the shapes of terrible monsters as they came near. Then a noble warrior would intervene, or the brat would come into her dream and change into a giant who frightened off the dirty pack of boy-demons. Some laugh, that. Leena kept a long knife under her dirty old blanket, the same wrap that served her as a cloak when she went out. That way she was certain that she had real protection. The witch stuff, the shouting and cackling, didn’t work as well with the gangs as it did with other sorts of adversaries. But they usually only bothered her when she strayed from the area between the rubbish dump and her place in the abandoned tannery, so with care there was no problem-other than finding food and a few little things to add to her comfort.
“Glory!” The exclamation sprang unbidden to her lips. A whole bundle of wax tapers had been discarded along with someone’s garbage. The breaks in the candles weren’t too bad, and the oiled cloth they were rolled in was a minor treasure in itself. Leena bent down and began scrabbling around in earnest in that particular pile of debris. Perhaps there was more good stuff to be had.
At an earlier time inside Old City, even within the slums, and outside in the New Town as well, others conducted their own searches even more carefully than old Leena scavenged for the means to stay alive. The word had gone out, and who had put it forth mattered not a bit. Beggars and thieves were alert. Petty clerics and city guards kept a watch on all they saw. Peddlers, shopkeepers, barmen, and ostlers too knew and sought to gain from their knowledge. Merely seeing a pretty woman named Meleena, and being able to prove it, was worth one hundred gold orbs. If she was seen with an infant, then the sum would be doubled. Should both be taken by those who sought them, then the informant who enabled that to happen would have a thousand of the fat discs of gold for his trouble!
Every young woman in Greyhawk was viewed critically. Every mother with a baby was a potential fortune. A thousand eager informants turned the city inside out seeking the two, and a thousand false claims were checked and proved to be nothing more than that. The word was out for weeks before the offer was finally cancelled. By then, nobody much cared anyway, for avaricious expectations quickly turn to other and easier prospects.
Other agents, ones with non-monetary motives, also sought the woman and the baby. Men and women with position and power used magical means or discreet inquiries to try to locate them. Strange creatures roamed the city at night searching for the two.
No magic succeeded, no inquiry uncovered a clue, no occult observer saw anything of consequence. It was as if the earth had swallowed up Meleena and her charge, or the pair had been removed to some other plane. After a time the hunt was, in fact, transferred to likely places other than Oerth, places where the pair could have found refuge. Only a few of the nether plane’s operatives remained to continue the search in Greyhawk, and then only because those individuals had other duties there as well. Weeks became months, months rolled into years. By then even those agents had forgotten Meleena and her ward. Certainly, by now, both were long dead.
“No one as weak and insignificant as that one could have avoided the sending of Poxpanus,” Sigil-dark observed when the subject came up in conversation one day.
“Agreed,” said Arendil, the new Great Priest of Nerull now presiding over the Lightless Temple.
“Our lord and master placed potent curses upon both woman and babe as well, did he not?”
“Most assuredly. I assisted with minor portions of the whole complex of dooming which was cast,” the cleric said slowly.
The mage was at a loss, “Five years now, near enough, and there has been no sign, no trace, no clue anywhere. There is only one possible answer. The pair was vaporized, blasted into nothingness. That must have happened long ago; so why do we still search?”
Arendil gazed at the mage without expression. Sigildark was already above his true mark, and before long he would have to be replaced. “That is why I summoned you,” he explained. “Other, more pressing concerns now demand our attention. There is no longer to be any search for either of the two.”
Sigildark looked satisfied at this, as if he had been influential in the decision and was receiving long-overdue praise for what he had advocated. The priest didn’t inform him of the fact that the redes of both Hades and the Nine Hells were unchanged. Perhaps they bore on an altogether different individual anyway. It didn’t matter, for the spell-binder had no need to know.
“What urgent matter am I to attend to now?” Sigildark asked pompously.
“It seems, dear mage, that there are clues to the whereabouts of the… objects we seek, the portions of the ancient relic we must reunite, hidden somewhere in the grimoires to be found within the very library of the Savants of Greyhawk. You are to…” and the priest thereafter proceeded to explain to the mage his task in regard to that matter. That was the conclusion of the whole affair of Meleena in the city.
“…thump yer gourd!”
The crone was at it again, and the little boy leaped to get clear. Leena’s cackle of mirth was sufficient to send a wave of hatred through his skinny body, but he scampered even faster. “Fetch me wood, brat, and don’t come back without enough to keep old Leena warm all night, hear?”
Safely outside, beyond her reach and secure that her crooked stick couldn’t touch him, the boy turned and made a terrible face. “Go scratch, you old bag! I’ll never come back and you’ll freeze to death!”
“I’ll smash yer gourd!” Leena cried, raising her stick threateningly and advancing toward him. The small boy ran off immediately, and Leena cackled her ugly laugh once more. An empty threat from an empty little gourd. The boy was useless, but somehow she would manage to make him of some value. She’d work him to death if necessary, pound knots on his head in the process. She knew that the dirty little bastard was the cause of all her troubles, and she meant to even the score. Meanwhile, he would be made of use.