"You're not fer knowing the half of it, elf woman," the dwarf retorted. "I been in more fights than you've had tumbles, an' I thought I seen it all. But never once have I seen an elf ghost come to the aid of the living! Are you thinking that the ghost of that liddle blue-haired elf woman follered you from the treasure room?" he asked Arilyn. "Morodin's Beard, ifn you could put some starch in that one, she'd be worth fighting!"
Yes, Arilyn admitted silently. That was precisely what she must do. Perhaps she could not call forth the elf-shadow warriors again, but she could restore to the forest elves a hero they knew, one they would willingly follow. She would have to, as Jill so aptly phrased it, "put some starch" back into the elven battle leader Zoastria. It was time to reunite the elfshadow with the slumbering form of her ancestor.
But first, she had to regain her own "starch."
Arilyn willed her swirling thoughts to find focus. She noted that her cheek was pillowed on something deep and fragrant, like moist velvet. Moss. The air was cool here and heavy with magic she had not been able to sense a fortnight ago. These things could mean only that they were back in the forest.
"Did you bring her home?" she whispered, thinking of the fallen Hawkwing. In her time in Tethir, Arilyn had come to realize that the ties between the elves and then-forest went too deep for death to sever. The green elves returned to the forest in ways that could not be understood or explained, and she needed to know that Hawkwing would find rest beneath the trees.
A long, heavy silence answered her question. "When your strength faltered, so did the shadow warriors," Foxfire said at last. "More men came from the fortress, and we were forced to flee. A choice had to be made between the living and the dead. Do not grieve for Hawkwing: she is free."
But she was not.
The spirit of the elven girl wandered the battlefield. She was dazed and angry and confused, though the battle was long over. The call of Arvandor was sweet and strong; still more compelling were the rhythms of the forest, heard and felt and understood as never before.
Yet the child could respond to neither. She had been torn from life too soon, and though her existence had not often been easy or happy, she was not yet reconciled to leaving it behind.
Thus it was that the priest of Loviatar had an easy time finding the elf maid's wandering spirit. An unseen hand reached out, seized the girl, and pulled her into a shadowy gray realm.
Hawkwing's untamed spirit rebelled against this captivity, but these were fetters that even a will as strong K as hers could not break. The entity that imprisoned her was powerful but twisted; a cold, salacious soul that
reveled in the wounds of the girl's discarded body and the frantic terror of her captive spirit. The ugly soul of this being-a human, a priest of some sort-was made all the more terrible for the impenetrable coating of smug piety that armored it.
"You must answer me what I ask you," his voice demanded, speaking in a language Hawkwing had never before heard but found that she could understand. "Behold this man's livid scar. Who is the elf whose mark this is?"
Hawkwing had no intention of responding, but the priest took the answer from her mind.
"Foxfire, an Elmanesse of the Talltrees clan," the priest's voice said aloud. "Where does this elf reside?"
Again the elven child refused. But it mattered not. The secrets of the hidden stronghold poured from her. She could no more stop them than she could command the wind or rain.
And so it went, for as long as the gray-souled priest desired to contain and compel her spirit. At last he was done with her. Hawkwing tore free and flung herself away from the inquisitor's casual cruelty. Nothing the elven girl had endured had marked or bruised her as deeply as this captivity of her essence and the plundering of her tribe's secrets. But though she was frantic and half mad, she set a true course for the elven woods and home.
There she had found solace before; in time, perhaps, it would come to her again.
Finding an agent of the Knights of the Shield was not BO difficult a thing to do, provided one knew how and where to look. Hasheth suspected he could learn a great deal of information in the clandestine shop of one of Zazesspur's coin brokers.
A very profitable and unofficial market in Tethyr dealt in the trading of the country's various coins. There were many types of gold pieces used throughout the land. Many of the larger cities and even some of the more powerful guilds or noblemen minted their own coins. The value of these rose and fell with the changing tides of fortune. Predicting how a given currency might fare, and trading coins in speculation of these changes, was a thriving business in ethyr.
Most merchants and makers of policy argued that there was no real difference in these currencies. The cities with more valuable currencies tended to pay higher wages and charge higher prices that those whose coins enjoyed a lesser reputation. In the end, they reasoned, the value of these coins in barter for goods and services was about the same throughout Tethyr and its neighboring lands. This was true enough, as far as it went, but this argument ignored a simple and rather obvious fact that occurred to remarkably few of Tethir's coin brokers.
Many of these coins, though quite different in value and purchasing power, contained about the same amount of gold.
Thus it was that a bag of a hundred Zazesspurian gulders, while nearly twice the value of a bag holding an equal number of the zoth minted in Saradush, weighed almost the same. There were in Zazesspur two, perhaps three brokers who would buy up the lesser coins, then melt and recast them as more valuable currency. The services of these enterprising souls also came in handy when one had other reasons for changing the shape of one's wealth. Prime among these were the personal coins, either stolen or given in payment, that were extremely difficult to pass in common trade. At times, possession of such a coin could be deadly.
The Knights of the Shield often ordered gold coins to be placed on the eyelids of those slain by their agents. So difficult was it to spend these coins that beggars and pickpockets would often pass such a corpse and leave the treasure untouched, rather than risk the Knights' retribution. There were, however, some people who hoarded these coins and used them in a specialized system of barter. To an assassin or a hired sword, a cache of Knights' coins was a mark of prestige that brought in other lucrative assignments. Such a coin could also be redeemed for favors or information that far surpassed the value of the gold it contained. And from time to time, assassins incurred expenses-such as the need for a new identity or a swift departure to a distant port-that demanded that such coins be melted down and made into more widely accepted currency.
During his time in the assassins* guildhouse, Hasheth
had learned the name of a woman who provided such services. He went to her now, riding one of his lesser steeds so as not to attract undue attention in the trades quarter of the city.
The establishment he sought, unaccountably named? the Smiling Smithy, was the sort of shabby place that |. replaced cast-off horseshoes and reattached the broken j; prongs of pitchforks. The sole proprietor and craftsperson I; did not exactly meet the expectations suggested by the | sign outside her shop. Melissa Miningshaft was a short, ':'• squat woman singularly lacking in either physical beauty or social graces. She was half-dwarven, or per-| haps a quarter-breed, yet she was nearly as stout and;. heavily muscled as any full-blooded dwarven smith.!… Her features brought to mind a dried apple, her graying brown hair was scraped back into a tight bun, and to; call the lumpy, ample form that strained the seams of f her brown linsey gown "shapeless" would be erring on the side of compassion.
At the moment, the smithy's thick and sculpted arms were bared to the elbows and glowing red from the warmth of the forge and from the effort of pumping the bellows which fanned and coaxed the blazing fire.