“Fool,” Biri-Daar said. “That’s the only kind of man who makes a deal with anything that comes out of the Abyss.”
“Easy for you to say,” Wylegh said, glaring hard at her. “You dragonborn have got a bit of the Abyss in you, I reckon.”
She stood over him for a long moment, so still that Remy was sure her next move would be a downward stroke to end Wylegh’s life. Yet when she did move, it was to turn her back on him. “Remy, select a horse. Wylegh, tell me how much the horse costs. We will pay you. Then we will make sure that everyone in the market knows what you have done.”
There was a pause. “That’s a death sentence,” Wylegh whispered.
“Hardly,” Iriani said. “You’ll just have to put on your traveling clothes and take one of your horses out on the road. Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, that’s how you got here, no?”
They left Wylegh there while Remy, with Lucan’s aid, selected a horse. It was a fine, large gelding, dappled gray and remarkably calm given everything that had just happened outside its stable door. “How much?” Biri-Daar asked.
“Take it,” Wylegh said. He hadn’t moved from the floor near the tack bench where she had first knocked him over. “Just take it.”
“I pay for what I take,” she said. “Name a fair price.”
Wylegh said nothing.
“Lucan,” Biri-Daar said. “What is that horse worth?”
“What’s it worth, or what would he charge for it?”
“What’s it worth?”
“Eighty, ninety,” Lucan said. “That’s being a bit generous.”
“Generosity never goes unrewarded in the end,” Biri-Daar said. She produced a pouch and counted out the money onto the tack bench. “Traveling money for you,” she said. “We’ll be by for our horses first thing in the morning.”
They took rooms for the night in a public house adjoining the keep, where the Council of Crow Fork itself guaranteed their safety and posted guards at doors and windows. “We have been fortunate,” Biri-Daar said. “First, that we have come through these betrayals with so little suffering. Second, that Iriani is known to the council and could get us a hearing before them.
“And there might yet be a third bit of fortune,” she finished. “Remy, for the third time. What is it you carry?”
“I told you I don’t know,” Remy said. “The vizier forbade me to look at it. I’m guessing he put some kind of protection on it to make sure I wouldn’t.”
“I am going to show you a few things that Roji showed me,” Iriani said as he made a gesture over the box. The characters carved into its lid gave off a brief, pale glow. “You guess correctly,” Iriani said. “There are several different charms on it. One so it can be found in the event…” He glanced up at Remy. “In the event that the courier doesn’t finish his errand. Others to prevent scrying its contents or physically opening it. It’s thoroughly trapped and ensorcelled, this box. Whoever is sending it-also whoever is receiving it-thinks it’s very important.”
“And someone involved in the creation of the box and the protection of its contents,” Biri-Daar added, “has added an appeal to Tiamat’s protection.”
Turning back to the rest of the group, he said, “I should have seen this before. It was there to see, but I didn’t know what to look for. After talking to Roji and seeing imps…” He trailed off.
“What about the imps?” Remy asked.
“They tend to appear as emissaries between certain underworld beings and certain corrupt mortals,” Keverel said. “Certain forces are looking for you, or for what you carry. They are mostly looking along the Toradan Road, or we would have seen much stiffer resistance so far.”
“Here’s my guess,” Iriani said. “There are two factions in Toradan. One is waiting for whatever Remy has because they want to use it the way it was intended to be used. The other is trying to prevent it from getting there because they want to use it as leverage for some other goal. Which is which and who is who, that we might find out more about.”
“Either way,” Lucan added with a tap on Remy’s shoulder, “there’s not much interest in keeping you alive.”
“Put another way,” Biri-Daar said, “Philomen is involved with demons. He may not know it, but that is the case. And if Tiamat’s protection has been solicited…” She trailed off, lost in thought.
“What?” Iriani prompted. “Dragonish business, no doubt, but are we going to be seeing drakes in the skies on the way to Karga Kul?”
“No, not that,” Biri-Daar said. “But I fear what might await us at the Bridge of Iban Ja.”
She would say no more on the subject, and after a short meal taken mostly in silence, the party retired each to his or her own thoughts. Remy’s head spun as he lay on the straw mattress. Imps? Tiamat? What was he carrying? Suddenly he wanted very much to go home and forget he had ever met the vizier of Avankil. The Quayside life was for him…
Yet when he dreamed, it was of places he had never yet seen in waking life.
“The market is supposed to be a sanctuary,” Keverel said with some sorrow the next morning. They were sitting around the central oasis. Once it had been a spring in the desert. After centuries of development, it was a rectangular pool, with stone steps built into all four sides so visitors could step down and fill their canteens while merchants and travelers haggled in the surrounding plaza. It reminded Remy of one of the courtyards of Avankil, where noblewomen under parasols gossiped while flanked by tiefling bodyguards, which were the current fashion in the city. Along one side of the oasis plaza, the keep loomed, extending to the market’s north wall. The other three sides were lined with permanent houses and trading posts maintained by the Dragondown’s established mercantile clans, interspersed with other clearinghouses of families from as far north as the Nentir Vale. In the plaza, Crow Fork Market had the aspect of a city coming to be. A hundred feet in any direction-save for into the keep itself-it looked like a bazaar again.
The spring itself was clear and cold and deep, water welling into it from a series of underwater caves. Incursions from those watery catacombs were not unknown, and the keep kept a detachment of guards on watch around the pool at all times.
“I wish I had come here sooner,” Keverel went on. “Here I can feel the spirit of Erathis moving, creating civilization from the wilderness. But I fear the market’s days as an oasis in the wastes are over.”
“They’ve been over since before I was born, Keverel,” Kithri said. “Any halfling could tell you that. Every month we get merchants coming to us because they’d rather risk the river than take their chances being overrun by hobgoblins at Crow Fork. You just never knew it because you’ve never been here.”
“It’s a problem for another time,” Biri-Daar said. “Today we start moving again.”
They replenished their stores and made a trip through an armorer’s stall before returning to Wylegh’s stable to take their horses. Lucan was annoyed at having to move on without taking advantage of Crow Fork Market’s many opportunities to hoodwink drunken traveling gamblers. “What’s the rush? We handled that filth easily enough. We can handle it again.”
They walked inside the stable, past council guards posted at the door. Wylegh had disappeared, no one knew where; his duties were temporarily in the hands of one of the keep’s grooms. Remy looked around, remembering the previous day’s encounter. The hobgoblins were gone, as was the troglodyte. Part of the stable was collapsed from the troglodyte’s mad swinging of its club, and streaks of gore stained the timbers here and there. Remy was struck by the idea that in a small way he had left his mark in Crow Fork Market. He had become a part of its history.
“That’s exactly the point,” Biri-Daar said to Lucan. “That was a test. Someone is after what we’re carrying. Whatever force that is, it was willing to sacrifice these to find out our strength.” She looked down into the open drain, the stones at its edge chipped and cracked by the troglodyte’s passage. “The next test will be sterner.”