Sadira backed away another step. “I don’t understand what they’re saying,” she said, glancing at the guards. “What do they think a small slave-girl like me could do to a strapping man like you?”
Bristling at the imagined insult, the templar scowled at the two brutish guards. “Close the gate when dark falls,” he ordered. “Then wait for me to return.”
“But-”
“Do as I say, Tak!” Pegen commanded, scowling at the reluctant sentinel. “No more arguments!”
After he had finished chastising the half-giant, Pegen nodded to Sadira. “Lead the way, girl. I hope your master’s shop isn’t too far.”
Sadira picked up the bundle of sticks and hoisted them onto her back. With Pegen following a step behind her, she walked past the rusty gates and through a gently sloping tunnel that passed beneath the city walls. At the other end, a monstrous block of granite rested to one side of the exit. Every year or two, when another of Athas’s cities ran out of food and sent an army to steal what it could from Tyr’s poorly stocked granaries, a high-ranking templar would levitate the block and it would be pulled into place to block the tunnel until the war was over.
Upon stepping past the barrier, the half-elf found the inside of the city more surprising than the templar’s presence outside the gate. In contrast to the cacophony of squeaking wagons and strident voices that had greeted her on previous trips, Tyr seemed as silent as the desert. The great boulevard that circled the inner perimeter of the wall was empty save for a handful of artisans and well-robed merchants dashing along with their eyes focused steadfastly on the cobblestones. The food and wineshops opposite the city wall, usually lit by torches and oil lamps until the early hours of morning, were uniformly dark. The rich aromas she remembered-fried rotgrubs, spicy silverbush, fermented kank nectar-were absent. In their place, she smelled only fetid animal dung and the acrid smoke of burning black rock.
Sadira turned left along the great avenue, following a route that she had traveled not more than two dozen times in her life. Pegen walked at her side, his heavy boots ticking an even cadence on the cobblestones. A few minutes later, as night was falling over the city, Pegen laid a hand on Sadira’s shoulder. He pointed down an avenue snaking its way between two rows of three-story mud-brick buildings.
“Aren’t we going to the Tradesman’s District?”
Sadira paused and looked down the avenue. It was a broad street, well-lit by flickering torches in door sconces. The half-elf had no idea where the avenue led.
“Marut’s shop doesn’t lie that way,” she said, pointing down the boulevard they were already traveling on. “It’s farther down here.”
Pegen frowned. “If you say so.”
After another three hundred steps, Sadira paused, then looked down a dark lane weaving its way into a ramshackle region of dreary tenements and crumbling shanties. Though the windows and doors of the mud-brick buildings were dark, the slave-girl’s elven eyes allowed her to see the sinister-looking residents who were watching the alley from every fourth or fifth building.
“Doesn’t this lead toward the Elven Market?” Pegen asked.
“My master’s just a short distance down the way,” Sadira said. She stepped into the dark alley before the templar could object.
The half-elf had gone no more than a few steps into the lane before she heard Pegen stumbling over the loose cobblestones in the street. He laid his hand on her burden and tugged.
Sadira obeyed instantly, dropping her bundle on his feet. She reached beneath her cloak and drew the obsidian dagger she had stolen from the guard in the Break. The human templar, unable to see in the dark, stumbled over the sticks and fell. Sadira spun, raising her dagger to strike.
The templar was sprawled over the bundle face-first, cursing and struggling to push himself back to his feet. Sadira realized that it would be a simple matter for her to disappear into the labyrinth of shabby tenements in this part of the city. Certainly that was what the Veiled Alliance would have wanted, for her contact had instructed her never to antagonize the king’s bureaucracy unnecessarily.
“Help me up, you clumsy girl,” Pegen ordered. “I could have you lashed for this!”
“Wrong thing to say,” the half-elf replied, deciding that “unnecessarily” was a relative term.
With her free hand, Sadira grasped his bronze pendant. She jerked it up so that the chain lifted his double chin and exposed his corpulent neck. Pegen’s eyes opened wide and looked toward her face, but remained unfocused and fearful in the darkness. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded in a gasping voice.
“Seeing if this knife is sharp enough to cut through your fat throat,” Sadira answered, laying the edge of her weapon’s blade to the thick folds of skin beneath his chin. She had to press hard, but the blade was sharp enough.
The flow of warm blood covered her hand. Pegen gurgled and clasped his hands over his throat. He rolled off the bundle of sticks and lay on his back, his life slowly seeping from between his fingers and his astonished eyes staring up at the night sky. Without waiting for him to die, Sadira cleaned her hand and the blade on his cassock, then ran down the dark streets at a sprint.
The half-elf did not slow her pace until she had slipped between a pair of tenements into a small square where five lanes met. The plaza was bathed in bright yellow light, for it was surrounded by six wineshops, two brothels, and a gambling house, all of which had burning torches in the sconces outside their doors. Dozing men, mostly humans and elves, lay slouched against the sides of the buildings, and half-naked women were wandering to and fro looking for someone in need of companionship.
Sadira stopped at the edge of the square and removed the blood-spattered cloak she was wearing. With the inside of a sleeve, she wiped the dust and sweat from her face, then stuffed the cloak into the satchel that held her spellbook. She ran her fingers through her amber hair in a half-successful attempt to remove the tangles. Despite her efforts, she knew she could not look even close to her best. Her recent run had left her chest heaving and her slender legs trembling with fatigue. Still, once she had done all she could to make herself presentable, she crossed the square to a wineshop whose entrance was adorned with a picture of a drunken giant.
Inside, a brawny man with a balding head and an unkempt red beard stood behind a marble counter, using a ladle of carved bone to serve fermented goat’s milk to three bleary-eyed patrons. As Sadira entered the shop, she caught the barman’s eye, then casually drew her hand across her full lips and delicate chin. He nodded toward the back of the shop, then whispered something to one of his customers. The patron immediately rose and stumbled out of the shop.
Sadira went to the back and sat on a small granite bench, placing her shoulder satchel beneath it. To her surprise, the red-bearded server brought her a mug of tart-smelling sapwine. As he approached, she smiled and said, “You know I don’t have any money.”
“I know, but it’s obvious you need something to drink,” the brawny barman said.
“Why?” Sadira demanded, feeling embarrassed. She touched her fingers to her cheeks, suddenly frightened that she had missed a spot of blood. “Do I have something on my face?”
The barman chuckled and shook his head. “No, you just look thirsty,” he said, motioning to two drunks sitting at the counter. “At least that’s what those fellows must have figured. They’re paying.”
Sadira gave the two men an enticing smile, then downed the mug of fermented tree resin in a single gulp. As the drink’s powerful kick hit her, she closed her long-lashed eyelids and shook her head. Handing the mug back to the barman, she announced, “I’ll have another.”