Preoccupation and a poor night's sleep dragged Zaranda's head forward and down from its customary proud carriage. As a result, she almost bumped into a man who came boiling out of a gate to her left. Or rather, smoking; he was trailing smoke and sparks from hair and clothing, and caterwauling like a man whose hair and clothes were on fire.
He pitched himself headfirst into a stone horse trough, raising a substantial hiss of steam and an even more substantial reek.
"What seems to be the problem?" Zaranda asked mildly as he reared up with algae hanging about his face and ears like green dreadlocks.
He pointed a dripping, still-steaming arm back through the gate into the stableyard. "Th-that witch," he said, sputtering spray. "She put fire to me."
Zaranda felt her brows knit in a frown. Her own experience told her "witch" usually referred to a female, and in no complimentary way. Best move along right now, the cautionary voice within her said. You've an appointment to keep, and this affair is none of yours.
She hitched her belt around to bring Crackletongue's hilt more closely to hand. "What witch?" she asked.
Faces were beginning to poke out of windows. Some were sleep-blurred and reluctant, others open and awake, but all showed some degree of eagerness. This was a district of honest working folk who rose and set with the sun, as well as others who lived to different schedules, morally and chronologically, but Zazesspurians of all stripes relished little more than a good civic disturbance. A small but brisk disturbance brewed in the stable-yard. Angry voices muttered. There came thumps and foot-scuffles and a squall like an angry badger. Then into the alley came a knot of rough-hand laborers and stable-boys, dragging with them what appeared to be an animated bundle of pale sticks and dirty burlap. The bundle was kicking and flailing and emitting the angry noise.
As they cleared the open gate, there was a sharp crack!, a fat blue spark, and a smell of ozone. At the same instant the whine resolved itself into "… let me go? The bundle's captors instantly obeyed, with yelps of dismay. "What," Zaranda asked mildly, "is going on?" A gap-toothed stableboy wearing a badly stitched leather hood was waving his hands in the air as if to cool them. "The creature shocked us!"
The creature in question reached a thin, dirty hand to part tentacles of dirty red hair. An amber eye peered forth from a grimy, snub-nosed face. It took in Zaranda with a wild adolescent mix of defiance, hope, and fear.
"Why were you holding, um, her in the first place?" asked Zaranda, concluding mainly from intuition that the captive was female. She made her hand slide along her belt away from the saber's hilt. She felt she had lost points yesterday by drawing blade on Earl Ravenak's earnest young ravers. Surely she could handle a random handful of louts without recourse to arms. Particularly since this is no business of yours.
"She witched Zoltan!" another lout exclaimed. He was a pinch-faced lad with curly, dirty blond hair and soiled apron, who was waving a butter paddle with as much menace as such an implement could muster. Unlike most of the others, who wore the blue and green of the Hostlers amp; Stablehands Guild, he had a green and brown rag knotted about one skinny biceps, signifying his affiliation with the Taverners, Innkeepers, amp; Provisioners.
"She's always up to tricks," a third said. "She soured a pail of cream Luko was carrying to the buttery of Bustamante's Excellent Hostelry."
"I did not," the redheaded girl said heatedly. She was even dirtier than her tormentors, Zaranda noted. "At, least, I don't think I did."
"Did too!" blond Luko declared, brandishing his paddle for emphasis. "And now she set Zoltan all aflame."
"He didn't look all aflame to me when he hit the horse trough," Zaranda said. "More smoldering around the edges."
"She made me get all tingly all over my body!" Zoltan announced. The way the slime-tendrils hung down over, his ears and between his wildly rolling eyes made him re-semble some kind of exotic and unsavory sea creature that had crawled up the pilings in the harbor. "Then my hair caught fire! And my clothes, too. I was burning up!"
Zaranda stared at him.
He dropped his eyes. "Well," he said, "I was smoking pretty good. Feh." He spat out muck.
"It's time we paid her back for her tricks!" cried somebody from the back of the small mob. The others growled assent-an ugly sound, though without any perceptible move to put it into effect.
"What's your name, girl?" Zaranda asked.
"Scab."
"How attractive. Did you really do that to him?"
She nodded. "I woke up to find him pawing me as I slept in the a-s-straw!" The dam of her defiance burst, and her face flooded with tears.
Beyond her sobbing, the silence in the alley grew even thicker than the fog.
"No, child," Zaranda Star said for what felt like the hundredth time. "I don't need an apprentice. Besides, it's not exactly healthy to be in my vicinity at the best of times, and these are far from that."
Scab stuck out her underlip in a truly impressive pout. Zaranda said nothing. The girl produced a tremor in the projecting lip, and when that elicited no more response, a shine of moisture appeared in an eye visible between clumps of dirty hair.
They sat on the steps of what had once been a fine residence of green granite blocks, between a pair of stone guardian beasts that had long since weathered to couch-shaped lumps. The building had been converted to a carpet warehouse; the arched doorway at her back was bricked over. Zaranda had her long trouser-clad legs drawn up before her and her arms around her knees, and, still ignoring her companion, gazed off across the Carpet Mart.
The sun was high in the sky. The broad plaza, flagged in yellow sandstone worn to a shiny and treacherous polish by generations of feet, was dotted with the rug merchants' kiosks, hung like flags with their colorful wares. Despite the troubles, buyers still flocked to Zazesspur from the north of Faerun to purchase excellent Tethyrian wool carpets, as they did to buy the finely finished furniture and cabinetry for which Zaz itself was famous. Myratma was better known for other textiles; but Zazesspur was the place for rugs.
Of course, the buyers would go back home with lurid tales of having purchased their wares from camelback, from hawk-faced bearded men with flowing robes and headcloths, and would sell them as "Calimshite" rugs. In fact Calimshite silk rugs, though pretty, were inferior in craftsmanship and durability to Tethyrian wool carpets; the real gems of the great bazaar in Calimport were silken rugs from far Zakhara-wondrous indeed, if of the nonflying variety, since the Zakharans exported few of their magic carpets willingly. Still, to most of the folk of the Heartlands and farther north, all fine rugs from the South were Calimshite, and that was that, just as Amn and Tethyr were called Empires of the Sands, in spite of not having any sand to speak of. People are like that, and not just on Toril.
Still avoiding Scab's piteous gaze, Zaranda sighed and stretched. It had been an eventful morning.
When Zaranda and her self-proclaimed charge arrived, a brief but vigorous skirmish had been in progress between some of Earl Ravenak's bullyboys and a patrol of civic guard blue-and-bronzes armed with iron-shod cudgels, evidently bribed by the carpet merchants to take an interest in Hairhead doings, which they were notorious for overlooking. The square had subsequently hosted two outbreaks, a jostling, and a battle royal among the colorfully caparisoned retainers of the various city council members. The last of these, from which the rug merchants were just finished righting kiosks and dusting off rugs knocked sprawling by the festivities, had pitted the minions of Anakul the Just against the goons of Jinjivar the Sorcerer.