"They're gone."
The lieutenant opened his mouth to pronounce doom upon the contumacious innkeeper. Then his eyes stood out from his olive-skinned face. "Gone?"
Quarlo nodded. "She paid her reckoning not an hour ago, for herself and her whole menagerie, and went trooping off to the harbor. She spoke of taking ship for Halruaa, or Zakhara even. Said she felt the climate here wasn't warm enough."
"Too warm for her, more like," rasped a voice from the patrol at the lieutenant's back. The other guards laughed, until a hard look from their sergeant-whose face looked as if it could be used to hammer nails, and had been-quelled them.
The lieutenant turned green. "Search the building!" he commanded in a voice strangled to a bat's ranging cry.
The patrol did, with sufficient thoroughness that more than one guest afterward had words with about valuable but readily concealable personal effects that had turned up missing. The only sign they turned up that Zaranda and company had ever been there was a series of complaints from the grooms that her war mare used loaded dice, which the lieutenant could not make heads or tails of.
"To the harbor!" the lieutenant commanded in a more robust voice than he'd been able to muster earlier. The sergeant bellowed orders, and the little patrolset out past the puzzled cordon at double-time toward the harbor.
In the rear marched the grizzled sergeant, looking grimmer than usual. He secretly believed the rest of the little unit-Lieutenant Flower Petal in particular-had missed their calling when they took up the blue and gold of the civic guard instead of the motley of the Jesters, Fools, amp; Harlequins Guild. If you asked him, this tale of taking ship for exotic lands was thinner than beer would be if that blue-nosed old grassquit Armenides had his way with Zazesspur. If Zaranda was at the harbor, he himself was the Simbul, Queen of Aglarond.
On the other hand, the patrol had been most particularly warned that Countess Morninggold and her accomplices were clever as dragons and about as tractable. And there was that which his wife had never understood, back when he served in the army of Ith-mong before Ernest Gallowglass was deposed by do-gooders, which lay behind what she chose to regard as his slovenly lack of ambition: that while sergeants never stood first in line when spoils were doled out, neither did they when it came time to apportion blame. In this present case, Shaveli had hinted that, should the fugitives not be apprehended, someone's head and neck might soon come to a parting of the ways.
So the sergeant thought it best to hold his tongue. Thus he marched down to the harbor, alleviating the ache in his feet and lower back with visions of the so-superior young lieutenant spending the rest of his career as a civic guard officer leading darkling-hunting patrols through the notably extensive and noisome sewers of Zazesspur.
And so, in the fullness of time, did it come to pass.
Part II
Career of Evil
16
It was dusk along the Trade Way north of Zazesspur. Like mauve fog, nighthawks coursed on scimitar wings through twilight and sought prey. Off in the west, clouds rose like fanciful mountains above the unseen Trackless Sea, all slate and indigo and molten copper where the last rays of the fallen sun struck them.
The lure of honestly gotten gain being almost as powerful as the other kind, several families of southern Tethir foresters, related by marriage, had banded together to purchase a number of wagons and attempt the trip through the Starspire Mountains and south to Zazesspur. The wagons were piled high with animal skins, a kind of bark used in tanning, and other vegetable stuffs for the manufacture of dyes. The great merchant caravans no longer plied the Trade Way from Amn and points north down to Calimport. And, so, if these enterprising foresters could reach Zazesspur, they could expect to reap a rich return from the city's leather-workers and dyers.
They had made it through the mountains and most of the way to the city. Unfortunately, ill-gotten gain still had its allure. Consequently, there had come a sudden drum of hoofbeats as evening came on, and suddenly the little caravan was surrounded by a score of robbers, who swung down from horseback to menace the foresters with drawn bows. The foresters were no mean fighters themselves under most circumstances. But as their destination grew nearer, they had relaxed their guard, a process expedited by the passing around of a couple of stone crocks of berry brandy by way of celebration, now seen to be premature.
The robbers, initially elated at the bloodless capture of a half-dozen wagons, grew surly when they threw back the canvas covering the loads and found bales of bark and sheaves of dried herbs. The leader of the bandits, a burly, black-bearded ruffian clad in rude black leather garments, which summer's heat would soon render quite unthinkable, had the makeshift caravan's master brought before him as he stood by the roadside.
"Where are the valuables?" he demanded as Wyancott-a towheaded, middle-aged chief among the foresters-was thrust to his knees before him.
"Valuables?" the caravan master repeated as if confused. "What's in the wagons is all we have. What wealth we possessed went to buy the wagons and the mules to draw them."
"You mean we went to all this trouble over nothing but a mess of twigs and branches?" the bandit chieftain roared. "Are we aarakocra, to make nests for our dwellings? Produce some real wealth, and quickly, or prepare to suffer accordingly!"
But Wyancott could only shake his head numbly. The leader, scowling ferociously, drew back his arm to strike.
Then he toppled into the poorly maintained ditch beside the road and commenced to snore.
Another flurry of hoofbeats. Riders swept past along the road. From his knees Wyancott looked wildly right and left to see infantry with leveled crossbows surrounding the halted wagon train in the gloom. The marauders who held his arms let him go and hurriedly raised their hands.
A bandit atop one of the wagons uttered a defiant cry, snatched up a short bow, nocked an arrow, and began to draw upon a tall woman riding up the road toward Wyancott on horseback. An arrow smote him in the center of the forehead. He rolled off the wagon to lie unmoving in the soft spring grass.
With the exception of the rash bowman, the bandits ' surrendered readily. Zaranda dismounted from Goldie, glanced down at the bandit leader she'd sent to sleep in the ditch. She extended a hand to the man with the thatch of white-blond hair, who was still on his knees looking thoroughly confused.
"Up you come," she said as he took her hand and hauled himself upright. "What's your name?"
"Wyancott," he said. He rubbed his jaw, rolled his tongue around in his mouth. "I thank you."
Zaranda nodded. A mercenary with a crossbow slung across his mail-jacketed back, one of the original escorts she'd brought into Tethyr, was kneeling in the ditch and binding the bandit chieftain's hands behind his back. The bandit chieftain snored loudly.
The rest of Zaranda's small but intrepid – she hoped – band was rounding up the demoralized bandits and disarming them. They were beginning to gripe at the realization of just how small a party they had surrendered to. Not that the outcome would likely have been different, save for more bloodshed; so intent had the marauders been on their haul that Zaranda's group had half surrounded them before making their presence known, and likely would have completed the job had not Zaranda feared the leader might hurt the cara-vanner, and so put him down for his nap. But Still-hawk's dropping of the lone man who showed fight had had a salutary effect on morale.
Which reminds me – Zaranda turned and gestured through the gloom at Chenowyn, who was trudging along the road, looking disgruntled but almost pretty in the simple white linen blouse and green linen breeches Zaranda had bought her, with her dark red hair brushed gleaming and bound back from her well-scrubbed face. She couldn't ride a lick, and hence had been riding postilion behind Zaranda, arms locked firmly about the older woman's waist. She was disgrun-tied because Zaranda had made her dismount before riding up to engage the bandits.