"You have been good to me," it crooned. "Far more congenial than my previous masters for millennia-not to mention easier on the eyes. I would help you. I offer you. secrets."
" 'Secrets,' " Zaranda echoed in disgust. Statue it might have been, but the head was palpably alive, aware of self and surroundings. Zaranda had found herself unable to bear the thought of the thing riding in claustrophobic darkness for weeks without end, so she took it out discreetly whenever she could. And look where your soft heart gets you, she upbraided herself.
"Secrets," the head repeated eagerly. "Secrets of the ancients. Secrets of sorcery long forgotten. The arts mantic, necromantic, or just plain romantic, if that's what you prefer."
"No," Zaranda said. She sat at her dresser, unwound her hair from its braid, let it hang unbound down her back as she brushed it out.
"Come now," the head said. "Any mage alive would kill to know such secrets as I hold within this bronze conk."
"Not me."
"Yоu could gain great power."
"Power doesn't interest me."
"Wealth beyond imagining."
Zaranda grimaced. "At what cost?"
"I hardly expected to find such small-souled niggling within you, Zaranda Star. This merchant life has smirched your soul."
"At least I still have my soul."
"I cannot help noticing," the head said in gilded tones that reminded her uncomfortably-in several ways-of Farlorn, "that for a woman of such striking handsomeness you spend an uncommon percentage of your nights alone. All of them, in my limited observation-not to put too fine an edge upon it."
She let that pass and brushed her hair with redoubled vigor.
"You could win the hearts of handsome princes."
"I've done that," she said tightly. She laid the brush down with exaggerated care to keep from smashing it against the dresser. "I've never needed magic, either. And princes aren't worth the bother. Too full of themselves, expecting every whim to be instantly obeyed."
"Ah, but with the lore I can impart, they would live only to obey your every whim."
"If I wanted a pet," she said, rising, "I'd buy a dog. Good night."
The head tut-tutted. "Zaranda, Zaranda. Doesn't your curiosity tempt you, most of all?"
She sat on the edge of her bed, which had four spiral-carved oaken posts upholding a fringed silk canopy. It was booty from a Tuigan hetman, who had himself looted it from Oghma-knew-where. It was rather ludicrous, but it secretly tickled Zaranda to have it.
"Yes," she admitted. "For example, if you know such secrets of ultimate potency, why don't the Red Wizards of Thay rule all Faerun? They're eager enough to do so."
"Ahh," the head said again. Had it an arm, Zaranda got the strong impression it would have laid one finger along its aquiline nose. "They were unworthy to wield such power. So I answered their queries in riddles until they grew tired of me and shut me up in a dusty, dreary warehouse." It sighed. "The sacrifices I make to maintain the world's balance."
Zaranda sat regarding the head in the yellow candlelight. That was one of the legends that led her to Thay, whispers of a brazen head of immeasurable antiquity and knowledge, whose most recent possessors had been unable to wring any sense from it. Exasperated, they had left it on a shelf a hundred years or so and forgot about it. It had thus become available to anyone with sufficient enterprise, not to mention foolhardy courage. Along came Zaranda and her hardy band.
Once they had reached comparative safety outside Thay, Father Pelletyr had performed divinations on the head. Its nature was so arcane that the cleric had been able to learn little of it, other than that it was definitely not evil in nature, which was the thing Zaranda had been hoping to learn. There was enough unbridled evil in the world, and she didn't care to add to it. Neither did she want to have gone to such hair-raising lengths to obtain the head only to have to cast it into the Inner Sea. But all that left her with more than a slight suspicion that all the bronze skull truly contained was beguiling badinage, that the head was nothing more than a practical joke, a long-dead mage's monument to himself in the form of a last enduring laugh.
"Good night," Zaranda said again, and stretched herself out on the bed. Its softness, just firm enough to avoid bogginess, enveloped her like an angel's embrace. She sighed with pleasure. Not for her was Stillhawk's notion that the best bed was hard ground.
"But you're a magician," the head almost whined. "I can teach you spells beyond imagining."
"I gave that up. Thank you. Good night."
"Don't you feel like taking your gown off? It's fearfully stuffy in here."
For answer Zaranda rolled on her side, facing away from the head, and pulled the counterpane, which had been, part of the Tuigan chieftain's trove and was inexplicably covered with embroidered elks and penguins, to her chin.
"Surely you are not by nature so grim and cheerless, Zaranda Star."
"No," she said. "I'm not. Good night." And she gestured out the candles.
The tower of Gold Keep was still visible away up the valley behind them, shining like its namesake in the morning sun, when Vander Stillhawk turned the head of his blood bay back and signed to the column behind him, Smell smoke.
"Me, too," Goldie said. "Wood, cloth, straw."
"A farmhouse," Zaranda said grimly. Her eyelids were ever-so-slightly puffy. For all the welcoming softness of her bed, her sleep had been fitful, troubled by dreams of blackness gathering like a thunderhead on the western horizon, and whispers at once seductive and sinister.
Father Pelletyr came jouncing up on his little donkey. Zaranda's stablehands had bathed the beast and plaited colorful ribbons into its mane and tail. Goldie forbore to pin her ears at it.
"Zaranda, what seems to be the difficulty?" the priest asked.
She pointed. A sunflower of smoke was growing rapidly in the sky to the northwest, pale gray against pale blue.
The priest clutched his Ilmater medallion. "Merciful heavens," he said.
Zaranda turned Goldie sideways on the wagon-rut path that wound its way through short spring-green grass. "Balmeric! Eogast!" she shouted to her sergeant of guards and her dwarven drover-in-chief. "Get the mules off the road and the men into a defensive circle around them. If any armed strangers come within arbalest range, drop them!"
"Must it then be raiders, Zaranda?" Farlorn asked in his lilting baritone, riding up on his gray mare. "It could be some farmer's been dilatory about cleaning the chimney of his cot and set his thatch alight."
"This is Tethyr," she said grimly. She turned Goldie and booted her after Stillhawk, who was already riding at a slant up the ridge to their right. The ranger had unslung his elven longbow from his shoulder. Farlorn shrugged and spurred his mare to follow.
"What of me?" the priest called.
"Stay and watch the caravan," Zaranda called back over her shoulder.
"Be careful, Zaranda!"
"You're wasting your breath, good father!" Farlorn shouted cheerfully back.
She charged for a quarter mile across country that had not entirely settled from the Snowflake foothills into Tethyrian flatland. The ground rolled like gentle ocean swells. Zaranda crested a rise and saw a prosperous farmhouse of at least three rooms. The walls were stone, but the insides and most of the thatch roof burned fiercely.
A woman ran toward Zaranda, rough brown homespun skirts hiked high, round cheeks flushed with fear and exertion. As Zaranda watched, a horseman in blood-sheened leather armor rode up behind her and drove a lance into her back. She uttered a despairing wail and pitched forward on her face.