"What's this about dreams?" Zaranda asked sharply through the steam.
"Nonsense, is what it is," White Eyebrow said, puff-ing furiously. "A shared fancy, a passing fad. Folk have nightmares betimes, which they always have and al-ways will; only the notion is abroad that there's some fell design behind it all, so that anyone who suffers troubled sleep must tell all his friends, and they too remember they have at some time known bad dreams; and so it all gets built up into some dark conspiracy of sleep."
With a tinkle of a different timbre, the larger bells affixed to the front door announced the entrance of cus-tomers. Though perhaps customers was the wrong word. Zaranda's fine nose wrinkled to a whiff of dirty hair and stale sweat as two young male humans came into the shop, shabbily dressed in black and gray, with hair hanging in their eyes in great unwashed clots. Short, dark-stained wooden cudgels hung from their belts.
Simonne's dark eyes narrowed. "Be calm, my daugh-ter," murmured White Eyebrow. "This, too, shall pass."
He glided forward. "How may I help you, young gen-tlemen?"
The huskier of the two, whose hair was dark, laughed nastily. "It speaks," he said to his partner in mocking wonder. He put a hand against the old gnome's chest and pushed him reeling back. His friend, who was skinny and dark blond, giggled shrilly through a promi-nent nose.
"You and your foul kind can leave this city, if you want to help me," the husky boy said. "Nothing else will do, in fact."
He picked up a vase glazed a deep, lustrous blue. Tiny flecks of light shimmered, seemingly deep within its slick surface: gold and white and blue and red. When the youth turned it this way and that in his un-washed hand, the points of light shifted as if they flowed within the very finish—or like the constellations in the sky when one turned one's head.
"Now, my young friend," White Eyebrow said, "that comes from a far world, on a vessel borne on wings of magic. If you care to hear, I'll tell you of it—"
"I'm not your friend, rodent!" snarled the boy. "Magic! The source of all our problems, no?"
"Surely enough, Fredaro," his companion said, bob-bing his head. "Surely enough."
"This reeks of magic," Fredaro said. "What will please me is to make an end of it." He raised it to the level of his brows and let it drop.
A slim but scarred hand caught the priceless vase before it struck the carpet-covered stone of the floor.
"Clumsy of you," murmured Zaranda Star, replacing the object on its shelf with her right hand. "But then, as careless of your appearance as you are, it need not sur-prise us, I suppose."
"Zaranda!" murmured White Eyebrow in alarm.
The boy's face purpled. "Bitch! I'll teach you to inter-fere." He raised a beefy fist.
"Will you?" She smiled, then pressed forward with her left hand. Color gushed from the youth's face as the tip of the poniard her hand held dug into his groin.
"I think not," Zaranda continued in pleasantly con-versational tone. "You'll not even teach me disgust for those of your ilk; I learned that long ago."
"Zaranda!" Simonne cried. The blond youth had snatched his cudgel, its head shod in gray iron. He lunged at Zaranda with weapon upraised.
With a slithering whisper like a metal snake on stone, Crackletongue slid from its sheath. Zaranda ex-tended her arm so that the saber's point found the notch of the youth's collarbone. He braked abruptly to avoid spitting himself, then dropped his cudgel, fell to his knees, and began to weep and plead for his life.
"You'll regret this," hissed his burly friend.
She pressed the dagger harder. "I suspect all I'll re-gret is not slaying you both. But that would distress my friend and spoil his fine rug, so I'll refrain. As long as you leave us in peace."
"You can't threaten us!" the boy exclaimed through gritted teeth. "Lord Ravenak—"
"—Is a cur unfit to sniff at honest dogs that go upon four legs. You may tell him so, with the compliments of the Countess Morninggold. Up, now, and quit sniveling. It's tiresome." The latter was spoken to the blond youth, whom she urged up with Crackletongue's tip beneath his chin.
"Zaranda," White Eyebrow said hollowly, "you know not what you do. When you're gone, they'll just return, with more of their kind."
"He's right!" shrilled the blond youth, getting his courage back now that Zaranda had promised not to kill him. His nose was quite red. "We'll fix you, you little monster! We'll—"
"What's your name, dung-blossom?" Zaranda in-quired. The blond boy shut up and glared at her from red-rimmed eyes. She gouged the flesh beneath his chin. "Your name! You let slip that of Fredaro here, for which I'll let him thank you in his own way and time. Now I'll have yours."
"I'll say naught!"
"Oh, yes, you'll speak. But if I have to put a compul-sion on you, I'll have you turning cartwheels naked down the street as well."
"You lie! You're a fighter, not a wizard!"
The lights in the shop blazed intolerably high, then all went out, plunging the room into darkness so abruptly it should have made a crashing sound. Then a single lantern flared out again from the wall above the youth's ragged hair, casting rainbow-edged light through crystal facets.
"Your name?"
"G-Gonsalvo, my lady!"
"Attend me well, Fredaro and Gonsalvo, as if your lives depended on it, which they do. Should any harm befall this shop or its proprietor or his daughter or any customer arriving or departing, I shall hunt you down and cut your hearts out. On my soul I swear it. Now, begone."
All the lights came back on. By the time the illumi-nation had found its way back to all the crannies of the shop, the door was banging shut on its frame, and the bells were jingling.
"Zaranda, Zaranda," White Eyebrow said, shaking his head. "Do you think all problems can be solved at swordpoint?"
"Not at all, old friend. Most of the problems life heaps on us are susceptible to no such solution, in fact. Yet some will answer to nothing else. It's vital to learn to recognize them in such times as these."
"If you stoop to violence, are you really any better than they?" the gnome asked.
"Yes," Zaranda said. "If I do it to defend myself and those dear to me."
She sheathed her cutlery and looked to Simonne, who said nothing, though her eyes blazed like lanterns, dark though they were.
"But I cannot always be here to help, as you and they both saw," she said. "And that you must deal with as you see fit. I bid you good day."
That night Zaranda's sleep was tormented by dreams, and a whispering Voice.
She was not the only one to dream, nor to hear words spoken in those dreams. And unlike her, some heeded what was said.
12
Unseasonable overcast trailed tendrils down into Zazesspur like arms clad in dirty, wet wool sleeves. They brushed Zaranda's face with clammy familiarity as she hustled along narrow Hostler Alley to her early morning appointment. The air was given added pres-ence by the smells of last night's grease, this morning's breakfast, and fresh horse dung.
The buildings' upper stories cantilevered over the al-ready narrow alley so that they threatened to pinch off the dangling arms of cloud. This was a district given over to hostelries of the middle grade and lower and served the other needs of travelers: stables, provisioners, and tav-erns. There was also the inevitable water-fluid popula-tion of demimondaines, barkeeps, scullery maids, back-alley bones-rollers, charm-vendors, cutpurses, rogues, bards, alley-bashers, and joy-girls and -boys, few of whom could be found abroad at this hour. The visitor to Zazesspur must seek elsewhere for fixed places of enter-tainment.
There were theaters of various sorts in the Players' Quarter, and gambling palaces and brothels in their own discreetly fortified precincts. There, well-paid sworders and the odd mage kept at bay the riffraff, whether jack-rollers and strong-armers, social activists who followed the brothers Hedgeblossom and Earl Ravenak, or even the individual city councilors' uniformed goon squads. The very lowest ranks of such establishments were to be found in Bayside, the waterfront district, where the gen-uine riffraff held sway.