The plump girl lost her timid smile. 'Oh,' she said gravely, 'you'll know.' She bowed and left them alone.
Tazi stepped into the room and was surprised at how well it was furnished, considering it was being used to house slaves. She figured that these wizards went out of their way to outshine each other, so some of the opulence had to spill over to the servants' quarters. While the girl who had led them to their room had been dressed well enough, Tazi wagered she didn't have a chamber nearly as fine as this one. Tazi padded over to one of the large beds and sank down gratefully with a huge sigh. She looked tiredly at the dwarf and could see he was furious.
'What?' she asked him, but her heart was not in it, and she was in no mood for a verbal fencing match.
'Is this worth it?' he demanded. 'Is your crimson gold worth all the misery that this adventure of yours is going to cause? Will you be satisfied only when everything crumbles around you?'
Tazi jumped to her feet and prowled around the stylish furnishings. She was tired and sore and didn't want to fight with the duergar on top of everything else. But, most importantly, his words had struck a nerve. What had started out as a simple enough undertaking had rapidly turned on her, and Tazi didn't know for sure what she had mired herself into and what the final cost was going to be. She eventually returned to the bed and sat on the end of it. She rested her elbows on her knees and laced her fingers together.
'I don't know,' she answered quietly. 'Maybe you can tell me.'
The dwarf appeared surprised by her response, perhaps because he expected more bravado from her. He searched the room until he found a stool the right size, and he pulled it up to her, but not too close.
'Why are you doing this?' he asked again, but in a softer tone, as he sat down.
Tazi looked at the dwarf and pursed her lips for a few moments, weighing things in her mind. Finally, she started, 'When I was very young, I took it upon myself to learn how to steal. Why I did it is none of your business, nor do I think you'd even care,' she said. 'But I did. And the easiest place for me to start was in my home.'
Tazi got up and moved around again. 'I lived in a big house,' she explained, 'with lots of rooms. There were my parents and my two brothers and more than a handful of servants, so there was a lot for me to choose from.
'Mostly, I would take little trinkets from my mother or brothers. For a while, no one suspected me. After all,' she paused to glance at the dwarf with a sideways grin, 'I was just a little girl. And, as we always had some help coming or going, the servants took the brunt of the blame.'
'You mean your slaves took the blame,' Justikar corrected her.
Tazi winced at the implied accusation. 'No,' she said vehemently, 'we did not own those people. They could come and go as they wanted. My family simply hired them to perform household duties for us. They always had a choice.'
'Were there other jobs some of them could've taken instead of cleaning up after you? Did they have a vast skill set that allowed them to pick and choose their lot in life? Do you think they all had a real choice, Thazi-enne Uskevren?' Jo'stikar asked her.
His accusations did not sit easily with Tazi. 'Did you want to hear my reasons or not?' she snapped, irritated that there wasn't a single window to look out of and avoid the duergar's shrewd gaze.
'Go on,' he told her.
'The servants took the blame,' she continued, 'but I always managed to get the various baubles back to their rightful owners eventually. All right,' Tazi admitted as she sat on the bed again, 'returning the things took a bit of convincing by a trusted family…friend,' she tripped over the word. 'He taught me more than a few lessons.
'The last thing I planned to steal belonged to my father. I had pilfered something from everyone else and considered an item of my father's to be my crowning glory. He is-was,' she corrected herself self-consciously and lowered her eyes, 'a very powerful man. Sometimes I used to think he was cold to me, but now, I suspect he was simply afraid to show me how he felt about me.
'He was a great collector of the beautiful and the unusual. Most of the things he treasured were fairly large pieces of artwork, and I was a bit daunted by how I might hide a painting or some such,' she told the dwarf. 'I snuck into his study and started to look around and see what I might be able to lift. As I prowled around the room I had only been invited into on a few occasions at that point, something glowed softly from his desk and caught my attention.' Tazi became somewhat lost in her memory and did not notice how closely the duergar watched her face.
'I crept over, careful not to disturb anything, and saw this odd lump of metal no bigger than my fist. It sat, carefully nestled in a chamois cloth on his big desk, amidst stacks of papers and quills. I had never seen anything like it before. As far as I knew, it was a piece of gold, but I had never seen gold that red before.' Tazi paused to tug at her lower lip as though she was contemplating the theft right then and there.
'Whatever kind of gold it was,' she told Justikar, 'it was perfect for my plans. I pocketed the treasure and was gone like a shot. My father was livid when he discovered the crimson gold was gone,' she ducked her shoulders and smiled sheepishly. 'I had never seen him so furious before. He went on and on about how hard it had been to obtain and what he was going to do with the thief when he got his hands on him ' she trailed away, lost in thought.
'So,' Justikar asked, 'what did your father do when he found out it was you?'
'He never found out, as far as I know,' she replied. 'My older brother discovered I had the stuff, and he played a 'prank' on me. After it was over, my left arm was broken, and my father's gold was lost forever. I was never able to return it to him.
'That was years ago,' Tazi added after a long pause. 'And now my father is dead, much too soon. There were things I still wanted to tell him, but that opportunity is gone now.' Tazi chewed her lower lip, unaware that her eyes were brimming with unshed tears. She jumped up and wanted over to a painting and appeared to study it.
'The house was too quiet, and my mother was desolate for a while after his death. When she was unhappy, I was all right as if somehow I could mourn my father through her. But a few tendays ago, I saw her smile again. I knew it was time for her to start to put away her grief. But that's when I became somewhat lost,' she said softly.
'I didn't know how to let him go, I realized. And it came to me. I could bring back the only thing I ever stole from him, the only thing I ever ruined between us as an offering. I could say good-bye finally. That was what was worth coming to this forsaken place for and still is ' her voice trailed away. She rubbed at her face and turned back to the dwarf.
'Foolish, wasn't I, all things considered?' she asked, prepared for the duergar's snide remarks and ridicule.
'No,' he said with a dignity she didn't imagine he would ever show her. 'No.'
She was nonplussed and simply stared at him for a while. In due course, she walked back over to the bed and sat down, studying him.
'All right,' she said finally, 'now you. Why are you here?'
'I'm a prisoner, in the wrong place at the wrong time,' he replied.
'Look,' Tazi shot back at him, 'I'm too tired for this. I admit, I don't know much about duergar, but I do know you are a long way from home. And people don't normally stray too far away without a good reason. I'd honestly like to know, if you would be willing to tell me. We are stuck in here together.'
The dwarf turned his head slightly and stared at her. Eventually Tazi became ill at ease and cast her eyes downward.
'What are you doing?' she asked and felt the heat rush to her cheeks.
'Faces are like stones,' he answered enigmatically. 'Their history, their character is written there plainly if one knows how to read it.' He sighed deeply, as though he had come to a decision.
'Fair enough,' he said after a pause, 'a truth for a truth. I came here for family, too.' Tazi watched him encouragingly but didn't want to interrupt him if he was willing to tell her about himself.
'My brother left our home several months ago and traveled here to Thay. You don't need to know where 'home' is, either,' he shot at her in anticipation of her question, but Tazi just nodded in agreement. 'He is the dreamer in the family, not me. You say you know something of dwarves. I'd wager not too much. Most humans don't bother. Did you know, for example, that up until a few years ago, our numbers were dwindling? And when I say 'our' I mean all races of dwarves.'
'I didn't know that,' Tazi acknowledged honestly, 'but I always suspected that there were not great numbers of you.'
'Great numbers,' Justikar snorted. 'You have no idea. And I'm not going to tell you, either. But a few years ago, the dwarven people received the Thunder Blessing, and suddenly we can't stop making whelps,' he explained,
