She looked up sharply. The linen-clad man had vanished. Zaranda shrugged and stuffed the scrap in her belt. Separating herself from the mob-now being led in a chant of 'share the wealth!' by Toby Hedgeblossom-she set out with long-legged strides down the Way, toward the Exotic Quarter.
The wizard's face was a twisted red mask glaring forth from white hair and disorder. 'That's it,' he said in a voice wound tight as a crossbow string. 'Enough. Begone with you and your eerie pranks.'
The girl could barely see him through her tears of hurt and anger and the red-hair tangles that hung unwashed before her eyes. 'It was an accident,' she said. Her lower lip jutted in what looked like sullen defiance, but was more an attempt to hold back full-blown sobs.
His self-control snapped like a crystal goblet dropped on pavement from great height. 'Accident?' he screeched. He flung out a skinny arm in a gesture that encompassed the wreckage of his shop and made his voluminous sleeve flap most alarmingly. 'Accident! You summon up a whirlwind to devastate my shop, and try to pass it off as accident?'
The walls of her own control gave way. 'But I can't help it!' she wailed through a sudden flood of tears. 'I don't know how to control the magic. That's why I want to learn!'
'Magic? This is no magic! Did you speak an incantation?' He was so close to her now that his spittle blended with the tears, making shiny runnels down her cheek and further matting the ends of her hair. 'No! Did you use spell components?' He scooped a pinch of spilled particolored powder from a bench whose marble-slab top had proven too massive to be toppled by the whirlwind.
He threw the powder in the air and blew on it. It puffed into a tiny cloud, then each mote became a brief bright spark of a different color that dispersed and drifted off into the gloom.
'No! One moment there was nothing but a thumb-fingered aspirant to be my apprentice making poor work of sweeping the floor. The next-chaos!' He shook his head. His gray hair stood out on both sides of his balding skull like dispirited static discharges. 'This was no magic. Magic is orderly and disciplined. Magic is something learned, something labored for, something won.'
He seized her by the elbow and marched her toward the door. 'What you did wasn't magic. It was madness, or possession, or I-know-not-what. But it's not something I'll suffer near me!'
He threw open the door. From the afternoon street, the sunlight poured in like scalding water.
'Now get you gone,' the magician declared, gripping the girl's arms both-handed to eject her. 'And never let me see you again. Or I'll show you what magic really is ab-ouch!'
The last came out in a squall as light flashed and sharp thunder cracked. The mage jumped back, waving singed palms in the air. His dark eyes were wide with shock and terror.
She stuck her tongue out at him and ran away down the Street of Misfortune Tellers.
'Milady,' a young voice called, clear and fresh as springwater. 'A moment of your time?'
Zaranda's long-legged impatient strides had carried her into a district where the upper stories of buildings jutted out to overhang already narrow, twisty streets, so that it seemed they leaned their heads together to conspire against the traffic bustling below. She stopped and turned, dropping her hand inside the knuckle-bow that guarded Crackletongue's hilt. The voice had sounded fair, but Zaranda had little reason to take for granted the friendliness of anyone she encountered.
Two young people were approaching her, a youth and a maid, he with hair as bright and yellow as summer sun, she with hair of lustrous pale brown falling in kinky waves down over her shoulders. Both were dressed as simply as the poorest peasant or artisan or mendicant, in white smocks belted at the waist with knotted rope. Yet the fabric of the smocks was shim-mery stuff, white and evidently expensive to Zaranda's merchant eye; their hands were soft and pale, and she doubted the girl had been born with that delicate wave in her carefully tended hair. These, then, were children of wealth.
Such seldom had much use for rough-garbed adventuresses of Zaranda's ilk, her purchased patent of nobility notwithstanding-and naturally she did not walk the streets with an imp mincing after her, announcing to the world that she was Countess Morninggold. But their smiles were so friendly and open that Zaranda felt an urge to bundle them off the street before anyone saw them and took advantage of them.
'How may I help you?' she asked.
'We'd like to give you this flower,' said the girl, holding forth a blossom as brilliantly blue as a civic guardsman's drawers.
'And what do you wish in exchange?'
The girl's face fell as if Zaranda had said something cruel. But her companion laughed a musical laugh. Like the girl, he wore a plain gold torque around his neck.
'You needn't speak that way,' he said. 'There's no necessity for payment. Please, lady, accept it as our love- offering.'
'I've often found,' Zaranda said, 'that things called free often cost the dearest.' But she suffered the white- clad girl to fasten the flower behind her ear.
'There,' the girl said, stepping back with a smile. 'You are even lovelier than before.'
'Who are you people?' Zaranda asked.
'We are All-Friends,' the boy said. 'We serve and worship Ao the Universal.'
'Ao?' Zaranda repeated, thunderstruck.
'We house the homeless and feed the hungry and go abroad spreading the message of Ao's universal love,' the boy said.
'If you feel you must, you may make a contribution to our ministry,' said the girl. 'But we work and pray for a day when the needs of all are met by sharing, and no longer is there talk of buying and selling.'
11
'I take it you've not heard of Armenides, then?' the old gnome said.
'No.' Zaranda stood on tiptoe to study her reflection in an ancient warrior's mirror-polished basilisk-hunting shield, hung on the wall of the cluttered shop. 'The flower looks good on me, does it not?'
'It does,' the gnome agreed, blowing smoke from his pipe. He was dressed in a simple gown of emerald- green silk, with a stand-up black collar on which were embroidered dragons rampant in gold. He smoked a long, thin clay pipe. All his hair was white, including both of his bushy eyebrows, which was a pity, since it left no apparent sense to his name, White Eyebrow. In fact, when all his hair was black, his right eyebrow had been turned snowy- white by a brush with magic. 'And the flower allows me to glimpse Zaranda Star's vanity, hitherto unsuspected.'
She laughed without self-consciousness, examined herself a moment longer. 'I'm vain enough,' she said. 'I can't always afford to indulge it, that's all.'
She turned and propped her rump on a table in the clear space beside an ormolu clock. She paid it only cursory attention; though it was like nothing else she had seen on Toril, it was standard fare for the Curiosity Shop. Though White Eyebrow was no magician and scrupulously avoided trafficking in magic items, he cultivated extensive contacts among the better-intentioned of those who plied the dimensions in spelljamming ships. After all, to impress an inhabitant of Faerun as a curiosity, an object had to be curious indeed.
'So why this sudden fad for Ao?' she asked. 'He's the preeminent god, I know, maybe the god the gods worship. But we mortals would be as well off venerating a tree stump, for all the interest he takes in us. He performs no miracles; he conveys no powers upon his priests.'
White Eyebrow raised a scholarly finger. 'And thus the tale leads us to Armenides the Compassionate, or the Pure, as he is sometimes called. He is spiritual advisor to our young Baron Hardisty. He came to Zazesspur a twelvemonth ago, claiming to bring a new dispensation from Ao. Ao has decided to take a more active role in the affairs of this world, Armenides avers. And he seems to have invested certain followers with the usual array of priestly powers.'
'These All-Friends are priests of Ao, then?'
'Indeed not. Merely devotees who do good works in the god's name. Drawn from among the children of Zazesspur's first families, by and large, which I find good in and of itself. It gives the spoiled darlings something to
