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 compulsion 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 illumination 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 presence by the smells of last night's grease, this morning's breakfast, and fresh horse dung.
The buildings' upper stories cantilevered over the already 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 taverns. There was also the inevitable water-fluid population 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 entertainment. 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 genuine riffraff held sway.
Tourists were at something of a premium these days. The harbor traffic, which was all that kept the city alive and reasonably prosperous, provided some custom for the inns, but nothing like what they had been accustomed to before the troubles began. Some hostelries had simply converted themselves into apartment blocks serving those displaced by the nomad invasions or the discord in the countryside, but it was still a buyers' market for short-term accommodations. Which was how Zaranda was able to keep herself and her comrades quartered in reasonable comfort despite the state of her finances, which were eroding like an arroyo bank in a heavy rain.
Preoccupation and a poor night's sleep dragged Zaranda's head forward and down from its customary proud carriage. As a result, she almost bumped into a man who came boiling out of a gate to her left. Or rather, smoking; he was trailing smoke and sparks from hair and clothing, and caterwauling like a man whose hair and clothes were on fire.
He pitched himself headfirst into a stone horse trough, raising a substantial hiss of steam and an even more substantial reek.
'What seems to be the problem?' Zaranda asked mildly as he reared up with algae hanging about his face and ears like green dreadlocks.
He pointed a dripping, still-steaming arm back through the gate into the stableyard. 'Th-that witch,' he said, sputtering spray. 'She put fire to me.'
Zaranda felt her brows knit in a frown. Her own experience told her 'witch' usually referred to a female, and in no complimentary way. Best move along right now, the cautionary voice within her said. You've an appointment to keep, and this affair is none of yours.
She hitched her belt around to bring Crackletongue's hilt more closely to hand. 'What witch?' she asked.
Faces were beginning to poke out of windows. Some were sleep-blurred and reluctant, others open and awake, but all showed some degree of eagerness. This was a district of honest working folk who rose and set with the sun, as well as others who lived to different schedules, morally and chronologically, but Zazesspurians of all stripes relished little more than a good civic disturbance. A small but brisk disturbance brewed in the stable-yard. Angry voices muttered. There came thumps and foot-scuffles and a squall like an angry badger. Then into the alley came a knot of rough-hand laborers and stable-boys, dragging with them what appeared to be an animated bundle of pale sticks and dirty burlap. The bundle was kicking and flailing and emitting the angry noise.
As they cleared the open gate, there was a sharp crack! a fat blue spark, and a smell of ozone. At the same instant the whine resolved itself into '… let me go? The bundle's captors instantly obeyed, with yelps of dismay. 'What,' Zaranda asked mildly, 'is going on?' A gap-toothed stableboy wearing a badly stitched leather hood was waving his hands in the air as if to cool them. 'The creature shocked us!'
The creature in question reached a thin, dirty hand to part tentacles of dirty red hair. An amber eye peered forth from a grimy, snub-nosed face. It took in Zaranda with a wild adolescent mix of defiance, hope, and fear.
'Why were you holding, um, her in the first place?' asked Zaranda, concluding mainly from intuition that the captive was female. She made her hand slide along her belt away from the saber's hilt. She felt she had lost points yesterday by drawing blade on Earl Ravenak's earnest young ravers. Surely she could handle a random handful of louts without recourse to arms. Particularly since this is no business of yours.
'She witched Zoltan!' another lout exclaimed. He was a pinch-faced lad with curly, dirty blond hair and soiled apron, who was waving a butter paddle with as much menace as such an implement could muster. Unlike most of the others, who wore the blue and green of the Hostlers amp; Stablehands Guild, he had a green and brown rag knotted about one skinny biceps, signifying his affiliation with the Taverners, Innkeepers, amp; Provisioners.
'She's always up to tricks,' a third said. 'She soured a pail of cream Luko was carrying to the buttery of Bustamante's Excellent Hostelry.'
'I did not,' the redheaded girl said heatedly. She was even dirtier than her tormentors, Zaranda noted. 'At, least, I don't think I did.'
'Did too!' blond Luko declared, brandishing his paddle for emphasis. 'And now she set Zoltan all aflame.'
'He didn't look all aflame to me when he hit the horse trough,' Zaranda said. 'More smoldering around the edges.'
'She made me get all tingly all over my body!' Zoltan announced. The way the slime-tendrils hung down over, his ears and between his wildly rolling eyes made him re-semble some kind of exotic and unsavory sea creature that
