man who would be its lord.
As it was, suspicion would fall at once on Ithmong. Zaranda's young cadre were bright, but villagers and countryfolk, not necessarily sophisticated. They might leap to the obvious conclusion and blame the town council. Farlorn would know better; Stillhawk had no more taste for intrigue than he had for wearing makeup, but he had been about in the world enough to realize how unlikely Ithmong was to be culpable. But would the man-the creature-who was her second-in-command?
Shield. The name tolled like a cracked bell in her brain. Someone had betrayed her when she was smuggling her caravan into Zazesspur. Someone had betrayed her inside Zazesspur. And someone had betrayed her in Ithmong.
Of course, what she had been betrayed for in Zazesspur was harboring the great orc. But what did that tell her, really? The searchers had missed him, after all. Maybe his presence had been used as pretext for searching Zaranda's quarters precisely because it would divert suspicion from him. Such a convolution would almost certainly be beyond his means-but it was a typically Tethyrian, and Zazesspurian, bit of nastiness. And Shield was ever-so- good at carrying out plans that others drew up
He had plenty of other opportunities to harm you, she tried to tell herself. But it was meager solace: so did anyone else who would have been in position to betray her on those occasions. That meant only the orog, Farlorn, and Stillhawk. Chen had come into the game too late, Balmeric had left too early, and the several mercenaries who had accompanied her both into and out of Zazesspur were scattered across Tethyr teaching plow-. boys and shepherd girls how to fight.
But why? Well, on other worlds evil was a choice, but here on Toril it was also a thing. Perhaps, as Farlorn and Stillhawk averred, it left an indelible mark on those who had been born to it.
And how? How could a servitor of evil pass himself as a paladin?
'Too easily, perhaps,' she answered herself in a bitter whisper. Who had ever heard of an orcish paladin? For that matter, who'd ever heard of a nonhuman paladin? Not Zaranda, nor anyone she'd ever spoken to about it. Perhaps Nyadnar had, but the sorceress would never have deigned to answer such a question, unless it served her highly idiosyncratic conception of the balance of forces necessary to sustain the universe-or her whim, which Zaranda suspected she found hard to tell from each other.
Still, still… Shield, can it be? She could not know for sure. All she truly knew was that someone she had accepted into her confidence had turned on her.
Which meant,' ultimately, that the one who had betrayed her was herself.
She could no longer help herself. The weeping started as a bubbling forth from eyes and mouth, like water through the hull of a boat holed by a reef. Then it truly tore loose, gushing now, a torrent. Her body convulsed to strident macaw cries of grief and anger a fear and pain and humiliation, interspersed with hoarse, panting breaths as of one who has run until her heart is about to burst.
Finally, exhausted, she fell into a state that, by comparison to her previous condition, was sleep.
A scratching sound brought her instantly awake. Her fingers clutched for Crackletongue. Then she felt again the whip marks that clothed her, felt hard stone, smelled moist stone and foulness.
Again it came, the scrape of tiny claws on rock, hard nearby. Zaranda's muscles tensed. There were any number of candidates for making such a sound, and under the circumstances it seemed unlikely to be anything pleasant.
Scritch, scritch. A slight hint of echo. Her visitor was in the drain, then. Well, that made it less likely it would be crawling over her face as soon as she fell back to sleep.
More scratching, of subtly different timbre, as if the unseen creature were testing the grate. Zaranda found herself oddly torn by hoping it would not somehow find a way through and at the same time hoping it would. Am I really so afraid of isolation, she wondered, that I'd prefer loathsome company to no company at all?
Silence now. She had an irrational sense that her hidden guest was waiting.
'What are you?' she whispered. Then she laughed; the stones from the dead-magic land would prevent eavesdropping by mystic means. She had encountered arrangements of tubes and funnels-miracles of design, not dweomer-craft-that enabled someone in one part of a building to listen in on what transpired in a room in an entirely different part. It was possible Hardisty had such a system built into his palace. And what of it? She was talking to a rat or an insect or a doubtless loathly whatever; let whoever wanted to listen in. Much good might it do them. 'What are you?' she asked again aloud. No response, which was no surprise; only that curious sense of expectation.
'I guess it doesn't matter, does it? You can't answer me, and it isn't very likely you understand. I'm merely talking to you because I'll go mad if I don't hear something besides my own breathing and the sound of water dripping; and if I talk to myself too much I'll fear I've gone mad anyway.'
She had dragged herself over the floor until she lay with her cheek on the floor beside the grate. 'You're a patient one, aren't you? What do you wait for?'
More silence, measured in many painful breaths. 'Well, whatever you want, I guess I've not provided it yet. Please forgive my failings as hostess, but I wasn't expecting to do much entertaining. I'm sure the place looks a fright.'
She turned her face toward the ceiling. The blackness hung above her with all the weight of the tons of stone overhead. 'You know,' she said, 'I've often heard that there is one who converses even with the rats and the roaches of Zazesspur. Certainly I've seen her in the company of beings stranger than that. If that's true, tell her Zaranda Star is here.'
She rolled onto her belly, put her mouth close to the grate, and spoke in a fierce whisper. 'She had some plan for me. I can't carry it out if I rot down here, or if Baron Hardisty decides to have me discreetly strangled and dumped in the harbor. If you can hear me, bear word of me to Nyadnar.'
Nyadnar. Nyadnar. The name echoed down the sewer pipe. Through it Zaranda heard the skitter-scratch of tiny claws, dwindling. Nyadnar.
I am going mad, she decided. Doubtless, it's for the best.
The clatter of massive bolts roused her. This wasn't the latch on the food slot at the bottom of the door, through which bowls of water and gruel were thrust at what she was certain were calculatedly random intervals; the door itself was being opened. She gathered herself into a crouch. It wasn't that she expected to be able to break past her jailers or overpower them. It was that, if they came to bear her to more torture, she would not suffer them to find her supine.
The door opened. The light from a single hand-held torch flooded through like noonday. Zaranda cringed and shielded her eyes like a vampire caught abroad by the rising sun.
In the torchlight stood silhouetted a tall figure in a robe and a square hat. 'Zaranda Star?' it said. 'Countess Morninggold?'
It was the voice of Duke Hembreon.
24
'You have held this captive in secret from the city council,' Duke Hembreon said. 'This is illegal. You will surrender her to me forthwith, in the council's name.'
Zaranda had clad herself in a white smock that one of the duke's escorts had thrown at her. It was already much worse for wear, and she hadn't taken a dozen steps in it. It took all her willpower to keep from simply letting herself hang in the grip of the two Zazesspurian city policemen who stood flanking her. She forced her-self to stand upright, albeit swaying like a sapling in a squall, and listened to the white-haired duke and Shaveli debate her fate.
The Sword-Master tipped back his head and brayed laughter through his nose.
'It's time to decide, old man,' he said in a challenging voice, hand on rapier hilt. The two blue-and-bronzes behind him wore unhappy looks beneath their morions.
'Decide what?' the duke demanded, visibly bristling at the other's impertinence. His escorts, in the blackenameled boiled-leather helmets and cuirasses of the constabulary, glared at the civic guardsmen with frank hostility. The police had no love for these Johnny-come-lately paramilitaries.
