George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

“Silence!” said Shrue the diabolist. “This is a bad time for wizards to be arriving anywhere by jinkered anything. Prepare the horxbrid and wagon, fetch my trunk, dress yourself in the dark blue Firschnian monk robes, and meet me on the lawn in forty-five minutes. We depart this very afternoon.”

The last few leagues rumbling along with the pilgrims’ caravan were much more pleasant — even for Shrue — than the hours spent hurtling underground through rock and magma. KirdriK had been commanded to silence once above ground, but for these last miles and leagues he expressed his dissatisfaction by hissing and belching at every opportunity.

In happier days, such a caravan passing through hostile lands — the primary assailants here were wind-stick wraiths, rock goblins, and human bandits — would have been protected by a minor wizard utilizing his various protective spells in exchange for pay. But since the rise of murderous prejudice against the magi, the pilgrims to holy shrines, merchants, and other caravaners had to make do with mercenary soldiers. The leader of this band of eighteen Myrmazon mercenaries was War Maven Dame Derwe Coreme.

Derwe Coreme and Shrue the diabolist had known each other for a bilbo tree’s age, but the magician’s true identity was safe with the woman warrior. It’s true that she laughed out loud when she first abandoned her megilla to ride in Shrue’s canvas-covered wagon; the diabolist sat at the reins shrouded in a common merchant’s shapeless tan robes, his lined and almost frighteningly saturnine face largely hidden by the shadows thrown by his soft-crowned, wide-and floppy-brimmed green-velvet Azenomei-Guild rugseller’s hat. The two chatted comfortably as Shrue’s wood-wheeled wagon rolled along in the rear of a caravan of more than forty similar wagons while KirdriK hawked, spat, and hissed in the rear amongst the carpets and Derwe Coreme’s fanged and clawed two-legged megilla bounded alongside in a state of extreme reptilian agitation at the scent of the daihak.

Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme’s past was shadowy and largely lost to legend, but Shrue knew that once this beautiful but scarred elder warrior had been a soft, innocent and sullen girl, as well as a largely useless princess fifth in line to the throne of Cil’s now-defunct House of Domber. Then one day a thief and a vagabond sent on a useless odyssey imposed as punishment by Iucounu the Laughing Magician had kidnapped young Derwe Coreme, despoiled her for his pleasure, and eventually traded her to a small band of the vile sump-swamp river Busiacoes in exchange for travel advice of very dubious value. The Busiacoes had used her roughly for more than a year. Eventually, her character and heart hardening like tempered steel, Derwe Coreme killed the six Busiacoes who’d kept her as a pleasure slave, wandered the swamp Wegs and Mountains of Magnatz for several years with a barbarian warrior named Conawrd (learning more about blade-and-spear warfare than any former princess in the history of the Dying Earth and, many say, more than the dull-witted Conawrd himself), and then struck out on her own to earn a living as a mercenary while wreaking her revenge on all those who had ever slighted her. The thief and vagabond who had first abducted her — although Derwe Coreme by this time considered that abduction a boon — was eventually tracked down in Almery. Although Derwe Coreme had originally planned for the splay-footed lout to suffer indignities that no male of any species would wish to contemplate, much less experience, she eventually contrived for him to escape with all of his members and appendages intact. (He had not been very good, but he had — after all — been her first. And far more than her parents or early palace tutors, his particular brand of selfish indifference had helped make Derwe Coreme what she was today.)

In recent decades, Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme had personally trained and hired out her Three Hundred Myrmazons — women warriors each with a story and attitude as ferocious as their leader’s — for lucrative mercenary work. For this caravan duty, eighteen Myrmazons had come along (although four or five would have sufficed for the few hundred wind-stick wraiths, rock goblins, and human bandits waiting to waylay this caravan) and each young woman warrior was megilla-mounted and dressed in skintight dragonscale armor that left her left breast bare. Even the Myrmazons’ adversaries — in their last seconds of life — found this ritual form of dress distracting.

As they chatted, Derwe Coreme laughed and said, “You are as droll and witty and private as ever, Shrue. I’ve often wondered what might have been our relationship if you’d been younger and I’d been more kindly disposed toward the male of our species.”

“I’ve often wondered what our relationship might have been had you been older and I had been a female of our species,” said Shrue the diabolist.

“You have the magic,” laughed War Maven Derwe Coreme. “Make it so!” And with that she whistled shrilly, her megilla ran up alongside the wagon and lowered its scaly neck, and she leaped across to the saddle and spurred the beast away.

The Caravan town of Dirind Hopz was overflowing with displaced pilgrims, merchants, and wayfarers. Bandit activity and general mayhem were so rampant in all directions south that even the most pious worshipers bound for Erze Damath found themselves halted in Dirind Hopz until private armies could clear the roads. There was a huge temporary encampment on the plains just to the northeast of the town and most of the pilgrims in Shrue’s caravan camped there, living in their wagons, and Derwe Coreme and her Myrmazons set up their own city of tall red tents. Shrue, however, in his guise as rugseller — and because he wanted to get as close as he could to the mountain along the river that had the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium at its summit — brought KirdriK and sought out an inn.

All the finer establishments were on the bluffs high above the Dirindian River, where they received cool breezes, offered expansive views, and kept their distance from the many sewers that opened into the Dirindian; but all the finer establishments were full. Shrue finally found a tiny room and tinier cot up under the eaves in the ancient, leaning, ramshackle Inn of the Six Blue Lanterns but had to pay an outrageous twenty terces for it.

Schmoltz, the one-eyed innkeeper whose forearms were thicker than Shrue’s thighs, nodded at KirdriK and said, “An extra twelve terces if your monk sleeps on the floor or stands in the room while you sleep.”

“Followers of the Firschnian Eye seek only mortification and physical discomfort,” said Shrue. “The monk, who never sleeps, shall be satisfied to take shelter in your barn amidst the dung heaps and foul-smelling brids and mermelants.”

“That’ll be ten terces for use of the barn,” growled Schmoltz.

After securing KirdriK in the barn, Shrue went up to his room and set one of his own rugs on the floor — it filled the small space between the bed and the wall — and then laid his own clean sheets and blankets on the dubious cot, burning the old ones in a flameless blue vortex. Then the diabolist went down to the common room to eat his late dinner. Rug merchants of Azenomei Guild never removed their hats in public, so Shrue felt moderately comfortable with his disguise under the low-hanging velvet brim, silk straps, half-veil, and floppy ear coverings.