Lawrence Watt-Evans - Taking Flight

It was finally broken when Asha wailed, “This sand gets into everything! Irith, could you be a horse again?”

“No,” Irith snapped. She marched on.

“Here,” Kelder said, “you can ride on my shoulders for a little while, until you get the sand out from between your toes.” He reached out his arms.

Asha looked up at him, considering, and then shook her head.

“No, Kelder, but thank you all the same,” she said. “I’ll walk.” She turned and trudged onward, slogging through the drifting sand.

Kelder dropped his arms, then shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, a little annoyed. Was that any way for a person to treat her champion?

He marched on, frustrated and resentful. Fulfilling a prophecy wasn’t turning out to be as much fun as he hoped.

He glanced over at Irith, at her flowing golden hair and the curves that showed through her garments as she walked.

On the other hand, he told himself, it did have its points.

He trudged on, thinking about the future.

They covered the last mile or so largely by the glow that spilled out over the walls of Shan on the Desert; the sun was down, the greater moon not yet up, and the lesser moon not enough to help.

Shan, though, blazed like a fire before them, lighting the sky orange.

Asha was staggering with exhaustion, and in the end she gave up and let Kelder carry her the last hundred yards, through the city gates and into the Bazaar.

They had not caught up with the caravan; Kelder had secretly hoped they would, but they had seen no sign of it.

He hoped that they hadn’t passed it, perhaps safely tucked away at Dhwerra. It should be waiting for them in Shan, Kelder told himself.

Once inside Asha stared about, wide-eyed, as Kelder lowered her to the ground. They were in the central square of the Bazaar, and Kelder and Asha both looked about in wonder. Irith waited impatiently for them to get over their awe.

The Bazaar at Shan was unique among all the markets Kelder had ever seen in that it was built on two levels-at least two levels, perhaps more. The ordinary open market was surrounded, not by the usual taverns and inns and shops, but by a maze of galleries and arcades, alight with torches and lamps of a dozen varieties, with merchants of every description lining every side, displaying their wares to crowds of eager customers.

And atop the galleries and arcades, on their flat roofs, there were still more merchants, still more customers, to be reached by innumerable staircases.

Most of the upper level was unroofed, or covered only by tents and awnings, but in a few places the upper tier, too, was partially enclosed by more substantial structures. Kelder could not see, in the tangle of firelight and shadow, whether there were still more merchants up on a third level.

Where there were no permanent stalls there were blankets heaped with goods, or blankets covering momentarily-untended goods, or wagons or carts or other vehicles. Entire caravans had set up shop under the colonnades around the market square; some of them had obviously been there for quite some time.

Nor was the Bazaar simply a single square. Oh, there was a central square, and a larger one than Kelder had ever seen before, but the galleries and arcades, colonnades and courtyards, stairways and stalls all extended for blocks, to left and right and straight ahead, inward from the city walls. Kelder could see no end to the labyrinth of buyers and sellers and goods.

It seemed to him that the Bazaar must surely occupy the entire interior of the city walls-but that was absurd.

Wasn’t it?

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Where do they all come from?”

“Where do all what come from?” Irith asked, startled. That was not the question she had been expecting.

“The merchants,” Kelder said, with a wave of his hand. “Look at them all! Where do they live? And where did all these people buying things come from? We didn’t see that many on the road, certainly. And we’re in the middle of the desert, and I don’t see any farmers here with their crops-what do they all eat? Where do they get all those things they’re selling?”

“Oh, don’t you know?” Irith replied, startled. She giggled. “Really, Kelder, sometimes it seems like you don’t know anything!”

Slightly resentful, but too awed and curious to worry about it, Kelder asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s all done by magic, of course! We aren’t in the Small Kingdoms any more, you know-they take their magic seriously here.”

“What sort of magic?” he asked, eyeing her cautiously. Magic, after all, was something she knew far more about than he did-and while he wanted to know more, he had a fair appreciation of how dangerous it could be. In fact, the thought of unfamiliar and perhaps hostile magic made him distinctly uneasy, especially after what had happened to those bandits back in Angarossa.

“Oh, I guess wizardry, mostly, these days,” Irith said, “but a lot of sorcery, too-it used to be mostly sorcery, but these days sorcerers aren’t what they used to be…”

“What are you talking about?” Kelder demanded. “What do sorcerers have to do with all this?”

Irith put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

“I am talking,” she said, “about this place -about Shan on the Desert!”

Kelder glared back, waiting for her to continue. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered that she had told him that the Bazaar specialized in sorcery, but he was in no mood to admit it.

She threw up her hands in disgust.

“Aah! Don’t you know anything about Shan?” she shouted.

“No,” Kelder answered, “I don’t. Except that it’s at the end of the Great Highway and is supposed to be the best place in the World to buy certain things.” He glanced around at the Bazaar and added, “Which I can believe.”

“All right, then,” Irith said, “I’ll explain.” She took a deep breath, and began, “Shan isn’t part of the Small Kingdoms-it wasn’t part of Old Ethshar. What it is, is the last bit of the old Eastern Command, that fought under General Terrek in the Great War. You know about that?”

“A little,” Kelder said. “I mean, of course I know about the war, and I’ve heard of General Terrek, I think. He got killed by a demon, didn’t he?”

Irith nodded. “A whole bunch of demons, actually. His whole command got wiped out, pretty much-all the demons of Hell got loose at once and went running all over the east, blasting everything. That’s where the Great Eastern Desert came from-it wasn’t desert before that.”

“Oh,” Kelder said, thinking about the vast, empty wasteland that surrounded Shan, and trying to imagine what could have caused it. By comparison, the demons who wiped out the bandits looked pretty trivial.

That reminded him of the caravan they had come to find; he glanced around, but recognized none of the wagons in sight.

A few did have heads on pikes, as it happened, but none of them were recent. Two were actually just skulls, rather than heads, and the others were approaching a similar state.

Irith continued, “Right, the demons did all that, and they were going to go on and destroy everything else, but the gods themselves came down from Heaven and fought the demons and defeated them.”

Kelder nodded, partly listening and partly still looking for the caravan; that part, about the gods coming and stopping the demons, he had heard before.

“But it was too late for General Terrek, of course, and all of his people-except for Shan.” She made a sweeping gesture, taking in the entire Bazaar. “See, this was Terrek’s main supply depot, and he had all his magicians here at the time, and they had all their protective spells up and everything, and they were able to hold the demons off until the gods came and rescued them.”