Lawrence Watt-Evans - Taking Flight

Here, Irith had sufficient credit and good will to obtain acceptable room and board at an inn inexplicably called The Stone from the Sky-but only a small room, so small that Ezdral and Asha took the two tiny beds, Kelder slept on the floor, and Irith took the form of a cat and spent the entire night curled up on Asha’s feet. A fourth human being would have been too much, but they didn’t have the money for another room, and Irith’s credit wasn’t that good.

The next day’s travel was the four-league distance from Urduron to Ophera; they got an early start, and made no attempt to go any farther, but instead set about earning a little money in Ophera, to help defray expenses.

Irith made a few aerial deliveries-primarily flying a packet of wizard’s supplies back to Urduron, for which she was paid three bits in silver. She tried to demand more, but gave in when the Opheran wizard threatened to simply conjure up a sylph for the job instead.

Kelder had to settle for coppers, but at least this time he avoided chopping wood, and instead spent a solid three hours weeding the gardens behind the inn Irith had chosen. That covered their room and board in full.

Asha was too young to do any real work, but picked up two bits by watching babies while the mothers went about business.

Ezdral insisted that he had looked for work and failed to find any; he contributed nothing to the common purse.

Both wizards connected with Irith’s errand, the sender in Ophera and the recipient in Urduron, knew love spells and countercharms; neither of them, however, admitted knowing a counter for Fendel’s Infatuous Love Spell.

“I don’t care for Fendel’s spells,” the Opheran remarked. “They’re tricky, and usually much more powerful than they need to be. Oh, they’re easy to work, but they don’t always work the way you want. The man was trouble; I can spot one of his spells from the style, and they’re all trouble.”

Somehow, this did not surprise Kelder at all.

He found himself thinking rather dismally about the ease with which Irith had flown, twice, the distance they had taken most of the day to cover on foot. It made walking seem vaguely futile.

On the other hand, he realized suddenly, it was a sign of Irith’s attachment to himself-and, he supposed, her attachment to Asha, and perhaps guilt about Ezdral’s enchantment as well-that she was willing to walk all this way when she could fly.

That was cheering. He had begun to wonder if he would ever be sufficiently sure of her affection to propose marriage, and this provided some encouragement.

That night, despite half-hearted attempts by the others to prevent him from doing so, Ezdral downed three bottles of wine and had to be carried to the room. The only good aspect of his early retirement was that it meant that he got the floor, and Kelder got a bed; there were three cots this time, all narrow.

The leg from Ophera to Krithimion was another relatively short one, and at breakfast Kelder suggested pressing on through Krithimion to Bugoa.

“What’s the hurry?” Irith protested. “Ethshar isn’t going anywhere. It’ll still be there if we take a few days longer to get to it.”

Kelder pointed to the semi-conscious Ezdral, who was leaning against the dining room wall, mouth hanging open, bits of fried egg in his beard. “The sooner we get him there,” Kelder said, “the better.”

“The way we’re rushing isn’t helping him any,” Irith replied. “His feet are all blistered-you shouldn’t have done that, making him keep up with me the day before yesterday, when we were trying to reach Urduron.”

“I’m sorry,” Kelder said, shamefaced.

“Besides,” Irith persisted, “we haven’t been checking all the wizards all that carefully, the way we just rush from one kingdom to the next-we might miss someone who knows the cure because of your rushing!”

“I doubt it,” Kelder said, recovering some of his composure. “If you want good wizards, you need to go to Ethshar-that’s what my grandmother always said.” He wondered for a moment whether the time might be ripe to mention the prophecies, with the mention of great cities, plural, but he decided against it.

“Well, I’m not turning into a horse again, Kelder,” Irith said, lifting her chin.

“Listen,” he suggested, “let’s just get to Krithimion, and we’ll see how we’re doing, and maybe we’ll go on, or maybe we’ll stay a night there. All right?”

Irith gave that a moment’s thought, and then agreed. “All right,” she said.

The town surrounding Krithimion Keep actually had a name of its own, to distinguish it from the kingdom it dominated; it was the town of Krithim, with no ending.

Krithimionese, Irith explained as they neared the town, was a patois of Ethsharitic and Trader’s Tongue; if there had ever been a distinct native tongue, which she doubted, it was now extinct, or perhaps spoken by a few stubborn farmers somewhere.

“When I was a little girl,” Irith added, “people didn’t have all these silly languages. There weren’t half so many, and everybody knew Ethsharitic even if they didn’t speak it at home.”

“That must have been convenient,” Kelder acknowledged.

Krithim was the largest community he had seen since leaving Shan on the Desert, and a closer match to his original expectations for the Great Highway than anywhere else he had yet visited. The king’s castle stood almost half a mile to the south of the highway, and the entire distance from castle to highway appeared to be a network of streets and gardens and houses and shops. A few of the major avenues were even paved.

The Great Highway itself was not paved, but it was lined with plank sidewalks, inns, taverns, brothels, and shops, and three broad flagstone boulevards connected it to a generous market square that lay one block to the south.

An elaborate fountain occupied the center of the square, with a basin of red marble surrounding a white marble column topped by a statue of a woman pouring water from a jug, water that flowed endlessly. Smaller carvings of various sorts adorned the rim. Kelder was not accustomed to this sort of civic display.

For a moment he wondered if Krithim constituted a “great city,” but despite the urban niceties he decided it was just a large town-or perhaps a small city, but not a great one.

Children were running about the market in a vigorous game of tag, ducking out of each other’s reach, dodging back and forth. One of them took a short-cut through the marble basin, splashing wildly, and Kelder shouted a protest, but no one else seemed to mind, and the boy ignored him, so he let it drop.

Asha was watching the carefree game enviously; Ezdral was eyeing the wineshops. Kelder’s own feet were sore; they were out of the hills now, but the road from Ophera had been rocky in places.

“Oh, Hell,” he said, “I guess we’ll stay here today and go on tomorrow.”

Irith smiled radiantly at him.

“Where’s a good inn?” he asked.

“There are a couple of good ones,” Irith said thoughtfully.

“A cheap one,” Kelder suggested. “We still don’t have much money.”

“The Leaping Fish,” Irith declared.

“The Leaping Fish?” Kelder asked dubiously. “Why would they name it that?”

Irith shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, “but they did.”

“Are we near the sea?”

Irith giggled. “No, of course not!” she said. “It must be fifty miles to the sea from here!”

“A lake, then, or a stream?”

Irith shook her head. “They just call it that,” she said. “It’s over that way, on the Street of Coopers.” She pointed to the west.