Victor Milan - War In Tethys

The peasants looked at each other, then nodded and went back to their shopping.

"I'll show you a dumb animal, you ringleted gigolo," Goldie grumbled.

"Goldie!" Zaranda said sharply.

The bard laughed. "Would you rather be thought a dumb animal or someone whose opinions are so sedi-tious she should be chopped up into food for hounds?"

For once Goldie had no answer. Father Pelletyr beamed indulgently as he bit into a raw onion he'd bought from a farmer—more early yield from the long Southern growing season. "They're right, anyway," he said. "A good, strong government is a benefit to all."

"Isn't envy a sin in Ilmater's eyes?" Zaranda asked quietly. The cleric looked blank. She decided not to press it; the crowd might decide she was better off as dog food, and while she was intrepid, by her reckoning she'd faced enough angry mobs in her lifetime.

The inn door opened. Three men emerged into the bril-liant midday sun, managing at once to saunter and swag-ger. They were typical Tethyrian bravos in garish costume, with puffed blouses and extravagantly padded codpieces, which tended to turn any sort of walk into a swagger. They arranged their broad-brimmed hats and floridly dyed plumes and walked across the road to the green.

Stillhawk watched them closely with his brooding dark eyes. He had sealed his bow in a waterproof case of some soft and supple hide that Zaranda suspected to be kobold skin—the elves had some folkways that seemed pretty abrupt by human standards. A man of the Dalelands, and an obvious ranger at that, was a substantial novelty in the sparsely forested Tethyrian plains. Zaranda feared he might excite the villagers un-duly if he wandered around with an elven longbow strung and ready for action. He wore his long sword, also of elvish make, scabbarded at his hip.

He dropped a hand as dark and hard as weathered wood to the hilt and looked a query at Zaranda. Stand easy, she signed to him.

The newcomers carried swords with elaborate hilts and blades so broad they each had two deep, wide fuller grooves—which lightened weight and increased struc-tural integrity and hadn't a blessed thing to do with let-ting blood flow, as the ignorant would have you believe. These swords weighed about five pounds each, which was in the upper range for anybody of human strength to wield one-handed and expect to live. Daggers they had as well, daggers in profusion: broad-bladed dag-gers, slim poniards, misericords, dirks, toadstickers, and hunting knives with grips of kobold bone. These blades hung all about their harness as if, come combat, they anticipated sprouting extra arms and fighting in the manner of the intelligent octopi rumored to haunt the rocks off the coast of Lantan in the Trackless Sea. But enough of blades.

There was nothing intrinsically sinister about the three. Their garb, outlandish and weapon bedizened as it was, was no more than what was fashionable among Tethyrian bravos, particularly soldiers-of-fortune—which these appeared to be. Their gait was fairly steady, which indicated they likely hadn't imbibed enough in the tavern to make them boisterous. They could turn into trouble, but didn't constitute automatic menace.

"Ho," said one with ginger-colored mustachios waxed into wings. He approached Stillhawk. "Are you the master of this traveling circus?"

The ranger nodded to Zaranda. The bravos looked to her and shrugged. Taller than any of them, with her man's garb and her saber with its well-worn hilt slung now at her own waist, Zaranda Star did not invite men to trifle with her, for all her handsomeness. Instead they craned to look past the mob of locals rummaging through the goods on the racks and drop cloths.

The tallest of the sell-swords, whose black hair hung in tight perfumed curls to his shoulders and who wore tights that were vertically striped red, blue, and yellow on one leg, and purple with yellow stars on the other, elevated a long and lordly nose.

"Rubbish for rubes," he opined. A general growl rose from the locals, but instead of pressing, they edged away from the heavily armed trio. Ignoring them, the black-ringleted bravo looked square at Zaranda.

"Have you noth-ing more worthwhile than straight pins and thimbles?"

"Straight pins and thimbles are amply worthwhile for folk who have none," said Zaranda evenly. She made it a habit not readily to take offense, and to deal in general in the calmest manner possible. This habit was highly prof-itable to a merchant. Her mastery of swordsmanship and her latent skill at magic made it easier for her to main-tain the required serenity of mind.

"We have some swords and daggers from the East," Farlorn said. "Wondrous work, of a style seldom seen in these parts." Zaranda had coached him carefully in ad-vance: Tethyrians tended to prize craftsmanship above all things.

The third man waved him off. His close-cropped brown hair and the yellowish scar that ran from one eye to his broad, stubble-clad jaw belied the foppery of his dress. "Weapons we have. Have you good magic?"

Farlorn cocked an eyebrow at Zaranda. A little sar-donically; this was her call to make, though Farlorn was one who little cared to defer to others. But he was, after all, in her pay.

Here was a cusp of sorts. Zaranda was ready enough to sell her goods to whoever was willing to pay a good price for them. The nicety here was whether the query sprang from mere curiosity, a prospective customer's in-terest, or something more sinister. On their own ac-count, these three worried Zaranda little, particularly with Farlorn and grim Stillhawk at her side. But who knew how many comrades they had out of sight outside the village, who might be eager to ambush even such a well-guarded caravan as this for sufficiently tempting plunder? Magic items were always in demand, im-mensely valuable in their own right and readily convertible to cash anywhere in Faerun.

Which, of course, was why a comparative handful of rare and powerful objects from fiend-haunted

Thay pro-vided the backbone of the profit Zaranda hoped to real-ize on this expedition.

"Are you mages?" she asked. "Could you, say, read a spell scroll, or ply an enspelled wand?"

Ginger Mustachios spread hands no less scarred than Stillhawk's. "We are simple fighting men. We have no skill with spells. Still, we can use enchanted weap-ons as readily as the next man."

Zaranda shook her head and smiled thinly. "I regret that the only magic weapons we have are those we our-selves carry. And they're not for sale."

It was the truth. They had won some enchanted weapons on the Thay expedition, but without exception these had been cursed, or such that they would turn and bite the hand of anyone who tried to wield them who wasn't a devotee of a dark god such as Cyric or Talos. Such objects were valuable to certain folk, of course, but Zaranda found it uncomfortable at best to have dealings with them. They were also of consider-able interest to collectors with more risque tastes, par-ticularly in the West. In Zaranda's experience, though, the potential for trouble outweighed the potential profit, so she had—not without a twinge of regret—opted to leave them where they lay.

Ginger Mustachios frowned briefly, and for a mo-ment Zaranda thought he might cause trouble; Tethyr-ian bravos often dealt poorly with disappointment and tended not to reckon odds when they were angry. But instead, he shrugged and glanced over at his burly, scar-faced comrade, who had found a brazen oil lamp that had in fact come from far Rashemen in the Unap-proachable East, and represented the upper limit of the luxury items the countryfolk might afford. This the man was rubbing surreptitiously on his sleeve.

"What ho, Argolio?" the mustachioed man sang out, clapping his companion's thick shoulder. "Think what you're doing, man. If by some chance this tall, foreign-born vixen had overlooked a magic lamp from the East, what then? Had a djinn appeared with a flash and a puff of smoke, next thing you knew you'd be down at the village midden, wringing out your codpiece!"