(A/N: Such tardiness on my part. I really hope this makes up for it. Not only did I borrow a computer for this, I had to have Witchwolf e-mail me my rough drafts (praise her!), then download ff dot net's free OpenOffice software when I discovered my borrowed computer didn't have Word. By the way, I don't fancy OpenOffice, but the price (or lack thereof) is nice.)

(Erg, bad job editing. Now fixed.)

tea time

Once every tendays, due to a lack of customers in the late afternoon, the entertainers at Shadash's teahouse would come together for their traditional afternoon tea. They used the scant hours of free time past the midday performance to run mundane and mysterious errands, train apprentices, and perhaps trade performance tips. Tea time in the cool darkness of the teahouse was more of a raging gossip session over fragrant drinks and elaborate playing cards than anything delicate or formal.

There were seven entertainers seated amongst a bevy of comfortable silk cushions. They were situated in a circle, with six young apprentices waiting on them, as was part of their training. The lot of them ranged in age, race, and demeanor, but they all had the same shifty eyes when cards were in their hands and silver and gold on the expensive carpet.

Shadash was not as skilled with cards nor as skilled as the others at cheating with them. He judged how well a session went by the severity of the amounts he lost or how well he could derail the game. A very sore loser, he was known to scowl, curse, and throw his cards around. The other performers enjoyed provoking him in addition to taking his money. It was hard to say which activity was more sweet to his compatriots when Shadash's tongue had a propensity for the bitter.

The consolation which kept him coming back to the tea party, was the hoard of information he gathered from the small talk gleaned from the others. There was no doubt in his mind that one or two of the other entertainers were in the same sideline as he, but while Shadash was terrible at cards, he liked to think he was a winner when it came to deciphering the information coming secondhand from patrons and casual customers.

Losing was a corrosive element for the young dancer, but in the long run, information covered his frequent losses. This time he was out for information about a former patron. As he contemplated his depleting gambling money and how to bring up the subject, he spared a hand to absently scratch the house's fox behind the ears. The long-tamed animal took to Shadash on the basis of boy's constant, almost pathological, wooing.

"The matchmaker is at Lolah again," Feshi smirked, laying down a crown card. He was not sure if the groans that followed were about his news or the card that made him the likely winner. "Nasoos paid the woman to tell Lolah he's the right one."

To his dismay, what he thought would be a tasty tidbit gathered no pigeons.

"Old news," snorted Cahm, placing a wagon card on the carpet. "Boring news. This isn't the first time he's done that."

Feshi looked at the wagon card with suspicion; it was too important a card to hand off unless one had two. Possibly it was a sacrifice to Jadiqa; it was one of the only cards that could travel once played and the muscular dancer played next.

"You're new here Feshi," Jadiqa shrugged, picking up the wagon card and scratching his fashionably bristly chin with it. The scratching noise set the fox's ears a-swivel from its nest in Shadash's lap. "You have no idea the shamefully stupid things Nasoos has done to win Lolah's cold heart."

"They say her god removed her heart," Chidi tittered helpfully from Feshi's other side, "when she removed herself from the temple."

Shadash rolled his mismatched eyes when the vacuous teenager's apprentice echoed the laughter and sipped his mint tea noisily in insult. Chidi was the house's prime belly dancer and had nearly every trait a Calishite man would want in a woman, minus all-important good breeding. Of all the entertainers in the house, it was surmised she was the most likely to enjoy the dark side of their profession. As a result, she was hated with a passion that was usually reserved for the management. In return, she had become a strangely good-humored inhouse extortionist.

Jadiqa spared Chidi's apprentice a menacing look that shut the girl up immediately before turning back to the cards. It looked as if he was about to toss the wagon back down, but then his gaze lingered on Cahm for a moment. A moment later he tucked the card into his hand and threw her a wink. "Do you want me to pull you?"

Cahm's eyes gave her away, but only because she wanted them to. "What do you think?" When he put the card back down paired with a stallion it seemed answer enough.

All eyes turned to Shadash. They found him staring blankly at his cards; it would be a good hand if somebody played a moon. It was the one card he needed to complete the set; he would then have all the cards necessary to represent a famous Calimshan legend. Nobody knew he had the deck's only Djinn. Moons were as common as sand and most people had discarded them the first two rounds, himself included. With none on the top of any played piles, he could not make his play. He could only wait until the forced discard and dealing round destroyed his chances.

It was certain that everyone expected him to play along with the wagon card. If enough people donated a good card, they would beat Feshi. The winnings would be low, but they would accrue no losses. Shadash looked at the grinning djinn and then at Jadiqa's handsome face.

"Don't mislead Feshi," the dark-skinned dancer remarked. "Nasoos got a hold of Pasha Wroning's diviner; that's hardly old news."

Many eyes around the ring grew wide at the proclamation; it was a new chapter to an old legend. "Now, older brother Jadiqa," Shadash continued in bored tones, "I hear your old lady--"

"Formerly your old lady," Jadiqa leered.

"--picked up a suitor. Is it true? Has she found someone better than Jadiqa?" Shadash toyed with a card, making it apparent he was deciding whether to play along with the wagon or not.

The older dancer scowled and lifted his gilt tea glass to his lips to buy time. Shadash was a terrible player, always letting his emotions get the better of him, but he knew how to get what he wanted. The wealthy widow had found the attention of the vizier's eldest son, and that meant Jadiqa would soon be tossed aside... or dead. The situation had the man secretly terrified; he hoped she would quit her patronage as soon as possible but she had yet to make any indication.

"It is always smart to trade up, Shadash," the man growled, his perfectly white teeth apparent in his Calishite-dark face. "Aren't you honored that she went from you to me?"

A faint smile lifted the corner of Shadash's fine lips at Jadiqa's confirmation rather than the implied insult. "Honored? But Jadiqa, who could be better than you? Like fine wine, you've improved with age. Certainly Jadiqa isn't getting any younger, is he? No, your body is fine, older brother, but no matter the exotic oils or goat milk, you cannot prevent the creases in your skin forever. Did she look into a younger man?"

The older dancer rose to his knees and hissed with such venom that the fennec started forward from the bed he had made of Shadash's legs. Both the fox and Shadash watched Jadiqa closely, noting the way his muscles twitched with the passionate desire to embed the darker skinned dancer's teeth to the gums in his solid knuckles. All eyes were on the eldest dancer; he was so intense that no one thought to place bets on whether there would be a fight or not. There would be no bet on who would win; Jadiqa's patrons often pitted him against dancers from other teahouses.

"The grand vizier's son, Leafback. Better I should lose her to greatness than you should lose her because she heard where you started out. At least I was sold here by my brothers." Slowly, very slowly, he lowered himself until he was sitting back on his heels. Hatred continued to fuel his gaze, a sudden loathing so intense that it could not fail to spill over his tongue. "And where did you come from? We all know you were some disease-spawned whore-dropping; squeezed out in the Avenue's backstreet sewage! We all saw the scorpion pit and pain-whore scars they paid to have removed! There's never been a filthier piece of refuse allowed berth in this house and you, more than all of us, know it! You may be a viper, but you can't shed your filthy skin!"

The hush that followed Jadiqa's lengthy outburst was heavy with poisonous tension. If there was one sure way to prompt Shadash into a frenzy, it was to remind him of his origins. All the dancers knew the danger and warned the apprentices assigned to work with him. More than one ignorant apprentice had run screaming through the main room with bright red hand prints on their cheeks and a snarling dancer hot on their heels.

For the second time, all eyes switched to Shadash, waiting for his volatile temper to explode. For a moment, the boy's face was blank. The tension grew as he sat motionless, staring at Jadiqa. The tension became a malignant beast that spared no one. Two of the apprentices closest to Shadash inched carefully away. One of the entertainers moaned softly with fear. Surely Shadash would curse them all with his potent evil eye.

Then Shadash's lips moved and all feared the terrible words he would speak. Would he speak set the curse in his strange native tongue? "You were born on this level, Jadiqa," he began calmly, "but you will fall to where I began. I was born amongst the maggots, but I will rise until I die encrusted in jewels; enshrined by princes and princesses. Those who do not climb the sand dune eventually sink to the bottom, those who continually strive will be rewarded with the summit. Let all who will not forsake you ride your corpse to the bottom."

His expression was one of complete seriousness until he completed his speech. Then his lips quirked into a leering grin. Without looking at his cards, he found the djinn card and held it up beside his face so that two sets of wicked eyes seemed to stare back at Jadiqa and his paling face. "Djinn destroys alliances, because he needs none."

The card dropped from his fingers and fell onto Jadiqa's modest discard pile. The wagon and stallion cards were rendered useless. Feshi sighed in delayed relief; Shadash had just insured his victory. The dancer didn't care that he'd given Feshi a break; he simply tossed the rest of his cards into the space between he and Jadiqa. They fluttered to the floor haphazardly as the young dancer stood up.

"You ruined your chances at winning just to spite me," Jadiqa snorted. He was recovering from Shadash's theatrical pronouncement and implied curse. He wanted nothing more than to minimize how foolish he felt by turning the feeling back on the other. He was not successful.

"The kind of person that puts out his own eye in order to take the eye of an enemy?" Shadash grinned like a madman, rising to stand over the others. "I'm that type."

Such words did Jadiqa's heart no good.

Next up: Good Side, Bad Side wherein a shadow of the past nearly unravels our anti-hero by presence alone. The longest scene to date and probably my favorite.