The voice was dripping honey, but ragged and breathlessly consumed in darkness whilst she spoke on.
"In the lands in which I was born children are taught to tell a story long before they are taught to write in cold black ink or to figure in bare numbers. This way is most likely the right way, for far fewer wish to read dead words and figures when they could listen to a living voice alluring them through paths that are tuned to resonate with the soul of those who hear. Across the years I have seen a thousand shores of sand and have told ten thousand stories, each more cunningly spun than the next. For men may be so easy to manipulate caught in the silken trails of a net of charming narrative. So let this be my price, for in your eyes I see topaz stones, and on your once-soft hands I read a story not unlike my own.
"I come from far across the seas and to the south, where the sun burns a brighter and stronger gold than in the north, in a great city where the sands meet sea, where to the north lies wild desert and to the south lies the ocean, equally untamed; where djnni walk through streets, ebony-skinned slaves of Chult carry burdens, sirens cry their haunting song while they roam the waves below, glittering snakes of the desert hiss tunes in the cool evening, and where in the homes of the wealthy gold and jewels the size of roc's eggs flow like water between the hands of their owners.
"To such a bejeweled cradle I was born, daughter to the vizier of a pasha and to the first among his concubines. The holy words of the lords of the sun and the sea were the first whispered to my ear. The juice of a ripe date from the finest of the three orchards belonging to my father was rubbed along my gums, and in the story told by one of my nurses I smiled and reached out a hand to grasp the shredded fruit to taste its pleasure on the first day of my life below the sun. The love of my father for my mother was greater than that for any of his other wives or concubines, for her wit and her beauty and perhaps above all for her voice. It was whispered that she was a siren of the sea that one of his fishermen had captured by net, or that she was the daughter of such a sea-nymph and a lowly fisherman who had stolen a bride from the waves. A sevenday after my birth, when it is known among my people that a child is likely to live, my head was shaven and a necklace of green peridots placed about my neck at the will of my father, and ninety-seven goats were slain and shared both in feasting and to the poor for the sake of good fortune.
"My earliest memories are the songs and sweetmeats of my mother. She favoured green and blue silks of all the different shades of the inside of a rainbow in her dress within the closed quarters of the zenana, where only the voices of women and children and eunuchs were permitted; and of course my father. She spread kohl upon her eyes and persimmon-scented myrrh upon her body, and took up the stringed al-‛ūd to play and to sing each day. Some said my voice was like hers, though in truth none could be her equal. She sung like no other, with a voice seeming hoarse and yet exactly the harmony wanted to the melody, and in an instant she could also turn it to liquid silver. She sung songs which had no words, and yet could be about nothing other than the dance of waves and bittersweet longings for love and adventure. I learned when I was very young that I could sit by her side and to quiet me she would easily give sweetmeats; or become lost in her music so that she did not notice when I reached for riches. Do you know of ḥalqūm, rosewater-honey? It is a sweet the colour of the pink of early dawn. The best kind uses a delicate sprig of mint to only touch it, just so, and careful tiny slivers of hazelnuts, and ought to be drowned in sweet-smelling rosepetal-drenched water and covered in powdered sugar-grains taken from cane-fields. Some call it delight: the pursuit of delight.
"There were jewelled baubles and chains for me, and even when sons came to my father I was favoured among his children. I could speak well and quickly in three languages, that of my land and the older tongue of that land where the greatest poetry is written, and the strange language taught by my mother; and unknown to him I forced the eunuchs to instruct in the homely common tongue for a fourth. Anything I asked for, I was given; and when I boldly slipped a loop of pearls from his waist, or tricked a ring from his fingers, I was praised for amusing him.
"And yet one yearns to escape the bars of a golden cage. I bribed a eunuch to take me to the city, down to the sea at the port. Raised upon black onyx and brilliant-cut rubies, pink pearls the size of pigeon's eggs and golden sapphires, polished sardonyx and gleaming chalcedony, beryl and lapis lazuli, turquoise and carnelian: shining fragments of mica and sandspar become the most precious of stones; delicate-whorled shells held more valuable than the finest star-sapphire cabochon. The markets awake at dawn with criers of all the gods calling their names and singing to bells, and then they are crammed with people; far more than this small northern town entire, for my city was a rich and wealthy one. The women of good family are veiled in black, the women of wealthier family carried in jewelled palanquins and entirely unseen, the women of better family still never present at all, only secluded and expecting merchants to attend upon them. It is much more tedious that way. Lamb is spit-roasted and shaved for the selling, juicy and spiced thickly with tumeric and cassia and nutmeg and ras el hanout; sorbets flavoured with pomegranate and figs and made with ice brought into being through enchanted cantrips; honeydew melons sliced and sold to passers-by. The air is full of smoke and perfumes and the smell of horses and mules and seasalt and people: there is life and excitement.
"The eunuch guard taught me more than he knew himself of how to escape free: and I threatened that I would tell my father of his first dereliction of duty if he did not overlook my other journeys. The only way to escape blackmail is to care not a fig for the words and the censure of others, provided that you yourself have what you want: and I wanted to climb the rocks and see the glitter of shells by the oceans, to plait seaweed into my hair and watch the bronzed bare-chested fishers dance by their catches. In plain abaya I escaped view; and indeed discovered some charmingly disreputable urchin-companions. I never did see siren-kin by the shores, no matter how long I searched.
"But girls are prone to flower and grow old and become used as bargain-pieces; no matter how pampered or beloved we may be. Perhaps my father had vast debts to pay; perhaps he truly thought to give me away; perhaps he cared not, for what is a girl but a tool unless she can use her abilities for her own self? A bird in a golden cage yearns for freedom; and later misses the bars of the cage. My father would have traded me to the first among the caliph's viziers: sixty if he was a day, fat and bald and syphilitic and wealthier than the wildest dreams of most.
"My other lover was the first mate of a ship called Exzesus. I remember his blue eyes were exotic to me, for he was fathered by a northerner. His ship was in port for three days: I fled with him on the third. I wore, of course, my dowry and anything I could carry that had not been nailed down; I went to my love in gold and silver and pearls and satins, the coin-lined headdress of the bride, the peridots of my birth month, for an adventurous passion. Then, of course, I learned that they were pirates.
"The seas are a rough and dangerous enterprise. But when faced with two evils, the one untried is always so much more fun. I sailed across seven-and-seventy seas with the salt in my hair and the skies fresh and clear and free. In the south I felt Chult's damp rainforest air and thieved weird cats'-eyes from a stone idol set alone in sand miles from any other construction, evaded the pursuit of angry tribesmen. In the north I have worn the fine white coats of the polar bear and the poorest sealskin; starved on freedom and grown to seek a lady's comforts—yet even the cleverest find it hard, at times. But I have seen more than most in my adventures; I could tell you tales of royalties and their habits— In Thay I have been feted for beauty by Red Wizards; in Halruaa seen skyships fly above the poor craft; thieved the map to stolen pirate treasure from a sleeping man in an Amnian port; discovered a new city and a new lover. Sometimes a girl simply attracts too much attention; or is caught in indiscretion...
"Adventurers meet in odd places; I met the silly elf hunting wyverns from a safe distance. I would rather, I told him, make love to an owlbear in heat. Then he would drag me to his cast-off's betrayed husband; a screaming baby. In the woods when I saw him his thin tunic was drenched and translucent with sweat; slim musculature, fine-boned hands, and a wide grin below his clownish warpaints...
"He is a silly elf. My...greatest profit of simple thievery was Dosan's warehouse of black lotus, neglected in all of his recent business. We seized, as I thought, the swag, sold easily and quickly; and yet the man is a mage. I cannot escape this. Haggard and ugly as his cursed spell has done to me, I should not...wish to. Tell the elf none of this. If I had left when he had asked; if I had seen the forests of Tethir; if we had stayed; if the world permits the asking of what might have been. I have seized my date-juice from life. If I am what you might be, do this last for me.
"The way to strike Angelo Dosan the mage is through his precious granddaughter. The—Street of Vesiham. A small quiet estate far from his Fist's quarters. The girl is the one way, I would think, by which you can have your wish to harm him. I have seen him with her, a red-headed lump of a girl: ugly, passive, everything I despise, never a rogue—and withal, the beloved granddaughter of Sarevok Anchev's captain. This is the knowledge you seek. Avenge me.
"So ends this part of your story and mine."
—
"Right," Imoen said, "nice work, kiddo."
No Faldy here; she'd blow her top at nymphy business. No 'Jantis, he'd cut up holy wooden-headed about the same thing, still holy or not. Could've done with Shar-Teel and Vic, but there were three of them, so that was just fine, Imoen thought. Get it done quick—real quick. She grinned, wondering if her teeth might look wide and white as a skull's evil grimace for someone who saw it through scrying. Claudia's skin sparkled beside her with the protection she'd chosen to cast over her skin; glittery, but rock-solid. Imoen fantasised for a moment about learning the fireshield spell that protected you with a gleaming pretty circle of dancing flame; but then walked in behind the other two since Skie'd opened the thick door with a quiet click.
Winthrop'd given her buttocks hell if the Candlekeep Inn's corridors'd looked anything like this, Imoen thought. There was no lights on in the wall-sconces, only an improvised thieves'-lamp Skie'd lit for them to see by; spiders lurked on the ceiling obviously having had plenty of time to build up webs nice and thick; dust was everywhere and creeping up her nostrils. She wanted to sneeze. She kicked the door shut behind them, so that from the outside it at least looked like there wasn't necessarily an armed burglary going on here.
There didn't look to be magic traps in the wide entryway, and Skie's hands said that the way was clear. Their footprints left marks in the dust; there were fainter signs of other prints, too, Imoen noticed. Booted prints that had gone both ways, bigger than any of their own footsteps. Other than that, looked like nobody'd stirred in this part of the house for months. The walls were wood rather than Ramazith's paintings, done in marquetry that grew more elaborate as they walked further in. These were dirty, neglected scenes that had to be different lands, different planes: places that a conjurer could summon from, Imoen guessed. There were beasts she hadn't seen before combined with beasts she thought were mythical combined with beasts that she knew could be summoned, and figures that looked human until you started to look closer. In Skie's halflight it was creepy to spare that closer glance and then see arms that didn't bend like arms, or hidden fangs or shell-like ears or hooves in place of feet, or eyes that were nothing like any human ought to have. Between them were foreign plants expensively picked out in the wooden figures, trees with roots like elm or oak that then grew into far stranger foliage. Imoen thought she saw a bush that burned with tongues of flame shaped like human fingers, and a tree upside down growing from a strange sky where the flowers floated beside it in the winds, and then a stylised tree where the image of the roots began in the floor below their feet before it branched itself to cover the ceiling. Seemed Ragefast liked veneered wood more than mage-paint in his decorations; they'd come to the end of the passageway. Skie hand-signalled to stop; Claudia got the message after Imoen pulled her back, and listening carefully there was a sound somewhere in this house. It sounded to Imoen like wind whistling through high-pitched silver chimes.
Ramazith'd given some handy tips on bringing down the mage protections the conjurer was likely to have. There wasn't much, really. The booted footprints were along mostly the same way as them: and the doors they managed to open along the way seemed to be unimportant. There were bare shelves and open, empty cupboards and dry-as-dust alembics and alchemy equipment; some mage books scattered hereabouts, some of the wax and the summoning chalk and the string and the dried hoof bits you used for a lot of conjurings still lying around. Imoen looked a bit through them; maybe it was better to search first before finding the mage himself. Or perhaps better to go straight to where he'd locked himself up in this dusty old house and knock him out instead of letting him get the drop on 'em—that was what every good rogue'd say. Had to prepare herself and lead the way, for Claudia acted like she couldn't say boo to a goose and this was mage stuff.
Then they came closer, and the high voice was stronger. Through one door in particular; Imoen pressed her ear to the gold-coloured keyhole set in the middle of a door starred by geometric parquetry, with the same veneer of dust.
"Please, release me. I fade even now," the sweet female voice said, in pleading that struck Imoen just below where Ramazith's magic had hit her. She was strong enough to ignore it.
"But we are made to be together; whether ye know it or no. Abela, in the grove you loved me and you are beautiful still." The other voice was whiny as Edwin, Imoen thought, seeking some ordinary comparison.
"Don't move!" Claudia whispered fiercely. Imoen blinked, and then managed to see the layer of braid around the keyhole: a whirling, red-gold explosive spell fit to burst around her not-quite-so-red head.
"I can't see how to untangle it!" she answered, suddenly afraid of a crimson mass above her neck and bone fragments flying to those marquetry walls.
Claudia studied it. "Ice c-chips," the girl said, stuttering slightly. "Could I...could I try to bind the fire-sprites up?"
"Quickly," Imoen answered, impatient—this was more rude comedy than heroic expedition, the sort of thing for belly-laughs out of Puffguts, not that that was difficult to make—and inside there was the voice of the nymph:
"In the grove it was true below the stars. I will die of what you call love. Only you would still call me beautiful. Please, take this collar from me."
"And that I cannot do. Together we will be, forever."
Claudia's spell was cast under her breath; Imoen saw the necklace of blue-white ice beads forming a few inches off her hands. A cantrip; manipulated like she'd seen happen with the salt, the reason why she'd picked the scared-rabbit mage for her team in the first place— The ice shards bound themselves to the fiery parts of the Weave-braid, and then it all fizzled into harmless steam. Imoen shook her head. "Pretty good," she said, and forced more than picked open the lock on the door herself, with Winthrop's tools; and then she came blazing into the room with an Agannazar's Scorcher flaring in her hand. Skie's sword was drawn; Claudia glittered in the pair of lights—and held a simple crossbow, for speedy disruptions.
"Surrender the nymph, and ya don't have to get hurt!"
"Who dares—who?" the mage returned, with a loud, girly, and Edwinesque shriek. He stood in front of the woman and splayed his scrawny arms wide, as if he wanted to protct her. His robes were black and embroidered with dark green in the design of leaves, and dirty and dusty as if they had not been cleaned for weeks. He was middle-aged, with greying dark hair and an angular face, his dark eyes glazed over like the honey top of a sweetbread. "You mean harm to Abela, my love and my life?"
The woman was a nymph: supernaturally beautiful, with knee-length raven-black hair of a blue sheen and shimmer, her face and bare arms the colour of dark smooth wood, and her eyes an unrelieved bright green. Around her neck was a blue-gemmed necklace too coarse to be anything other than human-manufactured. She sat still, traces of crystal tears by her eyes. Below the beauty was a deep sadness and she needed them to help her, because she was so beautiful and the most wondrous thing in the world, a sister who had to be aided at all costs—
Nymph! Enchanting enchant-y mind-messing stuff! Imoen's brain reminded herself. A cobweb-like string wound from the pendant that tipped the necklace between Abela's small breasts, held in the male mage's right hand.
"All right," Imoen said, "how about we just hold her for a moment?" About the room—much more important—she'd seen more books here, astrolabes and tools; maybe they could plunder it— "Who came here last?" The booted prints in the dust.
The mage simply stared. Off his head like any other crazy mage. The others were still ready; Skie'd woven forward, standing in front of them to protect.
"The Flaming Fist have come, and found my Abela not," Ragefast said. "Speak for who sent you! For what designs you have upon her!"
"You're aff...affected by her natural magic," Claudia said softly, her face still glittering with that stony protection. "Perhaps we could...help you both. If I could touch your skin, p-perhaps my dispelling could..."
"You would help me," Abela begged softly. "I am dying; Ragefast, do let her, please..." Then the nymph drew in air in a quick hiss, and glared, her perfect white teeth bared at them.
Ragefast reacted spiky-quick just like them: he made mirror images for himself, and then—quicker than Imoen'd been able to think—he did the circle of fireshield for himself. Eight wizards with eight blue-burning pools around them.
"Ramazith sent you! I feel his magic," the wizard said; and then his throat hoarsened while his skin hardened into bark like a druid, as if he took some of the power of the nymph behind him.
Abela whispered: "That one wishes to cut me to pieces! No...not that torture..."
And, Imoen concluded, this was absolutely the moment they found themselves hip-deep in the proverbial. Head downwards.
She whipped her set of missiles out with one hand and the instantlike Agannazar's with the other, because she'd figured she could do that. She closed her eyes; seven out of those eight images were illusions, and the illusions didn't have real flames— The missiles went for one and the fires for another, and she felt only a little bit singed. Couldn't afford to stop in pain. Claudia'd launched off the crossbow bolt, five to go. But by then Ragefast'd chanted his summoning spell, like any other conjurer: and it was an elemental. Watery-pretty, just like Faldy's nereid; dangerous like Faldy's Sirine-Queen. Her body was like Abela's but on a much larger scale, almost as tall as the ceiling, and the living water that made her body had started to flow into ice spears in either hand; then she became a flood.
Imoen felt herself drown.
Claudia's got the dispel, was her first thought; clerics could cast it better to stop arcanists, so she'd not bothered to seek it out...something she'd fix, if'n she got out. Skie was doing okay against water, the sword creating hissing steam. She couldn't see Claudia; the waves blinded her eyes and clogged mouth and throat. She put her hands over her face to try to clear some air; if she couldn't breathe, she thought wildly, they were done for.
Steam continued to fizzle, and then she gulped air again; it all but burned her throat, but it was good. Water to steam, stonelike Claudia managing the transmutation. "Keep it up!" she yelled to the other two; water-to-air, water-to-air, that clearing a space meant...
Imoen Winthrop didn't think slow in an adventure, especially after all that'd been forced on them. She'd taken care to get her good area-effects back, rotten egg from a dark corner of Sauriram's kitchens ready in her pouch; she sped the casting all she could, words and runes and gestures, aimed—then cast with all the water she could range for a spell component without hitting Skie.
It only made people unconscious, so Abela the nymph dropped quickly; and while she could hear the nasty wizard casting, Imoen also heard his voice change, hurt. Skie stabbed at an ice-spear reaching from the green water-mists, cutting it in two.
"Grease!" Imoen called, starting the hand movements for a flame arrow herself. Let him roast in his barkskin. Claudia figured out her plans, and got the grease under the feet of all the mirror images. Then just before Imoen could get her arrow down, three howling monsters came to Ragefast's summon.
Wolfweres, Imoen thought; but these fought like they were far better than the ones on the island...
She couldn't let herself get distracted, and Skie was in front of her; a shield in human form. Imoen's fire leapt from her hands and the grease puddle burst for each image of the wizard. She heard him scream.
Or...should've sighted for the real instead, mebbe, shouldn't have thought of burning blood— Skie fought the wolfweres, and it looked like she'd done something: she moved faster than she ought to be able to, had her bones bend too far and inhumanly flexible. It worked; one of the wolfweres fell. Beat the wizard and it's three down nil to go, Imoen thought.
She began the gestures for another fire arrow, and while she was doing it yelled: "D'you want this to go to your nymph?"
It worked as a threat; the poor thing was hurt enough from him that a flaming shock to the system'd have killed her. Of course she wouldn't really have done it, Imoen thought. Ragefast's response, though, wasn't to surrender but to draw a protection bubble around himself and the nymph. Imoen'd seen where the nymph lay on the floor: so that was the right mirror image. She pointed and called Claudia to dispel. That thing Skie was doing'd stopped, the kid was fighting more like normal, and one of the monsters raked claws across her stomach— Imoen, breathing hard, sent a row of magic missiles into the head of one while she couldn't do anything to the wizard himself. As long as the pair o' them were too busy to go for the spellcasters; the one she'd hit turned crimson eyes on her, but Skie got it in the back with her shortsword. Too bad wolfweres healed fast.
Claudia's dispel hit the Weave in separated-out blazing white unravellings, and she got it. The shield came down. Imoen, smiling grimly for vengeance, began that fire arrow over again. Definitely the last she'd have in her head; Claudia was the same way, slow-reaching into her magic. But Claudia's last spell was slightly faster, and the loud noise of a thunderclap hit the room. Ragefast collapsed to the floor; the wolfweres disappeared; and Imoen shook her head, noting somewhat-deafened ears. Claudia gestured frantically at her to stop the flame arrow, and even though it was a waste she did at the last moment.
Skie sat down, nursing the deep cuts over her chest; she passed a hand over them for that odd healing skill, though it didn't quite finish the job. Imoen bent down over ol' Ragefast and found that he wasn't dead after all.
"You were r-right," Claudia was saying now they could hear again, "we did not have to kill him; he will be saner without the nymph..."
Imoen nodded. "It was the shiny things we did this for," she said. "Load her into that cart in the back and cover her over, Claudia, Lu, I'll do the first search." She looked down at the nymph's unconscious body, trying to control her tones. "Ramazith don't want a dead nymph, so I guess we'd better be fast to drag her back." Her hands signalled to Skie as she spoke. "Me and Claud can pull the cart, we'll give you your share later." She bent down and began the search of the conjurer's equipment.
At last! Success—partway— She clutched the precious scroll to herself, and took a few other things that weren't nailed down for cover-over.
—
"By my scrying, you performed...adequately," Ramazith said. Imoen was suddenly conscious of dripping water from their clothes across his erotic-painted flooring. But the mage's attention was on the nymph's body, daring to run his wide and sweaty hands over her. "Components of nymph. Splendid."
"You g-gave your own word in your own tower to remove this," Claudia said. "Please d-do so."
The mage gestured impatiently. Imoen could feel his power; she and Claud were both about burned out. They'd no choice but to exit, of course, and leave Abela to Ramazith. He took off the necklace from her and laid it aside; and then started a holding spell for her. Imoen saw a knife come to his hand. The imp flew behind them, nagging them to leave.
And then, of course, from the earth below him erupted a druid, a young bear who could turn into a druid, and a Harper fighter; and from the shadows a bandaged thief.
When Jaheira and Faldorn had finished with the mage who wanted to cut up nymphs, Imoen sat down in the ruined tower, between two static-rendered pictures of acts she thought were illegal in several countries. Faldorn was bent over Skie's rough bandages now, with the other druid venturing criticism at each point of healing; Skie'd be all right, then. About time to tell Claudia what I really wanted, Imoen thought, looking across at the other mage.
—