Steel and Stone (8 page)

“A
MAZING HOW A BATH AND CLEAN CLOTHES CAN IMPROVE
a man,” Kitiara remarked the next day while she and the half-elf inspected the teeming Haven market. “You little resemble the slimy creature I pulled from the quicksand, half-elf. Dauntless barely knew you—once we caught up with him, that is.”

Tanis smiled. “The horses are enjoying oats and mash at the livery and could use a day’s rest. We have the will-o’-the-wisp’s treasure to spend, a sunny day, and time to enjoy it.” He inclined his head. “May I buy you breakfast, Kitiara Uth Matar?”

Kitiara assented with an elaborate nod. They’d eaten once, in their room at the Seven Centaurs Inn, but
now, at midday, their stomachs rumbled again. “It must be the result of weeks of those infernal elven battle rations,” she commented, pausing to admire a vendor’s wares—metal trays of fragrant venison sizzling with onions and eggs. “I’ll eat anything but more elven quith-pa. Dried fruit, pah!” She was about to order a plate of the fried meat when her gaze was attracted by a display of flaky pastry filled with custard and drizzled with strawberry icing. She halted as if mesmerized. “Oh, the decisions,” she murmured happily.

“We’ll have a plate of the venison and two of those frosted pastries,” Tanis told the vendor as Kitiara vacillated. “Lest you drool all over the man’s wares,” he told the swordswoman, who took the teasing with good humor.

Conversation took second place to eating for a time as the half-elf and swordswoman strolled down an avenue of the teeming market. Dressed in a short, split skirt of black leather and an overblouse of eggshell-colored linen, Kitiara drew many admiring looks from passersby, which she accepted with insouciance. Tanis, on the other hand, wore a pair of floppy, gathered pants in dark blue, plus a matching cotton shirt, both borrowed from the portly innkeeper at the Seven Centaurs. The shirt rippled with the slender half-elf’s movements.

Kitiara eyed him again. “We need to find you new clothes to replace your ruined leathers, half-elf. I’m used to you in Plainsman garb; it suits you better than the dress of an overfed city-dweller.”

Taller than Kitiara, Tanis had a better vantage, and in response he slipped a hand through her arm and drew her through the crowd. “I see just the place,” he said.

The half-elf stopped before a large wagon, uncovered at the back but with a shell-like contraption over the driver’s seat. Kitiara could see from the wagon’s design that it took four mules to pull the top-heavy thing. Standing atop the ribbon-festooned vehicle was a hill dwarf with a rust-colored beard that curled down to his belt buckle. He wore homespun dyed forest green, plus brown leather boots scuffed with what was probably decades of use.

Tanis and Kitiara waited while the dwarf finished with a customer, a loud woman who couldn’t decide between a pearl-and-platinum hair ornament and a seashell comb. “How old would you say this dwarf is?” Kitiara asked casually.

Tanis considered. “Flint’s nearly one hundred and fifty, and this dwarf certainly looks younger than Flint. I’d say this fellow’s been around about a century. About ten years older than me.”

Kitiara protested, “I’m spending time with someone who was an old man when I was born?”

When Tanis nodded and murmured, “In human years, yes,” she snorted.

“Do you care?” he asked.

Kitiara laughed. “No,” she admitted. “It’s not as though we’re going to get married or anything.”

The woman finally left with the comb and the hair bauble, and the dwarf who owned the wagon ambled over to Tanis and Kitiara. The vendor remained on the back of the wagon, glaring down at the crowd and picking his way among his wares with delicacy. “What do
you
want?” he muttered to the half-elf and swordswoman.

Kitiara looked annoyed by the dwarf’s brusqueness, but Tanis, accustomed to Flint’s blunt ways, only smiled. Crustiness wasn’t exactly uncommon
among hill dwarves. “We’re looking for clothes for me, and a dagger for the lady,” the half-elf said.

The dwarf looked pointedly at Tanis’s ill-fitting garb. “Thinking of leaving the traveling minstrel revue, then, are you?”

Kitiara bristled; Tanis put a restraining hand on her arm and signaled her to overlook the jibe. The surest way to annoy hill dwarves—or Flint Fireforge, at least—was to pretend to ignore their griping.

“Do you trade with Plainsmen?” the half-elf asked.

“I trade with everybody,” the dwarf said grumpily, “and they all try to take advantage of me. Plainsmen, gnomes, even other dwarves. You’d think I was an infernal nabob, the way they try to cheat me.”

“I’m looking for a pair of leather breeches and a leather shirt,” Tanis interjected.

“With fringe, I suppose,” the dwarf complained. “Everybody wants fringe. Damned frippery. What use on Ansalon is fringe, I ask you?”

Tanis smiled gently while Kitiara steamed, her brows knit over smoldering eyes. “Fringe would be fine,” Tanis said, “but it’s not necessary”—the half-elf paused significantly—
“if
you don’t have it.”

The dwarf rose to the bait. “ ’Course I have it! What kind o’ cheap outfit you think I’m runnin’ here, half-elf?”

Kitiara pulled her arm away from the half-elf and pointed at the dwarf. Her voice crackled. “Listen, old dwarf, do you want us to spend our steel elsewhere?”

The dwarf slowly swiveled to glare down at Kitiara from the back of the wagon. His eyes were the same green as his breeches and shirt. “The name’s Sonnus Ironmill, not ‘old dwarf,’ young lady. You the hoyden lookin’ for a dagger?”

Looking over Kitiara’s head, the dwarf addressed
the crowd in general. “A sword ain’t enough for this minx; noooo, she needs a dagger, too. How about a mace and pike as well?” He looked down at his fuming customer. “What kind o’ folks you hang around with, anyway? Or”—he leaned over and whispered—“do things get a mite touchy at the ladies’ quilting parties now and then?”

Tanis bent toward Kitiara. “He’s enjoying this,” he whispered.

Kitiara looked from Tanis to Sonnus Ironmill and frowned. “I’m looking for a dagger,” she finally said. “I lost my old one in some quicksand.”

The dwarf did a double take. “Eh? Quicksand?” Then he caught himself and recovered his grousing tone. “You’ll want lots of jewels and pearl inlay and the like, no doubt. Damned unnecessary. Decoration can throw off the entire balance of a weapon.”

“Listen,” she snapped, “do you have a dagger to sell me or not?”

“ ’Course I have a dagger!” the dwarf said, stomping over to a trunk, opening it, and tossing a folded bundle of leather at the half-elf. “Got scabbards, too, but I can see by the sheath showing from under that short skirt of yours that you don’t need one of those.”

Tanis caught the bundle of leather; it was a full suit in the style of the Plainsmen—fawn-soft deerhide the color of polished oak, fringed along the back yoke. Someone had embroidered the hem with beads. “May I try it on in your shack?” the half-elf asked, pointing at the turtlelike contraption at the front of the wagon.

“ ’Course. Were you planning to take your clothes off right here in publ … Hey! Did you say ‘shack’?” The dwarf pulled up short. As Tanis leaped onto the wagon, the half-elf took the full force of a vile stare from Sonnus Ironmill. Tanis merely shrugged and
headed for the dwarf’s quarters. The dwarf snatched a tray of daggers, plucked off a nest of silk scarves that had fallen over on the tray, and turned back toward Kitiara. “ ‘Shack,’ he calls it,” Ironmill groused under his breath. “Price o’ leathers just doubled for that.”

As Tanis changed into the garb in the dimness of the cramped interior, he heard a new, piping voice mingle with Sonnus Ironmill’s complaining tones.

“Nice daggers, Sonnus! I found a jeweled sword once, which was a lucky thing because the owner showed up when I was trying to figure out who to return it to, and he was really upset that he’d lost it. I knew he was glad I’d found it, even though he was too upset to be glad, really. I guess he’d been plenty worried. I—”

“Get out of here, you wretched kender!” the dwarf shouted. “And if you steal just
one more
thing from this wagon, I’ll … I’ll sell you to the minotaurs for goat food!”

“Steal?” The little voice dripped with hurt feelings. “I wouldn’t steal, Sonnus. I can’t help it that everyone loses things and that I’m lucky enough to f—”

“Enough!” the dwarf boomed. “Out!”

Tanis heard a thump that might have been a kender hitting the side of a wagon. As the half-elf pulled Sonnus Ironmill’s shirt over his head, Kitiara’s cool voice was the next sound he heard. “How much for this dagger, dwarf?”

The dwarf named a price. Kitiara haggled him down, and they had just struck a deal as Tanis emerged from Ironmill’s hut. “I’ll take it,” he told the dwarf, admiring the fit, “if the price is right.”

“Well …” The dwarf stroked his luxuriant beard. “It seems to me that suit may well be the only one of its kind west of Que-Shu, which is where I got it, and
didn’t it cost me a pretty pile of coins.… Its rarity increases its value, I’d think.”

“Except no one west of Que-Shu but the half-elf would want it,” Kitiara said as she fingered the gathered pouch into which they’d put the coins they’d found at the will-o’-the-wisp’s lair. “You’re lucky to be getting rid of it, dwarf. Maybe we should look somewhere else, Tanis.” Tanis nodded.

Sonnus Ironmill frowned at them both. “Five steel,” he pronounced.

“Three,” Kitiara and Tanis said at the same time.

“Four.”

“Done!”

Kitiara paid Sonnus Ironmill and slipped her new dagger, with its hilt inlaid with tiger’s-eyes, into her sheath. As she and Tanis plunged back into the milling crowd, they heard the dwarven vendor greet a customer with, “Well, what do
you
want?”

Kitiara brushed past a female kender, a waist-high creature with the race’s characteristic long brown hair gathered in a topknot. “That’s the creature who tried to rob the dwarf,” the swordswoman commented to Tanis.

“Rob!” the kender exclaimed. “I never steal. I do have incredible luck finding things. Do you think some people are just born with luck? I do. My sisters and I all have it. But I …” Brown eyes doelike with innocence, she was still chattering when a trio of teen-aged boys shoved between Kitiara and the kender. The childlike creature was lost to view, her lilting voice swallowed by the cacophony of the late-morning marketplace.

Tanis and Kitiara slipped among the marketgoers. The din was practically deafening. A seller of tapestries argued with a vendor of leather footware; each
accused the other of letting his wares spill into the other’s territory. Dozens of vendors tried to outdo each other in shouting their products’ superiority to the crowd.

An illusionist charmed the crowd. A juggler balanced a bottle on his head while twirling flaming batons. A veil-draped seeress offered to look into the future of those with money enough—and gullibility enough—to pay for the service. A gnome sold cymbals and Aeolian harps, flat boxes with strings, played, not by fingers, but by the wind. Two humans, a man and a woman, sat on a grassy hummock overlooking the market, tuning a pair of three-stringed, triangular guitars.

Sellers hawked scarves, perfumes, and fine clothing, all of which Kitiara ignored, and swords, armor, and saddlery, which she stopped to admire.

“I’d like to find something for my brothers,” Kitiara said. “A weapon for Caramon—he’s athletic, like me. And a set of silk scarves for Raistlin, I think. They’d come in handy for certain magic spells.”

“I may pick up a gift for Flint,” Tanis rejoined. “His first choice would be ale, I’m sure, but I’m not sure I want to haul a keg of Haven ale from here to Solace.”

“Isn’t it lunchtime?” Kitiara asked, her attention arrested by the calls of a man stirring a caldron of soup, which scented the air with sage, basil, and bay leaves.

Tanis followed her obligingly to an open bench near the soup vendor. “You guard the seat,” he told her. “I’ll pay; I’ve got a few coins.”

“We ought to divide up the booty from the will-o’-the-wisp,” Kitiara murmured.

Tanis nodded. “After lunch.”

He returned a few moments later, bearing a wooden tray upon which sat two steaming bowls of soup and
thick slices of white bread sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. They ate in silence for a while, savoring the chewy bread and peppery soup. Tanis carefully brushed sesame seeds from the beading on his new shirt, which prompted Kitiara to drop her hand to her thigh, where the sheath held—nothing.

“Tanis! My dagger’s gone! The kender!”

The half-elf leaped up. So did Kitiara. Then they were off in different directions.

Tanis pushed through the packed lanes as quickly as he could, gazing right and left, but he saw no sign of the brown-eyed kender. He made his way back to Sonnus Ironmill’s wagon. The dwarf was perched at the back of the vehicle, his short legs dangling off the back. Studiously ignoring several prospective customers, Ironmill clutched a tankard and munched a sandwich. Tanis smelled fish, garlic, and ale as he drew near and asked about the kender. He had to shout his question three times, each time louder, before the dwarf deigned to look down and reply.

“The last time I saw the thieving sneak, she was headin’ that way.” Ironmill pointed. “Guard your money pouch, half-elf. Drizzleneff Gatehop’s a quick one.” He paused, then resumed grumbling. “But Drizzleneff’s no worse than most of the scalawags I have to deal with. At least a kender doesn’t
intend
to be a scalawag.”

Ironmill looked away; clearly he considered the conversation over. He was obviously startled a moment later when Tanis swung himself up onto the wagon next to Ironmill and stood on tiptoe, scanning the crowd for signs of the kender.

The view wasn’t much better from the wagon than it was from the ground. Tents and banners gave the half-elf mere glimpses of what lay beyond the immediate
row. Tanis’s quick eyes did catch sight of Kitiara, who strode through the marketgoers, shoving and glowering at anyone who got in her way. He found himself hoping, for the kender’s sake, that the half-elf caught up with Drizzleneff Gatehop before the swordswoman did.