“I suppose,” Akabar replied. His eyes were looking a little glazed, and Olive could see that he wasn’t really concentrating on her words.
“Akash, what is wrong with you? You aren’t listening to me at all.”
Akabar shook his head and spat. “Some mage I turn out to be. I can’t get us the information we need, I don’t even notice that a member of our party can heal, and I’m at my fighting best when I’m controlled by an insane abomination. You shouldn’t have bothered to rescue me.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Olive chided. “You have your health, your mind, and your money—all the blessings, as we halflings say. You can’t blame yourself for what happened. It’s not as though you were trained to fight old gods.”
“Or anything else, for that matter,” Akabar added. “You and Alias are right, I’m a greengrocer. This has been my first real adventure not tied to the logical, reasonable flow of trade and money and safe, secure routes, and I’ve botched everything. I thought that with all my learning I could take on the world, but I’ve failed. I’m useless.”
“Look, Akash, adventuring isn’t as logical as columns in an account ledger. You can’t learn about it from books. You have to experience it to know what to do. You’ll get the hang of it eventually. And you haven’t been completely useless. If it weren’t for you, Dimswart would not have known to send Alias after me, and she never would have met Mist, and then we’d be fighting this Moander alone.”
“That is a rather tenuous recommendation of my talents.”
“Well, then, consider the fact that you saved us all from being poisoned.”
“What?”
Olive grinned slyly. “If I had to do the cooking, we all would have died from indigestion.”
Akabar did not respond to her little joke, so the halfling rambled on. “Look, what I’m trying to say is that eventually you’ll learn to think like an adventurer. Then you’ll really be a force to be reckoned with. Who knows, you may even teach us a thing or two. Reason may make all the difference between our success or failure, and nobody else in this group has as much of it as you do.”
Akabar remained silent, and Olive worried that the mead might have been too strong for him. “Anyway,” she said with a shrug, “I sort of like having you around. I sort of like you.”
A tiny smile played across the Turmishman’s lips. He sighed deeply. “I sort of like you, too,” he replied. “Do you have any more of that mead?”
While Akabar took a long pull on the flask, Olive asked, “So, what about him?” Ruskettle jerked her head in the direction of the sleeping reptiles. “Dragonbait the Cereal.”
“Saurial,” Akabar corrected, yet understanding how Olive felt. Guilty, no doubt. It was one thing for Alias and himself to recognize the halfling’s pettiness, selfishness, and thievery, and overlook it in the interest of party unity. But it was quite another thing to have one’s actions silently watched and, no doubt, judged by the likes of a paladin. Akabar himself wondered with acute embarrassment what the lizard thought of him and his constant failures.
“Saurial,” Olive said, finally getting the pronunciation correct. “He’s kept a couple of major secrets from us. He could be hiding a lot more.”
Akabar caught the blue glimmer of the runes shining on Dragonbait’s chest. Unbeknownst to Olive, she was late trying to raise Akabar’s suspicions against the lizard. Since yesterday, the mage reflected, I’ve battled him twice, lost both times, and then discovered that he was trying to save my miserable hide. Something he’s rather in the habit of doing. And though the halfling was right when she pointed out it was highly unusual for a paladin to travel with an adventuring group with their … character, the Turmishman found it impossible to believe that the saurial meant them any harm.
“After he helps us get Alias back,” Olive said, ignoring Akabar’s pensive look, “I think we should find a way to ditch him. Alias won’t like it, but it’ll be for her own good.”
“No,” the mage said. “If he keeps his own counsel, that’s his business. If my account balances, then so does his.”
In Olive’s eyes Akabar saw the look of a merchant who had decided it would be in her best interest not to drive too hard a bargain. She shrugged. “You’re probably right. There’s nothing to worry about. You rest. We’ll be moving out in the morning, and this time we’ll squash Its Ooziness. I’ll be tending the fire, not that difficult a job considering all the deadfall Big Mo left in its wake. Been a dry summer, too—wood catches easy.”
“Ruskettle?”
“Yes, Akash?”
“Would you please hand me my books? I think I’d better start studying. Like you said, we’ll need all the power we can get. Even mine.”
Alias woke in a dim chamber deep beneath Moander’s surface. All around her, patches of slime gave off a sickly green light. The glow from her sigils was brighter and purer, and to study her prison she held her arm out as a lantern, for she was no longer bound by mossy shackles.
The chamber was round and lined mostly with moss, except where moisture ran down its surface, nourishing the patches of luminous slime. She dug into the side of the wall with her fingers, but beneath the spongy moss she discovered an impenetrable mesh of thick roots and tree branches. She tried pulling the moss away in other spots, but found no weaknesses in her cage. The air was close and heavy with the smell of rotting leaves but quite breathable.
She still wore her armor and her leather breeches, but her cloak had begun to disintegrate so badly that it could no longer be tied on. She had lost her sword somewhere in Yulash, and her shield and daggers were missing, probably stripped from her person by the tendrils while she slept—knocked unconscious by Moander’s sponge mosses.
Trapped like an alchemist’s mouse, she thought. Then she decided, no, more like a broken machine crated in a cushioned box for the journey back home. She remembered all that Moander had threatened would be done to her in Westgate. Her memories would be wiped out again, her spirit smothered somehow. She shuddered.
Then she snarled in defiance. But what could one do to a god? Spit in its eye before it crushed you?
The wall across from her rippled. Chunks of moss dropped away, and a huge hand, palm upward, thrust into the chamber. It was woven, like wicker, of tree limbs. In the center of the palm a ball of light glowed with a swirl of gray and white. Alias thought it was some sort of eye, and she wanted to back away and hide from it.
Then the ball spoke. Two voices blended, one the highest alto, the other the lowest bass, with no middle range between the two. The essence of Moander’s voice.
Alias remembered the swirling gray and white that had covered Akabar’s eyes when the god had possessed him. She wondered if this ball was the true face of Moander.
“Hungry?” asked the voice. “Eat.”
The wall moss peeled in another spot, and a pair of tendrils thrust in her shield covered with half a dozen high-summer apples and a dead, uncooked yearling boar.
Taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, Alias walked over to the shield. The hole it had been pushed through was already rewoven shut. Her stomach rumbled, but she waited until the tendrils retracted through the wall before she reached for the apples. She backed away from the boar. It looked like it had been throttled to death.