Her cheer faded some since she had no one with whom she could share her joke. Even if Moander had lied and her friends were still alive, they were still up north, hundreds of miles away—she would not see them for a long time, if ever again. Already she missed them and felt lonely.
She was rounding the merchant yards of the Guldar family, when a familiar but very hoarse voice bellowed her name. She turned and peered down the road behind her. Three mud-spattered, bedraggled figures were waving their arms to attract her attention.
“Akabar!” she shouted. The weariness dropped from her and she ran to them, hugging first the mage, then the lizard, and finally even the halfling. Olive bridled some, drawing back, more concerned with brushing hardened mud from the front of her outfit.
“You’re alive!” Alias blurted, beaming at them. Olive looked as though she’d been swimming in a swamp, Akabar was dressed in a ragged kilt, and Dragonbait leaned heavily on his sword.
“You noticed,” Olive grumbled. “We just chased you from one side of the Realms to the other. Now we can’t even get in the gates. Damned forces of law and order.”
“It’s all right,” Alias assured her. “I know a place outside the city walls. They …” She almost said, “They know me there,” but she realized that they, like Jhaele of Shadowdale, would remember nothing about her. “They have good food,” she finished.
“I don’t care about eating,” Olive retorted. “I just want to get clean. I feel like I’ve been swimming in a sewer.”
Alias looked up at Akabar, wanting to apologize again for all the horror he’d gone through because of her.
As if reading her thoughts, the mage said, “We can talk when we get where we’re going.”
The swordswoman nodded. “Here, Dragonbait, give your sword a break and lean on me for a while,” she insisted, slipping herself beneath one of the lizard’s scaly arms and taking his sword in her other hand.
Akabar expected the proud saurial to refuse her help, but he accepted Alias’s close proximity and fussing like a cheerful child. Is it only the identical markings that bond them together? Akabar wondered. Or something more?
Alias did not recognize the innkeeper from her previously “remembered” stays at The Rising Raven. The inn was packed with traders and adventurers. Even if it hadn’t been so crowded, the innkeeper needed only one look at the ragtag crew before he began shaking his head vigorously, denying the existence of any vacancies.
Olive was the one who came to the rescue. Following the man across the tavern room, she whispered something to him that Alias and Akabar could not catch. Then she slipped him a coin. The innkeeper’s hospitality brightened. He led them from the inn, past the stable, to a warehouse with a small apartment within. The quarters were cramped but clean, and the innkeeper promised to send them hot water as soon as possible. Then he left them.
Dragonbait began to lay a fire in the stove, and Olive sat down in a corner, resting her head on her knees, exhausted. Alias examined Akabar’s shoulder and grimaced.
“You’ve dislocated it, all right. How’d you do it?”
“Ran into an old friend,” Akabar joked and tried to shrug. He winced at the pain.
“I wonder what Olive said to the innkeep when she bribed him,” Alias said softly.
“I wonder,” Akabar replied in an equally soft voice, “where she got the platinum coin she bribed him with.”
Olive moved over to the whisperers. “You want to wear that to bed tonight?” she asked Alias, nodding to the shackle about her arm. “Or do you want me to pick the lock?”
While Olive was working on the iron bracelet, two foot-boys arrived at their doorstep, one bearing a large copper tub, the other an ornate screen. They set these down, scurried out, and then returned with a pair of buckets and an oversized kettle. After setting the kettle on the stove and the buckets on the floor, they pointed out the location of the well, should the adventurers desire more water.
Olive declared the honor of the first bath and began setting up the screen to block the tub from view. “I’m sure I won’t be able to reach into that well,” she said to Alias. “Would you mind?”
“As soon as you get me out of this chain,” the swordswoman insisted.
“Oh, bother,” the halfling grumbled. She banged the manacle once with the end of the chain, and it sprang open.
“You have a really light touch,” Alias teased. She grabbed the two pails and set out for the water. Akabar followed.
“You won’t be much good for hauling with a bad arm,” the swordswoman said as she poured water from the well bucket into one of the pails she had brought.
“I am good for other things,” said Akabar, unsmiling. “I am a spell-caster as well as a merchant.”
“We’ll have to get a healer for that shoulder,” she continued, not understanding that she’d offended him.
“We’ve developed our own methods in your absence,” Akabar added, leaving Alias completely confused. His coolness hurt her. She realized that even though she’d come to terms with not being human, accepted it, and was now prepared to go on living, Akabar might not feel the same way about her. And if her friends didn’t accept her, who would?
An awkward silence fell between them.
Finally, Akabar overcame his pride—his usefulness was no longer at issue, and they had more important things to discuss. “Alias, what Moander said, what it made me tell you, what it made me do, the way it used me—I think I understand how you must feel.”
Alias finished filling the second pail and set it down beside the first. She shook her auburn hair and stared at the ground. “It told me you were all dead,” she said, swallowing back the memory of the grief and horror that had accompanied that moment. “It was lying then. It could have been lying before.”
Akabar was silent.
“What is it?” Alias asked. “Tell me,” she demanded.
“I was in its mind, as well,” the mage explained. “As far as it knew, it was telling the truth.”
“I see.” She looked down into the well. Her reflection in the water mocked her. Golem, homonculus, made-thing, that’s how the mage saw her now.
“It changes nothing, though,” the Turmishman said. “You are my friend, and I mean to help you, no matter how many gates we must pass through.”
Alias stretched out a hand and laid it on his good right shoulder, prepared to tell him he must leave, that she would not have him facing any more danger on her behalf, for the very same reason: he was her friend.
Before she could open her mouth, though, Olive, wrapped in a towel, called out from the doorway, “Are you getting water or what out there? I’m getting chilled, and the kettle’s already boiling.”
Alias grabbed both bucket straps and duck-walked the full buckets back to their apartment. Akabar followed, cradling his bad arm and quietly cursing the small, dirty halfling. She had been a nuisance since the day they’d met.
Once the bard was settled in her bath, soaking, and half-humming, half-singing some obscene ditty to herself in the tub, Alias turned her attention to Dragonbait’s wounds.
The sigil of Moander had faded from the lizard’s tattoo just as it had from hers. Her glee at discovering this was soon squelched by the sight of his wounds. There was a bloody half-healed gash on his hip, and he flinched when she touched an ugly greenish bruise on his side, indicating a possible broken rib. She offered him some warm compresses for the pain.
“We’re going to have to get a cleric,” she said again. “I wonder if one will be available after the dragon’s crash. Every time I turn around, Mist’s victims seem to be sucking up all the available healers. This’ll be the last time, though. How did you ever come to team up with her?”