"I am most grateful, Zulkir," Naglatha addressed him respectfully, but Tazi could see it irked the wizard to do so.
"I am sorry for the confusion," the image continued, "but I did not expect any of my guests to be robbing my orchards." A slow smile played about his lips, and Tazi realized that this could only be Szass Tam, the man Naglatha wanted to destroy. She tried to study him as best she could.
"Well, don't you mean Pyras Autorian's orchards? These are still his lands, aren't they?" Naglatha asked, and Tazi could see the calculating gleam in her eyes.
"Yes, yes," the necromancer dismissed, "his orchards."
"Well," Naglatha told the image, "no harm's done."
"No," Szass Tam agreed. "This matter is best forgotten. Considering how close you are, I will make sure that quarters for you, your servants, and your pet are waiting." Without warning, the image faded away.
Tazi kept a cautious eye on the zombies, but they lined up and filed^away in the direction from which they had appeared. She tossed the staff to the ground and walked over to Naglatha. The wizard had her eyes closed and her brow furrowed. Tazi stood before her and waited until she opened them again.
"Well?" she asked Naglatha.
"I was making sure that no one was watching us any longer," she explained. "He is no longer scrying us."
"Szass Tarn?" Tazi asked
"Yes," Naglatha nodded. "You handled yourself well," she acknowledged to Tazi.
"Not a scratch," Tazi replied.
"That incident was no accident, though," Naglatha deduced. "I wonder how many others attending the council might meet with misfortune before this is all said and done."
"Right this way," the elegantly dressed servant said as she led Naglatha down an elaborately carved corridor toward the other visiting dignitaries.
"Please make sure that my servants are treated accordingly for my rank," she said as she gave Tazi a parting wink. She and Justikar stood in the hall and waited for one of the other servants to assist them. It only took a few moments for a young girl, not nearly as richly decorated as the first, to appear. She smiled easily enough, and Tazi thought she was new and her probationary job was to assist the servants of the lich's guests. Not many of them were likely to complain if their bedcovers weren't turned down, so it was not a critical assignment.
"This way," she directed them in a high voice.
She took Tazi and Justikar down a narrow but well-lit passageway. There were several doorways open along the corridor, and Tazi could see humans that must have been the trusted servants of the important and wealthy guests of Szass Tam. They looked a bit confused in the large, well-furnished rooms with nothing to do. Tazi saw one young man who simply sat on a huge bed and stared straight at the wall in front of him, totally lost. She shook her head sadly and kept walking.
At the end of the passageway, the servant pointed to a room on the left. "I hope this will be satisfactory. We did not have any other rooms left, so I am afraid you and your companion must stay together." And the girl lowered her gaze. Tazi suspected she was almost embarrassed that the two of them, being of opposite sex, had to share quarters.
"It will be fine," she told the girl.
"You are welcome to maneuver through this corridor and you have access to a few of the work spaces along the next set of passageways. But that is all," she warned them.
"And how will we know when we've reached our boundaries?" Tazi asked.
The plump girl lost her timid smile. "Oh," she said gravely, "you'll know." She bowed and left them alone.
Tazi stepped into the room and was surprised at how well it was furnished, considering it was being used to house slaves. She figured that these wizards went out of their way to outshine each other, so some of the opulence had to spill over to the servants' quarters. While the girl who had led them to their room had been dressed well enough, Tazi wagered she didn't have a chamber nearly as fine as this one. Tazi padded over to one of the large beds and sank down gratefully with a huge sigh. She looked tiredly at the dwarf and could see he was furious.
"What?" she asked him, but her heart was not in it, and she was in no mood for a verbal fencing match.
"Is this worth it?" he demanded. "Is your crimson gold worth all the misery that this adventure of yours is going to cause? Will you be satisfied only when everything crumbles around you?"
Tazi jumped to her feet and prowled around the stylish furnishings. She was tired and sore and didn't want to fight with the duergar on top of everything else. But, most importantly, his words had struck a nerve. What had started out as a simple enough undertaking had rapidly turned on her, and Tazi didn't know for sure what she had mired herself into and what the final cost was going to be. She eventually returned to the bed and sat on the end of it. She rested her elbows on her knees and laced her fingers together.
"I don't know," she answered quietly. "Maybe you can tell me."
The dwarf appeared surprised by her response, perhaps because he expected more bravado from her. He searched the room until he found a stool the right size, and he pulled it up to her, but not too close.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked again, but in a softer tone, as he sat down.
Tazi looked at the dwarf and pursed her lips for a few moments, weighing things in her mind. Finally, she started, "When I was very young, I took it upon myself to learn how to steal. Why I did it is none of your business, nor do I think you'd even care," she said. "But I did. And the easiest place for me to start was in my home."
Tazi got up and moved around again. "I lived in a big house," she explained, "with lots of rooms. There were my parents and my two brothers and more than a handful of servants, so there was a lot for me to choose from.
"Mostly, I would take little trinkets from my mother or brothers. For a while, no one suspected me. After all," she paused to glance at the dwarf with a sideways grin, "I was just a little girl. And, as we always had some help coming or going, the servants took the brunt of the blame."
"You mean your slaves took the blame," Justikar corrected her.
Tazi winced at the implied accusation. "No," she said vehemently, "we did not own those people. They could come and go as they wanted. My family simply hired them to perform household duties for us. They always had a choice."
"Were there other jobs some of them could've taken instead of cleaning up after you? Did they have a vast skill set that allowed them to pick and choose their lot in life? Do you think they all had a real choice, Thazi-enne Uskevren?" Jo'stikar asked her.
His accusations did not sit easily with Tazi. "Did you want to hear my reasons or not?" she snapped, irritated that there wasn't a single window to look out of and avoid the duergar's shrewd gaze.
"Go on," he told her.
"The servants took the blame," she continued, "but I always managed to get the various baubles back to their rightful owners eventually. All right," Tazi admitted as she sat on the bed again, "returning the things took a bit of convincing by a trusted family…friend," she tripped over the word. "He taught me more than a few lessons.
"The last thing I planned to steal belonged to my father. I had pilfered something from everyone else and considered an item of my father's to be my crowning glory. He is-was," she corrected herself self-consciously and lowered her eyes, "a very powerful man. Sometimes I used to think he was cold to me, but now, I suspect he was simply afraid to show me how he felt about me.
"He was a great collector of the beautiful and the unusual. Most of the things he treasured were fairly large pieces of artwork, and I was a bit daunted by how I might hide a painting or some such," she told the dwarf. "I snuck into his study and started to look around and see what I might be able to lift. As I prowled around the room I had only been invited into on a few occasions at that point, something glowed softly from his desk and caught my attention." Tazi became somewhat lost in her memory and did not notice how closely the duergar watched her face.