The Lady was crowned by a pair of horns with flared bony plates extending back from them, giving the joint of head and neck an armored appearance. She had a long, broad, reptilian snout that nonetheless gleamed as though polished, and her teeth were a white fence of swords. Though reclining in rest the Lady’s very stillness spoke of power, as though at any moment she chose she could languidly reach out a limb and throw down the stone walls around her. A flick of her tail could slice the great spade-shaped tip through the solid black bedrock beneath the city of Souterm, which the locals still called by her name.
Yet for all that, her gleaming eyes were gentle. Though Nesha-tari willingly served the Great Blue Dragon, his attention was always piercing. No one came under Akroya’s blue gaze without falling to their knees. But in the eyes of the Great Bronze Dragon there was a warmth. Almost, strangely, an inexplicable feeling of home. A home of a kind different than any Nesha-tari had ever known.
“Great Mistress,” Edgewise said, releasing Nesha-tari’s hand. “May I present my cousin, a servant of your Blue cousin in the east.”
The Lady’s voice came to Nesha-tari then. The Dragon’s mouth did not move but her words filled the room.
“Nesha-tari Hrilamae,” the voice said, conveying a sense of faint distaste that was something other than audible. “One such as you should not be.”
Though it was not said nor otherwise conveyed with malice, Nesha-tari’s heart lurched and she choked out a sob. She thought she might fall to her knees after all, but the Lady’s bodiless voice continued.
“Stand up straight, girl. I do not condemn you for what you are.” The great serpentine neck eased back and the Lady’s head lowered to regard Nesha-tari on a more even level. The great unblinking bronze eyes looked into hers with a depth of expression impenetrable to a human, or half-human, mind.
“You are protected by my Pact-given word, child,” the Lady’s voice said from everywhere. “Even were you not, I do not choose to kill indiscriminately. No matter your dark origins, you are what you do. Not just what you are born.”
Nesha-tari stammered. “I…I have not always done well.”
“No,” the Lady agreed, sending a wave of disapproval rolling over Nesha-tari that brought her close to nausea. The bronze eyes before her seemed to darken momentarily.
“You have the blood of innocents on you, it is true. But many of us do.”
Tears she was scarcely aware of coursed down Nesha-tari’s face, her real face. She felt an urge she never had before Akroya, whose presence demanded only supplication. But the Blue was a very different sort of dragon than was the Bronze, of the Sky and not of the Earth. Before the Lady, Nesha-tari wanted only to ask forgiveness for her failings, and perhaps for her very existence.
“But it is not mine to give,” the massive head before her said before anything was asked. “Now, you will speak to me of why my Blue cousin in the east has sent you into my domains, for I know you have not come for your own reasons.”
Nesha-tari had been instructed on precisely what to say to the Lady, beginning with a long, memorized litany of formal salutations from the King of the Sky. None of it was in her head at the moment and Nesha-tari spoke only truth, and that simply.
“Lady, I am bound for Vod’Adia, and must pass through your domain to reach it. Once there, I must kill a man who seeks to enter the Sable City.”
*
Zeb and the Westerners were awakened sometime before dawn by soft knocking on the door of the long bunkroom they had taken in the dockside inn. Zeb answered the door in his skivvies and was told by the night deskman that Nesha-tari Hrilamae was waiting for them outside. The fellow looked disappointed that Zeb did not tip him, but of course the Minauan did not have a coin to his name. Zeb perhaps could have used that fact to justify, at least to himself, what he was still doing here. Lunch, then dinner, then a good night’s sleep had been his self-justification yesterday. Now with Nesha-tari again close by, Zeb forgot for the moment that he needed a reason to stay.
Amatesu helped Shikashe back into the myriad straps and ties of his complicated armor, a process that took even longer than it had to remove the whole works the night before. The three then made their way downstairs through the dark inn and found their hooded employer waiting out on the street where a drizzle rippled puddles on the cobblestones. Nesha-tari had a goblin with her and the little cherry-colored creature had a wheelbarrow, but it left as soon as the others appeared. Their baggage went in the barrow under an oiled tarp, and Zeb did not have to be told he would be the one to wheel it.
Nesha-tari said nothing but led her band north up the waterfront, walking ahead with Shikashe just behind her, Amatesu staying close to Zeb and the barrow. Zeb watched Nesha-tari walk, and his thoughts were simple.
He noticed their surroundings only dully as the group passed by tall granaries, then a sheltered cove of the harbor where Codian warships sat at anchor. They turned east at the head of the cove, passing in front of a blocky, ancient fortress of black stone, renovated and flying the Codian flag from four towers. Beyond the fort a grand boulevard ran north, so wide that a series of miniature parks with low stone walls filled the center lanes, trimmed grass and shady trees from which birds were just beginning to sing. Nesha-tari turned up the boulevard and walked up the right-hand side of the street in front of gaily painted row houses with flower boxes under tall windows, plated with high-quality glass.
The rain picked up, dripping onto Zeb’s nose from the edge of his helmet. Amatesu lifted the cloth covering in the barrow and put her patched, high-collared jacket beneath it with the bags, leaving her in a long shirt of coarse cloth. The shukenja then managed to distract Zeb from ogling Nesha-tari as she turned her face up to the rain, which arched her back a bit, and ran her hands back through her long, black hair, ringing out strands and actually cleaning it for the first time in what must have been ages. She did so while stepping nimbly among the cobbles more smoothly than Zeb was managing with the wood-wheeled barrow.
“Amatesu, may I ask you something?”
Amatesu glanced at Zeb, and the slight, unconscious smile that had begun to play at the corners of her mouth disappeared, returning her face to its typical look of solemnity. She wrung her hair a final time and let it plaster loosely against her face and over one shoulder.
“A unseemly concern with one’s appearance is…unseemly. I bathe to be clean, and to be healthy, but not so that I might be…”
“Pretty?” Zeb asked. Amatesu kept looking forward.
“As you wish,” Zeb said. “But whether you are pretty or not is not really up to you. I mean, I suppose we could get you a long wax nose. Maybe with some warts.”
Amatesu quickened her pace to move a few steps ahead of the barrow, but she did not go so fast that Zeb failed to catch the brief return of her smile.
The blocks the group passed as they moved up the grand boulevard alternated between quite nice houses and prosperous cafes and stores. Many structures had flat roofs with long stone gutters expelling spouts of water over the flagstone sidewalks and out onto the brick street, splashing quite a bit. The group moved more to the center of the road, passing along the tiny parks with their knee-high walls. Zeb saw that several had cisterns, open basins of clean water, and all had wooden benches under the old trees.