On what it is to be cold
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:06 am
It had been a long, cold winter; not as bitter as she was used to, but somehow all the more pervasive for it, the damp seeping into your very bones. Perhaps it was the surroundings; the nest of grimy stone walls still pitted with the cankered ruins from when the Thayans had attacked Selgaunt, and still inhabited by the same vermin who had always been here. The wicked and the selfish and the greedy and the vile she could manage, because these were predictable in their wants: money, standing, hold over their rivals, prestige, and above all they were predictable because they all cared for the same thing – themselves. No, it was the damaged she feared, those too far submerged in their own or others’ cruelty to care even for themselves – and they were always hard to be sure of. None of the crew surrounding the Lord of Snakes, or whatever title they had bestowed on him, had worried her overly – not the fat, greasy, stinking lecher Whyo, not the girl who manned his desk, perhaps not even the merchant himself. None bar the plain-looking girl with blue eyes, scars on her face, and tattoos which had a disturbingly Eastern feel. What that innkeep Jelkins had meant by “she has a thing for wolves” she wasn’t sure, but the corruption of wolves and demons and otvrasheniye – abominations, the undead – in Sembia meant it added to her unease. Far more danger there, certainly, than in hearing the tales of the murder, how one Daemos, hated by half that nest of vipers, had gone upstairs with a girl and had then been found shriveled and deprived of his eyes the next morning. It had pricked a memory in her of the yellow-skinned, black-bearded man and the blind woman who had been looking for that very place some days before – but she was in no mood to look to solve a crime so fitting that it could scarcely seem a crime to her, and certainly in no mood to stop the bout of recriminations and counter-violences which would follow. This is how vipers live.
It was not the surroundings. She had visited the place before, found fresh corpses over in the street at which the guards stepped by without breaking stride, and, when some of those who wallowed in Selgaunt’s despair had seen in this short, slight figure nothing but a few easy coins and had drawn blades, she had turned them into writhing pillars of flame and added a few more corpses to the open grave of the city’s streets. It had not felt like this. Perhaps it was simply that in the mountains, at altitude – and the High Country is so called for a reason – there is always the moment when you leave the snows, reach shelter, and light a fire to melt the icy shards the wind has slashed at you with, and the relief is worth all the cold before. It was not so in Selgaunt, where there was nowhere to escape to, and no way to leave the clinging damp of rain and misery behind. Not even when you had found the one you call sister in this place, the only family you have in the West, and perhaps the only family left anywhere. Rhuiri, her brother, had never quite had the sense she had, and though he was strong of arm and almost as quick-witted as she, he had not appeared at their appointed meeting place, though she had waited a whole summer for him in Cormyr all those years ago. She hoped he had simply been caught up in something, had perhaps now made his way back to Rashemen and been accepted there, really she did: and yet she had not used any of the methods her studies had revealed which might have allowed her to trace him. Why inflict on him what she had inflicted on so many others already? Why mark him with her love? She knew of it, and if he were alive he would know of it too; why seek him out simply to show it, when that would risk what he might have achieved? There were enough marked already.
And here was one, standing with eyes so wide you could almost see the levels to which the tide of misery had risen in her, her grace and beauty marred by ragged wounds and more ragged clothes. The last time they had seen one another had been here again, just before a ball, and the contrast could not have been more acute. She felt a surge of rage, blood-rage which her birth gave her no right to, when the extent of her sister’s loss became apparent: mind, route home, escape, brother. The tale had taken some time to piece together, and there were still great rents in it, raw with their absences: but her friend’s brother, the good one, had come to find her, had come even here, taking passage with a friend across the Sea of Fallen Stars – and, somehow, had found his sister – so they had done what any sane person in Selgaunt should: they had thanked Tymora for smiling on them, and sailed for home.
Their luck did not hold. Once the dragon had rent the ship to sodden driftwood, torn Aleksi’s friend in pieces with a single snap of its jaws, and swatted him overboard like flotsam…it let her live, to carry a message from one snake to another, and so she had appeared in the square looking as one would expect had the story been known. This one had not known it then, and did not know it all now, but threw herself into the investigations as best she could, helped plot the expedition so that it gave them the best chance of both secrecy and success, and had invested the last of the stones she kept against disaster on a scroll in a bone case carved with Thayan runes and one of the spoils from the defeat of the invaders of Selgaunt. She hadn’t had even enough success on the expedition to need its magic, however, and the expense irked her, even as the strange circularity of the object fascinated her. Objects returned to those they wished to, though war and bloodshed and failure kept them apart, perhaps. But the closest they got to Aleksi was the scene of an island with short figures dancing by a small dock, and there was no guarantee he was even there. And then the tides of despair rose higher still in her sister, and she could not prevent her following the Lord of Snakes and leaving Aleksi, or Aleksi’s corpse unrescued or merely unrecovered. She had marked even her friend, her sister, even her sister’s brother who she had never met, and she had left Selgaunt seeking old haunts, places she hadn’t been in more than a decade, and seeking to lay old ghosts to rest.
The sun elf Sumlith Aselama, or “Duskvater”, or Snenka, or simply Moonleaf, for one, with whom she had travelled for the best part of a year and then, abruptly, never seen again, not even when she followed whispers of his name to the Vast Swamp and even back to the High Forest from where he hailed. Or the ambassador Babras, whose death she had heard of having left Daggerdale to the drow their patonka lord insisted on welcoming into Dagger Falls, and whose ghost surely watched over Keriwen even now. Or those less prominent in the history of the place – the quiet, dirty elf girl Juney Jey who had some magic about her as frightened as she surely was, or the man in black who had sat by the treestump outside the gates for so long watching and waiting, and then had snatched an artifact from under the noses of all the heroes who sought it. She could not help but applaud such brazenness – but he too, understandably, had vanished without trace. Or the crazed half-orc witch with bird-skulls in her hair, Pakgu, or the redhaired hin Anton Rintari, deranged by his return from death and babbling from under his ponytail of an amulet which could control the mythals. Or even the lionheart, Arakiel Killthorne, who she had not seen since his and Arien’s child had been the infant Babras had saved, and who had died for what he believed in, fighting for the liberty of his home. It was a concept she doubted she could ever quite feel, although its meaning was clear enough. Him she had liked – taciturn, dour, but efficient – and in one of these only like the one he had married. The living, too, she planned to see – the twins she had heard of but never met, the old companions who were still there and still ensconced in their mountain and forest homes.
And at first it seemed it might be so – but then it was not the old ghosts that she found, but new ones that she raised. Gorm Grimbeard, who had survived an orc raid in the Thunderpeaks which swept the corpses of his brothers below the icy waters; his rediscovery of a home a dozen years before with the Ironstars after all he had lost – it was almost the redemption of the dull ache of her own years of homelessness. Dain Blackrock, too, curious and funny in a way the stout folk rarely were, brave and loyal in equal measure, and the only one she had trusted when she had believed Anton’s tales of the amulet; these two, and all their kin were dead, and Dagger Springs overrun by orcs. Their dozen years of security, of leaving a place for those who followed them to stand on, had been destroyed within a few tendays of her return: she should not have come back. She should not have threatened the homes these people had, or had earned for themselves; she should not have marked them. How to explain the importance these roots had for her, the only ones she had? For that, we would have to return to the beginning, and for that – as shadows lengthened on the desert she had crossed alone years earlier and over the trees of the Border Forest – for that there was no time.
It was not the surroundings. She had visited the place before, found fresh corpses over in the street at which the guards stepped by without breaking stride, and, when some of those who wallowed in Selgaunt’s despair had seen in this short, slight figure nothing but a few easy coins and had drawn blades, she had turned them into writhing pillars of flame and added a few more corpses to the open grave of the city’s streets. It had not felt like this. Perhaps it was simply that in the mountains, at altitude – and the High Country is so called for a reason – there is always the moment when you leave the snows, reach shelter, and light a fire to melt the icy shards the wind has slashed at you with, and the relief is worth all the cold before. It was not so in Selgaunt, where there was nowhere to escape to, and no way to leave the clinging damp of rain and misery behind. Not even when you had found the one you call sister in this place, the only family you have in the West, and perhaps the only family left anywhere. Rhuiri, her brother, had never quite had the sense she had, and though he was strong of arm and almost as quick-witted as she, he had not appeared at their appointed meeting place, though she had waited a whole summer for him in Cormyr all those years ago. She hoped he had simply been caught up in something, had perhaps now made his way back to Rashemen and been accepted there, really she did: and yet she had not used any of the methods her studies had revealed which might have allowed her to trace him. Why inflict on him what she had inflicted on so many others already? Why mark him with her love? She knew of it, and if he were alive he would know of it too; why seek him out simply to show it, when that would risk what he might have achieved? There were enough marked already.
And here was one, standing with eyes so wide you could almost see the levels to which the tide of misery had risen in her, her grace and beauty marred by ragged wounds and more ragged clothes. The last time they had seen one another had been here again, just before a ball, and the contrast could not have been more acute. She felt a surge of rage, blood-rage which her birth gave her no right to, when the extent of her sister’s loss became apparent: mind, route home, escape, brother. The tale had taken some time to piece together, and there were still great rents in it, raw with their absences: but her friend’s brother, the good one, had come to find her, had come even here, taking passage with a friend across the Sea of Fallen Stars – and, somehow, had found his sister – so they had done what any sane person in Selgaunt should: they had thanked Tymora for smiling on them, and sailed for home.
Their luck did not hold. Once the dragon had rent the ship to sodden driftwood, torn Aleksi’s friend in pieces with a single snap of its jaws, and swatted him overboard like flotsam…it let her live, to carry a message from one snake to another, and so she had appeared in the square looking as one would expect had the story been known. This one had not known it then, and did not know it all now, but threw herself into the investigations as best she could, helped plot the expedition so that it gave them the best chance of both secrecy and success, and had invested the last of the stones she kept against disaster on a scroll in a bone case carved with Thayan runes and one of the spoils from the defeat of the invaders of Selgaunt. She hadn’t had even enough success on the expedition to need its magic, however, and the expense irked her, even as the strange circularity of the object fascinated her. Objects returned to those they wished to, though war and bloodshed and failure kept them apart, perhaps. But the closest they got to Aleksi was the scene of an island with short figures dancing by a small dock, and there was no guarantee he was even there. And then the tides of despair rose higher still in her sister, and she could not prevent her following the Lord of Snakes and leaving Aleksi, or Aleksi’s corpse unrescued or merely unrecovered. She had marked even her friend, her sister, even her sister’s brother who she had never met, and she had left Selgaunt seeking old haunts, places she hadn’t been in more than a decade, and seeking to lay old ghosts to rest.
The sun elf Sumlith Aselama, or “Duskvater”, or Snenka, or simply Moonleaf, for one, with whom she had travelled for the best part of a year and then, abruptly, never seen again, not even when she followed whispers of his name to the Vast Swamp and even back to the High Forest from where he hailed. Or the ambassador Babras, whose death she had heard of having left Daggerdale to the drow their patonka lord insisted on welcoming into Dagger Falls, and whose ghost surely watched over Keriwen even now. Or those less prominent in the history of the place – the quiet, dirty elf girl Juney Jey who had some magic about her as frightened as she surely was, or the man in black who had sat by the treestump outside the gates for so long watching and waiting, and then had snatched an artifact from under the noses of all the heroes who sought it. She could not help but applaud such brazenness – but he too, understandably, had vanished without trace. Or the crazed half-orc witch with bird-skulls in her hair, Pakgu, or the redhaired hin Anton Rintari, deranged by his return from death and babbling from under his ponytail of an amulet which could control the mythals. Or even the lionheart, Arakiel Killthorne, who she had not seen since his and Arien’s child had been the infant Babras had saved, and who had died for what he believed in, fighting for the liberty of his home. It was a concept she doubted she could ever quite feel, although its meaning was clear enough. Him she had liked – taciturn, dour, but efficient – and in one of these only like the one he had married. The living, too, she planned to see – the twins she had heard of but never met, the old companions who were still there and still ensconced in their mountain and forest homes.
And at first it seemed it might be so – but then it was not the old ghosts that she found, but new ones that she raised. Gorm Grimbeard, who had survived an orc raid in the Thunderpeaks which swept the corpses of his brothers below the icy waters; his rediscovery of a home a dozen years before with the Ironstars after all he had lost – it was almost the redemption of the dull ache of her own years of homelessness. Dain Blackrock, too, curious and funny in a way the stout folk rarely were, brave and loyal in equal measure, and the only one she had trusted when she had believed Anton’s tales of the amulet; these two, and all their kin were dead, and Dagger Springs overrun by orcs. Their dozen years of security, of leaving a place for those who followed them to stand on, had been destroyed within a few tendays of her return: she should not have come back. She should not have threatened the homes these people had, or had earned for themselves; she should not have marked them. How to explain the importance these roots had for her, the only ones she had? For that, we would have to return to the beginning, and for that – as shadows lengthened on the desert she had crossed alone years earlier and over the trees of the Border Forest – for that there was no time.
