Chicks - Chicks 'N Chained Males Part 2

"Look," Kordel said desperately, "why don't you give me a hundred for the statue and quietly drop it down a deep hole? I'll pay you back later."

The fence's eyes went flat. "If it comes to that, why don't you just leave town to avoid paying up?"

"I gave my word!" Kordel flared back. "There are principles involved here."

The fence nodded. "Exactly. If anyone linked the sale to me, my career would be over. Sorry, Kordel.

The statue is valuable only to the cult. You've lost."

"You're wrong!" Kordel angrily s.n.a.t.c.hed up the statue, stuffed it into a large pouch-it made an interesting bulge-and strode for the door. "There must besomeone in this city who'll buy it."

"Not a chance," the fence called after her. "No one but the cult will touch the thing." Kordel halted. She stared for a long time at the door in front of her. "You think so?" she said without turning around. "No one but the cult?"

"No one," he replied firmly.

Kordel grinned over her shoulder at him. "I think you're right." And she vanished into the street.

"What," the fence asked, "am I supposed to do with that?"

"Buy it," Kordel said gaily. "And stop sneering. It's an act designed to bring my selling price down."

The fence sighed and picked up the object, a large emerald this time. "What happened with your bet?"

Kordel grinned. "You're fondling the prize."

The fence looked up in surprise. "I'm holding Bernard's family jewel?"

"It's not a family jewel any longer," Kordel said.

"Obviously," the fence agreed, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a jeweler's lens into one eye and peering at the emerald. "This gem is flawed. How did you win? I would have sworn no one would buy that statue."

"Emeralds are always flawed," Kordel replied smoothly. "And I didn't sell the statue."

"You didn't?" Again the fence looked up in surprise, but the effect was rather ruined by the jeweler's lens. "Then how did you make a profit?"

Kordel leaned against the table. "Do you have any idea," she drawled, "how much money you can make holding a G.o.d for ransom?"

The fence thought about that, then laughed aloud.

"Nightbond tried to bargain with me, if you can believe it," Kordel continued. "But I told her if she didn't give me a thousand silver, I'd send her a pile of slag and her profitable little rituals would come to an end.

I had her G.o.d by the-"

"I see, I see," the fence interrupted. "Now about this emerald . . ."

A sultry voice wafted into the shop as the fence peered out the window. "Is she gone?"

"She's gone," he replied.

The curtains to the back room rustled aside and a dark-haired woman slipped unctuously into the shop.

A mail overlay clinked against her black leather corset, and a small cat o' nine tails rustled at her belt.

"The emerald, please," she said, unfolding her hand.

The fence took up his customary place behind the table. "First my fee." "Of course." Anya Nightbond reached into a black leather pouch and stacked several silver coins on the table with fluid grace. "Two hundred for the emerald and two hundred for your trouble."

"I like doing business with the clergy," the fence remarked as he dropped the emerald into Anya's supple hand. "Especially the wealthy clergy. Who's next?"

Anya toyed thoughtfully with the gem. "Gilroy the Smuggler takes dares if he smokes enough seer's weed. I'll give a bundle to Bernard of Marthia when I return the betting emerald to him."

The fence nodded. "Just out of curiosity," he asked, "Kordel demanded a thousand silver from you for the statue. How much did you tell your congregation she wanted?"

"How much wouldyou pay to rescue your s.e.x life?" Anya purred. Then she sauntered out the door.

Elizabeth Moon is a beautiful, brilliant, and incredibly talented SF writer (In My Humble Opinion) but she'd rather be rich. Her most recent book isRules of Engagement. She lives in Texas with her husband, son, cat and horse. She'ssupposedto be hard at work on her next book, but I'm glad she took the time to give us this story.

Fool's Gold

Elizabeth Moon

"It's been done to death," Mirabel Stonefist said.

"It's traditional." Her sister Monica sat primly upright, embroidering tiny poppies on a pillowcase. All Monica's pillow-cases had poppies on them, just as all the curtains on the morning side of the house had morning glories.

"Traditional is another word for 'done to death,' " Mirabel said. Her own pillow-cases had a stamped sigil and the words PROPERTY OF THE ROYAL BARRACKS DO NOT REMOVE.

"It's unlucky to break with tradition."

"It's unlucky to have anything to do with dragons," Mirabel said, rubbing the burn scar on her left leg.

Cavernous Dire had never intended to be a dragon. He had intended to be a miser, living a long and peaceful life of solitary selfishness near the Tanglefoot Mountains, but he had, all unwitting, consumed a seed of dragonsfoot which had been-entirely by accident-baked into a gooseberry tart. That wouldn't have changed him, if his neighbor hadn't made an innocent mistake and handed him dragonstongue, instead of dragonsbane, to ease a sore tongue. The two plants do look much alike, and usually it makes no difference whether you nibble a leaf ofD. abscondus orD. lingula , since both will ease a cold-blister, but in those rare instances when someone has an undigested seed of dragonsfoot in his gut, and then adds to it the potent essence ofD. lingula . . . well. Of course it was all a mistake, and an accident, and the fact that when Cavernous went back to the village to dig his miser's h.o.a.rd out from under the hearthstone it was already gone meant nothing.

Probably. And most likely the jar of smelly ointment that broke on his scaly head-fixing him in his draconic form until an exceedingly unlikely conjunction of events-was an accident too, though Goody Chernoff's cackle wasn't.

So Cavernous Dire sloped off to the Tanglefoots in a draconish temper, scorching fenceposts along the way. He found a proper cave, and would have ama.s.sed a h.o.a.rd from the pa.s.sing travelers, if there'd been any. But his cave was a long way from any pa.s.s over the mountains, and he was far too prudent to tangle with the rich and powerful dragons whose caves lay on more lucrative trade routes.

He was forced to prey on the locals.

At first, sad to say, this gave him wicked satisfaction. They'd robbed him. They'd turned him into a dragon and robbed him, and-like a true miser-he minded the latter much more than the former. He ate their sheep, and then their cattle (having grown large enough), and once inhaled an entire flock of geese-a mistake, he discovered, as burning feathers stank abominably. He could not quite bring himself to eat their children, though his draconish nature found them appetizing, because he knew too well how dirty they really were, and how disgusting the amulets their mothers tied round their filthy necks. But he did kill a few of the adults, when they marched out with torches to test the strength of his fire. He couldn't stomach their stringy, bitter flesh.

Finally they moved away, cursing each other for fools, and Cavernous reigned over a ruined district. He pried up every hearthstone, and rooted in every well, but few were the coins or baubles which the villagers left behind.

Although the ignorant a.s.sert that the man-drake has powers greater than the dragonborn, this is but wishful thinking. Dragons born from the egg inherit all the ancient wisdom and power of dragonkind.

Man-drakes are but feeble imitations, capable of matching true dragons only in their l.u.s.t for gold. So poor Cavernous Dire, though fearsome to men, had not a chance of surviving in any contest with real dragons-and real dragons find few things so amusing as tormenting man-drakes.

'Tis said that every man has some woman who loves him-at least until she dies of his misuse-and so it was with Cavernous. Though most of the children born into his very dysfunctional birth-family had died of abuse or neglect, he had a sister, Bilious Dire, who had not died, but lived-and lived, moreover, with the twisted memory that Cavernous had once saved her life. (In fact, he had merely pushed her out of his way on one of the many occasions when his mother Savage came after him with a hot ladle.) But Bilious built her life, as do we all, on the foundation of her beliefs about reality, and in her reality Cavernous was a n.o.ble being.

She had been long away, Bilious, enriching the man who owned her, but at last she grew too wrinkled and stiff, and he cast her out. So she returned to the foothills village of her childhood, to find it ruined and empty, with dragon tracks in the street.

"That horrible dragon," she wailed at the weeping sky. "It's stolen my poor innocent brother. I must find help-"

"So you see, it's the traditional quest to rescue the innocent victim of a dragon," Mirabel's sister said.

"Our sewing circle has taken on the rehabilitation of the faded blossoms of vice-" Mirabel mimed gagging, and her sister glared at her. "Don't laugh! It's not funny-the poor things-" "Isn't there Madam Aspersia's Residence for them?"

"Madam Aspersia only has room for twenty, and besides she gives preference to women of a Certain Kind." Mirabel rolled her eyes; her sister combined the desire to talk about Such Things with the inability toname the Things she wanted to talk about.

"Well, but surely there are other resources-"

"In this city perhaps, but in the provinces-" Before Mirabel could ask why the provinces should concern the goodwives of Weeping Willow Street, her sister took a deep breath and plunged on. "So when poor Bilious-obviously past any chance of earning a living That Way-begged us to find help for her poor virgin brother taken by a dragon, of course I thought of you."

"Of course."

"Surely your organization doessomething to help women-that is its name, after all, Ladies' Aid and Armor Society. . . ."

Mirabel had tried to explain, on previous occasions, what the LAAS had been founded for, and why it would not help with a campaign to provide each orphaned girl with hand-embroidered underclothes for her trousseau, or stand shoulder to shoulder with the Weeping Willow Sewing Society's members when they marched on taverns that sold liquor to single women. (Didn't her sister realize that all the women in the King's Guard hung out in taverns? Or was that the point?) Now, through clenched teeth, Mirabel tried once more. "Monica-we do help women-each other. We were founded as a mutual-aid society for all women soldiers, though we do what we can-" The LAAS charity ball, for instance, supported the education of the orphaned daughters of soldiers.

"Helping each other is just like helping yourself, and helping yourself is selfish. Here's this poor woman, with no hope of getting her brother free if you don't do something-"

Mirabel felt her resistance crumbling, as it usually did if her sister talked long enough.

"I don't see how he can be a virgin, if he's older than his sister," she said. A weak argument, and she knew it. So did Monica.

"You can at least investigate, can't you? It can't hurt . . ."

It could get her killed, but that was a remote danger. Her sister was right here and now. "No promises,"

Mirabel said.

"Iknew you'd come through," said Monica.

As Mirabel Stonefist trudged glumly across a lumpy wet moor, she thought she should have chosen "stonehead" for her fighting surname instead of "stonefist." She'd broken fingers often enough to disprove the truth of her chosen epithet, and over a moderately long career more than one person had commented on her personality in granitic terms. Stonehead, bonehead, too stubborn to quit and too dumb to figure a way out . . . She had pa.s.sed three abandoned, ruined villages already, the thatched roofs long since rotted, a few tumbled stone walls blacked by fire. She'd found hearthstones standing on end like grave markers, and not one coin of any metal.

And she'd found dragon tracks. Not, to someone who had been in the unfortunate expedition to kill the Grand Dragon Karshnak of Kreshnivok, very big dragon tracks, but big enough to trip over and fall splat in. It had been raining for days, as usual in autumn, and the dragon tracks were all full of very cold water.

Her biggest mistake, she thought, had been birth order. If she'd been born after Gervais, she'd have been the cute little baby sister, and no one would ever have called on her to solve problems for the family. But as the oldest-the big sister to them all-she'd been cast as family protector and family servant from the beginning.

And her next biggest mistake, at least in the present instance, had been telling the Ladies' Aid and Armor Society that she was just going to check on things. With that excuse, no one else could find the time to come with her, so here she was, trudging across a cold, wet slope by herself, in dragon country.

They must really hate her. They must be slapping each other on the back, back home, and bragging on how they'd gotten rid of her. They must- "Dammit, 'Bel, wait up!" The wind had dropped from its usual mournful moan, and she heard the thin scream from behind. She whirled. There-a long way back and below-an arm waved vigorously. She blinked. As if a dragon-laid spell of misery had been lifted, her mood rose. Heads bobbed among the wet heather. Two-three? She wasn't sure, but she wasn't alone anymore, and she felt almost as warm as if she were leaning on a wall in the palace courtyard in the sun.

They were, of course, grumbling when they came within earshot. "Should've called yourself Mirabel Longlegs-" Siobhan Bladehawk said. "Don't you ever sleep at night? We were beginning to think we'd never catch up."

"And why'd you go off in that snit?" asked Krystal, flipping the beaded fringe on her vest. "See this? I lost three strings, two of them with real lapis beads, trying to track you through that white-thorn thicket.

You could just as easily have gone around it, rather than making me get my knees all scratched-"

"Shut up, Krystal," Siobhan said. "Though she has a point, 'Bel. What got into you, anyway?"

Mirabel sniffed, and hated herself for it. "Bella said if I was just investigating, I could go alone-n.o.body should bother-"

"Bella's having hot flashes," Siobhan said. "Not herself these days, our Bella, and worried about having to retire. We unelected her right after you left, and then we came after you. If you had just waited a day, 'stead of storming out like that-"

"But you're so impetuous," Krystal said, pouting. She pulled the end of her silver-gilt braid around, frowned at it, and nipped off a split end with her small, white, even teeth.

The third member of the party appeared, along with a s.h.a.ggy pack pony, its harness hung with a startling number of brightly polished horse bra.s.ses.

"I needed a holiday," Sophora said, her ma.s.sive frame dwarfing everything but the mountains. "And a chance for some healthy open-air exercise." The Chancellor of the Exchequer grinned. "Besides, I thinkthat idiot Balon of Torm is trying to rob the realm, and this will give him a chance, he thinks. The fool."

Mirabel's mood now suited a sunny May morning. Not even the next squall off the mountain could make her miserable. Krystal, though, turned her back to the blowing rain and pouted again.

"This isruining my fringes."

"Shut up Krystal," said everyone casually. The world was back to normal.

Cavernous Dire had subsisted on rockrats, rock squirrels, rock grouse, and the occasional rock (mild serpentine, with streaks of copper sulfate, eased his draconic fire-vats, he'd found). In midwinter, he might be lucky enough to flame a mountain goat before it got away, or even a murk ox (once widespread, now confined to a few foggy mountain valleys) . But autumn meant hunger, unless he traveled far into the plains, where he could be hunted by man and dragon alike.

Now, as he lay on the cold stone floor of his cave, stirring the meagre pile of his treasure, he scented something new, something approaching from the high, cold peaks of the Tanglefoots. He sniffed. Not a mountain goat. Not a murk ox (and besides, it wasn't foggy enough for the murk ox to be abroad). A sharp, hot smell, rather like the smell of his own fire on rock.

Like many basically unattractive men, Cavernous Dire had been convinced of his own good looks, back when he was a young lad who coated his hair with woolfat, and had remained convinced that he had turned his back on considerable female attention when he chose to become a miser. So, when he realized that the unfamiliar aroma wafting down the cold wet wind was another dragon, his first thought was "Of course." A she-dragon had been attracted by his elegance, and hoped to make up to him.

Quickly, he shoved his treasure to the back of the cave, and piled rocks on it. No thieving, l.u.s.tful she-dragon was going to get his treasure, though he had to admit it was pleasant to find that the girls still pursued him. He edged to the front of his cave and looked upwind, into the swirls of rain. There-was she there? Or-over there?

The women of the expedition set up camp with the swift, capable movements of those experienced in such things. The tent blew over only once, and proved large enough for them all, plus Dumpling the pony, over whose steaming coat Siobhan labored until she was as wet as it had been, and so were half their blankets. Then she polished the horse bra.s.ses on Dumpling's harness; she had insisted that any horse under her care would be properly adorned and she knew the others wouldn't bother. Meanwhile, the others built a fire and cooked their usual hearty fare, under cover of the front flap.