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Liera’ze awoke in a dark, unfamiliar place, running her wide-eyed gaze around in a panic. She felt a crippling, silent fear well up in her throat as her mind ran in circles, and she pushed wildly out of the lean-to. Ghostly moonlight pierced a mist of fine sand as she stepped into the clearing, and she remembered where she was. Bile rose in her throat. She stepped two yards from the campsite and threw up the small food she had eaten before going to sleep the day before. What am I doing? She let her body weight press against a dusty, sandstone pillar. Where am I? Why am I with these people? Memories came rushing back to her. Her knees buckled. She hugged tightly onto the pillar, feeling it shift unsteadily beneath her weight. “Give me guidance and show me peace,” she whispered a prayer in Saraer, “Offer me tools, and I’ll work for my prayer.” Liera’ze repeated the phrase a few times, her heart slowing down to an acceptable anxiety. She leaned back onto her knees.
A sudden strike of steel on stone caused the frazzled woman to leap up, spinning around. A girl, her face veiled with a black vaikal, and the rest of her body covered in a dark, woolen cloak, made one spark, then two. A small set of kindling lit- thin strips of metal that burned a bright blue, then lit the three coal rods in a more calming, dull-orange glow. Mi looked up at Liera’ze, her expression lost behind the black veil, then waved her right hand towards the opposite side of the camp. “Could you check on the horses?” Mi asked in Dunespeech. “There’s a handful of berries in the large one’s saddlebags. Some water too.”
Liera’ze sharply inhaled, pinching the bridge of her nose. She hadn’t noticed the small thief, but felt she should have. She walked to the small clearing where their two desert steeds were fitfully pulling at their tethers. “Shh, shh…” Her hand reached to lie gently on the beast’s snorting muzzle. Liera’ze soothed them in a practiced manner. “It’s alright, it’s alright. Just a little further today, that’s all…”
As the horses calmed- a skill well-trained in paddyfolk of the Sar- and the woman fished in the larger one’s bag for a few dried raza fruits and oats. She noticed Ren push out of the tent, stretching her arms to the sky in a yawn. The warrior’s vaikal was hastily slung around her face, with a couple patches of black hair pushing out between its seams. Her blade was strapped by her side. She seemed to avoid Liera’ze’s gaze as she exchanged a few short quips with Mi in their foreign language, and then began to clean out a couple dark purple flowers to place over the fire.
The sandstorm slowly coughed and sputtered out as the three women sat down by the softly burning coals. The sky above them was transitioning. The nighttime ring of ethereal, serpentine moon-dust slowly gave way to ruby sunrise. The sky bled as the red sun popped up over the horizon, and then blended into its usual, orange hue as its blue partner followed shortly thereafter. Mi cleaned and roasted the wild flowers with practice, though Ren sat by and watched curiously.
Liera’ze started a bit, and grabbed one of the flowers from Mi’s hand, to the thief’s surprise. “Cannot eat… uh… bright flower. Cha-voyen.” She said the Saraer word for the blossom. “Cha-voyen kill.”
The wind pressed the vaikal close to Mi’s face, and Liera’ze could see the outline of her brow furrowed in confusion. “Oh.” Was all the girl said, as she looked over and picked the other cha-voyen flowers off of the plates. “Thank you, Liera’ze.”
The woman blinked once at the name, then remembered that it was what she had called herself. It’ll be familiar soon enough. She told herself, and then replied by pointing towards a few of the other flowers. “Us Sarea, we live in Yves Sar.” She explained to the best of her abilities, “Voyen, kosren, yvna- we know cha- fruit-flowers.”
Mi nodded. “You should teach us more,” She said, “I’ve been using trial and error. Of course, I didn’t realize any of these could kill me…”
If only for a moment, the usefulness was nice. But their breakfast concluded quickly, and the three travelers mounted their steeds in the clear air. They rode south, then east, cutting past farms and small villages surrounding the ancient, pyramidal cistern-towers- clutching to the rocky ground around their square bases like barnacles to a ship’s hull. They saw no travellers, and no pursuers. Liera’ze noticed that the two girls had relaxed greatly by the time they had seen the first alighted desert post that marks the road towards Dra’angel.
Liera’ze had never seen one before. At first, it seemed to be a dark, stone obelisk- that was what her people had called similar monuments back in the Sar. But, as they veered their two worn mounts towards the object, it was obviously anything but stone.
Liera’ze guessed it was made of a single, massive bone, but it was also covered in studs of a grey, coral-like material that fanned out in a spiral around its base. The desert post bobbed up and down in the air, floating a half a foot off the ground like a sea-side buoy. The post itself was three sided, and had brass rungs affixed to each side. Within each of these rungs, white or blue flames flickered in all directions- up, down, and sideways- unlike a candle’s flame, which only licked upwards. Mi said they were called “witchlights”, and that the blue ones were for large caravans, the white for smaller groups of travellers like them. Ren moved up, took out a brass coin, and flicked it into the white witchlight ring, where it disappeared in a flash.
In its place, balanced on a carved ledge beneath the rung, the coin had been re-shaped into a cylindrical form, with a bright, white light glowing within. Ren palmed the deformed coin, and shot a glance at Liera’ze. “Wanna try?” She held it out towards her riding partner.
Liera’ze took the item in her hand. It was heavier than a coin had any right to be. “What do I…?” Her voice trailed off as she began to move it up and down. The light inside bobbed around a bit.
Ren hopped back up onto their steed in front of her, and twisted to tap the coin. “It’s a Dra’vin- a ‘coin finder’, if you would.” She gestured putting the object to her eye. “It’ll point us towards the city gates. Try it.”
Reluctantly, Liera’ze put the bright coin to her right eye, closing her other. Where she had expected to see a blinding light inside, she instead saw through the cylinder and onto the path before her- and a single blue line snaking across the ground and above the dune. “I see it!” She grasped Ren’s shoulder excitedly, and pointed over the daikun’s shoulder. “That way!”
Mi dropped her small steed back a moment to exchange a glance through her veil with Ren. It would be later that Liera’ze learned that they had all known the path to Dra’angel- coin finders were little more than tourist tolls and safeguards for the desperately lost. But, in the moment, giving Ren and Mi instructions on every turn of their journey, Liera’ze smiled. It was involuntary, and childish, and very, very real. To Ren, that was certainly worth a copper and some extra time.
Dra’angel’s shimmering form appeared to push up through dust and dirt as the women rode. It was well into the day when they crested the last hill of thorny brush grass, both horses were panting hard enough that Ren and Mi had to lead them on foot into the valley where the Coin City nestled before the ocean. Liera’ze, in her flat-footed sandals, carefully picked her way down the unpaved, dirt path behind them, trying to take in as much as she could about the city that spread before her.
The buildings of Dra’angel lost their color the closer they got to the ocean on the very far-side of the city. Outside of the walls, Liera’ze saw violet and red banners fluttering above the narrow streets that wound between unkempt bunkhouses and hovels. Poor Zabifolk and Sar drove carts of raza fruit or gourds past the three travelers, on towards the city gates. Old women and men chiseled stone statuettes outside of their houses. The buildings’ doors here were rust red, iron panels. Mi stopped them outside of a yellow-orange building only a few blocks into this shantytown. Liera’ze saw a few teenage boys throwing dice in an alley behind it, bragging loudly between themselves in a language she didn’t quite recognize.
“Welcome to Wharfside. I’ll sell the steeds here.” Mi finally said with a low voice, taking the reins of the larger steed from her sister. “Why don’t you two head on to the day market? I’m sure you can find something for Liera’ze that’ll make her look a bit more like a farmer or something.”
“Farmer?” The woman scowled at the smaller sister. “I never was ‘farmer’.”
“You are here.” Ren said in a softer voice. “Paddyfolk aren’t looked on kindly in these cities. It’ll be a pain or worse to deal with the guards when they ask why a woman like yourself is in their city when not delivering crops from the west.”
Liera’ze took a moment to take in what the daikun had said. She looked around briefly, realizing that the only Sar she saw were driving those heavy carts of gourds- and they didn’t loiter around like the Zabi kids in the alleyway. “Oh. I see.” Liera’ze’s words suddenly caught in her throat as a long-repressed outrage welled up in her chest. She swallowed it in a practiced manner.
“You okay?” Ren tapped Liera’ze’s elbow and bobbed her head towards a knot of colorful banners and dilapidated houses. “Come on, you’ll blend in just fine around here.”
The sword master took her by the hand and led her through the dusty street and into a clamour of noise and mercantilism. “This is not… correct?” Even if Liera’ze knew the Dunespeech words to describe the day market, she couldn’t have found them at this time.
All manner of merchants and swindlers plied their trade from the most bizarre platforms built from any material imaginable. Rusty iron or bronze plates, recovered sandstone or old, and the sea-worn hulls of ships were all suspended a yard and a half above the ground by heavy, grey stone pillars and a maddening mesh of iron chains and hempen rope. Merchants stood atop these, with rope ladders leading into the upper “floor” of the day market, their goods either hanging on chains beneath their platform or perilously laid on crates or displays atop it. Beneath the lightly wavering upper floor of the day market was no less chaotic- beggars lined the darker edges of the large square, while even more shops and stalls were dug into small dugouts. Clothiers and textile tradesmen, cooks, herbalists, and even a blind fortune teller plied their trade in the immediate vicinity- not to mention all the children, Sar, and other travelers moving throughout the chaotic mess. Liera’ze stood shocked by the chaos and strange color of the market.
“Hah, I suppose it isn’t correct.” Ren agreed, looking it over with a more familiar awe. “The lady of this city- the Coin Princess Dra Agara- is quite the stickler with her taxes. Even in these slums, she can find a way to tithe any shop or outpost into obscurity. So, the locals found a way around it- if the shops are not built on the ground of the Coin City, then they cannot be tithed for it. The ones on the ground are technically illegal, but they pack up each night, so the guards don’t care to take notice.”
Liera’ze shook her head in amazement. “Zabi laws.” She stated with astonishment. “So strange.”
Ren shrugged, her excitedly pulling the woman’s wrist. “It’s one of the better markets on the coast, I’ll tell you that. Come on, I need to see a few people before we get your clothes.”
The daikun pulled Liera’ze around the intricate bazaar, pointing out the flamboyantly jeweled fashionistas of Dra’canna, with their brilliantly dyed hair and ochre makeup, and stopping by a food stand run by an ancient woman that knew Ren by name. They ate rice cakes baked with desert-flowers, sitting together beside an unused, sandstone fountain. The bandit told Liera’ze about islands far to the south that she called home, about seeing a horse for the very first time, about coming to Dra’angel and finally being able to breathe since escaping her captors. Liera’ze mostly listened. Ren seemed young, but had seen so much. Yet that does not make her any older. The woman thought to herself. Liera’ze noticed how Ren greeted the children in the market, and how her back straightened up in excitement when she had a chance to talk about her home. She also noticed how that excitement quickly faded when the daikun remembered that she might never go back.
Ren had to leave for a moment to exchange the gold coins she had found for more appropriate currency, and it was while Liera’ze was wandering the inner platforms of the day market that she found her eventual clothier. He was a Zabifolk boy, maybe a few years younger than Ren, and had perched his platform against a crumbling wall that used to belong to some house or temple. He had slicked his black hair into a spiky helmet with a kind of clear adhesive that smelled of chrysanthemum. Liera’ze spoke first, “Not many wear cha-kyvna here.” The woman said, sidling up onto his small platform, which was suspended above a dugout with a withered lady selling blank fabrics. “It is common in the Gardener Cities. You wear it prettily.”
The merchant straightened his back in his sun-baked, leather chair. A few missing teeth dotted a wide grin. He spoke in fluent Saraer. “Many thanks, traveller.” He extended a gloved hand, palm facing up, and nodded his head in Sar fashion. “Welcome to my humble stall- I’m Redik of Nasi.”
Liera’ze had to blink the surprise from her wide eyes, before placing her palm over his and nodding in response. “Liera’ze of Yves Sar.” She let her gaze wander about the two yard-wide stall. Multicolored, flax tunics were hung atop small chests, some with Dunespeech symbols written on their mantle. A few flat-footed sandals lay un-tied in the back corner, and Redik gestured for her to sit down on a flat-topped, iron chest a yard away from him. She did so, smiling despite herself. “You know my tongue well, Redik.” She finally said. “It’s commendable.”
The merchant boy smiled again. “Nasi is a small paddy-town, not far from Yves Salamand. But, the Coralla came calling three years ago, and Nasi is now little more than rubble- not that I miss that dung-heap. I wandered the coast until I took up shop here.” He looked Liera’ze over with a quick glance. “You’re a Tar Sage, right? One of the old acolytes?”
Liera’ze was taken aback, and looked around conspiratorially for a moment. Then, she leaned in a little bit, bunching her cloak in a fist with nervousness. “How did you know?” She whispered.
Redik of Nasi laughed and waved his hand, speaking in a regular tone. “A guess, is all. You don’t look like the farming type.” He looked out at the rest of the people in the market- their conversations and bids calling out like a mosquito swarm around them. “If people come from Yves Sar, they’re either farmers, refugees, or Tar Sages. You’re in tough luck, though- the Coralla are closing in fast, circling this city like vultures.”
Liera’ze felt a tightness grip her heart at the mention of the mounted raiders. “My friend told me this city was safe?” She asked gently.
The merchant shrugged. “Dra’angel isn’t the paradise others take it to be. Escaped slaves, criminals, magicians- they all end up fleeing here because of Agara’s laws against bounty hunters. But that has made it a target, I think.”
The Sarea woman furrowed her brow. “A target?” She wondered aloud. “But the Coralla do not want to take the city- they live off of the outer dunes and hills. Why strike here when the west is a much easier target?”
Redik smiled broadly again. “Perhaps you’re right.” He admitted. “It’s just my suspicions, you know? In fact, if you want to know more, there is a man in the city- Kamaji ra Vitzallah. I send any Sar I meet to him if they’re staying a night in the walls. He’s an ex-criminal, but a good one, from my understanding. Takes care of people like us.”
At that moment, unsubtle footsteps of Ren tinked along the iron stairwell that made its way to Redik’s stall. “There you are.” The daikun exclaimed as she saw Liera’ze. “I’ve been looking all over. It seems you’ve found a place.” She turned to Redik. “We’re looking for clothes- something simple. My friend here will be making her way back to the fields in a few days time.”
Redik looked over Ren, nodding, and stood. In unbroken Dunespeech, he spoke with his signature, bright smile. “Of course! Let’s get her fitted with something appropriate. Any colors that catch your attention, ma’am?”
Perhaps an hour had passed, and Liera’ze was well-fitted with a green tunic and knee-length, grey skirt. She still wore her high-laced sandals- she was loath to give up on such good shoes- and was given a floppy, dark grey hat. Ren paid out six imperial ducals- square, greenish-black coins with a red falcon imprinted on each side- and a seventh for his swift work. Redik waved them away happily. He didn’t speak Saraeri with either woman again.