Gamori

Part 1

Sindar Pesh was an ostentatious, jovial pudding of a man whose company, despite his ludicrous loquaciousness, was seldom unwelcome. Being a merchant dealing in a panoply of goods, he would blather on to all who would hear, and all who would not, be they buyer or seller, the patrons and staff of every local tavern, or the random fool on the street. I can attest to his nonsensical charm which would glue one in place to be inundated by the most confounding stream of candied excrement that flowed forth from his mouth much as zephyrs and gales are unleashed from the cave of the wind goddess Aikadi. Not only did I conduct much commerce with him, but the pair of us were known throughout the Docks District of Portsgate as drinking buddies. Once, deep into his cups, Sindar said I was like the daughter he never had.

Two summers ago he told me of the dead thing in the sand. It was far out in the Kinshazi Desert, past the Great Wadi, southeast of the ruins of Eb Tamal, where no one living has walked in an age. Sindar had gotten himself a new business partner, an explorer of sorts, and they were planning an expedition in search of a vast cache of riches near where the thing lay. I was to meet the two at the Flying Fist to discuss my coming aboard as a third partner.

I stepped to the left and dodged a cross-eyed ruffian who staggered, drunk on both ale and punches, out of the tavern to vomit and spit a few bloody teeth onto the pave-stones. The establishment was, you see, aptly named. I tossed the dazed dunderhead a few coins and told him to procure some new gold teeth if he wished, to which he exposed his modified smile in a slow-witted smile of appreciation. Strolling then under the hanging wooden sign, beneath whose gilded letters was painted a winged mailed fist, I soon caught sight of Sindar, his bulk nearly breaking the chair at our favorite table. He puffed from a hookah, and stroked his black, forked beard with a pudgy, ring-bedecked hand, saying endearingly silly things to no one in particular.

"My friend!", he exclaimed, though he called nearly everyone such, "Seeing you again is like hearing my mother tell the fable of 'The Flurrit and the Fish-Cakes'! Daeryl, my twilight bloom, come and bring tankards of the usual sloth piss for me and this delightful personage!"

Daeryl, a young woman of twenty-two, stepped over several unconscious patrons sprawled on the floor and served us two Portsgate porters, which many said did indeed have a color indistinguishable from the urine of the Gwandian branch creeper. I inquired where Sindar's business associate was, and he said, "Do not worry, she shall be along presently. But.... I feel I should warn you, do not ask her, well, stupid questions. She despises those and all who ask them!"

I was about to assure him I was not raised by a bunch of oolar, those misbegotten, chalk-white, lamp-eyed troglodytes that leap about like circus freaks in their warrens of rock, when, looking toward the entrance, Sindar's own eyes became almost as large as an oolar's. "She's here," he hissed, and rose to greet her with typical flowery verbosity.

Turning around, I beheld a tallish, lithe, dusky woman of perhaps thirty or forty, her jet black hair cut short. Her prepossessing visage, which was hard to place an age upon, had an aquiline nose, curving black eyebrows, lips locked in a wisp of a smirk, and coffee eyes that could surely enthrall or wither one to death on the spot. She was dressed as a swashbuckler, wearing black steel-tipped boots, a fuchsia outfit of richly embroidered silk, and a saber on her belt. Upon her shoulder sat a nasty little creature, green of fur and glowering, which wriggled its wormy violet facial feelers.

She moved, slippery and serpentine, through the din and mayhem of the carousers towards us. I must have appeared as the most transfixed lummox in all the world, and may as well have been raised by those accursed subterranean abominations. Then it got worse, for when she got up to us she said, "So, the foppish windbag brings me a slack-jawed asshat. Which one of you luminaries wants to tell me why we are meeting in the center of this bar, where all may hear and see? Get us more private seating arrangements. You, the fat one, do it. The other one is apparently too primitive to utilize spoken language."