Here you go. Enjoy!
Welcome to My Parlor, Said the Fighter to the Spy
Darah froze, her fork just an inch from her mouth, the charred mutton still steaming. Her eyes darted from side to side, as if searching for something. She was alone in her dining room, as she knew she should have been. Once, she had been a prominent fighter in the Empress’s arena, and had earned enough gold and prestige to employ a small army of servants to see to her house. Those times were gone, now, and Darah lived alone.
But something caught the very edge of her hearing. Something in her house had moved when it shouldn’t have. It was impossible to think that it might have been an intruder. Even if Darah were past her prime as a fighter, she was still more than a match for any common prowler. She had a few political enemies, vying with her for favor with the Empress. But they had already won; the Empress had not granted her an audience in over a year. There was no need for any of her enemies to even attempt to kill her when, politically, she was already dead.
Moving slowly, Darah set her fork down on her plate. She took a deep breath and held it, listening to the silence for any noise. She heard none, but she knew she had felt some disturbance in the air. Something had changed. Darah glanced down at her dinner with a certain remorsefulness, knowing that it would be disappointingly cold by the time she got to it. She sighed, pushed herself away from the table, and grabbed the mace that was leaning against the chair next to hers. She flexed her grip on her familiar, favored weapon for just a moment before turning away from the table.
What followed was a thorough, comprehensive, systematic sweep of her home. The house was a remnant from her glory days, when the adulation of Empress and Empire alike had afforded Darah a degree of opulence unseen in most corners of the world. And although the servants, the sycophants, and the hangers-on had all left, the home was hers, and only the Empress herself could ever take it from her. And so, while she only truly used a small handful of the rooms, there were, in fact, dozens of rooms to check.
With each room she checked, Darah became increasingly convinced that somebody else was in her home. She could not exactly explain why that was. There was no sound to alert her to a stranger in her home. There was no strange odor hanging in the air. But there was something, some feeling that she had, that told her she was right. She had been a fighter her entire life, from individual combats to grand melees, and her instincts had kept her alive even when her considerable skill alone could not. She trusted herself, and she knew someone else was there.
That was why, when she finished searching the last room on the ground floor, she was surprised to find nothing. All of the windows and doors were secure. Many of them had been in rooms that had stood unused for some time, and the undisturbed dust made it clear that nobody had passed through them. It had not been a noise, as such, that had alerted her to her invader’s presence, but it raised the question of how the invader could have invaded in the first place.
Having secured the ground floor, Darah carefully climbed the sole staircase to the upper floor and continued her search. The first four rooms were completely clear, and their windows were all still latched and unbroken. It was unlikely that any intruder would have been able to access the second story windows from outside, but she had to check. The fifth upstairs room she checked was a storage room of sorts, with several pieces of old furniture covered in large sheets to protect them from the dust. She checked this room carefully before she decided that it, too, was clear.
As she was leaving the room, however, she froze, and then dropped to a fighting crouch. Again, it was not a sound that tripped her senses, just a vague awareness that she was not alone. Darah spun around and cast her lantern light back across the room. It still looked empty, and there was still no sound and no movement in the room. Despite what she could see, though, Darah was sure. Finally, she decided that directness was her usual path to victory in the arena, and it would, perhaps, work for her now.
“I know you are in this room,” Darah said confidently. “Show yourself. If you have come to challenge me, then get to it. If you have come to steal from me, I have plenty to spare, so take what you need and be gone.”
Darah stood there in the doorway for several long seconds before she heard it, the first noise she had heard from her mysterious visitor. It was the sound of an audible gulp.
Then, a small section of the far wall seemed to ripple and peel away from the rest of the wall. The shimmering form took a cautious step toward the center of the room, and then began to solidify. Darah, for all her training and experience, could not hide her confusion and horror at the form standing in front of her. It looked like a gigantic lizard, nearly as tall as she was, that resembled the tiny chameleons she would play with as a youth. It was incredibly thin, and was holding its two foreclaws high and close to its chest, as if trying to curl in on itself protectively.
“What the hell are you?” Darah asked, shocked by the creature in front of her. Surely, nothing like this creature had ever been seen elsewhere in the world.
“I…” it said, shocking Darah further. She did not imagine the creature could speak. “I was about to ask you that.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your…your scales!” The beast said. “What happened to them? Has some cruel warlord removed them? How did you survive?”
“What are you talking about? And how the hell did you get into my house?”
“I don’t know, I swear!” The creature held out its clawed hands in what Darah assumed was a gesture of peace, or at least one saying ‘please don’t kill me.’ “The last thing I remember, I was in Eshgar, sneaking through the palace of the warlord Fangash, and then…”
“I’ve never heard of any of those things,” Darah interrupted. “And there have been no warlords on Zabisce since the time of the Empress’s grandmother at least.”
“Empress? What is an empress?”
“You dare to insult our Empress?” Darah took a threatening step forward, and the creature curled in and turned slightly away.
“I mean no offense!” The lizard said hurriedly. “Forgive me, but I have never heard that word before.”
“Never heard the word? What the hell are you?”
“I…” the lizard began, then hesitated. When Darah raised her mace slightly in preparation for a threat, the lizard seemed almost to deflate, as if resigning itself to something. “I am a spy.”
“What is a spy?” Darah asked.
“What is…” the creature started, then stopped, exacerbated. “Spies are everywhere. All of the warlords are constantly…” he paused again, connecting everything Darah had said. “By the Hatchers,” he breathed. “Zabisce. You said ‘no warlords on Zabisce.’ What is Zabisce?”
“Are you mad? Are you so lost that you don’t even know the world?”
The lizard’s shoulders slumped even further. “I fear not,” he said, and then, strangely, fell down into a sitting position on the floor. “Zabisce is not my world.”
“What do you mean?”
The chameleon man shook his head. “I don’t know how this could happen. The name of my world is Elde.”
“Another world? That’s not possible. It’s not…” Darah stopped then. It wasn’t possible, she knew. But then again, she also knew that this Chameleon man was similarly impossible. And, as little sense as it made to her, the existence of the former would explain the existence of the latter. Further, the existence of the latter, which she could see with her own eyes, confirmed the possibility of the former. For the first time since she had detected the creature’s presence, Darah lowered her mace. “What is your name?”
He looked up at her. Tears seemed to be threatening his bulbous eyes. “I do not have a name.”
“What?” Darah asked. “How could you not have a name?”
He hung his head. “I was on my final lowling mission. Had I returned from Fangash’s successful, I would have earned my name. But now…”
He trailed off, but Darah could hear the heartbreak in his voice. She had no idea what he was talking about, but clearly, it meant a great deal to the lizard. “How will you get home?” She asked, surprised by the concern in her voice.
The nameless lizard shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I got here. I don’t… I don’t know…”
Finally, the reality of his situation seemed to crash in on him, and he covered his face and began to cry. It was an extremely surreal sight for Darah, seeing a creature who should not even exist weeping for the loss of a life she could not understand. For a long time, Darah did not know what to say. Eventually she repeated her question about spies, if for no other purpose than to get him talking again. After he explained it, she asked him what his mission was.
“Fangash is a powerful warlord,” he explained. “He has many underlings, and they are constantly struggling to be his favored officer. One of those underlings hired me to spy on Fangash himself to see who had his ear, and discover a way to improve his own standing.”
This struck Darah’s interest. It reminded her of the politics of those serving their Empress. They played a game similar to the one this lizard described with the warlords. But, of course, they had no spies, because spies did not exist on Zabisce. In fact, only one person in the entire world had even ever heard of them. Darah had been thoroughly defeated in that game, but perhaps she had found herself a weapon that would allow her to fight again. Perhaps the favor of the Empress was not as far beyond her reach as she had thought.
“Maybe you and I could make a deal,” she said to him. “You’re lost on a strange world with no way to get home and likely no way to survive. I could help you.”
“And in return?”
“I might have a problem that you are uniquely able to help me solve.”
The lizard seemed to consider this. “Before we strike any sort of agreement, you need to know one thing. I do not kill. I gather information. In certain situations, I may even plant some. But I will never take a life, no matter how much I may owe you mine.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Darah said. “If I kill anybody, I will do it face to face with my enemies, and I will do it myself.”
“I can appreciate that,” the lizard said, thinking. “Very well. I will accept your offer, with one understanding. I will be trying to return to my home, if I am able. If I succeed, I will consider our agreement null.”
“Null, you say?” Darah said. “I like that. I believe that is what we will call you, if it suits you as a name.”
The lizard shrugged. “I have no true name until I return to my home, and even then. Null is as good as any other name for our purposes.”
“Good. I’m Darah, by the way.”
“Darah,” Null repeated. “Very well, Darah. We have a deal.”
“Excellent. Then let’s get some dinner.”