Teldin passed and ignored a pair of babbling, fishy-smelling penguins, each dressed in red-and-green plaid shirts and ridiculously waving their flipperlike wings at him from the blanket on which their wares were laid out. Aelfred had already warned him about the dohwar, and their squawking pleas faded behind him. He did give a long look at a towering gray giant sitting cross-legged ahead of him. The giant wore purple-and-red striped breeches and a dirty white shirt. He stroked his braided beard as he quietly spoke with a motley collection of children of every race Teldin had ever hard of. Even sitting, the being was twice Teldin's six feet in height and almost as broad across the chest as Teldin was tall. A spacesea giant, he thought, recalling Aelfred's lessons on wildspace inhabitants.
It was because of the spacesea giant that Teldin didn't sec the girl, and they thumped solidly into each other in front of a rug merchant's stall.
"Oops!" the girl squealed, a startled look on her face. Barely a teenager, she came up to Teldin's breastbone. It struck Teldin next that the girl was also very beautiful.
"Paladine! I'm sorry. Are you all right?" Teldin instantly reached out to steady the girl.
The girl giggled and reached up to her black hair with a golden-bronze hand. A bright magenta kerchief was tied around her head, and a high, thick ponytail fell like water down her back. Teldin was vaguely aware that she wore a flowery perfume and a color-splashed dress that reached to her toes, but he was not able to look away from her huge, dark, eyes. Flecks of gold swam in them like distant stars. She would be a stunner when she grew up.
"I wasn't paying attention either," the girl said, still smiling. "It's hard to get around in a place this crowded. I've been here a few days, and I'm still trying to find my way. Are you new here, too?" Her voice was songlike. Something about it and the way she looked tugged at Teldin's memory.
"Uh, yes." Off guard, Teldin gestured behind him, downhill. "My ship docked about two hours ago. I was, ah, taking in the sights." That's all she needs to know, he thought. No need to involve anyone else in my problems.
"Great!" she said easily, as if she'd known him all her life. "Then we can explore the Rock together! Have you had something to eat since you got here?"
Things were getting out of hand. Teldin looked uphill for a moment, then deliberately let his gaze wander away and around the city. "I was going to explore a bit on my own," he said slowly. "I… need to see some people about business. It could take a while."
"Oh, but you have to eat, right?" the girl said brightly. "My name's Gaeadrelle Goldring. Gaye is fine. I saw this weird little tavern near the Burrows, son of half-sunk into the ground. Halflings run it. It smelled like they serve some kind of chicken dish. Let's try it. If it's awful, I'll pay. C'mon!"
"What about your parents?" Teldin asked, uncomfortable with the thought of having her tag along after him. She wasn't acting like a teenager, yet she was like a child in a way. "Wouldn't they-"
"My parents?" cried the girl, putting a hand on her chest in mock surprise. "Give me some rope! I'm not a kid! I've been walking loose on deck for years! I'm just shorter than you are, that's all. C'mon, let's take a walk. I don't bite much, and I'm starving. We've got to see a bit of the Rock before you get serious. This chicken place, now…"
Before he was fully aware of it, Teldin was walking beside Gaye as she led the way through the Greater Market. Still talking, she headed perpendicular to Teldin's original course. What in the Dark Queen's name am I doing? he thought. I have to find the elves and see what they know about this cloak. My life and many others depend on it. If the neogi find me again, they'll cut me to pieces and pick the cloak out of the gore, and then-
Gaye abruptly turned toward him and gave him a wide, happy smile. Her eyes were like wildspace itself. "So, are you hungry enough to try it?" she said.
Well, he reasoned, Gaye was charming, but she still seemed too young for anything other than polite company. She was very serf-possessed, but she couldn't be more than sixteen, eighteen at the most. He sighed and looked away, weighing his decision. This was an armed asteroid, and there were no neogi about. He'd been here only two hours. Another hour or two wouldn't make any difference. He hadn't eaten in almost half a day, thanks to his nerves over seeing the elves. Gaye could probably do worse in choosing a male figure to whom she could attach herself; he could at least look out for her, even if Aelfred felt the Rock was safe. Aelfred was seeing it from his own point of view, not from a teenaged girl's.
Halflings were supposed to be great cooks, too, or so he'd heard. There were no halflings on Krynn, and the halfling deckhand on the Probe wasn't trusted in the galley yet. Maybe Teldin had been missing something.
He wondered if he'd pay for this with more than money.
"Sure," he finally said. Gaye looked ecstatic.
If I'm missing anything, he decided, it's common sense.
*****
Lunch (or had it been supper? Teldin had no sense of time on this night-sky worldlet) had been excellent. Afterward, he and Gaye had wandered through the Burrows, the surface-and-tunnel community of the local halflings, then through orderly Giff-Town, with its quaint and long-winded signs. They'd even gone into the Lesser Market, a filthy street bazaar where the silent, meaningful gazes the local men sent in Gaye's direction led Teldin to walk close beside her with one hand on his sword hilt. (So much for Aelfired's opinions of the Rock's safety, he thought in disgust.) Gaye had been oblivious to potential danger, stopping at several ramshackle tables to inspect peculiar cups, ornaments, rings, and other items.
And Gaye had never once stopped talking. She had extensive, if superficial, knowledge of numerous worlds, cities, races, and ships. So far, Teldin had heard some of Gaye's experiences with, and opinions of, gnomes ("delightful!"), elves ("nice, but a little snooty."), dwarves ("so serious!"), wild-space ("it's big, isn't it?"), and some place called Kozakura, where she'd studied art of some kind. She'd arrived at the Rock on an aperusa ship about eight days earlier, admitting that she'd been here longer than she'd let on earlier. The aperusa men had been unbearable, she'd said, and had always tried to get her alone somewhere. Teldin felt his blood rise at that, but Gaye thought little of it, aside from saying, "I don't know how the women put up with it."
The details were jumbled up, but Gaye had apparently been roaming on her own for ten years or more. The issue of her exact age was becoming more confusing all the time, but Teldin wasn't ready to ask about it.
Three hours after they'd eaten, they were somewhere in the Dracon Enclave, near a semitropical grove of palm trees, sitting on the short-cropped grass. Before them was a large collection of reptilian beings of every sort, from centauroid dracons to manlike lizard men.
"I used to think that a lizard was a lizard, you know," said Gaye, "but then I saw that there were as many types of them as there are of people like us. I met some trogs once, not very friendly ones at that, and, wow, did they ever stink. It was incredible. Then I met dracons, saurials, sithp'k, and, of course, the wasag, like that little blue guy over there." Gaye pointed at a halfling-sized reptilian humanoid about thirty feet away, which looked over at them with a blank expression. Teldin leaned back on the grass and looked at the wasag, which flicked a thin, forked tongue in his direction, then he looked off to his left at one of the Rock's huge hexagon-base defense towers, bristling with siege machines aimed into the starry sky. The tangerine sun hovered low over the city skyline ahead of him. Aside from the sun's presence, he had learned that night was no different from daytime on the Rock of Bral. The air envelope around the asteroid wasn't thick enough to create a colored sky, so it was always dark above. Street and shop lights kept the city lit even when the sun was shining on the Rock's other side.