The Great Bazaar and Other Stories by Peter V. Brett Page A

impart.
Jeph Bales had been a good man, and honest, but his stern wisdom had kept him
from traveling more than a few hours from his home for his entire life.
    Every day away
from succor was another night spent outside with the corelings, and not even
Arlen took that lightly, but he had a deep and driving need to see things that
no other man had seen, to go places no other man had gone. He had been eleven
when he ran away from home. Now he was twenty, and had seen more of the world
than any but a handful of other men.
    Like the parch in Arlen's
throat, the voice was simply another thing to be endured. The demons had made
the world small enough. He would not let some nagging voice make it even
smaller.
    This time he was
seeking Baha kad'Everam, a Krasian hamlet whose name translated into "Bowl
of Everam," which was the Krasian name for the Creator. Abban's maps said
it rested in a natural bowl formed by a dry lakebed in a river canyon. The
hamlet was renowned for its pottery, but the pottery merchants had stopped
coming more than twenty years ago, and a dal'Sharum expedition had found
the Bahavans taken by the night. No one had gone back there since.
    "I was on
that expedition," Abban had claimed. Arlen had looked at the fat merchant
doubtfully.
    "It's
true," Abban said. "I was just a novice warrior carrying spears for
the dal'Sharum , but I remember the trek well. There was no sign of the
Bahavans, but the village was intact. The warriors cared nothing for pottery,
and thought it dishonorable to loot. Even now, there is pottery left in the
ruins, waiting for any with the courage to claim it." He had leaned in
closely then. "The work of a Bahavan pottery master would sell for a
premium in the bazaar," he said meaningfully.
    And now, Arlen was
in the middle of the desert, wondering if Abban had made the whole thing up.
    He went on for
hours more before he caught sight of a shadow creasing across the clay flats
ahead of him. He could led his heart thudding in his chest as Dawn Runner's
plodding hooves slowly brought the canyon into view. Arlen breathed a sigh of
relief, reminding himself that he ignored his father's voice for a reason. He
turned his horse south; the bowl came into sight not long after.
    Dawn Runner was
grateful when they rode down into the bowl's shade. The hamlet's residents had
apparently shared the sentiment, because they had built their homes into the
ancient canyon walls, cutting deeply into the living clay and extending outward
with adobe buildings indistinguishable in color from the canyon and invisible
from any distance. A perfect camouflage from the wind demons that soared out
over the flats in search of prey.
    But despite this
protection, the Bahavans had still died out. The river had gone dry, and
sickness and thirst had left them vulnerable to the corelings. Perhaps a few
had attempted the trek through the desert to Fort Krasia, but if so, they were
never heard from again.
    Arlen's initial
high spirits fell with the realization that he was riding into a graveyard.
Again. He drew wards of protection in the air as he passed the homes, calling
out "Ay, Bahavans!" in the vain hope that some survivors might
remain.
    Only the sound of
his own voice echoed back to him. The cloth that had served to block sun from
windows and doorways, where it remained at all, was ragged and filthy, and the
wards cut into the adobe were faded and worn from years of exposure to harsh
desert wind and grit. The walls were scarred by demon claws. There were no
survivors here.
    There were demon
pits dug in the center of the village to trap and hold corelings for the sun,
and blockades running up the steep stone stairways that zigzagged in tiers up
the canyon wall to link the buildings. They were hastily built defenses, put in
place by the dal'Sharum not to defend the Bahavans, but rather to honor
them. Baha kad'Everam had been a village of khaffit , men whose caste
made them unworthy of the right to hold spears or enter into