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I managed a shaky smile. “Yeah, but this place is as dry as those catacombs in Validen.”
“Fortunately, there aren’t any bodies down here,” he assured me.
Ben kept a hold of my hand and guided me to the bottom where we found ourselves among piles of crates. They were stacked in a haphazard fashion and many of them had inches of dust on their tops. The same dirt covered the floor, but I just made out a sort of path through the fallen earth that led to the rear wall of the room.
My heart began to pound in my chest as we neared the wall. Ben stopped a few feet from the barrier and held aloft the lantern. The frail light revealed a squat black stone with bushy stone eyebrows and thick stone lips.
I blinked at the creature. “Pazari?”
CHAPTERTWELVE
I squinted at the creature.The stone figure did indeed resemble our Validen acquaintance down to the pair of arms carved out of its smooth black sides.
The eyes opened and gave off a yellowish glow. The voice it spoke in wasn’t the deep gruff tone of Pazari, but a higher pitched and more feminine version of him. “Who dares compare me to that oaf?”
Ben smiled at the creature as he bowed his head. “It’s been quite a while, Tijari.”
The golem squinted its eyes at Ben. “Benjamin Castle? Is that you?”
Ben spread out his arms on either side of himself and inclined his head to the stone. “In the flesh.”
The creature scoffed. “My god, you’ve aged poorly. You should take better care of yourself.”
Ben burst into laughter. “And you haven’t changed a bit, Tijari.”
“A sitting stone rarely does,” Tijari quipped as her eyes fell on me. “But who do we have here?”
Ben gestured to me. “Tijari, meet Millie Lucas, my fiancee.”
I cast a scowl at him, but his pronouncement made the stone interested. “Is she? She doesn’t look like much, but I like her aura. It’s soft, like the summer breeze I used to feel before the earth sank.”
I blinked at her. “The earth sank?”
“Oh yes, when that horrible storm came through,” Tijari mused as she knitted her eyebrows together. “What a mess of sand and dirt it brought in! And all that seawater! It was enough to make a person drown and believe me, I saw many meet that fate that day.”
“We were curious about some events a little closer to the present,” Ben told her.
Tijari wrinkled her bulbous nose and movement made the sound of rocks grating together. “Oh well, these younger generations don’t know when to listen. Now what is it you were wanting to know about?”
“About the recent trouble with the Thaqiba and in the house of Prince Sharif.”
“Tall orders, especially the first one,” Tijari mused as she cast a side glance at him. “And I won’t be asking for the usual exchange today.”
Ben lifted an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
Tijari swept her eyes over the dusty basement. “As you can see, I haven’t received many visitors of late. In fact, the last time someone came down here was that pathetic shopkeeper Ghabiun. He was looking for some cloth he’d misplaced and thought it might be down here. I told him he couldn’t have set it down here because he was looking for a fabric that had only recently come in, at least from what I heard during his conversation with the delivery man-”
“Tijari,” Ben interrupted her. “Would it trouble you if you stated your price for any information you might have for us?”
Tijari wrinkled her nose. “Well, if you insist, but I only have information about the Thaqiba. You’ll have to find your own way out of that Sharif trouble.”
“We’ll gladly take that, but what’s the price?” Ben insisted.
The stone lifted her eyebrows and looked at him through narrowed eyes. “The payment for the information will be for you to scrub my back.”
Ben blinked at her. “Pardon?”
Tijari rolled her eyes. “I want you to rub my back with water, but not just any water. Only water from the ghasl will sink into my cracks and properly purify my luxurious body.”
