Earth: Town of Simka, Feliss Province
One day before the spring equinox
2457 A.D.It began, as many things do, in a tavern: about eight o'clock on a Friday evening, in The Pot of Gold on Post- Hoc Lane in Simka. Contrary to its end-of-the-rainbow name, The Pot of Gold was a dreary blood-clot of a place -- the sort of vomitous swill-hole where the lamps had to be locked in wire cages to prevent drunks from swigging the kerosene, where the tapman's only insurance policy was a trio of flintlock pistols worn on a grease-smudged bandoleer, and where the Steel Caryatid squashed a cockroach <bang> with her tankard before asking, "Why would anyone go on a quest?"
"For glory," said Sir Pelinor.
"For God," said Sister Impervia.
"For kicks," said Myoko Namida.
"For Gretchen Kinnderboom," said I, "provided the task didn't take too much effort, and Gretchen promised to be extravagantly grateful."
The Caryatid slapped my foot (which was propped on the table beside her). "Be serious, Phil," she told me. "I'm talking about real, honest-to-goodness quests, not trotting down to Dover-on-Sea to fetch peach-scented soap."
I sat up straighter. "They've got a new supply of peach-scented soap?"
"Vanity, vanity," murmured Sister Impervia, whose own taste in soap could be described as "The more lye, the better."
"We're talking about quests," said the Caryatid, "and I don't understand why a sane person would go on one. Not that anyone at this table qualifies as sane."
Sir Pelinor sucked on his mustache, producing a wheezy, bubbling sound that was amusing the first time I heard it, irritating the next dozen times, totally maddening the three hundred times after that, and now a source of complete indifference. "Depends what you call a quest," he said. "Suppose a village hereabouts was having trouble with a largish animal -- a bear, perhaps, or a cougar. I wouldn't call it insane to gather a few friends and go hunt down the beast."
"Especially," Myoko added, "if the villagers offered a reward."
"Or suppose," Sister Impervia said, "a gang of heathen bandits stole St. Judith's jawbone from the academy chapel. Wouldn't we be honorbound to organize a party and retrieve the saint's remains?"
The Caryatid made a face. "Those aren't quests, they're errands. You'd leave such business to the town watch ... if Simka had a real town watch, instead of Whisky Jess and the Paunch That Walks Like a Man. I'm not talking about junkets to the countryside, I mean real live quests."
"What qualifies as a real live quest?" Myoko asked. "Finding the Holy Grail? Slaying the Jabberwock?"
"Saw a Jabberwock once," Sir Pelinor said with another mustache-suck. "Rusty mechanical thing in the remains of an OldTech amusement park. Four hundred years ago, parents paid for their kiddies to ride its back. No wonder OldTech society collapsed -- if I'd seen that monster when I was a child, I wouldn't have slept again till I was twenty."
"I don't care about your Jabberwock," the Caryatid said. "I don't care about quests at all."
"Then why," Myoko asked, "do you keep talking about them?"
"Because," the Caryatid answered, staring moodily at the cockroach guts on the table, "this afternoon I had a sort of a prophecy kind of thing."
"Uh-oh," said the other four of us in unison ... even Sister Impervia, who's theologically obliged to treat prophecies as Precious Gifts From Heaven. We all knew the Caryatid had flashes of second sight; alas, her gift of prophecy only raised its head when something really ugly was about to happen.
