Free City of Hawks by Gary Gygax

a cloak when she went out. That way she was certain that she had real protection. The witch stuff, the shouting and cackling, didn’t work as well with the gangs as it did with other sorts of adversaries. But they usually only bothered her when she strayed from the area between the rubbish dump and her place in the abandoned tannery, so with care there was no problem-other than finding food and a few little things to add to her comfort.
    “Glory!” The exclamation sprang unbidden to her lips. A whole bundle of wax tapers had been discarded along with someone’s garbage. The breaks in the candles weren’t too bad, and the oiled cloth they were rolled in was a minor treasure in itself. Leena bent down and began scrabbling around in earnest in that particular pile of debris. Perhaps there was more good stuff to be had.
     
    ***
     
    At an earlier time inside Old City, even within the slums, and outside in the New Town as well, others conducted their own searches even more carefully than old Leena scavenged for the means to stay alive. The word had gone out, and who had put it forth mattered not a bit. Beggars and thieves were alert. Petty clerics and city guards kept a watch on all they saw. Peddlers, shopkeepers, barmen, and ostlers too knew and sought to gain from their knowledge. Merely seeing a pretty woman named Meleena, and being able to prove it, was worth one hundred gold orbs. If she was seen with an infant, then the sum would be doubled. Should both be taken by those who sought them, then the informant who enabled that to happen would have a thousand of the fat discs of gold for his trouble!
    Every young woman in Greyhawk was viewed critically. Every mother with a baby was a potential fortune. A thousand eager informants turned the city inside out seeking the two, and a thousand false claims were checked and proved to be nothing more than that. The word was out for weeks before the offer was finally cancelled. By then, nobody much cared anyway, for avaricious expectations quickly turn to other and easier prospects.
    Other agents, ones with non-monetary motives, also sought the woman and the baby. Men and women with position and power used magical means or discreet inquiries to try to locate them. Strange creatures roamed the city at night searching for the two.
    No magic succeeded, no inquiry uncovered a clue, no occult observer saw anything of consequence. It was as if the earth had swallowed up Meleena and her charge, or the pair had been removed to some other plane. After a time the hunt was, in fact, transferred to likely places other than Oerth, places where the pair could have found refuge. Only a few of the nether plane’s operatives remained to continue the search in Greyhawk, and then only because those individuals had other duties there as well. Weeks became months, months rolled into years. By then even those agents had forgotten Meleena and her ward. Certainly, by now, both were long dead.
    “No one as weak and insignificant as that one could have avoided the sending of Poxpanus,” Sigil-dark observed when the subject came up in conversation one day.
    “Agreed,” said Arendil, the new Great Priest of Nerull now presiding over the Lightless Temple.
    “Our lord and master placed potent curses upon both woman and babe as well, did he not?”
    “Most assuredly. I assisted with minor portions of the whole complex of dooming which was cast,” the cleric said slowly.
    The mage was at a loss, “Five years now, near enough, and there has been no sign, no trace, no clue anywhere. There is only one possible answer. The pair was vaporized, blasted into nothingness. That must have happened long ago; so why do we still search?”
    Arendil gazed at the mage without expression. Sigildark was already above his true mark, and before long he would have to be replaced. “That is why I summoned you,” he explained. “Other, more pressing concerns now demand our attention. There is no longer to be any search for