by Paul S. Kemp
“What do you want?”
“Get out of my sight,” Riven retorted. “And tell Verdrinal to get down here, now.”
The house guard’s eyes narrowed. Riven assumed he was trying to be intimidating. “He’ll be along soon enough.”
Riven said nothing. Verdrinal was no doubt upstairs with a woman. The nobleman went through women the way other men went through clothes. The man’s insatiable tastes made him weak—he lacked focus, lacked discipline.
“Why don’t you fetch Hov, boy. Keeping an eye on me is no job for a little puke like you.”
The house guard snarled and stepped back from the landing. He stomped down the stairs, a white-knuckled grip on his sword hilt. He walked up to Riven, face to face.
“Don’t ever burst in here again or I’ll put you down. I don’t need Hov for the likes of you.”
Before the guard could move, Riven whipped free a dagger and stabbed him through the gut.
The surprised house guard grunted in pain, tried to draw his own blade, but doubled over instead. Warm blood coursed over Riven’s hand and stained the house guard’s purple uniform black. Riven jerked the dagger free and kicked the guard to the floor.
“Never say don’t to me, boy.” He knelt and wiped his blade clean on the dying house guard’s uniform.
“Drasek!”
Verdrinal’s voice from atop the stairs pulled his gaze upward and wiped the satisfied smile from his face. The tall, brown-haired Zhentarim nobleman had taken the time to don a shirt and blue pantaloons. He pointed a long finger at the groaning house guard.
“What have you done? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good men?”
Riven ignored both the question and the house guard’s dying spasms. He stared into Verdrinal’s eyes.
“If he was a good man, he wouldn’t be dying on the floor. And if you ever call me Drasek again, Verdrinal, I’ll leave you bleeding beside him.”
Verdrinal smiled distantly at the threat and descended the stairs. “But Riven sounds so formal,” he said with a phony smile. “And the two of us such old friends.”
Riven spat on the foyer floor, sheathed his dagger, and said nothing.
The house guard gasped and finally expired. Verdrinal looked down at the expanding pool of blood on the hardwood floor. His smooth, handsome face creased with a flash of anger. “What a blasted mess.” He stared ice at Riven. “Varra,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Varra!”
After a moment, a pretty brunette maid in a white nightdress scurried into the foyer through an adjacent doorway. Upon seeing the corpse, she gasped.
“Clean this up please, Varra dear.” He shot Riven an ingenuous smile. “Mister … Riven and I will be in the study.”
The girl gave a frightened nod, whirled in a cloud of white nightdress, and ran from the foyer. Riven watched her go, aroused by the way the thin cotton hugged her slim hips as she ran. Verdrinal’s voice stopped her at the doorway.
“Oh, and Varra …” She turned, eyes wide. Riven leered at her.
“Please let Hov know that I have company.” She nodded again and ran off.
Riven glanced at Verdrinal and didn’t bother to hide his derision. Hov, a brick wall of a warrior with a two-handed broadsword and a mean temper, headed Verdrinal’s houseguards.
“Afraid?” he asked Verdrinal.
“Merely cautious, Riven, as always.”
Cautious or not, Riven knew that he could put Hov down one-on-one, but the big bastard probably would bring along additional men. That could create problems.
Stay sharp, he reminded himself. Though Verdrinal was incompetent, he was also reasonably cunning, and he resorted to bloodletting almost as readily as Riven. He’d turn the house guard loose if Riven pushed him too hard.
Taking a deep breath, Riven struggled to quell the anger that had brought him here. Killing one of Verdrinal’s house guards had helped.
Verdrinal strolled into the study off the foyer and lit an oil lamp. Plush chairs and expensive rugs covered the floors. Beautiful, Riven acknowledged, but decadent and useless, like Verdrinal himself. Bookshelves towered from floor to ceiling, filled with leather bound tomes and ribbon-tied scrolls. Riven doubted Verdrinal had read many of them. He collected books just as he collected women—pretty things to decorate his home and impress visitors.
Verdrinal pulled forth a decanter of liquor from a cherrywood hutch and poured himself a glass. “Drink?” he asked Riven.
“No.”
Verdrinal shrugged and sauntered back to where Riven stood in the study’s doorway. Neither man sat. Verdrinal eyed him over the rim of his glass.
“What is it you want, Riven? What time is it? Second hour? By Cyric, it’ll be dawn in five hours.” As if to make his point, he staged a theatrical yawn.
Riven forced down the urge to punch Verdrinal in his open mouth. No doubt Hov and his men were already watching from some secret room nearby.
“What I want is an explanation. And since Malix has gone underground, that leaves only you.” Malix, Riven’s handler and the highest-ranking Zhentarim agent in Selgaunt, had vanished soon after Riven had sabotaged the Righteous Man’s summoning of the dread. “You know anything?”
Whirling the liquor around in his glass, Verdrinal regarded Riven shrewdly. His green eyes reminded Riven of a viper’s.
“Malix has returned to headquarters to personally report recent events to Lord Chembryl. In the meantime, he’s left me in charge.”
Riven stiffened. “You!”
“Me.”
“Temporarily, no doubt.”
“Temporarily,” Verdrinal said, conceding with a nod. He quickly added in an arrogant tone, “But until then, I’m your superior.”
At that, Riven’s anger boiled over. He no longer cared about the Zhentarim hierarchy or whether Hov and the guards were watching. He stepped close to Verdrinal and hissed into his face, “Well then, you arrogant little bastard, if you’re the one in charge, then you can explain to me what in the dark is going on! I’ve lost six operators to this demon. Six! And every one of them sucked dry as a prune. Malix said the dread would kill the Righteous Man and then leave. Leave!” He clenched a fist before Verdrinal’s handsome face and barely restrained the impulse to beat the man to pulp. “Godsdamned mages never know what they’re talking about!”
Verdrinal endured the tirade without expression, even the insult and fist in his face. He waited to be sure Riven had finished, then replied in the tone of voice used to explain something to an angry child. “Things have changed, Riven.”
Riven stared at him, amazed that Verdrinal could say something so obvious, and so stupid. “Really.”
Verdrinal winced at the sarcasm, took a sip from his glass.
“The dread has somehow managed to remain on our plane. Malix is not sure how. He is sure that it has summoned lesser minions,” here he smiled, “and is now doing what demons do.”
Riven found Verdrinal’s self-satisfied tone infuriating. The man was speaking casually about demons, as though they prowled Selgaunt every other tenday! He forced down his anger only because he needed information. “So what are we going to do about it? I can’t keep losing men to this thing.”
Verdrinal gazed at him condescendingly. “Malix’s orders are to do nothing about it.”
“Nothing! Did his brain turn to dung? It’s killing my men. Our men. Good operators.”
“True, but it is also killing the heads of certain noble families and a multitude of rival leaders. It appears to have taken the Righteous Man’s enemies as its own.” He smiled and waved his hand, a weak gesture. “Don’t you see? It’s doing our work for us. We’ll let it purge the underworld and only then move against it. That’s why Malix went to see Lord Chembryl personally, to determine when to take the next step.”
Riven had to admit the logic of the course. A few dead low-level Zhentarim operatives were copper pennies to the gold fivestars of dead patriarchs and rival guildmasters. Malix had been hoping merely to elim
inate the Night Knives with the dread, but the creature was doing far better than expected; it was single-handedly securing Selgaunt’s entire underworld for the Zhentarim.
“How do we know we can get rid of it?”
Verdrinal ignored the question. “It attacked Stormweather earlier tonight.” He grinned smugly, took a sip of his drink, and said nothing more. Verdrinal knew Riven’s hate for Erevis Cale. He wanted him to ask for details.
Riven could not help himself. “And?”
“And at least twenty guests present for one of Thamalon’s balls were slaughtered.” Casually, he took another sip from his glass. “Did you know that I was invited to that ball?”
Riven ground his teeth together. You should’ve attended, he thought, but didn’t say. “Cale?”
“Lives. Apparently drove the dread off himself, though the Uskevren daughter was gravely hurt. Quite a man, this Erevis Cale. Quite a man, indeed.”
Riven realized that he had been clenching his fists. He released them and said, “I’ll take that drink now.”
“You know where it is.”
Riven walked to the cabinet and surveyed the many bottles Verdrinal kept there. Able to read only with difficulty, he could not tell the vintage of any of the wines, but he’d be damned before he let Verdrinal know of his illiteracy. He grabbed a bottle at random and poured himself a glass. “He’ll be looking for a cause,” he said, and gulped the wine in a single drink. “Cale, I mean.”
Verdrinal nodded. “I hope so. If all goes well, he’ll find his cause. That’ll solve another of our problems, won’t it?”
Riven nodded stiffly and poured himself another glass of wine. He gulped it down too.
A month earlier, Cale and that little halfling rat Jak Fleet had ruined Riven’s otherwise perfect plan to kidnap the youngest Uskevren whelp, Talbot. In the process, they had marked Riven with a scar on his back that had yet to heal fully. More importantly, the failed operation had dealt a harsh blow to Riven’s aspirations for rising within the Network.
Now I find myself answering to a decadent dolt, he thought.
Since then, the Zhentarim had been keeping a close eye on Cale. They would have done the same with the halfling, but Jak Fleet had vanished into the underworld. Riven had known ever since that Cale’s death was simply a matter of time, but he had hoped to kill the bald overgrown butler himself. A man like Verdrinal would not understand that.
Still angry, he walked back to face the nobleman and jabbed a finger into his chest.
“What about my men? I can’t afford to lose any more.”
Verdrinal backed up a step and placed a finger to his lips in affected surprise. “Dark! You’ve just reminded me of something. Oh my! Oh, this won’t make you happy.”
Riven’s stare bored holes into him.
Verdrinal feigned dismay, but Riven saw the mirth in his eyes as he spoke. “Before Malix left, he told me to tell you to have your men go underground. To avoid the dread. That way—”
Riven smacked the drink out of his hands and gripped him by his fish-white throat. “You dog!” He slammed his head into Verdrinal’s nose. Verdrinal exclaimed and staggered backward, clutching at a broken nose streaming blood.
“You want to play games with me! I lost six men while you sat on that warning!” He jerked free a dagger, grabbed Verdrinal by the robe, and waved the blade before his dazed, watering eyes. “I should split you right now.”
“If you do, you’ll never get out alive,” Verdrinal mumbled, and smiled through the blood pouring out his nose.
Behind him, Riven could hear the hurried boot stomps of Hov approaching alone. He spat into Verdrinal’s face. “Won’t be long and the time will come for you and me.” Riven pulled Verdrinal’s bleeding face close. “Just not tonight.”
Verdrinal, recovered now from the blow to his nose, and actually grinned. Disgusted, Riven threw him to the floor.
“Our time can come tonight, Drasek,” Verdrinal taunted. “If you want to stay. I’m sure Hov would appreciate some company.”
Riven turned and found himself staring into the wide, leather-armored chest of Hov. He took a step back and looked up into the big man’s dull brown eyes. Hov glared down, right hand on his sword hilt, left hand clenched in a fist.
“Anytime,” Riven whispered. “I’ve already left one of yours dead on the floor. What’s one more to me?”
Hov smirked but said nothing.
Riven stalked past and headed for the foyer. Behind him, Verdrinal’s mocking voice rang in his ears. “Praise to Cyric,” the nobleman said, the standard Zhentarim words of greeting and farewell, but only among compatriots.
Without breaking stride, Riven shouldered over a delicate nude female statue. It shattered into hundreds of pieces on the foyer floor, chunks of marble splashed into the pool of blood that Varra had yet to clean up. Verdrinal squealed in protest.
“You bastard! You—”
Riven smiled and strode out the door. “Praise to Cyric,” he said mockingly over his shoulder.
CHAPTER 5
AFTERMATH
Cale waited anxiously in the carpeted hall outside Thazienne’s room. Sweat beaded his brow and a lump sat in his throat. When he had left her side to organize the cleanup, she still had been unconscious and barely breathing. Her face had looked so pale and drawn.
Behind the closed door of the bedroom, he could hear Thamalon, Shamur, and Tamlin praying with High Songmaster Ansril Ammhaddan, Priest of Milil. Talbot had not yet arrived. Cale had sent a servant for him several hours ago, and was growing worried by his continued absence. Talbot would never forgive himself if something happened to her and he was not here for it.
Though Thazienne still treated her little brother as if he were an adolescent—much to the rapidly maturing young man’s annoyance—Cale knew that brother and sister still shared a close bond. He hoped Talbot arrived soon.
Through the thick door Cale listened to the soft, melodic murmur of the High Songmaster’s song spells and the teary, answering chorus of the grief-stricken Uskevren. Thamalon had invited Cale to accompany the family in prayer of course, but Cale had gently declined. He was not a religious man. His presence would be a hindrance to them, not a help. Prayer and priests made him uncomfortable. Gods made him uneasy. He thought people of faith often to be overly gullible—followers not leaders. Only Jak had shown himself an exception to that rule. Religion distracted men, made them blind to the true nature of events around them. The Righteous Man embodied the point. His obsession with the worship of Mask had made the old man vulnerable. Cale would never allow himself to fall into such a trap. No, Cale preferred to rely not on divine assistance, but on his brains, his body, and his blades. Now more than ever before, however, he realized that those three things could not solve all problems. He saw in his mind Thazienne lying unconscious in her bed, weak and stricken, barely breathing. His wits and steel could do nothing for her, he knew, but he still could not bring himself to offer prayer.
Of course, his brains and blades could solve other problems. The need for payback, for example.
Later, he reminded himself, and swallowed his rising anger. For now, Thazienne’s well-being was all that mattered. Besides, at the moment he felt too exhausted and worried to plan vengeance. For an instant, he wished he could allow himself to find solace in faith.
Instead, he found solace in a high backed armchair. His anxious pacing did nothing but wear out the carpet and his nervous fidgeting only fed his worry. Trying to calm himself, he crossed his long legs, clenched the carved arms of the chair, took a deep breath, and tried hard to remain still. He had ordered the staff away so that they would not see the family distraught, but he would have welcomed someone to talk to now. Even Larajin. Anything to distract him. He felt so damned useless!
The praying within Thazienne’s bedroom stopped. Cale waited anxiously. After a moment, the door to her room slowly opened and the High Priest shuffled out. A heavyset yet stately looking old man with a thick beard and a ne
atly combed mane of gray hair, High Songmaster Ammhaddan looked so somber that Cale’s stomach hit the floor. He tried to rise from the chair but the strength had gone out of his legs.
Tamlin, eyes red and swollen, followed the High Songmaster out. Thamalon and Shamur came last. Both still wore their attire from the celebration, the fine clothes now stained, wrinkled, and disheveled.
With tears streaming unabashedly down his clean-shaven face, Thamalon gently pulled the door closed. Beside him, Shamur struggled to hold back her own tears, but finally lost the fight and wept openly. Her slight body shook with sobs.
Awkwardly, as if unsure of himself, Thamalon took her in his arms. She stiffened immediately, haltingly returned his embrace, and quickly disengaged. Though grief-stricken, she still insisted on maintaining her distance from Lord Uskevren.
Cale saw the hurt on his lord’s face. The wound in his heart of a stricken daughter salted by the coolness of his wife. At that moment, Cale detested Lady Uskevren.
“It will be all right,” Thamalon whispered to her. He lifted a hand as though to touch her face, but let it fall to his side without contact. “It will be all right.”
Caught up in their emotion, Cale felt his own eyes begin to well. He lowered his head and looked at his hands. She can’t be dead! he inwardly protested. She can’t.
He had to hear it explicitly before he would believe it.
He stood on legs still weak and walked over to the solemn High Songmaster, who looked on the grieving Thamalon and Shamur with an understanding, fatherly expression. High Priest Ammhaddan turned to see him coming and regarded him with the same paternal warmth. Cale’s legs gave out and he nearly fell to the floor. The High Songmaster, strong despite his years, caught him by the arm and helped him to stand upright.
Cale gave him a grateful smile through teary eyes. His voice caught when he spoke. “Well?” he asked, and winced in anticipation of the answer. “How is she?”