Tangled Webs

by Elaine Cunningham

  Aumark looked puzzled. “You are known to us all, Glammad, and your honor is beyond question. But you were not on the Elfmaid during this battle. Nor does your faith in this elf woman remove all suspicion from these mainlanders. They claim to have been rescued twice by sea elves. Are they in league with those who have done us so much mischief?”

  “Look elsewhere for the cause of your troubles,” advised Caladorn. “Does it not seem strange to you that the dead sea elves were placed in Ruathen barrels?”

  “Your reasoning is unsound,” Aumark pointed out. “If the elves believe that men of Ruathym killed their kindred, they would certainly seek revenge.”

  Murmurs of agreement rippled through the crowd, but Caladorn stood firm. “The dead elves were left in our path for us to find, and the stamp of Ruathym left plainly upon the deed.”

  “You are accusing us?” Aumark asked with deceptive calm.

  “I am warning you,” the nobleman replied. “Word of this matter is certain to bring trouble to your shores.”

  “If Waterdeep attacks, we will be ready,” Aumark said stoutly, and the assembled warriors responded with a roar of approval.

  Caladorn shook his head. “You mistake my meaning. My family’s business concerns are far-reaching. If Waterdeep had plans to attack Ruathym, I would surely have heard of them.”

  “So you say,” broke in a new voice. A burly man with a wild mop of curly, sun-streaked brown hair broke from the crowd and walked with the rolling gait of one not long off a ship’s deck toward the young Waterdhavian.

  “Wulhof of Ruathym,” he said shortly. “My ship put in to home port this morn, after a trip to Caer Callidyrr. Word on the island of Alaron is that a fleet of Waterdhavian ships is headed to the northern Moonshaes. Someone tipped ’em off with news that the Captains’ Alliance plans to sweep the smaller islands with a big raid come the new moon. And if that was about to happen,” he said with a significant glance at Aumark, “we would know about it.”

  “What Wulhof says is true,” agreed the First Axe. “Ruathym and Luskan have an alliance by that name, but we have made no such plans.” Aumark’s blue eyes narrowed and turned cold as they studied Caladorn. “Perhaps this is a ruse by your city, an excuse to attack our merchant ships!”

  “Did it not occur to you that the ships now guarding the Moonshaes must have been taken from their normal routes? These are the ships that patrol the northern seas!” Caladorn persisted.

  Wulhof let out a bark of humorless laughter. “Don’t I know it! A pair of ships flying Waterdeep’s colors chased us halfway to the Whalebones! And us not taking so much as a bolt of linen or a keg of honey by piracy!”

  “Not this time, leastwise,” offered a broadly grinning Northman.

  A burst of raucous laughter greeted this jest. When the mirth had faded, Liriel spoke again. “Try to follow what this man is saying: If there is no raid, then why have the eyes of the great sea powers been fixed on the Moonshaes’ outlying islands? Isn’t it possible the rumors of impending raids are no more than a diversion?”

  “I say there is a raid,” offered Ibn, taking the pipe from his mouth and fixing a venomous glare upon the drow. “It’d be just like Luskan to have a party and not invite us.”

  The assembled Ruathen responded with mutters of agreement.

  “That is not hard to believe,” Aumark said with a tight smile. “But if it is so, what are we to do?”

  “What good Northman waits for an invite?” roared Wulhof. “I say we set sail for the Moonshaes’ Korinn Islands straightaway and join the Luskan raiders. And let our damned ‘partners’ worry if there’s plunder enough left over to make up their share!”

  “It could mean battle with Waterdeep,” the First Axe pointed out, hoping to deter the rising tide of battle-lust.

  “Or, more likely, it could mean war with Luskan,” Liriel said, brandishing the ring of the High Captain of Luskan—the ring taken from the hand of the man who had commanded the attack on the Elfmaid.

  But her warning was lost in the excited roar that followed Aumark’s words. The Northmen, who had been denied the glory of combat for too long, hurried off to hone the edges of their swords and axes in preparation for the coming raid—and the possibility of a coming war.

  “Stupid, stubborn … men!” sputtered Liriel as she paced the floor of Fyodor’s room. “Idiots who think only with their swords—long or short! Even drow males are capable of better. At least they have the sense to watch their backs for the hidden blade. These orc-brained imbeciles are preparing to rush out to sea, leaving their homeland undefended, when it should be plain as moonlight that they are the target of a conspiracy! And rather than listen to someone who understands such things—who was weaned on treachery and intrigue—they pay heed to battle-randy sailors. It’s beyond belief!”

  Fyodor, seated on his narrow cot in Ruathym’s warrior barracks, observed the angry drow with an expression of resignation and waited for the storm to pass. Yet he could not deny that there was much wisdom hidden among the ranting words.

  “You are sure of this ring? And the sea elf who gave it to you?”

  Liriel lifted her pendant of Lloth. “With this I have looked into his mind. Xzorsh is like you—he speaks only truth. I don’t think the noble-minded idiot knows how to lie, and he’s as ridiculously slow as these Northmen to accept the possibility that one of his own might somehow have gotten the knack of it!”

  Her exasperated declaration brought several questions to Fyodor’s mind, but he was hesitant to ask most of them for fear of setting the volatile drow off in some new direction. One of these questions, however, he could not help but ask. “You have used the symbol of your goddess to look into my mind?”

  “No. Lloth will not touch you through me, this I swear!”

  The drow’s vehement tone and the haunted look in her amber eyes convinced Fyodor not to pursue the matter. “I agree with you that many strange things have happened in Ruathym, but I cannot piece them together.”

  “Let’s start with the raid on Holgerstead,” she said. “I suppose you’ve considered that Ibn might have supplied the tainted mead.”

  “More than considered,” Fyodor agreed somberly. “I have made inquiries among the men of Holgerstead. No one recalls that mead was among the goods Ibn sold.”

  “Who’s to say he needed to sell it? He might just as well have slipped a couple of kegs in among the rest.”

  “We could check Hrolf’s warehouses to see if some is missing,” Fyodor suggested.

  Liriel responded with a humorless chuckle. “Much good may that do us. Hrolf was not one for keeping records, and he wasn’t much of a housekeeper. No one but he knew what was in that place.”

  The Rashemi sighed and rose from his bed. “You continue to think on it, little raven. I am required to hold council with the other chieftains, but we will speak of these things as soon as we might.”

  “The heavy burden of power,” she said lightly, hoping he might hear the irony—and perceive the truth—in her words. But Fyodor responded only with a somber nod, and they walked together in silence.

  After Fyodor left her, Liriel made her way to Hrolf’s warehouse and let herself in with the key the pirate had given her. She did not hope to find any answers there, but she was tired and frustrated and in sore need of solitude. So she rummaged about a bit, found a few bolts of cloth, and fluffed them into a bed.

  Liriel had no idea how long she’d slept before she was roused by the squeak of the opening door. She was on her feet before the door swung shut behind the three men who had entered the warehouse.

  “Thought I’d find you in here,” announced a familiar, hate-filled voice.

  The drow sighed. This was starting to get tiresome. At least this time Ibn had been thoughtful enough to bring reinforcements. That might add some interest. He was flanked by Harreldson, the sailor who served as cook aboard the Elfmaid, and another man whose face was familiar but whose name Liriel had never learned.

  “One
of us you might catch with your damned elf tricks, but not three. You’ll not be getting away this time,” Ibn exulted. All three men drew their swords and began to advance on the drow.

  “Need help, do you? You prove yourself not only a traitor, but a coward!” she mocked him.

  Her accusation stopped the man in his tracks, and a stunned expression crossed his usually stolid face.

  “You are the traitor of Holgerstead,” she continued. “Who else could have supplied the drugged mead? Why else would you have traveled to Holgerstead rather than honor your captain?”

  Ibn snorted angrily. “Not that old song again! You’ve accused me before of getting into the mead, and you know damn well this tale holds no more truth than the last one. You’ve fooled a lot of folk here, but some of us remember the ways of the Northmen. Elves are not to be trusted, be they black, white, or green! Hrolf died, the damn fool, because he wouldn’t see that!”

  Something in his words raised a terrible suspicion in Liriel’s mind. She knew Ibn’s hatred of elves ran deep, but was it possible that he had slain his captain for the “crime” of consorting with elves?

  The very thought congealed the drow’s anger into a cold and killing rage. Her first impulse was to hurl a fireball at the red-bearded man, one that would leave nothing of him but cinder and ashes. Yet she did not dare. Hrolf had told her of the barrels of smoke powder stored in the enormous room.

  “So it was you who killed Hrolf,” she hissed as she advanced on the much-larger man. Although he held a weapon and she did not, Ibn instinctively fell back a step before her fury. His bearded face was slack with astonishment.

  But he quickly recovered from his surprise and brought his weapon around in a sweeping overhead strike. Liriel dove to one side and rolled clear, hearing as she did the sound of the first mate’s sword meeting answering steel. She came up to see Fyodor and Ibn circling each other, blades at the ready. The two other sailors closed in to help; Liriel quickly dispatched these with a pair of thrown knives so she could focus entirely upon the coming duel. Never had she seen Fyodor so angry, not even in the grip of a berserker’s frenzy.

  “I am Rashemi, and my sword is pledged to the wychlaran,” he stated. “Once before you attacked my lady; the penalty is death. You would have died that day at sea, had she not asked otherwise.”

  “Actually, it’s three times now, but the last one was hardly worth mentioning,” Liriel put in. When Fyodor tossed her a questioning look, she added, “He put a poisonous spider in my bed. How pathetic.”

  “Give me leave to kill him,” he said softly, his blue eyes blazing with wrath.

  For a moment Liriel was filled with cold exultation at the prospect of her enemy’s death and the absolute power she wielded at this moment over both men. It was an emotion she had seen many times, written on the dark faces of her drow kin, but one she herself had never expected to feel. The realization chilled her deeply. It was as if the touch of Lloth had left icy indentations upon her soul.

  “No!” she said with venomous denial, responding as much to her own thoughts as to Fyodor’s request.

  The young Rashemi stared at her. “It is a matter of law and of honor. This I must do, if I am to be your champion. Three times this man has attacked you—how can I let him live?”

  “Do you think I care for your laws?” she demanded wildly. “I will not send you into battle to kill for me, and perhaps to die. I will not!”

  The young man heard the note of rising hysteria in Liriel’s voice. He hesitated only a moment, then hauled back his sword and swung it high and hard toward the watchful Ibn. The older man parried the blow. Fyodor stepped in under their joined blades and delivered a single punch to Ibn’s gut. With a deep “Ooph!” the man dropped his sword and bent double. Fyodor brought the hilt of his blade down hard on Ibn’s neck, and the man dropped, senseless, to the warehouse floor.

  For a long moment the drow and her champion stared at one another. “War is coming to Ruathym, little raven,” he said softly. “A time will come when you must send me into battle. It is my destiny … and yours.”

  Liriel spun away from him and walked from the wooden building, her eyes burning with tears she could not shed. It was plain that Fyodor had misread her hesitation, thinking only that she feared to put him in harm’s way. That was true enough, as far as it went, and as much truth as she could bear for him to know.

  Adding to her confusion was the thought that Hrolf had been slain by a man he trusted. In her homeland many people fell to the treachery of friends, but it pained her to the soul that the openhearted, generous Hrolf would be betrayed in such fashion. It seemed to Liriel that in any way that mattered, this place was little different from Menzoberranzan.

  Very well, then. If that were true she knew precisely how to act. As the drow hurried toward the shore, her fingers closed around her holy symbol. She thrust aside the lingering despair that had been her constant companion since the day Lloth had claimed her as priestess. The power was hers; she would use it. She had promised Lloth a battle, a glorious victory. The Spider Queen would have her due, or Liriel would slay every stubborn Ruathen who stood in her way.

  But first, she had to convince the battle-mad idiots that they were getting ready to fight the wrong enemy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DROW DON’T DREAM

  Liriel half ran, half slid down the steep bluff that led to the sea. As her anger slipped away, the meaning in Ibn’s words shifted and took on new light. She was no longer so certain the man had caused Hrolf’s death. In fact, he seemed to have put the blame for it upon the sea elves, and on her as well. At first she had assumed his angry words had no purpose other than to vent his hatred of elven people. Now she suspected he saw them as truth.

  And perhaps Ibn was not entirely mistaken. Liriel would not soon forget the image of the hideous fish-man that lurked behind the handsome facade of the sea elf Sittl, or her suspicion that he might be a malenti. Xzorsh had vehemently denied the possibility that his friend might be a mutated sahuagin—had not even so much as acknowledged that such creatures existed—but still Liriel wondered. There was one who might have the answer, or who at the very least could be compelled to seek it.

  The drow stopped at the very edge of the water and dug in her bag for a tightly folded square of white silk. She shook out the delicate shawl, letting its fringed length flutter over the water like a banner. According to the lore books, a captured nereid would follow its soul-shawl and plead for its return; Liriel had circumvented this nuisance by commanding the nymph to stay silent and away. But now she had need of the nereid, and her long, high call rang out over the murmur of the waves.

  In moments the water nymph came to Liriel’s command. The creature retained little of the radiant beauty that had so entranced Wedigar. Even her voice was wan and pale as she begged for her shawl. Pitiless, the drow wrapped the wide silken sash around her own waist and faced down the nereid.

  “What do you know of Hrolf the Unruly? A big man, yellow braids, a mustache that came nearly to his chin? Did you cast a charm upon him? Answer truly, or I’ll rip these three pieces off the shawl’s fringe!”

  “No, I have charmed no man since the brown-bearded shapeshifter,” the nereid whined. “Is there one you would like me to charm and drown? This Hrolf?”

  Liriel’s eyes blazed as she tore the threads from the nereid’s soul-shawl. The nymph let out a wail of anguish and began to sob into her hands.

  “Little raven, what are you doing?”

  The drow turned and shielded her eyes with one hand. Fyodor stood atop the bluff, his blue eyes filled with horror as he gazed at the scene below.

  “Getting answers,” she called up to him. “Listen if you want, and come down if you must, but by all means let me get on with it!”

  At once she turned back to the weeping nereid. “Was it you who caused the other men to drown?”

  “Some of them,” the creature admitted. “Others were lured into the embraces of my sisters.
A few, though, were taken in by kelpies.”

  “Kelpies?”

  “Plant creatures. Third-rate sirens,” the nereid said with professional disdain. “It was a kelpie, I am told, that captured the sea elves your fisherfolk dragged ashore.”

  “Xzorsh did not speak of this,” Liriel mused.

  “As well he would not! It is hardly something to boast of.”

  “What do these kelpies look like?”

  “In water, they appear much as any common seaweed, with long wavering fronds. From time to time they throw off sprouts—small, round things whorled like the shell of a snail. When full grown, kelpies can cast a charm that makes them appear as a woman, a horse, or a sea mount—or whatever other creature the victim is most likely to desire.”

  Liriel tucked this information away. Most of it was new to her, but she wondered why the seagoing Ruathen did not suspect such creatures were at work. Most likely kelpies were unfamiliar to them, perhaps brought from distant shores. “From where did these kelpies come?” she demanded, hoping the nymph would name Luskan. That was the sort of evidence she needed!

  A sly look entered the nereid’s eyes. “From a place far beneath the sea. I will take you there,” she promised eagerly. “I will show you where they are grown!”

  The drow lifted one snowy brow. “Grown?”

  “The sprouts are tended, then sown into the sea to grow and to kill. Oh, let us go there!”

  But Liriel remembered something she had seen just a few days earlier, and vague suspicion firmed into certainty. She doubted she had to go anywhere with this nereid in order to find the immediate source of the kelpie sprouts.

  “You will stay here until I have need of you,” the drow commanded.

  “But my shawl,” the nereid pleaded, her hands extended. “Give it to me, and I will do anything you ask!”

  Liriel turned away and climbed the bluff, paying no heed to the nymph’s piteous entreaties. Fyodor extended a hand to her and helped her up the last few steep feet of the incline.