Demascus interjected, “I doubt any rival nation would be happy learning that its neighbor just found a way to dramatically upgrade its military power.”
“That’s what the Stewards believe, and that Tymanther has taken action,” said Arathane. “For no good reason! It’s all rumor derived from speculation based on zero evidence. We need to confirm whether Tymanther really is our enemy in this matter. If so, attacking our mine … is an act of war.”
“Huh,” said Arathane.
“But if they’re not responsible,” the queen continued, “our misguided response could cause a war where none was needed, while whoever’s really responsible for depriving us of our arambarium supply continues unchecked.”
“You need someone to find out what’s actually going on at the mine,” said Demascus.
The queen nodded, “And report back, which is demonstrably harder than it sounds. We need clear intelligence before we devise a response. A bungled policy could do more damage than no policy at all.”
“You said you’ve already sent peacemakers?” Riltana asked.
“Yes. Not to mention a special team of spies hand-picked by the Steward of Earth. But we’ve heard nothing. The mine is a blind spot. Not knowing what’s going on there is a like a tumor in the underbelly of Akanûl.”
“Where’s the mine?” said Demascus. “You said it was off the coast? Give me landmarks to steer by, and I’ll see what’s going on.” Anticipation of finding trouble made his heart beat faster. Or maybe it was just Arathane’s presence. He couldn’t be sure. He also suspected he was being more than a little rash.
“Hold on!” said Riltana. “I’m expert at sneaking into places—you need me along, too. But I don’t work for free. Neither does Demascus, except he’s too polite to remind you.”
“You’ll be compensated,” said Arathane. “And you’ll have my thanks, if you succeed.”
Riltana shook her head. “More coin I don’t need. What I do need …” The woman dropped her head, then looked up again. “All I would like is a small favor. Could you … could you tell Carmenere that I’ve agreed to help you? And that I’m thinking of her? Since she took that diplomatic post in High Imaskar, I’ve lost track of her. And I …”
The queen considered a moment, then said. “I will. In the next diplomatic courier package the Court of Majesty sends east, I’ll include a personal letter and make sure Carmenere sees it.”
Riltana smiled shyly. Demascus blinked. He’d seen the windsoul knocked unconscious by a goblin sneak, nearly ripped in two by a rakshasa assassin, and curse a streak so foul that he was certain the gods themselves blushed. This was the first time he’d ever seen Riltana vulnerable.
Demascus cleared his throat and said, “Anything else you can tell us, Your Highness? Even an insignificant hint could help us prepare. In my business, preparation is usually key.” He was glad she didn’t immediately ask him what his business was. She probably wouldn’t like the idea that he could sometimes call on the half-forgotten skills of a master assassin.
Arathane shook her head, then stopped and raised a hand, “You know, there is something. Not much, but … a peacemaker report a few months ago came to the Steward of Earth’s attention, and he mentioned it to me. I didn’t think anything about it at the time. Something about trouble on the wharf, in one of the warehouses shippers use to store cargo. Warehouse … fourteen? The detail that stands out in my mind is how, despite that shipyard workers reported sounds of a bloody conflict inside, when the peacemakers showed up, there was no evidence of anything amiss.”
“And how’s that connected with the mine?” said Riltana.
The queen shrugged and said, “On the same day, the speaking stone on the island went dead for almost an entire bell before we reestablished communication. We never did find out what caused it. Anyway, the phantom conflict in the warehouse and the speaking stone lapse occurred near the same time. Could be just a coincidence. I haven’t given it a moment’s thought until now.”
Demascus said, “We’ll run by the warehouse when we book passage out to the island. Speaking of which—where exactly is the mine?”
She stood and produced a parchment from her belt pouch. “The coordinates. What’s written here is a state secret.”
“It’s safe with us,” said Demascus. He reached for the parchment, but she took his hand before he pulled away.
She said, “Be careful, Demascus. We never did find time to have our chat. When you return, hopefully with news less dire than a Tymanther aggression on Akanûl soil, let’s remedy that.”
“Uh, that … that would be good,” he managed to respond.
“Yes,” said the queen. “I suspect it will be.” She released his hand, nodded to him and the windsoul, and departed his house.
Demascus was off balance too much to open the door for the monarch of Akanûl, so he just watched her back recede as she walked across his yard. She cut quite a figure …
He slammed the door as Fable slunk up. “I’m too quick for you, cat,” he said. When he finally turned back to Riltana, he saw she was grinning, all signs of vulnerability gone from her face.
“What?” he asked.
“Could you be any more transparent?”
“What’re you talking about? I—”
She shook her head. “Even a half-wit could see it. Damn, for someone so normally put together, you’re like a starving dog in a butcher shop whenever she’s around.”
Demascus chuckled. “It’s that obvious?”
“Yeah. I’m afraid it is.”
THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANÛL
17 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
RILTANA FLEW AMONG THE HOVERING CITYMOTES. THE wind caressed her like a lover’s arms. It bore her up when she asked, but only for a breath, before gently letting go.
She paused on a rusting bridge cable to take in the grandeur of the city.
The streets wound switchback paths up the cliffs, and steep stairs cut nearly vertical ascents between buildings. Suspension bridges arced between earthmotes above and below. Titanic pillars of stone rose from the sea, and gleaming elemental spires hung with crystalline clarity throughout the middle air. But today, the normally sunbaked streets and bright cliffs were dim beneath a shroud of clouds. An approaching storm darkened the iron sky, threatening a downpour of torrential strength. Normally she hated the rain, the dark, the sun-concealing clouds.
But not today.
Today, Airspur smelled sweeter than it had in months. The piling thunderheads looked like fairy castles. She wanted to fly up to them and see who lived inside. She wanted to sing. Maybe do a little jig. The queen was going to write to Carmenere on Riltana’s behalf! All Riltana had to do was help Demascus check out some moist piece of rock off the coast and see what kind of idiocy the miners had got up to. Easy. She imagined a gold-foil envelope, stamped with the queen’s seal in red wax. The envelope would be delivered to Carmenere’s rooms in faraway High Imaskar. She could see Carmenere breaking the seal, then reading her royal aunt’s message that pled for the estranged silverstar to make peace with Riltana …
She pumped her fist and grinned at a pigeon roosting on a nearby suspension line. If Arathane put in a word for her, the stubborn silverstar was bound to see reason! Carmenere would never have taken the diplomatic post so far from Akanûl if she and Riltana hadn’t quarreled. Probably …
The sooner she and Demascus accomplished Queen Arathane’s little job, the sooner the message would be dispatched. Riltana had volunteered to investigate the warehouse while Demascus chartered a ship in the dock district. Demascus had wanted them to stick together, but she’d insisted they split their efforts to save time. Patience wasn’t one of her strengths. Besides, she wanted to distract herself from thinking about the near disaster of last evening. I was so close! she thought. That damned painting was supposed to have been in the House Norjah gallery. Her black market inquiry, courtesy of Chant’s connections, had finally produced a lead. The odd woman who�
��d responded had seemed so legitimate, knowledgeable, and convincing. She’d known things only someone familiar with the painting of Queen Cyndra could’ve described. Why had a stranger pretended the missing painting was in that shadowy gallery?
Riltana frowned. Eventually she’d get that painting back, oh yes. And Hells help anyone who stood in her way. Or maybe not. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Having Carmenere’s queenly aunt on Riltana’s side was a surer road to reconciliation than anything Riltana could hope to accomplish on her own. Maybe she didn’t need the royal painting to impress Carmenere …
Frankly, given what’d gone down at Demascus’s apartment the previous evening, it was lucky things had turned out as well as they had. The goddess Tymora must be smiling down on Riltana. So why do I feel so guilty?
She knew why, of course. Because of her own damnable impulsiveness. She couldn’t help herself when certain situations reared their heads. Like finding herself alone with a surfeit of valuable and easily transportable goodies. Riltana smacked a fist into her palm. The pigeon on the suspension cable startled and winged off. She hadn’t been completely honest with Demascus. The Norjah vampires were right to call her a thief. When she’d slipped into their gallery and found no sign of the painting she’d sought, well, she helped herself to one hanging there instead. As compensation, of course; she’d paid a pretty sum to the woman who’d given her the tip. Riltana couldn’t be expected just to eat that coin, right? She’d only realized that she might be diving off a higher cliff than she’d reckoned when she lifted one of the paintings from its hook. The illustrated figure began whispering to her secrets of thievery and concealment—
Reflexively, in the moment of surprise, she transferred the framed canvas to the nonspace her gloves accessed. Then, while still wondering if she’d merely imagined a talking canvas, an alarm tripped. Probably an alarm wired into the hook on which the painting had rested. A horde of pig-straddling vampires roared into the gallery. She’d fled, and they gave chase. Even through the empty air! When Riltana realized she wasn’t going to lose them, she headed to Demascus’s home. The deva had helped her out of binds before, though never one so serious. She blinked. It was too late to change what’d happened. All she could do was deal with any consequences from House Norjah. Later. After she and Demascus handled the arambarium situation and Riltana received her reward from Queen Arathane. It might not even be too much to imagine that Carmenere could receive Arathane’s letter within just a couple of tendays!
She pitched forward off the cable and dove past an entire cliffside neighborhood in mere heartbeats, braking on wings of wind at the last instant. She came down like a honeybee on a petal, her boot heels barely clicking the shingles of a warehouse roof.
The queen had identified this warehouse. Thanks to her dawdling on the bridge, Demascus was probably already down along the wharf talking to potential ship owners about a charter. She’d have to make up for lost time.
Riltana dropped from the rooftop into the middle of the busy street. A gaggle of dockworkers glanced at her. Most likely they saw just one more courier wearing Airstepper Guild robes on her way to deliver a package to a captain or merchant in the dock district. The robes perfectly concealed her newly enchanted leather armor. Pricy, but paid for with the reward she’d earned when helping the queen with the plague demon hiding beneath the Firestorm Cabal several months earlier. She sauntered through the open front door of the warehouse. Sweat-soaked workers were wrestling crates into compact rows that stretched back to the far wall and halfway to the ceiling.
A genasi with a quill and scroll noticed her. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a message to deliver.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s a document. I’m supposed to deliver it directly to the owner of this place.”
The genasi shrugged and pointed at a short flight of stairs leading up to a landing halfway up one interior wall. “Lord Pashra isn’t here.”
“Mind if I wait?”
“Fine. But stay out of the way.” The genasi returned his attention to the workers.
Riltana sidled up to the foreman. He was totaling cargo manifests. Apparently this Lord Pashra did a mean business in turnips, potatoes, and onions. That explained the pungent odor. Nothing mineral related. Not that she had expected it to be so easy.
“Yes?” the genasi said, noticing her still standing next to him and ogling his tallies.
“You know what? The smell of all these onions is making me sick to my stomach. Mind if I go wait up by the office?”
The genasi waved a hand. “If that will get you out from under my feet.”
Riltana took the stairs. When she reached the landing at the top and peered back, neither the foreman nor the workers spared her so much as a glance. They were absorbed in their task of finding a more efficient packing configuration to make room for a “mess of beets” from Turmish. If they were acting unconcerned to throw off suspicion, they were doing a damn fine job … Too good. Riltana had the sinking feeling she was on the wrong track and wasting time. Well, she was here. She should at least take a quick look around to make certain.
She faded back from the railing until she was right next to the office door. She tried the handle. Locked. But not for long. Riltana pulled a thin wire and a couple of other oddments from the cuff of her robe. With her back to the door and her eyes on the warehouse floor, she tried to give the impression that moving crates was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. She inserted the pick into the lock by touch. It was an exploratory poke, to see how many pins she was dealing with … and whether or not Lord Pashra had fortified the lock with a trap. But the telltale tightness of a mechanical trigger connected to something nasty, or the faint tingle that usually warned her of a hex, was absent. All she needed for the simple mechanism was a tension wrench, a slight turn, a few taps with the wire used like a pick … and click.
She opened the door just enough to slip through, and entered. She didn’t quite shut it behind her; she wanted to hear if anyone came up the stairs—
A flicker of movement by her boots made her freeze. She let out her breath as she watched a spider scuttle away across the scratched plank floor, probably terrified she would stomp it flat.
The space was too big to have originally been an office. Pashra must have converted an ancillary storage room. A ramshackle table squatted in the center of the chamber, surrounded by stools. Another table was shoved into the far corner, creating a makeshift desk. It was layered with a mess of open scrolls and parchment pages. A lantern bolted to the wall over the desk bathed the room in yellowish light. Shelves in one corner held a litter of colored stones, books, scroll cases, and what apparently was a collection of dining plates from all over Toril. Then Riltana caught sight of a map on the wall between the desk and shelves that showed both the continent of Faerûn and a land mass to the west labeled “Returned Abeir.” The word “Menzoberranzan” was written in red ink on the map some miles northeast of Waterdeep. The name seemed vaguely familiar, but Riltana couldn’t place it. Something to do with elves, maybe?
“Now,” she murmured, “If I were secretly funneling a super-rare elemental mineral out of Akanûl, where would I hide my secret ledger describing my treachery in exact detail?” She chuckled. Finding such a record wasn’t out of the question. Criminals had at least as much cause to keep track of their merchandise as did legitimate merchants. In her experience the difference between legal and illegal wares was mostly dependent on how richly bribed the public officials were.
She sorted through paperwork. Manifests, lists of ports, projected prices for various vegetables, notes of intent to buy or sell various amounts of said vegetables, and upkeep costs for boats and warehouses … didn’t this Pashra have some sort of filing system? The disarray was almost comical and definitely ordinary.
Something came into focus about a foot in front of her, its shadow large on the clutter of documents. She leaped back with a curse even as she saw it
was another spider, this one hanging on a slender web she’d missed in the lantern’s dull light. She’d never been especially afraid of spiders. Until she’d seen the nightmare called Murmur feed several people to its pit of bugs. They’d been devoured alive, swarmed by hungry spiders and other insects … Her stomach felt funny. She swallowed, and focused on the tiny arachnid dangling in front of her. It’s just a spider, she told herself. It can’t hurt you. Unless it’s poisonous.
Either way, it was an ugly bastard with a body nearly as thick as her thumb. She could even make out its little eyes, like tiny buttons, fixed on her.
“All right, blister, that’s how you want to play it?” She grabbed a handful of papers and rolled them up. As if it guessed her intent, the spider sprinted down its web line and disappeared somewhere behind the desk. She leaned across the morass of papers and noticed a hollow she’d missed in the wall. As she peered inside, her eyes widened.
The hollow crawled with spiders. Too many to count, boiling over each other and across some kind of bulky object. A … person, wrapped in a shroud of lacy webbing. She could make out features frozen in a rictus of open-mouthed terror, beneath a suffocating white layer.
“Oh, shit!” Most of the spiders were coin size, but a few were larger than her palm. She eased back.
“Greetings,” a voice said.
Riltana spun. A watersoul genasi stood just inside the door, now closed. Damn.
“Who’re you?” she said. Something wasn’t right about him. The sea-foam hue of his skin was unnatural, as if the watersoul suffered some kind of sickness or blight.
“I’m Pashra. The question is who’re you?”
She swallowed, and forced herself not to glance back down into the hollow.
“I, uh, got a message to deliver. A document. For you, I guess, if you’re the owner.”
The genasi said, “That’s me. Can I ask why you’re going through my desk?”
She raised the incriminating papers she’d rolled into an impromptu spider-swatter. “What, these? I thought I saw a bug.”
Sword of the Gods: Spinner of Lies Page 4