Arklem Greeth turned to the magical darkness. “I’m grateful,” he said, and sincerely.
“You will have many years to repay us,” said the voice, and it melted away as the darkness dissipated.
Arklem Greeth went to his beloved Valindra, and when she didn’t respond to him, he sat and draped an arm around her.
His thoughts, though, sailed out to sea.
“It has not been a good winter,” Deudermont admitted to Drizzt and Regis in the palace that day. “Too many dead men, too many shattered families.”
“And during it all, the idiots fought each other,” Robillard interjected. “They should have been out fishing and hunting, preparing the harvested crops and pooling their supplies. But would they?” He scoffed and waved his hand at the city beyond the window. “They fought amongst themselves—high captains posturing, guildless rogues murdering….”
Drizzt listened to every word, but never took his eyes off Deudermont, who stared out the window and winced at every one of Robillard’s points. There was no disagreement—how could there be, with smoke rising from every quarter of Luskan and with bodies practically lining the streets? There was something else in Deudermont’s posture that, even more than the words, revealed to Drizzt how brutal the winter had been. The weight of responsibility bowed the captain’s shoulders, and worse, Drizzt realized, was breaking his heart.
“The winter has passed,” the drow said. “Spring brings new hope, and new opportunities.”
Deudermont finally turned, and brightened just a bit. “There are promising signs,” he said, but Robillard scoffed again. “It’s true! High Captain Suljack sat behind me on that day when I was appointed as governor, and he has stood behind me since. And Baram and Taerl have hinted at coming around to a truce.”
“Only because they have some grudge with Ship Rethnor and fear the new leader of that crew, this creature Kensidan, whom they call the Crow,” said Robillard. “And only because Ship Rethnor ate well through the winter, but the only food Baram and Taerl could find came from the rats or came through us.”
“Whatever the reason,” Deudermont replied. “The Mirabarrans suffered greatly in the explosion of the Hosttower and have not opened the gates of the Shield District to the new Luskan, but with the spring, they may be persuaded to look toward the opportunities before us instead of the problems behind us. And we will need them this trading season. I expect Marchion Elastul will let the food flow generously, and on credit.”
Drizzt and Regis exchanged concerned looks at that, neither overly impressed by the goodness of Elastul’s heart. They had dealt with the man several times in the past, after all, and more often than not, had left the table shaking their heads in dismay.
“Elastul’s daughter, Arabeth, survived the war and may help us in that,” Deudermont said, obviously noting their frowns.
“It’s all about food,” Robillard said. “Who has it and who will share it, whatever the price. You speak of Baram and Taerl, but they’re our friends only because we have the dark meat and the fungus.”
“Curiously put,” said Drizzt.
“From Suljack,” Robillard explained, “who gets it from his friend in Ship Rethnor. Suljack has been most generous, while that young high captain of Rethnor ignores us as if we don’t exist.”
“He is unsure, like the Mirabarrans, perhaps,” Regis offered.
“Or he is too sure of his position,” Robillard said in a grim tone that Kensidan, had he heard, would have certainly taken as a warning.
“The spring will be our friend,” Deudermont said as the door opened and his attendant indicated that dinner was served. “Caravans will arrive by land and by sea, laden with goods from the grateful lords of Waterdeep. With that bargaining power in my hands, I will align the city behind me and drag the high captains along, or I will rouse the city behind me and be rid of them.”
“I hope for the latter,” Robillard said, and Drizzt and Regis were not surprised.
They moved into the adjacent room and sat at Deudermont’s finely appointed table, while attendants brought out trays of the winter’s unexpected staple.
“Eat well, and may Luskan never be hungry again!” Deudermont toasted with his feywine, and all the others cheered that thought.
Drizzt gathered up knife and fork and went to work on the large chunk of meat on his plate, and even as that first morsel neared his lips, a familiar sensation came over him. The consistency of the meat, the smell, the taste….
He looked at the side dish that ringed his main course, light brown mushrooms speckled with dots of purple.
He knew them. He knew the meat—deep rothé.
The drow fell back in his chair, mouth hanging open, eyes unblinking. “Where did you get this?”
“Suljack,” Deudermont replied.
“Where did he get it?”
“Kensidan, likely,” said Robillard as both he, Deudermont, and Regis stared at Drizzt curiously.
“And he?”
Robillard shrugged and Deudermont admitted, “I know not.”
But Drizzt was afraid that he did.
If Valindra Shadowmantle’s corpse had indeed been animated, she didn’t show it those hours subsequent to the strangers’ visit in Arklem Greeth’s subterranean palace. She didn’t sway, didn’t moan, didn’t blink her dead eyes, and any attempts to reach the woman were met with utter emptiness.
“But it will pass,” Arklem Greeth told himself repeatedly as he moved through the sewers beneath Illusk and Closeguard Island, collecting allies for his journey.
All the while, he considered the intruders to his subterranean palace. How had they so easily gotten past his many wards and glyphs? How had they even known that his extradimensional room had been anchored down there in the sewers? What magic did they possess? Psionics, he knew, from the one who had entered Valindra’s consciousness to calm her, but were they truly powerful enough in those strange arts to utilize them to neuter his own skilled magical wards? An involuntary shudder coursed Greeth’s spine—the first time anything like that had happened in his decades of lichdom—but it was true. Arklem Greeth feared the visitors who had come unbidden, and Arklem Greeth rarely feared anything.
That fear, as much as his hatred for Captain Deudermont, drove the lich along his course.
With an army of unbreathing, undead monsters behind him, Arklem Greeth went out into the harbor then out to sea, steadily, tirelessly moving south. He found more of his unbreathing soldiers in the deeper waters—ugly lacedon ghouls—and easily brought them under his sway. The undead were his to control. Skeletons and zombies, ghouls and ghasts, wights and wraiths proved no match for his superior and dominating willpower.
Arklem Greeth swept them up in his wake, continuing south all the while, paralleling the shore as he knew the Waterdhavian ships would do. His army needed no rest in the depths, where day and night were not so different. With their webbed, clawing hands, the lacedons moved with great speed, weaving through the watery depths with the grace of dolphins and the impunity of a great shark or whale. They stayed low, far from the surface, sliding past the reeds and weeds, crossing low over reefs, where even the mighty and fierce eels stayed deep in their holes to avoid the undead things. Only through a great expenditure of magic could Arklem Greeth hope to pace the aquatic ghouls, and so he commanded a pair to tow him along with them. Every so often, the powerful lich opened dimensional doors, transporting himself and his ghoulish coachmen far ahead of the undead army, that he would note the ships long before engaging them.
Well-versed in the ways of the ocean, Greeth suspected that the ships might be near when he first spotted the inevitable companions of any such flotilla: a lazily-swimming and circling school of hammerhead sharks, common as vultures along the perilous Sword Coast.
Greeth could have led his lacedon army wide of the small group, but the lich had grown bored of the long journey. He willed his escorts in a straight-line ascent toward the school, and he started the festivities by rolling f
orth a ball of lightning at the nearest sharks. They popped and jerked at the sparking intrusion, a pair hung stunned in the water and several others darted fast out of sight in the murky water.
The lacedons swam furiously past Greeth, their hunger incited. They tore into the closest sharks, and the stunned pair thrashed and rolled. A ghoulish arm was torn free, and floated down past the amused Arklem Greeth. He watched as another lacedon, clamped firmly in the jaws of a hammerhead, was shaken to pieces.
But the undead could not be intimidated, and they swarmed the shark with impunity, their claws slashing through its tough skin, filling the dark water with blood.
The school came on in full, a frenzy of biting and tearing, a bloodlust that made ghoul and shark alike a target for those razor teeth.
Greeth stayed safely to the side, reveling in the fury, the primal orgy, the ecstasy and agony of life and pain, death and undeath. He measured his losses, the ghouls bitten in half, the limbs torn asunder, and when he finally reached the point of balance between voyeuristic pleasure and practical consideration, he intervened in a most definitive way, conjuring a cloud of poison around the entirety of the battlefield.
The lacedons were immune, of course. The sharks fled or died, violently and painfully.
It took great concentration for Greeth to control the bloodthirsty ghouls, to keep them from pursuing, to put them back in line and on course, but soon enough the undead army moved along as if nothing had transpired.
But Greeth knew that they were even more anxious and eager than normal, that their hunger consumed them.
Thus, when at last those ships floated over Arklem Greeth’s army, Greeth was well-prepared and his beastly army was more than ready to strike.
In the dark of night, the ships at half-sail and barely moving in still air and calm waters, Arklem Greeth turned his forces loose. Three score lacedons swam up beneath one boat like a volley of swaying arrows. One by one, they disappeared out of the water, and the archmage arcane could only imagine them scaling the side of the low, cargo-laden ship, padding softly onto the deck where half-asleep lookouts yawned with boredom.
The lich lamented that he wouldn’t hear their dying screams.
He knew soon after that his ghoulish soldiers were tearing apart the crew and rigging, for the ship above him turned awkwardly and without apparent purpose.
A second ship came in fast, as Arklem Greeth had expected, and it was his to intercept. Many ships of the great ports were well-guarded from magical attacks, of course, with wards all along their decks and hull.
But those defenses were almost always exclusively above or just below the waterline.
The lich led the way in to the bottom of the ship with a series of small magical arrows. He concentrated his firing and soon the water near his target points hissed and fizzed as the arrows pumped acid into the old wood of the hull. By the time Arklem Greeth arrived at the spot, he could easily punch his hand through the compromised planks.
From that hand flew a small fiery pea, arcing up into the hull before exploding into a raging fireball.
Again the lich could only imagine the carnage, the screams and confusion!
In moments, men began diving into the water, and his lacedons, their job complete on the first ship, plunged in behind. What beauty those creatures showed in their simple and effective technique, swimming up gracefully below the splashing sailors, tearing at their ankles, and dragging them down to watery deaths.
The ship he had fireballed continued on its course, not slowing in the least as it reached the first target. Arklem Greeth couldn’t resist. He swam up and poked his head out of the water, and nearly cackled with glee in watching the tangled ships share the hungry fire.
More ships approached from every direction. More desperate men jumped into the water and the lacedons dragged them down.
All the darkness echoed with horrified screams. Arklem Greeth picked a second target and turned it, too, into a great fiery disaster. Calls for calm and composure could not match the terror of that night. Some ships dropped sail and clustered together, while others tried to run off under full sail, committing the fatal error of separating from their companion vessels.
For they couldn’t outrun the lacedons.
The ghouls fed well that night.
CHAPTER 29
WRONG CHOICE
T here’s not enough,” Suljack complained to Kensidan after the most recent shipment of food had arrived. “Barely half of the last load.”
“Two-thirds,” Kensidan corrected.
“Ah, we’re running low, then?”
“No.”
The flat answer hung in the air for a long while. Suljack studied his young friend, but Kensidan didn’t blink, didn’t smirk, gave no expression at all.
“We’re not running low?” Suljack asked.
Kensidan didn’t blink and didn’t answer.
“Then why two-thirds, if that’s what it was?”
“It’s all you need,” Kensidan replied. “More than you need, judging from the load you dropped at the Red Dragon Inn. I trust that Deudermont paid you well for the effort.”
Suljack licked his lips nervously. “It’s for the better.”
“For whose better? Mine? Yours?”
“Luskan’s,” said Suljack.
“What does that even mean?” asked Kensidan. “Luskan’s? For the betterment of Luskan? What is Luskan? Is it Taerl’s Luskan, or Baram’s? Kurth’s or Rethnor’s?”
“It’s no time to be thinking of it like that,” Suljack insisted. “We’re one now, for the sake of all.”
“One, behind Deudermont.”
“Aye, and it was you that put me behind him that day when he became governor—and you should’ve been there! Then you’d know. The people ain’t caring about which high captain’s which, or about which streets’re whose. They’re needing food, and Deudermont’s helping.”
“Because you’re giving my supplies to Deudermont.”
“I’m giving them to Luskan. We’ve got to stand as one.”
“We knew the winter would be difficult when we goaded Deudermont to attack the Hosttower,” said Kensidan. “You do remember we did that, yes? You do understand the purpose of it all, yes?”
“Aye, I know it all full well, but things’ve changed now. The city’s desperate.”
“We knew it would be.”
“But not like this!” Suljack insisted. “Little kids starving dead in their mother’s arms…I could sink a ship and watch her crew drown and not think a bit about it—you know it—but I can’t be watching that!”
Kensidan shifted in his chair and brought one hand up to cup his chin. “So Deudermont is the savior of Luskan? This is your plan?”
“He’s the governor, and through it all, the people are with him.”
“With him all the more if he’s doling out food to them, I would expect,” said Kensidan. “Am I to expect him to be a friend to Ship Rethnor when Baram and Taerl unite against me? Am I to expect those now growing more loyal to Deudermont to turn from him to support my work?”
“He’s feeding them.”
“So am I!” Kensidan shouted, and all the guards in the room turned sharply, unused to hearing such volatility from the always-composed son of Rethnor. “As suits me, as suits us.”
“You want me to stop supplying him.”
“Brilliant deduction—you should apply to the Hosttower, if we ever revive it. What I want more is for you to remember who you are, who we are, and the point of all of this trouble and planning.”
Suljack couldn’t help himself as he slowly shook his head. “Too many fallen,” he said quietly, talking to himself more than to Kensidan. “Too high a price. Luskan stands as one, or falls.”
He looked up, into the eyes of an obviously unimpressed Crow.
“If you’ve not the stomach for this,” Kensidan began, but Suljack held up his hand to defeat the notion before it could be fully expressed.
“I will give him less,” h
e said.
Kensidan started to respond, sharply, but bit it off. He turned to one of his attendants instead, and said, “Get the other third of Suljack’s supplies packed on a wagon.”
“Good man!” Suljack congratulated. “Luskan stands as one, and she’ll get through this time of pain.”
“I’m giving them to you,” Kensidan said, his tone biting. “To you. They are yours to do with as you see fit, but remember our purpose in all of this. Remember why we put Deudermont together with Brambleberry, why we let the good captain know of the Hosttower’s involvement with the pirates, why we tipped the Silver Marches to the advances of the Arcane Brotherhood. Those events were planned with purpose—you alone among my peers know that. So I give to you your rations, in full, and you are to do with them as you judge best.”
Suljack started to respond, but bit it off and stood taking a long measure of Kensidan. But again, of course, the Crow assumed an unreadable posture and expression. With a nod and a smile of gratitude, Suljack left the room.
The dwarf slowly followed, letting the high captain get long out of earshot before he whispered to Kensidan, “He’s to choose Deudermont.”
“Wrong choice,” Kensidan replied.
The dwarf nodded and continued out behind Suljack.
Amid the cries and the men rushing around, Suljack ran to the window overlooking the dark street, the dwarf close behind.
“Baram or Taerl?” the high captain asked Phillus, one of his most trusted guards, who knelt beside a second window, bow in hand.
“Might be both,” the man replied.
“Too many,” said another of the guards in the room.
“Both, then,” said another.
Suljack rubbed his hands across his face, trying to comprehend the meaning of it all. The second shipment had arrived from Ship Rethnor earlier that same day, but it had come with a warning that High Captains Baram and Taerl were growing increasingly angry with the arrangements.
Suljack had decided to send the excess food to Deudermont anyway.
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