by Mel Odom
“Aye,” a man said.
Jherek strained to hear better, but the numbness filling his body seemed to affect his ears as well. He was certain he knew the voice.
“Old Finaren, he’s soft on his people. Always puts something aside for them. Knew he’d give it to this boy even with him being what he is.”
The elf woman knelt and went through Jherek’s clothing. Her practiced fingers found the leather pouch Finaren had given him. She tossed it, seeming to weigh its worth in that single motion. “So young,” she said, standing. “Pity.”
“We should take his head,” Croess said. “Prove to that damned wizard that we did what we set out to do.”
“No,” the woman replied. “He’ll take our word.”
“His foot, then,” the big man said. “We’ll make it look like the ghost that’s supposed to haunt this place was responsible for killing him.”
“After you’ve gone and bled all over the place?” the woman taunted. She shook her head. “No, I’ll not have him mutilated. The old woman who raised him will be allowed to bury all of him.”
“Maybe that’s not your choice,” the big man grated. “It was me that got hurt. I’ll do as I damn well please.”
“Try, and he won’t be the only one who dies here tonight,” the woman promised.
Silence filled the court for a moment, then Jherek heard the big man limp away. His hearing dwindled, making it impossible for him to hear anything else that might have been said. His vision blurred, then finally turned dark. He felt stilled, buried in the icy core of his own shadow, wearing it like a shroud.
Through it all, even though the fear and anger burned through him, he wondered where the voice was. Why wasn’t it commanding him again, telling him to live so that he could serve?
The darkness crept in and stole even his thoughts away.
VIII
30 Ches, the Year of the Gauntlet
Laaqueel paused at the top of the wooden steps leading up to Fishgut Court. The battle taking place out in the harbor was drawing all of Waterdeep’s attention. More sailors and shopkeepers ran toward the harbor. Several of them brushed past Iakhovas and his wererat group, letting her know his spell still masked them. She studied the harbor, amazed that the attack had made it this far. Even when Iakhovas had made his plans, she’d had her doubts.
Another fiery salvo came from Waterdeep Castle’s catapults, painting flaming lines through the dark sky for a moment, then splashing down in the water in a violent flash of sparks and hisses that overrode even the screaming fear and rage and disbelief coming from the surface dwellers. Fingers of oily fire splayed out over the waves stirred up by Iakhovas’s wizard’s storm. The waves crashed ten feet high now, slopping over the sides of many vessels at anchor and shoving them into each other.
A Waterdhavian Watch wizard rode a flying carpet out over the harbor toward a floundering raker besieged by sahuagin boarding from the water. The malenti watched the wizard start his gestures to unleash a spell. Her instinctive fear was of fire, knowing how quickly her people perished when fought with that element. She said a quick prayer to Sekolah to spare the sahuagin warriors because the dead could not fight and she knew the Great Shark would understand that. The sahuagin didn’t see him, and she wished she could call out a warning.
Despite the howling winds being stirred up by the storm, the flying carpet held steady. It even held steady when the brine dragon’s head erupted from the uneven water. The dragon was nearly thirty feet in length and had a triangular, wedge-shaped head filled with sharp teeth. Covered with ridged and craggy scales that didn’t fit well together, the creature was a virulent green. Yellow tufts ridged its head, running from between its eyes and becoming standing scales as they went on down its back. It had flippers instead of claws. Snapping its wide mouth open, it clamped down over the wizard, swallowing him and the carpet whole. The dragon disappeared below the surface again just as quickly.
“Laaqueel,” Iakhovas called in a harsh voice.
She turned to face him.
“We’re not here to win, little malenti,” the wizard told her. Lightning suddenly savaged the skies, a forked white-hot sword that sheathed itself in purple umber, then winked out. In the brief, eye-stinging flash of light, Iakhovas’s tattoos stood out harshly against his skin. “But neither then shall your people lose more than the surface dwellers.”
Knowing it was the best she was going to get, she nodded. As she turned to take another look at the action in the harbor, a dragon turtle surfaced. It stretched his ponderous head out, unveiling the scaled armor protecting its neck, and breathed a cloud of scalding steam over sailors manning a nearby cargo ship. The men died instantly, their corpses throwing off gray smoke as they cooled in the night. Maybe the sahuagin wouldn’t win this battle, but the malenti knew that this night would never be forgotten in the history of the City of Splendors.
“Haste, little malenti,” Iakhovas told her. “Even now, with all the strength I’ve gathered, I’m not without limits. Should I not get what I’ve come for this night, the sahuagin sacrifices will indeed be for naught. I am their savior whether you wish it so or not.”
Laaqueel tightened her grip on her sword. Was he lying, or was he telling the truth about his limitation? She didn’t know. She gazed into his black eye, knowing the patch over his other eye was a silent promise that he wasn’t infallible, unless it was a sacrifice he’d willingly made at some time in exchange for something he wanted more.
She also knew that he wouldn’t tolerate her questioning him. She hurried up the steps after him, moving around the sign at the top of the stairs that advertised Fishgut Court’s attractions and businesses.
Iakhovas moved with confidence, working his way through the maze of streets that had Laaqueel lost almost immediately. In the sea, she’d always been able to get a perspective on the sahuagin communities by simply swimming above them. Here on land she was locked in with only two dimensions open to her. Despite her limited familiarity with coastal towns, she didn’t feel comfortable straying out of sight of the sea.
They left sight of the harbor almost immediately, though, and she tried to remember the streets as she saw the signs. Adder Lane came first, clearly marked. Ahead and on the left, a number of lanterns with different colored glass illuminated the full-sized carved creature out in front of an inn called the Rearing Hippocampus. Bouncers stood watch over the doors, their hands never far from their swords.
As Laaqueel passed them, a small group of sailors ran toward the inn, bellowing about the attack in the harbor. Iakhovas led his group down Adder Lane onto Gut Alley, cutting across to Snail Street, then turning left there. When they reached an intersection with Shesstra’s Street, Iakhovas turned right onto Book Street.
An older man with two young women stepped from a small shop. The painted letters across the boarded over bay window declared the place to be an herbalist’s. The business looked like it had fallen on hard times. The man and women were dressed in ill-fitting clothes that had seen better times.
Without warning, one of the young women screamed and grabbed the older man’s arm, pointing at Iakhovas and the wererat group.
Iakhovas’s attention swiveled onto her at once. “Execute the woman!” he ordered. “Damn her and the rudimentary skill she has for the true seeing. Humans should never have been allowed magic!”
His words hammered into Laaqueel. For the woman to have seen through the illusion Iakhovas wove with his magic, she had to have used magic of her own, but what magic was that?
What did she see when she saw Iakhovas as he really was?
The wererats broke ranks quickly, giving chase at once. Laaqueel pushed herself, feeling incredibly sluggish on the surface, but letting her desire to know more about her master push her to greater speed.
Obviously knowing that they weren’t going to be able to outrun their pursuers, the man barked orders to the screaming women to keep running, then turned to face the first of the wererats. He slipped a long,
slim club from his belt and called out in a harsh voice.
The lead wererat grinned in anticipation. As he moved to the attack, Laaqueel watched the creature’s human features drop away, becoming increasingly ratlike.
The shopkeeper swung his club with precision and skill, slipping past the wererat’s sword. When the club reached the wererat’s skull, it crashed through bone and brain, killing the creature at once.
From her studies, Laaqueel knew the wererats could only be harmed in any form other than their human ones by silver or enchanted weapons. The club represented a definite threat. She pulled up a step, allowing the pack of wererats to overtake her.
“Afraid?” one snarled at her as it changed into a rat man.
Laaqueel ignored the creature, feeling no disgrace at allowing it to attack the shopkeeper. Three wererats leaped at the man, driving him backward as they swung their short swords and snapped their vicious teeth.
A cold shiver prickled through Laaqueel as she took up the chase again. The young woman’s own abilities for magic had been revealed when she saw through Iakhovas’s illusion and the man’s by his club. The malenti knew it probably didn’t end there, but she gave chase, skirting around the snarling bodies of the wererats taking the shopkeeper to the ground by force. Still the man fought them, even knowing he was going to die. Every time the hand-carved club landed, wererat bones broke.
The extra effort required simply to breathe above the surface drained Laaqueel. Her gills flared open in an effort to compensate. The two women ahead of her grew closer, though, and none of the residences around them threw open their doors to help. Book Street remained deserted.
The women rushed into an alley to the left.
Laaqueel caught the corner of the building with her free hand and whipped her body around. The alley surprisingly turned sharply, almost switching back on itself to the right.
The woman who’d seen through Iakhovas’s illusion reached for a perilously stacked pile of refuse at the side of a fishmonger’s shop. Standing taller than a man, packed with fish tripe and bones from a few days’ business as well as rotting vegetables and other garbage, the pile came down in a wet rush.
Battered by the garbage coming down on top of her and swarming underfoot, Laaqueel nearly fell. She caught herself on one hand and kept going forward. Huge rats came down in the refuse as well. One of them whipped through her hair in its fright, and two others clung to her body. She swept the one from her hair, then hurled herself up against the side of the building to knock the ones off her back.
The women continued to scream fearfully.
Hoarse voices shouted overhead, and a few lights came on. No one came to investigate and no one peered too closely from the windows above ground level.
The malenti caught up with the second woman first. She swung her sword, bringing the flat of the blade down hard. The woman stopped running at once, dropping to the ground and laying stunned.
Still in full stride, Laaqueel grabbed the other woman by her hair and yanked her from her feet. The woman came down hard on the muddy cobblestones. The breath left her lungs in a rush.
Breathing hard, her gills not quite able to meet the demands being made on them, the malenti held her sword under the woman’s throat. She looked into the surface dweller’s eyes, seeing the fear there and relishing it. Fear meant power.
“Tell me—” Laaqueel gasped, “—tell me—what you saw!”
The young woman cried, tears flowing freely from her eyes as she shook her head and panted, “I can’t.”
Knowing the wererats were going to be on them within minutes, Laaqueel yanked the woman up and dragged her back to where she’d left the first woman. The malenti laid her sword on the ground and held the woman with one hand. She laid her other hand on the unconscious woman’s face. She prayed in her tongue, the sahuagin clicks echoing in the alley even over the continued shouts by the people inside the houses.
In answer to her prayers to Sekolah and to the power she wielded in the Great Shark’s name, the unconscious woman’s face writhed with sudden infection-filled weals. As she finished the prayer, the weals erupted in bloody pus. The woman moaned with the pain even though she was unconscious, barely clinging to her life.
Laaqueel fixed her hot gaze on the woman and shook her. “Tell me!” she roared. “Tell me what you saw or she’ll die in agony!”
It took two attempts for the woman to get any words out. “I can’t!” she cried finally. “Tymora help me, what I’m telling you is the truth. I was doing a true seeing, looking at an object brought to us by a sailor who wanted to know if it had any magic about it. When we heard the screams coming from the harbor, I went outside. I didn’t mean to see you.”
“What did you see?”
She shook her head. “The rat men,” she said. “You, and—”
“What about the other man?”
She struggled to make her mouth work.
“Better you welcome Umberlee’s dark caresses than leave yourself in my hands, child,” Laaqueel promised.
“I can’t tell you,” the woman said, “because I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What?” the malenti demanded. She heard the slap of feet on the cobblestones, coming closer. Whether they were wererats or Waterdhavian Watch, she was almost out of time.
“It was huge. Fearsome. All fins and teeth and—evil of the darkest sort. It hungers!”
Before Laaqueel could ask anything further, a green glow surrounded the woman. In the next instant her body came apart in thousands of flying sparks.
The malenti leaped back, startled and fearful of getting burned. The green sparks held neither fire nor heat, though, swirling into the air and winking out in a matter of heartbeats. Nothing remained of the woman. Laaqueel forced herself to her feet, seeing Iakhovas at the alley’s mouth.
He gave her a baleful glare with his single eye.
The creaking wheels of a wagon drew Laaqueel’s attention. She shifted to face the alley, spotting the black plague wagon rolling toward her at once. Ebony sheets fluttered in the wind.
No driver held the reins, and no draft animals pulled the wagon. It rolled slowly at Laaqueel, and the malenti knew she was looking at more of the hated surface dweller magic.
IX
12 Mirtul, the Year of the Gauntlet
“Wake up, boy!”
The stern voice scratched Jherek from the comfortable womb of darkness that had settled over him like a shroud. He wanted to tell Malorrie that he was dead, but he knew it wasn’t true. The quarrel still burned deeply in his chest.
“Who did this to you?” Malorrie demanded.
Jherek ignored the question as he opened his eyes. “What are you doing here?” His voice carried a whistle with it, and he knew it was caused by his left lung filling up with blood from the puncture wound. It already felt like rocks had been shoved into his chest, making it harder to breathe.
“You were late home to sup, boy,” Malorrie said. “Madame Iitaar sent me to bring you home. She knew when Butterfly put into port and how long she takes to off-load.” He made a sour face. “From the looks of things, she’s going to be properly vexed that she didn’t send me sooner.”
“It’s been kind of inconvenient for me as well,” Jherek told him honestly.
“You’ll not die.”
Jherek didn’t disagree. If anyone knew death, it was Malorrie. The old phantom had never admitted when he’d died, nor given any details on the how of it.
He knelt over the young sailor, concern etched in his translucent eyes, his gaze as always made somewhat confusing because he could be seen through. He was dressed as he always was in warrior’s chain mail with a deep scarlet tabard that hung to his ankles. It carried no coat of arms, no insignia of any kind. He carried a broadsword sheathed at his hip, stripped of any ornamental designs that might have offered a clue as to the phantom’s background. His face belonged to that of a man in his middle years, and his nature made it hard to tell the color of his
skin or hair or the thin mustache that stained his upper lip, but Jherek always felt the phantom’s eyes in life had been the blue of the seas.
“Mayhap you should lay here, boy, until I get some help.”
“No,” Jherek croaked. “This is Seven Cuts Court, remember? It’s a wonder I’m not dead already.”
“That arrow sticking out of your chest … it’s possible the ghost that haunts this place thought you were already dead.” The statement was Malorrie’s attempt at a joke, but he spoke truth as well.
The likelihood traced cold fingertips along Jherek’s spine. He had no idea how long he’d lain there after he’d passed out. It was still night, and his lung hadn’t completely filled up, so he knew it couldn’t have happened long ago. There was no sign of the elven woman or her partner.
The young sailor rolled over, then used his hands and knees to push himself up into a crawling position. It was awkward with the quarrel sticking out of his chest. Still it was short. If he’d been pierced with a cloth yard shaft, he might not have been able to get to his feet at all.
Standing, he swayed dizzily. He felt Malorrie clamp a hand on his elbow, helping steady him. He also knew the cost the old phantom had to endure himself with the contact. Where a true ghost had no problems touching a living being and doing harm, the geas that had been laid on Malorrie to prevent his rest in the afterlife also kept him from making contact with many of those still living. If he did lay hands upon them, the whisper of life-force that maintained him was drained by the living.
When Jherek had first come to Velen seven years ago, he’d fallen and broken a leg. Malorrie had been the first to find him. The phantom, ever considerate, tried to care for Jherek only to find to the consternation of both that touching a wounded person drained his life-force even more rapidly. Malorrie had never told Jherek how he’d happened to be in Velen, or why he’d decided to befriend him as a young boy, but Jherek had learned then that the price the old knight had paid had been high. In all his years, both alive and while dead, Malorrie said he’d never met or heard of another like him.