The City of Splendors c-2

by Ed Greenwood

  Lhamphur and Dorn Imdrael shot him similarly suspicious glances, but it was Lhamphur who spoke up. "What's the occasion, Var? And why here, in such secrecy, instead of at your grand little citadel on Nethpranter's Street? Something you don't want your 'prentices to hear?" He glanced around curiously. "What is this place, anyway? A new venture you want our coins for?"

  The Shark's eyes flashed, and-just for a moment-the room sang with tension as every guest awaited the expected explosion.

  Then Varandros Dyre smiled and slowly reached for one of the two decanters on his desk, and men breathed in the room again.

  "No to your last, Master Smith! Dyre's Fine Walls and Dwellings owns this building free and clear, thanks to the successes we've all shared in this season. Just as Lhamphur's Locks and Gates recently acquired a warehouse for metals to meet the need for gates and hinges and doorplates, I find myself in need of a place to store cut and dressed stone. I can't just leave it lying about in the streets, now can I?"

  This caused an overly eager eruption of chuckles from Dyre's closest friend, Hasmur Ghaunt, which thankfully distracted the Shark from noticing the expression that passed momentarily over the face of Jarago Whaelshod, the last-invited of his four guests. The proprietor of Whaelshod's Wagons privately held the view that to save sharing coin with him whenever possible, Varandros Dyre frequently did just that. The Watch usually came to Master Carters to inquire as to how piles of building-stones came to be blocking the narrow streets of the southerly wards of the city, rather than bothering the fastest-rising builder in Waterdeep.

  "No," Dyre said heartily, "I don't want your coins, yet I do want to share some news with you, and the words we may exchange shouldn't be overheard by anyone. My home comes furnished with not only 'prentices but daughters and servants, whose hearing, I shouldn't have to tell any of you, can be far keener than even their tongues."

  Some chuckles arose. Of the five men in the room, only Hasmur Ghaunt was unmarried, and only Dyre had buried a wife. All of them had been blasted, at one time or another, by the dragonlike temper of Goodwife Anleiss Lhamphur.

  "My lasses'll be along later to bring us food to go with this death-to-thirst, but we'll hear them arrive and have to let them in: there'll be no listening at keyholes."

  The four guests nodded. Jacks were drained and set down thoughtfully, and Dyre waved at his guests to have more and drink freely.

  Surprisingly, it was the swift-to-roister Dorn Imdrael who put his hand over the top of his jack and suggested, "Before we all get roaring, suppose you tell us why we're here. I prefer to be prudent when giving my aye or nay."

  Dyre nodded. "Well said. Of course." He looked meaningfully over at the closed and barred door they'd all come in by. It was the only door in the room.

  His glance made Hasmur Ghaunt lean forward in almost breathless haste to gabble, "I barred the door like you said! And set the alarm-cord, too!"

  Dyre nodded his thanks and planted his hairy, battered hands on the table. "Yestermorn," he began, "a man of mine was injured falling off a scaffold in Redcloak Lane."

  His guests winced, frowned, and made sympathetic sounds. The days of hushing up deaths and maimings of workers were gone or going fast. A hurt man meant coin paid out for no work, and hard questions in the guildhall-or harder questions from the Watch.

  "Boards broke and spilled him off works that had got all twisted the night before and near-fallen into Redcloak Lane."

  "Wasn't that Marlus and his crew?" Lhamphur asked disbelievingly. "I thought he was one of the best-"

  "He is. A pack of noble pups at play set their swords on him and his hammer-hands, and started fires, too! One scaffold came right down, but this second one they hauled back into place and braced, and I hardly blame them. But for the whim and grace of Tymora, and the Watch happening along in a timely manner for once, the whole place would have burned!"

  There were gasps and whistles at that, and more than one man reached for a decanter.

  "As you know," Dyre went on, his voice on the edge of a snarl, "this is hardly our first brush with Waterdhavian nobility."

  Lhamphur pursed his lips. "They walked free?"

  "They did. The Watch gave them cold words but let them go. Utterly unpunished. One of them made noises about restitution, and that was the end of it."

  Whaelshod shook his head. "They've got to be stopped," he growled, and heads nodded around the room.

  Dyre's was one of them, as the grim beginnings of a smile crept onto his face. Two seasons back, some idiot nobles had taken it into their heads that racing each other on their most wild-spirited horses from the Court of the White Bull to the South Gate was a daringly sporting thing to do. The fastest way out of the Court was down Salabar Street, and Whaelshod's Wagons stood on west-front Salabar. Everyone knew Jarago Whaelshod had lost beasts and harness and had one man injured.

  "I don't know how prudent 'twould be to complain about it, though," Lhamphur said slowly, twirling his jack in his hands.

  Dyre suppressed a knowing smile. Nobles bought the elaborate and expensive gates crafted by Master Smith Karrak Lhamphur, and nobles paid the highest coin for copies of keys made with utter discretion, which half the city knew to be Lhamphur's special skill and greatest source of income.

  Instead of sneering, Dyre nodded. "Right you are, Karrak. We've complained before and gotten nowhere. I'm through complaining."

  All of his guests looked up sharply. This time, Varandros Dyre did smile.

  "Something must be done," he told them. "And mark me: this time, something will be done."

  The proprietor of Ghaunt Thatching, normally Dyre's smiling and enthusiastically tail-wagging follower, frowned at his friend a little doubtfully. "Uhmm… Var? What d'you mean?"

  Varandros Dyre sat back, regarded his guests over the large and battered ruin of his nose, drew in a deep breath, and began.

  "Waterdeep's a city of coins, hard work, and the rise and fall of trade. How is it that we who sweat and strain for every last nib and shard suffer the antics of idle young men who ruin property and harm hard workers and cost us all coin?"

  His voice had sharpened to match the fire in his eyes. Dyre drew himself up as firmly as Mount Waterdeep and answered himself. "Because we know speaking up or seeking justice is a waste of time and marks us as men to be hurt, ruined, or driven out of the city. Why? Because, deep down, we know the Masked Lords, who purportedly rule us all in fairness and supposedly number among their ranks many dungsweepers and humble crafters from Trades Ward garrets as well as master merchants and the occasional noble, are in truth all nobles or powerful mages! The Lords keep the city safe and firm-ruled and orderly not for the common weal but to guard the power they have-and they suffer none to rise and challenge it! The tales of humble folk wearing the Masks of Lordship are mere fancies intended to accomplish just one thing: to keep any Waterdhavian not nobly born from rising up against the rule of the Lords!"

  He leaned forward again, eyes blazing. "Now, I've no more interest in ruling Waterdeep than the rest of you, but I have had it up to here-" He slashed one hand across his throat, "-with standing idly by, swallowing my lost coins and trying to smile into the foolish young faces of those who openly despise and ridicule us because of the names they happen to have been born with, while this goes on and on, and we await a real disaster! City blocks set aflame, scaffoldings falling with scores of good men on them… as our taxes rise year by year, those who're driven beyond prudent silence are savagely put down-"

  There were grim nods across the room, as everyone remembered Thalamandar Master-of-Baldrics, and the body of Lhendrar the weaver being fished out of the harbor, and…

  "— and the nobles grow more and more reckless and steeped in their depravities, as they jeer at us from behind the wall of faceless Lords! How many of them wear the Masks of Lords? How many?"

  "True," Imdrael muttered, "all true, and said before, by many of us, even without…" He held up his jack in salute, to indicate the fine wine it
held.

  "True," Lhamphur echoed, "and to my mind almost all the Lords are probably nobles, yet pointing fingers at rot and corruption is one thing, and doing something about it is another. The doing is what can get us all killed."

  "So what," Jaeger Whaelshod asked heavily, as if Lhamphur's words had been an actor's cue, "d'you want of us, Var?"

  The Shark looked across his gleaming desk at them, juggling something in his large-fingered hands. Almost lazily, he tossed that something into the air.

  It flashed back the light of the candle-lamps as it came. The merchants holding their jacks of wine, men of Waterdeep all, drew sharply back from what they saw in an instant was battle-steel, and let it bite deep into the table not far in front of Karrak Lhamphur and stand there quivering.

  The weapon was a slender, finely made dagger with a curiously shaped pommel: a speartip topped by a star, bearing an ornate monogram on the sides of the spear blade.

  "M… K," Lhamphur deciphered it frowningly. "Kothont."

  "Dropped by one of them, in his haste to carve up Marlus," Dyre told them. "They don't hesitate to draw steel on us."

  The proprietor of Ghaunt Thatching had gone as pale as the linens his sisters were wont to hang across his balcony on Simples Street. Cradling his jack in trembling hands, he asked faintly, "But what do you want us to do, Var? Surely not-not-" He nodded at the dagger wordlessly, his meaning clear enough: take up arms.

  Dyre smiled and shook his head. "Nothing so drastic. I want us to work together, friends, to make a new day dawn over Waterdeep. Let us be that 'New Day.' Not to butcher Lords, nor cause unrest in the streets, for how does that help hard-working merchants make coin? No, I've something simpler and fairer in mind: to make the folk of the streets demand, more and more loudly, until 'tis the Lords who'll have to agree to the changes we seek or draw their blades and show us all their true villainy."

  Lhamphur looked very much like a man who had impatient oaths dancing ready on his tongue, but asked only, "What changes, Var?"

  "I want the Masks to come off. Lords should vote openly, in front of anyone who wants to walk in off the street and watch, and I want the Lords to stand for election just like guildmasters-say, every ten summers."

  Eyes narrowed, then brightened again.

  "That's all?"

  "But then everyone would know how they voted!"

  "Exactly. Lords who rule unfairly, to fill their own purses, or to reward themselves and their rich noble friends, would have to answer to honest men."

  Jarago Whaelshod set down his jack very carefully and announced, "That, friend Dyre, is a New Day I'll work to bring about."

  "Aye! Me, too!"

  " Yes!" Ghaunt shouted, coming to his feet for an instant before realizing how loudly he'd bellowed and freezing into silence, as stiff as the monument on a paladin's tomb.

  "Oh, sit down," Dyre told him irritably. "There's no harm done, for there's none as can hear us here."

  In the forehall at the bottom of the stairs, a slender hand deftly unhooked the alarm-cord. Three pairs of hastily bared feet ascended a few steps, and three heads bent nearer still, so as not to miss a single word from the locked room above.

  Muttering an apology, Hasmur Ghaunt hastily sat down again, almost toppling a decanter.

  Imdrael shot him a look of contempt and asked Dyre in a low, eager murmur, "So what will we of the New Day do, exactly?"

  "Are you with me?" Dyre asked, just as eagerly. "Each and every one of you? Guild oath?"

  His four guests almost fell over each other's tongues giving their emphatic oaths, two of them nicking palms and slapping down blood onto the table in the manner of their guilds. Decanters danced, and Dyre's smile grew.

  "You know the Lords control the very sewers beneath our feet?"

  Every Waterdhavian knew that, and the four merchants said so.

  "Wherever the sewers don't run just to suit them in their spying and rushing bands of thugs here and there by night to silence unruly commoners, they cause passages to be dug. As a Master Stoneworker, I see much of the ways beneath the cobbles, and I swear to you: this is truth."

  Four heads nodded-and from somewhere below came the sharp creak of a board, as if someone was on the stairs.

  Five heads turned with frowns of alarm to listen intently.

  And heard only silence.

  The stillness stretched until Dyre stirred and muttered warningly, "For the words we've traded here this night, we could be the next unruly commoners to be silenced, so-"

  "We must protect ourselves!" Imdrael hissed.

  The Master Stoneworker smiled thinly. "I've already started doing precisely that."

  From below came the hollow boom of the door-knocker. The men of the New Day flinched in unison, grabbing hastily for daggers.

  "Dyre," Lhamphur snarled through suddenly streaming sweat, "if this is some sort of trap-"

  The Shark flung the door wide, peered down the stairs, and turned back to his guests with a smile.

  "Alarm-cord still stretched, door still closed, and-hear that giggling? — my gels at the door outside, with hot platters of something to make us all a little less fearful! Men, 'tis time to talk of the new buildings we'll raise together before the season's out, and those we must repair before they topple! No New Day talk around the ladies, mind!"

  "We're not fools, Dyre," Whaelshod muttered under his breath.

  "Oh, no?" Lhamphur whispered, his own knuckles white on the hilt of his still-sheathed dagger. "Let's hope not, or the heads that roll won't be the ones wearing the masks of the Lords of Waterdeep."

  You must find him, Piergeiron had said. From what I've seen this day, I'm certain any father would rejoice in such a son.

  The First Lord's words echoed in Mrelder's mind, mocking him with the hope he'd cherished for more than a year. The false hope.

  He knew. He had yet to open his eyes, but he knew the graft had been a failure.

  There was a dull, phantom ache where his left arm had been. If the gods had granted Golskyn's prayers and found Mrelder a worthy host, he would now be aflame with searing pain. Not lightly did the monstrous gods award their favors.

  A faint, unfriendly hiss came from somewhere beside him. Then another, slightly fainter.

  Mrelder fought his way up through the darkness. As lantern-light flared before his eyes, he turned his head toward the hissings.

  The dying sahuagin lay on a table beside him, its gills flaring weakly as it gasped out its last breaths. A foul scent came from the charred, blackened stumps that were all that remained of not one, but all four of its scaled arms.

  Four times had the followers of Lord Unity attempted the graft, and four times Mrelder's body had refused to accept the gods-given improvement.

  "My son lives," Golskyn said coldly, looming over Mrelder, "and the sahuagin dies." His tone left little doubt as to his opinion of this state of affairs.

  "I… I'm sorry," Mrelder managed to murmur.

  "My sentiments precisely," his father replied, each word burning like acid. He drew a long dagger from its belt-sheath. "The mongrelmen follow me because I tell them they are more, not less. They enjoy the special favor of the True Gods. They are already well along the path only the strong may take. They are my children. I need no other."

  Golskyn lifted the knife high.

  This was it. His father's patience was at an end. Forlorn dreams and schemes flooded Mrelder's mind, a storm-flow of regret and loss. All would fade with him, thrown away in this dark cellar, all…

  One idea caught in the rush of thoughts, looming rather than being swept on. A moment later, it was joined by another-and fresh hope, as Mrelder realized the two notions could become one: the sahuagin-shaped Walking Statue and the Guardian's Gorget.

  "There's another way," he gasped.

  "To end your worthless life?"

  "To gain the strength of mighty creatures!" Mrelder gasped excitedly, seeing it all now.

  The priest's uncovered eye narrowed. "Expla
in."

  Mrelder nodded, but the words he needed would not come. As his stupor faded, the pain came in waves. He reached across to the other table to pluck away a strip of the dying sahuagin's scales from one of its stumps. Holding up the ribbon of hide, he managed a single word: "Gorget."

  For a long moment Mrelder prayed to any gods who might be listening that his father would remember the letters he'd written about Piergeiron and the Walking Statues, wherein he'd told Golskyn about this wondrous magical piece of the First Lord's armor, enspelled to command the great constructs.

  Golskyn lowered the knife. His uncovered eye regarded his son thoughtfully. "This has possibilities. You can do this? With your… sorcery?"

  Mrelder nodded. Perhaps he could prove to Golskyn that magic and items that held it were worthy sources of power, and in doing so earn his father's respect.

  And, not incidentally, save his own life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Naoni Dyre sang softly to herself as she spun the last few chips of amethyst into shining purple thread.

  A hole in the kitchen doorframe held her distaff: a long-handled runcible spoon, both ladle and fork. Instead of wool or flax, it held a steadily diminishing pile of rough amethysts. Delicate purple fibers spilled between its narrow tines in a curtain of gossamer purple that drew down into a triangle. At the point of that triangle Naoni's deft, pale fingers were busily at work, drafting the fibers together and easing them onto the shaft of her spindle.

  It was a simple drop spindle, a round, smooth stick ending in a flat wooden wheel and hung suspended by the fine purple thread. As it spun, its weight pulled the fibers from the gemstones, and the thread collected in a widening cone atop the wooden wheel.

  It was no small skill, keeping the spindle moving at the perfect speed-not so fast that it broke the delicate thread nor so slow that it fell to the floor. To Naoni, the rhythm was as natural as breathing.

  When the last of the gems slipped into thread, Naoni eased the spindle to the floor. She didn't fear a fall might shatter her work. Anything she spun became as strong and flexible as silk, for Naoni Dyre was a minor sorceress.