by Ed Greenwood
Overhead, in an attic not far above the tumult, the smoke and noise had awakened two elderly, dozing sisters: Rethilda, who called the bat-infested rooms home, and Undaera, from the farm crossroads of Windy Hill nigh Secomber, who was visiting her sister in the big city for the first time.
She'd been horrified at the filth, noise, and dangers of Dock Ward and had said so, colorfully and at length, almost causing a rift between them.
So it was with a certain satisfaction that Rethilda surveyed the brawl now filling the street and turned triumphantly to the gaping, trembling Undaera to ask, "Well, sister? Does Windy Hill offer this sort of free entertainment? Hey?"
"Too many people are watching from above," Golskyn snapped, as swearing, snarling sailors clawed at the ruby-cloaked man and the splendidly armored bodyguard. "Far too many blades here, too!"
Mrelder nodded. "There'll be no dragging Piergeiron through our front door-not unless we want half the Watch, and the Guard, too, coming in after him!"
"We don't need him," Golskyn said sharply, "just the Gorget-but folk must not notice us taking it!"
A dying bodyguard reeled back, with three burly sailors stabbing him so swiftly and repeatedly with their daggers that it looked like they were drumming their fists on his armor, leaving Golskyn's path to the paladin clear.
Two bodyguards who now lay sprawled and very dead in their own spreading blood had earlier dragged the signboard off the Open Lord. Piergeiron lay on his back, eyes shut and mouth open, dead or unconscious; the Lord of the Amalgamation didn't care which. Just now, all he cared about was that Piergeiron was so cursed big that he didn't think he could drag the man anywhere.
"Mrelder!"
"Here, Father!" Mrelder gasped, fighting his way free of the heavy body of the Watchman who'd been trying to throttle him. He'd spell-frozen the lawman long enough to slice open the Waterdhavian's throat with his dagger.
"Stop amusing yourself and help me, here!"
Mrelder leaped to obey, and the paladin's armor struck sparks from the cobbles as they dragged him, limp limbs bouncing and rattling, into a doorway.
More bodyguards were bearing down on them, but Golskyn could bark orders as grandly as a king when he wanted to. He drew himself up to block their view of Mrelder tearing at the Gorget and commanded, "The Open Lord lives! See that you keep him safe!"
The foremost bodyguard promptly burst past the priest-and saw what Mrelder was doing.
He raised his blade with a yell, but Golskyn whirled and drove his own dagger into the man's throat from behind, dragging it viciously crosswise and spraying Mrelder with more blood.
Without slowing the priest whirled around again to face the second bodyguard, who stood horrified, and told the man sternly, "Fear not! We've nothing against you-or Lord Piergeiron, either! This is a personal matter involving his villainy!"
Golskyn pointed grandly at the bodyguard he'd just murdered with his dripping dagger-and so did Mrelder, who was clutching the Gorget behind his back with his other hand.
The bodyguard raised his sword and bellowed, "Blayskar a villain? He's me cousin, you murdering bastards!"
Mrelder whirled and fled, and the bodyguard plunged after him. Golskyn coolly swept his overcloak off and over the man's head, then throat-punched him as he stumbled.
The stumble became a topple, and Golskyn swept his cloak away again as he plucked up the bodyguard's sword, dragged the man's helm off, and brained him with the hilt. Tossing the blade down, he ran after Mrelder.
The smoke was thick enough above them now to set people to coughing and prevent anyone at a window from clearly seeing where they went. It was high time to retire from this field of victory.
A new crowd was wading through the smoke now, almost all of them Watchmen. Mirt knew them-and more to the point, they knew him, even through all the blood and heaped sailors' bodies.
"Old Wolf, let's be having you on your feet," one grunted, heaving and dragging. Mirt let out a roar of pain that ended in a sob.
Gods, he was hurt… hurt bad!
"Get me," Mirt gasped raggedly, as Watchmen rolled dead sailors aside, "back to my house: There's healing there!"
They raised him to their shoulders almost tenderly, but the Old Wolf nearly fell out of their grasp in his eagerness to point across more bodies at a gleam of armor, and gasp, "Grab Piergeiron there, too! Bring him to my place! If that damned squarejaws goes down, some fools'll start a war in the city to get onto his throne, sure's sure!"
Watchmen rushed to do just that, the Open Lord's helm and one gauntlet rolling away forgotten as they hoisted him and began the swift trot to Mirt's Mansion.
The street was empty of both moneylenders and Open Lords even before a father and a son finished groping their way through their own doorway with a stolen gorget and got the door safely bolted and barred in their wake.
"Perhaps the tunnel repairer moved away," Naoni sighed, "or died; dwarves are long-lived, not immortal."
"Perhaps," Faendra sniffed, "the folk at the rooming house were lying to us!"
Lark chuckled at the girl's indignant tone. "Of course they were, but that might have nothing at all to do with Buckblade. Some people lie for no better reason than to keep in practice."
"Mayhap we were given the wrong address in the first place," Naoni said-and then stopped abruptly and threw up her hand in warning.
The others looked along her pointing finger, down the street ahead, where men were spilling out of doorways and rushing at each other. There were shouts and the flash of swords. There were far more familiar flashes, too: bright gemweave cloaks!
Lark rolled her eyes. "Watching Gods above, are those men everywhere?"
"Perhaps they're following you, sister," Faendra teased, staring in fascination at toppling handcarts and clattering blades.
Lark laid firm hands on Dyre elbows. "We don't want to be here, mistresses," she warned, even as loud crashings erupted behind them.
The three whirled around and found themselves staring at more Watchmen than they'd ever seen together before. Forty or more hard-faced lawmen were hastily dragging handcarts and carriages together to form a barrier.
"Excuse me," Lark called, dragging Naoni and Faendra forward, "but-"
"Sit you down out the way and keep silent, lasses!" a Watch armar barked back. "There'll be no getting past us this way!"
Watchmen were hurriedly scaling the barrier and taking up positions in front of it, as others came trotting out of alley mouths, drawing blades as they came.
The street fight swirled closer, and Lark sat down. Faendra swiftly followed, leaving Naoni standing uncertainly, turning this way and that as she sought escape.
"We can't flee," she concluded reluctantly, and crouched down just as a Watchman sprinted past.
"Why do these things always have to happen on my watch?" he growled. "Why can't they have their brawls…"
His voice was lost in the rising clangs and cries of men trying to butcher other men, as the three crouching women watched the battle come reeling to meet them.
A man whose face was a mask of blood hurried toward them out of the fray, ruby-red cloak billowing behind him. He'd been cut across the forehead and was running blindly, cursing fervently yet slowly, as if amazed.
So much blood… so much blood…
His wounds didn't hurt all that much, but Lord Beldar Roaringhorn felt empty and betrayed, as if-as if the gods had been lying to him all along, and the world was very different from how he'd thought it worked.
Scores-nay, hundreds-of fights he'd been in, his blade sending men reeling, and he'd never been cut before. Never. Wasn't he invulnerable to such things, at least until his promised destiny was achieved?
His wounding had been so hideously swift and easy. Just like Malark, under those falling beams…
Watchmen were moving to intercept the young noble, snapping, "You, goodsir! You! Stop! Stand! The Watch commands you! Halt where you are!"
The youngest Lord Roaringhorn wiped a
t his streaming forehead with the back of his hand and stumbled onward as the three women gawked up at him.
He reeled on the littered cobbles as a Watchman came at him-and was suddenly looming above the three lasses.
Lark made a sudden, wordless sound and rose to flee, and Beldar slashed out blindly at the sound, cutting only empty air as Faendra shrieked. He lunged, slipped, and came crashing into Lark.
They fell heavily to the cobbles together, Beldar a sagging, dead weight. Two Watchmen sprinted over, blades reaching down.
"Away!" Lark shouted at them, as fiercely as any warrior. "Get your steel away!"
As the two officers stared down at her uncertainly, she waved down her blood-streaked front at the man whose surprisingly heavy body was sprawled across her lap, and snapped, "Can't you see he offers no threat?"
"Some sort of lord," one Watchman said to the other. They traded quick, satisfied smiles.
"So dawns the New Day," Naoni whispered to Faendra, her gray eyes wide with horror. "Gods above, what has Father started?"
Mrelder leaned back against the bolted door and stared down at what gleamed in his grasp: The Guardian's Gorget. This small metal plate enabled the First Lord of Waterdeep to command the Walking Statues. Little was publicly known about it-few thought it more than mere "show" armor-but Mrelder's life-long fascination with Waterdeep had led him to many of her secrets. He'd sought out and memorized every scrap of Waterdhavian lore in all Candlekeep.
"What wait you for?" snapped Golskyn.
"I'm holding history in my hands," the sorcerer murmured, eyes fixed almost reverently on the Open Lord's crest. "This touched royalty, as surely as has any king's crown or warsword."
"You're holding the future in your hands," his father snarled, "and it's time you realized your role in shaping it. What is a king but an accident of birth and blood? True men become, powerful tyrants take. All your life you've yearned for this city-if you're my true son, you'll stretch out your hands and take what you desire!"
Mrelder nodded and put the surprisingly heavy gorget around his neck. Closing his eyes, he sought for the calm that would let him attune himself to it.
Instantly vivid fire flashed through his mind: a path of golden light. He was swept along it at incredible speed, through thick woods. Suddenly a smoothly rounded black tower loomed up before him, and a spectral voice demanded the password.
Of course. No man, not even Piergeiron, would wield such power without safeguards. The Open Lord and Khelben Arunsun were fast friends; of course the archmage watched Piergeiron's back.
The archmage watched…
With dawning horror, Mrelder realized there was a burning in the back of his mind, the shadow of a strong-and growing-presence. An alien will blossomed in his head, like a glowing web of power. A small, bright tendril twisted from it, questing deeper, closer…
Gods above! He'd drawn the attention of the Lord Mage of Waterdeep!
And he was mind-linked to the Blackstaff!
Mrelder tore the metal off with desperate hands and flung it away. It was still in the air when he hurled the most powerful detachment spell he knew at it, a magic crafted to break the hold of a scrying device and turn its power back upon the seeker.
The gorget flared into brilliant red flame an instant before it crashed into the wall, searing right through a tapestry and biting into the stone beyond. Then it rebounded and fell, leaving dusty wool smoking in its wake.
Golskyn pounced on the smoldering tapestry, tore it down, and emptied two ewers of water over it. The stench of wet, burnt wool filled the room.
His son paid little heed. Mrelder crouched over the fallen gorget. It seemed whole and unharmed, its flame gone.
He touched it with a cautious fingertip. It was already cool.
Warily he picked it up. There was no lingering sense of the seeking magic.
Strong hands seized his collar and dragged him to his feet.
Before he could draw breath, Golskyn slammed him against the wall so hard that Mrelder's vision swam. The gorget fell from his numbed fingers.
His father leaned close, hands at Mrelder's throat and face contorted with rage. "Fool!" he snarled. "I should have let this wretched city burn and you with it!"
Strong spellglows flickered around a bare spellchamber in Blackstaff Tower, lighting the awed faces of Khelben's apprentices. They'd been working for hours now, building a web of glowing, humming lines of magical force without really knowing what they were doing.
The Blackstaff was directing them as gracefully as any dancer, crooking a finger here and silently beckoning there to call forth their castings in precise places, as the spellweb grew to fill the room. The apprentices were accustomed to Laeral's encouraging murmurs and directions, but Khelben Arunsun worked in silence, black robes swirling, and the web was brighter and had risen faster than anything Laeral had ever guided them through. Only he knew what he was striving for, and he Was reeling, suddenly, clutching at his head with both hands and screaming.
As the apprentices stared at him in rising terror, Khelben swayed as the lines of force plunged into him, converging with terrifying speed.
There was a soundless crash that rocked the room, rippling waves of magic raced out past their ankles to slam into the wall and strike clattering shards of stone free… and the great spellweb was gone, leaving only a faint, fitful glow around the rigidly upright body of the Lord Mage of Waterdeep, whose eyes were wide, staring wildly and unseeingly in different directions and whose mouth was slack and drooling, even before he started to topple.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Tammert!" the wild-eyed apprentice sobbed, long hair still crackling about her shoulders in the swirling chaos of magic that was eddying around them like so many tugging waves of sparks. "Is he dead?"
Tammert Landral had once, several rooms below this one, tried to put a sword through Qilue of the Chosen and been scorched by silver fire for his pains-and he was the closest of them all to the fallen Lord Mage of Waterdeep. He swallowed, stretched out a hand that he snatched back hurriedly when magic rose up from the Blackstaff's apparently intact body to shock into him with a burning, menacing snarl, and replied, "I–I don't think so. Get Maresta! And Araeralee! Hurry!"
The apprentices of Blackstaff Tower being what they were, his order would have ordinarily evoked not obedience but a flurry of dispute and loftily offered opinions, but just now almost everyone in the room wanted desperately to be somewhere else. Aside from Tammert and Callashantra, who stood uncertainly right where she'd been when she'd shouted to him, the room emptied in a few frantic moments.
While Tammert hoped desperately that Maresta Rhanbuck, motherly whirlwind that she was, and Araeralee Summerstar, of whom the Lady Laeral was so fond, would know what to do.
"Mother Mystra, guide us," he prayed fervently, going to his knees and sacrificing a spell from his mind to make his prayer flame up and hopefully be heard. "Oh, that Laeral was here!"
However, it was the impish and beautiful little seductress Jalarra who next appeared in a doorway, to say brightly, "Everyone just came tearing past me like all the devils in the Nine Hells have come visiting! What'm I missing? I-oh."
Eyes going very wide, she stopped, feeling the magic still roiling around the room wash over her, and peered across its fading, flickering glows at the sprawled body of Khelben Arunsun.
"What happened? Is he-?"
"I don't know," Tammert told her grimly, not turning to take his eyes off the fallen archmage for a moment. "Go get Maresta, will you?"
Surprisingly, Jalarra whirled around to do just that-and let out a little shriek of alarm as Maresta and Araeralee almost flattened her in their own hasty arrivals.
"We've sent a calling-spell to the Lady Laeral," Maresta panted, looking more flustered than any of them had ever seen her before, "and we can only hope-"
There was a soundless flash, and the room suddenly held one more person. Jalarra shrieked again.
"Have we trained you that
badly?" the Lady Mage of Waterdeep demanded, from where she stood towering over Tammert. "That 'hope' is the only thing you can think of to do?"
She whirled around, saw Khelben, and hurled herself at him. Tammert almost gratefully flung himself out of the way.
The apprentices watched Laeral crawl atop the Blackstaff, eyes closing as if she was trying to feel something. Then she turned her head, gave them a grim nod, and announced, "Backlash-and a bad one."
The apprentices kept silent, not knowing what to say.
"Maresta," Laeral added briskly, "you're in charge. Waterdeep must believe the Lord Arunsun is still here and at work. All of you: if anyone asks, we're both here but we're busy, right? If anyone gets insistent, tell them we're busy with Mystra."
There was another soundless flash, and all of the glowing, swirling magic in the room was gone. The stones where the Lord and Lady Mages of Waterdeep had lain were bare and empty. Tammert Landral trembled, then, and started to sob in awe.
A vast smile was unfolding in his mind amid silver fire… fire that swept over him in wordless reassurance.
"Tammert!" Maresta snapped. "What befalls?"
"Mystra," he managed to gasp. "She heard my prayer!"
White motes of light danced in Mrelder's darkening vision. His father's hand tightened on his throat… the winking lights swirled faster, flashing like tiny stars and clustering ever-brighter.
"Fool!" thundered Golskyn, giving the sorcerer a shake that let Mrelder sob in a breath but brought pain bursting through his head like a stabbing lance. "I waste my time chasing a magical trinket, only to have you lose your nerve and destroy it?"
"No," Mrelder managed to croak. "Not… destroyed."
The cruel grip loosened. "Then why did you cast it aside? Why hurl spells at it?"
Mrelder cautiously backed away, shoulders scraping along the wall. "My knowledge of the gorget was incomplete," he husked, head pounding. "Didn't realize… trying to use it… would mind-link me to Khelben Arunsun."