City of the Dead

by Rosemary Jones

  “Magical protections on the doors, really? I didn’t feel anything in your basement.”

  “That’s because you entered from above, as a friend of the family. The Doorwatcher would have known that and let you alone. Although”—a gleam of amused speculation lit Sophraea’s dark eyes—“I suppose that could be why your spell rebounded so spectacularly on you.”

  “Can’t wait to meet this Doorwatcher,” said Gustin, but he sounded more intrigued than aggrieved.

  “You already have,” Sophraea started but then they rounded another corner. Huddled around a couple of torches, shadowy figures blocked the way. Gustin pulled Sophraea into an alcove and shuttered the lantern, leaving them in darkness.

  “Best wait until they pass,” Gustin whispered in Sophraea’s ear, tickling her dark curls with his breath.

  “Probably just some neighbors heading home from a party. The City of the Dead’s gates would be locked by now and they are using these tunnels instead.” But her explanation sounded weak to Sophraea. Most folks avoided going anywhere near the graveyard after nightfall, even underground. Something about how the group scurried together, hands clutching their dagger or sword hilts, and the constant glances back over their shoulders did not suggest a late evening party of revelers.

  “I thought that halfling said that she would lead us to treasures,” whined a slender man clad in black silk from head to heel. He passed close enough to where Sophraea and Gustin hid that they could hear the whisper of his trousers.

  “Who would have thought her hands would be so cold,” answered his female companion, a well-rigged fighter bristling with knives, sword, and even a short shield. Another tall man stalked at her side, well-armored and with a hint of orc in his scowling features.

  The fourth man, more drably dressed than the others, stopped and stared back into the darkness. He looked straight at the alcove where Sophraea pressed back against Gustin. She held her breath. Gustin’s hand tightened on her shoulder.

  Then the swarthy bravo shrugged and turned to follow his companions, saying as he left that section of the tunnel, “Well, if there are not treasures to be had tonight, I’m for hot wine and a warm bed. Let’s go.”

  The sounds of this odd quartet died away, leaving the tunnel empty and silent behind them.

  Gustin eased out of the alcove, keeping a hand on Sophraea’s shoulder to hold her back. He listened for a few cautious minutes and then unshuttered the lantern.

  “So this is basically a highway for thieves as well as honest folk,” he observed.

  “I don’t suppose the officials like it,” said Sophraea with a shrug, “but you see worse on the streets above. Besides, thieves don’t bother people like us.” She made the last statement with more ferocity than veracity, but they were so close to the tomb that she couldn’t bear to turn back. Something was pulling her, something like that odd sense of direction that she had within the City of the Dead, but stronger.

  She knew she would find an answer just about … there.

  Sophraea stopped so abruptly that Gustin nearly ran her over, flinging out one long arm to catch himself against the tunnel wall.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “The Markarl tomb,” she said, “or just outside of it.” With that queer double vision that had haunted her through the tunnels, she saw the little brick-and-mortar tomb that stood directly above them. But the always locked bronze door? Was it a little ajar?

  “So now what?” Gustin raised the lantern, casting a wider circle of light. At the very edge of the yellow glow something glittered.

  Sophraea darted forward, finding a tarnished gold shoe. She picked it up, holding it high so Gustin could also see it clearly in the lamplight.

  It was very small and obviously made for a lady. Fashioned in a style popular long ago, the shoe’s brocade fabric was badly frayed along the edges and the thin vellum soles decayed.

  “Where do you think it came from?” she said out loud.

  “A corpse,” muttered Gustin.

  She clutched the little shoe in one hand, reaching out her other hand to touch the walls. Solid stone met her hand, dewed with the usual dampness encountered in that part of the tunnels.

  Sophraea continued poking around the edges of the muddy passageway, which smelled more like sewer than crypt, not that it was easy to tell the difference.

  “I don’t think there would be a body this deep,” she said. “This is a storm drain, only full in worst rains, but they’d never risk a body washing out from here. That’s why the tombs and portals are above. The water is supposed to drain down and then out.”

  “So somebody dropped it passing through. Or the water did carry it here? And, by the way, how hard was it raining today?” Gustin peered at the dank walls, as if expecting water to suddenly come pouring in.

  “Not that hard.” Sophraea shook her head at a newcomer’s lack of knowledge of Waterdeep’s precipitation. “Something like that would take a true downpour. Not that mizzle we’re getting right now.”

  The passageway seemed even more shadowed and dank. A cold and clammy feeling settled with a shudder upon her bare hands and face. As they retraced their steps to Dead End House, Sophraea felt compelled to look back over her shoulder. The tunnel remained empty behind them.

  She glanced at the wizard beside her. He seemed completely unconcerned by the shadows flickering along the walls that made her start and stare. Of course, he was a wizard, one of those adventurers who had roamed everywhere from what little he had told her. Sewer tunnels under a graveyard wouldn’t bother him. And, she thought, raising her chin and holding her head a little higher, she wasn’t worried either. He needn’t think just because she was younger, and shorter, and had never been outside the walls of Waterdeep, that a few thieves passing them in the tunnels or some oddly shaped shadows swirling across the ceiling above them would frighten her.

  Then she heard the soft exhalation, like a woman trying to muffle a cry.

  “Do you hear something?” Sophraea whispered to Gustin, resisting the impulse to clutch at his arm.

  “My teeth chattering,” he answered back. “It’s freezing cold all of a sudden.”

  The damp cold of the tunnels intensified. Sophraea felt like one of the Carver cats on the days that the wind blew from the north. Something was making her skin prickle and she fought an urge to whip around and stare again into the shadows. In the same odd double vision that let her see where they were in relationship to the City of the Dead, she thought she could see something following them out of the passages. At the very edge of her hearing, she heard something like the soft light footsteps of a woman. Sophraea was sure of it.

  “Stop,” she hissed at Gustin, tugging at the edge of his sleeve.

  “Not here,” he hissed back as they reached the intersection with three tunnels, the shortest passage leading to the Dead End door. “There’s somebody ahead of us.”

  She heard a sob.

  “No,” Sophraea insisted, “there’s somebody behind us.”

  They were directly below the Dead End gate. In her double vision, Sophraea could see the iron bars shake. The sound of a woman sobbing echoed in her head, somewhere above, somewhere behind. Her sense of direction gone dizzy, Sophraea tugged again at Gustin’s sleeve.

  “We need to stop.”

  “Not yet,” said Gustin, grabbing Sophraea’s hand and dragging her toward the Dead End door.

  From the middle tunnel entrance burst the plainly dressed bravo who they had seen earlier. His sword was drawn. His expression was unpleasant.

  “Stop!” cried the thief, unconsciously echoing Sophraea.

  “Not likely!” yelled back Gustin, pulling Sophraea along at a clip of long legs that left her shorter strides nearly flying off the ground.

  Over his shoulder, Gustin muttered a string of foreign words. Their pursuer faltered. Then with a growl like a wounded dragon, he pressed after them.

  “That one never works on the run,” gasped Gustin. “I’ve rea
lly got to stop trying it in situations like this.”

  “Are … you … often …” Sophraea panted.

  “Yes. That’s why I can talk and run. Keep going!”

  They sprinted to the door, the burly fighter barreling behind them.

  Sophraea and Gustin crashed into the door. Sophraea beat out the Carver’s secret knock in rapid haste with her small fists, still clutching the old shoe.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” she whispered.

  She could see their pursuer in her mind; imagine the slash of his sword’s blade.

  His outstretched hand brushed her shoulder.

  Gustin swung around, his clenched fist crashing into the thief’s face. That didn’t stop their attacker. He fell back with a snarl, then lunged toward them, his sword slashing. Sophraea ducked, throwing herself against Gustin to knock him out of the way. As they fell sideways, the sword’s blade hit the door at the height where her head had been.

  She was sprawled against Gustin with her arms outspread. He tried to free his hands, caught between them. She struggled to get off him so he could use his wand.

  Sophraea pushed her hand into Gustin’s chest for leverage, then swung backward with her arm extended. She tried to close her fingers tightly around the lantern’s handle, felt the jolt as it hit the thief. The lantern clattered to the floor.

  This time the thief shrieked in pain. He wiped blood from his face and lunged toward her.

  Sophraea screamed. Feeler and Fish flung open the door and Gustin tumbled inside the room. She fell toward their outstretched arms, almost reached them.

  Seeing a tall man with writhing tentacles for hair and another with a double row of shark teeth, the thief hesitated. Then he saw the glitter of the gold shoe in Sophraea’s out-flung hand.

  The thief lunged at Sophraea, grasping her wrist and pulling her to him. Gustin, just as firmly anchored on the other wrist, pulled her toward the open door.

  Feeling like the battered ball in one of her brothers’ games, Sophraea let out a shriek higher than any since earliest childhood, when Myemaw had said “That child is small but she has champion lungs!”

  All the men winced. Sophraea took advantage of the thief’s momentary distraction to stamp hard on his instep with one pointed heel. He gasped and for a moment, froze with shock. Sophraea twisted around, turning as much as possible with the two men still hanging onto her wrists. A second kick, with her equally sturdy and pointed boot toe, caught the thief on the side of the knee, where his armor didn’t cover the side of the tender joint.

  The man let out a yell, much as Leaplow once did when a younger Sophraea had shown him the maneuver taught her by Cadriffle.

  Dropping Sophraea’s wrist, Gustin secured a firmer hold on her waist and lifted her away from the thief, even as the frustrated and furious man swung down his sword.

  Feeler came flying out of the door to tackle the thief. The blade missed Gustin’s head by a breath as he ducked and rolled away, but the pommel clipped his crown.

  Sophraea and Gustin rolled together into the center of the basement.

  The thief fought free of Feeler’s grasp and sprinted away.

  Once again sitting in a tangle of the wizard’s long limbs on the basement floor, Sophraea found herself being examined in a concerned way by Feeler and Fish.

  “Are you all right?” asked Feeler.

  “Fine, fine,” said Sophraea as she started to scramble to her feet, but stopped when Gustin swayed against her. She dropped the shoe that she had clutched so tightly throughout the chase to steady the young man.

  “He hit my head,” said the wizard in a blurry tone. Blood trickled down from the brown curls. “It hurts,” he confided to her.

  “Oh no,” said Sophraea, recognizing these symptoms all too clearly from various mishaps in the Carver household. She waved one hand in front of Gustin’s glazed expression. “How many fingers do you see?”

  “Pretty ones,” replied Gustin and promptly passed out on the cold floor of the gravediggers’ room.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The first thing upon waking any morning, Gustin always noticed the smell of his room. Long before he cracked his eyes open or stretched one hand out from under the covers to grope for his boots (he kept them under his pillow in a cheap tavern or under the bed if the door had a good lock), the scent of his current resting place would worm into his nose.

  In Cormyr, his room stank like a stable, more specifically like the part of a stable usually carted away in the early morning. Not surprising as that room overlooked a large pile used for fertilizing the inn’s vegetable garden.

  In Waterdeep, his room on Sevenlamps Cut always reeked of fried fish, which was odd as the tavern owner never fried anything, as far he knew. That man preferred to boil his stews until everything was pale, mushy, and tasteless.

  On the road from Cormyr to Waterdeep, when Gustin could find a room and didn’t have to sleep outdoors in the back of the carter’s wagon (which always smelled damp and just a bit moldy under the canvas), his various rooms had smelled of unwashed travelers.

  But this room in Dead End House! Ah, he took another deep sniff even as he snuggled under the feather quilt. This room smelled wonderful. Clean linen on the bed, beeswax polish on the chair by the door and the table set under the window, and, oh truly fantastic, the whiff of something baking straying up from the kitchen. This room smelled exactly the way that he always thought a room should smell in the morning.

  Gustin Bone sat up quickly so he could get a better sniff of whatever his first meal of the day would be. His head swam and he clamped his mouth shut to hold back a moan. He tenderly probed the three expert stitches that Reye Carver had sewn in his scalp the night before.

  His memory of the previous night was confused.

  Going up the stairs out of the basement remained a bit of a headachy blur, his clearest recollection being a too close, upside down view of Feeler’s tentacles after the big gravedigger had slung him over his shoulder.

  In the kitchen, there’d been lots of chatter. Lots and lots, so he had let his eyes slide out of focus and slumped in the chair where Feeler had dropped him, waiting for the noise to subside. At some point, he heard Sophraea babbling on about how she just opened the basement door a crack to show Gustin the tunnels and this horrible man had tried to break in.

  He had heard men’s voices outshouting the women’s protests.

  “We’ll get the rat, twist his scrawny neck!”

  “Leaplow, I don’t like that language in my kitchen.”

  “Sorry, Mother. All right, come on, we’ll catch him and then decide.”

  “I know what you’ll decide. And you know he’ll have an army of his friends down there by now,” answered Reye Carver. “So we’ll clear them out!”

  “And start a war in the tunnels? I think not!” That had been Myemaw, Sophraea’s tiny grandmother, the one that made him laugh at supper with her descriptions of what people actually ate in Waterdeep.

  “So what do you want us to do?” Leaplow shouted and the floorboards reverberated under his feet as he danced up and down. Like his sister, Leaplow always seemed to be moving fast, impatient for the next step. Only, he went thud, thud, thud across the floor rather than the distinct tap, tap, tap of Sophraea darting away to get him a towel in cold water.

  Gustin distinctly remembered hearing their mother Reye sigh and then say in a weary tone, “I would like all of you out of my kitchen. If you have nothing else to do, go sweep up the courtyard.”

  “At night? You want us to sweep at night?” Leaplow and his cousins exclaimed together in a way that made the pots rattle on the shelves.

  “Just make yourself useful somewhere else!” Myemaw scolded.

  Sophraea had draped the cold towel across his head and water had dripped into his ear and down the back of his neck. He’d drooped a bit lower in the chair so she’d lean over him and shield him from all the noise that several truly enormous Carvers in the kitchen were creating.

&nbs
p; And then another male voice had said, “Come on, boys,” and it sounded to Gustin like an army of boots tromping out of the room.

  Unfortunately, he had recognized Leaplow’s voice saying, “I think I’d better stay here. I want to know why he was in the basement with my sister.”

  Gustin slumped into the position of a remarkably harmless fellow. He really hadn’t felt up to facing an angry brother.

  But it had seemed a pretty unlikely tale that Sophraea told to Leaplow, something silly about wanting to show him the foundation stones laid by the first Carver. As if he’d leave a warm parlor to go looking at a foundation! And he’d been about to say so when Sophraea’s soft little hand was clamped tightly over his lips and she had whispered in his ear, “Just moan and don’t say anything. We’ll get out of this faster.”

  Then Reye and Myemaw replaced the cold towel with cloths soaked in hot water and a very sharp needle, and moaning was an incredibly simple thing to do.

  After all that, when Myemaw had slipped a nice cup of a hot spicy drink into his hand that eased the sting on the top of his scalp, Leaplow said, “What are we going to do with him? Leave him in the chair all night?”

  And Sophraea had protested and said something nice about him being so brave (which was true, he now realized, recalling the fight with the thief, even though she hadn’t spoken any other word of truth in the kitchen that night).

  Then Reye Carver said in her quiet voice, “He deserves a room of his own tonight so he can rest. We will give him Fitlor’s, he certainly doesn’t need it anymore.”

  While wondering vaguely what had happened to Fitlor and why he wouldn’t want such a splendid room, Gustin pulled the covers a little higher around his shoulders and prepared to enjoy a short snooze before finding something to eat.

  Just as he started to settle back into the warm and comfortable bed, a horrible thought occurred to him. This room was perfect. It smelled perfect. It felt perfect. It was exactly what he had been seeking ever since he ran away from the dull little farm smelling of despair and ruin where he had grown up. And it was only his on a temporary basis.