Dissolution

by Byers, Richard Lee

  “In other words, you wish to resume our old arrangement. Which still had four years to run. If I assist you with your current problem, will you continue to concern yourself with ‘mundane’ affairs, or will you lock yourself away in your tower once more?”

  He considered lying, but his instincts told him she’d see through it.

  “I’m not entirely sure what will become of me,” he said. “As far as I know, if I’m successful, I ought to wind up reestablished in Sorcere with all my transgressions forgiven, but for some murky reason, I wonder. I’m caught up in something I don’t yet understand, and only the dark powers know where it will lead.”

  “Then if you want my help, you’ll have to set me free … today.”

  “Impossible, I don’t have the requisite funds on my person, nor the leisure to dicker with Nym, for that matter. You know he’d stretch any negotiation out for days, just to be annoying. Nor do I have time to arrange an escape.”

  She only stared at him, and he understood.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Is it a bargain?”

  “It is if you actually give me some help. My problem is this: An unusual number of males have run away from home of late.”

  “That’s your errand? To find some rogues? What makes it important enough to send a Master of Sorcere?”

  He smiled. “I have no idea. Do you know anything about it?”

  She shook her head. “Not much.”

  “Frankly, any crumb of genuine information will put me ahead of where I am now.”

  “Well, I’ve heard only the vaguest hints, but they suggest this isn’t just a case of an unusual number of males deciding independently to elope. They all ran to the same place for the same reason, whatever that reason may be.”

  “I thought as much,” said Pharaun. “Otherwise, why would Gromph be interested? But it’s reassuring to hear that your own agile mind has arrived at the same conclusion.”

  She sneered.

  Pharaun absently ran his fingertip along one of the swirling lines woven into his robe.

  “I doubt a threat would suffice to draw so many boys away from home,” he said. “Some would have the courage to defy the threatener or the sense to appeal to their kin for protection. Nor would a hypnotic charm do the trick. Aside from the natural resistance to such effects that all we dark elves possess, some of the males would have carried wards in the form of amulets and such. No, I think we have to assume the rogues sneaked away of their own volition to accomplish some positive end. But what?”

  “They’re organizing a new merchant clan?”

  “I thought of that, but Gromph says no, and I’m sure he’s correct. For if that were the case, then why the secrecy? Since trade is important to all Menzoberranzan, people don’t generally object when a male becomes a merchant. It’s one of the two or three legitimate ways to distance oneself from Mother’s harsh and arbitrary hand.” He grinned. “No offense. I’m sure that in happier times, the males under your authority had no reason to complain of you.”

  “You can bet I would give them reason now.”

  “Given your more recent experiences, that’s understandable. So, if the rogues aren’t putting together a caravan, what are they doing? Preparing to flee Menzoberranzan for good and all? Or, goddess forbid, have they slipped away already?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t tell you precisely where they are, but I believe they’re still somewhere in the city proper, the Mantle, or conceivably out in the Bauthwaf.”

  “Now that truly is good news. I wasn’t keen on a hunt through the wilds of the Underdark. Not only is there a general lack of amenities, the winemakers are uncorking the new vintages the tenday after next.”

  Pellanistra shook her head. “You haven’t changed.”

  “Thank you, I’ll take that as a compliment. Now, let’s get down to the crux of the matter, shall we? I require names. Which of your visitors dropped these ‘vaguest hints’ which you have so sagaciously interpreted?”

  She gave him a smile radiant with spite. “Alton Vandree and Vuzlyn Freth.”

  “Who themselves subsequently disappeared and are thus unavailable for questioning. It makes sense, I suppose, but it’s unfortunate all the same.”

  “I’ve given you everything I have,” she said. “Now fulfill your end of the deal.”

  The wizard frowned and said, “My dear collaborator, it would devastate me to disappoint you. Yet I stipulated that you’d have to offer me information of some significance, and frankly, I’m not sure you’ve delivered. I really know little more than I did before.”

  “Do it, or I’ll tell every soul who comes into this cell that you’re looking for the runaways. Perhaps that will have some ‘significance’ for your mission. I assume it is supposed to be a secret. Things usually are where you’re involved, and you haven’t mentioned a legion of assistants following you about.”

  Pharaun laughed. “Well played. I surrender. How shall we do this?”

  “I don’t care. Burn me with your magic. Stick a dagger in me. Break my neck with those long, clever fingers.”

  “Interesting suggestions all, but I’d just as soon that Nym didn’t bill me for your demise. If we can make it look as if your heart just stopped of its own accord sometime after I look my leave, I’ll have a chance.”

  He cast about, noticed the thick, fluffy pillow on the bed, picked it up, and experimentally gripped it at both ends. It felt good in his hands.

  “This ought to work,” he said. “Perhaps you could oblige me by lying down?”

  chapter

  FIVE

  Ryld sipped his chilled, tart wine with a sense of satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that the game, though technically still in progress, was already won. In three more moves, his onyx wizard and orc would trap and mate his opponent’s carnelian mother.

  As usual, he had accomplished his victory without recourse to the dice. Truth to tell, those clattering ivory cubes with the magically warmed images incised on the faces were the one aspect of sava he didn’t like. They interjected blind luck into what should be a contest of pure cunning.

  Ryld’s adversary, a scrawny young merchant clansman with an uncouth habit of letting drops of liquor slide from the corners of his mouth as he guzzled, had thrown the dice early on and gloated when chance allowed him to eliminate one of the older male’s priestesses.

  Shoulders hunched, brow sweaty, he stared at the board as if the fate of his soul were being decided thereupon. A truly competent player would have recognized almost instantly that there was only one move he could make. Indeed, he would have foreseen the inevitable mate just three moves hence and resigned.

  Mindful of his true purpose for visiting the Jewel Box, Ryld, doing his best to sound only casually interested, took up the thread of the conversation that he and the slightly tipsy trader had been carrying on in fits and starts.

  “Did your cousin give you any warning that he was going to run away?”

  “No,” the clansman answered curtly. “Why would he? We despised each other. Now shut up! You’re trying to break my concentration.”

  Ryld sighed and settled back in his spindly, flimsy-looking limestone chair. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed something that made him sit up straighter, double-check the precise position of Splitter leaning against the wall, and stealthily loosen his short sword in its oiled sheath on his belt.

  He himself didn’t quite know what had alerted him. These weren’t the first circle of revelers he’d watched rise from their seats and draw their weapons, either to play at fencing or to settle a quarrel that had nothing at all to do with the hooded male defeating all comers at sava. Indeed, within the confines of the Jewel Box, blades rasped from their scabbards with a certain regularity. Superficially, this new quartet was no different, but somehow Ryld knew that they were. Sure enough, they stalked straight toward him and his oblivious opponent through the fragrant haze of incense. Other patrons, likewise sensing the swordsmen’s intent, made
haste to clear the way.

  A blade with a glowing redness—an imprisoned spirit perhaps—oozing inside the adamantine, flicked in a horizontal sweep at the tabletop. Ryld caught the weapon and pushed it away before it could upset the sava pieces or his neatly stacked winnings. The long sword was as sharp as only an enchanted weapon could be, but he managed the grab without cutting his hand. Finally startled from his reverie, the scrawny boy looked wildly about.

  “May we help you?” asked Ryld.

  “We’ve been listening to you,” said the owner of the long sword.

  Though not so big as Ryld, he was nonetheless husky and tall for a drow male, and the points of his prominent ears seemed to reach above the top of his head like a bat’s. He was the best dressed and plainly the leader of the foursome, even though his broad, sullen face bore the mottled bruises of a beating. The weapons master assumed that some noble female must have seen fit to give the male a pummeling. His companions would think none the less of him for that.

  Especially since, Ryld noted, two of them were hurt as well, moving a trifle stiffly or slightly favoring one leg. Perhaps they were all kinsmen, and one of the priestesses in their House had gone on a regular tear.

  “You’ve been asking a lot of questions about runaways,” the swordsman continued in a threatening drawl.

  “Have I?” Ryld replied.

  He reflected that it was too bad the three musicians had left the stage a few minutes back. He doubted that anyone had managed to eavesdrop on his conversations while the longhorn was shrilling away.

  The other male scowled and asked, “Why?”

  “Just making conversation. Do you know something about the rogues?”

  “No, but I know that in the Jewel Box we don’t like it when people are too curious. We don’t like them hunting runaways. We don’t like them listening to every private thing we say and reporting back to the Mothers.”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  Maybe he was, but he had no intention of confessing it to this fool.

  “Ha!” the swordsman scoffed. “If you were, you wouldn’t admit it.”

  “Be that as it may, I suggest you and your friends return to your table and let this boy and I finish our game.”

  The male with the red sword swelled like an inflated bladder on the verge of bursting. “You’re trying to dismiss me like a servant? Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Of course, Tathlyn Godeep. I trained you. Do you remember me?”

  Ryld pushed back his cowl, exposing his hitherto shadowed features.

  Tathlyn and his friends goggled at their former teacher as if he had just revealed himself to be some ancient and legendary dragon.

  “I see you do. So I’ll bid you good day.”

  Tathlyn looked as if he was groping for a comment that would allow him to terminate this confrontation with his dignity intact, but the onlookers started to laugh. His fear less compelling than his pride, he screwed the sneer back onto his face.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice raised to cut through the laughter, “I know you, Master Argith, but you don’t know me, not the person I have become. Today I am the weapons master of House Godeep.”

  House Godeep was one of the petty Houses of Narbondellyn, whose frantic rivalries on the very bottom rungs of the ladder of status were almost beneath the notice of the nobles farther up. Ryld doubted the Godeeps would rise much higher with Tathlyn leading their warriors. During his training, the boy had learned to swing a sword with reasonable skill, but he had always demonstrated extraordinary recklessness and general poor judgment when placed in command of a squad.

  “Congratulations,” said Ryld.

  “Perhaps if you’d known I would rise to such an eminence, you wouldn’t have taken such delight in smashing my knuckles and beating my shoulder to pulp.”

  “I didn’t do it for sport. It was to teach you to close the outside line and to stand up straight. I tried simply telling you to make the adjustments, but you didn’t heed me.

  “Now,” Ryld continued, “I’ve explained I have no intention of tattling to the matrons about anything I might happen to learn in this place. Is my word good enough for you? If so, we should have no quarrel.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “Lad—excuse me … Weapons Master, pause, breathe, and reflect. I sense you’re feeling angry over your aches and bruises. Perhaps you want to take it out on someone, but I’m not the person who administered the beating.”

  Tathlyn stood silent for an instant, then he said, “No, you’re not, and I suppose all the punishment during training was for my own good. No hard feelings, Weapons Master. Enjoy your match.”

  He started to turn away, then whirled back around. The point of the red long sword streaked at Ryld’s neck.

  Before the four companions had even reached the sava table, Ryld had inconspicuously centered his weight and planted his feet in a manner that would allow him to get out of his chair quickly. He simultaneously sprang up and brushed the blade aside with a sweep of his arm, but he didn’t strike it at quite the proper angle. The wicked edge of the red sword drew a little blood.

  Ryld realized that this was his first real fight in the better part of a year. He’d intended to go out with one of the companies patrolling Bauthwaf, slaughter himself a few of the predators that were always wandering in from the caverns farther out, but somehow he had never bestirred himself to do it.

  That was no problem. He had no fear that he was rusty. It was just that, looking back, he was surprised at his lack of motivation.

  All these thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant and without slowing his reactions in the slightest.

  Tathlyn jumped back out of reach, but one of his companions was lunging at Ryld. It looked like they all intended to fight, which probably meant they were all the weapons master’s kin and subordinates. Otherwise, one or more of them might have stayed out of the quarrel.

  Ryld twitched himself out of the way of his attacker’s wild head cut, drew his leaf-bladed short sword, and thrust. The onrushing Godeep’s momentum, Ryld’s strength and skill, and the magical keenness of his point served to bury the weapon deep in the crook of his assailant’s fighting arm. Though not his favored weapon, the short sword—enchanted to wound even incorporeal spirits—was a fine blade. Blood started from the puncture, and, staggering, the Godeep dropped his falchion. It would actually have been easier to kill the dolt than merely incapacitate him, but Ryld was on a secret mission, and outright homicide was far more likely to attract attention than a simple tavern brawl.

  Tathlyn and his other two friends saw their chance and rushed in. Ryld knew that he didn’t have time to pull the embedded short sword out of his victim’s flesh. If he tried, his other enemies would have him. He cloaked the wounded Godeep in a ragged bulb of darkness and shoved him at the others.

  Ryld couldn’t see through the obscuring field any more than his adversaries could, but, peering around the edges of it, he saw the wounded Godeep reel into his fellows and stagger them, startle them, too, with the sudden, unexpected impediment to their sight. That gave the weapons master the time he needed to whirl, take in the obstructive clutter of furniture and gawking sava players before him, and leap up onto the table where his own game sat waiting. His racing feet annihilated the snare he’d so cunningly laid for the merchant, hurling the pieces rattling across the board and onto the floor.

  He jumped down on the other side, grabbed Splitter, and spun back around to face his enemies. In one smooth blur of motion, he yanked this most trusted of all his weapons from its scabbard and came on guard. Despite its hugeness, the greatsword was so perfectly balanced that it felt as light as a dagger in his grasp.

  He noticed that the noncombatants in the taproom had begun shouting encouragement and insults at the fighters. A couple quick-thinking gamblers were giving odds.

  Ryld’s three remaining adversaries manhandled their shadow-shrouded kinsman out of their way and stalked forward, manifest
ly hoping to pin the fencing teacher against the wall. The one on the left hung back a bit, none too eager, but he didn’t look as if he’d actually turn and run unless Tathlyn told him to, or else he saw the weapons master himself go down under Splitter’s razor edge.

  Ryld had no intention of letting himself be trapped. He moved away from the wall the same way he’d moved up to it, springing onto the table and charging across.

  When he reached the far edge, he discovered a rapier poised to skewer him in the vitals when he plunged off. The Godeep on the other end of the blade—the bolder of Tathlyn’s two kinsmen—was quick, and he’d conceived a pretty good tactic. Ryld’s impetus was such that he probably wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from hurtling right onto the Godeep’s point.

  But he could whirl Splitter through a sweeping low-line parry. The greatsword clanked into the other male’s lighter blade and snapped the last six inches off.

  Ryld jumped down almost on top of the rapier fighter, so close it would require a moment to bring Splitter’s blade to bear, a moment that the other Godeeps might turn to good advantage. Instead, the weapons master bashed the greatsword’s heavy steel ball of a pommel into the center of the rapier-wielder’s forehead. The impact thudded, and the male fell backward.

  Something clacked hard but harmlessly against Ryld’s breastplate. He glanced down and saw that one of the spectators, someone who’d bet on his opponents, perhaps, had shot a hand crossbow at him—but the weapons master didn’t have time to look for the culprit. He had to pivot to fend off his fellow swordsmen.

  Predictably, Tathlyn was in the lead. Ryld cut at the weapons master’s head, and his erstwhile student instantly backpedaled, retreating just far enough to avoid the stroke. He’d learned good footwork somewhere along the way, better than Ryld remembered.