She wondered if her sojourn in Menzoberranzan had diminished her. Back in Ched Nasad, she had enemies in- and outside House Zauvirr to keep her strong and sharp, but in the City of Spiders none had wished her ill. Had she forgotten the habits that protected her for her first two hundred years of life? If so, she knew she’d better remember them quickly.
The enemy hadn’t finished with her. She wasn’t so dull and rusty that she didn’t recall how these covert wars unfolded. It was like a sava game, progressing a step at a time, gradually escalating in ferocity. Her unknown adversary’s first move, though she hadn’t known it at the time, had been to turn Umrae and lie to Triel. Faeryl’s counter-move was to capture the spy and remove her from the board. As soon as Umrae missed some prearranged rendezvous, the foe would know her pawn had been taken and advance another piece. Perhaps it would be the mother. Perhaps the foe would suggest to Matron Baenre that the time had come to throw Faeryl in a dungeon.
But life wasn’t really a sava game. Faeryl could cheat and make two moves in a row, which in this instance meant truly fleeing Menzoberranzan as soon as possible, before the enemy learned of her agent’s demise.
Light-headed and sour-mouthed from her exertions, Faeryl dragged herself to her feet, trudged in search of Mother’s Kiss, and wondered just how she would accomplish that little miracle.
chapter
TEN
Cloaked in the semblance of a squat, leathery-skinned ore, whose twisted leg manifestly made him unfit for service in a noble or even merchant House, Pharaun took an experimental bite of his sausage and roll. The unidentifiable ground meat inside the casing tasted rank and was gristly, as well as cold at the core.
“By the Demonweb!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Ryld replied.
The weapons master too appeared to be a scurvy, broken-down orc in grubby rags. Unbelievably, he was devouring his vile repast without any overt show of repugnance.
“What?” The Master of Sorcere brandished his sausage. “This travesty. This abomination.”
He headed for the culprit’s kiosk, a sad little construction of bone poles and sheets of hide, taking care not to walk too quickly. His veil of illusion would make it look as if he were limping, but it wouldn’t conceal the anomaly of a lame orc covering ground as quickly as one with two good legs.
The long-armed, flat-faced goblin proprietor produced a cudgel from beneath the counter. Perhaps he was used to complaints.
Pharaun raised a hand and said, “I mean no harm. In fact, I want to help.”
The goblin’s eyes narrowed. “Help?”
“Yes. I’ll even pay another penny for the privilege.” he said as he extracted a copper coin from his purse. “I just want to show you something.”
The cook hesitated, then held out a dirty-nailed hand and said, “Give. No tricks.”
“No tricks.”
Pharaun surrendered the coins and to the goblin’s surprise, squirmed around the end of the counter and crowded into the miniature kitchen. He wrapped his hand in a fold of his cloak, slid the hot iron grill with its load of meat from its brackets, and set it aside.
“First,” Pharaun said, “you spread the coals evenly at the bottom of the brazier.” He picked up a poker and demonstrated. “Next, though we don’t have time to start from scratch right now, you let them burn to gray. Only then do you start cooking, with the grill positioned here.”
He replaced the utensil in a higher set of brackets.
“Sausage take longer to fry,” the goblin said.
“Do you have somewhere to go? Now, I’m going to assume you buy these questionable delicacies elsewhere and thus can do nothing about the quality, but you can at least tenderize them with a few whacks from that mallet, poke a few holes with the fork to help them cook on the inside, and sprinkle some of these spices on them.” Pharaun grinned. “You’ve never so much as touched a lot of this stuff, have you? What did you do, murder the real chef and take possession of his enterprise?”
The smaller creature smirked and said, “Don’t matter now, do it?”
“I suppose not. One last thing: Roast the sausage when the customer orders it, not hours beforehand. It isn’t nearly as appetizing if it’s cooked, allowed to cool, then warmed again. Good fortune to you.”
He clapped the goblin on the shoulder, then exited the stand.
At some point, Ryld had wandered up to observe the lesson.
“What was the point of that?” the warrior asked.
“I was performing a public service,” answered the wizard, “preserving the Braeryn from a plague of dyspepsia.”
Pharaun fell in beside his friend, and the two dark elves walked on.
“You were amusing yourself, and it was idiotic. You take the trouble to disguise us, then risk revealing your true identity by playing the gourmet.”
“I doubt one small lapse will prove our undoing. It’s unlikely that any of our ill-wishers will interview that particular street vendor any time soon or ask the right questions if they do. Remember, we’re well disguised. Who would imagine this lurching, misshapen creature could possibly be my handsome, elegant self? Though I must admit, your metamorphosis wasn’t quite so much of a stretch.”
Ryld scowled, then wolfed down his last bite of sausage and bread.
“Why didn’t you disguise us from the moment we left Tier Breche?” he asked. “Never mind, I think I know. A fencer doesn’t reveal all his capabilities in the initial moments of the bout.”
“Something like that. Greyanna and her minions have seen us looking like ourselves, so if we’re lucky they won’t expect to find us appearing radically different. The trick won’t befuddle them forever, but perhaps long enough for us to complete our business and return to our sedate, cloistered lives.”
“Does that mean you’ve figured out something else?”
“Not as such, but you know I’m prone to sudden bursts of inspiration.”
The masters entered a crowded section of street outside of what was evidently a popular tavern, with a howling, barking gnoll song shaking the calcite walls. Pharaun had never had occasion to walk incognito among the lower orders. It felt odd weaving, pausing, and twisting to avoid bumps and jostles. Had they known his true identity, his fellow pedestrians would have scurried out of his way.
As the two drow reached the periphery of the crowd, Ryld pivoted and struck a short straight blow with his fist. A hunchbacked, piebald creature—the product of a mating of goblin and orc perhaps—stumbled backward and fell on his rump.
“Cutpurse,” the warrior explained. “I hate this place.”
“No pangs of nostalgia?”
Ryld glowered. “That isn’t funny.”
“No? Then I beg your pardon,” Pharaun said with a smirk. “I wonder why this precinct always seems so sordid, even on those rare occasions when one finds oneself alone in a plaza or boulevard. Well, the smell, of course. We don’t call them the Stenchstreets for nothing, but the buildings, though generally more modest than those encountered elsewhere in the city, still wear the same graceful shapes our ancestors cut from the living rock.”
The teachers paused to let a spider with legs as long as broadswords scuttle across the street. The Braeryn notoriously harbored hordes of the sacred creatures. Sacred or not, Pharaun reviewed his mental list of ready spells, but the arachnid ignored the disguised dark elves
“That’s a foolish question,” said Ryld. “Why does the Braeryn seem foul? The inhabitants!”
“Ah, but did the living refuse of our society generate the atmosphere of the district, or did that malignant spirit exist from the beginning and lure the wretched to its domain?”
“I’m no metaphysician,” said Ryld. “All I know is that somebody should clear the scavengers out of here.”
Pharaun chuckled. “What if said clearing had occurred when you were a tyke?”
“I don’t mean exterminate them—except for the hopeless cases—but why just let them squat here in their dirt like a
festering chancre on the city? Why not find something useful for them to do?”
“Ah, but they’re already useful. Status is all, is it not? Does it not follow, then, that no Menzoberranyr can find contentment without someone upon whom she can look down.”
“We have slaves.”
“They won’t do. Predicate your claim to self-respect on their existence and you tacitly acknowledge you’re only slightly better than a thrall yourself. Happily, here in the Stenchstreets, we find a populace starving, filthy, penniless, riddled with disease, living twenty or thirty to a room, yet nominally free. The humblest commoner in Manyfolk or even Eastmyr can turn up his nose at them and feel smug.”
“You really think that’s the reason Matron Baenre hasn’t ordered the slum scoured clean?”
“Well, if that conjecture seems implausible, here’s another: Rumor has it that from time to time, someone meets the goddess herself in the Braeryn. Supposedly she likes to visit here in mortal guise. The matrons may feel that the neighborhood is, in some sense, under her protection.” The wizard hesitated. “Though if Lolth has gone away for good, perhaps they don’t need to worry about it anymore.”
Ryld shook his head. “It’s still so hard to belie—”
Pharaun pointed. “Look.”
Ryld turned.
On a curving wall below a dark elf’s eye level was a sketch, this time smeared in blue. It consisted of three overlapping ovals, conceivably representing the links of a chain.
“It’s a different mark,” said Ryld. “Hobgoblin maybe, though I couldn’t tell you the tribe.”
“Don’t be intentionally dim. It’s the same peculiar, reckless, pointless crime.”
“Fair enough, and it’s still irrelevant to our endeavors.”
“It’s a dull mind that never transcends pragmatics. Two signs, representing two races, implying two specimens of the lesser races demented in precisely the same way? Unlikely, yet why would a single artist daub an emblem not his own?”
“Coincidence?”
“I doubt it, but as yet I can’t provide a better answer.”
“It’s a puzzle for another day, remember?”
“Indeed.”
The masters walked on.
“Still,” pressed Pharaun, “don’t you wonder how many scrawled signs we passed without noticing and exactly what form they took?”
Ignoring the question, Ryld pointed and said, “That’s our destination.”
The house’s limestone door stood open, most likely for ventilation, for the interior radiated a perceptible warmth, the product of a multitude of tenants crammed in together. It also emitted a muddled drone and a thick stink considerably fouler than the unpleasant smell that clung to the Braeryn as a whole.
Ryld had been born in a similar warren, had fought like a demon to escape it, and he felt a strange reluctance to venture in, as if squalor wouldn’t let him escape a second time. Unwilling to appear timid and foolish in the eyes of his friend, he hid the feeling behind an impassive warrior’s countenance.
Pharaun, however, freely demonstrated his own distaste. The porcine eyes in his illusory orc face watered, and he swallowed, no doubt trying to quell a surge of queasiness.
“Get used to it,” said Ryld.
“I’ll be all right. I’ve visited the Braeryn frequently enough to have some notion of what these little hells are like, though I confess I never entered one.”
“Then stick close and let me do the talking. Don’t stare at anybody, or look anyone in the eye. They’re likely to take it as an insult or challenge. Don’t touch anyone or anything if you can avoid it. Half the residents are sick and probably contagious.”
“Really? And their palace gives off such a salubrious air! Ah, well, lead on.”
Ryld did as his friend had asked. Beyond the threshold was the claustrophobic nightmare he remembered. Kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls, bugbears, hobgoblins, and a sprinkling of less common creatures squeezed into every available space. Some, the warrior knew, were runaway slaves. Others had entered the service of Menzoberranyr travelers who picked them up in far corners of the world, took them back to the city, and dismissed them without any means of making their way home. The rest were descendants of unfortunate souls in the first two categories.
Wherever they came from, the paupers were trapped in the Braeryn, begging, stealing, scavenging, preying on one another—often in the most literal sense—and hiring on for any dangerous, filthy job anyone cared to give them. It was the only way they could survive.
This particular lot had likewise learned to live packed into the common space without the slightest vestige of privacy. Undercreatures babbled, cooked, ate, drank, tended a still, brawled, twitched and moaned in the throes of sickness, shook and cuffed their shrieking infants, threw dice, fornicated, relieved themselves, and, amazingly, slept, all in plain view of anyone with the ill luck to look in their direction.
As Ryld had expected, within moments of their entrance, a pair of toughs—in this instance bugbears—slouched forward to accost them. With their coarse, shaggy manes and square, prominent jaws, bugbears were the largest and strongest of the goblin peoples, towering over the rest—and dark elves, too, for that matter. This pair was, by the standards of their destitute household, relatively well-fed and adequately dressed. They likely bullied tribute out of the rest.
“You don’t live here,” rumbled the taller of the two.
He wore what appeared to be a severed goblin hand strung around his burly neck. Drow occasionally affected similar ornaments, usually mementos of hated enemies, but they sent them to a taxidermist first. It was too bad the bugbear hadn’t done the same. It would have prevented the rot and the carrion smell.
“No,” Ryld said, tossing the bugbear a shaved coin, paying the toll to pass in and out of the house. “We came to see Smylla Nathos.”
The hulking goblinoids just looked at him, as did several others creatures. A scaly, naked little kobold tittered crazily.
Something was wrong, and the Master of Melee-Magthere didn’t know what. He felt a sudden tension and exhaled it away. Looking nervous was a bad idea.
“Isn’t this Smylla’s house?” he asked.
The shorter bugbear, who still loomed nearly as huge as an ogre, laughed and said, “No, not no more, but she still live here … kind of.”
“Can we see her?” said Ryld.
“What for?” asked the bugbear with the severed goblin hand.
The weapons master hesitated. He’d intended to say that he and Pharaun wished to consult Smylla in her professional capacity as a trader in information. It was essentially the truth, though that didn’t matter. What did was that he hadn’t expected it to provoke a hostile response.
Pharaun stepped up beside him.
“Smylla sold our sister Iggra the secret of how to break into a merchant’s strongroom,” the wizard said in a creditably surly Orcish rasp. “How to get around all the traps…. Only she left one out, see? It squirted acid on Sis and burned her to death. Slow. Almost got us too. It’s Smylla’s fault, and we come to ‘talk’ to her about it.”
The smaller bugbear nodded. “You ain’t the only ones wantin’ that kind of talk. Us, too, but we can’t get at the bitch.”
Pharaun cocked his head. “How come?”
“A couple tendays ago,” said the bugbear with the severed hand necklace, “we decided we was tired of her bossing us and her lamps hurting our eyes. We jumped her, hit her, but she chucked one of those stones that makes a flash of light. It blinded us, and she run up to her room.” He nodded toward the head of a twisting staircase. “We can’t get through the door. She locked it with magic or somethin’.”
Pharaun snorted. “Ain’t no door my brother and me can’t bust through.”
The bugbears exchanged glances. The smaller one, who, Ryld noticed, was missing several of his lower teeth, shrugged.
“You can try,” the larger one said. “Only, Smylla belongs to us, too. Hit her, bleed her, slice
off a piece of her and eat it, but you can’t keep her all to yourself.”
“It’s a deal,” Pharaun said.
“Come on, then.”
The bugbears led them through the crowded room and onto the stairs, where they still had to pick their way through lounging paupers. Partway up, the brute wearing the decaying hand put it in his mouth and began slurping and sucking on it.
At the top of the steps were a small landing and a limestone door with a rounded top. Two sentries, an orc and a canine-faced gnoll with sores on his muzzle, sat on the floor looking bored.
The disguised teachers made a show of examining the door.
“Can you knock it down?” Pharaun whispered.
“When the bugbears couldn’t? Don’t count on it. Can you open it with magic?”
“Probably. It’s magically sealed, so a counterspell should suffice, but I don’t want our friends to observe me casting it. That really would compromise my disguise. Stand where you obstruct their view and do something distracting.”
“Right.” Ryld positioned himself in the appropriate spot and glowered up at the two bugbears. “We can open it. What loot is inside?”
The larger bugbear scowled and, the odious object in his mouth garbling his speech a little, said, “We made a deal. It didn’t say nothing about no loot.”
“Smylla took Sis’s treasure,” Ryld replied. “We want it back, and extra too, for wergild.”
“Hell with that.”
The bugbear with the missing teeth reached for the knife tucked through his belt. Ryld could see it was a butcher’s tool, not a proper fighting blade, but no doubt it served in the latter capacity well enough.
Ryld rested his hand on the hilt of his short sword, the weapon of choice for these tight quarters, and said, “You want to fight, we’ll fight. I’ll slice your face off your skull and wear it like a breechcloth, but my brother and I came to kill Smylla, not you. Let’s talk. If you never get the door—”
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