by Ed Greenwood
“Elminster gives thee thanks, Tyche,” he murmured into the rushing darkness. He’d managed to hang onto his head in that chamber of death; he supposed that was something … something even mighty wizards hadn’t managed! Prudence stifled the whoop of exultation that suddenly rose within him—but it warmed him as he was swept out of the darkness into the blue, lamplit dimness of evening beneath the docks. He turned his head to look up at the dark spires of Athalgard and grinned his defiance at them.
The feeling lasted until he’d clambered out of the water onto a disused dock and started the cold, dripping walk home. If he’d been Farl, he’d have taken his knowledge of who’d died in that chamber to swoop down on a hand’s worth of houses this very night and seize riches their owners would never claim before relatives or lesser vultures knew man or treasure was missing, and be safely gone into the night.
“But I’m not Farl,” Elminster told the night, “and not even all that good a thief—what I am is a good runner.”
To prove it, he outran the armsman who came around a corner just then, halberd in hand, who with a startled shout recognized the youth he’d almost spitted in a stairway in Havilyn’s house not twenty breaths ago. Their pounding pursuit took them along a winding street lined with the walled gardens of the wealthy. As they ran under overhanging trees, a dark shadow reached down from one of them and struck the armsmen hard and accurately in the face with a cobblestone.
The man pitched to the cobbles with a clatter, and Fan dropped lightly down into the road, calling, “Eladar!”
Elminster turned at the top of the road and looked back. His friend stood with hands on hips, shaking his head.
“Can’t leave you alone for an evening, I see,” Farl said as El puffed his way back down the street.
As he came up, his friend was kneeling on the guard’s neck, expertly feeling for purses, spare daggers, medallions, and other items of interest. “Something important’s happened,” Farl said, not looking up. “Havilyn came running in, all out of breath, and said something to Fentarn—and we were all ordered out of the house, and the armsmen after us to be sure we were turned out into the street—while the lot of them ran somewhere—ran, El, I tell you … I didn’t know any high-and-mighty merchants remembered how to run.…”
“I was where the important thing happened,” Elminster said quietly. “That’s why this one was chasing me.”
Farl looked up at him, eyes alight. “Tell,” was all he said.
“Later,” Elminster replied. “Let me describe the dead first, and once ye’ve named them, we can visit whichever unsuspecting incipient houses of grief bid fair to have the heaviest loot lying around for the taking.”
Farl grinned fiercely. “Suppose we do just that, O prince of thieves.” In his excitement and the effort of lifting the guard’s body, he did not see Elminster stiffen at the word “prince.”
“We’re fair out of room in there,” Farl said in satisfaction when they were safely away from the boarded-up shop where their takings were cached. “Now let’s go somewhere where we can talk and not be seen.”
“The burial ground again?”
“Fair enough—once we make sure it’s free of lovers.”
They did so, and Elminster told Farl the tale. His friend shook his head at El’s description of the Magister. “I thought he was just a legend,” he protested.
“Nay,” El said quietly, “he was frightening—ah, but it was magnificent, the way he ignored their best spells, and calmly judged each and struck them down. The power!”
Farl cast a sidelong glance at his friend. Elminster was staring up at the moon, eyes bright. “To have that much power, someday,” he murmured, “and never have to run from an armsman again!”
“I thought you hated wizards?”
“I—I do … magelords, at least. There’s something about seeing spells hurled, though, that—”
“Fascinates, eh? I’ve felt that.” Farl nodded in the moonlight. “You’ll get over it once you’ve tried to fire a wand or speak a spell over and over again and nothing happens. You learn to admire it from a distance and keep well clear—or be swiftly slain. Godsbedamned wizards.” He yawned. “Well, a good night’s work.… Let’s get some slumber under Selûne—or we’ll be snoring somewhere when full day comes again.”
“Here?”
“Nay—two of those dead, at least, have family vaults right here—and what if their servants, sent to clean up the tombs and the brush for a burial, are fearful enough of walking dead to demand an escort of armsmen? Nay, we need to find a roof elsewhere.”
A sudden thought came to Elminster, and he grinned. “Hannibur’s?”
Farl grinned back. “His snores’d wake a corpse.”
“Exactly.” They laughed and hastened back through the dark streets and alleys of the city, avoiding aroused bands of armsmen who were tramping aimlessly about in the night, looking for a running youth in dank leathers and an old mage strolling along in the air—and no doubt inwardly hoping they’d find neither.
As the half-light that heralds dawn stole down the river and into Hastarl, El and Farl settled down on Hannibur’s roof, wondering at the silence from below. “What’s become of his snoring?” El murmured, and Farl shrugged his own puzzlement in reply.
Then they heard the small sound from below that meant Hannibur had slid open the eye panel on his back door. They exchanged raised eyebrows and bent to look down into the alley—in time to see Shandathe Llaerin, called “the Shadow” for her smoothly silent ways, and perhaps the most beautiful woman in all Hastarl, come lightly up the alley to Hannibur’s back door. They heard her say softly, “I’m here at last, love.”
“At last,” the baker rumbled as he drew the door warily open. “I thought ye’d never come. Come to the bed ye belong in, now.”
Elminster and Farl exchanged delighted glances, and clasped hands with fierce joy in the night. Then, all thoughts of sleep gone, they settled down to listen to what befell in the room below.
And were fast asleep within seven breaths.
The hot sun woke the two exhausted, filthy thieves sometime late in the morning … and once they were awake, the smell of fresh-baked rolls and loaves wafting up from Hannibur’s shop made sure they stayed that way.
Stomachs growling, the two thieves peered carefully down at the bedroom below. They could just see Shandathe’s elbow as she slept the day peacefully away.
“Don’t seem right, that she should sleep when we can’t,” Farl complained, rubbing his eyes.
“Let her sleep,” Elminster replied. “She’s doubtless earned it. Come.” They climbed carefully down the crumbling back sills and crossbeams of the shop next door and went off to the silver-bit baths—only to find folk lined up.
“Whence this sudden urge for cleanliness, goodsir?” Farl asked a sausage vendor they knew by sight.
He frowned at them. “Haven’t ye heard? The mage royal and a dozen other mages were killed last night! The dirge-walk begins at highsun.”
“Killed? Just who could manage to slay the mage royal?”
“Ah.” The sausage seller leaned close confidentially, pretending not to see the eight or so folk who crowded or leaned out of the line to listen. “There’s some who says it was a mage they awakened from sleeping in a tomb all these years since the fall of Netheril!”
“Nay,” a woman standing near put in, “ ’Twas—”
“And there’s some,” the sausage seller went on, raising his voice to ride over her, “what says it was a poor wretch they caught an’ were going to eat, alive, so they say, for some foul magic—but when they sat down at the table, he turned into a dragon, and burned ’em all! Others say ’twas a beholder, or a mind flayer, or summat worse!”
“Nay, nay,” the woman said, pushing in, “that’s not it at all—”
“But meself,” the sausage vendor said, elbowing her back and raising his voice again, so that it echoed back off the stone wall across the alley, “I think the first tale
I heard is the true one: their wickedness was punished by a visit from Mystra herself!”
“Yes! That’s it! ’Twas just that as happened, I tell thee!” The woman was hopping up and down in her excitement now; her capacious bosom heaved and rolled like tied bundles on the docks in high winds. “The mage royal thought he had a spell that would bring her to heel like a dog so he could use her power to destroy all wizards but ours and conquer all the lands from here to the Great Sea beyond Elembar! But he was wrong, and she—”
“She turned them all to boars, thrust spits up their behinds, and seared ’em in the hearth fires!” The gleeful voice belonged to a man nearby who stank of fish.
“Nay! I heard she plucked off all their heads—and ate ’em!” an old woman said proudly, as if King Belaur personally had told her.
“Ah, get gone wi’ ye. Why’d she do that, eh?” The man next to her stepped on her foot, hard.
She hopped in pain, shaking her finger under his nose. “Just you wait, clever-nose! Jus’ you wait an’ see—if they has carved wooden ‘eads when they’re borne past us, or their heads covered wi’ the burial cloaks, then I’m right! An’ there’s some folk in Hastarl as’ll tell you Berdeece Hettir’s never wrong! Jus’ you wait!”
Farl and Elminster had been trading amused looks, but at this Farl smiled and said out of the side of his mouth, changing his voice so that it sounded gruff and distant: “I suppose as thou wouldn’t put money on it, hey?”
In an instant, the alley was a bedlam of shouting, red-faced Hastarl folk holding up fingers to indicate their wagers.
“Wait a bit, wait a bit,” Elminster said—and silence fell: Eladar the Dark never talked. “It always distresses me to see ye wager,” he said, looking around earnestly, “because after, there’s so much hard talk and people furious at those who didn’t pay. So if ye must wager—and ye know I don’t throw my coins about thus—I’ll write down thy claims, and all can be settled fair, after.”
There was much talk … and then a growing agreement that this was a good idea. Elminster tore the sleeve from the rotten shirt he was wearing, got some ink from the street scribe in trade for a quill that he’d stolen out of a window a tenday ago, and was still carrying in his boot, and set to work, scratching out sums with a rough-pointed needle.
In the rush, none of the folk noticed Farl met several heavy wagers, standing always for the headless side. Elminster worked his way along the line to its head, dodged inside to continue wagering, hung the scribbled sleeve on a high nail, and plunged headlong and fully clothed into the old winepress tub that served as the bath. The water was already gray with filth, and Elminster came out again just as fast, pursued by the furious proprietor. They dodged around the rinse-pump while Farl worked the handle, dousing them both with rather cleaner water—and then Elminster thrust four silver bits into the man’s hand, leaped to retrieve the wager sleeve, and scampered out again.
“Gods blast thee! ’Tis a gold piece a head this day!” the man bellowed after them.
El spun around, disgusted, and tossed a handful of silver bits in the bath-keeper’s direction. “He’s a worse thief than we’ve ever been,” he muttered to Farl as they headed for a good place to hide the sleeve. It seemed fitting that the folk of Hastarl were willing to pay good gold to see the backs forever of the mage royal and a good handful of magelords besides.
“Or a better,” Farl agreed. Word of what had befallen was all over the city; folk talked of nothing else around them as they walked—and something of the air of a festival hung over the city. El shook his head at the open laughter, even among the patrols of armsmen. “Well, of course they’re happy,” Farl explained to his wondering partner. “It’s not every night that some helpful young thief—even if he does prefer to give all the credit to some mysterious mage who conveniently came out of thin air and just as helpfully vanished back into it again—downs the most hated and feared man in all Athalantar and many of his fellow mages … not to mention a bunch of men that shopkeepers in this city owe a lot of coins to. Wouldn’t you be, in their place?”
“They just haven’t thought about which cruel magelord will step forward to proclaim himself mage royal, and make them even more fearful than before,” Elminster replied darkly.
The wide streets along the route of the dirge-walk were filling already; folk who owned finery (and bath facilities of their own to prepare for its wearing) were pushing for the best positions—unaware of the flood of less polite and poorer neighbors who would shortly be charging in to seize the vantage points they wanted, regardless of who thought they owned it already. In most such processions, a good score of folk ended up crushed under the wheels of the carts, shoved forward by the press of leaning, shouting common folk.
“Are you thinking of what houses may be standing empty this good day, groaning with the weight of coins for the taking, while all Hastarl turns out to watch corpses paraded by?” Farl asked lightly.
“Nay,” Elminster said. “I was thinking of switching the bucket that bath-keeper sits on for another—taking the one he’s filling up with coins right now, and in its place leaving a bucket of—”
“Dung?” Farl grinned. “Too risky, though, by far—half the folk in line’d see us.”
“Ye think they don’t know what we do for a living, Farl? Even ye can’t be that much the idiot!” Elminster replied.
Farl drew himself up with an air of injured dignity. “ ’Tis not that, goodsir—’tis that we have a reputation to maintain. Everyone may know that we take, aye—but none should ever see us doing the taking. It shouldst be magic, d’you see? Like those wizards you’re so fond of.”
El gave him a look. “Let’s go take things,” he said, and they strolled off to arm themselves for the workday ahead.
One house topped the list of places to loot, and they hastened hence, wearing livery that was not their own but that served to conceal carry bags strapped to their backs and bellies and to hide the handfuls of daggers they both carried.
They dropped over the back wall into a pleasant garden, crossed it like two hungry shadows, and swarmed up a climbing thornflower to a balcony. A servant was asleep in the sun in the room beyond, seizing a prize opportunity while his master was out of the house.
“This is too easy,” Farl said as they sped up the stairs to a gilded door. He thrust his dagger into the carved snarling lion in its center and waited while the spring-loaded darts flashed away harmlessly down the stairs. “Don’t these fools realize that the shops that sell ’em thief-traps are always run by thieves?”
He dug his blade into one of the lion’s eyes, and the cut-glass eye popped out of its setting to dangle from the end of a cloth ribbon. Finding the wire in the opening behind the eye, Farl cut it and swung the door open. El looked back down the stairs as they went in, but the house was silent.
The bedchamber was a vision of red and deep pinkish tapestries, cushions, and couches. “I feel as if I’m in someone’s stomach,” Farl muttered as they crossed this sea of red.
“Or wading around in an open wound,” Elminster agreed, striding up to a silver jewel-coffer.
As he reached for it, a hard-thrown dart flashed past his fingers. Farl spun, dagger in hand—to stare into the eyes of two women and a man who were climbing swiftly in through a window. They were all clad in matching black leathers, and bore a sigil on their breasts: a crossed moon and dagger.
“This loot belongs to the Moonclaws,” said one woman in a steely whisper, her eyes hard.
“Ah, no,” Farl replied disgustedly, hurling his dagger. “Gangs!”
His blade spun through the air to plunge through the hand of the other woman, the hand that had been sweeping up with a dart in it. She screamed and fell to her knees.
Elminster hurled a dagger hilt-first into the man’s face, tossed a cushion after it, and then sudden rage took hold of him. He leaped forward to plant a kick so hard in the man’s gut that he groaned aloud as his toes struck the armor plate there—but its wearer w
as driven headlong back out the window to fall screaming to the garden below, a garrote waving uselessly in his hands.
“So noisy … so unprofessional,” Farl murmured, snatching up the jewel-coffer. The wounded woman was fleeing for the rope at the window she’d come in by, sobbing from the pain and shaking blood all over the red carpets. “Hey—that’s one of my good blades!” he complained as the other woman leaped at him, hurling one dagger and raising another.
Farl ducked and swept the coffer up; her blade struck it and shot into the ceiling, where it struck a roof-beam and stood quivering. The woman tried to reach over the coffer and slash his face, but Farl simply stepped around her, keeping the coffer between them, his head low and out of reach, and shoved her away with its end. She slipped on the carpet, and he brought the coffer down hard on her head. She collapsed soundlessly, and Elminster gently laid her unconscious companion atop of her, handing Farl his blade.
Farl examined its bloody tip and wiped it on the woman. “Dead?”
Elminster shook his head. “Just asleep; too hurt to defend herself.” They knelt together over the gem-coffer, scooping and snatching in real haste, until Farl said, “Enough! Use their rope—let’s begone!”
They paused to check the firmness of the gang’s grapnel, and then hastily clambered down, Farl first. The male thief lay sprawled senseless on the turf, with a shocked-looking servant gazing down at him. Seeing the rope dance and jerk, he stared up at them. Then he screamed and ran, and from the window above them, the two thieves heard an angry shout.
“Gods bedamned! Let’s hope they’ve no crossbows!” Farl snarled, slipping down the rope as his hands burned.
Then suddenly, sickeningly, the rope was no longer attached, and they were falling. There was a thud and a grunt from below as Farl landed. El tensed at the thought he might soon land atop his partner, but Farl was already up and sprinting out of the way. Elminster tried to relax as the turf swiftly rushed up to meet him.
The landing was hard. He got up, wincing; his right foot hurt, and beside him lay the man he’d kicked, mouth open and face white. A sick feeling rose in him, but as he scrambled to his feet, he saw the man’s hand move feebly, grasping for a windowsill that wasn’t there. Elminster and Farl sprinted together across the garden and scrabbled hastily up and over the wall. They dropped into the street outside and began strolling nonchalantly toward the nearest cross street, but a heavy clothyard shaft hummed low over the wall and struck the high wooden gate of the house across from them.