Cold Steel and Secrets: A Neverwinter Novella, Part III

by Rosemary Jones

  “Wait,” he said. “An ambush doesn’t help the boy.”

  She nodded, but still slipped past him, heading toward Karion’s room. Her sword was drawn and she looked ready for battle.

  Sarfael checked the hallway carefully, but heard and saw no evidence of the crawling claws. He followed Elyne.

  The place was torn apart, the old man’s chair tipped over, and his piles of rubbish strewn across the floor. Papers were shredded and long strips of parchment curled around their feet.

  “Karion was no careful housekeeper,” Sarfael observed, “but this looks deliberate.”

  Elyne stirred the shreds of paper with her booted foot. “These were ripped apart by claws. Do you think those things that attacked us earlier turned against him?”

  “Perhaps. Do you see any sign of Montimort? Or Karion?”

  She shook her head. “Downstairs, if anywhere inside the house. Karion lived as much in his kitchen as this room.”

  “Ah, yes, the cheese.” Sarfael remembered Karion’s greedy snatching of the supplies they brought earlier and his stashing of his favorites around the kitchen and pantry. All watched by the stuffed remains of a former pet, a large cat left on the kitchen table to scare off rats.

  They proceeded carefully under the painted eyes of the disapproving portraits and went down the stairs past the cityscapes of a more pleasant and long gone Neverwinter.

  The old man lay on the hearth, one out-flung hand almost resting in the kitchen fire. A kettle boiled above the flames.

  Elyne gasped and rushed down the steps. She turned the body over and recoiled. Karion’s face, chest, arms, and hands were shredded as if mangled by some wild beast. To judge by the deep claw marks in his flesh, the old man had struggled mightily before he died. His face was contorted into a bloody mask of fear and anger.

  “What could have done this?” Elyne exclaimed.

  Sarfael started to make some comforting but meaningless remark. He doubted any besides Elyne would mourn the murderous seer with his delight in undead pets and rubbish-stuffed rooms.

  The firelight flickered in the glass eyes of the stuffed cat that crouched upon the stone floor. Blood dripped from the creature’s mouth.

  Sarfael gave a shout of warning as the undead cat leaped for Elyne.

  She ducked the attack, rolling to one side, and then reversing to strike with some force. Elyne skewered the undead creature precisely through the heart. The cat swiped at her with one paw. Elyne fell back. The creature followed.

  “The head,” Sarfael shouted, “cut off the head. If you can’t hit that, go for the legs. Slow it down.”

  He circled in the opposite direction, looking for a good hit.

  With a silent snarl, the creature leaped to the top of the kitchen table and then whirled in the opposite direction. Elyne chased after it, but the undead creature moved with great speed, dodging her strikes and clawing out with one and then the other paw.

  It leaped off the table, slashing right and left, and herding Elyne into one corner.

  She parried with a lighting series of strokes, even cutting off the cat’s tail, which fell with a sawdust thud to the floor. But her rapier was too light to cut off the cat’s head, even as she notched its ragged ears and slashed deep cuts into its neck and legs.

  Glancing around the kitchen, Sarfael saw the kindling tumbling from the stack next to the kitchen fire. One stick lay half in and half out of the fire, just outside the reach of Karion’s outstretched hand.

  “Clever,” Sarfael said. “You knew what was needed.”

  He snatched the burning brand from the fire and vaulted the kitchen table to belabor the cat with it.

  The undead creature recoiled from the fire but its dust-dry fur caught the spark. In moments, flames engulfed it.

  Elyne leaped away, shouting, “Drive it into the fireplace or it will set the whole place alight.”

  Sarfael hooked the beast under its belly with the burning stick of kindling and threw it across the room into the fireplace. With a mighty whumpf, it exploded into bits of fur and ash. One green glass eye rolled across the floor to stop at their feet.

  After a moment of stunned silence, Sarfael said, “Do we keep searching? Do you think Montimort is still here?”

  Elyne crouched on the floor, apparently studying tracks in the dust. “Cheese,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  She pointed to the pantry. “Montimort probably headed there when the cat attacked.”

  Elyne walked into the long narrow room lined with shelves and packed with boxes and jars, calling Montimort’s name softly. Sarfael followed. The place smelled strongly of cheese.

  Peering into one dark corner, Elyne crouched down. “Come out,” she said. “It’s gone. You’re safe.”

  A muffled squeak responded.

  “No more arguments,” Elyne said in the same firm tone she used when she told her students to practice again. “We need to leave now.”

  A thin brown rat slid out from the corner. Sitting upright, it curled its forepaws into its chest. Its whiskers twitched in a familiar way.

  “Montimort!” said Sarfael. The rat tilted his head in a manner very reminiscent of the boy. “That’s an interesting trick.”

  “But dangerous,” Elyne said, holding out one hand so the rat could climb up her arm and disappear into the hood of her cloak. “If a fight goes badly, he drops into the rat form automatically and scurries away. But his mastery over the change is poor and he doesn’t always change back as quickly. It’s one of the reasons he ran from the Dead Rats. They kept trying to beat better control into him. Which, of course, is the worst way to teach anyone.”

  “Do the other students know?” Sarfael asked as they left Karion’s house.

  “No. That’s why he only practices with me after the others have left. First dozen times I thrust a sword at him, he changed instantly. Poof. Montimort gone, and away ran the rat. He’s gotten better since then. He managed to hold his form when those claws attacked, although that might have been because they had such a tight grip on him.”

  The rat inside her hood, Montimort, popped up his head and snorted at her assessment.

  “How did you acquire this student?” Sarfael wondered.

  “He came to me,” Elyne said. “There he was one night, bruised and bloody, on my doorstep. He begged me to teach him how to fight. How could I turn him away?”

  Mavreen had begged him too. Begged him to teach her all his tricks, so she could add a rogue’s fighting skills to her mastery over spells. So she could destroy the Red Wizard who murdered her family.

  “You can’t,” he said to Elyne. “You can’t refuse. Not when you see their heart and soul in their eyes. Not when you know how much it means.”

  Dawn faded into bright morning before Montimort regained his human form. Elyne hugged him fiercely when he sidled out of the storage closet where they’d left the rat.

  Then she smacked him firmly on the side of his head.

  “Don’t do that again!” she said. “Running off. Not telling me.”

  Sarfael watched the scolding with tired amusement. He’d long ago trained himself to doze on his feet. Rather like his horse, when he considered it. But it had been a long night, made longer by Elyne’s nervous pacing alternating with her bouts of attacking the practice butts with any weapon close at hand. At one point, he suggested that she go home and he wait for the boy. But the look she gave him indicated that she could practice blows on his body as well as the straw-covered target, and he’d kept quiet after that.

  “But I have it, the key, the word we needed,” Montimort said. “I can trigger the spell upon the box and summon the crown to us.”

  “You’re sure?” said Elyne. “That the spell will work?”

  “I’m certain,” Montimort replied. “But we need to be outside the city. And high. Upland Rise.”

  “But I thought the box was for carrying the crown into the city,” Sarfael said, remembering Karion’s tale. Upland Rise
was a wasteland outside the city, stripped of its trees in Lord Neverember’s recent rebuilding of the docks.

  “I spent days studying it,” said Montimort. The excited boy nearly twitched out of his clothes with excitement. His voice rose and sweat gleamed on his face. “The spell will only work on Upland Rise. We have to go tomorrow night. At moonset.”

  “After dark it’s not safe,” Elyne said. “Not without a large group.”

  “We have to do it then,” Montimort insisted.

  Sarfael looked at him with narrowed eyes. How could the boy be so sure?

  “Very well,” Elyne said. Obviously she had no doubts about Montimort’s sudden revelations. “I’ll go to Arlon and we’ll assemble the Nashers. You’ll need protection out there. And we’ll need to leave the city throughout the day, in small groups, or we’ll attract the attention of one of General Sabine’s patrols. Sarfael, you bring him last.”

  “Moonset,” repeated Montimort, sounding as if he were reciting remembered instructions. Sarfael wondered again where he’d learned that lesson.

  “We will meet you there,” Elyne promised before she left.

  Sarfael remained behind. The boy fidgeted under his regard.

  “How did you find the key?” he asked. “The word that you needed?”

  Montimort shrugged. “Karion knew it. He talked so much about the box, knew its history so well. I realized he had to have the key. He kept hinting as much when we were there.”

  “So you figured that out,” Sarfael said. “But how did you get the word from him? Last time he saw you, he tried to kill you.”

  Montimort bit his thumbnail and mumbled something.

  Sarfael waited.

  Finally, Montimort blurted out, “I scared him. I scared him into giving me the word. But I didn’t know the cat would kill him. Then it attacked me! It wasn’t supposed to do that! And when it came after me, I changed and ran.”

  “You murdered him,” Sarfael said, trying to sort out the events in his own mind. Where had Montimort suddenly acquired the ability to animate the dead? From everything he had said, and everything that Sarfael had seen, the boy had never been so powerful a wizard. And Karion had struck him as something of a dangerous old rascal. It would have taken some true knavery to best him. Was Montimort truly the innocent he seemed? Or, as Karion accused him, more of a Luskar and a threat than Sarfael originally suspected?

  “He would have killed me!” Montimort shouted. “And I had to get the key. I had to. With it, we gain the crown. And then she can be queen of Neverwinter!”

  Startled out of his own dark suspicions, Sarfael asked: “Who?”

  “Elyne!” said Montimort.

  In that one word, Sarfael realized, were all the answers to Montimort’s unusual behavior. The boy merely acted to help Elyne.

  “She’s the closest descendent of Alagondar left in the city.” The words tumbled out of Montimort. “Arlon Bladeshaper and even Lord Neverember can’t truly trace their lineage back that far. Everyone knows it. They all gossip about it. How she could lead the Nashers if she wanted to, that she has more right than Arlon, but she won’t push herself forward.”

  Sarfael remembered Elyne’s explanation of how she formed her school of “elegant fighting” for the young Nashers, of how she wanted to keep her former playmates from being killed by their attempt at rebellion. But I, she had admitted, am a very bad Nasher. I wouldn’t know what to do with the city if I had it, she once said.

  “Montimort,” Sarfael said very gently, because the boy shook with his passion and because he suspected that Montimort had paid a terrible price for his newly acquired skills. “Montimort, she doesn’t want to be a queen. She has no ambition in her heart for such a thing.”

  “She must be queen,” Montimort cried out. “Elyne must take the crown. She’s the only one. If she doesn’t, it’s all for nothing. I murdered Karion for nothing.”

  The boy collapsed in a heap, weeping in lost and wild abandon. After a long moment, Sarfael crouched down beside him and placed his hand on Montimort’s shoulder. “We will go to Upland Rise. You’ll try your spells. Perhaps it won’t work. Perhaps it will. Then let others decide what to do with the crown of Neverwinter.”

  Let Dhafiyand have it, Sarfael thought. If the boy succeeds, I’ll steal it from them and give it to Dhafiyand. And make sure that Elyne and all the rest stay out of his net. Perhaps a trade: a pardon for them, in return for a crown.

  “Step careful,” Mavreen warned him as he fingered the hilt of her sword and contemplated tricks to deceive a master deceiver. For Sarfael could think of no more terrible fate for Elyne than to be queen of that broken city, with its warring factions and its dark history of shifting and ever deadly politics. Those who ruled Neverwinter or sought its throne were doomed, Sarfael thought, and, like the boy who wept beside him, he would do whatever he could to save Elyne.

  The wind blew cold across Upland Rise. In the gray gloom of the predawn morning, the treeless hill reminded Rucas Sarfael of a graveyard. The stumps of the trees stood as memorials for Neverwinter’s gentler past, when it had once been a wooded parkland for the amusement of its citizens.

  The white fog off the river ringed the base of the hill, leaving them stranded atop like mariners shipwrecked upon some island. All the Nashers were there: Elyne, Arlon, his followers, and her students. Even plump little Virchez, the Neverwinter merchant with ties to rich relatives in Waterdeep, had screwed up his courage and stood with the rest, a lantern in one hand and a wavering sword held not too steadily in the other.

  Glancing at the crowd, Sarfael almost regretted that he had not sent word to Dhafiyand to stop them. It would have been so easy for General Sabine to march out a few Tarnian mercenaries, arrest the lot, and confiscate the box. He could have slipped away in the confusion and later arranged for Elyne and Montimort’s release. Arlon, who was blustering at the others and shouting orders, he would cheerfully have left in some dungeon until his temper cooled.

  But, of course, if he did that, then he wouldn’t know if Montimort’s spell worked. He wouldn’t know if the box could summon the crown. And Dhafiyand most explicitly ordered him to watch and wait, to not act. Oh, he was so sick of orders and waiting. But, oh, he did want to see if a crown would appear.

  “Curiosity,” Mavreen mocked him once, “will kill you quicker than any sword thrust. You insist on sticking your nose around every dark corner just to see if there is something there that will bite it off.”

  Well, he’d never paid any attention to her reproaches then and, as much as he missed her, he certainly wasn’t going to let the memory of his first and last student stop him now.

  And, if there was a crown, and he could steal it, he gained a much more powerful stake in the game of Neverwinter’s dark politics. With a crown, he could buy freedom for his friends.

  Montimort finally seemed to have the spell started. The boy stood in the center of a ring of nervous Nashers. Torches flared all around him as he directed them to cast their light on the box that he held straight out from his body.

  He turned the box so the emerald glittering in the center of the lid faced him and began to read the words inscribed around it. Montimort intoned the spell slowly, the Thayan rite making his voice sound harsher and deeper than ever before. As he read the spell, the emerald began to glow brighter and brighter.

  With a shout, Montimort ended the spell. The emerald flashed so brightly that Sarfael closed his eyes automatically.

  When he opened them, he saw Montimort tumble back from a tall green figure holding the box in her two hands.

  Dressed in vest and trousers, the emerald woman regarded them all without expression on her perfectly carved features.

  Montimort seemed as stunned and surprised as the rest of them, but the boy visibly swallowed his fear and spoke sternly to woman. “Bring us the crown!” he commanded.

  She nodded once with regal solemnity. A glowing green circle appeared at her feet. The jewel woman stepped through it and di
sappeared.

  The wind ruffled their cloaks. The crackle of the torches was the only sound on the hill.

  Then, because it was a gathering of Nashers, they all started speaking at the same time.

  “What was that?”

  “Who was that?”

  “Did we get the crown?”

  “Now what should we do?”

  Arlon yelled at them all to be quiet, which made everyone talk in hissing whispers.

  Elyne moved next to Sarfael and spoke in normal tones to him. “Perhaps that will be the end of it,” she said, and she sounded relieved. “The spell failed.”

  “Not yet,” Sarfael said, pointing at the glowing green circle of light still visible on the top of the hill. Montimort watched it with narrowed eyes, paying no attention to the resounding rumpus around him.

  The circle flashed and the Nashers fell back. The green woman again appeared on the top of the hill. She held out her emerald hands, the dark wood box balanced across her palms.

  Montimort reached out and took it. Another brilliant flash, as bright as lighting but silent as the grave, and the woman was gone. The emerald on the center of the box gleamed for a moment with an internal light, but then the glow faded until it only reflected the glitter of the torches.

  Stunned, the Nashers waited in silence for Montimort to speak.

  Sarfael glanced at Elyne. Alone, of all of them, her eyes were on the boy’s face rather than the box in his hands. “He’s all right,” Sarfael reassured her.

  Finally, the impatient Arlon blurted out, “Well, do you have it? Is it the crown?”

  Blinking his eyes as if he had just woken from a dream, Montimort shook the box slightly. Something heavy rattled inside.

  “Open it,” Arlon commanded.

  “No!” Sarfael said, stepping forward. “Not here. Not in the open and the dark. Let’s take it somewhere safe.” Somewhere I can steal it, he added to himself, and before you can all get a good look at it.

  Because, at the end of the day, a box was just a box. Even one that rattled. A story for the taverns. The sight of a true crown, one that had been seen and might even be placed on one of the heads in their group, that story would be far more dangerous for the teller and the listeners. Dhafiyand might even act to silence such a story with blood.