City of the Dead
( Waterdeep - 4 )
Rosemary Jones
Rosemary Jones
City of the Dead
Prologue
Spring 1467
On such a day as this, a day of such good weather that people wandered in the streets with no more business on their minds than to dally in the warm sunshine, Waterdeep irritated Lord Dorgar Adarbrent.
He walked muttering through the crowds, pushing the more aggravating pedestrians aside with his cane. He knew his irritation was irrational.
After all, on a fine day, the city presented itself in its greatest glory: the gleaming statues, the marvelous buildings, the crooked streets, the busy harbor, the hustle, and the glamour. But there it was. The vibrant city, the noisy and argumentative city, annoyed him. Yet, for almost all his long life, Lord Adarbrent had loved Waterdeep more than any living thing.
On such a day, Lord Adarbrent's unquiet mind drove him to the quietest place in all of Waterdeep, the City of the Dead. At the Coffinmarch gate, he turned away from the southern end of the cemetery, avoiding the many visitors and public monuments there. Instead he trod the lesser paths leading north, toward the tombs emblazoned with the old names, the noble names, the names of families once known and now long forgotten by all but him.
Soon his own footsteps crunching upon the gravel were the only sounds he heard. Oh, if he concentrated, there were the indistinct whispers that always filled the air in that silent place, but the sun was bright overhead and the shadows were driven into hiding beneath the bushes or in their graves and he had never been afraid of ghosts.
At last he reached the tomb he sought. He unlocked the bronze door. A slight rustle stirred in the dark and a whiff of rose oil, faint as the memory of a dream, issued forth. His mind immediately soothed, Lord Adarbrent descended the mausoleum's steps into the gloomy, peaceful depths.
The ball sailed over Sophraea's head and landed with a splat in the middle of a mud puddle. From her viewpoint as a goalpost, watching her various older brothers and many young male cousins scramble after the ball, five-year-old Sophraea could not tell if the boys had scored a point or incurred a penalty. It did not seem to matter. Everyone was sliding through the puddle, fists flying. The misshapen and much abused leather ball rolled away unheeded, stopped finally by an uncarved headstone.
Above the little girl, the sky shone a cloudless blue, only the thinnest ribbons of white clouds scudding past the crooked gables of Dead End House.
The ringing of hammers against wood, iron, and marble echoed through the yard as Sophraea's father, uncles, and older cousins began their morning's work on the gravestones and coffins commissioned for the recently deceased of Waterdeep's richest families.
Sophraea's mother, grandmother, and aunts had agreed that the first day of Tarsakh was a beautiful day for cleaning. The Carver women were busy turning over carpets, sweeping out dust, and generally scrubbing Dead End House from basement to attic.
Swept out of the door with her brothers and younger cousins, Sophraea sat upon a stack of clothing abandoned by the boys, kicking her legs and wondering what to do. After designating her as a boundary marker in one of their endless ball games, Sophraea's older brothers had told her to "stay put and don't follow us," an instruction she heard so often as the youngest member of a large and mostly male family that she forgot it immediately.
While the boys fought and tussled for the possession of the battered leather ball, Sophraea grew more and more bored with her job as a coat weight. With a shout, her brother Leaplow jumped on her cousin Bentnor, who had just regained his feet after the last wrestling match, and the rest of the boys piled on top.
Realizing that nobody was paying any attention to her, Sophraea slipped off the pile of the boys' coats and wandered to the far end of the courtyard.
The gate to the City of the Dead stood ajar, one of her bigger cousins having just carried a bronze marker through it. One of the black and white Carver cats slid through, intent on its own business in the graveyard. Beyond the gate, Sophraea could see the tangle of spring flowers, tall bushes, and gleaming marble tombs. A buzz of bright wings amid the flowers attracted her eye.
Little Sophraea Carver stepped through, the open gate and into Waterdeep's great graveyard. No one saw the tiny girl with the head of black curls disappear into the haunted pathways of the City of the Dead.
Behind her, the shouts and the thuds of the boys at play faded away. As she trotted down the crushed stone path, Sophraea passed beneath the shadow of a marble monument, the statue of a tall woman dressed all in armor weeping into the hand covering her face. Tears trickled through the stone fingers to fall into a simple basin at the woman's feet. Sophraea kneeled and peered into the pool, trying to catch a glimpse of spring tadpoles or her own reflection. But the water was too brown and murky, stained by the remains of winter's dead leaves.
A quick search yielded a long branch, light enough to carry to the basin and long enough to satisfactorily rake the leaves out of the pool. Happy with her work, Sophraea forgot about her brothers and did not even notice when the hands of the statue moved, so the weeping woman now peeped through open fingers at the child laboring by her marble feet.
Despite the bright sun, pale fingers of mist twined around the rooftop of the tomb behind the little girl. The statue raised its head and glared. The fog slipped back to a hole in the ground. Oblivious, Sophraea continued to clear the pond of debris.
Eventually, the long evening shadows crept across the grass to touch the edge of the pool. Leaves stirred in the bushes surrounding the pool, although no breeze ruffled the little girl's dark curls. Sophraea looked up. The sun had sunk low enough to be hidden by the great mausoleum before her.
Having lived all her short life above the workshop where her family created such figures as the marble statue above her and the stone sarcophagus and barrel tombs surrounding her, these monuments to the dead did not worry the little girl. But the shadows growing darker in the corners and the bushes rustling around her made Sophraea think that the time had come to find her way home. Besides, she was hungry and if she didn't get back quickly, the boys would probably snatch more than their fair share of supper.
Setting off on the path as fast as her short legs could trot, Sophraea rounded the corner to face a brick and timber tomb built like a miniature Waterdeep mansion. The tomb's bronze door swung wide open. Stepping carefully through the door was a tall man, who ducked his head a little to avoid knocking off his wide-brimmed hat against the marble lintel. The bronze door gave a mournful squeal as he pulled it shut behind him.
Taking a large iron key from his pocket, the gentleman locked the door with a distinct click. He turned and Sophraea instantly recognized the face as exactly the sort of creature her brothers whispered about in the hallways of Dead End House late at night when they were supposed to be climbing the stairs to their bedchambers.
Beneath the wide-brimmed black hat, the visage presented to the terrified child was a cadaverous mixture of yellow and white, the gentleman's pale skin heavily pockmarked across the nose and cheekbones. His lashes and eyebrows were a mottled gray and the color of his eyes a muddier brown than the pool where she had been playing.
Recently dared by her brother Leaplow to peek in a coffin after the occupant had been tenderly placed there, Sophraea did not hesitate to identify the figure now bending closer to peer at her as a corpse!
"Are you lost, child?" said the corpse in a suitably creaky and cracked voice.
"No," whispered Sophraea, too terrified to either scream or run. Then she repeated something that she had heard a hundred times around the family table but never understood. "I am a Carver. Carvers can't get lost."
"O
f course." The corpse nodded in solemn agreement. "But it is close to sunset. Perhaps you should go home now."
Sophraea just stared back, still frozen into place by this unexpected encounter.
"You came through your family's gate. The Dead End gate." Each word that the corpse spoke was carefully enunciated, much in the manner very ancient relatives used to speak to the youngest Carvers. This mixture of not quite a question, not quite a statement was exactly like the type of conversation Sophraea endured during the visits of her grandmother's elderly lady friends. Perhaps the gentleman was not a corpse, she thought, but simply the male equivalent of the wrinkled, white-haired ladies who sat around the kitchen table.
"Did you come through the Dead End gate?" asked the elderly corpse man again. "Do you know your way there?" Sophraea bobbed her head in tentative agreement. "I will walk with you. It is time that I returned home."
One pale and age-spotted hand slid into a deep pocket. Slowly he withdrew his closed hand and extended it toward Sophraea.
"Would you like a sweetmeat?" he said.
Sophraea shook her head violently. Seeing the ancient face crease with an odd look of uncertainty, as if he knew he had said something wrong but wasn't sure how to correct himself, she added, "I am not supposed to take sweets from strangers. And it is too close to my dinner time. Mama would scold me."
Stepping into the last full rays of the sun, the elderly gentleman leaned over the child. "You are a good girl."
He patted her awkwardly on the head, like a man more used to hounds or horses than children, and pocketed the sweet.
That close, Sophraea saw the wrinkles and spots on his skin looked exactly like those on the hands of the old ladies who came to eat cake with Myemaw and gossip about how the city was once so much grander. Even the mustiness of the elderly man's coat held the same smell of preserving herbs and old house dust as the ladies' cloaks.
"I thought you were a dead man," Sophraea burst out in her relief and the old gentleman's gtay eyebrows rose to his scanty hairline at her pronouncement. "But you're alive! I am sorry, saer."
Removing his wide-brimmed black hat, the old man bowed with exquisite courtesy and stated, "Lord Dorgar Adarbrent, most certainly alive and entirely at your service." A rusty sound came bubbling out of his throat, something halfway between a polite cough and a chuckle, as he replaced his hat.
"Sophraea Carver," said Sophraea, dipping into a brief curtsy as she would to one of her grandmother's friends.
"Now, child, let me walk you home. You should never be in the City of the Dead after dark." The old man scratched his chin as he stared at the child. "Hmmm… in fact, even though you are a Carver, you are quite too young to be here alone at any time."
"That is what everyone says. Sophraea, stay here! Sophraea, don't go there!" confided the little girl, turning obediently at the wave of the nobleman's hand and leading him back along the path toward the Dead End gate. "But the boys were kicking their stupid ball. It is so boring! All I do is sit! So I left and nobody told me to stop."
Lord Adarbrent gave another rusty chuckle. "Ah, I see that the boys were the ones at fault."
Sophraea skidded to a halt. Although she was five, and growing up in the tail-end of a big family had left her with a large vocabulary, she wanted to make certain that she undetstood Lord Adarbrent.
"Does that mean the boys are in trouble?" she asked carefully.
"I rather suspect that they are." Lord Adarbrent nodded, hooking one finger over his nose to hide a smile.
"Oh, good!" cheered Sophraea. "I want to see that!"
As she drew nearer the gate, Sophraea heard shouts, but in a higher and much different tone than when she had left. Recognizing her mother Reyes cries, Sophraea quickly climbed the steps to the Dead End gate.
"Wait for me, child," cried the old gentleman.
Sophraea paused at the top of the gate stairs. Behind her, Lord Adarbrent peered uncertainly through the twilight gloom.
"Come along," said Sophraea. "I must go in."
At the sound of her voice, his head swung up and he stared directly at her. "Ah," he said with satisfaction, "I see the gate now".
"Are you coming?" Sophraea asked.
"Certainly," the old man said, climbing up the moss-slicked stairs.
At the sound of another shout from her mother, Sophraea turned and ran to the center of the courtyard.
All her brothers and all her younger cousins were lined up before her mother Reye. Her uncles Perspicacity, Sagacious, Vigilant, and
Judicious stood in their workshop doors, attracted by the noise. Ail had worried lines creasing their big foreheads. Out of the windows hung at least two aunts and Sophraea's grandmother, each adding her shouts to Reyes scolding.
"How could you have lost her!" yelled Reye. "You were supposed to be watching Sophraea!"
"Don't know," muttered Leaplow.
"Wasn't me," added Bentnor.
Lord Adarbrent gave a small cough behind Sophraea. Reye whirled around and, catching sight of her daughter, sped across the courtyard to snatch the child up. "Where have you been?" she Said. "Look at your skirt. You're all dirty down the front. Where were you?"
The scolding and questions Sew so fast around Sophraea's head that she didn't know when or how to answer. Her father came up to them more slowly. A giant of a man, he looked over his wife's head at Lord Adarbrent and nodded at the old gentleman. "Thank you for bringing our Sophraea back."
The nobleman waved one age-spotted hand in dismissal. "The child knew her own way back. Quite a clever girl, Carver."
With a final bow, Lord Adarbrent crossed the courtyard to the street-side gate and let himself out.
"You've been in the City of the Dead!" shouted Reye. "Oh, you bad, bad boys, to let her go through that gate! She's much too young!" Reye swatted bottoms right and left. The boys fled howling with excuses of "didn't see her!" and "it's not my fault!"
Sophraea's smirk at the rout of her brothers quickly ended as her mother whirled back.
"You bad girl!" cried Reye, swatting Sophraea hard enough to be felt through her petticoats and then hugging her even harder. "You must never go into the City of the Dead alone! It isn't safe! Especially after dark!"
"Sorry, Mama," mumbled Sophraea.
"Now, Reye," said her father. "No harm was done." He squatted down to look Sophraea straight in the eye. "But you must promise never to go through that gate without me or one of your uncles."
"Never?" protested Sophraea, who knew "never" could last as long as a year or more.
"Not until you're a grown girl, pet. The City of the Dead is no place for small children alone. Especially at twilight." Her father hoisted Sophraea up on his shoulder, to give her a ride back to the house. She wrapped her hands around his broad neck and leaned her cheek upon the top of his curly head. "Oh, oh, you're strangling me!" cried her father in mock terror. "What must I do to get rid of this terrible monster!"
Sophraea giggled and kicked her heels upon his shoulder. "Take me home!" she cried.
Despite all the excitement and fussing that followed at supper, Sophraea did not completely forget her father's orders nor to venture alone through the Dead End gate, perhaps because Leaplow made his own promise "to wallop her good" if she ever got him in that much trouble again. But like many Carver family rules, it became relaxed and stretched until she routinely trotted up and down the mossy stairs on errands with the rest of the family.
Like her boisterous brothers, Sophraea grew up assuming that any haunts or horrors on the other side of the wall would never harm her. After all, she was a Carver and those buried by the Carvers rarely bothered the family.
And Sophraea's belief in her family's safety never wavered until the winter that the dead decided to use the Carvers' private gate to go dancing through the streets of Waterdeep.
ONE
Winter 1479
Rain and wind rattled the window, wakeingSophraea Carver from her troubled dreams. After rolling over twice
and punching her lumpy pillows three times, Sophraea sighed and sat up. The last live ember in the bedroom fireplace gave out the faintest red glow. The window shook again as another blast of Waterdeep's wet winter hit it. The rotting month of Uktar certainly was starting with a roar of watery fury.
Sophraea slid out from under her tangled blankets. Barefoot, toes curling when they encountered the cold floorboards, she padded to the window. Leaplow had promised to fix the loose casement many times, but her brother never seemed to make it up the four flights of stairs to her bedroom. Which meant that once again she had to deal with the noise and the draft in the darkest hour of the night. Grumbling a little under her breath, Sophraea grabbed the edge of the casement, meaning to shove the bolt as hard and tight as she could. But a flicker of light caught her eye.
Her bedroom windows faced east, overlooking the City of the Dead rather than the crowded streets of Waterdeep. It was quieter on this side of the house, gravely quiet as the family often joked. From her room at the very top of the house's crooked east turret, right under the roof, Sophraea could see all the northern half of the graveyard from the Deepwinter Vault all the way to the Beacon and Watchway Towers.
This late at night, there should be nothing to see. No lights should be shining in the City of the Dead except the few lamps left burning to mark the main paths and mausoleums, and most of those were in the south end where the grand civic memorials stood, well out of sight of her window. The City Watch would have closed and locked all the public gates at sunset. Sophraea knew no honest citizen would be wandering through the old graveyard and the dishonest ones generally kept away after dark. There were far more profitable and less dangerous targets for thieves to be found amid the bustling nightlife of Waterdeep's best and worst neighborhoods.
But the whirling ball of light appeared again, a wildfire flicker that statted in the north end of the cemetery. It leaped and swirled in patterns resembling the pathways leading away from the northern tombs. The light flickered out and then reappeared much closer to the cemetery wall, almost directly under her window.
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