by Ed Greenwood
Through it all she heard her killer say softly, “Tell you who I am? When I can let you die never knowing? Why, Tamaeril, gracious lady, I find I cannot afford you this satisfaction. Pray accept my deepest apologies.” He laughed, a mirthless rasp that made her shudder.
Tamaeril forced her head up again and watched him through dulling eyes. Her will carried the crystal stopper silently on, on across the room. She would have only an instant once he discovered it. She dare not look until the very last moment.
Tamaeril forced herself to shudder again—it was not difficult, but the pain it brought was sickening—and turned her head, as if in agony. There. There it drifted, straight on, inches away from the servants’ gong. Goddess, aid me!
Tamaeril turned her head back to look at him. The gong rang.
He smiled. “Oh, by all means, Lady, summon aid. I want eyes to see you and loyal retainers to strike down with my Art! I want to enjoy this to the full! My thanks!” There was a sudden rustling behind him.
He spun with that thin-lipped smile still on his face. A spray of magic missiles darted from his hand to blast away the life of her just-awakened songbird, in its cage. Her tormentor hummed merrily as they heard the thud of a maid’s slippers on the stair below.
Tamaeril raised a hand and spoke a cantrip of her own devising; the first magic she’d created for herself, under the tutelage of the one called Elminster, long ago. The elegant carpet beneath her slayer’s feet jerked suddenly, sending him stumbling off-balance, back toward his flickering gate. Her other hand, slow and trembling, found its way to the cold steel in her breast.
When he regained his feet, the masked man was snarling with rage. “Enough, old cow!” he snapped. He strode forward and wrenched his blade free, twisting it savagely in her breast as he did so.
Tamaeril gave a little scream and doubled over, spitting blood. The hand that had been climbing past the blade found its destination by accident. Her convulsing fingers grasped the amulet about her neck. Dimly Tamaeril was aware of her murderer backing up to his gate. The door of her chamber swung open. The wards shone suddenly bright across it. Her maid’s thin scream rose shrilly. Shouts and pounding feet came in answer.
The amulet glowed, faint and blue-green and soothing. Pain ebbed as Tamaeril stared into the light and lost herself in it. She scarcely felt the magic missiles that tore into her old and broken body, lifting her back up into a sitting position in the high-backed chair. Tamaeril made a gift of the last of her strength. With the few fading instants of her life, she whispered a warning to her colleague and friend Mirt. Mirt, Beware! Masked one … comes slaying lords … has Art … took me, Tamaeril.…
And so, with the pride of accomplishment, Tamaeril, oldest Lord of Waterdeep, slid into the embrace of death. The crystal stopper shattered as it struck the floor. The chamber was silent for a moment before the small, grieving wail of Tamaeril’s favorite cat began.
[Somewhere in Hell, the fallen human—sprawled on rocks drenched with his own blood—sinks hungry and yet sick, parched and yet awash, into waiting oblivion.…]
DON’T YOU FAINT ON ME, TREACHEROUS HUMAN! WE’LL JUST TASTE THE MIND- WORM TOGETHER AGAIN, SHALL WE? YOU WERE FINALLY GOING TO SHOW ME SOME MAGIC, AFTER A TOUR THOUGH ALL THE DYING LORDS OF WASTERDEEP, AS I RECALL….
[mind lash, mental pincers clamping down furiously, images streaming]
Mirt the Moneylender, who had once been called Mirt the Merciless, stared around the darkened wizard’s parlor and swallowed. “Gods take us all,” he rumbled, broad blade already gleaming in one hairy fist. “What are we coming to, that lords of Waterdeep can be struck down in blood, in their own cozy-rooms? And a wizard, too!”
He glared about the room like an angry hawk, bristling. A battered hand-axe seemed to find its own way from his belt into his other hand.
“Keep close now, lass,” he added. “I can’t protect you if I can’t reach you, as some smart-tongued prince or other said to his concubine, just before I spilled his brains out.… I forget me just where that was, now. Gods, but I must be getting old!”
“Now, my lord,” Asper reproved him softly, her own slim blade in her hand as she put her back to his, eyes darting warily about the room, “remember that ballad of Randal Morn’s: ‘You’re only as old as the one who feels you’!”
Mirt grunted, and then chuckled reluctantly. “Aye. Aye, I recall. But hush, now, as we prowl a bit. If any buck’s going to try and gut me, I want to hear him coming!”
They stood together in the dim, cluttered parlor of Resengar called the Whitebeard (and, by some of his apprentices, Old Baldpate), a lord of Waterdeep and one of Mirt’s friends. Or rather, he had been.
Not the width of a hand from Mirt’s battered, flapping old boots lay Resengar, eyes gleaming sightlessly up at the star-decorated ceiling above. The old wizard’s hands were drawn up as if to ward off a foe. His mouth was open in disbelief. Just beneath it, someone had opened another mouth in his throat, a red sword slash that still leaked blood onto the dark furs underfoot.
Looking down at him, Asper almost expected Resengar to cough his dry little cough, look all about with beard bobbing, as he always did, and apologize for having nodded off. But as silent moments followed, one after the other, he did not move. Those staring, sightless eyes grew dull. Resengar would never cough again.
Mirt had liked the shy, fussy old wizard perhaps best of all his fellow lords, after Durnan. He’d been looking forward to swapping ancient tales over even older wine tonight with the aging fusspot, watching Resengar stare longingly at Asper as he treated her with elaborate courtesy—until the wine took him and he began to snore, whereupon they’d quietly leave. As usual.
Now someone had cut Resengar the Whitebeard down in the middle of his cozy-room, his most private chamber, amid all his wards and defenses of Art. Someone who had left a silver Harper’s pin behind on the breast of the wizard’s robes. Resengar—who had never worn his own rune, let alone any other insignia—did not even own such a thing.
Someone was going to pay. Pay in blood, if Mirt the Merciless had anything to say about it. He hadn’t realize he’d snarled that aloud until he heard Asper’s soft but firm, “Yes, Lord. I am with you and will stand with you in this.”
Mirt turned to smile at her, and Asper saw tears glistening in his angry old eyes. He met her understanding gaze, saw her expression, and tossed his head, turning away quickly. “Well, then,” he said gruffly, “let’s be looking about, then! We won’t be finding anyone while we stand here, growing old!”
Asper only smiled and nodded as her lord turned and stomped away into the dim corners of the chamber, weapons raised. He had been a lion of a man once. Iron shoulders swung axe and long sword from the saddle on many a battlefield in those days, with force enough to cleave armor and bone. Or so the old warriors’ tales told, in the taverns.
Men had called him Mirt the Merciless, and when he rode, fear rode before him. The Wolf, he was, and his men the Company of the Wolf. They looted and slew with grim efficiency. Butchery was never their mark, except against those who did not pay the Wolf his promised fee, or dealt him treachery. Those he hunted down and slew—mercilessly.
No man can stop the seasons, it is said, or escape their slow but certain claws. Winters pass, uncaring, and with them strength seeps away. The Wolf became the Old Wolf; Mirt grew old and gray—and rich. Men no longer feared his name. He rode no longer to war. The coin he had won by the hire of his sword he lent out, at fair rates, in the city of Waterdeep. Those who tried to cheat him learned that his sword had not grown so slow as all that, and that over the years he had learned a trick or two and picked up a useful magical bauble or three.
When honest debtors could not repay loans, he lent them more in return for a share of this and a share of that. In such a way he saw many old war companions to comfortable graves, who would otherwise have starved or frozen, homeless, in winter gales. Mirt said prayers over their failing foreheads or unhearing remains, paid for the burial
s, and turned over what they had left to their descendants. What he owned a share of—hovels, shops, or ships—he bought outright and took as his own.
In this patient way Mirt the Moneylender grew richer without making over-many enemies, and became as well loved as a moneylender can. Well loved? Aye, and in the end a lord of Waterdeep, for many small kindnesses revealed in his grayer years, and one greater one.
The homeless girls of the city were always welcome at Greygriffon House, once the quarters of Mirt’s mercenary company. Mirt spent much gold hiring good women to see to the girls’ upbringing and tutelage, and himself sponsored them to apprenticeships as they desired or gave them dowry when they were taken to wife.
“Mirt’s Maids” were always to be seen wearing gowns as fine as any goodwife when out in the streets. When of seventeen summers, they were free to take their weight in silver and gold and make their own way in the world. Some stayed happily at Greygriffon House. Others asked Mirt to sponsor them as apprentice smiths, or warriors, or ship captains. The Old Wolf proved to have a heart as soft as his pockets were deep, and did so.
If he grumbled and bristled and blustered through his days, those who knew him saw past that and valued his friendship for what it was. Mirt grew fat and wheezing from hours at the flask and belly-up to well-laden tables, but he never laid aside his weapons or let down his guard of wary eye and sharp wits.
Asper looked at her lord now and saw wrinkles and stubble, his paunch and wild-flowing, mostly gray hair. She saw too the anger smoldering in his eyes as he looked around the room with drawn sword raised, and loved him all the more.
She had always loved him, since that day many years ago when he had come loping through the streets of a burning city, while his troops looted and slew all around him, and scooped her up from under the wild hooves of a riderless horse.
Hardened fighting men had looked on amazed as their general, the cold and deadly Wolf himself, caught up the crying toddler. He had held her close against his stubbly cheek as he snatched the reins of the terrified horse, hauled it near enough to grab a brutal fistful of mane, swung into the saddle, and spurred out of that ruined place.
Women he had taken, that night and many nights later, but always he bathed and cuddled his stolen child before he slept, telling tales and hoarsely whispering coarse songs to her in the night.
“Asper” was all she remembered of her name. Asper she was to him. She rode to battle strapped to his back, wrapped to the chin in thick, sweat-stained leathers. A great steel shield covered him from shoulder to shoulder and kept her safe, if half deafened and much bruised, within.
He fed her on mare’s milk and such wine, fruit, and cheese as she could suck from his fingers. Later she ate bread and half-raw meat, and choked on the fiery wines he plundered from a hand’s-worth of cities. Scarred and loud-voiced warriors tickled her and showed her tricks of knife-throwing and string-knotting and drawing in the dirt around a hundred campfires. She laughed a lot and grew to love the man who made her laugh so.
Winters passed, and Mirt’s riding and fighting came less often. Asper finally lost count of the battles she’d been big enough to actually see and grew steadily sadder at what her eyes beheld. One after another, many warriors she knew and liked groaned or gasped their last moments away or lay twisted and still in the dust. Mirt grew older, too, and slower, and at last he came to vast, noisy Waterdeep to stay, not just for a roaring ride of drinking and wenching and hiring on new swordsmen.
Asper grew taller. Mirt took to buying her gowns and fine slippers and one day awkwardly presented her with a canopied bed and a room of her own. He had held her, too, when she came howling from night-terrors or sheer loneliness to interrupt his snoring, and told her gruff and bracing truths and marched her firmly back to her own bed. He even took to calling her his daughter.
So she had been the first of Mirt’s Maids, Asper reflected, even if he saw her more as his daughter and less as a consort. She would never leave his side, if she could manage that. She would die for him, gladly, if the gods willed it so. She would do anything—anything—to take the tears she saw now away, forever. But Resengar lay dead, and she could not bring the dead to life.
Mirt’s angry prowl around the parlor ended on his knees beside his old friend. He carefully examined blood and wound and the body that bore them. He took a silver pin carefully into his hand.
Asper could see nothing more in the sudden, silent flood of her own tears.
A strong, familiar arm went around her shoulders. “Now, lass,” Mirt rumbled in her ear, “smile! Remember Resengar leering at you and showing you that little cantrip he was so proud of, that made the circle of stars.… When Mystra thinks of her follower Resengar, she’ll remember such things as those … and she’ll be smiling, mark you!”
Asper did, despite herself. Ah, Mirt! she thought, the gods smile upon me, indeed, to give me you as father and lord and perhaps husband someday, all at once!
“No!” he whispered, slowly. “Gods, no! Tamaeril!” Asper spun to look up at him, blinking away tears in sudden foreboding. “Tamaeril!” Mirt cried suddenly, his voice sad and soft. Defeated. Axe and blade hung forgotten in his hands.
“Lord?” Asper whispered, hesitantly. Mirt looked off into the shadows a moment more. Then he turned his head slowly toward her voice, as if dragging himself back from a far-off place. His eyes were haunted.
“Tamaeril is dead,” he said roughly. Anger burned in his eyes again. His chin came up. “Someone is slaying the lords of Waterdeep,” he said, jaw set coldly, eyes dangerous. “Someone able to pass wards”—he waved his blade impatiently around the room—“whose magic should be impassable. Someone who may be a Harper or wants all to think him one. Or her. It may just as easily be a maid or an illithid or worse. It goes masked, is all I know.” He shook himself, as if awakening, and strode toward the doorway with sudden energy. “Come, lass!”
“Where?” Asper asked, following him out of that room of death.
“To find Piergeiron. The lords must be warned.” The Old Wolf strode down the worn stone steps toward Resengar’s oval front door and the many-shadowed back alley beyond.
“Tamaeril? The Lady Tamaeril Bladesemmer?” Asper murmured her question, her back to Mirt’s shoulder as he crouched by the door’s way-slit, peering into the night beyond.
“Aye. She managed a sending to me as she died.” Mirt kicked the door open grimly and thrust a cloak on his axe out into the alley. Silence. No shadows moved. He shrugged and tossed the cloak aside, crouching to hurl himself out into the night. “Fast, now,” he whispered softly. “And stay low.”
“My lord,” Asper whispered back urgently, “shouldn’t we go home for armor and friends, better weapons, magic? You are not the least of the lords! You stand in great danger!”
Mirt grinned wolfishly. “The gods must know I grow bored, these days. I would share that danger, lass! If this one who slays lords knows I am a lord, then let him find me! I want to be found … for if he finds me, then it follows that I will have found him!”
The blade he held lifted a little, a snake eager to strike. “I feel in some need of finding this lord-slayer, right now,” he added softly, and Asper shivered a little in spite of herself. Then he was gone, out into the night. She set her trembling lips together in silence, raised her blade, and followed. As always.
Eight
FRESH TORMENTS
Elminster stumbled forth over sharp stones into full wakefulness once more—and into the claws of a red haze of pain.
It seemed he’d been lurching and scrabbling and crawling along forever, his guts sick with agony, his thoughts a chaos of grim scheming and involuntary remembrances, goaded by the archdevil riding his mind like some exhausted, tatter-winged bat steed.…
YOUR MIND IS LARGER THAN I’VE SEEN IN A HUMAN BEFORE, Nergal mused, his mental-voice as silken-smooth as ever. Cruelty thinly cloaked in grace …
This reaming could take forever, and I weary of it.
; Elminster drew himself up so he could lean against a stone thickly smeared with old, black blood. The cracked skulls of devils crunched and rolled under his feet. And so?
AND SO, DEFIANT MAGE, ’TIS TIME TO BURROW THROUGH YOUR TWISTED TANGLE OF A MIND IN EARNEST. Nergal said in a mind-voice that was a sharp biting sword. I SPURN THE VISIONS YOU LAY BEFORE ME TO WASTE MY TIME. I CARE NOTHING FOR LONG-AGO ADVENTURES OR ROMANCES. I DESIRE MYSTRA’S POWER—I KNOW YOU MUST HAVE WIELDED IT, AND FROM YOUR MEMORIES OF SUCH USAGES, I CAN LEARN! SO GIVE ME, MAN—YIELD AND CRAWL!
Shouldn’t that be yield or crawl? All ye need do is—aaarggh!
[dark lances stabbing, bright pain flashing, tumbling, memories surging, falling, wild pain, screaming screaming amid devil’s laughter, rising to outbellow all]
LITTLE WORM, I COULD HAVE DONE THIS TO YOU FROM THE FIRST!
[mind lash, raw screaming]
HAH! I should have done this to you from the first!
[bright whirling chaos of torn memories, shards and scraps a-tumble]
… Across the fields she saw him go, a bent and tattered gray form. He dwindled, striding steadily on, became a tiny figure, and was gone.
And she shivered, sighed, and turned away.
[images dwindling, falling, fading, lost and forgotten forever, now, in the wake of an archdevil’s wrath]
The warrior looked down at the gathering vultures and the heaped bodies of the fallen and leaned on his spear.
Far they stretched from the height where he stood, far across rolling hills and the plain beyond; a hundred hundred souls and more this day. Davalaer thought on the wailing and grim sorrow that news of this battle would bring to the dales, even though victory had been theirs. Too many men would never return home. Too many were gone forever.
Aye, there would be lamenting in the houses of the dalefolk. Davalaer sighed, looking out at the still forms below. “But they will forget,” he said heavily. “And then—somewhere, sometime—this will happen again.”