by Ed Greenwood
FORGIVE ME, EL. I’M STILL LEARNING. HEAR THEN MY WILL: YOU ARE TO ACQUAINT CALADNEI WITH VANGERDAHAST’S SCHEME AND WATCH OVER HER AS WELL AS HIM, STEERING HER IF NEED BE. I DON’T WANT TO LOSE THE WAR WIZARDS OR SEE INFIGHTING AMONGST THEM—OR THEY’LL BE JUST ONE MORE FRACTURED, HOSTILE FELLOWSHIP OF SELF-INTERESTED MAGES, LIKE THE RED WIZARDS.
ALASSRA, THOSE SAME RED WIZARDS ARE UP TO FRESH MISCHIEF IN AGLAROND. BEWARE MINDWORM MAGIC WORKING ON THOSE YOU TRUST.
The Simbul’s smile was as wry as her voice as she replied, “Most Mighty, beyond present company, I trust no one. And sometimes, I’m not too sure about either of you.”
Divine laughter rolled around the mountaintop again, but whereas Mystra clearly took the Queen of Aglarond’s words as a jest, Elminster’s fondly knowing and forgiving smile told Alassra he knew she was quite serious—and as wise as ever.
* * * * *
Malakar Surth’s head rang like a bell, and hurt as much as if he was being beaten ceaselessly with one, too—a large and rusty specimen. Snarling at the pain and shaking his head in a vain bid for relief that did not come, he opened his eyes, let the slowly whirling room parade past him in all its wavering glory for an unknown time, and recalled something: he was in the Dagohnlar bedchamber.
The Dagohnlars were his sworn foes, whom he and Bezrar had just bound and threatened—and who were quite possibly still sharing the room with him … knowing where any number of weapons lay ready to hand, while he did not, his own knife lost somewhere in the crash that had felled him.
Even if they were not here, or armed and seeking his death even now, this was still their house, with all the guards, servants, and trained hungry dogs they could muster—while he was helpless here at the heart of it, trapped under this cursed wreck of an excuse for fine furniture—swathed in all manner of slithery silks, mind you, but still trapped—and by the light creeping through yon window, it was nearing dawn.
Nearing dawn?
Shar kiss and slap! Darkspells had ordered him to have the closed coach ready before dawn to take him to Lady Ambrur’s mansion! Haelithtorntowers wasn’t but three streets away from here, and the Thayan’s inn another eight streets off, but … but …
With a scream of rising fear and frustration Malakar Surth kicked and beat his fists and pulled at splintered wood like a madman. Somehow he got the leg that was doubled under him and pinned by what was left of a wardrobe doorframe … free!
With a roar of fleeting, frantic triumph the hooded merchant erupted from the wreckage, trailing some splinters and wearing others, and staggered to the door he’d come in by, sparing only the briefest of glances for the cowering Dagohnlars.
Surth wrenched the door open and sprinted through it, flattening a timid maid who was standing uncertainly outside with the Lord and Lady Master’s morning jug of hot spiced wine ready with two goblets on a tray.
Jug, wine, tray, and all flew high into the air on the wings of a startled shriek, ricocheting musically among the gaudy forest of cut glass orbs and brilliantstars that Starmara’s prized and grotesquely gigantic “crown of candles” chandelier presented to the world beneath the vaulted ceiling overhead. As Surth ran, fell, and stumbled down the stairs at breakneck speed, these tumbling missiles descended again to favor him with various bruising greetings.
One goblet rolled underfoot and sent him crashing headfirst down a flight of stairs, into a huge, ring-handle-festooned (and thankfully copper rather than more breakable earthenware) pot of ferns. It toppled, spitting earth and fronds, and clanked along in his wake as Surth slithered down the next flight, found his feet at the bottom, and plunged helplessly into an embrace with a dazzlingly gleaming suit of Dagohnlar ancestral armor, full coat-of-plate and a head taller than he was.
It came down like a—well, like a toppling suit of armor that had been badly wired together and home to nests of mice for some seasons and therefore free to come apart and messily spew its contents in a bouncing, clanging chaos that carried the frantically cursing merchant down the last flight of stairs, windmilling his arms for balance and frightening the sleepy door-steward (who’d snatched down a vicious battleaxe to defend himself and found it so heavy that he’d almost fallen over) hastily aside.
Surth hit the inside panels of the ornate double entrance doors of Dagohnlar House still running at about thrice the speed and weight necessary to send them flying open. He tumbled helplessly down the broad, wet marble steps beyond, into Calathanter Street, and fetched up groaning on the cobbles by sliding rather greasily to a stop in something that smelled all too familiar: horse dung.
At least, Surth thought grimly, hoping his hurts were just aches and not bones helpfully shattered before the Red Wizard Darkspells could break all the rest of him with some angry spell or other, he was face up in the horse dung.
“S-surth? B’gads, you’re alive! Did they throw yuh out?”
That voice was all too familiar. Bezrar, who must have run and abandoned him to certain death, alone in that bedchamber with two hired slayers! Bezrar, the utter dolt and complete simpleton who’d—
Strong hands (accompanied by much wheezing and breath that smelled like mint-sugar—mint-sugar?—rather than the usual old garlic and reekingly older fish) plucked Malakar Surth up from the cobbles and set him on his feet.
Malakar Surth drew breath for the rudest words his mind could find to blisteringly deliver to a certain fat merchant, in the few breaths it would take Surth to find and pluck forth Bezrar’s own dagger and bury it hilt-deep and repeatedly in Bezrar’s fat and stupid face … then blinked, gaping his mouth wide in astonishment with not a single choice word uttered.
Bezrar stood before him uncertainly shifting from best-booted foot to best-booted foot. The importer and wholesaler of sundry goods was clad in the quietest, most dignified finery Surth happened to know he owned. There was a just-as-uncertain half-smile on his face and a long, long lead-rein shared space with a coachwhip in one of his hands. The other had just opened wide the door of Surth’s closed coach—which was drawn up neatly before the doors of Dagohnlar House. He blinked at it again, half-believing it would vanish and leave him staring into the hard and surly faces of an angry Watch-patrol, with some Dagohnlar servants pointing him out for immediate arrest.
The coach, however, stayed very much where it was, gleaming in the light, clinging rain Marsembans were pleased to prosaically call “pre-dawn mists” with its side-lamps lit and Surth’s best team of matched dapple-grays standing patiently in harness. Patiently, which meant they’d been fed.
Surth shook his head in disbelief, and his jaw dropped still more. Two folded bath-towels were piled neatly on the coach floor, below a seat that sported a complete, laid-out change of Surth’s clothes. The very dark ruby outfit he’d intended to wear, from gloves to velvet-trimmed boots.
He turned his gaping face to Bezrar, who broke into a grin. “I did good, huh? I saw the note you left for your stable-master, and he told me what it meant. So … here we are.”
For the first time in his life, Malakar Surth threw his arms around a man with love in his heart and an intent to kiss.
“Ho! Hey! No time for that, or we’ll be late for your ‘associate.’ Your horseman gave me to understand that doing that would be a very bad thing.”
“Bezrar,” Surth managed to say, as he clapped the fat merchant’s arms enthusiastically and lunged past him for the towels, “I shall heap special prayers on Shar’s altar on your behalf for this and—and buy you something you especially want!”
“That dancing lass at the Amorous Anchor?” Bezrar asked hopefully.
“Two of her! Or her and her best friend, rather, or—luminous, Bezrar! Just … luminous!”
Malakar Surth was not a man given to throwing back his head at the unseen, mist-shrouded stars and cackling wildly, but he did so now—attracting a raised eyebrow from a Watch officer turning the corner in the forefront of his patrol; a brow that lifted even higher as the thin, laughing man began to wildly tear his clo
thes off and fling them uncaringly behind him.
The Watch patrol eyed the open door of the coach, exchanged weary glances with each other, and in unspoken accord turned down another alley. Idiot nobles …
Surth was whipping the horses down Tarnsar Lane toward Chancever Street, still wildly grateful to Bezrar—who sat grinning smugly beside him—until a dark thought struck him: how had Bezrar known just where, in Surth’s very private and trap-fitted house, he kept these clothes? Or managed to reach that even more private and trap-guarded closet?
Eight
NIMBLE NAVIGATIONS IN MARSEMBER
If you’d see true villainy, look not to alleyways or dark taverns. Seek out the high and private chambers of the wealthy and the nobility, keep hidden, and watch what befalls. In matters of fell evil, practice improves performance as in all other things—and such practice is more possible than in alleys, because bored players seeking entertainment dally and dawdle before delivering their killing thrusts.
Irmar Amathander of Athkatla
Many Roads To One Ending
Year of the Bright Blade
The harbor water was no cleaner the second time around. Narnra was thankful she couldn’t see all the slimy things she was disturbing as she plunged to the depths amid much evil bubbling of rotting things rolling all around her. Kicking against the bottom to start herself upward again, she drew her knees up, struggled to pass her bound arms down under her boots and up in front of her, and came gasping to the surface, just as a magnificent nearby splash announced the arrival of her pursuer.
Of course. She’d almost miss him, if ever she was out and about in Marsember by night without her doggedly pursuing Rhauligan. Almost. Why, every Waterdhavian thieving lass should have one.
With a sour smile on her lips from that thought, Narnra doubled up like a wriggling eel and swam for the other side of the canal. Even with her wrists bound together, Narnra found she could cleave the water quite quickly—and for all their stink, these oily canals were calmer and less crowded than where she’d learned to swim: the just-as-filthy waters around the docks of Waterdeep.
Still, she was used to clawing at the water when she wanted to hurry and using porpoise-wriggles only when trying to keep very, very quiet … and she was growing tired already.
Rhauligan would be up and quiet again to listen for her in another breath or two, and her most likely destination couldn’t help but be rather obvious.
In one direction—through Rhauligan—the canal joined the wider tangle of fingerlike canals and slips that made up this end of Marsember’s harbor. In the other, just ahead, it ended in a turn-basin choked with rotting nets, a scum of dead fish, and oily refuse. A lone barge, waterlogged and awash, was moored to a dock there. It looked as if only its mooring-chains were keeping it from sinking and that they—brown and crumbling with rust—might soon sigh and give up their task. The barge seemed to belong to a once-grand stone warehouse that looked every bit its rival in the race to become forgotten, abandoned, and utterly decrepit.
Narnra made for the lowest point of the barge rail where it was a good foot or so under water and rolled herself up onto the ancient vessel, scattering chittering rats and startling sleeping seabirds into complaining flight.
Rhauligan could hardly fail to miss that, but ’twasn’t as if the kindly gods had left her any choice, now, had they?
Even if he was charging through the water at her now, her first task was to bide right where she was, sitting on something painful and unseen in the stinking, crab-scuttling water of this barge, and try to saw through Rhauligan’s bindings with her boot-knife.
Easing her blade out without dropping and losing it was slow work. Wedging it in the rotting barge-planks took but a moment—but cutting her bindings took far too gods-bedamned long and involved a cut finger and some more cursing.
Shaking away drops of blood with a snarl, Narnra stood up and fumbled in her back pouch for the spare draw-string bag she carried—a mere scrap of leather with pierced ends gathered by a single thong—in case she ever found loot enough to need something extra to carry it away in (something that had happened exactly twice in her life thus far). Thong drawn tight, the bag made a clumsy bandage for her finger. She ran hastily along the barge toward its basin-end, where the dock looked more solid and less trash-strewn.
Behind her, blood sank like smoke into the inky water—which boiled up into a long, slender tentacle that burst forth, dripping, to stab hungrily out across the now-deserted barge … right in front of the furiously swimming Glarasteer Rhauligan. He glared at it and plunged right over it, snatching at the nearest mooring-chain.
His fingers closed around it at about the same time three more tentacles lanced out of the water, and his other hand closed on the hilt of one of his daggers.
One of the trio of tentacles undulated through the air over the barge, for all the world as if it could sniff and see, following the first tentacle in the direction Narnra had fled. The other two curled around to stab at Rhauligan, who decided—particularly in view of the fact that a habitual glance back over his shoulder had just shown him no less than three suspicious-looking bulges moving purposefully through the waters of the canal, straight toward the barge—that getting every inch of his well-used hide clear of the water right yesterday would be the wisest thing to accomplish in his life right now.
He let go of his dagger without drawing it and clawed his way up onto the barge, rotten planking crumbling like wet bread under his fingers. Tentacles were sliding boldly up along his legs as he heaved, kicked, and rolled for all he was worth, not caring if he ploughed through most of what little was left of the barge with his face if it got the rest of him out of the water.
Which was when he discovered that some of the tentacles were rising from the water-filled depths of the barge itself … a bare breath before Narnra at the far end of the ramshackle wreck screamed enthusiastically.
Rhauligan saw her struggling like a suddenly animated figurehead, body wavering back and forth on the prow of the barge with tentacles spiraling around her in a small forest—then a smaller but no less energetic forest of tentacles was slapping across his face and body, dragging him down toward the water his right cheek was already coldly kissing.…
With a snarl of fury he plunged his hand into the open front of his plastered-to-his-hide silk shirt, found the tiny trinket riding on its thong there—and tugged.
It took three wrenches before the gods-be-blasted thong broke. By then his arm was hauling the weight of six or more finger-thin tentacles along with it. Rhauligan fought to raise his hand high, his eyes on the struggling thief he was hunting. She had a knife out now and was using it with frenzied viciousness—but there seemed to be no end to these tentacles.
There were more rising up around him now, too, some of them festooned with weed-clocked human bones … and some bearing partial skeletons. Small wonder the warehouse and barge were so deserted!
Rhauligan muttered the word Alusair herself had taught him. He hated to lose this magic, one of the few things the Crown Princess had ever given him—and with a lovely, avid kiss, too!—but on the other hand, he’d hate to lose his life, too, so …
He threw the trinket down the barge, snapping his wrist to spin it farther even as the clinging tentacles dragged at his arm. It bounced once and skittered into some refuse. He closed his eyes hastily.
Sudden heat warmed his face an instant later, even before the flash and the roar that sent the barge heaving upward under him … and the tentacles spasming into a wild and frantic dance of their own. A chaos of wriggling, flailing, shivering tentacles tumbled him over and erupted past him, desperately seeking …
Some impossible escape from the fire that was now raging along the barge, burning even underwater thanks to the magic, cooking the unseen heart of the tentacles. Rhauligan scrambled to his knees as the wet, ropelike things fell away from him by the dozens and saw Narnra half-flung off the far end of the barge.
She landed with a
splash in the filth of the basin but churned the water in her haste to swim up and out of it, and in less time than it took Rhauligan to catch his breath and bound toward the dock she was ashore at the street end of the basin, running hard, if unsteadily, into the mists of approaching dawn.
Hurling hearty mental curses at the dying tentacled thing, the Harper hound raced past the burning barge after her, bursting out onto the street almost under the wheels of a handcart being trundled by a half-asleep fishmonger.
The cart promptly crashed over onto him—but thankfully was empty at this time of the morning. The man who’d been pushing it erupted in startled rage, clawing aside his ramshackle boxes in his haste to get at Rhauligan and do damage.
The Harper greeted him with a charge up from the ground that brought one balled fist in under the fishmonger’s chin and thrust him off his feet to bounce halfway across the street—bowling over a Watch patrolman who with his fellows had just formed a ring of drawn swords around a dripping and furious Narnra.
The Watchman’s fall allowed her to bolt through the space he’d been standing in—which meant she came sprinting out of the mists right into Rhauligan’s arms.
Ducking and twisting at the last moment, she slid under his grasp—though his fingers raked a bruising trail along Narnra’s slick, slimy-wet flank—and ran down the street, dodging twice as she heard his boots thundering on the cobbles right behind her.
The Watchmen were running too, blades and cudgels waving in all directions, so the first canal Narnra saw, safely on the other side of the street from the one that had erupted in tentacles, she sprang into. Rhauligan’s splash fountained in the roiling aftermath of hers.
The Watchmen skidded to a stop at the edge of the churning, dock-slapping water, shook their heads, and turned away. “Report ’em as drowned—lovers’ dispute gone ugly, both fell in with the fishes. Unidentified outlanders, the both of them, so retrieval not our duty. Write it down, Therry,” Rhauligan heard one of them growl, as he followed Narnra’s dark, wet head around a corner into a narrow side-canal. He was recalling, with ever-increasing verve, just how much he’d never liked Marsember.