Elminster's Daughter

by Ed Greenwood

  Steam was curling out of various windows and hatches in the stone buildings that rose on both sides of the canal—straight up out of its waters, most of them, without jetties or perch-porches, though crumbling scars of stone here and there marked where such features had once been ere barge collisions, gnawing waves, and the claws of winter ice removed them. Rusting crane-arms festooned with the decaying remnants of ropes, pulleys, and wooden block-and-tackles jutted from some of the building walls, but to reach them from the water even the most nimble of Waterdhavian thieves would have had to fly—or had a boat much taller than any barge to clamber up.

  Much of the steam roiling and eddying its way into the thickening pre-dawn mist was coming from lighted windows, for the hours of darkness are work-time to many in cities all over Faerûn who craft things or prepare things fresh. The smells borne on much of the steam told Rhauligan—whose alerted stomach rumbled enthusiastically more than once, as he swam grimly on—that many of these buildings were cookshops and bakeries preparing for the flood of hungry morning workers who’d descend at dawn to snatch something more or less edible before hurrying to where they worked. Eel pie, Rhauligan recalled sourly, was the dish of choice for working Marsembans. Almost made one want to become an adventurer or a Purple Dragon assigned to the Stonelands, where eels were no more than a disgusting word used in bad jests.

  A flood of refuse suddenly hurtled out of one lighted window, pelting down into the water around him. Rhauligan ducked his head under the filthy water just in time. Eel pie, indeed—and as such dishes used every last possible part of the slimeworms, the only trimmed parts to be discarded would be bits too diseased or rotten to be hidden by a thick, hot-spiced gravy, or devoured without immediate convulsions and collapse of diners. The same bits that were now sharing the waters under his very nose.

  Gods, but I hate Marsember!

  There was a splash ahead, and Rhauligan had a brief glimpse of Narnra’s hand closing on a doorsill that hung over emptiness, the work of either a particularly stone-skulled builder or the remnant of a way down onto some now-vanished dock.

  A moment later, the dark and dripping figure of Narnra surged out of the water like some man-sized eel, wriggling momentarily in midair as she snatched for a handhold that wasn’t where she needed it to be, clinging to the outside of the back door that belonged to the sill. It sported a well-lit, steam-spewing open upper half, and by the sounds of sizzling and chopping and snatches of brief conversation coming out of that large opening, it belonged to a cookshop.

  A moment later, a bucket of eel waste-trimmings took Narnra full in the face. Rhauligan didn’t even have time to shape a grin before she plunged through the window. Gods spit, but she’d grabbed hold of the bucket in mid-fling and been pulled into the room with it! In with the cooks—and their cleavers!

  He set his teeth, ducked his head down, and charged through the water, hoping he’d be there in time.

  Eyes smarting from eel-guts and guck better not thought about, Narnra slithered belly-down through the door hatch, catching a glimpse of a startled, yelling cook’s face on the other side of the bucket, as well as a lot of swaying candle-on-chain lanterns. Hitting the floor and sliding wetly along it, she found herself passing along a row of ovens, each sporting the behind of a stoking-lad beneath it who was shoving in kindling for all he was worth.

  One stoker put a boot into her face backing up, so she plucked a scrap of wood from his pile and rammed it into his behind. He howled, halting in alarm, and she was past and rolling frantically away from the ovens to avoid the boots of the bellowing cook with the bucket as he kicked and stomped at her head and hands, his shouts turning startled heads all over the kitchen.

  The nearest of those heads stared down at Narnra over a tray of fresh-made, raw eel pies. Narnra rammed one arm against an ankle and shoved at the other ankle with her other hand—and the tray and its holder toppled over her like a over-tall tree severed by a woodsman’s axe, crashing into the kicking cook.

  He stumbled back, almost falling, and flung his empty scraps-bucket at Narnra’s head. It whanged off one waving boot of the man who’d been holding the tray—then Narnra was on her feet and sprinting hard into the midst of three fat, shrieking women and their small host of half-finished eel pies.

  They lurched and scuttled in all directions, and she darted this way and that through them, hip-slamming the last woman headfirst into a cart of dirty pots, ladles, and pans.

  The crash was both deafening and spectacular, as the Silken Shadow left it behind, charging around a cutting-table toward the door out of this place, within sight at last.

  Ahead, there was a serving-counter in the way. It came equipped with a grizzled, startled-looking cookshop owner frozen in the act of wiping it with a bit of dirty rag to gape at her. Narnra ran right at him, intending to veer away at the last moment.

  Across the busy kitchen, on the far side of other cutting-tables, cooks were cursing. The racing thief had ignored them as being safely out of her way, but she’d reckoned without the swift-tempered and forearmed nature of most Marsembans. Cleaver after cleaver was snatched and thrown at her racing figure. Now in swift succession they crashed into bowls, other howling cooks, oven doors, and the faces of startled stoking-lads who’d just straightened up to catch sight of whatever was causing all the excitement.

  One whirling blade caught Narnra on the arm, bruising rather than cutting her, and sent her reeling into the grizzled counter-cleaner, who embraced her with an incoherently wordless gabble of amazement and swiftly mounting fear.

  Narnra pumped three swift punches into the stained and reeking apron covering the man’s bulging belly. He spewed whatever he’d just finished eating over her racing body into the face of the first cook, who—lightened by the lack of his scraps-bucket—had managed to mount a clumsy pursuit of this destructive intruder.

  Blinded and snarling in disgust, the cook reeled and elbow-skidded along a counter, spilling and scattering eel pies by the dozens … as the green-faced owner of the cookshop folded aside with a groan, and Narnra vaulted the counter with grace enough to freeze one of the young stokers where he stood, staring in awed lust—which got him smashed flat to the floor by a snarling Glarasteer Rhauligan.

  The Harper and Highknight had already weathered almost a dozen flung pots on his own charge through the cookshop kitchen, cleavers being in suddenly short supply—but someone found one last black-bladed monster somewhere and sent it whirling with shrewd aim as Rhauligan rounded the cutting-table for his run toward the counter.

  The Harper saw its deadly flicker out of the corner of his eye and flung up his arm to ward it away from his face. It bit deep into his shoulder and banged harmlessly away off his scalp rather than laying open his face or cleaving his skull in twain.

  Rhauligan roared out his pain, not daring to slow, and the vomit-covered cook sagging on the counter took one look at his furious face and the streaming blood and fled, sobbing a frantic way aside.

  Bleeding—again. Oh, this little hunt just gets better and better.

  The Harper burst out of the cookshop door into the wet mists in time to see Narnra halfway up the wall of the building, clinging to a drainpipe. She was slipping often in the wet and going slowly as she tried to work her way past a balcony jutting out from the floor above the cookshop—but she was already well out of his reach, and he couldn’t climb any faster than she could. To say nothing of whether or not any drainpipe would prove sturdy enough for the weight of two, all the way to the roof.…

  Just inside the cookshop door, in the open space in front of the serving-counter, was a side door. It would be the way up some cramped, dark stairs to the loftier levels of this building.

  Rhauligan turned and raced back inside, frightening a fresh howl of alarm from the kitchen. The side door proved to be locked, but Rhauligan carried a prybar—good as a cudgel, stouter than a sword and boasting some saw-teeth besides—sheathed to one leg, and he took out the frustrations Narnra was building
in him on that door.

  The defenseless wood offered little resistance, and the Harper boiled up the stairs like a storm wind and put his shoulder to the door on the first landing.

  It cracked like a thunderstroke, broke in half, and gave way inward, spilling him onto a half-asleep man and his only-slightly-more-awake wife who lay on a straw mattress on the floor. Their sons were already awake and peering out the lone, filthy window at the gloomy mists of slowly brightening dawn. They whirled, wide-eyed, as Rhauligan’s stumbling boot came down on their father’s stomach. The winded man sobbed for breath, flinging out his arms convulsively—one of them across his wife’s throat, silencing her in the first meeping moment of an emerging scream.

  “Morning!” the Harper rapped grimly, never slowing in his charge across the room. “Balcony door! ‘Way in the name of the King!”

  One boy gawked mutely, and the other, eyes shining, shot a bolt and flung wide the balcony door. Rhauligan thanked him with a fierce grin and plunged out into the mists, whirling to face the drainpipe in time to see Narnra’s boot lifting just out of reach.

  He grabbed for it anyway, knowing as he did that he was going to be about a fingerlength short. He was.

  Well, he’d almost laid a hand on her. He slapped it onto the pipe instead and swarmed up it after her, grunting at the pain each pull stabbed into his cloven shoulder. He had to get close enough that she wouldn’t have the time to turn on the rooftop and dagger his face or hands—aye, he had to be that close to her, or …

  Narnra glanced down, hissed out a curse—he was close enough to almost feel her breath, as he clawed his way hastily upward—and wasted no time on trying to kick at him or deal him any wounds. Instead, she fled up the pipe like a little girl running from all the nightmares life could muster, panting and clawing with almost frenzied speed, and raced across a roof of loose and shifting tiles to spring out and down onto the roof of the next building.

  She landed hard, knocking her breath from herself, and spun around on one knee to keep an eye on her pursuer as she panted to get her wind back.

  Rhauligan was hauling himself up onto the roof she’d just left. Narnra snarled wordlessly, fought her way to her feet as he straightened—then thought of something and bent to her other boot to snatch another knife to hurl at him. Its sheath was empty.

  Either she’d lost it during this chase, or he’d taken it while healing her. Hissing a curse at him instead, she spun around, ran, and leaped onto the next roof through the thickly rising, scented steam of someone’s laundry, coming up from a skylight.

  Beyond, the roof was flat, all of metal sheets sealed and patched with thick pitch, ankle-deep in slippery, bird-dung-dotted water—and … and Narnra found herself with nowhere she could safely leap to, on a building with wide streets on two sides, Rhauligan grimly approaching on the third, and a barge heaped high with spear-like, jagged salvage-wood on the last side that it would be sheer suicide to jump onto. She glared around at treacherous Marsember for a moment in the lightening dawn, then spun around and raced back to the open skylight.

  Rhauligan was just launching himself at her over its billowing murk. Narnra sat down in her run and skidded over the edge moments before his boots crashed down through where she’d just been.

  Her fall was a short one, onto stout metal poles draped with someone’s damp tapestries. They gave way like a sling, dropping her down through a roaring stream of air. Chains were clanking all around her as racks of clothes hanging from them were rocked forward and back, forward and back, by levers that vanished down through the floor. By the loud, rhythmic hissing, the Silken Shadow guessed that there was a gigantic bellows in the room below, presumably being worked by the same grunting, sweating coin-slaves who were tugging on the levers and feeding the fire that was warming all this rushing air. My, but the world of laundry was an exciting place.…

  Or certainly would be, if she didn’t get out from under where Rhauligan was sure to land in the next few moments. She debated drawing her belt-dagger and plunging it through the tapestry when he landed in it … but no, she wasn’t here to slay Harpers, just to get away from them. Yonder was a row of trap-doors that must offer access to the levels below—probably through shafts nearly dry clothes would be pushed down.

  Someone shouted at her as she raced between the swinging racks of garments, and she had a glimpse of a startled old man whose bare arms were a riot of varicolored tattoos waving angrily at her. She gave him a nod and a smile and kept right on running to the trap-door at the … right end.

  Flinging it back, she smelled hot fabric and saw light far below—and in it, neat stacks of what looked like folded cloaks or blankets. It was the work of but a moment to launch herself feet-first down to join them.

  Behind her, she heard another shout followed by a grunt and a thud. That would be Rhauligan paying his respects to old Manybrands. It seemed she’d been right: the world of laundry was an exciting place.

  Narnra plunged past a room full of all the noisy, sweating activity she’d envisaged and landed gently in a large, brightly lit room below that, toppling and scattering hot, fluffy cloaks in all directions. No one was near, and Narnra rolled enthusiastically, trying to get herself mostly dry ere she waded out to find footing and run on.

  Along the way, she snatched up a cloak, shook it open in her hands—and when Rhauligan crashed down into view, she flung it over his head, managed to tug him over into a cascading fall of piled laundry to where she could get a hard knee into his blinded and muffled head, then sprang away, not daring to stay and try to smother him because enraged launderers were approaching at a run from various directions now, all shouting furious curses she couldn’t tarry to hear properly. She left them closing in on the thoroughly entangled Rhauligan, sprang over some sort of sorting table where women cowered away from her behind wicker baskets … and found another handy, waiting door. This one was even open.

  Still, she was losing count of doors she was having to blindly rush through and had long since lost her patience with being hunted all over this strange city. It was waking up now, and soon she’d be dodging frequent Watch patrols and carters in the streets and watching eyes, watching eyes everywhere. She doubted there even was such a thing as a dry rooftop to try to sleep on in Marsember, even if she knew this grim, tireless Harper was safely taken away from his hunt. Narnra was beginning to think the only way to do that was to make sure he was dead.

  Well, she certainly wasn’t wading back into the land of enraged launderers to see to that. Perhaps they’d take care of it for her, though she was beginning to doubt an army could stop Glarasteer Rhauligan, let alone a few angry Marsembans.

  She fled down a short stair, through another door—smashing flat an unsuspecting man passing by as she crashed it open—and out into the streets, wondering when it would be prudent to slow down and walk as if she belonged here—in black leathers, aye—rather than running like a thief and catching every interested eye.

  When Rhauligan was … yes, yes, yes! With a growl of anger Narnra saw two Watch patrols coming together at a street-moot ahead and dodged aside. She had to get aloft again before he saw where she went and—

  Then she saw it. A street over, behind a wall of old buildings that sprouted balconies and rickety outer stairs above their shopfronts, beyond their lines of dripping clothing—imagine hanging clothes out to dry, in night-mists like this!—and water-cisterns … water-cisterns? Well, rainwater would almost have to be cleaner than canal-water, and a little less salty.…

  There was a high stone wall in superb condition with trees rising behind it. Some sort of noble’s walled garden, if Marsember was anything like Waterdeep. Yes, there was the row of spikes most nobles seemed to think a wall needed, atop a stretch of buttressed stone that must overtop a two-story building and run longer than six or seven of the shops nearer to her.

  Narnra stopped looking at the wall and hurried to get closer to it, looking now for some way to get up onto it.

  * * * *
*

  Durexter Dagohnlar drew himself upright with as much dignity as a naked, bound, and overly fat man can muster whilst sitting on his own bedchamber floor and fixed the Watchcaptain with a coldly disapproving gaze.

  “There was no need to push past my wife and invade our home, sir,” he said stiffly, as his steward hastened to cut his bonds, “no matter how many overexcited servants came running to summon you. No need at all. I—that is to say we” he amended hastily, catching sight of the dagger-laden look his wife was favoring him with, from behind the Watchmen, “Starmara and myself, ahem, vanquished a very old foe here this night—a foe who came to slay us with magic but was forced to flee. I’ll not reveal his name even to War Wizards, because uttering it will awaken some very dangerous spells he left behind. So let’s just forget th—”

  “You can write it down for me, then, Lord Master Dagohnlar,” the Watchcaptain said calmly, the mouth under his grizzled mustache carefully expressionless but his eyes every bit as wintry as the merchant’s. “To save the strongest War Wizards in the city the time ’twill take to come and empty your mind of everything of interest to the security of the city … and adherence to all of our laws.”

  Durexter opened and closed his mouth in trapped bafflement for a few moments then said triumphantly, “I’m sorry, Watchman, but I can’t write. I never learned how.”

  The Watchcaptain didn’t bother to order his men to step forward and forcibly take Durexter Dagohnlar into custody. He was too busy rolling his eyes. His men moved forward anyway, their snorts of derision almost as loud as those from various gawking servants.