Dissolution wotsq-1

by Ричард Ли Байерс

  TEN

  Cloaked in the semblance of a squat, leathery-skinned orc, whose twisted leg manifestly made him unfit for service in a noble or even merchant House, Pharaun took an experimental bite of his sausage and roll. The unidentifiable ground meat inside the casing tasted rank and was gristly, as well as cold at the core.

  «By the Demonweb!» he exclaimed. «What?» Ryld replied. The weapons master too appeared to be a scurvy broken-down orc in grubby rags. Unbelievably, he was devouring his vile repast without any overt show of repugnance. «What?»

  The Master of Sorcere brandished his sausage. «This travesty. This abomination.»

  He headed for the culprit's kiosk, a sad little construction of bone poles and sheets of hide, taking care not to walk too quickly. His veil of illusion would make it look as if he were limping, but it wouldn't conceal the anomaly of a lame orc covering ground as quickly as one with two good legs. The long-armed, flat-faced goblin proprietor produced a cudgel from beneath the counter. Perhaps he was used to complaints. Pharaun raised a hand and said, «I mean no harm. In fact, I want to help.» The goblin's eyes narrowed. «Help?» «Yes. I'll even pay another penny for the privilege.» he said as he extracted a copper coin from his purse. «I just want to show you something.» The cook hesitated, then held out a dirty-nailed hand and said, «Give. No tricks.» «No tricks.» Pharaun surrendered the coins and to the goblin's surprise, squirmed around the end of the counter and crowded into the miniature kitchen. He wrapped his hand in a fold of his cloak, slid the hot iron grill with its load of meat from its brackets, and set it aside. «First,» Pharaun said, «you spread the coals evenly at the bottom of the brazier.» He picked up a poker and demonstrated. «Next, though we don't have time to start from scratch right now, you let them burn to gray. Only then do you start cooking, with the grill positioned here.» He replaced the utensil in a higher set of brackets. «Sausage take longer to fry,» the goblin said. «Do you have somewhere to go? Now, I'm going to assume you buy these questionable delicacies elsewhere and thus can do nothing about the quality, but you can at least tenderize them with a few whacks from that mallet, poke a few holes with the fork to help them cook on the inside, and sprinkle some of these spices on them.» Pharaun grinned. «You've never so much as touched a lot of this stuff, have you? What did you do, murder the real chef and take possession of his enterprise?» The smaller creature smirked and said, «Don't matter now, do it?» «I suppose not. One last thing: Roast the sausage when the customer orders it, not hours beforehand. It isn't nearly as appetizing if it's cooked, allowed to cool, then warmed again. Good fortune to you.» He clapped the goblin on the shoulder, then exited the stand. At some point, Ryld had wandered up to observe the lesson. «What was the point of that?» the warrior asked. «I was performing a public service,» answered the wizard, «preserving the Braeryn from a plague of dyspepsia.» Pharaun fell in beside his friend, and the two dark elves walked on.

  «You were amusing yourself, and it was idiotic. You take the trouble to disguise us, then risk revealing your true identity by playing the gourmet.» «I doubt one small lapse will prove our undoing. It's unlikely that any of our ill-wishers will interview that particular street vendor any time soon or ask the right questions if they do. Remember, we're well disguised. Who would imagine this lurching, misshapen creature could possibly be my handsome, elegant self? Though I must admit, your metamorphosis wasn't quite so much of a stretch.» Ryld scowled, then wolfed down his last bite of sausage and bread. «Why didn't you disguise us from the moment we left Tier Breche?» he asked.

  «Never mind, I think I know. A fencer doesn't reveal all his capabilities in the initial moments of the bout.» «Something like that. Greyanna and her minions have seen us looking like ourselves, so if we're lucky they won't expect to find us appearing radically different. The trick won't befuddle them forever, but perhaps long enough for us to complete our business and return to our sedate, cloistered lives.» «Does that mean you've figured out something else?» «Not as such, but you know I'm prone to sudden bursts of inspiration.» The masters entered a crowded section of street outside of what was evidently a popular tavern, with a howling, barking gnoll song shaking the calcite walls.

  Pharaun had never had occasion to walk incognito among the lower orders. It felt odd weaving, pausing, and twisting to avoid bumps and jostles. Had they known his true identity, his fellow pedestrians would have scurried out of his way. As the two drow reached the periphery of the crowd, Ryld pivoted and struck a short straight blow with his fist. A hunchbacked, piebald creature—the product of a mating of goblin and orc perhaps—stumbled backward and fell on his rump. «Cutpurse,» the warrior explained. «I hate this place.» «No pangs of nostalgia?» Ryld glowered. «That isn't funny.» «No? Then I beg your pardon,» Pharaun said with a smirk. «I wonder why this precinct always seems so sordid, even on those rare occasions when one finds oneself alone in a plaza or boulevard. Well, the smell, of course. We don't call them the Stench streets for nothing, hut the buildings, though generally more modest than those encountered elsewhere in the city, still wear the same graceful shapes our ancestors cut from the living rock.» The teachers paused to let a spider with legs as long as broadswords scuttle across the street. The Braeryn notoriously harbored hordes of the sacred creatures. Sacred or not, Pharaun reviewed his mental list of ready spells, but the arachnid ignored the disguised dark elves. «That's a foolish question,» said Ryld. «Why does the Braeryn seem foul? The inhabitants!» «Ah, but did the living refuse of our society generate the atmosphere of the district, or did that malignant spirit exist from the beginning and lure the wretched to its domain?»

  «I'm no metaphysician,» said Ryld. «All I know is that somebody should clear the scavengers out of here.» Pharaun chuckled. «What if said clearing had occurred when you were a tyke?» «I don't mean exterminate them—except for the hopeless cases—but why just let them squat here in their dirt like a festering chancre on the city? Why not find something useful for them to do?» «Ah, but they're already useful. Status is all, is it not? Does it not follow, then, that no Menzoberranyr can find contentment without someone upon whom she can look down.» «We have slaves.» «They won't do. Predicate your claim to self-respect on their existence and you tacitly acknowledge you're only slightly better than a thrall yourself. Happily, here in the Stench streets, we find a populace starving, filthy, penniless, riddled with disease, living twenty or thirty to a room, yet nominally free. The humblest commoner in Manyfolk or even Eastmyr can turn up his nose at them and feel smug.» «You really think that's the reason Matron Baenre hasn't ordered the slum scoured clean?» «Well, if that conjecture seems implausible, here's another: Rumor has it that from time to time, someone meets the goddess herself in the Braeryn. Supposedly she likes to visit here in mortal guise. The matrons may feel that the neighborhood is, in some sense, under her protection.» The wizard hesitated. «Though if Lolth has gone away for good, perhaps they don't need to worry about it anymore.» Ryld shook his head. «It's still so hard to belie—» Pharaun pointed. «Look.» Ryld turned. On a curving wall below a dark elf's eye level was a sketch, this time smeared in blue. It consisted of three overlapping ovals, conceivably representing the links of a chain.

  «It's a different mark,» said Ryld. «Hobgoblin maybe, though I couldn't tell you the tribe.»

  «Don't be intentionally dim. It's the same peculiar, reckless, pointless crime.»

  «Fair enough, and it's still irrelevant to our endeavors.» «It's a dull mind that never transcends pragmatics. Two signs, representing two races, implying two specimens of the lesser races demented in precisely the same way? Unlikely, yet why would a single artist daub an emblem not his own?» «Coincidence?» «I doubt it, but as yet I can't provide a better answer.» «It's a puzzle for another day, remember?» «Indeed.» The masters walked on. «Still,» pressed Pharaun, «don't you wonder how many scrawled signs we passed without noticing and exactly what form they took?» Ignoring the question, Ryld pointed and said, «Th
at's our destination.»

  The house's limestone door stood open, most likely for ventilation, for the interior radiated a perceptible warmth, the product of a multitude of tenants crammed in together. It also emitted a muddled drone and a thick stink considerably fouler than the unpleasant smell that clung to the Braeryn as a whole. Ryld had been born in a similar warren, had fought like a demon to escape it, and he felt a strange reluctance to venture in, as if squalor wouldn't let him escape a second time. Unwilling to appear timid and foolish in the eyes of his friend, he hid the feeling behind an impassive warrior's countenance. Pharaun, however, freely demonstrated his own distaste. The porcine eyes in his illusory orc face watered, and he swallowed, no doubt trying to quell a surge of queasiness. «Get used to it,» said Ryld. «I'll be all right. I've visited the Braeryn frequently enough to have some notion of what these little hells are like, though I confess I never entered one.» «Then stick close and let me do the talking. Don't stare at anybody, or look anyone in the eye. They're likely to take it as an insult or challenge. Don't touch anyone or anything if you can avoid it. Half the residents are sick and probably contagious.» «Really? And their palace gives off such a salubrious air! Ah, well, lead on.» Ryld did as his friend had asked. Beyond the threshold was the claustrophobic nightmare he remembered. Kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls, bugbears, hobgoblins, and a sprinkling of less common creatures squeezed into every available space. Some, the warrior knew, were runaway slaves. Others had entered the service of Menzoberranyr travelers who picked them up in far corners of the world, took them back to the city, and dismissed them without any means of making their way home. The rest were descendants of unfortunate souls in the first two categories. Wherever they came from, the paupers were trapped in the Braeryn, begging, stealing, scavenging, preying on one another—often in the most literal sense—and hiring on for any dangerous, filthy job anyone cared to give them. It was the only way they could survive. This particular lot had likewise learned to live packed into the common space without the slightest vestige of privacy. Undercreatures babbled, cooked, ate, drank, tended a still, brawled, twitched and moaned in the throes of sickness, shook and cuffed their shrieking infants, threw dice, fornicated, relieved themselves, and, amazingly, slept, all in plain view of anyone with the ill luck to look in their direction.

  As Ryld had expected, within moments of their entrance, a pair of toughs—in this instance bugbears—slouched forward to accost them. With their coarse, shaggy manes and square, prominent jaws, bugbears were the largest and strongest of the goblin peoples, towering over the rest—and dark elves, too, for that matter. This pair was, by the standards of their destitute household, relatively well-fed and adequately dressed. They likely bullied tribute out of the rest. «You don't live here,» rumbled the taller of the two. He wore what appeared to be a severed goblin hand strung around his burly neck.

  Drow occasionally affected similar ornaments, usually mementos of hated enemies, but they sent them to a taxidermist first. It was too bad the bugbear hadn't done the same. It would have prevented the rot and the carrion smell. «No,» Ryld said, tossing the bugbear a shaved coin, paying the toll to pass in and out of the house. «We came to see Smylla Nathos.» The hulking goblinoids just looked at him, as did several others creatures. A scaly, naked little kobold tittered crazily. Something was wrong, and the Master of Melee-Magthere didn't know what. He felt a sudden tension and exhaled it away. Looking nervous was a bad idea. «Isn't this Smylla's house?» he asked. The shorter bugbear, who still loomed nearly as huge as an ogre, laughed and said, «No, not no more, but she still live here. . kind of.» «Can we see her?» said Ryld. «What tor?» asked the bugbear with the severed goblin hand.

  The weapons master hesitated. He'd intended to say that he and Pharaun wished to consult Smylla in her professional capacity as a trader in information. It was essentially the truth, though that didn't matter. What did was that he hadn't expected it to provoke a hostile response. Pharaun stepped up beside him. «Smylla sold our sister Iggra the secret of how to break into a merchant's strongroom,» the wizard said in a creditably surly Orcish rasp. «How to get around all the traps. . Only she left one out, see? It squirted acid on Sis and burned her to death. Slow. Almost got us too. It's Smylla's fault, and we come to 'talk' to her about it.» The smaller bugbear nodded. «You ain't the only ones wantin' that kind of talk. Us, too, but we can't get at the bitch.» Pharaun cocked his head. «How come?» «A couple tendays ago,» said the bugbear with the severed hand necklace, «we decided we was tired of her bossing us and her lamps hurting our eyes. We jumped her, hit her, but she chucked one of those stones that makes a flash of light. It blinded us, and she run up to her room.» He nodded toward the head of a twisting staircase. «We can't get through the door. She locked it with magic or somethin'.» Pharaun snorted. «Ain't no door my brother and me can't bust through.» The bugbears exchanged glances. The smaller one, who, Ryld noticed, was missing several of his lower teeth, shrugged. «You can try,» the larger one said. «Only, Smylla belongs to us, too. Hit her, bleed her, slice off a piece of her and eat it, but you can't keep her all to yourself.» «It's a deal,» Pharaun said. «Come on, then.» The bugbears led them through the crowded room and onto the stairs, where they still had to pick their way through lounging paupers. Partway up, the brute wearing the decaying hand put it in his mouth and began slurping and sucking on it.

  At the top of the steps were a small landing and a limestone door with a rounded top. Two sentries, an orc and a canine-faced gnoll with sores on his muzzle, sat on the floor looking bored. The disguised teachers made a show of examining the door. «Can you knock it down?» Pharaun whispered. «When the bugbears couldn't? Don't count on it. Can you open it with magic?» «Probably. It's magically sealed, so a counterspell should suffice, but I don't want our friends to observe me casting it. That really would compromise my disguise. Stand where you obstruct their view and do something distracting.» «Right.» Ryld positioned himself in the appropriate spot and glowered up at the two bugbears. «We can open it. What loot is inside?» The larger bugbear scowled and, the odious object in his mouth garbling his speech a little, said, «We made a deal. It didn't say nothing about no loot.»

  «Smylla took Sis's treasure,» Ryld replied. «We want it back, and extra too, for wergild.» «Hell with that.» The bugbear with the missing teeth reached for the knife tucked through his belt. Ryld could see it was a butcher's tool, not a proper fighting blade, but no doubt it served in the latter capacity well enough. Ryld rested his hand on the hilt of his short sword, the weapon of choice for these tight quarters, and said, «You want to fight, we'll fight. I'll slice your face off your skull and wear it like a breechcloth, but my brother and I came to kill Smylla, not you. Let's talk. If you never get the door—» «Open,» Pharaun said. White light shone at Ryld's back, making the bugbears wince. Squinting, the warrior whirled and scrambled for the opening. «Hey!» yelped the smaller bugbear. Ryld felt a big hand fumble at his shoulder, trying to grab him, but it was an instant too slow. He followed Pharaun over the threshold and slammed the door. «You need to hold it shut,» the wizard said. «I can't do it for long.» Leaning forward, Ryld planted his hands on the limestone slab and braced himself. The door bucked inward. For a split second, the dark elf's feet slid on the calcite floor, then they caught, and he held the barrier in place. Barely. Meanwhile, Pharaun was peering about. He gave a little cry of satisfaction, picked up a small iron bar, and set it so it overlapped the edge of the door and the jamb about halfway up. When he took his hand away, the charm remained in place.

  «This is quite a clever little device,» the wizard said. «Oh, and you can let go now.»

  Pharaun turned the mechanical locks his spell of opening had disengaged, snapping each shut in its turn. It was actually the enchanted length of iron that had up to then kept the goblinoids out, but he thought he and Ryld might as well be as secure as possible. It also seemed the courteous thing to do. His hostess, however, didn't seem to appreciate t
he gesture. «Get out!» she croaked. «Get out, or I'll slay you with my sorcery!» The masters turned. Smylla Nathos had lit her sparsely furnished room with a pair of slender brass rods, the tips of which emitted a steady magical glow. They protruded from the necks of wax-encrusted wine bottles like tapers sitting in candelabra, which they perhaps were meant to resemble. Maybe Smylla missed the spellcaster's traditional mode of illumination but couldn't obtain it anymore. She herself lay at the limit of the light, on a cot in the shadows at the far end of the room. Pharaun could just barely make her out.

  «Good afternoon, my lady,» the wizard said, bowing. «It shames me beyond measure to ignore your request. Yet should this gentleman and I pass through your door a second time, the bugbears and their ilk will rush in, and that, I think, is the very eventuality you sought to forestall.» «Who are you? You don't talk like an orc.» «My lady is a marvel of perspicacity. We are in fact drow lords come to consult you on a matter of some importance.» «Why are you disguised?»

  «The usual reason: To confound our enemies. May we approach? It's tedious trying to converse across the length of the room.» Smylla hesitated, then said, «Come.» Pharaun and Ryld started forward. Behind them, the bugbears were cursing, shouting threats and questions, and pounding on the far side of the door. After four paces, the wizard's stomach turned at yet another stench, this one humid and gangrenous. He'd half expected something of the sort, but that didn't make it any easier to bear. Even the phlegmatic Ryld looked discomfited for an instant. «Close enough,» Smylla said, and Pharaun supposed it was. He had no desire to come any nearer to that wasted form with its boils and pustules, even though the enchantments bound into his mantle and Rylds cloak and dwarven armor would probably protect them from infection. «Can you help us?» asked Ryld. The sick woman leered. «Will you pay me with the magnificent great-sword you wear across your back?» Pharaun was somewhat impressed. The illusion of pig-faced orcishness shrouding his friend made Splitter look like a battle-axe, but Smylla's rheumy, sunken eyes had pierced that aspect of the deception. When he recovered from his surprise, Ryld shook his head. «No, I won't give you the sword, I worked too hard to get it, and I need it to stay alive, but if you want, I can use it to clear away the goblinoids outside. My comrade and I are also carrying a fair amount of gold.» Her dry white hair spread about her head, Smylla lay propped against a mound of stained, musty pillows. She struggled to hitch herself up straighter, then abandoned the effort. Apparently it was beyond her strength. «Gold?» she said. «Do you know who I am, swordsman? Do you know my history?» «I do,» Pharaun said. «The gist of it, anyway. It happened after I more or less withdrew from participation in the affairs of the great Houses.» «What do you know?» she asked. «An expedition from House Faen Tlabbar,» the wizard replied, «ventured up into the Lands of Light to hunt and plunder. When they returned, a lovely human sorceress and clairvoyant accompanied them, not as a newly captured slave but as their guest. «Why did you want to come? Perhaps you were fleeing some implacable enemy, or were fascinated by the grace and sophistication of my people and the idea of living in the exotic Underdark. My hunch is that you wanted to learn drow magic, but it's pure speculation. No outsider ever knew. «For that matter, why did the Faen Tlabbar oblige you? That's an even greater mystery. Conceivably someone harbored amorous feelings for you, or you, too, had secrets to teach.» «I had a way of persuading them,» Smylla said. «Obviously. Once you reached Menzoberranzan, you made yourself useful to House Faen Tlabbar as countless minions from the lesser races had done before you. The difference being that you were accorded a certain status, even a degree of familiarity. Matron Ghenni let you dine with the family and attend social functions, where you reportedly acquitted yourself with a drowlike poise and charm.»