Thornhold

by Elaine Cunningham

  “Let them try. They will not find it as easy to get into the fortress as we did. Unless of course,” Dag added, “you gave them the same information you gave me.”

  The knight’s blue eyes widened with a sharp, sudden flash of fear. “I did not, but there might be others among the order to whom Hronulf entrusted this knowledge.”

  Dag didn’t really care—he brought up the matter just to tweak the older man. If the gathering paladin army had this knowledge, it would do them little good. The tunnels beneath the fortress had been so altered that men could wander about for tendays without finding the old passages.

  “There is another matter of which we much speak,” Dag continued. “I have a daughter. Though her existence has been kept secret for more than nine years, she is now widely sought. What do you know of her?”

  “Sir?” inquired the knight, puzzlement on his reflected face. “Why should I know anything?”

  It was not a lie—Dag had yet to catch the fallen paladin utter a direct untruth—but it was a blatant evasion. This irritated the priest.

  “I run short of time and patience,” Dag said through gritted teeth. “Hear me well. The girl was abducted from her foster home by a single man, even though her foster father was an elf of considerable skill at arms. The Zhentarim are not known for such acts of foolish bravery. That leaves … who?”

  Sir Gareth bowed his head. “I have earned your suspicions, Lord Zoreth. My part in the raid on your childhood village—”

  “Is past history,” Dag cut in coldly. “I have no intention of making you suffer for past misdeeds, but I assure you, your continued existence depends upon your ability to serve me quickly and well. Is that quite clear?”

  “Pellucid, my lord,” the knight agreed.

  “A straight answer, then. Did you or did you not have a part in abducting my daughter?”

  “Alas, the answer to that is not so simple as your question suggests,” the knight said, his face deeply troubled. “My order was indeed responsible, so some of this lies at my door.”

  Dag sniffed at the self-serving “confession,” but found in these words welcome news. “My men tracked Cara’s abductor. He was headed to Waterdeep. I want his name, and soon thereafter, I want his heart on a skewer.”

  “There are many paladins in Waterdeep,” Sir Gareth hedged. “Tell me more of your daughter, so that I might make discrete inquiries. I myself never saw the girl.”

  That seemed a reasonable request. “She is nine years of age, but small and slight, so that she looks to be no more than six or seven. Her hair is brown, as are her eyes. There is a touch of elf blood in her. Her ears are slightly pointed, her eyes are large and tilt up at the corners, and her fingers are very tiny and thin.” As soon as the last words were out, Dag rued them. He did not want to draw any attention to the girl’s hands—and the extremely valuable ring she wore.

  “And my sister,” Dag added hastily. “What word on her?”

  “I sent her to Thornhold, as you directed. Did she never arrive?”

  Dag decided that was a question best left unanswered. “I want the woman and the child found and turned over to me. Find a way to circumvent the other knights. Is that quite clear?”

  The knight lifted two fingers to his brow in an archaic salute. “I am pledged to honor the children of Samular’s bloodline. All will be done as you say.”

  Dag shook his head in disgust and released the enchantment. Sir Gareth’s face faded abruptly from the globe—but not before Dag caught a satisfying glimpse of the anguish inflicted by the spell’s release.

  He despised the old knight. He hated all paladins, and particularly those who, like his own father, took vows as Knights of Samular, but this man simply galled him. Sir Gareth Cormaeril had once been a mighty knight, his father’s friend and comrade. He had saved Hronulf’s life once and had received the wound that shrunk his sword arm and ended his career in battle. But there was a weakness in the man, a weakness of will and heart that Dag particularly despised. He himself had triumphed over physical weakness—why should another man see in it an excuse to give up all he once was?

  That was precisely what Sir Gareth had done. He had fallen prey to Malchior’s cunning snares, abusing his new role as exchequer of the order when his younger brother, a rogue and a gambler, ran afoul of Zhentarim-owned pleasure houses. Malchior had assumed the young lord’s debts, and Gareth had quietly “borrowed” money to repay the Zhentish priest rather than risk personal or family scandal. That was the beginning. From there, it had become increasingly easy to purchase the man’s soul, a few words at a time.

  It amazed Dag that Sir Gareth did not yet seem to realize this.

  What Dag was, he had chosen to be. He had great power, granted him by a mad god and wielded in ways that a man like Sir Gareth could never conceive. And he intended to get more of the same, by much the same methods—or worse, if such path came to him. What he did, he chose. What he was, he acknowledged. There was a basic honesty in this that Sir Gareth could not begin to comprehend or duplicate.

  As Dag tucked the globe away, an ironic smile touched his lips as he noted that, in this matter at least, he possessed more virtue than a man lauded as one of Tyr’s great knights.

  * * * * *

  To Bronwyn, the three days of the return voyage went all too quickly. She spent many hours with little Cara, answering her seemingly endless supply of questions. The little girl had a deep curiosity about the world, and her yearning to see far places was written on her small face as she listened to Bronwyn’s tales.

  True, Cara had other things to occupy her time. She played with the five dwarf children, holding her own surprisingly well in tussles and arguments with the much stronger and stockier dwarves. Ebenezer also took a special interest in the girl, and he spent hours telling her stories of his adventures, answering her questions. He even carved a toy for her, a small wooden doll with slightly pointed ears. The limbs were jointed and connected with strings so that the doll could be moved about. Bronwyn, who caught him at work stitching together bits of sailcloth for clothes, commented on the delicate work—and immediately wished she hadn’t. The dwarf gave her a bit of advice on the merits of minding her own affairs, in the form of a tongue-lashing that almost, but not quite, covered his embarrassment at being caught red-handed and soft-hearted.

  To her surprise, Bronwyn found that she enjoyed being with Cara. She’d never had any experience with children, not even when she herself had been a child, but she enjoyed the girl’s curiosity, approved of her stubbornness, and admired her resilience. By the time the outer islands that protected Waterdeep’s harbor came into sight, Bronwyn decided that if she were ever to have a daughter, she would be more than happy if the girl took after Cara.

  But Cara had a family—a father, who was almost certainly kin to Bronwyn. The need to find him, for both of them, was growing in Bronwyn like a fever.

  Cara, unfortunately, was little help. She remembered her father only as “Doon,” and the description she gave of him was what might be expected of any eight-year-old half-elf. He was a grownup. He had dark hair. He was big.

  It was not much to go on.

  She did have a great deal to say about the man who had stolen her away from the only home she had ever known. He had a sword, which he had used to kill both of her foster parents. He was a tall man, with light blond hair cut short. He rode a white horse and wore a white tunic with a blue design on it. At Bronwyn’s bidding, Cara tried to sketch it, but the childish scrawl was far from enlightening. They rode for a long time and stopped at a beautiful house. After that, Cara remembered nothing. She had fallen asleep and awakened in the hold of the ship with an aching head and a fiercely empty stomach. Bronwyn, who listened to this with silent rage, realized that the child had been drugged. She vowed to find who had done this and make certain that they would send no more children to the life that she herself had endured.

  Finally Narwhal sailed in through the southernmost entrance to the harbor, past
the lighthouse known as East Torch Tower: a tall, slender cone of white granite that flamed like its namesake. Bronwyn would have preferred to sail to the northern entrance, for the harbor fees were somewhat less and she would be much closer to her shop, but Captain Orwig absolutely refused to come within a longbow’s shot of a place called Smugglers’ Bane Tower.

  A pair of small skiffs met them at the chained entrance, and a woman clad in the gold and black uniform of the Watch asked to come aboard. At this, the ogre captain bared his fangs in a sneer and started to go for his cutlass. Before he could speak, Bronwyn caught his arm and nodded to the water beyond the skiffs. Orwig tracked her gaze and defeat registered in his small, red eyes. Several heads broke the surface of the water here and there, and shadowy, vaguely human forms swirled around the ship. Mermen, ready to aid the officials if need be. Orwig valued his ship too highly to risk having it scuttled from below.

  “Permission to come aboard,” he snarled. He shot Bronwyn a glare that left the matter in her hands, then stalked off.

  Bronwyn produced the logs stating their cargo, and, on Orwig’s behalf, paid out the cargo tax in some of the coins taken from the slave ship. She wrote a note for the docking fee, promising to deliver payment to the Harbormaster within three days. The chain was lowered, and Narwhal allowed to sail into the harbor. For Captain Orwig’s sake—the ogre was clearly uncomfortable with this port—Bronwyn requested that the ship be allowed to dock at the nearest available slip.

  Within an hour, the passengers had disembarked onto a small, barnacle-encrusted pier just off Cedar Street. Narwhal took off with such haste that the last dwarf to disembark was still on the gangplank. He fell into the harbor with an enormous splash and sank like an axe. Four mermen managed to drag him the surface, though all of them were visibly worse for wear before the task was done. A grinning dockhand threw down a rope. Glad for something they could do, a dozen of so of the Stoneshaft clan seized the rope and hauled it up with a gusto that brought the unfortunate dwarf vaulting out of the water and skidding along the dock on his belly.

  Once that bit of excitement was over, the dwarves gathered into a cluster on the dock, their eyes wide as they gazed around the bustling scene and the narrow, crowded streets beyond. For once, all fifty-some-odd dwarves were struck silent, their contentious voices stilled by their awe of the city.

  “Gotta excuse them,” Ebenezer murmured to Bronwyn. “I’m the only one been out of the clanhold much. The rest of them, well, you might say they’re ducks in a desert.”

  “The sooner we get them settled, the better,” Bronwyn agreed. She hailed a tall, bald man who wore the insignia of the wagoner’s guild on his jacket. After a brisk, brief haggle, she hired three wagons to haul the dwarves through town to her shop.

  “We could-a walked,” Ebenezer complained once they were settled inside a closed wooden wagon that smelled strongly of fish and old cheese.

  “Fifty dwarves marching through the Dock Ward?” she scoffed. “It would look too much like an invasion. That much attention, we don’t need.”

  The dwarf considered this, then nodded grudgingly. “What’s your plan, then?”

  “For now, we’ll go to my shop. I’ll send out some messengers, call in a few favors. We’ll get everyone settled.”

  Ebenezer looked over to the fistfight that had erupted between two of the dwarf lads. “Not an easy thing,” he observed.

  The wagon driver, as directed, let the dwarves off in the alley behind Curious Past. Despite Bronwyn’s pleas for discretion, they roiled down the narrow path, clearly feeling more at home in the close, tunnel-like corridor than they had for many days.

  They descended on the Curious Past like a plague of blackbirds. Alice’s response astonished Bronwyn. The gnome produced a sword from under the counter, as well as a smoke-power pistol. These she brandished at the first pair of dwarves in the door.

  “You’ll not get past me,” she said with such conviction that Bronwyn believed her. “Take your looting elsewhere.”

  “Alice, it’s me!” Bronwyn shouted over the heads of the dwarves. “It’s all right. They are with me.”

  The gnome’s eyes bulged. “All of them?”

  Bronwyn raised her hands in a helpless shrug, knowing she was asking a great deal of the gnome. Alice’s tiny shoulders lifted and fell in a sigh, but she stepped aside.

  In roiled the dwarves, their eyes rounded with awe at the sights around them. “Quite a trove,” Tarlamera said with grudging admiration. She picked up a bangle bracelet studded with large gems. Instead of slipping it onto her wrist, she fisted it in her hand so that the raised stones augmented her knuckles. She lifted her fist and admired the effect. “Nice. Yours, gnome?”

  “I should say not! That piece was commissioned by Lady Galinda Raventree.”

  Tarlarmera’s eyes glinted. “Might could be she’d like to go a round or two, you think? Sitting on that ship has left us all a mite restless and ready for fun.”

  The image of the iron-willed society queen facing off in battle against the dwarf woman brought a wry smile to Bronwyn’s face. That fight, she’d happily pay to observe. “Alice, why don’t you go to the market and get something for our guests? Some bread and meat, a keg of ale. Have it delivered.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to carry it back,” the gnome grumbled. She seized her shawl off its hook and took off—gratefully, it seemed to Bronwyn.

  One of the dwarf lads started to climb a shelf after an axe that had caught his eye. A sleek, black form glided from the rafters and landed on his shoulder.

  “Think about it,” Shopscat advised.

  With a yelp, the young dwarf let go and tumbled to the floor. The raven winged off and settled down on a tall urn.

  “It talks!” exclaimed a dwarf woman with delight, her stubby finger pointing at the raven. Her eyes took on a battle gleam, and she came over to Shopscat and leaned in close, nose to beak. “Been a while since I had me a roast bird,” she said, a challenge in her voice.

  The raven stared her down. “Think about it.”

  The dwarves laughed uproariously. “Might be you could keep that up for a while, Morgalla, if you asked the right questions,” Ebenezer said.

  She shrugged and grinned, then wandered off to finger a long string of pink pearls displayed on a wooden bust.

  They spent a pleasant hour poking through the shop and exchanging insults with the raven. Just as some were starting to get restless, Alice returned with a half dozen strong porters and the requested refreshments.

  The instant the first keg hit the floor, the dwarves converged from all three floors of the shop. They snatched up whatever came to hand—silver mugs, gem-encrusted goblets—and clustered about. The gnome cringed as she took in this casual use of the treasures she guarded.

  “We can hire someone in to help clean up,” Bronwyn told her.

  “If you have the coin left to do the hiring,” Alice shot back. She nodded toward their visitors, who were making short work of the piles of food. Two of the dwarves were already tapping the third keg.

  It seemed that Ebenezer was thinking along similar lines. “Don’t you doubt, I’m gonna pay you back every copper,” he vowed softly. “Tell me what I can do to help get them earning their keep.”

  Bronwyn glanced at Cara, who was petting Shopscat and chattering happily. Her heart melted at the sight of the little girl and the obviously charmed raven.

  “There are dwarves in the city, but the sort of labor your clan can do is always in demand. I know people who can line up what we need.”

  “You got a lot of friends, if they can set up this bunch,” Ebenezer commented.

  “In a manner of speaking.” This brought up a matter that Bronwyn had been puzzling over for several days. She had realized aboard ship that she would have to rely upon the resources of the Harpers to get the dwarves settled. Disclosing membership in this secret organization was forbidden, except in extreme situations or to trusted friends. Though she had known Eben
ezer for a relatively short time, she counted him as among the best she’d found. She decided to confide in the dwarf.

  Taking him by the arm, she led him to a relatively quiet corner. “What do you know of the Harpers?”

  Ebenezer scowled and spat—hitting the bronze spittoon by the door with dead-on accuracy and ringing force. “Nothing good. As I hear it, they’re not big on minding their own affairs.”

  “That’s true enough,” she said hesitantly. “But they are good at gathering information and passing it along. If I contact the right Harpers here in the city, by highsun tomorrow I should have every member of your clan set up in business. Sword smiths, gem workers, bakers. Whatever skills they have, I can match.”

  “How do you know who to—” The dwarf broke off, his eyes suspicious. “You’re one of them.”

  Bronwyn sighed. “Guilty. Is that such a bad thing?”

  “Maybe,” he grumbled. He slanted a look up at her. “What you did for my clan—was that Harper business?”

  “No,” she said stoutly, even though she suspected that claiming otherwise might sway the dwarf’s opinion on the matter. “That was personal.”

  “Good.” He nodded in satisfaction. “Well, then, you tell me where to go, and I’ll be getting the process started.”

  Bronwyn hurried up the stairs to her chamber—evicting the pair of dwarf children who were jumping on her bed—and sat down at her writing table. Under the false bottom of her drawer were sheets of parchment bearing the sigil of Khelben Arunsun. This rune, his personal symbol, gave force to whatever was written on the parchment. The Harpers under his direction were to use them only in dire circumstances. Bronwyn had but two. She dipped a quill in her inkwell and began to write a letter to Brian Swordmaster.

  Even as she wrote, Bronwyn’s mind skipped ahead to the consequences of this measure. Khelben would know when one of his special edicts was used, and by whom. Brian Swordmaster, though a common tradesman and a quiet, modest man, was a great friend of the archmage. The story would get to her Harper master all too soon.