by Ed Greenwood
Laeral gave him a hard look. “When you’re a woman with silver hair and these—” she gestured at her bosom—“men stalk and pounce all the time. I got used to it quite a few centuries back.”
Then she turned to the Blackstaff. “In the morning will you contact as many of the Masked Lords as you can and have them meet me at the Palace? They need to be warned, and I want to watch their faces as we talk, in case any of them seem just a bit too smirkingly complacent about the deaths so far.”
“If they all head there and the slayer is watching, we’ll be identifying Masked Lords for him,” Vajra replied.
Laeral sighed. “He—or she—already knows how to identify and slay Masked Lords, doesn’t he?”
Vajra sighed as well, added a curse under her breath, nodded, and headed for the door.
“Should you be walking alone in Dock Ward by night, Lady?” Mirt rumbled.
“I’m the Blackstaff,” she replied, without turning or slowing, “not a defenseless maiden.”
When she opened the door, a strong smell of smoke came in out of the night. What Laeral had taken to be harbor fog drifting past the windows held the reek of wood smoke and tar and … worse things.
And then she saw the first flickering amber reflections on the highest rocks of the Castle Spur.
Mirt and Elminster were out the door in such a rush they sent Vajra staggering back out of the way.
Laeral sprinted to join them as a crackling roar arose from behind her.
It came from beyond the house. From the harbor.
They all turned as the first wash of heat warmed their faces.
And found themselves looking into the leaping flames of the Nine Hells.
Boardwalks and lashed-together ships stood like black sticks, silhouetted against orange-white flames that roared skyward in a crackling hurry to lick the stars.
Mistshore was ablaze.
CHAPTER 2
Waterdeep Watches
Though it may seem as if all Waterdeep rushes and bustles about with eyes and minds only for their own business at hand, it profits everyone to always remember that part of their business is watching what is unfolding around them, without seeming to, in hopes of seizing on the next big thing, the next road to riches. Even if only to sneer, Waterdeep always watches.
—Largreth the Good Knight, in Chapter 5 of The Rise of Randral: A Chapbook Adventure by Sandreth Yendrel of Neverwinter, published in the Year of the Striking Hawk
DARLETH DRAKE HADN’T SURVIVED A SCORE OF WATERDHAVIAN summers by being unobservant or careless; he was looking for trip-threads before he ascended the outside stair. And so, of course, he found them.
Her usual thin black threads. So many more daring little black gowns that would never be mended.
Yet when he reached the door at the top of the stair after avoiding them all, it opened before he could reach for it.
So they’d been watching for him out the lone window, too. Drake smiled, tucked himself to one side of the door, and waited.
“Come in,” his employer said after several long moments of silence. She sounded irritated. “We’ve waited long enough.”
“Inevitably. Haste and a direct journey aren’t wise if one hopes not to be followed,” Drake replied, stepping into the darkness and sidestepping immediately along the inside wall, so the man he knew would be nearby with weapon in hand could swing the door shut.
“Were you followed?” that man—the guildmaster—asked sharply. Stout Cuthbarrel was sweating, his calmness a rather poor act. Not like the two lithe, slender, and dangerously pretty young noblewomen in the room.
A bare, rather dirty rented room with cracks in its yellowing plaster walls, and nary a bench to sit on. Not the surroundings customarily preferred by nobles, but perhaps they’d enjoyed lounging languidly against the walls. Not that they needed the practice.
Drake shook his head. “Lundreth’s diversion worked. Mistshore will be burning for days, and half of Dock Ward will be busy shifting cargoes away from the heat. That’s what’s riding their minds right now.”
“Not the assassination of the Open Lord of Waterdeep?” Zaraela, the woman who was not his employer, did not sound in the least surprised. Interesting.
“Not,” Drake confirmed. “The Blackstaff entered and soon departed again, with none of the hurry or upset she’d have shown if the Lady Silverhand was dead. Unless she was in on the killing, of course.”
“Any idea who is?”
Drake shrugged. “Many ideas, but … mere guesses, all of them.”
“And we’re not in the guessing game. Thank you, Drake.”
That little quirk of Tasheene’s mouth meant that his employer meant those words as a clear dismissal, so Drake bowed and went out. He headed back down the stairs without closing the door behind him, so they could watch him go and make sure he was out of earshot. They’d take his vault over the railing halfway down as avoiding a tripwire, not a move to the underside of the flight of steps so he could clamber right back up it unseen, beneath the open treads.
Someone—Cuthbarrel, most likely—started to close the door again, but his employer said, “Don’t bother. It’s time to be gone. I think we’re all done with waiting.”
“With all the flames and smoke, the city will be awake and gawking, if they aren’t already,” said the woman who was not his employer.
“You mean we won’t be trying for another tonight,” Cuthbarrel grunted. “That’s fine by me. Tomorrow night, at yours?”
“At mine,” Drake’s employer confirmed. “We’ll have Haelinghorse next.”
They all moved as the guildmaster swung the door open, so Drake swung himself to the underside of the top stair landing and braced himself there. It wouldn’t do to have any of the three see him while they were removing trip-threads.
Not that his employer would be all that surprised.
• • •
ELMINSTER PEERED DOWN one more hallway—polished marble floor, gleaming wood-paneled walls, arch-shaped wooden ceiling—and caught sight of yet another Palace servant watching them. The forty-third he’d counted since their arrival through the back door, and he’d probably missed spotting a few.
He turned back to Laeral and murmured, “It seems they watch over you rather intently, here. What’re they afraid their Open Lord might do, I wonder?”
Laeral sighed. “They mean well. They’ve been trained to leap—”
“Before a Lord of Waterdeep can get the word ‘frog’ all the way out, aye,” Elminster commented. “Neverember must have been a proper terror.”
Laeral shrugged. “From all I’ve heard, he was simply a no-nonsense, energetic, charge-ahead leader.”
Elminster smiled. “Like I said …”
Laeral decided it was time to sigh again, but thankfully, they’d reached the door she’d been heading for.
“In here,” she told him, leading the way, “we can be less formal. And more private.”
“Here” was an office dominated by a large round wooden table that was itself dominated by huge stacks of parchments, some of which had overflowed onto the accompanying chairs. Two seats, facing each other along the curve of the table, were still unencumbered. Laeral gracefully lowered her long-legged six feet into one of them, and indicated the other.
Elminster sat down, tapped his empty and unlit pipe approvingly against the carved edge of the table, and said gently, “So unburden thyself, lass. Repeated assassination attempts, sullen guildmasters, a sneering nobility, dastardly agents of the not-quite-vanished Neverember seemingly everywhere, some citizens pushing for war with Neverwinter so they can sell swords and helms and blankets and all, and the usual intransigence and feuding among the Masked Lords, with some of them angry with ye for not being content to be a puppet or empty-headed figurehead, and the rest angry with ye for not fixing everything with a wave of your Art-endowed hand. Aye?”
“Economically summarized,” Laeral said ruefully, “but aside from the Neverember element—which I suspect is far more imagin
ed and rumored than it is real—’twas ever thus. You mustered your summation so effortlessly because the Open Lord of Waterdeep always faces such challenges. Yet the city faces real problems I must somehow get my fellow Lords to enact good governance upon. There’s a malady spreading in Downshadow, though it hasn’t yet risen to the notice of those whose tongues spread rumors in the streets. There’ve been several subsidences in the southern half of the city—buildings collapsing into their own cellars, when said delvings were being enlarged—with men buried or crushed and guilds getting angry as blame is hurled about. Not to mention fresh reports of dragons being seen in the skies, and giants standing on the slopes of Sar and Helimbrar, spying on the city. Oh, yes, and men in strange helms riding giant vultures amid the clouds above Dessarin Vale!”
“Ah, well,” Elminster teased, “ye can’t say Waterdeep isn’t laying on entertainments for ye!”
“Hard work, I fear not,” Laeral replied. “Diplomacy, I flatter myself I can handle. Yet as I get older—and my Art fades—I find myself increasingly irked by the small matters, the minor annoyances that once I laughed off or brushed aside. How can Waterdeep ever be a place of harmony and civic pride when hateful and foolish rumors daily rule the minds and tongues of far too many sensible citizens?”
“Such as?”
“Several energetic someones are forcefully and persistently putting it about the Deep that some fell wizard—or the entire Watchful Order, as a way of blackmailing everyone so as to make their own bid for ruling power—will animate the Walking Statues, and send them striding through the city smashing the buildings of their foes, with their foes still inside them.”
“Ye smell a campaign to spread this notion, as opposed to the usual overhearing and seizing upon and talking to others?”
“I do. And there are more frivolous madwit irritations, too.” Laeral was getting annoyed, and her long, unbound silver hair was stirring, lifting from her shoulders to lash and swirl, the tresses questing in different directions.
When her customarily twinkling emerald green eyes met Elminster’s, he saw that they were flaring silver.
“For instance, some bright spark is writing scathing commentary on my every utterance—and those of every guildmaster and loose-jawed noble in the Deep, too—under the name of, Mystra help us, Volo. You’d think no one would want to borrow that particular name after its original bearer indulged in so much infamy, would you?”
“Ah, but ’tis not borrowed,” El informed her gently. “ ’Tis the same man.”
“What? How by all the Lost and Hidden Words of Power did he survive beyond his due lifespan? Surely he mastered far too little Art to—”
“Mystra,” El replied. “If all of we Chosen were hunted down in the wake of her fall, she needed others to hold enough of herself so she could rise again. Others unexpected, who would not be hunted down. So—though he knows it not—Volo became one of her unwitting champions.”
Laeral rolled her eyes. “That scamp? He’s almost as persistent an annoyance as Mirt—or you.”
A twinkle arose in Elminster’s eye. “We try,” he said gently, and turned away to reclaim his pipe, which had chosen the last few moments of his inattention to drift slyly away.
His own Art was lessened of late, and he knew that all of the Seven Sisters had suffered more in this regard. None of them could mindscry at will anymore, subtly or otherwise, and must needs resort to the brute-force Weave-powered scouring that wrecks minds as it reads them, and so was best used on the dying or dead before their brains were entirely cold. If Laeral now admitted to him that she was forgetting many spells, the details of casting them simply falling out of her head time after time so they were effectively lost to her … well, she wouldn’t be the first of the sisters to reveal as much to him.
He was doing it, too. Drawing directly on the Weave and by sheer effort of will seeking to bring about specific effects, where spells failed. It worked, but was often imprecise, and was very tiring.
And although the Seven tended to have fiercer passion than he did, high emotion was best suited to the brief mighty strike, not the long and bitter endurance. That was his own mastery.
“Have ye Ironguard rings enough?” he asked.
Laeral’s eyes were green again as she looked back at him. There was a lingering, deepening silence before she murmured, “You know, don’t you?”
“That our Art is failing? For all of us?” he almost whispered. “Of course.”
There had been something approaching fear in Laeral’s face, but at his words it fell away, leaving her looking thoughtful. She lifted her hand to show the plain ring on her longest finger. “Another rides in my hair, and I have six more hidden about the Palace.”
Silently Elminster did back his left sleeve to reveal a bracer on his forearm. Instead of armor plate, its rigid leather inner and outer surfaces bore pouches—and out of one he drew a bone pierced at both ends to hold either end of a thong. Untying one end of that length of leather, he slid six identical plain metal rings off the bone and dropped them into her hand.
“Ye can never have too many. There are too few loyal folk in any city to leave even one unprotected, when ye discover their worth.”
“Thanks,” Laeral said simply, and reached to her bodice to draw up a small purse on a fine chain, into which the rings disappeared. “You are far more a creature of the Weave than the rest of us, El. Tell me: just how much can I or any wielder of the Art hope to hide from you?”
Elminster shrugged. “Just about everything. There’s simply too much going on at all times, too much overlapping chaos, for me to watch and follow and anticipate. These days, I’m more the man who glimpses an arrow hissing past out of thick smoke for an instant and tries to tell myself its fletching was this hue or that. Nay, Uncle Weirdbeard is no all-seeing spy. Still less, all-knowing.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Your life would be so boring, if ever …” Laeral’s large eyes were twinkling again.
Elminster judged the time was right to ask her one of his own larger questions. “So, lass, tell me: When the delegation of Masked Lords came to ye, what made ye accept the position of Open Lord? And later even visit other Lords of the City and try to persuade them to support ye?”
“Mystra,” Laeral replied flatly, and when El opened his mouth to ask more, she leaned forward, put a firm fingertip to his forehead, and poured a memory into his mind.
He was Laeral, standing barefoot somewhere in a vast and dimly moonlit forest, the trees very dark and what little light there was a deep blue. In the air before him floated those two gigantic, long-lashed eyes, and Mystra’s voice rolled into his head out of gentle depths.
Now that the Silver Marches is no more, stability is needed in the Sword Coast North, and I have other tasks for Alustriel. It’s your turn on a throne.
“On a throne?” Laeral asked sharply, then bit back a sigh to ask, “Where?”
In the Palace of Waterdeep. They’ll turn to you soon enough. Accept; it is needful. Your presence will inhibit certain individuals who would otherwise push ahead with magic that will do much harm, and court the very real possibility that public mood will turn against wizards, with determination to exterminate—and wielders of the Art will begin to fall.
Laeral bowed her head. “So be it. So long as you know that I may have to eliminate some of them myself.”
I trust you to do what is needful. You few, I can trust that far.
And with that chilling sadness in the voice of the goddess they all served, Elminster was back in the cluttered little Palace office with its heaps of parchment and many doors, blinking a little grimly at Laeral.
Who sat smiling wryly at him. “Elminster, I need your help in this.”
Elminster smiled back. “It’s why I’ve come.”
• • •
“IT’S WHY I’VE come.”
Laeral almost allowed herself to relax in relief. Her old, old friend and sometime mentor smiled at her, the pipe he seemingly never fill
ed and lit these days thrust jauntily into one corner of his mouth. He looked amused, and as Laeral watched, he plucked out the pipe and leaned forward to say something more, probably a jest—
And then his face changed, acquiring a distinct look of alarm, and he said, “Excuse me. I must leave ye, to attend to … a more pressing matter. I’ll return soon. I hope.”
And he rose, spun around in a whirl of his old robe, and was gone from the room—winking out of existence a stride before he reached the closed door.
Laeral sat suddenly alone in her office, shaking her head ruefully.
“Secrets, always secrets,” she whispered at the empty air where he’d been. “It’s the part of being a Chosen I’ve always hated the most. All the damned deceit.”
• • •
YOU ONLY GOT a ceiling this high—outside the mansions of highnoses, that is—by punching up to take the height of two full floors.
And they’d done that here, must have done, because there was more than enough room to put in a grand false ceiling, one side of which rested atop a false wall, built far enough out from the real wall to create a passage between them that his spread arms couldn’t quite span.
Glethro couldn’t imagine why anyone would be madwits enough to spend all this coin on a false wall made to fall over—made to fall over!—and bring the false ceiling he was just finishing gilding, right now—down in ruin on the floor below.
Flat on his back on the loftiest boards of the scaffold, Glethro looked over at that wall, for the six hundredth or so time. Even the sniffiest, most jaded old noble would have to grant that it certainly looked grand enough.
“Even from up here you can’t tell the support columns are cut right through,” he marveled.
“You’re not supposed to be able to, Glethro,” Haemiekal said gruffly from beside him. But then, Haemiekal said everything gruffly; the old man was quite possibly made of gruff. Gruff and bone and bile, a great wrinkled sack of boiling bile—
The old sack glared at him. “Now let’s get done. If we so much as brush that wall while we’re taking this scaffolding down—”