by Ed Greenwood
“A very effective poison,” Shrikegulk agreed. “Well, then, we’re off. With every last drop of all the drinkables we found in there, too.”
“Good. Make sure the lads know it’s all poisoned, so they don’t sample. And that the poison is something that’ll have decayed into uselessness by morning, leaving just spoiled drink, so it’s really not worth stealing for their own nasty purposes.”
“You think of everything, Saer.”
“It’s why I’m still alive, Shrikegulk.”
CHAPTER 4
Castles in the Air
I down another tankard, let it warm me well,
Drink weaving its usual memory-flooding spell
And taking me to fancies bright beyond compare
Where I am lord of all, ruling castles in the air.
—from the ballad Down Another Tankard by the minstrel Qardrella Havreth, published in the Year of Lost Ships
“WHAT, BY ALL THE KISSES OF THE LOVE GODDESS, IS THAT?”
Dundermur was drunk enough to weave and stumble as they walked along the worn and uneven cobbles of Ship Street in search of a tavern that hadn’t just run out of Skaugan Sour, but there was nothing at all wrong with his eyesight.
The man beside him, who was carefully not calling himself Volo save when putting quill to parchment, peered up along Dundermur’s none-too-steady arm.
In this dark and chilly tail end of night, there were fewer lanterns ablaze on the docks than usual. The Mistshore blaze had freed scores of hulks to drift underwater, imperiling ships both moored and under way, so loading was only going on at the southernmost docks.
Yet there were still plenty of stars, on this relatively cloudless night, and over the great dark shoulder of Mount Waterdeep, something was blotting them out.
Something big.
A cloud as dark and solid as a flagstone, and atop it … a castle! Stern, thick towers, both square and round. A real fortress, not a pretty thing of soaring turrets and pennants.
Dark and lightless, silent and foreboding … and moving. Drifting slowly—very slowly—landwards.
A shout from down the street marked someone else’s noticing it. Dock Ward was awake at all hours, and there were others walking rather than busily loading and unloading.
Volo cast a quick glance down the street, to make sure danger wasn’t nigh—or a Watch patrol; Watch guards were apt to be full of awkward questions they wanted prompt answers to—then looked up at the castle in the sky again.
A cloud castle. Just like in the tales.
“Well, now,” said Dundermur, to no one at all. “Well, now …”
And the stonemason started walking again. Thirst is a strong goad for a habitual drinker. Volo fell into step with him; Dundermur had coin enough to pay for tankards for them both, was pleasant enough company, and when sufficiently slaked tended to let fall all sorts of interesting gossip that a man with a talent for a quip or a little invention could spin into truly salacious broadsheet fodder.
The apparition in the sky was causing a stir.
“Yon’ll be the work of the Lady,” the man who’d shouted was busily telling some friends who’d spilled out of a tavern at his shout. “Our new Open Lord. Stands to reason she’ll start using magic on us—from a fortress above our heads. Or wants her own luxury digs, up in the air where she don’t have to pay taxes.”
“Where do the chamberpots empty, that’s what I want to know!” one of those friends said suspiciously, squinting up at the castle.
“That,” Volo muttered under his breath, “is the least I want to know.”
• • •
EVEN WHEN SHE could find sleep, Vajra had recently acquired a nasty habit of coming suddenly awake, alert and breathing hard—and bewildered as to why.
This time, sitting bolt upright in the gloom, she felt a pulse of magical warmth from the Blackstaff under her hand. Something had goaded it into wakefulness, of a sort. Snatching it out from under the bed linens, she padded quickly down the stairs to the room below, turned to the large and intricate map of the sewers that adorned one arc of its wall, and tapped it with the staff.
Khelben’s old but solidly reliable magic obediently awakened, showing her the usual view of Dock Ward from on high.
It was always wisest to look for trouble in Dock Ward first.
There were plenty of folk on the streets, of course, but a lot of them were standing in little knots and clusters staring up at something. At the same something, over that way …
It was … Mystra forefend! A cloud castle?
Vajra hurried down the stairs. There were robes and boots by the doors she could snatch on ere stepping outside to point the staff at the apparition and make sure it wasn’t merely someone’s elaborate illusion.
Somehow, still two floors above getting outside, she already knew it wasn’t. Things were just never that easy these days.
• • •
LAERAL SAT AND scratched. Those buckles had left itches behind. She hadn’t been wearing armor all that often, lately, and her usually sleek hide was reminding her of that.
She sipped more wyvernscale tea, deep green and spicy and just the way she liked it. Almost an echo of the turtle soup Luse liked so much.
And a wonderful soother when trying to call up memories and sort out thoughts …
There was something one of the Hidden Lords had said to another across the Lordsmoot more than a tenday back, while she’d been talking with another Lord. Something not meant for her ears, that she’d nonetheless heard and told herself to remember for later.
Well, it was “later” now, specifically one of the few moments she’d get that wouldn’t have courtiers and servants awake and bustling in to interrupt her every few breaths, so if she was going to recall things, and really think about them …
Tolvur. It had been Tolvur, that fat toad of a man. Capable, no doubt, shrewd in ways useful to the city, yet … still a toad. He’d been talking to Gwelt. “Usual place. No, below. It’ll take time. Always does, to hide it all over Mistshore.”
So whatever it was—smuggling of some sort, probably, to evade Palace taxes or guild control and prices of something in bulk—it was probably ashes now. Which meant, if she knew men like Tolvur at all, and she’d outlived so many, that he’d want to talk to Gwelt, nay, need to talk to Gwelt.
She was probably too late, but …
Laeral stood up, dug into the tiny pouch on her sash for the wisp of bat fur she’d need, murmured the incantation, gingerly touched the fur to both eyeballs, and let her arcane eye move out and away.
Sinking into the Weave, she guided it faster than she’d otherwise have been able to do. Tolvur lived not far from the Palace, up the Street of Bells … there. The house wherein a light had just gone out in a high window. So was he settling down to snore, or—?
Before her little flying eye had time to rise to that window, a rear door opened and a stout man in a nightcloak strode out, threaded his way through the garden, and through his garden gate. Bodyguards rose from dozing in garden seats to take up stations in front and behind their employer. The trio headed briskly south. Dock Ward? And just what sort of legitimate business would a Hidden Lord of the city, whose public coins came as rents from Castle and North Ward premises, have at this hour?
In such haste, too. The three men turned down Snail Street, so, yes, Dock Ward.
Laeral drew her eye in closer and dropped it down to hip level, just behind the rear guard.
Just as Tolvur stepped abruptly into a dark doorway between two shop fronts. An entrance that led to dwellings on the floors above those shops. These were probably buildings he owned, and there’d be a steep stair inside that door …
There was, but as the rearguard stepped through the door and locked it behind him, the fore guard did something to those steps, and four of them swung up and out like a door.
To reveal a dark opening, downward onto a lightless landing. The bodyguard felt around in that darkness, drew out a stout storm lantern, l
it it with ease, and handed it to Tolvur.
Who stepped past him without a word and descended, not waiting for the two guards to follow and close the hatch.
Laeral took a long, slow sip of tea; closed her eyes to concentrate on what her distant ocular was seeing; and followed the lord with the lantern. Down, down into fresh mystery …
• • •
THE CASTLE WAS real, all right.
And huge. It loomed up ahead of her, dark and silent. Vajra willed the Blackstaff to drink in magic in case hostile lightning or some sort of unseen warding awaited her, but … she flew on, and nothing came.
She slowed, drifting up to the arch-topped front door. It stood open, vast and dark, an opening so high that a Walking Statue could have strolled through without ducking its head.
Holding up the staff in case death awaited, Vajra went in.
Into soft and deepening silence, in a chamber that was vast. And opened into larger, darker ones on either side. All around her soared walls of moisture-beaded stone, of a smoky and somehow roiling hue like storm clouds that rose to lofty vaultings she could barely see overhead.
“Well met?” Vajra called, as calmly as she could. Her raised voice didn’t roll away from her, nor echo. It was swallowed up as if the air were made of velvet.
She descended to the floor. Gigantic flagstones, of irregular shape yet as smooth as unpolished marble. She grounded the Blackstaff, and it flashed to indicate powerful magic in what it touched, but struck with scarcely a sound. And no echo at all.
She rose again, to hover, looking around. On all sides, huge dark spaces, the thick air sharp with a scent she knew.
The same iron tang she’d smelled before, in the wake of lightning strikes. Was it growing stronger, building to something? Or just seeming stronger, now that she’d identified it?
She was being watched. She could feel it. She spun around in the air with all the flashing speed she could muster—and found herself gazing only at mist. A little drifting mist …
Of course! Cloud giants could become mist.
“Know you,” she announced boldly, “that this city stands not unguarded!”
She turned in the air as she said that, half expecting something to come racing at her out of the darkness. Even if it was only a spear.
A giant’s spear might be half as long as Ahghairon’s Tower stood tall, mind you, and thick enough to tear her in half rather than make a hole through her …
“Who are you?” a voice came to her, out of the distant darkness around a corner. It was soft but deep, so deep it shook her teeth. More curious than sharp, thank Mystra and all the gods for small things.
Vajra swallowed, and headed for where the voice seemed to have come from.
Around that corner was another huge dark room, a deep void of dark emptiness, and more eddying mists. A lot of mist, like receding columns of smoke.
And beyond the mists, something more.
As if her scrutiny had been a signal, a wan radiance kindled in the air around that something, revealing it to be a huge … sculpture. If sculpture was the right word. She was looking at an intricate assembly of gold coins the size of dinner plates, strung on fine wires to form spiraling intertwined strands in a great air-filling column of curlicues.
Vajra peered all around. Lots of mist, but no giants showed themselves.
“I am the Blackstaff,” she answered the empty air. “The Lady Mage of Waterdeep. Guardian of the City of Splendors.” And she hefted the fragment of the Blackstaff, and made it glow.
Interestingly, it chose to glow with a black radiance, and throbbed with an energy she’d never felt before.
Somewhere in the darkness she heard an indrawn breath. The staff had made someone apprehensive.
“So,” she called, “why are you here?”
“Why does any merchant come to Waterdeep?” Calmer than she was, and a shade short of insolence.
“You’ve come here to trade?” Vajra demanded. “Only to trade?”
There came no reply.
Vajra tried again, several times, but got only silence.
So she flew back to the high entry hall inside the open door, and backed into the doorway itself.
“Your intrusion,” she announced sternly, “is neither welcome nor lawful. As Guardian of Waterdeep, I say you must depart or be destroyed!”
Then she whirled around and flew away, swift and dodging back and forth as she descended, in case anything pursued her.
Nothing did. Rounding the dark shoulder of Mount Waterdeep, seething, she sought the Palace.
To report to Laeral.
• • •
TOLVUR AND HIS lantern descended alone, leaving his bodyguards behind. Laeral kept her eye close to the stone ceiling, which grew colder and damper and more noisome with the lord’s every step.
The cellar at the bottom of the steps was dank, reeking of mildew and littered with spongy-rotten old boards and splinters, the litter of crates torn apart a decade ago. The walls were of stone black with mold, interspersed with wood that was already mostly mold. Tolvur laid a hand on a nailed cross-piece, turned it, and the door it had been holding shut groaned open to reveal light and a handsome man—Laeral recognized Ammasker Gwelt by his sly smile, even before she saw the rest of him—sitting on a rickety chair with a half-clad woman in his lap.
The woman scrambled up in an instant and was gone out the other door, leaving Gwelt barely time to slap her behind as she departed. Tolvur frowned.
“You let some low-coin lass know our meeting place?”
“This is where she lives when we’re not meeting here, Tolvur. Don’t you even know your own tenants?”
Tolvur shrugged. “I know their coins, that’s enough.”
Gwelt shook his head. “Not wise, friend. Not in Waterdeep. Here, details matter.”
“I prosper well enough.”
“I was thinking of survival, not prosperity,” Gwelt replied. “As in, we Masked Lords keeping hold of our own lives a little longer.”
Tolvur shrugged again. “We all die, it’s just a matter of when.”
“Yes. When as in now. Or has it escaped you that three of us have been murdered in as many days?”
“Three? Two I know of, but—”
“Some woman was running down the street screaming as I walked here; Haelinghorse has been found with his head hacked off.”
“Ye gods! I’d thought it was Neverember getting even, but he and Haelinghorse were laugh-tankards together. So who—?”
“That’s why I wanted to meet with you. Try this thought: perhaps it’s the Lady Laeral killing off Lords, hmm? She gets installed in the Palace, and we start to die, one after another.”
“So … what shall we do?”
“Ah, there you have me. We could flee the city, but that just puts our peril off for a time. Or we could hole up in the best fortresses we can devise here in the Deep, and conduct our business through our subordinates, but …”
“But,” Tolvur agreed glumly, “if we retreat from the daily cut-and-thrust of mercantile dealings, we’ll lose much. Is the risk that great?”
It was Gwelt’s turn to shrug. “I’m not living like a rat when I’ve gotten used to prowling like a lion. And I suspect that’ll hold true for most of us. Our greed will win out over all, as it usually does—oh, there’ll be a few fearfuls, but most of us will be damned if we’ll let some mysterious killer drive us behind walls to cower—”
Her spell ended abruptly, leaving Laeral reeling and blinking at spell-smoke.
What had done that? Neither of those two Lords mastered any Art, and—
The Blackstaff shone darkly in front of her eyes.
She looked up to meet the eyes of the woman who held it. Vajra was excited. No, angry.
“Where were you?” the Blackstaff demanded.
“Off being a Lord,” Laeral told her. “I don’t just sit sipping tea on a throne day and night, you know. What news?”
“You didn’t notice the castle?
Floating in the air just outside the harbor?” Vajra was incredulous. “The giants wouldn’t even show themselves or answer my questions. I need you to come with me and rouse the Watchful Order, so we can have a strike force ready before daybreak.”
“What?” Laeral shot up from the table, upsetting her tea but catching the mug before it could hit the table. “Did they attack you?”
“No, but—”
“Then we do not rush to make war on them. At dawn you can call on the Order to discuss defending the Deep against any attack—when it comes. We will not start a war in the air above the city without provocation.”
“But—”
“Vajra,” Laeral said firmly, “do you hear me? No rush to attack! I forbid you from doing any such thing.”
The Blackstaff’s eyes caught fire. “But—but we can blast them, and should! To deter anyone else from feeling they can just show up above us unannounced, and to show the Deep how strongly we safeguard them—how firm your rule is.”
“It’s not my rule,” Laeral snapped, really angry now, “and we should not just blast them. I am not the Tyrant of Waterdeep, and won’t try to be. My role is to keep the fractious citizenry of the Deep working and living together, not to be their tyrant and scare them all into chanting my causes and standing to attention when I stride into rooms.” She started to pace, but quelled herself in mid-step to whirl around and tell Vajra severely, “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, as my centuries have unfolded, it’s that hurling down towers with spells just because you can creates problems, it doesn’t solve them. You may reduce one arrogant foe to a stain on a wall, but he will have a family, or allies, or both, and somehow you will almost always have made things worse, not better. Life is not as neat and simple as a big decisive battle that ends a chapbook, followed by everything sliding into a tidy resolution.”
Vajra started to pace and throw her arms about. “So you’re just going to leave our city undefended? Until the giants fly into the heart of it and start raiding and smashing, like the dragons did?”
“A giant,” Laeral snarled, “is not a dragon. Did you bother to find out why they were here?”