Death Masks

by Ed Greenwood

  And Laeral stopped crying, stared down at him in astonishment—and burst into helpless laughter.

  • • •

  TASHEENE CAME AWAKE out of a nightmare of running naked through the streets of Waterdeep in a torrential night rainstorm with her skin afire and the crackling flames roasting her like boar as she went, yet failing to ignite the blood-dripping severed heads of four—no, five—no, six Masked Lords she was clutching in one hand, while laughing Watch guards pursued her and no matter which alley she dodged down Antler always loomed up ahead of her, wearing a terrible smile that promised doom—

  Something had awakened her.

  Some sound.

  Small, but nearby. A sound that shouldn’t have been there.

  A stealthy sound … something breaking.

  Or rather, being broken, by someone taking great pains to keep what they were doing as quiet as possible.

  Tasheene lay in her bed in the pitch darkness straining to hear. It had come from that direction, at least a room away, but—

  There! Another sound. Small, scarcely audible, but quite definite. Someone was quietly breaking into Melshimber House, two rooms over from hers.

  Stealthily.

  Tasheene drew in one long, deep breath and slipped out of bed by the swiftest safe way, snatched up her best two poisoned daggers, and padded naked in the pitch dark to the door. Then out into the passage.

  No time to get dressed, no time to light lamps. If she was swift enough, she could get to where she could stab whoever came out of that door. It was slowly being drawn open as she got there, and took her stance against the wall beside it. She was in time. Just.

  Now, blades up. Even if they blocked her first fang, the second should get them right in the—

  Whoever it was emerged, and she struck.

  Her first dagger was parried, the second caught and held by a deft hand closing on her wrist, then both her wrists were twisted ruthlessly and her daggers sent flying and her assailant kept on twisting and pulling and—

  She ended up on the passage floor, winded and pinned and staring up at the intruder who was holding her down.

  He thrust his face close to hers, and she saw who it was: Darleth Drake.

  “My apologies for awakening you, Lady,” he hissed, “and visiting alarm upon you. I’m very sorry I had to do this, but—”

  He fell silent as he saw Tasheene look past his shoulder at who was now lurching out of the room he’d emerged from.

  The brightest thing about Zaraela Raelantaver was her glittering eyes. Much of her skin had burned away, leaving her face horribly disfigured—nose almost all gone, bone showing through one cheek, teeth visible through crisped gaps—and all of her hair was gone, leaving a scorched and blackened skull. Her clothes were burned into her skin, and were tearing it away in places as she moved, trembling in pain.

  “Oh, may Tymora deliver you!” Tasheene gasped.

  Zaraela regarded her bleakly before that ashen, lipless mouth moved. “You did this to me. Get me some laerand, if you have any, before I go mad from the pain.”

  Drake rolled away, and the freed Tasheene sprang up from the floor and ran to obey—so she never saw Drake pluck forth two daggers from sheaths in his boots, daggers identical to the poisoned pair he’d procured for her a month back, and quickly retrieve her daggers, picking them up carefully by the pommels, and slip them into his sheaths.

  For her part, Zaraela leaned against the wall and shuddered in helpless agony, until Tasheene returned with a small flask and gingerly poured it into Zaraela’s lipless mouth.

  The burned woman reeled, spasmed, flung her head back against the wall and banged it there thrice as she whimpered in pain … and then relaxed with a gusty sigh, slid down the wall—and then, with a terrific effort, straightened herself and stood tall.

  “Temple of Tymora?” Tasheene asked urgently. The bright new House of Lady Luck temple was a curving-walled thing of beauty a mere three blocks away, at the corner of the Street of Whispers and Diamond Street.

  “Temple of Tymora,” Zaraela confirmed flatly. “You pay. We go now. After you dress and get me a cloak.”

  “Wait,” Tasheene said quickly. “We need a fire, to account for you—your injuries, that is. Not the workshop, something else. Or the Watch will have you in chains the moment you leave the temple.”

  “And so?”

  “Ammasker Gwelt is hosting a party for his investors in the upper rooms of the Diamond Masks tonight.”

  The laerand had done nothing to slow Zaraela Raelantaver’s mind. “The next Masked Lord on our list?”

  “Yes. And no one will successfully bring back from the dead someone whose ashes are so mingled with those of many others—and the building they were all trapped in.”

  After a moment, the ravaged face twisted in a grimace that was meant to be a smile. “They’ll be reeling drunk by now. They hired doxies, no doubt, so … let the Diamond Masks burn.”

  Tasheene nodded and started to turn eagerly away—but one of Zaraela’s blackened hands closed on her shoulder like a claw.

  “You,” she said fiercely into Tasheene’s face, “will go inside and make sure he’s in there, first. I’m not burning down buildings full of random Waterdhavians.”

  Tasheene dressed and encloaked her blackened fellow conspirator in the space of a few hasty breaths. It look the three of them only a little longer to travel the two blocks from Melshimber House to the Diamond Masks. The club was a rebuilt villa that stood a door east of Galeturrets, the city mansion of House Husteem.

  Zaraela stood lookout, leaning against the carved entwined and leering gargoyles pillars some long-ago Husteem had unaccountably favored, as Drake easily scaled the many-balconied club wall on his way to set fires on the roof, and Tasheene went inside in search of their next Masked Lord.

  The club was crowded but obviously in the drunken and wanton declining hours of Gwelt’s get-together. Tasheene nodded brightly to the club doorjack and went straight upstairs, to an upper floor that reeked of spilled wine and spewed stomachs and strong perfume and arousal. Where she picked her way through room after room of slurringly chortling revelers and blearily amorous couples until she found a candlelit chamber dominated by a magnificent four-poster where Ammasker Gwelt was abed with two play-pretties.

  He recognized her, and gave her a leer over the rounded curves of the two professionals entwined with him, but the women were less welcoming. “Go find your own!” one of them sneered.

  Tasheene stared at the trio for a moment—a moment in which she could already smell heavier smoke than the reek of the candles—and then smiled, strode to the sideboard, and took up the nearest of the pair of slender lit candles in heavy metal candlesticks.

  She pinched out its flame between her fingertips, ignoring the pain. One of Gwelt’s hired companions, watching her, exclaimed, “Oooh, a lover of pain!” in tones of oh-so-astonished mockery.

  Tasheene met the eyes of that playpretty, plucked the candle from its ornate metal holder, and rammed it into the woman’s mouth. Before the startled doxy could spit it out, she reversed the candlestick to make of it an ornate little mace, and dealt hearty blows to the heads of all three people in the bed.

  Gwelt and the two women slumped unconscious, and Tasheene tossed the candlestick atop them and strode out of the room, leaving them to the flames.

  Once she was back out on the street, she turned and looked up at the club roof—to see smoke billowing and tiles already beginning to crack. Some tiles had been pried up and shoved aside to create gaps in the roof—and flames were leaping up and dancing through those darkening clefts.

  Drake joined Tasheene with a satisfied smile on his face, towing the encloaked Zaraela.

  “I think we’d best be gone,” he observed airily. “Before inquisitive Watch guards get between us and Tymora’s healing.”

  As they hastened away, the flames behind them reached for the starry night sky with a sudden roar.

  • • •


  IT WAS BRIGHT mid-morning in Sea Ward, and although the reek of smoke still hung strong in the walled grounds of Galeturrets, the smoke itself was gone.

  Here in Lord Erland Husteem’s front upper floor study, the sharp smell was thankfully fainter, as two lords sat over wine, alone. The house servants had been dismissed and told to stay out of earshot.

  The visiting noble made polite mention of his host’s fortunate escape from the ravages of last night’s regrettable and disastrous fire next door.

  “Quite so,” Lord Husteem said briskly. “The gods are to be thanked. The blaze did no more than scorch the thick old stones of my outer wall. The Diamond Masks was gutted, however, its roof falling in through the floors below—so there’ll no doubt be months of hammering and worse, as they rebuild.”

  He poured them both refills, and added, “But I asked you here for a reason of more import than a club fire, Lord Gralhund.”

  “I expected as much, Lord Husteem.”

  “I’d like to begin by asking a rather impertinent question, my only defense being that these are, it seems, increasingly impertinent times. So tell me now, was a certain Lord Orond Gralhund asked to be a Hidden Lord of Waterdeep?”

  Gralhund waved a deprecating hand. “Well, well, aheh, that’s not the sort of thing a man of breedin—”

  “So was I,” Husteem interrupted. “I refused, and I’m sure you did, too. Only a fool is going to say yes when it’s a death sentence. So they won’t get too many highborn. The fools among us are those who’ll never be asked.”

  “And so?”

  “And so they’ll soon run out of lords, or nearly so, and get desperate, and start appointing just about anyone.”

  “We’ll be ruled by a bunch of grasping commoners? Bane blast all!”

  “If we push the right way, we can get quite a few guildmasters to accept, and—”

  “Guildmasters? You’re mad! The moment they get their hands on—”

  “Indeed. However, I’ve noticed—Hells, any child would notice—they don’t agree on much among themselves. And unless the murderers are only looking to slaughter nobles, they’ll be targets themselves, soon enough.”

  Lord Gralhund swallowed a good amount of wine, and nodded slowly as he did so, but came up for air with a question. “And what if they survive, and we’re ruled by hrasting guildmasters?”

  Lord Husteem smiled a cold and ruthless smile. “Well, considering how easy murdering Masked Lords seems to be, and how ineffectual the Watch obviously is, we simply eliminate every guildmaster we don’t want breathing Waterdhavian air any longer, and keep only the good ones. So nominate and push those we hate, and in this way we’ll get rid of them.”

  Lord Gralhund stared at his host thoughtfully, then broke into a wide and wicked grin, and raised his goblet in salute.

  CHAPTER 13

  We All Do What We Can

  I see your somber and wary haste as you prepare for war

  Readying to defend these walls, and seeking spies within them

  For you are like to die soon, a-fighting for this city

  But are you worried that we lowly shopkeepers shall not?

  Hear me and be assured, lords, that we all do what we can.

  —Rathheld Smallcloaks, in Chapter 5 of The Siege of the Doomed City: A Fantasy by Emaerra Harlholiss of Athkatla, published in the Year of the Starving

  “PRAY PARDON, LADY SILVERHAND,” THE COURTIER SAID APOLOGETICALLY, “but six Lords of the City are here, and asking to meet with you.”

  And I know just which six, Laeral thought, as she gave the man a warm smile and replied, “Thank you. They’re in the Lordsmoot, I trust?”

  “They are.”

  “I shall attend them in all haste. Please tell them so.” She dismissed him with a nod, and he bowed and withdrew.

  She knew the reason for this visitation. A haggard Ezender Drayth had just left her, after a hurried visit during which he’d promised to try to set watch over every surviving Hidden Lord of the city.

  “A ticklish business, Lady,” he’d said gloomily. “I must manage to guard them all without tipping off everyone in the city as to their identities, so I’ve been forced to split up the skulks and assign one skulk member to heading up each guardian force. Our thinking is that these forces will bide near the Lords they’re guarding, but not directly accompany the Lords.”

  “Functioning in addition to any private bodyguards a Lord has or may wish to hire,” Laeral interpreted.

  The Warden had nodded. “They’re hiring like fury, now—and so are guildmasters and nobles and most of the wealthier independent citizens, too, all over the city. Pay rates are soaring as the most fearful try to outbid each other, and we’ve seen at least two bloody clashes already, over not much at all; just rival bodyguards eager to demonstrate their dedication, and all too apt to see threats in every person standing too near.”

  That scramble had erupted thanks to the news—and wilder rumors—now raging across the city. Three more citizens revealed in death to have been Masked Lords had been murdered, over the day and night before: the Sembian wine-seller and collector Oszbur Malankar; the half-elf sorceress and artisan Dathanscza Meiril; and the moneylender, landlord, and investor Ammasker Gwelt.

  So all Waterdeep now knew someone was killing the Lords of Waterdeep, one by one. Yet that was about where truth ended and speculation—however dressed up as truth wagging tongues could make it—began. The broadsheets were full of wild speculation. Who’s Behind This? The ousted Lord Neverember? The Zhentarim, or Cult of the Dragon, or some other Outland Power? The Xanathar? Some cabal of guilds or nobles planning a coup?

  It would rage on, whatever she or anyone else did or didn’t do. That was the trouble with rumors; once loosed, they were like untamed beasts, rushing everywhere snarling, with no good way of stopping them.

  And as she had that thought, one of the rear entrances to the Lordsmoot loomed in front of her. Laeral put a calm smile on her face, pushed open the door, and strode in.

  The same six Masked Lords that had met with her last time faced her again across the table. Voskur, Hrimmrel, Haelhand, Heirlarpost, Maremthur, and Cazondur. They did not look happy.

  “You’ve heard the news,” Heirlarpost said, before she could utter a word; a statement, not a question. As Laeral started to nod, he swept on. “We’ve hastened here to name more candidates for these new vacancies—uh, wait! Where are you going?”

  For Laeral had turned on her heel and reopened the door she’d come in by. She stopped, looked back at them all over her shoulder, and said firmly, letting her gaze move calmly from one of them to the next as she did so, “We have an agreement, Lords. After a late evenfeast tonight, all the assembled Lords will meet here in the Palace—in a room all of you are unaccustomed to gathering in, a chamber I’ve selected because it can be isolated, with Watch guards and Watchful Order mages ready for trouble in all the rooms and corridors around it—and your fellow Lords of Waterdeep will then have their opportunities to nominate candidates.”

  She took a step back, into the doorway.

  “But,” Heirlarpost sputtered, “if the assembled Lords can’t agree, and not every vacant lordship gets filled, what then?”

  “We need not have every Mask worn,” she reminded him. “By tradition, just nine Masked Lords and the Open Lord are sufficient to rule.”

  “By tradition, not law,” Braethan Cazondur spoke up, his deep and deliberate voice as flat and emphatic as a king’s, but Laeral met his gaze with a calm and steady lack of expression.

  “There is no law as to the minimum who can rule,” she replied, “and by tradition, in time of war or crisis—and is this not a time of crisis, Lords?—the Open Lord alone can command.”

  She let those words hang in the air, and as Lammakh Heirlarpost swelled up for an outburst, added crisply, “I assure you all that I have no intention whatsoever of becoming some lone tyrant, and will, if a majority vote of the surviving Lords when the meeting commences tonight
goes that way, step aside as Open Lord and depart this city. However, I believe this may be the very worst time to force me out.”

  She gave them a smile then, and added, “So go, and get some sleep, and eat heartily—or if you’d prefer not to step outside these walls again until after our meeting tonight, or even tarry within the protection of the Palace longer, we certainly have well-appointed apartments enough to house you in comfort—stay here and dine and converse. We Lords meet together, all of us, to dine and to decide matters, tonight.”

  “But—” Heirlarpost began, and then Laeral shut the door on whatever else he went on to say, and strode away.

  It takes patience to train stubborn beasts.

  She smiled.

  Even me.

  • • •

  “OOOH,” DRELLA SAID mockingly, “big coin. A private booth! Fancy, fancy! Tell me now, how much does a private booth cost at The Hearty Platter?”

  Mirt snorted. “Better you not know. ’Tis not as if it’ll be worth it.”

  “Is that a challenge?” Waratra asked, leaning boldly forward across the table.

  The fat old man chuckled. “Put those away. We’re here for business, my ladies of the alleys. Business.”

  “Spill,” Ravva ordered flatly.

  “I want all three of you to watch the slopes of Mount Waterdeep above and behind the Palace, and the streets immediately around, for anyone suspicious who approaches the Palace a little before, at, or after dusk tonight. Extra pay.”

  “And do what, when this someone suspicious happens along?”

  “Report to me just as fast as you can without raising an alarm among all the guards and Watch patrols; I’ll be wandering around shopping and drinking—and ‘just happening’ to stroll past you from time to time.”

  The three girls stared across the table at him until Mirt growled, “What? What’ve I asked that’s so ill? Won’t you do it?”