by Ed Greenwood
Now Mirt did look around, for there was much to see. Here and there about the plaza, as he stared in this direction and that, crossbow bolts were shimmering as they hung in midair, inching very slowly toward Lords of Waterdeep who were being hustled toward the Palace by hard-faced and anxious bodyguards.
As he gazed, bolt after bolt came to a hovering halt. Shielding spells cast by Watchful Order mages, had to be.
Mirt looked to the closest corner rooftops—that’s where the mages and City Guard posted themselves day and night hereabouts, back in his day—in time to see a young mage take a speeding bolt in the throat that snatched him off his feet, lifeblood fountaining while he was still arched over backward in midair. Before he fell back out of sight Mirt was already feigning his own collapse to the cobbles, where more than a few bodies now lay sprawled, because that twist and fall let him peer back where the mage’s death had come from.
A familiar bowman, somehow. No livery nor armor, just nondescript homespun, but it was someone Mirt had seen in Dock Ward these past few days, someone the lasses had told him worked for … the Xanathar.
So, now! Zhent agents trying for the Lords, men of the Xanathar working with them? Or just wanting as many Lords dead as possible, or taking out Watchful Order mages who were handy targets right now?
Mirt huddled low on the cobbles as he spun around in all directions, trying to see his hired lasses. Across the plaza, a Watchguard slumped to dangle over the edge of a roof, a bolt protruding from the front of his open-faced helm. A second toppled from another rooftop, a bolt through his neck.
People were running again, shrieking and pelting through the plaza out of street-mouths, fleeing from the wrath of Watch guards now boiling out of buildings everywhere to seek bowmen.
And a roar arose as adventurers burst forth from inns and taverns and pelted down streets, weapons drawn as they shouted.
All of them, Watch guards and ruffians alike, converging on the Palace.
“Someone’s been hiring,” Mirt growled, lurching to his feet and running to the nearest of his girls.
It was Ravva, looking as if she was enjoying herself immensely. She pointed as he ran up, and when Mirt looked where, he discovered she was pointing to her fellow hirelings.
“Get down!” Mirt roared, grabbing for Ravva’s arm. “Stay low, and get to cover!”
Ravva grinned unconcernedly at him as she eluded his hand but fell in beside him as he ran on toward Drella. “Fat man, you’re the best cover around here!”
Mirt was too wheezingly breathless to answer, and was still fighting for breath when their headlong sprint brought them to two Watch guards, who loomed up in front of them with a stern, “Hold hard, there! Stop and answer to the Watch!”
Without an instant’s hesitation Ravva flung herself at their ankles, rolled hard under them, and toppled them both sprawling, even before Mirt had to break stride.
Then she was up, as supple as a harbor eel, and running on.
“Yer crazed, you know that?” Mirt grunted at her, sidelong.
Ravva gave him a wide and merry grin. “If you say so! You’re paying!”
• • •
WHEN DRAKE HANDED her the helm of the third Watchguard he’d had to kill so they could stay on this rooftop, Tasheene pulled it on as fast as she could, thanking him with a wordless nod. Which he might not have even seen, for he was already busily stripping a limp Watchguard body of its armor.
Which was a very good idea, considering how stlarning many crossbow bolts had come humming past their ears in the brief and rather breathless time they’d been up here.
Six freshly slain Watch guards lay underfoot, but from this vantage point, Ahghairon’s Tower was directly ahead and the Palace rose spired and magnificent against the looming mountainside to their right.
She noticed Drake reach up and rub at his neck, just behind his ear. For the second time, she realized, perhaps the third, since Watch guards had stopped dying all around them. Tasheene peered.
It was some sort of mark. A brand.
And it was new, still red and inflamed. Drake seemed to feel her scrutiny; he turned, snake-swift, caught her looking at him, and rewarded her with a frown.
She looked away, saying nothing.
We all have our secrets, and hers had brought them here where they were so, so likely to die. She ducked her head. This helm didn’t even have a front to it, and occasional crossbow bolts were still snarling out of the night like angry wasps …
Then something moved, in the air before her.
Something in the vista beyond the edge of the roof; something that should not be moving.
It was a rippling in the air, as if the empty night above the plaza was disturbed harbor water. It could only be—Tasheene frowned—the normally invisible magical fields surrounding the slim stone pinnacle of Ahghairon’s Tower, stirring.
Drake was watching the ripples, too, so this wasn’t just some trick or affliction of Tasheene’s own eyes. Like all Waterdhavians, she knew the dark and slender tower in front of the Palace as something unchangeable, a landmark that was just “always there.” Silent, shut up, deserted, and never visibly changed by the passing years; no one had been able to enter it since Ahghairon’s death.
The ripples suddenly blossomed into swirls of roiling and vivid blue, silver, and gray—and a short, dusky woman appeared atop them, standing in midair as if the fields were solid ground under her boots.
It was Vajra Safahr, the Blackstaff, holding what was left of the fabled Blackstaff itself above her head. Her eyes flashing, the small and slender woman cried out words of magic that struck Tasheene’s ears like thunderclaps, then rolled across the sky like thunder.
The fragment of staff in her hands flared into blue-white, restlessly crawling serpents of magic, writhing and knotting and—becoming many streaking bolts that spat forth to speed down from the staff, turning and darting in accordance with Vajra’s will.
Bursting where they hit, flaring around targets who flung up their arms in agony and fell—every one of them the bowmen and swordswingers who did not wear Watchguard uniforms and weren’t bodyguards to any hurrying Lord of Waterdeep.
The onrushing adventurers faltered before those bright missiles, but the Watch guards did not, racing to ring the Lords and help bustle them inside the Palace.
Tasheene and Drake watched the Blackstaff and the ripples she had caused wink out of existence together, leaving the night air empty once more.
They had crossbows of their own ready and loaded with poisoned bolts, but in tavern tales long shots by those who don’t practice their archery daily may find improbable marks; in nightdark, on this rooftop, the two of them would just have to wait until Lords got much closer. After all, they were after specific Lords, and in those helms, no Lord was an easy target for a distant bowman. They would have to loose at joints and hands, and hope Tymora smiled on their aimings.
“Hold this on,” Drake ordered, handing Tasheene a bloodstained Watch breastplate, “while I buckle you up. Stay low.”
She crawled over unpleasantly bloody Watch guards to get to where he could do that, and settled the unlovely piece of armor where it should go. “Any sign of the Lords we’re after yet?”
“No,” Drake replied, “and I—”
Whatever else he’d been going to say was lost in the sudden whaaanggh of a crossbow bolt glancing off Tasheene’s breastplate like the full-weight roundhouse blow of a strong warrior’s fist and leaping on into the night.
“Down!” Drake snarled, shoving her. Another bolt promptly skidded across the armor of two dead Watch guards with an unpleasant hiss, and followed the first quarrel into oblivion beyond the roof-edge.
Drake shoved at a body to thrust it up enough to form a shield of sorts as he wormed around on his belly, hastily donning his own borrowed Watch armor. Bolts rang off dead arms and shoulder-plates with force enough that Tasheene, wincing as she watched and tried to burrow in among the bodies to get even lower, knew would have
left behind bad bruises if she’d been inside those plates.
“Who, by all the Watching Gods—?” she demanded angrily of the night sky above her.
“Xanathar men, by where those’re coming from,” Drake replied calmly. “Grab our poisoned bolts—mind you don’t set the bows off, plucking them out!—and let’s get gone from here. Leave the bows; we’re done here.”
“But—”
“But nothing. This armor will turn aside glancing strikes, but if a few of those catch us squarely, we’ll be as dead as these Watch louts. Come!”
He was crawling for the hatch they’d come up onto the roof through, as a fresh rain of bolts rang off the armor of the dead all around them.
“So it’ll be the snatching,” Tasheene panted, as she crawled up over a burly corpse and slid face-first down to the rooftop beyond it, poisoned bolts clutched in her hand. She had gloves waiting, under this breastplate, but the time to try to retrieve them wasn’t yet.
“I thought it would be,” Drake replied calmly, as he lifted the hatch and held it up so it could serve as a shield for her climb down into the attic below. A trio of bolts came out of the night and thudded into it as one, slamming it down again.
Drake patiently tugged it open again with one hand, and rolled Tasheene into the opening with the other.
She fell headfirst toward the unseen floor below, and twisted desperately in midair, landing hard on her shoulder with enough force to drive all her wind out of her. Bouncing on her back amid the dust of seeming centuries, Tasheene gasped out a curse that made Drake grin. She saw that, in the fleeting glimpse of his face she got through the hatch, before he flung himself down to join her.
Tasheene rolled, a maneuver both loud and painful in the unaccustomed armor, and almost got clear in time. Almost.
CHAPTER 15
A Memorable Feast
And if we are now come at last to the inevitable
To the meal that shall end in bitter confrontation
Where hard words shall be loudly spoken
And sharp swords sing and shed much blood
To leave lives splattered across the floor
The succulence of the dishes swift forgotten
Well then, before all the violence begins,
Let it at least be deemed a memorable feast.
—Joskor the Fool, in Act II, Scene 4, of the play Mir Undefended by Mrendra Halagoast, Playwright of Mintar, first performed in the Year of the Turret
THIS EVENINGFEAST HAD LACKED THE USUAL GLASS FOREST OF BUSILY circulating decanters, but all of the rich broths the meats had been drenched in gave off heady whiffs of wine. However, what actually addled the senses, Laeral had been assured, had been boiled off in the kitchens. Which wasn’t to say certain senses in this room might not be addled already, without any recourse to drink.
So now the dishes were being cleared away, and the Open Lord of Waterdeep was facing the surviving Lords of the city—all thirteen of them (not counting the absent Mirt, of course)—across the table. Their helms had been doffed after they’d entered the room, so the servers had been the usual small handful of senior palace servants.
Sipping a glass of broth, Laeral gave no outward sign that Dove and Syluné were invisible whisperers busily filling her ears.
“The one called Cazondur stopped on his way in, several times,” Syluné warned, “to slip coins to various courtiers and servants. Would you like the roster?”
Later, dear, Laeral thought back. Later.
“He’s up to something,” Dove muttered darkly.
“They all are, dear,” Syluné put in. “They all are.”
Laeral sent them a mental grin. Watch and listen to all of this, please, sisters. I can’t look into every face and overhear each murmured aside.
“Of course,” Syluné murmured.
“It will be our pleasure,” Dove added.
Laeral felt them drift away. Swallowing the last of the broth and handing it to the attentive servant who’d just set three tall glasses of water in front of her, Laeral rose and gave that maid a smile of thanks and nod of dismissal.
At the back of the hall, the servants by the doors saw that nod and smoothly withdrew, firmly closing the doors behind them with enough noise to reassure those in the room that they had been closed.
Laeral watched to see which Masked Lords looked around to check that the servants had all departed. Cazondur, of course, and Heirlarpost, and … Voskur. The latter two making a show of it, to show that they were carrying out an assigned duty, and were attentive to it. Laeral put away her wry smile before it could reach her lips.
Their duty done, they nodded. To Cazondur.
Who pointedly turned his attention to Laeral. Which in turn seemed to be the signal for attentive silence to fall.
Laeral smiled into it.
There were Cazondur’s six, on her left: the gently smiling Cazondur himself; then the carefully expressionless lady, Maremthur; saturnine Hrimmrel, Haelhand the red-faced mountain, Heirlarpost frowning and restless, as if straining at a leash to bound forward and savage the Open Lord; and next to him, the lean and tall Voskur. They were separated from the three independent and spirited female lords—Stravandar, Arhond, and closest to Laeral’s right hand, the half-elf Sarathlue Serendragon—by Omin Dran and the three neutral lords who said little.
It would have been a wiser strategy for Cazondur to have scattered his fellow conspirators around the table—if, that is, he or they sought subtlety. Yet they were probably long past such fripperies of the weak and prudent.
The Lords were all watching her, now.
“I should like to begin,” she said pleasantly, “by offering you all protective escorts, if you want them. In addition to any private bodyguards you may have, of course. Details drawn from among the Watch and the Watchful Order, who can surround your homes or wherever else you may visit, to watch for, and defend you against, intruders, arsonists, folk with crossbows, and the like.”
The Lords regarded her in wary silence.
“If you are interested,” Laeral added, “please see Warden Drayth after we’re done here, in the Dundolphin Room, or apply for your own audience with him with the gate guards at Castle Waterdeep, on the morrow or henceforth. These are … extraordinary times.”
She surveyed their wary, waiting faces.
“Which is, of course, why we’re gathered here tonight. The loss of seven Lords in such a short time compels us to elect new Lords to our ranks, for the good—and for the very stability—of the city.”
Silence. They waited attentively.
“Six Lords from among you,” Laeral went on, “have put forward six candidates. Lord Heirlarpost, will you oblige us by naming them?”
Lammakh Heirlarpost rose, visibly swelling in size, preened for a moment, and then said, “Fellow Lords, we believe these citizens are worthy to wear the Mask: Daerrask Querreth, whose business activities make him well known among investors of our city; Zuzeena Qeldur, who owns many shops, in every ward of the Deep, and so understands the needs of our shopkeepers; Halark Tarncrown, who enjoys much success as a merchant and as an investor; the widow Cadraethe Haulhenarr, who since her husband’s death has founded her own new business, which flourishes; the decidedly wealthy Zereth Keltaerond, whose business connections strengthen our trading ties in Calimshan; and Perengal Yuskalaunt, a shipping fleet owner whose diplomatic skills are well-known.”
He fell silent then, as if expecting applause. What he got instead was Khaliira Arhond stirring in her seat to incline her head to one side in thought and ask, “Have any of these candidates been asked if they’re interested? And have any of them expressed interest in a lordship, in the past?”
“No,” Heirlarpost told her, rather stiffly, “I have not spoken to any of them. As tradition dictates.”
“Nor have I,” Voskur put in, a response that was swiftly echoed by the rest of the six. It was Hrimmrel who added, “We all know prospective Lords aren’t queried beforehand, so what moved you to
ask this?”
“My own need to vote,” Arhond replied firmly, “informed by knowing if any of these have eagerly sought the Mask. Perhaps for their own gain.”
Heirlarpost shrugged. “Then be assured they have not.” He smiled around the table, drew a deep breath in and out, and then said briskly, “Well, then, let us vote on—”
“Not so swiftly, my Lord,” Laeral interrupted smoothly. “We are all equals here. So it follows that these six candidates are equal to any other candidates put forward by other lords.” She looked around the table. “Does anyone wish to provide any other names of citizens they deem worthy of wearing the Mask?”
She looked at Cazondur. He was glaring coldly around at one face and then another, as if by silent menace he could cow any Lord into silence who would otherwise have made a suggestion.
Yet as time passed, almost inevitably, a Lord spoke up. Sarathlue Serendragon clasped her hands before her and announced, “I think Daranthra Xathnout of Trades Ward—the oxen-tender who styles herself ‘Lady of the Hoof’—would make a good Lord. And give us eyes into our environs. Too often, we hear from the lower Dessarin only when there is trouble.”
Omin Dran nodded, and as if Serendragon’s suggestion had opened a sluice-gate, there came a sudden flood of suggestions from the neutral lords: the dressmaker Vaelra Kallo of North Ward; Belmark Chelvurr of Castle Ward, who kept a hiring registry of caravan outriders and guards for costers using the city; Emmura Flanthyn of South Ward, of Flanthyn’s Fastwares, who raced fresh fruits and vegetables and small necessities to shops all over the city; and Ildunstran Wurth, of Dock Ward, who dealt in fishmeal and night soil and fertilizers, and in conveying bulk root vegetables from Secomber and the Dessarin to market stalls in the Deep.