Death Masks

by Ed Greenwood

  “Damned drow,” he muttered, pushing the door most of the way closed. “They get in everywhere. Every chapbook’s full of them—and scimitars, and their spider queen.”

  “Certainly seems so,” Tasheene agreed, rolling cautiously to a sitting position, and then standing. The room didn’t sway in the slightest.

  Darleth watched her check that her weapons were all where they should be, then tugged his sword out of the corpse and wiped it on drow hair. “Heard anything about noble houses consorting with drow? Or is it all Asmodeus, Asmodeus, and Supreme Asmodeus?”

  “Just the Lord of Sin,” Tasheene snapped back at him, nettled. When would he start appreciating that nobles weren’t all alike? She didn’t think commoners were all the same. “No drow.”

  “Well, then, they’re either bold enough to be in league with some fine upstanding citizen of Waterdeep who lived down here,” Darleth said grimly, “or something is going on in the Underdark, to have them venture all the way up here.”

  “There’s just the one of them,” Tasheene objected. “Didn’t drow traders used to visit Skullport?”

  “Used to,” Darleth replied, “and there’s not—”

  Like sudden lightning he ducked down and lunged through the doorway, very low and hard around to the right beyond the doorframe, stabbing upward.

  This time, when he grunted and backed into the room using his sword as a handle again, the drow he was dragging was eye socket-impaled on his blade.

  “—just one of them.”

  Tasheene gave him a teasing smile. “So, where’s that ‘safe way back up’ you promised me?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Darleth grinned. “Let’s go.”

  And he ducked out of the door, keeping low. He didn’t return, so Tasheene went after him, and found herself in a long, smooth-walled stone passage lined with doors, stretching to unseen dark destinations in both directions. There were dead bodies—some drow, some human, most of them looking rather old and decayed and rat-gnawed—strewn here and there down the hallway, and Drake was beckoning her from a little way down it to her left. She ran to him, and as she reached him he started running, too.

  “Don’t get separated from me, whatever happens,” he warned.

  “Don’t get killed, whatever happens,” she replied. “You’re my way out, remember?”

  The passage gave into a room through a tall archway, and it had many archways and many chambers opening off it, some of them with the same faint glows on their ceilings that the room Drake had taken her had, and others dark. Water was drip, drip, dripping somewhere, and she could hear a sound she could only describe as a scuttling from the farthest arch yonder.

  Drake went nowhere near it, instead taking a small, doorway-sized arch into another room where there was what looked like a dried-up fountain, and an evil smell of decay. It was coming from bodies on the other side of the fountain, but Drake hurried through the room without giving them a glance, his sword and dagger still out. “Up ahead,” he murmured, “we’ll have to be very quiet, or—”

  He never had a chance to say more, for the next archway took them into a long, odd-angled room lined with doors that had seven or eight drow stalking warily down it. At the sight of Drake, they hissed and ran forward, and Drake ducked away and snarled at Tasheene, “Run!”

  So they ran, pelting through a succession of well-lit rooms, the drow coming after them in a dark and graceful flood. Drake looked back from time to time, never slowing to do so, and three rooms later Tasheene couldn’t resist looking back, too.

  There were six drow trying to run them down now, slender curved swords flashing in their hands.

  Drake calmly said a soft curse, and at the next archway they burst through he turned abruptly to the right; Tasheene nearly overshot the narrow side-arch he plunged through. Along a pitch-dark, narrow passage and then out and on, her strength and wind starting to leave her, legs getting heavier, but they were out into larger, brighter room, that took a lot of time to cross, and when she looked back now there were only five drow.

  “Fewer,” she panted, three rooms later, and Drake nodded and shot a look back and said with some satisfaction, “only three.”

  Three?

  What was making them vanish?

  One by one, taken down from behind? Just what was lurking here in Downshadow?

  But they were in a passage now that ended ahead at a closed stone door, and Drake was slowing so as not to crash into it.

  The door had four large holes in it, arranged in a square—and as they pounded up to it, four long, one-piece metal spears thrust out through those holes and jabbed at them, turning to track them as if the unseen wielders could see them.

  The drow were closing fast, and wearing cruel and confident smiles.

  “All hail the Xanathar,” Drake said quickly—and the spears were pulled back and the door swung open.

  It folded back into a cavity in the wall, concealing whoever had been behind it, and their spears. All that Tasheene saw, as she glanced back when it slammed heavily and metal dagger-latches rang down into sockets, was two of those strange all-metal spears shoving it closed, their wicked points thrust into socket-blocks affixed to the inside of the door, to do so.

  As they ran on, Tasheene gave Darleth Drake a wary look, and silently mouthed the name “Xanathar.”

  His only reply was a wide and cheesy grin.

  • • •

  JALESTER’S HEART WAS pounding. He and Dunblade were both on the floor, in the corner beside the window, staring from time to time at the crossbow bolt—it was a heavy war-quarrel, too big for a handbow to loose; big enough to punch through a man and leave him torn almost in half—in the wall.

  Yet time stretched, and stretched, and no more bolts came.

  Nor anything else, and their tense waiting inevitably relaxed. After a while, Dunblade tossed Jalester his boots, and the stockings worn under them. Jalester tugged them on.

  More time passed, but nothing more happened.

  Eventually Jalester crawled around the bed to the closet, slid its door open, crawled inside, and by feel examined it very thoroughly for secret doors or panels. Trying to find whatever way Elminster had used to arrive through it, so they could use that same way out—but he could find nothing. Ceiling, floor, and side and back walls sounded solid, and nothing seemed to shift. He could find no catches, nothing that had any give to it at all.

  And, of course, the empty closet—for the two of them didn’t own enough to hang or heap much of anything in it—was also devoid of the slightest trace of Elminster.

  “Farruking wizards,” he muttered, crawling out and around the bed again.

  “So,” Dunblade murmured in his ear, “do we go peek out the window, and perhaps swallow a bolt or two? Or go to the door, and chance collecting a pair in the chest?”

  Jalester sighed. “Why don’t you try searching the closet? Somehow, I don’t think he used magic to whisk himself here and gone again. There must be a way in and out that I missed.”

  “You don’t think he used magic? Infamous ancient wizard, bedmate and Chosen of the goddess of magic, and you don’t think he used magic?”

  “I … there was no tingling.” There. He’d said it. There was no backing away now.

  “What?” Faerrel Dunblade raised himself on one elbow so their faces were almost touching, and tendered a fierce glare. “Explain.”

  Jalester swallowed, sighed, and said, “When magic is used close to me, I can feel it. An itch or a tingle or even a feeling like I’m being burned, that is. Both before Elminster opened the closet and stepped out, and after he went back in and closed the door again … nothing.”

  Dunblade’s glare sharpened. “Are there any other little secrets you’ve been keeping from me?”

  “No,” Jalester replied, but knew how hot his face felt. He must be blushing as red as a banner.

  Dunblade gave him a look of withering contempt, rolled away, and started to get up.

  The cro
ssbow bolt that howled into the room just then laid open his back with a vicious zzzzzzzip and plucked him along on its headlong rush to bury itself in the far wall. He roared in startled pain and fell, his yell joined by Jalester’s shout.

  And then, through the shattered window, there came a larger roar, and a burst of light, followed by the unpleasant pattering of many not-so-small, wet fragments landing everywhere near.

  The heat and smoke of the explosion followed, though Jalester barely noticed them in his leap across the room to the groaning, writhing Dunblade. There was a deep furrow across Faerrel’s shoulder blades, a gash that bled wetness like an awning in a cloudburst, and he was beating on the floor with his fists in pain, drumming—

  Jalester tried to pull the bleeding edges together with his hands, but it was like trying to make the halves of a sliced melon knit together and be whole again. So much blood … so much blood.

  The closet door banged open again, and suddenly the reek of the explosion was chokingly strong.

  Or, no, that sharp burnt smell was coming from Elminster! From his spread hands, that wisps of glowing blue smoke were curling rather lazily up from.

  “Sorry, lad,” he said gravely. “I got them. Feed him this.” El reached into the breast of his robes, drew out something, and handed it to Jalester.

  It was a glass vial encased in an ornate frame that he might have appreciated the beauty of at another time.

  Right now, though, he tore its stopper off, then shoved his beloved over on his back—and when Dunblade bellowed in pain, pounced on his chest like a panther and forced the vial into his open mouth and held it there, clinging on grimly as Faerrel blindly tried to tear Jalester off and then clout him flying, enduring the pummeling of hard fists until their owner suddenly sagged, sighed, and went limp.

  “D-d-dunblade?” Jalester shrieked.

  But his friend was breathing, eyes half closed and rolling, and …

  Elminster’s weathered old hand descended to engulf Jalester’s, the long fingers warm and strong. “Easy, lad, he but sleeps for a moment, as the healing takes hold. It affects some that way. His eyes will snap open in a moment, and—”

  They did, right then, Dunblade staring up at them both, bright-eyed and alert.

  “Gods, that’s better!” he exclaimed. “That pain—all gone!”

  “Good,” Elminster said heartily. “Then so am I.” He patted Jalester’s shoulder and murmured in his ear, “Mind ye kiss him better, now. He’s healed and at the very surging height of his energy!”

  “What?” he asked. “What’re you—oh.”

  Before he could make a face at the old wizard, the closet doors closed again, leaving Jalester and Dunblade alone together.

  Jalester looked at his friend—and then set about kissing him better.

  • • •

  IT TOOK ALL of the keys Tasheene rarely used, and the last of her energy, but by using the overgrown old side-gate into the Melshimber House grounds, the wine cellar tunnel, and two unlit and disused flights of back stairs, she and Drake made it back to her bedchamber unseen by the staff.

  Something caught the faint light as she unhooded her bedside glowstone—something on her bed, that shouldn’t have been there.

  Tasheene took up the stone and held it close, like a lamp.

  And then froze at what she saw, Darleth Drake at her shoulder.

  It was a note, obviously left for her to find:

  I still await daughters.

  She and Drake stared at each other—and then with one accord, turned and headed back out the door.

  • • •

  ELMINSTER LOOKED INTO the third likely chamber, found it empty, and stepped back into the little back passage with an exasperated sigh. “Where are ye, Laer?”

  “Well, now I know why you’ve been so successful with the ladies, down the centuries,” Laeral replied tartly, leaning out through an apparently solid section of wall that was obviously an illusion, to give him a kiss on the cheek. “It’s that charming come-hither winning bedside manner of yours.”

  “I am a charmer,” he replied, in the same mocking vein. “Seriously, why the hide-and-seek?”

  “I believe in making my would-be slayers work for their blood,” she said lightly. “You saw my official bedchamber?”

  “Dummy in the bed, enspelled gossamer threads all over the place like a spiderweb; hoping to trace anyone who disturbs them. Must drive the maids wolf-howling mad, trying to clean.”

  “They’re forbidden to enter the room to try. I never use it. Your timing is as impeccable as ever, El; I was just about to lock myself into my reverie room for the night.”

  “And which particular broom closet are ye gracing with your behind when ye commune with the Weave, hmm?”

  “This hidden one, here.” Laeral drew him in through the illusion, into a lightless alcove apparently devoid of doors. Yet when she pushed here and just there with her hands, one entire wall pivoted at its center to allow someone to edge past. She did that, told him, “Give me a moment,” and disappeared.

  El nodded calmly to the blank closed wall where she’d gone, and devoted himself to trying to figure out just which rooms of the palace were above and below this little hiding-place. One just never knew what it would come in most useful to know …

  If he’d cared to pry, he would have heard Laeral whispering to her invisible stray sisters to leave her alone with Elminster. A request that made both Dove and Syluné chortle and say, “Ho, ho, ho!”

  Laeral tendered a withering sigh and snapped, “Dirty-minded trulls!”

  “Oooh, such compliments, Lady Silverhand!”

  Laeral rolled her eyes and pushed open the door to beckon Elminster inside.

  The moment the door had closed behind him, El asked, “So, where were ye?”

  “Doing a little investigating of my own,” she replied. “In Dock Ward.”

  El sighed. “I’m supposed to either leer now or remind ye of the prudence an Open Lord should be governed by, but …”

  “ ‘But’ indeed. Why don’t you tell me your news, instead?”

  “Some adventurers hired by Lord Cazondur just tried to kill the two ye hired to watch over the Masked Lords. Three quite different adventuring bands in the city have been hired over the last two days, by a man I strongly suspect is really a magically disguised illithid.”

  Laeral had shown no surprise at El’s first sentence, but the second one made her arch one shapely eyebrow.

  “Hired on behalf of different masters,” he went on. “I know not who, yet, but the hints I’ve managed to glean suggest three different employers, none of whom is Cazondur, and all of whom want one murder accomplished. Thine.”

  The Open Lord gave him a wry smile. “If you’re trying to frighten me into prudence, El, it’s not working.”

  “I’m not trying to do anything, beyond warn ye that at least three attempts may be made, so if one is defeated, ye shouldn’t relax and think the peril past. Expect others.”

  Laeral sighed. “Thanks to serving Mystra for centuries, I always do.”

  Elminster nodded. “Permit me a boldness?”

  Laeral’s smile was unguarded this time. “Of course. From you, I’ve come to expect them, too.”

  “Compliments, compliments, lass; ye’ll turn my head!” El replied fondly, and reached out to touch the top of her head with the middle fingertip of his right hand.

  Closing his eyes in concentration, he slowly drew that fingertip down across her forehead and the length of her nose, then across her lips, down her chin and throat, and on, straight down the center of her body.

  Laeral rolled her eyes, but brought up her hands and parted her breasts so his fingertip could glide between them. On down it went, so she pulled aside her robe. At her navel he stopped, put his forefinger beside the middle finger, placed the forefinger of his other hand on the other side of that middle finger, then lifted the middle finger and brought the two forefingers firmly together. After a moment, he drew
them apart again, each moving out to her hipbone. From there, he traced down the outsides of her legs, fingertips moving in careful unison, down to her ankle bones—and from there around her instep to the insides of her feet, then down her feet to the tips of her big toes.

  Then he took away his fingers and straightened up with a grunt and a nod. “Done.”

  “Good,” she replied dryly. “Done what?”

  “Accomplishing this,” he said—and Laeral found herself looking at herself. An exact duplicate of herself.

  “In case I must pretend to be ye,” he explained, his voice sliding with every word toward the timbre and pitch of hers, until they seemed to match. “So ye can be in two places at once—or I can stand in a spell-fray, where ye might fall.”

  Laeral gave him a flat, expressionless look. “And you don’t think I’m capable of fighting my own battles?”

  “Far from that, Laer, far from it. Mystra told me this little dodge might be needful, so I’m preparing for it. She may not be the Mystra who birthed ye Seven, but there are still echoes of the old Mystra in the Weave—and they send her visions, even as she sends visions to us.”

  “Mystra has always shown you more than she has us,” Laeral said softly. “I wonder why.”

  “I’m already roughened and ruined. Ye are her daughters. I must be the warrior, the shield who will do any craven thing needful, so at least one of ye will always survive.”

  “Survive to do what?”

  “Succeed her, of course.”

  CHAPTER 18

  A Luxury Not Worth the Price

  Even the most absolute and hedonistic of rulers eventually discover— and all too often, the hard way—that indulging their every whim, lashing out with neither hesitation nor thought, to say nothing of prudence, is a luxury not worth the price.

  —Annaskur Vornrheld, writing in Chapter 3 of his book No Truce With Tyrants: Observances of a Master Merchant, published in the Year of the Prince