Death Masks

by Ed Greenwood

  Drake shrugged. “I mark three likely groups of eyes on us right now. There almost always are watchers in the Deep, any time and any place. It’s how those that don’t like honest work and can’t win knife-fights earn their coin.”

  “Isn’t that most of Waterdeep?”

  Drake grinned. “You begin to see how widespread the watching is.” Peering down the street, he checked his chimney-anchored safety line, rose to his full height, and started walking down the roof, toward its edge.

  “So, how best to get inside, if the Lord doesn’t leave? And when?”

  Whatever opinion Drake might have offered never left his lips, for at that moment a hire-coach rumbled down the street and came to a stop just below.

  Drake had started his journey to the lip of the roof at his first sight of the rattling conveyance, so he was in perfect position to see who got in or out. No one out, but Ieirmeera Stravandar—expensively dressed, and alone—got in, the coach jack closed the door on her and rejoined the drover, and the coach rumbled away again.

  This was their chance.

  Drake unhurriedly rejoined Tasheene. “This is it. Let’s get to real work.”

  Excitement rising, she hung her brush on the bucket-hooks alongside his. She had already decided that if this all went wrong and she somehow survived to start a new life in some city far from the Deep, roof-sealer was not one of her preferred career options.

  • • •

  “FAUGGH! HOW D’YOU stand it?”

  The new arrival was clutching at his tunic, trying to get it up and over his nose. Ah, the full throat-choking reek of vintage guano.

  The old man tending the birds shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  The dovecote stank, to be sure, and anyone climbing the seemingly endless spiral stair to reach it naturally tried to draw in a deep breath or six once they’d puffed their way to the top.

  It was all the same to the bobbing, cooing, occasionally fluttering messenger doves, on their perches all around Kuszsuthur. As long as they got their cracked grains and grit, they cared not a whit for stinks or human complaints or much of anything else.

  Kuszsuthur’s visitor was peering out through the wall-louvers at the forest of roofs all around. Of course. That was the second thing new arrivals always did, after getting their breath.

  This one, however, did not evince a typical reaction to the dovecote’s vista of the Deep’s roofscape. Instead, he stiffened at something he saw, shook his head, and with the full gruff authority of a longtime veteran of the Carpenters’, Roofers’ & Plasterers’ Guild, jerked his thumb in the direction of a man and a woman across the forest of roofs who were now hurriedly leaving their half-finished roof sealing and swarming down a ladder, and growled, “At least one worker on a roof has to be a full member of the guild, and I know neither of those two. Non-guild work! Very bad! Very bad!”

  He found himself complaining to empty air. Burtuld Kuszsuthur was gone down the spiral stair like a bolt of lightning in a hurry, for all his impressive count of years. The guildsman stood bewildered. He never saw the old dove keeper speak to a certain young man in the building below, nor see that young runner sprint off down the street at a most impressive speed.

  Moving so wildly and swiftly, on his most urgent errand, that the Harper badge usually hidden under his over tunic flashed into view, again and again. For the few panting moments before he was around a corner and gone.

  All around the puzzled guildsman, the doves pecked and cooed and pooped. They couldn’t have cared less.

  • • •

  LANDARMYN VOSKUR HAD certainly done well for himself. White marble with gold trim, everywhere, in soaring overblown pillared luxury that Mirt thought overdone even for ostentatious Sea Ward mansions, but … to each his own. He didn’t have to look at all of these ugly, badly painted and no doubt entirely fanciful portraits of sea captains and battle masters and what looked like gilded emperors whose faces all bore a striking resemblance to Voskur’s, and were probably intended to represent his illustrious ancestors. Who were far more likely to have been starving hardscrabble homesteaders in various windswept wilderland backwaters of the frozen North than to have ever worn all the gilt and fancy fabrics they were depicted in.

  Their descendant, sitting in a high-backed, curlicued, gilded aspiring-to-be-a-throne chair under the portraits inevitably looked smaller and drabber. Not to mention far less sanguine and more … evasive.

  Yes, that was it. Landarmyn Voskur was busy being evasive.

  Mirt was getting very good at rumbling, “Well, I suppose you would have to—” and “I quite see, I quite see,” but Voskur, however convolutedly and unwittingly, was imparting enough to confirm that there was indeed a cabal within the Lords, of which Cazondur was the brains and gave the orders, whereas Heirlarpost made all the public noise.

  “Well, but of course,” Mirt rumbled reassuringly. “I quite see that for the good of all Waterdeep—”

  “Ah, pray excuse the interruption, lords,” Voskur’s chamberlain put in smoothly, gliding to a stop beside Mirt’s chair and dry-washing his hands a trifle nervously, “but I must tell you, Lord Voskur, that you have a visitor who mustn’t be kept waiting.”

  Those words were evidently a sort of code, for Voskur blanched and almost shot to his feet, barely remembering to mumble, “A moment—be right back!” before he hurried to accompany the chamberlain back through the concealed panel in the walls that the chamberlain had appeared through.

  Barely had it closed behind them when there was a grunt that became a fearful cry that ended abruptly in a horrid gurgling, followed by a heavy double thud.

  Mirt sighed, clambered to his feet, lumbered to the wall, drew the knife he was best at throwing, and hauled the panel open.

  To find Lord of Waterdeep Landarmyn Voskur lying sprawled and dead, his throat slit and blood running out across the passage floor.

  A passage that was empty of chamberlain, though Mirt could faintly hear the man’s distant shout, “The Watch! Ho, the Watch! Arrest the fat man! Murder! Murder! My lord is slain!” There followed a loud, ringing din that sounded very much like someone hammering with a cane or sheathed sword on a shield hung on a wall.

  The City Watch of Waterdeep had been accused of many things down the years, but deafness was seldom one of them. Damn.

  Mirt remembered the way he’d been conducted earlier, and a side entrance of Voskur’s mansion he’d passed on his way to its grand front entrance, before that. Surely, if he turned here … yes! He ducked hastily out that side door and slipped away.

  There was another side door on this side of the mansion, about a dozen paces on, and as Mirt looked back, it opened to let Braethan Cazondur make his own hasty exit out another door. They exchanged fleeting glances before hurrying off in opposite directions.

  Not having been born the day before, Mirt lurched two or three strides and then hopped into an abrupt sidestep, then ran on and did it again—and on that second sidestep, a tiny dagger flashed past his ear to bounce and tinkle away along the cobbles ahead.

  Poisoned, of course. Mirt never slowed, and didn’t turn to look back until he was finished crossing the street and gaining the handy cover of someone’s scalloped-stone portico.

  By then, Cazondur was a distant figure just ducking around a corner into a side street—and out of sight.

  Mirt did the same thing in the opposite direction, wheezing his hurried way a block over, and then rushed back to the Palace.

  Where knowing the old secret back ways and servants’ passages to hurriedly reach Laeral proved useful. He’d almost got his wind back by the time he fetched up in front of her desk.

  “Cazondur leads the cabal,” he grunted, without salutation. “So much Voskur spilled before Cazondur cut his throat, and put the arm on Voskur’s chamberlain to frame me for the slaying. I now stand in urgent need of using you, lass, as my alibi when the Watch tries to apprehend me.”

  Laeral demonstrated that she was getting very good at wi
ncing.

  • • •

  “FOR TIRELESS INVESTORS and captains of coin-grubbing industry,” Dunblade commented, “these Lords spent a very long time lounging around eating.”

  “They’re making deals,” Jalester said gloomily. “In between all the bites and swallows. How many bottles is that, now?”

  Dunblade shrugged. “More than have been gathered together on any table I’ve ever been eating at.”

  As if on cue, his stomach rumbled again. So did Jalester’s, a bare breath later, even though they’d both eaten well before taking up their station here, holding the reins of a horse Elminster had arranged for them to tend, on the pretence that it belonged to one of the well-heeled diners inside the very expensive Castle Ward eatery whose many-paned windows they were now oh-so-casually peering through.

  Watching over no less than three of the surviving original Lords of Waterdeep, who were lingering together over the last goblets of a long and leisurely highsunfeast.

  A sleek and expensive dozen-wheeled street coach rumbled to a stop beside them then, the nearest gleaming door of its long passenger cabin swung open, and a familiar white-bearded face looked out.

  “In, now!” Elminster commanded. “Leave the horse; it’ll be just fine by itself. Haste, lads, haste!”

  Jalester and Dunblade quite happily made haste, the coach moving the moment the hindmost boot among them left the cobbles.

  “Where are we headed?” Dunblade asked, with the bright smile of someone who doesn’t expect a straight answer but is going to ask for one anyway.

  “To a tallhouse in Trades Ward where at least two miscreants will be trying, right now, to kidnap the daughters of Masked Lord Ieirmeera Stravandar.”

  Jalester frowned; fast coach or slow, traffic was heavy ahead. “Won’t we be too late?”

  “To prevent the snatching? I doubt that’ll prove necessary. The Harpers and the Stravandar servants should prevail, unless the kidnappers have reinforcements no one’s spotted yet. Nay, ye’re needed to give chase across the city—perhaps under it—when the miscreants flee. I want them detained, or failing that wounded and unable to be so bold soon again, or failing that, slain. Alive for questioning is best.”

  “While you do what?”

  “Skulk in the background watching for whoever will be watching the miscreants—and in the process, spying on ye. That’s why the coach will drop ye and rumble right on to let me out a street beyond, and why ye shouldn’t expect to recognize me after that.”

  “Waterdhavians are far more devious than adventurers,” Dunblade observed ruefully.

  • • •

  IT SEEMED THAT not only had Landarmyn Voskur’s chamberlain accused Mirt of murdering his master, but one Braethan Cazondur had evidently hastened to tell the same Watch patrol that he’d seen that very same stout and wheezing Mirt fleeing to the Palace.

  Laeral had provided Mirt with a decanter, a chair, and an antechamber with a comfortably massive chair to put his feet up and enjoy the contents of the decanter in. Then she’d returned to her documents, and perused and signed just one of them before a rather breathless Watch patrol commander fetched up before her desk, red-faced and scowling. He seemed the always-scowling sort, and his temper had not been improved by the flat failures of all of his attempts to browbeat palace servants and staff into searching the vast building from turrets to cellars for him. They had all issued various reminders that they were in fact immune to the authority of the Watch while on duty within the Palace walls.

  “Lady Open Lord,” the glowering swordcaptain was huffing, “I find myself wanting to demand your assistance in this matter. I need you to command your people here in the Palace to scour every last room and passage for a murderer—a murderer whom I have good reason to believe is within these walls right now, endangering your very person!”

  “And who, Swordcaptain, is this presumed murderer?”

  “A miscreant of stout build who calls himself Mirt. I’m told he’s been seen in the recent past in your company.”

  “He’s in my company right now,” Laeral informed the Watch officer crisply, stepping through an open doorway, taking Mirt by the hand, and towing him out where the swordcaptain and his patrol crowding up behind could all see him, “and has been since very early this morning, officers, discussing irregularities in the finances and tax payments of Landarmyn Voskur that he was investigating for me. If I were you, I’d detain that chamberlain and question him very closely, with Watchful Order assistance, about any other guests Voskur may have had in his household today. Such persons should also be questioned, no matter how wealthy or powerful or high-ranking they may be. I know where the man Mirt has been, so I know lies have been told to you. Given how many Masked Lords of this city have been slain recently—and I may as well tell you that Voskur is one of them—I am intensely interested in who told those lies.”

  “Be that as it may,” the swordcaptain said stiffly, “the man Mirt will have to accompany us now. I am placing him under arrest.”

  “He will not, and you are not,” Laeral said flatly, stepping into his path as he advanced past her desk. “Or has the Watch ceased to report to the Open Lord of this city? And thereby lost its rightful authority and become no better than uniformed adventurers?”

  “I report to my superiors,” the swordcaptain told her sternly. “Not to you.”

  “Oh?” Laeral asked calmly. “Who is the head of the Watch?”

  “The Warden of Waterdeep.”

  “And who does the Warden report to?”

  “The Lords of Waterdeep.”

  “And am I not the Open Lord of Waterdeep?”

  “You are, but that doesn’t mean you can give me orders,” the swordcaptain replied firmly. “The Lords of Waterdeep collectively command the Warden, and he commands us. No individual Lord can give us any direct order.”

  “Except the Open Lord,” Laeral snapped. “The laws have not changed. I know, because I reviewed them when I agreed to sit on this throne. And the laws also say quite clearly, as they have for over a century, that any two Lords acting in accord with each other, and in each other’s company, can give a direct order to any Watchguard.”

  “The Warden issued a new standing order to the Watch yestereve,” the swordcaptain said carefully, “that until further notice we were to obey only his orders, and not those of the Open Lord. And as for two Lords acting together, I see only one of you.”

  “Ahem,” Mirt rumbled, “you seem to forget, Mraekur, that I am a Lord of Waterdeep. The senior Lord of Waterdeep, may I add.”

  He put a hand on Laeral’s elbow. “And I can count, too. I mark two Lords standing together here, in accord. So obey us.”

  “You are an accused,” the swordcaptain replied, frowning, “so—”

  “Ah?” Mirt interrupted, wagging a finger. “Ah? Innocent until proven guilty, hey?”

  “Protective custody until trial,” Swordcaptain Mraekur responded, reaching out to try to grab that wagging finger.

  “Hear my direct order,” Mirt growled, moving his arm so the Watch officer couldn’t snare his digit. “Go and bring the Warden of Waterdeep here to this office and the presence of the Lady Silverhand right now. Detain him if he delays or refuses.”

  The swordcaptain stepped back and turned to look at his patrol for guidance, a little helplessly.

  In response, they turned in perfect unison and quick-marched out of the room. He had no choice but to follow them.

  CHAPTER 20

  Welcoming Opportunity

  Lords, know that welcoming opportunity

  Is what I fill my days with, dawn to dark

  Opportunities to slay foes or do them ill

  Opportunities to exploit friends or make new ones

  Opportunities to rut and gorge and dream.

  Life is all about welcoming such opportunities.

  —Gult the Reaver, in Act II, Scene III, of the play Three Thrones Riven by Alandur Torthcrown, Playwright of Zazesspur, first performed in
the Year of the Wave

  MIRT LUNGED FORWARD LIKE A CHARGING WALRUS AND SLAMMED Laeral’s office door behind the seething, reluctantly departing Watch officer, then shot its heavy—and bright new—bolts across, to keep it shut.

  Laeral stared at them. “Where did those come from?” There was an edge to her voice that made Mirt hasten to reply. Very politely.

  “Elminster installed them last night, after I went and bought them from the headquarters of the Splendid Order.”

  Laeral did not need that guild’s full title to understand him. “When last night?”

  “While you were communing with the Weave. Probably about the same time someone got to Drayth with a spell or two, to get him to concoct such a ridiculous standing order. Or told him that this was his part to play, in some scheme he’s already part of. I know not which.”

  Laeral sighed, regained her temper with an effort, and asked, “And if he is corrupt—or merely outraged—and comes back here with forty-odd armed and angry Watch guards? One bolted door won’t hold them back for long.”

  As she said those words, someone tried the bolted door from the other side. They exclaimed in surprise, shook the door, tried its ring-handle again, then rapped on it sharply.

  “One bolted door won’t have to,” Mirt replied, ignoring the insistent knocking that followed, “because you’re coming with me for the next two bells or so. You won’t be found to arrest or defy—and neither will I—until we return.”

  “And then?” Laeral’s voice held that dangerous edge again.

  “And then we’ll be accompanied by the Blackstaff, a handful of the friendliest Lords—that is to say, those I’ve had a drink or two with since returning to my city, and sounded out on their support of your Lordship—along with some adventurers I’ve hired, and three resourceful young Dock Ward lasses who will delight in tweaking the noses of Watch guards.”

  Laeral gave him a hard and direct look. “It’ll be just like the old days. Mayhem and bluster and wild adventure in the streets.”