by Ed Greenwood
The magical flames they’d left behind swiftly reduced the dead men to ash and kept on merrily blazing away, licking across the polished floor to climb the walls hungrily.
A servant came in apologetically, gaped at the rising flames, and fled, slamming the doors as he started to yell.
Even at that, the spreading conflagration threatened much of the Palace until the duty Watchful Order mages—and then Elminster, arriving from the streets at a breathless run—managed to quell the flames.
Of Laeral, the courtiers could find no sign.
• • •
“WELL, I’VE WAITED in less comfortable vantage points,” Zaraela commented, shifting a broken chair that had collapsed under her when she’d sat in it in wary experimentation. Chair or no chair, she had to be in this spot, or she wouldn’t be able to peer through the pigeon-dung-streaked dormer window at the nearby tallhouse that was the home of the Stravandars.
“That’s good,” Drake replied, “because I think we’d best wait until after dark to try anything.”
“ ‘Try anything’?” Tasheene asked. “Don’t you mean ‘storm the place’?”
The three of them were ranged along the leaky end of a Trades Ward rooming house attic that overlooked the Stravandar tallhouse, deciding where and when to best assault it. The dry end was in use, partitioned off into sleeping closets for the house staff; this end was one long, low open room, given over to the ravages of damp and heaps of broken furniture that might one day yield up useful parts for repairs. Or rot down entirely, first.
Drake shrugged. “Haven’t decided what our best ‘anything’ is, yet. Until nightfall, we should watch, and try to decide how best to get in—and how many people are inside.”
“So we can storm the place,” Zaraela interpreted with a grin. “With style and verve.”
Drake gave her a smile, but pointed out the nearest window. “I’m not so sure that storming the place will work, with just the three of us. A Watch patrol can get here very quickly if the alarm is raised, and I’m thinking we’ll take casualties.”
“So we need a diversion,” Tasheene put in. “That drives those inside out to where we can get at them. Like a fire.”
Zaraela gave her a look that had drawn daggers in it, but said merely, “Explain.”
“Well … if we throw something flaming through the windows on the other side of the house, we can wait on this side to take down the Lord—or capture her daughters—when they flee.”
Drake held up a hand for silence and went from window to window, staring hard at where the Stravandar’s visible windows and doors were. “That should work well,” he announced when he was done looking, as he reached down both boots and then up his forearms, and produced four folded hand crossbows of Calishite make; “dart guns,” Tasheene would have called them. He unfolded and assembled them in a trice—snap, snap, snap—and passed one to each of his fellow conspirators. “As we have these.”
“I’m having nothing to do with fire,” Zaraela snapped. “I’ll be right here in this attic, with this.” She waved the dart gun.
Drake nodded. “I’ve the best arm. I’ll throw the fire starter.” He pointed at an eatery three doors down from the Stravandar tallhouse. “When the time comes, Tasheene and I will go down and wait in the alley, there. If anyone comes, Tash, start noisily throwing up by their slop-barrels, and act as if you’re drunk. Very drunk. Until someone flees the house and you can get clear aim. There’ll be bodyguards and servants to eliminate.”
“You loose first,” Zaraela told Tasheene, “and then I’ll take down a target. That way we won’t waste two bolts making the same corpse.”
Tasheene nodded, and looked to Drake. “You have a fire starter hidden somewhere on you, too?”
“Part of it. I just need a stone for weight, and something flammable to wrap around it. I’ll go foraging for both now. And get us some food and throatslake while we wait.” He looked at her and then at Zaraela. “Play nice with each other while I’m gone.”
Both women gave him arch looks, then glanced at each other and chuckled.
• • •
SAMBRIL LANE IN Dock Ward was home to more than one nondescript little hovel. The most expensive of these ramshackle, rotting residences commanded a view of the city’s south gate; the least expensive were those situated closest to where rotting fish was often piled. Most of them had either attics that let in too much rain and sleet and harbor mists for comfort, or filthy, windows-boarded-over upper rooms.
Only one of those upper rooms hid a circle painted on the floor that had been enchanted into a permanent teleportation circle—so it was the one that the wizard Glenmaur and the investor and landlord Cazondur appeared in now.
Stepping out of the circle, Glenmaur led the way to a door that was barred shut with a complicated frame of sliding timbers set into the thickness of the wall, and manipulated that frame so the door opened to let them out into a room reeking of decay. They passed several rotting human bodies—“Warnings, in case anyone is bold enough to break in,” Glenmaur explained calmly—to descend decidedly rickety stairs to street level.
Where the wizard ordered Cazondur, “You go out that door, and I’ll leave by this one.”
Cazondur found his door was bolted from within, and looked a silent question at Glenmaur.
The wizard nodded. “Worry not, I’ll bolt it again behind you.” So Cazondur shot the old but still stout bolts, opened the door a crack and peered out to make sure the way was clear of passing Watch patrols or any curious loiterers, then departed. Out of long suspicious habit he then raced around the outside of the building to where he could see the other door.
But not only did Glenmaur not emerge from it, there was some rotting street refuse strewn along its bottom edge that looked to have been there, undisturbed, for some time.
And although Cazondur stayed where he was, watching, for quite some time before frowningly walking away, the door remained closed, and the street wizardless.
Hmmph. You just couldn’t trust anyone in the Deep, these days.
• • •
AS A MEANS of perception, the Weave was most easily used to see the extent and nature of active Art. With practice, a Weave-wielder could learn to accurately see lurking enchantments and magic items, and then, life and unlife. It took both power and the familiarity of long usage to gauge sentience and to trace chains and rods and then wires—and then, with the greatest of difficulty, organic webbing like ropes and thin cords. Stone and earth barriers that weren’t bedrock were very hard to see. Using the Weave like a second pair of eyes took most humans decades of practice, and these were not skills Laeral had devoted overmuch time to, though all of Mystra’s Chosen had them. However, traveling with her were two unseen sisters who were now of the Weave; who lived its flows and patterns and understandings in every passing moment. So Dove and Syluné watched for traps and malevolent lurkers as Laeral walked, and kept her from harm.
No sane person walks Waterdeep’s wetshod-navigable sewers alone, but it had been some centuries since Laeral had laid any claim to being sane.
She wore quartets of the most powerful battle-wands of the Palace’s arsenal strapped to her forearms, under her sleeves, projecting nigh her wrists so her curled fingertips could just touch them. And so, fire them. Spare wands rode inside her boots, hidden under her breeches.
This wasn’t something she’d felt the need to do often, but the first time she’d employed this little trick was more than seven centuries ago, and she’d become very good at making it look like she was deftly hurling spells, not triggering wands.
And the beauty of having her sisters silently assisting her was that where her command of the Weave was fumbling and feeble and not something that came as second nature to her, Dove and Syluné could use the Weave to steer a wand fireball to strike a target in just the right spot—or transform that explosion of flame into an explosive disintegration.
They were doing that a lot right now, as Laeral ducked arou
nd an archway to blast her latest death tyrant.
She’d destroyed three so far, and was beginning to wonder just how many the Xanathar had enslaved. Or compelled to serve it, or whatever its arrangement with them was.
Where their disintegration rays destroyed walls and enlarged archways and caused occasional ceiling collapses—rains of stones and dirt and old bricks as cellars above fell into a suddenly enlarged sewer below—her disintegrations burst above and behind them, targeting their spectral eye-motes and twisted by Syluné, who’d mastered many transmutations, into utter and savage destroyers of those eyes. A death tyrant without most of its eye-rays she could destroy as readily as she’d blasted their handful of servant zombies.
Alone, armed with just the wands and without the Weave, she knew very well that she’d have been dead moments after sighting the first undead beholder. Though the Weave would then have taken her, leaving only her body as a zombie under that tyrant’s control—a control she could have wrestled and broken, Syluné had informed her.
This fourth death tyrant was larger than those she’d faced before, the main eye of its eerie skull a malevolent white mote wrapped in magenta glows, and as she peered at it and then ducked back around a slick stone curve of tunnel wall, Laeral discovered she was growing weary of hurling destruction. It was good that so many beholders were now gone from the roots of Waterdeep, but …
Her fury borne of the frustrations of being Open Lord and her grief at the memories of Khelben so often thrust under her nose here in the Deep was now largely spent. It was time to abandon this futile and deadly attempt to reach the Xanathar and return to the streets above, and the Palace—and her accursed desk with its ever-growing stacks of contracts and treaties and studies and forms.
So she sent her next wand-blast at the ceiling just above the tyrant—and let Dove and Syluné gleefully turn the stone shards it showered the undead thing with into jagged spears and darts of radiant energy that melted through the skull, and boiled eye-motes into nothingness on contact.
And when Laeral’s next wand-blasts were Weave-warped into bursts of radiant flame that rent the skull into a cloud of tumbling shards that fell into dust, she found herself truly alone at last.
In a dark chamber that led in one direction to a room filled by a placid inky pool where nothing and no one floated waiting for her, in another to a dusty cave-in where a ceiling had collapsed long ago, and in a third to a very freshly mortared wall of fitted stone blocks where an open passage had been, probably earlier this same day.
In the deepening silence, Laeral surveyed the ceiling and floor out of long habit, in case spectral eyes might open to menace her or a good old stone block might fall, and said, “I’m not trying to destroy you, Xanathar. I just want to talk to you.”
Almost immediately, in the archway that led to the chamber with the pool, something tiny fell from the ceiling, to clack on the floor. A stone.
Laeral sprang back, fearing a deluge of rock and dirt would follow, a crushing and smothering stone fall, but saw … a tiny trapdoor closing in the dark mold-mottled stones above.
After a long and wary time of waiting, she dared to go and peer at the stone. From afar, with Dove and Syluné’ spinning the Weave around her into a sort of armored tunnel that moved with her.
Cautiously Laeral reached out with the Weave herself, questing toward the stone to probe it for enchantments.
When that invisible finger of power reached the fallen stone—a nondescript, rather jagged piece of rock that would fit comfortably into her palm—some magic awoke around it, stirring up into a phlegmy, unpleasantly liquid voice that said calmly, “Yet I am not here, Open Lord, just as you are so evidently not what you once were. We shall talk soon enough. For now, you have more than enough to occupy you in the city above. When you have time to fear, I’ll be here. Waiting.”
• • •
THE ATMOSPHERE IN the room was beyond tense. Lord Erland Husteem sat in his favorite chair and put on his best smile, but the guests gathered here were his fiercest rivals.
It was the same room in Husteem House where he’d met with Lord Orond Gralhund earlier, and Gralhund was here again. So were three proud lords to whom the name “Husteem” was a hissing and an abomination, but these were extraordinary times, and they’d been invited in light of the refusal of the Hidden Lords to elect any of the guildmasters proposed by Husteem—and they had come.
Lord Halmor Assumbar, truculent and burly, his beard a flowing, styled, and scented reddish-brown jaw fringe. Lord Harlbrittur Kothont, clean-shaven and long-jawed and sharp-nosed, his features twisted in their customary sour disapproval. Lord Eskeneldur Manthar, sleekly fat and darkly handsome despite his advanced years, like a greedy and overfed old cat well pleased with its life of lounging on cushions.
All of them now on the edge of bristling, all of them working at stiffly overcoming their differences.
“It seems,” Lord Assumbar was saying grudgingly, “our city needs us. And if having a title and pride in our lineage means anything at all, it means standing up for something. I’m prepared to do that, if I hear any sense. So talk, Husteem. You called us here, so tell us what you’d have us do. And may all the gods smile upon the Deep, and grant that we do the right thing.”
“As always, when the city needs real leadership,” Lord Kothont sniffed, “we must stride into the breach. The Open Lord is an ineffectual figurehead no matter who warms the throne; the Hidden Lords are their own little self-serving private club, filling their purses at public expense and caring nothing for the longer view and the greater good of the city; and the guildmasters are even more selfish, continually pushing to rob honest citizens blind and restrict what others can do to—”
“Enough,” Husteem bellowed, the sudden volume of his roar enough to bring startled silence. “Your every word may be right and true, Lord Kothont, but if we are to lead, and turn the helm so this city sails not deeper into storm and strife but to a brighter horizon, we have to stop treating the guilds as criminals. We must see them as equals, with their own rightful part to play—or how dare we demand they accord us the same courtesy? The same necessary courtesy? Necessary because we need them, lords! They earn the coins we lack—and admit it, the days when you or I or any of us could buy entire streets of the city on a whim are gone, long gone, never to return! The guilds and the high houses must be partners. We must work together. We may not agree on much, we may not like each other, but if we cannot work together, this city is doomed—and deserves to be.”
A little silence followed his words, until old Lord Manthar stirred himself, and said a little huskily, “Now that was a speech I’ve waited years—decades—to hear. Husteem, command me. That is a vision I can get behind.”
“I … I, too,” Lord Assumbar said reluctantly. “But Husteem, when came you to these views? There was a time when you loudly wanted the guilds broken up and outlawed, and the rights of citizens stripped down. And it was not so long ago.”
“I saw those views as right quite recently,” Husteem admitted. “The very same night as hope caught fire within me that they could be more than just opinions and loud words. The night I saw Laeral Silverhand dining in the Flying Lion, before they named her to the Lordship, and plied her with good wine and tried to get her to side with the high houses. She said to me then what I’ve just said to you. Soft-voiced, but with fire in her eye. Lords, a woman sits in the Palace who wants to do just what I do, so at last we have a chance. Our best chance.”
“Not with the Hidden Lords saying nay, we don’t,” Lord Kothont observed sourly.
“Oh?” Lord Assumbar roused himself, his words coming out swift and excited, all trace of hauteur gone. “So many of them have been murdered, there soon won’t be any left to vote against the Open Lord! How many are there left, right now? Less than a dozen, and there may be fewer by tomorrow!”
Kothont leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. “Is she having them killed, do you think? She arrives in the Palace, and they start
to fall, like flies in a frost! Suspicious, damnably suspicious!”
Lord Gralhund waved a dismissive hand. “Or someone else saw her installation as their opportunity. Having an Open Lord who, unlike Neverember—unless I’ve judged him wrong—won’t react to a murderous threat by turning tyrant and hurling the Watch into scouring out the guilty like hounds, and slaughtering them without hesitation. I saw no signs of her arriving with her own private army, or pet band of slayers-for-hire. The Lady Mage of Waterdeep may be many things, but nothing in our histories suggests she did daggers behind closed doors. When she had a dispute, it unfolded before the eyes of the populace. No, Kothont, this doesn’t feel like her way.”
Manthar nodded, and turned to their host. “So, Husteem, what would you have us do?”
“Start meeting with guildmasters. Working with them, investing in their projects, reaching out to them instead of our customary sneering at them and seeking to pay one off against another. My lords, it’s time for us to grow up.”
Kothont reddened in anger, drawing breath and filling out his chest for an explosion of rage.
But he was forestalled by a curious dry, choking sound from behind him. He turned, to peer—like everyone else—at its source.
Behind Lord Manthar, Lady Husteem had stepped out from behind a tapestry, and was now doubled over in a helpless flood of phlegmy chuckles.
“Oh,” she sobbed out, when she could find breath enough, “to think that I should live to hear this! Lords of Waterdeep, realizing it’s time for them to behave like adults. Past time, I should say! Bravo, my lords! Bravo!”
“And just how long,” Lord Kothont inquired icily, “have you been eavesdropping?”
She drew herself up and met his gaze fearlessly. “All my life, Lord. All my long and boredom- and frustration-filled life.”
And out from the tapestries behind her came a woman with a sharp challenge in her eyes, a woman Lord Kothont knew all too well. Or had thought he had.