by Ed Greenwood
“Watchful Order and Watchguard details are stationed as near at hand as is practical without revealing to the entire city the identities of the Hidden Lords,” Elminster put in. “None of them want to emerge to attend any meeting, regardless of what the Open Lord has called it to deal with. Not until the murderer is found.”
Mirt cleared his throat, looked at the ceiling, and asked, “Or is the murderer a murderess? The Open Lord herself, perhaps?”
That made Laeral lift her gaze from the documents at hand to favor him with a look.
“Laer, let me explain,” Elminster said smoothly. “Disquieting rumors are being energetically spread all over the city, all variations on this theme: that a dozen guildmasters went to see the Open Lord, and she murdered them on the spot.”
“Reduced them to ashes with fire magic,” Mirt put in, waving his hands. “Right in her office in the Palace, as they were being served wine!”
Laeral rolled her eyes and brought one fist down on the parchments in front of her, but she did it resignedly, not as if the documents were foes whose jaws she could break as she drove them through the table.
“Lass,” Elminster said gently, “I want the rumor-spreaders found and questioned, to see who’s behind them. Yet you are the Open Lord in earnest now; we’ll follow your orders, and so need your approval to undertake such a hounding.”
Laeral nodded her thanks, and sighed. “Do what you must,” she said wearily. “This has gone too far for gentle patience now. It’s gauntlets time. Spiked gauntlets time.”
“Oooh.” Mirt had grown a grin. “Can I watch?”
Laeral gave him a quelling look. “Volo lives, indeed.”
El opened his mouth to say something, the corners of his mouth curling in mirth, and she snapped, “You, Old Sage, can be of great help by observing silence for once. Right now, and lasting until you’re gone from this chamber. Less than a breath from now. That’s right: get you gone. I need to do a little thinking, without two grinning helpers standing over me. Thank you.”
• • •
“IZKREL BLOUNT,” SHRIKEGULK muttered, over his shoulder.
Braethan Cazondur looked up from his wine and his perusal of detailed maps of the city.
“Let him pass,” he smirked.
Izkrel Blount had been a servant at the Palace for a long time. Some of the younger folk in livery made use of the Palace laundry, but Blount considered that less than ethical—and he had no particular desire to have young lasses grinning at him because they knew the hue of his clouts.
So twice a tenday, for his smallclothes wardrobe was not large, he took half of his laundry to a small washer works in Trades Ward, and fetched the other half home again, for use.
Or at least, that was his public reason for taking his laundry elsewhere. The real reason had to do with the unmarked door beside the laundry jakes, and the stair ascending behind it that led right here, to Cazondur’s duty guards.
One of them was a scarred mountain of unpleasantness who held a spear in one hand like a toy—until such moments as this one, when he aimed it down the stair, wicked-sharp tip at the throat of anyone coming up the stair. In this case, an uncomfortable-looking Izkrel Blount.
The other guard was the cold-eyed, earless and sinister Shrikegulk.
Blount shrank away from him as he passed the earless man.
Cazondur nodded politely to the palace servant, who knew that cue, and hastily babbled that the Watch had scoured the city, even pounding on the doors of nobles, but had found no sign of Warden Drayth. “T-the man has just … vanished.”
Cazondur smiled thinly, thanked Blount, tossed him a gold coin—some foreign minting, not a good Waterdhavian dragon—and told him to hurry back with his laundry. “These days, the Watch has spies everywhere.”
The three men in the room watched Blount hurry back down the stairs. After the door at the bottom had closed, Shrikegulk turned to Cazondur. “We took the body to just where you said.”
“Of course,” Cazondur smiled. “He’ll be naught but gnawed and scattered bones by now. So he’ll be telling no one that Glenmaur enspelled him so I could command his tongue when I chose to. We can’t have the Open Lord learning of that. My, my, no.”
• • •
ALL THIS WEAVE-WORK was exhausting, but this particular working had to be done. Laeral checked the locks on the doors of the little disused room one more time, satisfied herself that she was alone—and by the lack of sounds outside, no servants or courtiers were bustling about looking for her, lay down on the floor, closed her eyes, and called on the Weave.
Sinking down into its flow, she called on the power she could tap there to work a telepathic link, reaching out to Dagult Neverember, Lord-Protector of Neverwinter and her ousted predecessor as Open Lord of Waterdeep. This was dangerously close to the mindtouching Mystra had forbidden, so she forced all the mental damage the contact would do back on herself, to leave Neverember unharmed.
The Weave was quiet but ripple-filled this morning; its surges more white than blue.
Laeral was amusedly reflecting that such a description would be meaningless even to most wizards when, quite suddenly, she found herself in contact with Neverember. He was alone in an office, sitting at a desk. Writing.
Laeral sent her mind’s-eye drifting closer. Writing payment orders for his treasury, so workers on the road building between Neverember and Waterdeep would be paid. Her contact with him had been so easy because he’d just thought of her—specifically, about how to proceed with negotiating a deal with her so Neverwinter and Waterdeep would cooperate on patrolling the road. Armed patrols, strongholds located along it at regular intervals, and adjacent encampments with shelters for travelers …
The pain of the contact was rising fast. Suffering, Laeral spoke abruptly; to him, it must have seemed as if the empty air was suddenly interrogating him. “Dagult Neverember, I am Laeral Silverhand, and I must know: are you involved in the murders of Masked Lords of Waterdeep?”
Neverember drew back as if he’d been slapped, hearing not just her words but feeling her mind against his, and said curtly, “No! I am not.”
The mind-link was deepening, and her agony with it. It was intimate enough, now, that Laeral knew he was telling the truth.
I must use this when judging criminals, whatever the pain.
She hadn’t time for such thinking; the pain was beyond bearing! She fought to form words before it overwhelmed her. “Thank you, Dagult. I believe you. I just had to hear it from you personally, so I could tell my fellow Lords that I’d asked you. I admire the work you did in Waterdeep, and appreciate both the hard choices and the tireless diplomacy you’ve made such a success of, to accomplish what you did.” She managed to impart friendliness toward the man, wrapped around the diplomatic words, and knew that he could mentally see that she was telling the truth. That genuinely pleased him; he smiled—
In the instant before her suffering overwhelmed her entirely, forcing her to dissolve the link, Laeral flung some last thoughts at him in a sobbing mind-scream: she and Waterdeep were otherwise fine, the road is a good thing and she valued him as an ally, but she must go now because of troubles with this magic.
The last Laeral knew of Dagult Neverember, he was frowning thoughtfully at those thoughts.
And then agony and the Weave broke over her, and she plunged deep, hurtling into darkness …
Sister, she heard Syluné say urgently to Dove, or thought she did, this is how the Weave can heal her. Work with me …
Oblivion meant the pain slipped away.
CHAPTER 24
Weaving Much from Very Little
You are not the first fool to overreach herself
In clutching for gold and glory and a throne
The world is full of ambitious fools trying far too hard
Making noise but weaving much from very little.
—Seldruth the Sage, in Act II, Scene VI, of the play I Had A Dream Once by Daerreth Torrar, Playwright of Tsurlagol, firs
t performed in the Year of the Prince
IT SEEMED AS IF ALL WATERDEEP WAS SUSPICIOUS OF THEM. JALESTER Silvermane felt the weight of unseen and decidedly unfriendly eyes on his back now, and he could see by Faerrel’s face that his partner felt the same.
The Watch hadn’t wanted to release them. They’d faced questions barked as well as snarled: “Where’d you get the Watch badges? Hey? HEY?” and “So just why are you two still alive, when you were found under officers of the Watch lying dead of poison? What can you tell us about how you got there? Hey?”
Yet they’d been reluctantly released at last, and had headed straight to the Palace—where the door guards had declined to let them in.
They’d produced their Watch badges in an attempt to win their way past, and the door guards conferred doubtfully, consulted a superior, then relented.
Jalester let out a great sigh of relief as he stepped inside the Palace, but Dunblade looked quickly back over his shoulder, as if expecting a firm hand to clutch at them, and haul them back.
“This way,” Jalester suggested as they strode along, trying not to seem in too much of a hurry.
“All right,” Dunblade agreed. “But why this way, exactly?”
“It should be our best chance of finding Elminster, or that Mirt, or the Lady Silverhand. Through that door is the fore chamber, the outermost audience chamber of three before the one with the big table, where the Lords of the city all meet together and eat and vote and so on. Each gives into the next; remember, when El took us to get hired?”
“Vaguely,” Dunblade admitted. “I usually remember every door and direction, so I can get out of a place in a hurry, but this Palace …” He shook his head.
They held up their Watch badges as they saw the doorjack ahead of them stiffen and then start to step into their way—and he drew back again, face acquiring a slight trace of respect.
So they passed through the door he was guarding and into the fore chamber, and saw Elminster and Mirt standing, goblets in hand, talking quietly together; the tall bearded man and the short, stout one.
“Elminster!” Jalester couldn’t keep from calling.
The Sage of Shadowdale gave them a smile. “Ye’re bursting with some news, lad—so out with it!”
“We only just got out of the Watch’s clutches! They kept us for questioning!”
“Wise fellows. Ye were on a mission; what did ye get up to that was so suspicious?”
“Last night, at the fire at the Stravandars’ house—we saw a man and a woman there, and tried to fight them, but the man’s a swordsman who can carve out both our vitals in a trice, and he downed us and then a lot of Watch guards fell on us, dead from the poison on his daggers, and they were too heavy and we couldn’t—”
Mirt was chuckling, and El held up his hand and said, “Hold hard, lad, hold tongue! We know what befell the Stravandars; just tell me about this man and woman. They were together, yes?”
“Yes, and they might be the two you had us chase, earlier, who got away through the Gost’s mansion.”
“So they might, but tell me now not ‘mights’ but what ye know, from last night.”
“They had poisoned weapons,” Dunblade spoke up, “and the man told the women he’d just murdered Masked Lord Stravandar, after the woman told the man that they couldn’t go, because ‘He’ll have our lives if we fail.’ ”
“Would ye recognize those two if ye saw them again, d’ye think?”
Jalester nodded. “Oh, yes!”
“Unless they were heavily disguised,” Dunblade amended.
“Good.” El looked past them then, to give a glare to two men who’d sidled up behind Jalester and Dunblade to listen.
“These two outrank ye in the Watch now, so obey them rather than trying to arrest them for something,” he commanded the two.
“Oh?” the older of the two undercover Watch guards asked. “And just who are you to give us such orders?”
“I,” Elminster told him firmly, “am the new Warden of Waterdeep.”
“What?”
“That should be ‘What, Saer?’ ” El informed him dryly. “Now, get ye back to Castle Waterdeep and inform everyone that these two are to be trusted and obeyed, not hampered at every turn.”
The undercover Watch guards exchanged doubtful glances. They were still doing so as the Sage of Shadowdale advanced on them and snapped crisply, “Go.”
They went.
El promptly hustled Mirt, Jalester, and Dunblade through a solid-looking part of the fore chamber wall that turned out to be a sliding panel and along a narrow and dimly lit passage behind that panel to a shelf-lined chamber with a door that locked. Once they were all locked inside, he said, “Stand still. I’m a trifle rusty on my disguise spells.”
To Mirt’s eye, what El did then looked more like Weave-work than a proper spell, and so it was, but El silenced him with a look.
Then he stepped back and announced, “Behold. We all look … well, like down-at-heel shop help, rather than our usual selves.”
He then rummaged in some boxes on the shelves behind him for a moment, produced Watch badges for them all to hide in their boots—“Yes, a second set for ye, lads; let one be confiscated, and ye’re still Watch guards to the next folk ye need to cow”—and they took back passages to deeper rooms filled with clothes of all sorts that were shimmering with faint, failing preservation spells.
“Tarthus did this spellwork,” El murmured, lost in memory for a moment, “and Kitten provided most of these garments, from her collection of disguises.”
“You want us to put these on?” Mirt rumbled, lifting two of the jerkins with a critical air.
“Yes, ’tis time for us to play at being shopkeepers.” He handed two slumping cloth bundles to Jalester and Dunblade. “False bellies. There are side-slits ’neath the padding; hide thy swords in there—scabbards and all, mind.”
Jalester gave him a disbelieving look, but Dunblade grinned and started strapping on his false belly.
“What’s all this for?” Jalester inquired, holding up his belly with an air of incredulous helplessness.
“Hunting the ones spreading rumors about the Open Lord murdering guildmasters—and for all I know, nobles and Masked Lords of the city and dung carters, too, lad. Think we’ll hear any unguarded speech if we walk into a tavern as a wizard, a Lord of Waterdeep, and two Watch guards? Now hurry up; even the secret tunnels in this place have traffic jams.”
• • •
SEA WARD FEATURED only expensive and exclusive eateries. Diners did not expect the crowding, poor lighting, and noise they could readily find in lesser establishments, should they visit other wards of the city. Yet in Sea Ward as elsewhere, the more outrageously expensive a place, the sparser its clientele: even in fabled Waterdeep, there’s a limit to how many individuals will regularly part with a gold coin for a tiny glass of water, sparkling or otherwise.
So it was that at about the same time as a disguised Elminster and his three confederates were striding through dark and narrow passages eastwards to reach the cellars of less pretentious eateries, a water clock was chiming gently in the hushed and nigh-deserted upper dining lounge of Mermaid On A Dolphin, with only one diner there to hear it.
Braethan Cazondur had been enjoying the view from the windows. The Mermaid occupied the southeastern corner of the moot of Vondil and Feather Streets, and although he always found the passing parade of Waterdhavians interesting, one invariably saw an exalted selection of “better folk” through these particular windows.
He’d dined alone, thoroughly enjoying a platter of his favorite mixed-fowl-stuffed eels. As the last of the chimes died away, he unhurriedly drained the last of his post-prandial drink, rose and made his way to a discreet door in a dim back corner, passed through it—and found himself facing an impassive guard in livery, at the foot of a narrow staircase.
The man was wider and taller than some doors. Each of his hands was as big as Cazondur’s head, and his eyes promised cold death.
Cazondur gave the guard a handful of gold coins and spoke a certain word, and the man stood aside. Whereupon the Mermaid’s lone diner ascended the stair, and at its top found himself facing another two liveried guards, one with a wand in his hand and the other holding a long rapier Cazondur knew to be tipped with sleep poison.
The right pass-phrase got him past these impassive sentinels. He opened a door beyond them and stepped into a room where a lone man was sitting at a table set for three that a graceful, silent woman in the same livery was just clearing platters littered with the remains of a meal from. She replaced them with a fresh decanter and a second glass that matched the one the man at the table was sipping from, and withdrew, leaving the two men alone.
“I trust you enjoyed your meal?” Cazondur asked politely.
“I did. A rare pleasure; the notorious Vaerentevor Qasmult seldom dines in public,” came the sardonic reply. “Thank you for paying for this. It is of course a prelude to your requesting me to do something.”
“Offering to hire you to do something.”
“Something dangerous.”
“And expensive.”
“What makes you think mere coin will interest me?”
“Qasmult, your purse is nigh empty. You’ve been deigning to go to revels thrown by lesser wastrel nobles these past few months, and you hate such people. You’re attending so you can get something to eat and drink without having to spend coin for it.”
“You weave much from very little,” the wizard replied coldly.
“You lost the patronage of Talest Alambur three summers back, the Sarsails shipwreck cost you so much you had to sell your last two Trades Ward properties, the failure of Trantur Scrollworks lost you more, and your work for the Master Mariners was ended by them two months ago. You’ve been seen visiting the moneylender Alrasklan, who’s far from the willing first choice of any Waterdhavian seeking a loan. Shall I go on?”
“Your spies are diligent,” Qasmult said sullenly, “but even if I was starving in the alleys of Dock Ward, why would mere coin interest me?”