by Ed Greenwood
Laeral gave her a smile. “Good. Finding him quickly is now … highly desirable. So how?”
“Well, Cazondur habitually wears at least four enchanted things I know of: a mindstone—akin to a ring of mind shielding—a ring of spell turning, a brooch of shielding, and a gorget of far speaking.”
“The first three are known to me, and I can guess what the fourth is by its name, but pray enlighten me as to its specifics.”
Vajra frowned. “It’s very rare. A wearer can speak and their voice will issue not just from their mouth but from a matching gorget, no matter where that linked throat-plate is, worn or not. We could only trace the ‘other’ gorget of a matched pair if we had one, and the link was active, that is, a wearer of one of the two was actually speaking.”
Laeral nodded, and Vajra went on, “So what I thought might work best is trying to trace the ‘blank spot’ a mindstone generates, in very close proximity to a brooch of shielding. If he’s still wearing both, then where they are is where he is, too. I can’t do this by spell, so …”
She looked at Laeral, who shook her head and admitted quietly, “Neither can I, but I remember something of how Khelben could compel the Blackstaff to search for the ‘signatures’ of magic items active at that moment in the city, from within Blackstaff Tower. If you’ll allow me …”
She reached out, and Vajra flinched away, trying to take the Blackstaff out of her reach for a moment before she mastered herself and sat grimacing in shame.
Laeral laid a hand on Vajra’s cheek and said softly, “Be at ease. I know what you’re warring with, remember?”
And through her touch, she sent memories flooding into Vajra, who trembled, opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again without a word. She shut her eyes tight and concentrated on what Laeral was sharing: remembrances of Khelben calling on the Blackstaff to focus and Weave-power seekings and scryings for him.
After a moment, Vajra whirled away and started to pace, holding the Blackstaff up before her like some priests held holy relics aloft before them as they processed to an altar. She started to mutter, half-words and slurred sounds Laeral couldn’t hear. After watching her for a moment, Laeral went to her and shadowed her from a careful step away, moving with Vajra as she wheeled and walked blindly and wheeled again, ready to reach out and catch her. What the Lady Mage was doing was exhausting, intense concentration, and soon enough—
Vajra started to reel. Laeral hastily took hold of her and helped her across the room to a chair and table so she wouldn’t fall.
The Lady Mage was spent, out on her feet. So much so that halfway across the room, she dropped the Blackstaff.
It plummeted to the floor, bounced once, then hovered just above the polished floorboards.
Laeral got Vajra sitting.
“The Blackstaff!” the Lady Mage moaned. “Must … have …”
Laeral managed to keep the pity from her face as she fetched the Blackstaff. The surviving fragment was the head of the staff and the shaft just below it where Laeral had been wont to grasp it, and it felt so familiar, so right …
Firmly she put it down on the table right beside Vajra, and guided the Lady Mage’s hand to it, then let go.
Vajra embraced the staff, clawing it to the edge of the table and lying with her cheek and breast against it. She panted as if exhausted from a long run, then pulled the Blackstaff against her breast and sat bent over in the chair, hugging it.
After a time she sobbed and shuddered in pain, as if someone had driven a blade into her, threw back her head, and spat out, “I can easily trace the enspelled helms of the Masked Lords, and there’s one in the same place as a mindstone and a brooch of shielding! The rings have been moving, borne by someone walking to a certain building in North Ward, but the Mask has been stationary in that building for most of this day.”
“Several Masked Lords could have all three things,” Laeral pointed out gently.
“True, but I’ve detected a Mask in this spot, on and off, for months now, so I walked there two tendays back to take a casual passing look. I can tell you the building the ring-wearer has entered is a former wealthy Waterdhavian’s private mansion, recently renovated, that now bears the name ‘Thantilvur Investments.’ It’s the third building in from the High Road, on the south side of Tarnath Street.”
“And how likely is it,” Laeral asked softly, “that Thantilvur Investments is a business established and owned by one Braethan Cazondur?”
Vajra smiled thinly. “Being as it’s registered with the Palace tax-takers as owned by one of his maids—who just a summer ago was a hand-to-mouth alley kiss-and-cuddle lass dancing in the Saucy Satyr club in Trades Ward—highly likely, I’d say.”
Laeral nodded. “Now hear me well, Vajra. This is an order. Stay away from Cazondur; I’ll handle him. What I need you to do is find Elminster and tell him about Cazondur, as I’ll probably need El’s aid in dealing with our villainous Masked Lord—who’s not to be slain, whatever befalls. We need to learn from him every last detail of his conspiracy, so we can get every last individual who’s working with him, and stop the murders—not just slow them down but leave ourselves a lurking menace that’ll strike later.”
Vajra rolled her eyes. “You think just like Khelben did.”
Laeral smiled. “Who do you think taught him that patience, dear? He was a tad too much the righteous smiter when we first met.”
She turned away suddenly, and added in a whisper Vajra had to strain to hear, “And when I miss him most, my patience—my iron patience—is almost all I have left.”
• • •
“THERE YOU ARE!” Mirt bellowed. “What—”
Jalester and Dunblade, who’d been running with him, hastily drew out of the way, and Mirt caught sight of Drella lying still on the temple steps, and Ravva and Waratra pleading on their knees with priests of Valkur—Valkur?
Two lumbering strides took him close enough to Drella to see he was looking at a corpse. He rounded on the priests and roared, “How much? How much to have her back alive?”
The largest, fattest priest looked pained. “No amount of—”
“A hundred thousand dragons!” Mirt shouted.
“No, no, as I’ve just been explaining to these young, er, ladies—”
“Two hundred thousand!”
The priest drew himself up disdainfully. “Do you seek to buy the consecrated—”
Mirt’s hairy hands descended on the man’s shoulders, and although the priest was a shade taller than the old lord in the flopping boots and food-stained garments and every bit as fat, he found himself being hoisted off his feet and dragged nose to nose with a maw as loud and raging as any dragon’s. “No! I seek to have them do their holy duty and raise my friend from the dead! Or do I have to get Valkur to do it myself?”
“Y-yes. Yes, you do,” the priest sputtered. “And no amount of bribery—”
Mirt set him down gently on his feet, dusted off the front of his vestments while the priest sniffed, lifted his chin, and put the beginnings of a sneer on his face—and then without any windup slammed an uppercut into the man’s jaw that smashed him off his feet and slammed him thunderously into his own temple doors.
The holy man slid down them, limbs limp, and the underpriests ran to him.
“His neck’s broken,” one gasped.
“He’s dead!” The priest who’d gasped that turned and shouted accusingly at Mirt’s back, “He’s dead!”
“Just like my friend,” Mirt spat, without turning. “Valkur will be so pleased.”
The priests traded wild, helpless glances, and then the doors of the temple were thrust open from within, shoving the body aside, and more priests came out.
“He just killed the Wavemaster!” one of the underpriests shouted, pointing at Mirt. Gaping and then looking angry, the new arrivals from inside the temple surged forward.
Only to recoil as a dusky-skinned woman in dark robes, who was clutching a fragment of a magical staff that had b
lue sparks buzzing about it like angry bees, appeared in midair right in front of them. She spun around to face the lurching man they were headed for, who was now bending over a body of a girl who had two crossbow bolts through her, and two sobbing girls of like age cradling her, and said to his backside, “Mirt! Mirt, where’s Elminster?”
“Gone,” Mirt snapped, without turning. “Departed precipitously, by magic, when something went wrong with a mad wizard he’s nursing back to health.”
“Who?”
“Ask him,” Mirt barked. “I haven’t lived this long by spilling the secrets of angry old archwizards who happen to be the Chosen of yer actual goddess of world-spanning magic!”
Vajra rolled her eyes and pleaded, “So where is he?”
“I know not, truly. Somewhere wizards go.”
Vajra cursed, long and colorfully, and was still doing so when a dozen priests of Valkur tried to shove her aside to reach Mirt.
The Blackstaff flashed blindingly once, and twelve sets of shoulders thudded into each other and the temple doors.
Before the groaning priests could fall to the waiting stone steps, the Lady of the Staff was gone again, having teleported away as abruptly as she’d arrived.
“Remind me,” Ravva said fiercely through her tears, “to have as little to do with wizards as possible in future.”
• • •
“YOU’LL HAVE TO sign for them,” the Palace courtier said, a little uncertainly.
“Will I?” Laeral’s voice was mild, but he shrank back from her as if she’d thrust a flaming sword at him.
“Y-yes.”
“Very well,” the Open Lord of Waterdeep replied, and plucked the clipslate from him, slipped its quill from the top of the clip with the deftness of long practice, and went down the lists. “One rod of absorption, one Ironguard ring—hmm, one that I created, I see—and gloves of missile snaring, one pair. There. That seems to be in order.”
“Uh, ah, that’s my line …” The courtier faltered under her gently smiling gaze. Her eyes held eager death, and that smile … that smile was hungry for blood.
“So it is,” Laeral almost whispered. “You’ll have to forgive me. I can be indiscreet when I go to war.”
CHAPTER 27
So Beautiful and So Deadly
See the dark dancer, through the trees?
’Tis not the goddess herself, but one of her mortal worshippers
Sleek and lithe and shapely, a creature of the night
So beautiful and so deadly
Like black flames—too close and you’ll be burned.
—Dancers of Eilistraee, a ballad by the minstrel Ondamur Jereth, chapbook-published in the Year of the Scythe
THERE IT WAS: THANTILVUR INVESTMENTS. Laeral strode to the door, stepped calmly to one side of it, took the discarded tree-branch she’d picked up four streets back, and used it to operate the knocker.
Nothing happened except a cheerful distant shout from within, of “It’s open.”
Laeral pushed with the branch—and the door swung open. She held it out like a sword and proceeded through the door, stepping back out across the threshold immediately.
But nothing plummeted down from above, and although she looked to left and right, no one was lurking against the inside wall on either side of the door, or waiting with leveled crossbow.
All she could see, down the length of a high-ceilinged and dimly lit room, was Braethan Cazondur, sitting at a scroll-littered desk under a lamp, calmly working.
He looked up. “Ah, Lady Silverhand! What an unexpected pleasure!”
“Is it?” Laeral asked in quiet challenge, stepping through the door and taking two swift steps to the left before proceeding down the room. Its floor was of large, smooth flagstones, laid solidly, and she could see no hint of waiting traps.
The room was long and straight, like a wide corridor, intersecting at the back with a cross-corridor, with Cazondur’s desk right at the meeting-point. He was giving her a pleasant half-smile of greeting, and murmuring something under his breath. Laeral guessed he was using magic, and called on the Weave. He was—the gorget—and she heard him mutter, “Glenmaur, I need you. Laeral’s here. Destroy her.”
She neither slowed nor stopped, but kept on walking, wrapping the Weave around her like unseen gossamer armor as she went.
Open Lords of Waterdeep did what they had to do.
• • •
THIS WAS IT. Braethan Cazondur felt the tingling as the gorget awakened. “Glenmaur,” he murmured, not letting the smile leave his face, “I need you. Laeral’s here. Destroy her.”
This was the great gamble. He was trusting that Glenmaur wouldn’t betray him. And that Qasmult hadn’t killed Glenmaur yet—and for that matter, that Glenmaur didn’t yet know Qasmult had been hired to kill him, and by whom.
Gods, but there was a lot of trusting involved in deception …
Laeral was walking right into his trap. She probably knew it, but she wasn’t here to kill him out of hand—she’d have blasted in his front door and the building it was part of and him with it from the street, without warning, if she’d been here to do that. No, she wanted him alive, to question him, and that gave him the upper hand.
The upper spike-gauntleted hand. He managed to keep his smile from widening.
The walls flanking her as she strode so confidently toward him were both false, grand moldings and all, and had been built a few feet shorter than the lofty two-floor-high ceiling of the building after he’d had it gutted. On their tops rested a row of crossbeams with heavy stone blocks laid atop them, concealed by the nicely plastered ceiling.
The false wall on Laeral’s left had been built just inside the real side wall of the building, but the one on her right stood about ten feet out from its adjacent real wall—and its support uprights, hidden from her on its inner side, had been sawn right through, and were just resting atop their bases. Ready to fall.
Then, quite suddenly, Glenmaur was there. Appearing in the gap between the sawn-through false wall and the real wall beside it, giving him a grave nod before turning and going to the tiny opening concealed in the wall molding. It was behind Laeral now as she walked, and Glenmaur unhurriedly cast a spell deftly through it.
She whirled around in mid-step when his prismatic wall flashed into being behind her, its shimmering hues so beautiful and so deadly.
And Glenmaur took three swift strides, to be right beside her with the false wall between them, and reached out, the ring on his finger flashing as he called on its power.
Then he was sprinting right at Cazondur to get out of harm’s way, as the ram his ring had sent forth smashed a sawn-through pillar off its base behind him—and the whole flimsy wall came down with a roar, beams and massive stone blocks and all.
Ah, but it was wonderful!
The false walls and ceiling collapsed just as they’d been designed to, slamming into Laeral—and driving her, struggling and shattered amid a welter of tumbling beams, into and through waiting prismatic doom.
And Glenmaur, turning to see his work while he was still running, gloated aloud, “Hah! So easy that the Chosen must have been fooling us all along! They’re not mighty archwizards, after all! So the infamous Elminster, who’s been seen with her here in Waterdeep, will prove no trouble at all!”
Unseen behind the crowing mage, Cazondur’s own growing and gleeful smile fell right off his face.
He had to get rid of all wizards in the Deep. Except himself.
• • •
MYSTRA, THE PAIN!
So this was what it felt like, to be of the Weave, forcibly torn from a buried and broken body …
She was fire, silver fire, and yet she was Laeral. She was agony, burning crackling agony, agony that could see and hear and feel. Ohhhh …
Whirling up into the Weave, Laeral felt the pain start to ebb for the first time, and stopped trying to scream. All that came out was raw silence, anyway, and …
Far below and behind her, rubble shift
ed as a splintered beam groaned and split farther, and two wedged stone blocks tipped and rolled.
One of them crushed her skull like a small and delicate egg, but the wizard who’d slain her—it was Imindur Glenmaur, yes—couldn’t see that. He came rushing over, alarmed, to plant himself and work another spell. Was Laeral Silverhand going to rise up unscathed, or heal herself in a trice, through some trick of the Chosen?
He was going to make very sure of her demise. With a …
Laeral knew this casting well. A cone of cold, to be hurled at the little bit of her he could see: one bared hip, exposed in the torn edge of a heap of fallen wall and ceiling. She looked instead at Cazondur, who was looking just as apprehensive as Glenmaur—but his eyes weren’t on the shifting rubble but on Glenmaur’s back. And he was hunkered down behind his desk, now, and tearing off every last bit of magic he had. Fearing being traced, of course.
A moment later, as Glenmaur was watching the searing cold of his spell strike home, Cazondur stole out of the room behind him. Laeral darted after him, an unseen shadow in the Weave.
The man ducked through a secret door and into a passage. It forked and forked again, and all of the side-passages, in the walls of adjoining buildings, had scores of exits. Cazondur must be counting on Glenmaur not having time to check them all.
Neither did Laeral, for right around her, with all this magic being unleashed, the Weave was seething, and she was being torn apart all over again. It didn’t hurt, this time, but she was having to chase after herself, to cling to what was her and rebuild, melding what was Laeral amid the rippling, roiling chaos …
It would be so easy to just leave it all behind, and ride the Weave …
• • •
SHE WAS BACK in the Tower.
This room in Blackstaff Tower, dominated by its table with the magnificent map of Waterdeep; the room where she felt most powerful, most in control.
Most in control, not truly in control of anything! The Lady Mage of Waterdeep she might be, the Blackstaff, but here she was sitting in a chair clutching the Blackstaff to her face and trying, trying to feel Elminster’s whereabouts through the Weave—and failing miserably.