Death Masks

by Ed Greenwood

  A glossy hemisphere of black opal, that had tiny metal eyestalks raking back from its edges. The whirlpool symbol of the Xanathar.

  That gem was glowing, and out of it came the oily voice of the Xanathar, speaking Undercommon.

  “Cazondur has gone too far. So I have new orders for you both …”

  • • •

  DRAKE’S DAGGER WAS raised on high, but he was looking at Cazondur, not Tasheene.

  “No,” he said simply, and flung the dagger down. Tasheene’s eyes couldn’t help but follow it, as it bit into the oiled wooden floor and quivered there, upright and deadly.

  “What?” Cazondur roared. “Your blood-bond compels you!”

  “I love the Lady Melshimber. I will defend her, not slay her—and I stand here now to attest to the truth of her words.”

  Cazondur looked disgusted, and wrenched a tiny vial from around his neck, the delicate thread that had held it parting in a trice. Snarling a magical word, he dashed it to the tabletop.

  The high, ringing tones of its shattering were lost in sudden leaping flames as its contents blazed up—and Darleth Drake shuddered, convulsed, and backed away from Tasheene. Or tried to, as he spat out flames. What he did instead was stumble and fall, limbs spasming as more fire leaked out of him.

  Tasheene wondered wildly where her nearest healing potion might be. He was fighting to look up at her, struggling to say something.

  “Love … you,” Drake gasped, before he collapsed and the flames leaped up.

  His eyeballs sizzled and popped, his skin darkened, shriveled and shrank in a racing destruction as a reek like roast boar arose under Tasheene’s nose, and she stood in helpless horror, flexing her hands but finding nothing for them to do.

  Her Drake was doomed.

  Her Drake was … dead.

  And as she burst into tears that spat and sizzled in the flames that kept her from even embracing him, Tasheene realized how her world had darkened forever. She had loved him, this man, and had now lost … everything.

  Everything at all.

  Behind her, up on the table, Lord Cazondur laughed. “So perish all traitors!”

  “Except you, perhaps?” an angry voice—a woman’s voice—hissed in one of his ears.

  He whirled, but no one was there. He’d walked away from Laeral, and she was now a good ten steps from him, at least.

  “Boo!” another woman spoke, in his other ear.

  • • •

  BRAETHAN CAZONDUR RECOGNIZED neither of them, having never heard Dove or Syluné speak, but guessed this must be some trick Chosen could play. He batted the air wildly around him to be rid of the voices, realizing as he did so how ridiculous—or unhinged—this would make him look. That fueled fresh rage.

  He strode down the arc of the table to its end, stepped down onto a chair he’d never considered himself a lowly enough Lord to occupy, and shoved courtiers and servants out of the way as he headed for the wall.

  Or rather, a gong on the wall.

  “And now,” he snarled, striking the gong with his gauntleted fist, “I’ve had quite enough of this!”

  In answer to the gong’s ring, doors along that wall flew open, and various Palace servants peered out through them, with loaded crossbows in their hands.

  Seeing Cazondur, they looked to him for orders.

  “Feather anyone who tries to get to me,” he commanded, waving at all the nobles, guildmasters, Watch guards, courtiers, and servants in the room. “Anyone. Fire at their heads.”

  Then he took something from a pouch affixed inside the metal cuff-plate of one of his gauntlets, turned to address those same folk, and sneered, “All of you are standing in a chamber whose magnificent floor was freshly oiled yestereve—at my orders. So you can all burn.”

  He whirled, drew back his arm, and hurled what he was holding straight at Laeral. Who had guessed what he might be about to do, though not his target, and readied the ring she wore.

  So when his nine-bead necklace of fireballs came arcing toward her face, it met the wall of force she’d called out of the ring, rebounded almost as hard as it had come, struck the table, and burst.

  That part of the table, and the room beyond where the table most closely approached the south wall, an area crowded with Cazondur and many others, erupted in shattering flame, the table riven asunder in a storm of flaming shards and splinters.

  Everywhere in the room, frightened folk started to scream and run. Flames snarled up the tapestries along the south wall, burned bodies that had been hurled against them tumbled back to the floor—and Lord Braethan Cazondur picked himself up off the floor beyond the blazing table, apparently unharmed despite his smoldering vestments.

  “Armor of fire resistance,” he sneered, gesturing at what he was wearing underneath, as the spreading flames revealed it.

  Two Watch guards dared to charge at him through the flames, but Cazondur’s co-opted Palace servants, aiming their crossbows from the open doorways, took them down.

  Cazondur went to that wall, walked along it out of the flames to the large hanging map of Trades Ward that adorned it, and did something that made the map swing open like a door to reveal a storage niche behind it.

  Out of which he took a staff.

  “A staff of the magi,” he gloated, hefting it. “It’s amazing what treasures are just sitting around the Palace, awaiting anyone who bothers to look for them.”

  He turned to level the staff at Laeral, just as there came a peculiar groan from the back of the now-empty storage niche.

  Cazondur spun back to face the niche just in time to see that the groaning was coming from a long-disused panel; the back of the storage niche was swinging open.

  And into it, out of the darkness beyond, stepped a lithe and slender dark woman. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark of skin, and she wore form-fitting black clothing and high black boots.

  “Belvarra Bowmantle, at your service once more, Braethan,” she purred. And through the opening behind her stepped a mind flayer in dark high-collared robes. The sight of it dragged dismayed curses out of Watch guards and nobles all over the Lordsmoot.

  “Are we too late to the revel?” the agent of Asmodeus asked sweetly.

  “Ah,” added Suthool, through his speaking-stone gorget. “I see we’re not. Good, good.”

  Cazondur smiled. “You’re in time to watch me slaughter these fools,” he told them, turning back toward Laeral to aim at her again.

  “With that?” Belvarra asked, pointing at the staff—as Suthool stepped around her and drove a needle-thin poisoned blade right through the Lord’s neck, from behind.

  “Urrraalalaggh!” Braethan Cazondur gurgled, eyes bulging in astonishment and agony.

  • • •

  BELVARRA BROUGHT A hand crossbow out from behind her back and coolly took down the only Palace servant who looked likely to let loose with his crossbow. Then she stepped around Cazondur so his body shielded her from the other crossbow-holders, plucked the staff out of Cazondur’s failing hands, and tossed it into the rising flames.

  “We took the real one more than a year ago,” she informed the dying Lord, “and left that duplicate—mere carved and painted wood, bearing not the slightest magic at all—in its place. Check and recheck, foolish man; don’t just check once.”

  As she calmly recocked and reloaded her blowgun, Cazondur turned to flee. He managed only two steps before sagging to his knees, his face going purple. His eyes bulged and stared, pupils so large almost no whites showed, and yellow foam spilled from his mouth.

  “And think more than once,” Suthool told him. “Your mad hunger for power has cost you your life, and ruined all our schemes. We prefer Waterdeep as it is!”

  Then the mind flayer looked out over the flames at everyone else in the Lordsmoot, his gaze fixing longest on Laeral, as his speaking stone flashed and the peculiar voice emanating from it rose in volume to carry clearly across the room.

  “We’ll be going now,” he announced crisply. “
If anyone is as foolish as Cazondur here, and tries to stop us, they’ll share his fate.”

  “If we’re chased and taken down,” Belvarra added, “the dooms we’ve prepared and left ready will be unleashed—and plague will grip Waterdeep.”

  Into the shocked silence that followed those words, a Watch officer barked, “Ready bows!” to the Watch guards all around the chamber—and Jalester and Dunblade rushed through the flames at Belvarra and the mind flayer, swords raised.

  Only to falter and reel as Suthool mind-blasted them, leaving them stunned.

  Belvarra put her next crossbow bolt into the face of the Watch officer who’d barked the ready order, and then she and the illithid, moving in smooth unison, pounced on Jalester and Dunblade.

  Holding the limp-limbed pair as body shields against any archery, the mind flayer and the agent of Asmodeus headed back toward the panel, to make their escape.

  Both Jalester and Dunblade tried to struggle, limbs weak and clumsy at first, their swords clanging down out of numbed and weak hands.

  Belvarra deftly swung around behind Jalester, one arm wrapped around his throat and the other darting stiff-fingered to specific spots that made his hands go burningly nerveless, but Dunblade wrenched free of the mind flayer, slicing its tentacles with a dagger.

  • • •

  SUTHOOL TOSSED ITS head in pain and drove its intact tentacles into Dunblade’s ears—and the young man quivered horribly, ululating and clawing the air vainly as the mind flayer mind-tapped … and drained.

  Whereupon Laeral gathered all the Weave-strength she could from around her, and the magical baubles she still bore, and attacked Suthool mind to mind.

  Mystra forbids! Dove thought at her.

  She can punish me if she sees fit, Laeral thought back grimly. Me, I think saving thousands upon thousands from plague—more, if they flee the city and carry it with them, to infect thousands more all across Faerûn—is worth the transgression.

  As a startled Suthool stiffened and turned to face Laeral, the air between them—above the now-dwindling flames licking up from the polished floorboards—blossomed into a brief blue-white star.

  Out of it stepped Vajra Safahr, the seventh Blackstaff of Waterdeep, with the staff whose title she bore blazing black fire in her hands.

  “A Walking Statue caught me and held me,” she hissed, “and so I live! Die, whoever you are, my would-be slayer!”

  The Blackstaff roared forth ravening dark fire.

  • • •

  THE COZY ROOM was lined with shelves crammed with all manner of books, except for where the door was, and the fieldstone chimney and hearth rose. The wizard Mordenkainen was sitting at ease in a worn and comfortable old overstuffed chair beside the fire, reading. He was smiling and even chuckling as he turned the pages, and had been for some time when he suddenly sat bolt upright, eyes gleaming as he stared across the room at nothing, his current chapbook falling from his hand.

  “Elminster?” he snapped. “What’re you up to? Is that a mind flayer?”

  Then he winced, shook his head, looked down at the large goblet of wine balanced on one arm of the chair—a glass he’d been trying to empty slowly, after El’s last sarcastic comments—acquired a look of disgust, and dashed its contents into the fire.

  He shook his head again and retrieved his book.

  “Now, where was I?” He flipped pages quickly until he found the right one. “Oh, yes, the fourteenth dastardly Cormyrean noble, and the young lady from Sembia with the volcanically erupting breastworks …”

  • • •

  THE FIRE FROM the Blackstaff crashed into an unseen barrier halfway along the smoldering great table, a barrier it snarled up, curled around, and consumed, fading greatly as it did so.

  That attack, and the time it took to destroy the wall of force, gave Belvarra the moments she needed to shove Jalester away and dart back into and through the niche she’d come in by.

  Laeral left off her attempts to mindfight the illithid and called on what she knew of the Blackstaff’s enchantments, quelling its dark fire in an instant.

  A moment later, she’d seized control of the staff, which thrummed eerily under her governance, and hurled it across the room—towing Vajra, who clung to it desperately, trying to regain mastery of what she held—through the air.

  The Lady of the Staff was still trying to impose her will on the hurtling fragment when it brought her into a bone-shattering collision with the mind flayer, whom it pierced, and pinned to the wall.

  Suthool writhed in pain, impaled on the staff and held grindingly against the unyielding stones by the enchanted fragment that still sought to race on through both illithid and stone wall.

  The mind flayer was still struggling, tentacles flailing in pain, when Laeral charged up to it, caught two of those tentacles in her hand, and severed them with her belt-dagger.

  Into the burst of mental anguish that followed she surged, ruthlessly invading the illithid’s mind on her own rising tide of pain—for Mystra’s dictates were not to be defied. Yet Dove and Syluné drove in with her.

  When Laeral had sliced off all the tentacles, she flung the dagger away so she couldn’t possibly be coerced into stabbing herself, and bored on into the fell and pain-wracked mind.

  Her own agony was surging, but it took mere moments to pierce the creature’s outermost, current racing thoughts, and learn that this talk of a plague-trap was all lies … and to confirm all of Cazondur’s perfidy.

  This creature called itself Suthool, and it had finally managed to overcome and enthrall Elminster, but that control was now slipping under the goad of its physical pain at the severed tentacles—and under Laeral’s faltering assault.

  She was reeling herself now, at the dazed limits of what she could bear to do, but burned her way deeper into Suthool’s mind, showing no mercy.

  It recoiled, writhing, and relinquished control of Elminster—and then she forced it to reluctantly confess its ruse aloud to the room through its speaking stone.

  Yet she was beyond agony by then, and drowning in a yellow haze that flooded her mind. She had pushed too far, defied Mystra’s dictates too much, and …

  Suthool broke free of her with a hiss of triumph, and reached for her throat.

  CHAPTER 30

  Endgame

  Skilled players at dice and cards and board and murmuring courtiers drifting about thrones both smilingly speak of the endgame when all is decided, and something is won. But inevitably far more is lost.

  I am no fan of endgames.

  —the wizard Vangerdahast, said in open court in the Royal Palace of Suzail in the spring of the Year of the Prince

  A LOUD GASP SOUNDED IN LAERAL’S LEFT EAR. IT WAS DOVE, collapsing into the Weave under the same pain still raging in Laeral’s head.

  Syluné went away a moment later, leaving behind her own sigh in Laeral’s right ear.

  As Suthool, trembling with rage and pain, tightened its long-taloned hands about her throat.

  Laeral couldn’t even struggle. So weak …

  The last of her control over the Blackstaff faded. It left off trying to ram its way through the illithid into the wall and fell.

  Right onto Suthool’s foot. It bounced off with a thud. The mind flayer flinched at the pain, but then let go of Laeral and snatched for the Blackstaff. Such power …

  Pouncing on the enchanted thing, the illithid turned the dark fragment eagerly in its hands, trying through its pain to understand how to master it. To heal itself, to blast all foes, to—

  • • •

  VAJRA SAFAHR FELT that fumbling tugging at the Blackstaff, the latest bid to break her own mastery of it.

  It seemed as if black tentacles were violating her mind, worming and grasping … She shuddered in revulsion, but the probing went on, dragging her out of the daze she’d been plunged into by her head-first collision with the mind flayer and the so, so solid wall behind it.

  She was sick of being casually bested. She was sick of hu
rting. And she was heartily sick of seemingly everyone in all Waterdeep trying to wrest control of the Blackstaff away from her.

  She called on the Blackstaff.

  This, this … mind flayer! wanted the staff so much? Then let it taste what it was trying to gain.

  Vajra lay on her face where she’d fallen, right beside the illithid. She rolled over and called up the Blackstaff’s black fire in one snarling surge.

  And Suthool had no wall of force to use as a shield.

  The mind flayer was clutching the staff with both hands, staring at it close up, mind open and straining.

  Suddenly erupting black fire sluiced over it like a bucket of hurled water, drenching the creature and sending it staggering backward, a hideous squalling erupting from its speaking stone until the gorget burst with a soaring shriek.

  Suthool fell, writhing in agony, bathed in the Blackstaff’s black flames, hands blackening but unable to let go.

  Until Vajra, panting her way to her feet, tore it free with her will, trailing ashes and crisped fingers in its wake as it soared up to her own waiting hands.

  She reclaimed it with a great sigh of relief, and stepped back to see who else might need burning.

  • • •

  LAERAL WAITED. UNABLE even to get up. The moment Vajra turned and saw her might be the moment before her last.

  Would Mystra let her sink into the Weave?

  Or would she die here, burned by the staff the love of her life had wrought into what it now was.

  Ah, the gods so loved irony …

  Vajra turned, and—was trampled and bowled over in one pounding, racing instant, struck senseless against the floor, the Blackstaff bouncing away like so much thudding timber.

  Her destroyer had been the lad called Jalester, charging blindly forward with tears streaming down his contorted face, rushing to his lover.

  The drooling, now-witless staggerer who’d been Faerrel Dunblade.

  “Faer!” he cried, taking hold of the taller Dalesman. “Faer!”

  He shook Dunblade violently, screaming the man’s name, but the shambling thing he was clutching didn’t even focus its eyes on him, let alone speak.