by Ed Greenwood
Elminster's Daughter
( The Elminster Series - 5 )
Ed Greenwood
Ed Greenwood
Elminster's Daughter
Sons, sons-always you boast of what your tall sons will do, with their sharp new wits and sharper new swords! Remember, O Prince, that you have also daughters! You're not the first man, great or low, to forget the shes he's sired, but mark this wisdom, Lord (not mine, but from the pen of a loremaster who was dust before dragons were ever driven from this land): The sages who turn the pages of history have a word for men who overlook their daughters . . . and that word is "fools."
Astramas Revendimar, Court Sage of Cormyr Letters To A Man To Be King Year of the Smiling Flame
One
A MURDEROUS MEETING OF MERCHANTS
A wizard, a merchant, a lord among merchants-I see no shortage of fools here.
The character Turst Sharptongue in Scene the First
of the play Windbag of Waterdeep
by Tholdomor "the Wise" Rammarask
first performed in the Year of the Harp
It was a moonfleet night, the silvery Orb of Selune scudding amid racing tatters of glowing cloud high above the proud spires of Waterdeep. Wizards in their towers and grim guards on battlements alike stared up and shivered, each thinking how small he was against the uncaring, speeding fire of the gods.
Far fewer merchants bothered to lift their gazes above the coins and goods-or softer temptations-under their hands at that hour, for such is the way of merchants. Hundreds were snoring, exhausted by the rigors of the day, but many were still awake and embracing-even if the hands of most of them were wrapped only around swiftly emptying tankards.
There were no tankards, no embraces, and no soft temptations in a certain shuttered upper room overlooking Jembril Street in Trades Ward. Instead, it held a cold, bare minimum of furniture-a table and six high-backed chairs-and an even colder company of men.
Six merchants sat in those chairs on this chill night in the early spring of the Year of Rogue Dragons, staring stonily at each other. The glittering glances of five of them suggested that the health of the sixth man, who sat alone at one end of the table, would not continue to flourish for more than a few breaths longer had it not been for the presence of the two impassive bodyguards who stood watchfully by his chair, cocked and loaded hand-crossbows held ready and free hands hovering near sword-hilts.
That sixth man said something, slowly and bitingly.
Outside, in the night, a shadow moved. An unseen witness to the merchants' meeting leaned closer to the only gap in the shutters across the windows of that upper room. Clinging head-downward to the carved stone harpy roof-truss nearest to the shutter, the shadow sacrificed as much balance as she dared, and strained to hear. Her slender arms were already quivering in the struggle to keep herself from plunging to the dark, cobbled street below.
"There are really no more excuses left to you, sirs," the man who sat apart told the others, smirking. "I will have my coins this night-or the deeds to your shops."
"But-" one of the men burst out, and then bit off whatever else he'd been going to say and looked helplessly down at the bare table before him, face dark with anger.
"So you'll ruin us, Caethur?" the next man man asked, his voice trembling. "You'd rather turn us out onto the streets than bleed us for another season? When you could set your hook at a higher rate, grant us more time, and keep us in debt forever, paying you all our days and yielding you far more coin than our stones are worth?"
Secure in the strength of the two murderous bodyguards at his back, Caethur leaned forward with a widening-and not very nice-smile on his face and replied triumphantly, "Yes."
He leaned back in his chair, very much at his ease, steepled his hands, and murmured over the resulting line of fingertips, "It will give me great pleasure, Hammuras, to ruin you. And you too, Nael. And especially you, Kamburan."
He moved his eyes in his motionless, smiling face to the other pair of seated merchants and added with a sigh, "Yet it almost pains me to visit the same fate upon you two gentlesirs. Why, I'd almost be inclined to give you that extra season Hammuras speaks of, if, say, something happened to still Kamburan's oversharp tongue forever. Why-"
One of that last pair of merchants slapped his hand down on the table. Wo, Caethur. You'll not turn us to savaging each other whilst you gloat. We'll sink or stand together."
The other merchant of the two nodded balefully.
Caethur gave them both a brittle smile, wiggling his ring-bedecked fingers so the gem-studded gold bands adorning them flashed in the lamplight like glasses of the new vintage Waterd-havian nobles had dubbed "sparkling stars," and said airily, "Well, then, we've come to that moment, sirs, when the wagging of tongues must give way to making good, one way or another. Kamburan, why don't you begin?"
Reluctantly, the white-bearded merchant reached a hand into the breast of his flame-silk overtunic and drew forth-slowly and carefully, as two crossbows lifted warningly-a glossy-polished wooden coffer only a shade larger than his palm. Wordlessly he flipped it open, displaying the frozen fire of the line of gems within for all to see. Seven beljurils, sea-green and shimmering, their flash-fires building.
Kamburan set the coffer gently on the table and slid it toward Caethur.
Halfway to the moneylender it stopped. Caethur lifted a finger, and one of his guards stepped smoothly forward to close the coffer and slide it the rest of the way down the table. The moneylender made no move to touch it.
"We should have gone to Mirt," Hammuras muttered. Caethur gave the spice dealer a shark-like grin. "Life is filled with 'should-haves,' isn't it, Hammuras? I should have chosen to deal with more astute and harder-working tradesmen and never come to this regrettable salvaging of scraps from the wrack of what should have been five flourishing businesses."
"None of that!" Nael snarled. "You know as well as the rest of us that times have been hard! The beasts from the sea, a season's shipping shattered, wars in Amn and Tethyr and the fall in trade with both those lands. . . ."
Caethur spread his hands and lifted his eyebrows at the same time, to ask mildly, "And did not every merchant of Waterdeep face these troubles? Yet-behold-they're not all here, sitting around this table. Only you five." Turning his gaze to Hammuras, he held out a beckoning hand.
Grimly, the spice merchant produced a small coffer of his own, displayed the rubies it held, and slid it along the table.
It stopped within reach of the moneylender, but Caethur made no move to take it up. Instead, he turned his expectant gaze to Nael. Who sat as still as stone and as pale as snow-marble. "Well?" Caethur asked softly, into a silence that was suddenly very deep and yet as singingly tight as a drawn bowstring.
Nael swallowed, lifted his chin, swallowed again, then said, "I've brought neither gems nor my deed here with me, but-"
Without waiting for a signal, one of the crossbowmen fired, and Aldurl Nael's left eye was suddenly a bloody profusion of sprouting wood and flight-feathers. The brass-merchant reeled in his seat, head flopping back and mouth gaping, and did not move again. Crimson rivulets of blood spilled from his mouth, seeking the floor.
"-but how unfortunate," Caethur said mildly, finishing Nael's sentence for him. "For Nael, and for all of you. After all, we can't have any witnesses to such wanton butchery, can we?"
The other guard calmly fired his crossbow, and Hammuras died.
As the three surviving merchants shouted and surged desperately to their feet, both guards tossed their spent crossbows aside and plucked cushions off a shelf affixed to the back of Caethur's chair. Four more hand-crossbows gleamed in the lamplight, loaded and ready. Coolly the guards snatched them up-and us
ed them.
Kamburan groaned for a surprising long time, but the rest of the room was still in but a breath or two.
"The bolts my men use, by the way," the moneylender told the corpses conversationally, "are tipped with brain-burn, to keep prying Watchful Order mages from learning anything of our meeting-and how you happened to so carelessly end up wearing war-darts in your faces. After all, we wouldn't want to start one more irresponsible city fashion, would we?"
Caethur rose from his chair, nodded to his two guards, and waved a hand at the gem-coffers on the table. "When you're done stripping the bodies of all deeds and coins and suchlike, bring those."
As he strode to the door and slipped out, he took something from a belt-pouch. It looked like a beast's claw: a grip-bar studded with a row of little daggers. When Caethur closed his hand around the bar, the blades protruded from between his fingers like a row of sheathed talons. With his other hand, the moneylender drew a belt dagger and used it to cautiously flick away the sheaths that covered every blade of the claw. Something dark and wet glistened on each razor-sharp point.
Thrusting the dagger through a belt-loop and putting the ven-omed claw behind his back, Caethur waited, humming a jaunty tune softly under his breath.
When his two laden bodyguards came to the door, he gave them a frown as he blocked their way and pointed back into the room.
"You've missed something," he said sharply.
His bodyguards gave him astonished and displeased looks but whirled to look at the dead merchants; the moneylender was not a master to be crossed.
The moment they turned Caethur took a swift step, slashed them both across the backs of their necks with his claw, and sprang away to avoid the thrashing spasms he knew would follow.
The guards were young and strong. After they stiffened with identical grunts of astonished agony, they managed to whirl toward their master, glaring, and claw at the air wildly for some seconds ere the venom stilled their limbs, and sent them toppling into the long dark chill of oblivion.
Caethur applied another knife, this one slaked liberally with brain-burn, to both of the men he'd just slain, and calmly set about collecting everything of value in the room full of corpses. After all, brain-burn was expensive . . . and after word got around of this night's deaths, the hiring-price of guards agreeing to work for him was bound to go up sharply.
Still, the cost of just one man informing the Lords of Waterdeep of his deeds would be much higher. Kamburan's cloak, still draped over the back of his chair, was unstained, and when bundled around Caethur's takings, served well as a carry-sack. He drew his own cloak around him with not a hair out of place nor any change in his easy half-smile at all.
It wasn't the first time Caethur the moneylender had walked away alone from a room full of dead men. Such things were, after all, a regrettable but all-too-often inevitable feature of his profession.
Outside, the shadow moved, swinging up and away from the shutter, seeking the edge of the roof. A booted foot slipped, a curse blazed sudden and bright in a mind that kept its dangling body coldly silent-and with a sudden surge of effort, the shadow gained the roof and scrambled away.
* * * * *
As soon as he entered the portal, he felt it: a disturbance in the flow of the Weave, straight ahead. Someone or something was casting a spell on his intended destination or had laid a trap of enchantment on it already. Only those like himself, highly attuned to the Weave, could feel it-and move to avoid whatever danger was waiting.
Chuckling soundlessly, the archmage stepped aside, moving through the drifting blue nothingness to emerge elsewhere, from a portal linked to neither the one he'd entered nor the imperiled one it reached.
* * * * *
Narnra crouched in the lee of a large but crumbling chimney, wincing at the burning ache in her shoulder. She'd torn something inside, it seemed. Something small, thank the gods.
Ah, yes, the watching, all-seeing gods. She glanced up, and thought another silent curse upon the enthusiastically devout idiots who enspelled the Plinth to glow so brightly by night. Thieves don't welcome beacons that illuminate their working world well.
And a thief was what Narnra Shalace was. That had been her profession since her mother's mysterious death and the rush of neighbors, clients, and Waterdhavians she'd never laid eyes on before to snatch all they could of what had belonged to her mother. Only frantic flight had kept a frightened and furious Narnra from being taken herself, doubtless to be sold as a slave by whichever noble had set his men to chasing her.
Everyone knew there were laws in Waterdeep that touched nobles and many more that-somehow-did not. Moreover, noble and rich merchant families had ships and wagons in plenty and outlying lands beyond Waterdeep's laws to travel to, where anything or anyone could be taken.
Leaving a suddenly coinless, bereft Narnra Shalace hunted through the alleys and rooftops. So she'd become what she was being treated as-one more thief scratching to survive in a city that was not kind to thieves.
So here she was, aching and scheming on a decaying rooftop in Trades Ward. A lonely young lass, fairly nimble in her leaps and tumblings but not particularly beautiful, with her slender, long-limbed build, her hacked-off dark hair, black-fire eyes, and beak of a nose. "The Silken Shadow," she billed herself, but still she saw men smirk when she uttered that title in the dingy, nameless taverns near the docks where odd stolen items could be sold for a few coppers-and no questions.
The winter had been hard. If it hadn't been for chimneys like this one, the cold would have taken her before the first snows-and one had to fight for the warmest rooftop spots in Waterdeep.
As it was, Narnra spent much time hungry these days. Hungry and angry. Fear was with her at every waking moment, keeping her glancing behind her and knowing it was largely in vain. She could not help but be uncomfortably aware of how skilled other thieves in this city were … to say nothing of the Watch and the Watchful Order and the Masked Lords alone knew how many powerful wizards. She was a match for none of them and not even a laughable challenge to most.
To come to their notice-save as a passing amusement-would be to die.
So here she crouched, desperate for coins to buy food for her belly and all too apt, these days, to fall into rages.
Rage is something a thief who expects to live to see the dawn can ill afford.
She sighed soundlessly. Oh, she was lithe and acrobatic enough to prowl the rooftops, but not comely enough to seek the warm and easier coin-hers if she could dance unclad inside festhalls. No, she was just one more lonely outlander scrambling to make a dishonest living on the streets of Waterdeep. Scrambling because she lacked the weapons of a noble name or a shop of her own to make forging a dishonest living comparatively easy.
Scowling, Narnra drew forth the purse she'd snatched earlier in that street fight in Dock Ward. A gang of thieves, that must have been, to set upon two merchants that way, and she'd raced in and plucked their prize, so they'd be looking for her. . . .
All for three gold coins-mismatched, from as many cities, but all heavy and true metal-six silvers, four coppers, and a claim-token to a lockbox somewhere in Faerun that she knew not. Well, they would have to serve her.
From inside the top of her boot she drew a larger yet lighter purse, drew open its throat-thong with two fingers, checked that the cloak was laid beside her in just the right position, and shifted herself a fingerlength closer to the edge of the roof, ducking low.
So far as she could tell, the moneylender had no more guards left. He was wearing some sort of daggerclaw, shielded from idle eyes by a cloak he was carrying draped over that arm, but he moved like a man wary and alone. He'd hastened through Lathin's Cut to reach the High Road, and there waited in the first deep doorway for a Watch patrol to pass, and fallen in close behind it. He looked like any respectable merchant caught in the wrong part of the city late at night and trying to wend his way safely home.
If he was going to avoid the scrutiny of the standing Watc
hpost ahead, where the great roads met, he would have to turn aside just below her, in only a few paces more. His gaze flicked upward, and Narnra held her breath and kept very still, hoping she looked like a rooftop gargoyle. Caethur strode on, slowing and stepping wide so as to look around the corner, then drawing in toward it, to duck around close to the wall.
Delicately, the Silken Shadow spilled her paltry handful coins down from above, to flash before his nose and bounce and roll. The moneylender froze rather than darting into a wild run back and away, peered at a rolling gold coin, and-looked up.
To meet the handful of sand from her larger purse, followed by a shadow that leaped down at him with spread hands clutching the cloak in front of her like a streaming shield.
Caethur the moneylender had time to gape but no breath for a shout ere she slammed into him, smashing him to the street. She felt something in him break and crumple as she rode him mercilessly, their bodies bouncing on the cobbles together. By then she had the cloak tight around his head, one knee atop the arm that bore the claw, and a hand free to backhand him across the throat, as hard as she could.
That quelled the dazed beginnings of his groans and left him sprawled and limp. Narnra cut his well-worn belt with a slash from her best knife, snatched away the belt-satchel-heavy with deeds, coins, and coffers-and was up and gone, leaving her sacrificed coins and stolen cloak behind.
Yet swift as she was, she was not quite swift enough. There was a shout from up the street and the flash and flicker of Watch torches turning.
Grimly the Silken Shadow sprinted for her life, seeking the shop just ahead that had an outside staircase.
You'd think I'd be somewhere grander than this, she thought savagely for perhaps the ten thousand and forty-sixth time, if my father truly was a great wizard and my mother a dragon. Where's my high station, my wealth, and my power? Why can't I hurl spells or turn into a dragon?