Shadowbane tap-4

by Eric Scott De Bie

  “Aye,” Kalen said. “That’s what the Dragon said: ‘the turncloak priest.’ Do you know any other priests in Luskan?”

  Toytere shrugged. “Sithe told me you got old Lord Ever-Be-Wary to see you,” he said. “And also that he be dead.”

  “Yes.” Kalen nodded at the Coin-Spinner complex. “Well?”

  Toytere squinted at their target. “Not easy, that be the truth. But we can do it.”

  Kalen regarded him skeptically. “We?”

  Toytere nodded. “Why not? If it gets you gone from me city.”

  “That it will.”

  “Right then.” He smiled. “Maybe we resolve our business first, no?” He trailed off and chuckled-a sound that involved clicking his filed teeth.

  Kalen reached for Vindicator under his cloak. The halfling’s eye twitched repeatedly and his lips seemed wet as though he hungered for a conflict. There was an air about him that spoke of battle-one he sought and one Kalen would gladly give him. He would rather fight a duel in the open than fear a knife in the dark.

  “Eh, maybe later.” Toytere coughed.

  Whatever was wrong with the halfling, it hadn’t overcome his reason-he knew when he was overmatched. It was a tribute to how confused the halfling must be that he had even considered fighting Shadowbane blade to blade.

  “While we just be brooding here for the moment,” the halfling said. “You want me to tell your fortune?”

  “Why not?” Kalen said.

  The halfling took his hand and stared into it, his eyes glossing over like fogged glass. He hummed a tune under his breath to unlock the Sight. For a moment, he stared right through Kalen. Finally, he shivered. “Ay, this be good.”

  “Oh?” Kalen raised an eyebrow.

  “You retire a crippled old man outside a town called Shadowdale,” Toytere said, “where you spend your time offering bad advice to younglings and tupping goats. Oh”-Toytere smirked at him-“and you be ugly, but I don’t be needing the Sight for that.”

  “Well,” Kalen said. “At least I’m alive.”

  The halfling’s smile widened. “True that be.”

  The spark of mirth fell away. They stared out at the temple.

  “I loved her, you know,” Kalen said. “Like my sister.”

  “And she was me sister,” Toytere said. “That don’t change a thing between us.”

  He wiped his nose with his sleeve and Kalen caught him nibbling at his wrist. He squinted, trying to make out a bandage, but the halfling scoffed.

  “Enough of this,” Toytere said. “We go now.”

  “King’s parley,” Toytere said to the guards at the gate.

  The two men-armed with heavy crossbows and swords, gold coins on leather thongs around their necks-looked at one another, then back down at the halfling, then up at Kalen.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Me bodyguard,” Toytere said.

  “And why you need a bodyguard when you come to parley?”

  “Oh, I don’t fear the honorable Coin Priest,” the halfling said. “But the streets to this place, they not be so safe, no? These streets be full of cutthroats, it’s said, that sooner cut out your tongue than bid you well met. I can ill parley without a tongue, methinks.”

  The men seemed a touch confused by Toytere’s speech, but they caught the drift. “ ’Ware the Lady’s snares,” one of them said as he pushed open the door. “If Tymora favors you-”

  “Oh aye,” said Toytere. “I do remember.”

  “Snares?” Kalen asked.

  They entered a great worship hall cleared of chairs or benches for supplicants. In the center stood an altar shaped like a coin, shadowed by a carved statue of the goddess Tymora. Kalen remembered that the statue’s shadow marked the hour of the day-or night, were the moon bright enough. A dim light flickered across the shadow-dappled hall.

  “Watch your step,” Toytere said. “Me Lady Coin, she be fond of her tricks ’n’ traps. She only meets with those Tymora favors-others, well, they don’t make it.”

  Somehow, the concept didn’t surprise Kalen-it even seemed familiar, never knowing if death or pain would strike in any heartbeat. He pointed out a tripwire, which they stepped over cautiously. Toytere was smiling like a madman.

  “Lady Coin?” Kalen asked. “The Coin Priest is a woman?”

  Toytere laughed uproariously at the question, then caught himself and scowled. “So say her face, but faces they do deceive.”

  “As do words.”

  “It be a good tenday to be a lass in Luskan, it seems,” Toytere said. “Two of five Captains be ladies now. There goes the city, no?”

  “Three,” Kalen said, “if that Dragonblood Kasi becomes queen of the Shou.”

  Toytere looked at him blankly, then grinned. “Aye,” he said. “I do be forgetting.”

  Kalen wondered if he had truly forgotten the Dragonbloods, or if he’d included Kasi in his count and “forgotten” to include Myrin as the head of the Dead Rats. What was his game?

  Kalen gestured to a rusty blade hung precariously from the ceiling. “A messy deterrent to unwise guests.”

  “Such be luck,” Toytere said. “Perhaps it best you not touch nothing in this place-unless you know the Lady loves you and be watching.”

  Kalen knew he’d not die-not until he resolved this mess and got Myrin out of Luskan.

  They made their way cautiously across the chamber, avoiding tripwires, wolf irons, and pressure plates at random intervals. When they reached the center, Kalen paused for a moment.

  “What?” Toytere said irritably.

  “Well, at least some things stay the same.” Kalen pointed upward.

  The Clearlight took its name from the multi-colored window in the roof: one of the last surviving sheets of glass in Luskan and one carefully preserved by the folk in the city as a matter of tradition. Kalen was pleased to see the tradition still held. He took in the faint starlight filtering down, and it filled him with as much wonder as it had in his youth. He had seen far greater wonders in Waterdeep and even Westgate, but this sight reminded him that beauty yet persisted even in a place as wretched as Luskan.

  Below the window stood the same statue of Tymora from his youth. Someone had actually made efforts to clean the graffiti off and seal the cracks from the years of abuse by the mean-spirited folk of this depraved city.

  “Perhaps this Coin Priest of yours truly is reverent,” Kalen said.

  “Oh, she’s none of mine.” Toytere pointed. “And look again, no?”

  Kalen looked up at the statue’s face, deep in the folds of its cowl. Shadow had hidden it before, but the statue’s face seemed as marred and cracked as ever-rendered unrecognizable by time and spite. If this Coin Priest truly cared for Lady Luck, would she not have fixed the visage of her goddess? Something about that seemed familiar too-as had the tricks and traps-but he couldn’t quite say what.

  Gazing at the iconography, Kalen was suddenly uncertain of his initial appraisal of the temple. Perhaps it didn’t represent Tymora at all, but instead Beshaba. “Coin-Spinner” could just as easily refer to the Maid of Misfortune as to her bright-eyed sister, Lady Luck. He wondered if that’s what “turncloak priest” meant.

  Toytere murmured a song below his breath. Kalen found that more than a little disturbing-that, and the way Toytere had laughed loudly at the entrance. Again, he wondered what ailed the halfling. Had he been bitten after all, and even now, the Fury grew inside him?

  They came at last to the other end of the trapped hall and Toytere directed them to a single door set beside defaced statuary. It was not the main set of double doors, flanked by withered gold curtains, but rather a servant’s door.

  “Heh!” Toytere gestured to a large black stain on the floor near the double doors. “That could be us, Little Dren. The doors sprout fangs when you touch them false.”

  His huge smile unsettled Kalen more than anything he’d said before. The halfling seemed to long for death and every second without it made his smile all the more
manic. Kalen checked Vindicator at his belt. Something about this felt so godsdamned familiar, as well. Almost-

  “After you, goodsir,” Toytere said with a bow.

  When they entered the Coin Priest’s chambers, it all made sense to him. The traps that could spring at any moment, the defaced feminine statue, the hall bare of ornamentation. He’d known all these things, grown up with them.

  And the one common factor that tied them all together was the woman in the loose-fitting white robe, reclining on a black divan in the center of the room.

  His hand went to Vindicator’s hilt.

  “Kalen,” the Coin Priest said in recognition. “Take them.”

  On her word, crossbows clicked and sighted on Kalen and Toytere’s faces. Six of her acolytes stood ready-men and women with cruel faces and no hesitation.

  Kalen watched only the woman who issued the commands. She was much older, but he recognized her eyes. One was cold and pale, so like his own. The other was a platinum coin that winked at him in the candlelight.

  Toytere eyed the crossbows. “I suppose you two have met, no?”

  Priestess and paladin locked eyes across the room. For them, no one else mattered.

  “Hail and well met, Kalen,” the Coin Priest said. “Little Brother.”

  “Well met, Eden,” he said. “Sister.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  26 KYTHORN (MORNING)

  "Well,” Eden said, grinning like a hungry fox among sleeping chickens. “My goddess must love me, to offer me this delicious reunion.”

  “Truly.” Kalen did his best to ignore the crossbows. “You look well, Sister.”

  “You’re a godsdamned liar.” Eden grinned. “But you’re sweet to say so.”

  His assertion had been true, after a fashion. The Eden before him was not the sickly girl of his memory-poorly crafted and worse tempered. Some of the signs of her youth remained: a leather-and-metal brace on her left leg, a cane set with antlers at its head that leaned against the divan, quick to hand. There was a certain fleshy presence about her Kalen found all too familiar. She had the body of a girl who’d been told she could never be thin or pretty.

  “Wait,” Toytere said. “Brother? Sister?”

  “For a seer, you’re remarkably blind,” Eden said. “I suppose you hardly realize other folk exist, much less their relations. But I suppose you never met us together.”

  “You came back to Luskan,” Kalen said. “After mother-”

  “Spare me the reminiscences.” Eden brushed ebony black ringlets back from her weathered, Luskan face. “I should kill you right now.”

  “If that is what you will have.” Kalen wondered if he could cut down one of the crossbowmen before they shot him. He could use that man as a shield, get to the next …

  “A thousand pardons,” said Toytere, “but we be coming here under a banner of king’s parley, Lady of the Clearlight. Or do that not matter?”

  “Oh bother.” Eden’s full lips turned into a pout. “Why, of course that matters. This one is with you? Think carefully, ’ere you answer.”

  Kalen realized putting his fate in Toytere’s hands did not relieve him in the slightest, Sight or no Sight. The halfling could have his revenge right now.

  “Aye, your ladyship, he is mine,” Toytere said at length. “And I’ll have no violence done against him, all the same to you.”

  “It isn’t, but very well.” Eden waved her lackeys back, but they kept their weapons trained on the visitors. She gestured to a full sideboard with liquors of various colors. In Waterdeep, such a selection would be a matter of course in a noble’s sitting room; in Luskan, Eden must have robbed or killed a dozen bootleggers to acquire it. “Wine? Something stronger?”

  “No,” Kalen said.

  “Suit your own self.” Eden waved and one of her attendants poured her a snifter of brandy. “I’m surprised to see you here. To what do I owe the denied pleasure of your deaths?”

  Kalen bit his lip. He should have known Beshaba had been frowning on this whole damned quest: to bring him to this city he hated, to try to rescue a woman who didn’t want to leave, to avoid a boy he could not teach. Now, the only lead he had was the word of a dying madman, which pointed to his sister.

  He had no choice. “The plague.”

  “The Fury. Quite painful, I hear.” She sipped her brandy. “So what of it?”

  Kalen had hoped it would be easier, but he saw Eden would not part with any knowledge readily. “We were told you knew of it,” he said.

  “Told by whom?” she asked. “The Dragonbloods, who you attacked this very day? I trust the Old Dragon’s well.”

  “Dead,” Kalen said.

  “Pity,” Eden said. “He was a worthy opponent. Unlike your little halfling there, who can’t even See a waiting ambush.”

  “Ah-” Then Toytere shrugged. “True, it be.”

  Kalen crossed his arms. “What are you doing here, Eden?”

  “Why, serving the pleasure of the goddess.” Eden gave him a mock toast.

  “Which one?” Kalen asked. “Tymora or Beshaba?”

  “Neither. Both.” She shrugged. “I feed the hungry and clothe the naked-at the end of a night when fewer starve or freeze than had to, does it truly matter?”

  “Yes,” Kalen said.

  Eden smiled at him.

  Silence stretched, punctuated first by the scrape of glass on wood when Eden set her empty glass on the side table, then by a click-click-click as Eden tapped her fingernail on her eye-coin. The rhythmic sound grated.

  “That’s it?” Toytere said. “You’ll tell us nothing?”

  The halfling’s tone drew their attention. He was the picture of anxiety; sweat beaded on his forehead and his jaw was clenched tight. He shivered, as though he could barely hold back a far more violent outburst. He recoiled as though chastened.

  “The Fury.” Eden took up her cane and rose from the divan. “You’d expect, in the nature of plagues, to see folk hacking and coughing, but no. Rather”-she stepped toward Kalen with an awkward sort of sensuousness, like a wounded cat that yet stalks its prey-“rather, folk become beasts. Moody, aggressive, even mad. Rioting in the streets, brawls and duels … ’tis only after, if victims survive all the fighting, that the sickness eats them from within.”

  “Well,” Toytere said. “Thanks, lass, but we knew all that. Now if you’ll excuse-”

  “This plague,” Kalen said, his eyes on Eden. “How does it spread?”

  He knew the answer already-in his heart-but he needed the words.

  “None know,” Eden said. “It could be water, or air, or blood-maybe rats?”

  “Bah,” Toytere said, avoiding Kalen’s questioning glance.

  “Myself, I believe it simply a part of this city,” Eden said. “The gods’ curse, laid upon ruined Luskan. Here, after all”-she touched Kalen’s chin with her cold, gloved fingers-”who’d notice everyone fighting all the time? You could have it and think you are simply trying to live in the harsh world that is Luskan. At least, until the rages begin.

  “A person with the Fury,” she began as she turned to Toytere, who veritably shook. She swayed up to him and gently laid her hand on his head. “He grows impatient, first. Then he shouts or snaps at naught. Then out of the blue he savages you. Like an animal. And then”-she clicked her tongue while reaching for Toytere’s wrist-“dear, dear-that doesn’t look well at all.”

  The halfling swatted her hand away. “You shut your rutting mouth!”

  “So.” Eden eyed Toytere, as did Kalen, pointedly.

  The halfling saw their scrutiny and reined in his emotions. “What I be meaning,” he said. “You be showing some respect, me Lady Coin, for them’s what died a terrible death.”

  “Granted,” she said, turning and moving back to Kalen. “I’ve prayed the Lady for a cure for this malady, but none has appeared. The only end I know for the Fury is death.” Toytere clutched at his arm. For the first time, Kalen noticed a soaked bandage under the halfling’s slee
ve. He felt cold inside.

  “No doubt the Lady will provide,” Eden said, looking back at Toytere. “Her blessing is sharp, like a knife upon a whetstone. It prepares us for the violence to come.”

  The halfling lost most of the color from his face. Had Kalen entertained any doubt, he knew now that Toytere had the Fury or at least believed he did. Kalen could believe it as well. The way the halfling had acted before-his outbursts and impatience … all of it fit Eden’s words exactly. Did she speak truly or was she merely trying to frighten them?

  Eden gazed at him levelly. “Were I you,” she said, “I would get whatever you came to Luskan to find”-she smiled slightly-“and leave.”

  That, Kalen thought, was as wonderful idea.

  He turned, but she caught his face between her hands, studying him. “You look well, my handsome brother,” she said. “Aye, that’s the face of the Silverymoon seducer who raped my mother, right enough.”

  Kalen wanted to protest, but the words caught in his throat. “Sister-”

  “Barely,” she said. “Though I’m glad you’ve kept your face, Kalen.” She pressed her cheek against his. “Shame about the parley, else I’d gladly tear it off for you.”

  Kalen shivered.

  Eden pushed him away dismissively and wiped her hands. “See them out,” she said to her guards. “Gently, if you will.”

  When they were almost to the door, she held up a hand. “Hold,” she said. “Pray, what did Umbra say exactly. The words he used?”

  “He spoke of a turncoat priest,” Kalen said. “ ‘The turncloak is the one who knows all.’ I assumed that was you.” He scrutinized her carefully, but she hid her reaction well. She’d always been a far better liar than he. Had this whole visit been a waste of time?

  No, Eden had conveyed something of value-a threat. One that awakened him to what had to be done next. He had to get Myrin out of here.

  “Farewell Brother,” Eden said. “Get out of my city and don’t return.”

  “That,” Kalen said, “I can promise.”

  Eden had very much enjoyed that exchange.

  It amused her to witness the confused look on Kalen’s handsome but stupid face. As well, she always enjoyed watching the halfling sweat. She realized why he had come in the first place-to keep her from slipping word of his impending betrayal.