by Ed Greenwood
The commander wasn't about to verbally retreat from the cold refusal he'd just given, but nodded curtly. The foregate opened.
Tantaerra and The Masked were ushered into sixty feet or so of cobbled passage between the foregate and the still-closed inner gate, the massive stones of the gate-keep all around and above them, complete with firing ports everywhere.
As the foregate started to creak closed, an armored Molthuni rode up out of the night, yelling, "Stop them! Stop them! That explosion? They did that! Stop them before-"
With a grim smile, Tantaerra pointed a finger of the Fearsome Gauntlet, and smashed the man into silence.
Then she whirled at the thunder of onrushing boots, to blast down the gate guards charging from the inner gate-but The Masked hissed, "Trust me" into her ear, put his hand on the gauntlet, and snarled, "Luraumadar!"
A racing wave of magic flashed out of the magical gage. It shook Tantaerra and her partner, numbing their very teeth-but the onrushing guards fell or stumbled dazedly along the walls, then dropped to the ground. Unseen weapons clattered behind walls, and an arm appeared through one of the firing ports overhead, dangling limply.
Eerie silence fell.
Beyond the unconscious guards, the inner gate stood ajar. Tantaerra and her partner peered through it.
More silence, and no one to be seen. Cautiously they ducked through it, into Braganza. They were met by cartwheels rumbling, some echoing footfalls, and the smaller sounds of a large city largely asleep.
A door stood open, near at hand. The Masked peered into the room beyond, then stepped into it. Frowning, Tantaerra followed.
It was a guardroom, empty of people. A lit storm-lantern on the table showed them a chair overturned, among several chairs arranged around a table strewn with cards and dice, oiled rags, and whetstones. Through another open doorway they could see light-and smell food.
Boar stew, steaming in bowls on a table where men sat slumped and silent, with tankards of what looked like small beer, and handloaves of hardbread. No one in the bunkroom moved, save for quiet snores.
Suddenly ravenous, Tantaerra and The Masked rushed to the table and ate, Tantaerra taking up a great jug of beer and pouring it slowly down her throat in delight.
The belch that tore out of her after her last swallow was thunderous, and her partner's flat stare set her to giggling. He shook his head. "The gauntlet didn't kill them, you know. We don't have long."
Tantaerra promptly snatched up a full bowl and spoon, and muttered, "So eat and walk, masked man. Eat and walk."
She headed for the door, and her partner swiftly drained a handy tankard and claimed his own bowl.
∗ ∗ ∗
Night-shrouded Braganza wasn't as asleep as they'd first thought. The distant explosion had roused many, and the Watchguards on duty were concerned and frowningly alert, but no hue and cry was raised for two figures striding purposefully along with no trace of furtiveness. And what sort of thief strides the streets eating stew?
Tantaerra was almost done when they arrived at the great door of the soaring stone mansion of Lord Krzonstal Telcanor. The house guards stirred at their approach, readying weapons.
"Yes?" the guard commander snapped coldly, as The Masked strode up.
"Lord Telcanor bade us speak to him the moment we returned to Braganza," Armistrade snapped right back.
"You can wait until morning, whoever you are," the commander said flatly, eyes flickering as he took in the bowls and spoons-and the halfling. "He's asleep, and I'm not waking him."
"I'll be needing your name, then," The Masked told him calmly. "So the General Lords know who to punish. Lord Telcanor may, of course, not wait for whatever Canorate may want to do to you. He may want to appease them by doing it to you first."
The commander frowned and stepped back, making a hand-signal. In response, a row of gleaming spears were leveled to menace them.
"Well," Tantaerra murmured, "you tried. Some things never change."
"Aid, here!" the commander barked sharply, as boots scraped the cobbles behind her.
A Watchguard patrol had come by.
She and The Masked both risked looks over their shoulders, and were treated to the sight of competent-looking Watchswords spreading out carefully to block their escape.
"Your names and lawful business," the Watchguard patrol leader demanded in almost bored tones, advancing on them from behind.
By way of reply, Tantaerra whirled and flung her empty bowl into his face. The Masked threw his-still laden with enough stew to make it stick to the man's face-at a hulking Watchsword right behind the patrol leader.
There was a general roar and charge.
"You down, but Gauntlet up," The Masked told her firmly in the midst of the din, going to the street and dragging her down with him.
The gauntlet flashed under his direction, his mask echoing that burst of light-and charging Molthuni fell on their faces in a great clattering of spears and clanging of armor.
Followed by …silence.
Tantaerra looked all around. House guards and Watchswords alike had fallen, slumped and silent.
"Was it something I said?" she joked, as Tarram hauled her to her feet and headed for the front door of the Telcanor mansion.
A lone night porter was standing between the two grand rows of show armor and looking bored when they stepped inside, but he was so astonished to see a female halfling in his entrance hall that he actually bent down to peer at her.
The uppercut Tantaerra delivered snapped him right back into The Masked's roundhouse punch. It knocked him cold, but he wavered on his feet just long enough for Tarram to catch him and slow his journey to the floor into something near silent.
"The Lord might be asleep, but I'm thinking he's far more likely to be two floors up," The Masked commented. "In that audience chamber of his."
Tantaerra smiled crookedly. "Front stairs, or back?"
"Back. Fewer people for us to fight, or who can raise the alarm before we can get to them. Oh, and we leave the gauntlet here."
"And you were made Imperial Governor when, exactly? No, seriously, Tarram, I agree about the back way, but why stash the gauntlet? And where's 'here,' exactly?"
"With this," The Masked told her, tapping his mask, "I can call on its powers without them seeing it on one of us-the one of us who'll immediately be the target for anything they can hurl. And 'here' is …here."
He tapped the closed helm of the nearest suit of armor.
Tantaerra looked up and down the two impressively gleaming rows, pivoted to scan the hall and make sure no second servant was peering at them from anywhere, and asked, "What if they're enchanted? The armor, I mean. Then they can go prancing off anywhere, the gauntlet with them, and we're beyond roasted."
Her partner pointed. "Animated? With that many bolts holding them to those frames to keep them upright? Hardly."
"I am convinced," she granted, and surrendered the Fearsome Gauntlet. In a trice The Masked put it inside the helm, lowered the visor again, and stepped away. No trace of it could be seen.
"Right," she sighed. "Off we go to what's almost certainly going to be a rather unpleasant meeting. He'll try to trick us."
"He'll try to kill us," The Masked replied. "No one's succeeded yet."
"It only takes one success," she muttered back. "Lead on, Masked Fool."
He grinned, and did so.
∗ ∗ ∗
Around them, the House of Telcanor was dark and silent. They tried to keep it that way.
They saw no servants along the route they took through the vast mansion, and although they weren't certain exactly where the upper passage they ended up in gave into the rear of the audience chamber, they needn't have worried. Long before they reached it, they could see light, and hear voices and the trudge and scrape of many booted feet moving about.
As soon as he saw the open door the light was spilling through, The Masked stepped to the side of the passage and stood to attention against the wall, li
ke a guard. Tantaerra joined him, and followed as he sidestepped his way along that stretch of the passage.
By the time they reached the doorway, they could hear that someone was angry. Someone confident, male, and not young.
The audience chamber was ablaze with light. Lord Krzonstal Telcanor stood inside, fully dressed and with a large metal goblet in his hand, looking grim. So did the handful of his guards who stood with him.
Striding back and forth before them was the owner of the angry voice: the advisor Tartesper.
"I've just come from the Bailiff of Braganza, who is…upset. He and Lord Cole Ravnagask are suspicious that the rival houses of Mereir and Telcanor might have some involvement with the recent explosion not far outside the city walls. We must be very careful to do nothing in the days ahead that might add to their suspicions."
Lord Telcanor shrugged. "They seem suspicious of everything I do. Shall I take up gardening, perhaps? Or will they think that a mere cover for burying inconvenient bodies, or some such?"
At that moment, two guards turned a corner in the distance, and came along the passage. They saw Tantaerra and The Masked listening at the open door, shouted, and snatched out their weapons.
The Masked strode through the doorway into the audience chamber as if it were his own. Tantaerra hastened to follow.
Lord Krzonstal Telcanor gaped at them, then smiled in triumph and told his advisor, "Behold! The two investigators from the General Lords I persuaded to undertake a certain mission for the glory of Braganza!"
"I do recall, Lord. Yet I look upon them now, and see no Fearsome Gauntlet."
Telcanor winced, then glared at Tantaerra and her partner. "Well? Did you recover it?"
Tantaerra glared back. "We have not. Yet."
"Yet you dare to return? You're traitors! You must have been merely posing as investigators reporting to the General Lords. Guards, kill them!"
"No, Lord!" Tartesper snapped. "These two alive protect your neck! These two dead will be dismissed as mere fabrication on your part! They must be taken to the Bailiff for questioning!"
The guards hesitated, swords half-out, and looked to their master.
Who sighed and said reluctantly, "Tartesper, you are right. As always." He waved his guards back.
Whereupon the advisor confronted Tantaerra and The Masked. "The time has come," he told them coldly, "for you to tell us who you truly are."
"Lord Investigators, reporting directly to the General Lords," Armistrade said boldly.
Tartesper shook his head, his disbelief clear, then asked quietly, "Tell me: what sleeps beneath the white tomb?"
"The greatest secret in Canorate," The Masked told him promptly.
The advisor lifted an eyebrow.
"What gate does the black key unlock?"
"The gate to Molthune's heart."
"Who was the seventh?"
Tarram's answer came a shade more slowly this time. "The Red Dragon."
Tartesper sneered at him. "A clever thief may buy or overhear one pass-phrase, or even two, but I've not found one yet cleverer than me."
He looked at Lord Telcanor. "They're no 'Lord Investigators.'"
Then he turned to the Telcanor bodyguards, and ordered, "Disarm and arrest them."
"I'd not try that, if I were you," The Masked warned, backing toward the east wall and drawing a dagger. Tantaerra moved with him, wishing she still had two hands so she could have two daggers right now.
Unimpressed, the guards drew swords and advanced.
"Keep back," The Masked warned them calmly.
One sneered, and none of them paused in their menacing advance.
Tantaerra saw her partner's mask flash; he'd called on the gauntlet. A moment later, with a sound like parchment tearing, only as loud as thunder, a rift opened across the floor of the audience chamber.
And swiftly widened, amid rumblings that grew louder and louder.
Some lamps below exploded like shattered stars as ceilings fell and walls crumpled. Several floors beneath the audience chamber were collapsing into a chasm.
Three of the bodyguards fell into the gulf with startled shouts, tumbling down through torn timbers, falling wall stones, and plaster dust. The others scrambled back from the edge of the rift.
"My home!" Lord Telcanor howled, his goblet falling forgotten from his hand to bounce on the floor, ringing like a bell-until it fell into the rift, and was lost in the widening destruction below. He swelled up in fury and pointed across the gulf at Tantaerra and her partner as if his fingers could stab them across half a room. "Arrest them!" he bellowed, "and break their arms and legs! They don't need to be able to run and fight to answer the Bailiff of Braganza!"
The Masked's mask flashed again.
One wall of the audience chamber tore open from top to bottom, leaving the room open to the night. As Lord Telcanor gaped in disbelief, a cool breeze wafted in.
Through the gap, another wing of the mansion could be seen across a courtyard, soaring and grand in the light of its many lanterns.
"It would be unwise to continue to demand such things, Lord Telcanor," The Masked told their shaken host, and pointed at that grand wing of Telcanor House.
It promptly groaned, shed a few roof slates, then slowly, but with a quickening, growing thunder, leaned forward and collapsed before their eyes, a huge swath of its front wall falling into the courtyard.
Leaving five floors of rooms torn open to the air-and Lord Telcanor aghast and in tears.
"We can kill everyone, and destroy Braganza, if we must," Tantaerra informed the Telcanors on the far side of the wide chasm that now stretched from one end of the audience chamber to the other. "Don't force us to do so."
She shot a look at her partner, lifted her hand to shield her face, and behind it hissed, "How did you do all this?"
"Badly built, this place," he muttered back. "Make the right pillar vanish, and all the rest follows."
The advisor hurled a spell at them, shouting, "Abadar demands your destruction!"
Purple flames roared out of nothingness to sear Tantaerra and her partner-but vanished right in front of their noses, leaving them standing unscathed.
"Abadar does nothing of the sort," The Masked retorted. "Just as you're no priest, of Abadar or anyone else!"
He lifted his hand, and the Fearsome Gauntlet rose into view, up through the chasm.
The advisor swiftly snapped out another magic.
Tarram Armistrade smiled. The mask pulsed, the gauntlet drank the advisor's spell-and went dark. It shuddered in midair, and with an audible groan cracked from one end to the other.
As its fragments started to fall, Tantaerra shot a look at her partner. He stared back at her, aghast.
They fled for the back passage door together.
The advisor hurled another spell after them, but succeeded only in blasting down the door and the wall that framed it. The flying fragments of that blast crushed the foremost bodyguards, who'd taken another door out into the passage to get around the rift and reach The Masked and Tantaerra, spattering the passage walls with gore.
"After them!" Lord Telcanor bellowed, his voice terrible with wrath. "Kill them!"
His surviving bodyguards hesitated for a moment, but he ran out into the passage after them, his eyes ablaze with fury.
Not waiting for him to catch up, they resumed the chase.
Too enraged to fear for his own safety, their master followed. They pounded past the smeared bodies of the fallen guards and along the passage, where Lord Telcanor flung open the door of his treasury and roared at the duty guards inside to join him, so loudly that they flinched back.
They rushed out into the passage, and their master led them, following Tantaerra and The Masked, pelting down the back stair, where-
Lord Krzonstal Telcanor came to an abrupt halt, to gawk at carnage.
The staircase below him was choked with the broken bodies of his guards. Just in time, he saw their doom and his peril-as long, wormlike arms reach
ed down from the sloping underside of the stair, seeking to rend.
A tentacled monster was clinging to the ceiling above him, reaching for them.
Telcanor and his guards stumbled hastily back up a few steps, out of reach, as the tentacled monster clinging to the ceiling grabbed at them.
Below them on a landing, Tantaerra and Tarram put their backs to the wall.
"It's Voyvik!" Tantaerra shouted unnecessarily. "Use the mask, or something!"
Next to her, The Masked spread his hands helplessly.
Then a door on another landing opened, and blue bolts of magic streaked out, missiles that swept up and unerringly into the monster.
The terrified Lord Telcanor sobbed and clawed his way back a few steps higher.
The tentacled monster convulsed, writhing in pain. Another volley of magical missiles raced from behind the door to smite it, and it shuddered and shrank back-but when the blue radiance faded, the weakened, maddened creature reached out again angrily.
Its tentacles still couldn't reach either Lord Telcanor and his guards or Tantaerra and her partner. After straining to do so several times, they flailed about in frustration.
Then the thing of tentacles began to slowly descend the wall, moving as if it was in great pain, heading for the door where Tantaerra crouched.
"Ah, yes," came a sardonic comment from the other doorway on the landing. "That's the problem with letting the ignorant play with magic. They don't know what they're doing. Or when, for instance, they'll expend the last of an item's power. The gauntlet was a wonderful thing-but not endless."
It was Telcanor's advisor Tartesper, but his face and body were …changing. He looked more and more different with every step he took, as he strolled out onto the landing and gave Tantaerra an unpleasant smile.
She stared at him. "Karm?"
"Who else?" he replied smugly. He now looked exactly as he had when meeting Voyvik in the forest. "It's a shame that Voyvik was unable to complete his mission, but now here you are-and with my mask, I see. How convenient."
He peered up the stair at Lord Telcanor. "So, Krzonstal, would you care to negotiate your rescue? At a price of, say, half your Braganzan properties? Fitting hire, I'd judge, for your staunch new ally, the most powerful wizard in Molthune."