The City of Splendors

by Ed Greenwood

  Which means, he thought silently, no one will be able to hear the screams.

  Golskyn turned. “As yet,” he remarked almost idly, “I see no sahuagin.”

  Mrelder entered the tunnel and stepped into an alcove, lifting his lantern to light up a large raised cistern capped with iron bars. “At least twenty feet deep. Water storage, perhaps; this place was built as a hidden refuge.”

  Golskyn strolled over to take a closer look.

  “ ’Ware, Father,” Mrelder murmured.

  As he spoke, four thick, green-scaled arms thrust up through the bars at Lord Unity’s face, talons flexing to seize and rend. The old priest flung himself to the floor, rolling away with surprising agility.

  He came up smiling. “A live sahuagin! Who’d have thought it possible?”

  Mrelder bit back the urge to sarcastically thank his father for having such confidence in him and instead asked, “Shall we harvest the limb?”

  Golskyn nodded.

  Mrelder signaled to a ready trio of mongrelmen. One took a pinkfin from a large bucket, and another hefted a heavy chain, threaded through a metal ring in the ceiling directly over the cistern, that ended in a barbed hook. With deft brutality the first mongrelman transfixed the fish with the hook, and raised this squirming, dripping bait for all to see.

  His two fellow acolytes faced each other across the cistern, each holding a docker’s reach-claw: a metal rod ending in two open, claw-like metal pincers, fitted with a trigger-wire that controlled a spring holding the pincers open.

  “Ingenious,” Golskyn murmured, seeing what they meant to do. “Begin.”

  The cloaked acolytes started to chant. The strange result was more akin to nightmares than bardcraft, half-spoken and half-sung over a jagged, ever-changing rhythm.

  Hoth drew his sword and extended it, long and slender, toward the chanting mongrelmen.

  Then Golskyn began to sing, a thin thread of melody that twined around the chant, goading it to a higher pitch and intensity. Like foul incense it rose, prayers to gods whose names Mrelder still did not know.

  Slowly Hoth’s sword began to glow, not with heat but with a cruel, pale light: divine magic. Mrelder nodded to the acolytes by the cistern.

  The mongrelman who’d baited the hook hauled on the chain, lowering the dying pinkfin to dangle over the iron bars, gasping and writhing.

  The taloned hands lunged for the fish.

  The mongrelmen flanking the cistern moved just as swiftly. A pair of triggers snapped, and iron claws clanged shut around sahuagin wrists.

  Its hissing, snarling bellow of rage was almost lost in the swelling chant. Still singing, all the acolytes rushed forward to haul on one reach-claw, pulling one sahuagin arm well up through the bars. Tugging and singing, they managed to pull it flat against the iron grate. The manacled sahuagin thrashed and struggled but was overmatched.

  Hoth strode close, glowing sword lifted on high. He hefted it, two of his hands on the hilt and one on each crosspiece, his thews rippling—and then brought the blade down.

  Scales, flesh, and bone were shorn through as if they were so much butter, and the arm bounced on the stone floor, severed above the elbow. The cleanly sliced stump vanished back through the bars, and a bubbling wail of agony trailed away into the unseen waters.

  Mrelder was already peeling off his tunic. He lay down quickly on one of the tables, extending his arm. Strong hands held it firmly in place as he closed his eyes and composed himself, silently reciting the mind-chant an old monk of Candlekeep had taught him.

  It was working. He was drifting … down … deeper and darker, all sound fading. He was only dimly aware of the continuing chant now …

  He’d spent hours practicing this, hoping that if his mind was settled just so, his body might accept the new limb.

  White-hot pain exploded in Mrelder’s skull like a fireball, dashing his wits and will to screaming froth in the void, tatters that writhed, faded … and were lost in the deepening, silent darkness.

  Varandros Dyre leaned across his gleaming desk and snapped, “Be welcome!” with a fire in his eyes that betokened no good for someone.

  All the men taking chairs in this unfamiliar upper office wondered just who Dyre held such ill will toward, and hoped they’d not be caught standing too close to whoever it was when the old Shark struck.

  Dyre noticed Karrak Lhamphur eyeing the nearest of the small, gleaming forest of decanters on the curving table before the arc of guest-seats, and waved at it grandly. “Drink, friends!”

  Lhamphur and Dorn Imdrael shot him similarly suspicious glances, but it was Lhamphur who spoke up. “What’s the occasion, Var? And why here, in such secrecy, instead of at your grand little citadel on Nethpranter’s Street? Something you don’t want your ’prentices to hear?” He glanced around curiously. “What is this place, anyway? A new venture you want our coins for? ”

  The Shark’s eyes flashed, and—just for a moment—the room sang with tension as every guest awaited the expected explosion.

  Then Varandros Dyre smiled and slowly reached for one of the two decanters on his desk, and men breathed in the room again.

  “No to your last, Master Smith! Dyre’s Fine Walls and Dwellings owns this building free and clear, thanks to the successes we’ve all shared in this season. Just as Lhamphur’s Locks and Gates recently acquired a warehouse for metals to meet the need for gates and hinges and doorplates, I find myself in need of a place to store cut and dressed stone. I can’t just leave it lying about in the streets, now can I?”

  This caused an overly eager eruption of chuckles from Dyre’s closest friend, Hasmur Ghaunt, which thankfully distracted the Shark from noticing the expression that passed momentarily over the face of Jarago Whaelshod, the last-invited of his four guests. The proprietor of Whaelshod’s Wagons privately held the view that to save sharing coin with him whenever possible, Varandros Dyre frequently did just that. The Watch usually came to Master Carters to inquire as to how piles of building-stones came to be blocking the narrow streets of the southerly wards of the city, rather than bothering the fastest-rising builder in Waterdeep.

  “No,” Dyre said heartily, “I don’t want your coins, yet I do want to share some news with you, and the words we may exchange shouldn’t be overheard by anyone. My home comes furnished with not only ’prentices but daughters and servants, whose hearing, I shouldn’t have to tell any of you, can be far keener than even their tongues.”

  Some chuckles arose. Of the five men in the room, only Hasmur Ghaunt was unmarried, and only Dyre had buried a wife. All of them had been blasted, at one time or another, by the dragonlike temper of Goodwife Anleiss Lhamphur.

  “My lasses’ll be along later to bring us food to go with this death-to-thirst, but we’ll hear them arrive and have to let them in: there’ll be no listening at keyholes.”

  The four guests nodded. Jacks were drained and set down thoughtfully, and Dyre waved at his guests to have more and drink freely.

  Surprisingly, it was the swift-to-roister Dorn Imdrael who put his hand over the top of his jack and suggested, “Before we all get roaring, suppose you tell us why we’re here. I prefer to be prudent when giving my aye or nay.”

  Dyre nodded. “Well said. Of course.” He looked meaningfully over at the closed and barred door they’d all come in by. It was the only door in the room.

  His glance made Hasmur Ghaunt lean forward in almost breathless haste to gabble, “I barred the door like you said! And set the alarm-cord, too!”

  Dyre nodded his thanks and planted his hairy, battered hands on the table. “Yestermorn,” he began, “a man of mine was injured falling off a scaffold in Redcloak Lane.”

  His guests winced, frowned, and made sympathetic sounds. The days of hushing up deaths and maimings of workers were gone or going fast. A hurt man meant coin paid out for no work, and hard questions in the guildhall—or harder questions from the Watch.

  “Boards broke and spilled him off works that had got all twisted th
e night before and near-fallen into Redcloak Lane.”

  “Wasn’t that Marlus and his crew?” Lhamphur asked disbelievingly. “I thought he was one of the best—”

  “He is. A pack of noble pups at play set their swords on him and his hammer-hands, and started fires, too! One scaffold came right down, but this second one they hauled back into place and braced, and I hardly blame them. But for the whim and grace of Tymora, and the Watch happening along in a timely manner for once, the whole place would have burned!”

  There were gasps and whistles at that, and more than one man reached for a decanter.

  “As you know,” Dyre went on, his voice on the edge of a snarl, “this is hardly our first brush with Waterdhavian nobility.”

  Lhamphur pursed his lips. “They walked free?”

  “They did. The Watch gave them cold words but let them go. Utterly unpunished. One of them made noises about restitution, and that was the end of it.”

  Whaelshod shook his head. “They’ve got to be stopped,” he growled, and heads nodded around the room.

  Dyre’s was one of them, as the grim beginnings of a smile crept onto his face. Two seasons back, some idiot nobles had taken it into their heads that racing each other on their most wild-spirited horses from the Court of the White Bull to the South Gate was a daringly sporting thing to do. The fastest way out of the Court was down Salabar Street, and Whaelshod’s Wagons stood on westfront Salabar. Everyone knew Jarago Whaelshod had lost beasts and harness and had one man injured.

  “I don’t know how prudent ’twould be to complain about it, though,” Lhamphur said slowly, twirling his jack in his hands.

  Dyre suppressed a knowing smile. Nobles bought the elaborate and expensive gates crafted by Master Smith Karrak Lhamphur, and nobles paid the highest coin for copies of keys made with utter discretion, which half the city knew to be Lhamphur’s special skill and greatest source of income.

  Instead of sneering, Dyre nodded. “Right you are, Karrak. We’ve complained before and gotten nowhere. I’m through complaining.”

  All of his guests looked up sharply. This time, Varandros Dyre did smile.

  “Something must be done,” he told them. “And mark me: this time, something will be done.”

  The proprietor of Ghaunt Thatching, normally Dyre’s smiling and enthusiastically tail-wagging follower, frowned at his friend a little doubtfully. “Uhmm … Var? What d’you mean?”

  Varandros Dyre sat back, regarded his guests over the large and battered ruin of his nose, drew in a deep breath, and began.

  “Waterdeep’s a city of coins, hard work, and the rise and fall of trade. How is it that we who sweat and strain for every last nib and shard suffer the antics of idle young men who ruin property and harm hard workers and cost us all coin?”

  His voice had sharpened to match the fire in his eyes. Dyre drew himself up as firmly as Mount Waterdeep and answered himself. “Because we know speaking up or seeking justice is a waste of time and marks us as men to be hurt, ruined, or driven out of the city. Why? Because, deep down, we know the Masked Lords, who purportedly rule us all in fairness and supposedly number among their ranks many dungsweepers and humble crafters from Trades Ward garrets as well as master merchants and the occasional noble, are in truth all nobles or powerful mages! The Lords keep the city safe and firm-ruled and orderly not for the common weal but to guard the power they have—and they suffer none to rise and challenge it! The tales of humble folk wearing the Masks of Lordship are mere fancies intended to accomplish just one thing: to keep any Waterdhavian not nobly born from rising up against the rule of the Lords!”

  He leaned forward again, eyes blazing. “Now, I’ve no more interest in ruling Waterdeep than the rest of you, but I have had it up to here—” He slashed one hand across his throat. “—with standing idly by, swallowing my lost coins and trying to smile into the foolish young faces of those who openly despise and ridicule us because of the names they happen to have been born with, while this goes on and on, and we await a real disaster! City blocks set aflame, scaffoldings falling with scores of good men on them … as our taxes rise year by year, those who’re driven beyond prudent silence are savagely put down—”

  There were grim nods across the room, as everyone remembered Thalamandar Master-of-Baldrics, and the body of Lhendrar the weaver being fished out of the harbor, and …

  “—and the nobles grow more and more reckless and steeped in their depravities, as they jeer at us from behind the wall of faceless Lords! How many of them wear the Masks of Lords? How many?”

  “True,” Imdrael muttered, “all true, and said before, by many of us, even without …” He held up his jack in salute, to indicate the fine wine it held.

  “True,” Lhamphur echoed, “and to my mind almost all the Lords are probably nobles, yet pointing fingers at rot and corruption is one thing, and doing something about it is another. The doing is what can get us all killed.”

  “So what,” Jaeger Whaelshod asked heavily, as if Lhamphur’s words had been an actor’s cue, “d’you want of us, Var?”

  The Shark looked across his gleaming desk at them, juggling something in his large-fingered hands. Almost lazily, he tossed that something into the air.

  It flashed back the light of the candle-lamps as it came. The merchants holding their jacks of wine, men of Waterdeep all, drew sharply back from what they saw in an instant was battle-steel, and let it bite deep into the table not far in front of Karrak Lhamphur and stand there quivering.

  The weapon was a slender, finely made dagger with a curiously shaped pommel: a speartip topped by a star, bearing an ornate monogram on the sides of the spear blade.

  “M … K,” Lhamphur deciphered it frowningly. “Kothont.”

  “Dropped by one of them, in his haste to carve up Marlus,” Dyre told them. “They don’t hesitate to draw steel on us.”

  The proprietor of Ghaunt Thatching had gone as pale as the linens his sisters were wont to hang across his balcony on Simples Street. Cradling his jack in trembling hands, he asked faintly, “But what do you want us to do, Var? Surely not—not—” He nodded at the dagger wordlessly, his meaning clear enough: take up arms.

  Dyre smiled and shook his head. “Nothing so drastic. I want us to work together, friends, to make a new day dawn over Waterdeep. Let us be that ‘New Day.’ Not to butcher Lords, nor cause unrest in the streets, for how does that help hard-working merchants make coin? No, I’ve something simpler and fairer in mind: to make the folk of the streets demand, more and more loudly, until ’tis the Lords who’ll have to agree to the changes we seek or draw their blades and show us all their true villainy.”

  Lhamphur looked very much like a man who had impatient oaths dancing ready on his tongue, but asked only, “What changes, Var?”

  “I want the Masks to come off. Lords should vote openly, in front of anyone who wants to walk in off the street and watch, and I want the Lords to stand for election just like guildmasters—say, every ten summers.”

  Eyes narrowed, then brightened again.

  “That’s all?”

  “But then everyone would know how they voted!”

  “Exactly. Lords who rule unfairly, to fill their own purses, or to reward themselves and their rich noble friends, would have to answer to honest men.”

  Jarago Whaelshod set down his jack very carefully and announced, “That, friend Dyre, is a New Day I’ll work to bring about.”

  “Aye! Me, too!”

  “Yes!” Ghaunt shouted, coming to his feet for an instant before realizing how loudly he’d bellowed and freezing into silence, as stiff as the monument on a paladin’s tomb.

  “Oh, sit down,” Dyre told him irritably. “There’s no harm done, for there’s none as can hear us here.”

  In the forehall at the bottom of the stairs, a slender hand deftly unhooked the alarm-cord. Three pairs of hastily bared feet ascended a few steps, and three heads bent nearer still, so as not to miss a single word from the locked room above.r />
  Muttering an apology, Hasmur Ghaunt hastily sat down again, almost toppling a decanter.

  Imdrael shot him a look of contempt and asked Dyre in a low, eager murmur, “So what will we of the New Day do, exactly?”

  “Are you with me?” Dyre asked, just as eagerly. “Each and every one of you? Guild oath?”

  His four guests almost fell over each other’s tongues giving their emphatic oaths, two of them nicking palms and slapping down blood onto the table in the manner of their guilds. Decanters danced, and Dyre’s smile grew.

  “You know the Lords control the very sewers beneath our feet?”

  Every Waterdhavian knew that, and the four merchants said so.

  “Wherever the sewers don’t run just to suit them in their spying and rushing bands of thugs here and there by night to silence unruly commoners, they cause passages to be dug. As a Master Stoneworker, I see much of the ways beneath the cobbles, and I swear to you: this is truth.”

  Four heads nodded—and from somewhere below came the sharp creak of a board, as if someone was on the stairs.

  Five heads turned with frowns of alarm to listen intently.

  And heard only silence.

  The stillness stretched until Dyre stirred and muttered warningly, “For the words we’ve traded here this night, we could be the next unruly commoners to be silenced, so—”

  “We must protect ourselves!” Imdrael hissed.

  The Master Stoneworker smiled thinly. “I’ve already started doing precisely that.”

  From below came the hollow boom of the door-knocker. The men of the New Day flinched in unison, grabbing hastily for daggers.

  “Dyre,” Lhamphur snarled through suddenly streaming sweat, “if this is some sort of trap—”

  The Shark flung the door wide, peered down the stairs, and turned back to his guests with a smile.