The City of Splendors

by Ed Greenwood

  Golskyn sipped his cider. “So if we say and do the right things, we can ‘use’ a large number of these coin-hungry schemers. To what end?”

  “I’m not certain. Yet this unrest, the anger against the Lords and the nobles, these snarls in the taverns over the falling buildings … all can be turned to our advantage. The city’s more restless than I’ve ever seen it before.”

  His father turned an amused eye Mrelder’s way, and the sorcerer hastily amended, “Not that I’ve seen all that many years passing in Waterdeep, I’ll grant, but gray-bearded Waterdhavians are saying it in the streets and alehouses, and goodwives in the shops agree with them.”

  “So this city is, as they say, ripe for the plucking,” Golskyn murmured. “Whereas any hothead can set men to swords out and shouting in the streets, superior beings can control, or at least steer what unfolds, to achieve intended ends.”

  “Exactly,” Mrelder agreed, a little too enthusiastically.

  Golskyn was suddenly facing him, his uncovered eye as cold and hard as ever. “And so, my son of such wisdom and keen perception, what plans have you thought through to take advantage of this rare opportunity?”

  Mrelder swallowed, aware that he was on dangerous ground. He said cautiously, “The grafts, Father, are valuable. If we can master them, they improve us.”

  Golskyn’s smile was wintry. “And?”

  “Yet they are by definition limited to we who already believe in Amalgamation, who revere you for your vision and try to enact your desires.”

  The priest waved impatiently at Mrelder to continue.

  “More can be accomplished by improving others—if, through these improvements, we achieve a measure of control over those persons we … augment.”

  Golskyn nodded. “We gain tools, whether they know their servitude or not, and thus increase our reach and power. Continue.”

  Mrelder took his first sip of cider, more to look away from his father’s piercing gaze than to slake any thirst. “Perhaps,” he told his tankard carefully, “it’s this control that’s most useful to us, not the improvements themselves. I say nothing against the gods, mind, or the rightfulness of augmenting ourselves as they guide us to; I speak now only of others, non-believers. Nor am I necessarily saying such persons should remain non-believers … only that control itself is valuable and that there are other ways to achieve control than through—”

  “Cutting useful bits from beasts most would deem ‘monsters’?” Golskyn’s tone was cold. “So you look no higher than an alley-thug who seeks to gather a gang around him and so feel powerful? Tell me, O wise young one: What sense is there in controlling fools and weaklings?”

  “They can go places and do things that augmented men cannot. If I’d gained and mastered that sahuagin arm, I wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near Lord Piergeiron. I’d have been wrestled down and carried off for his guard-wizard to mind-ream!”

  “Until you prove yourself before the gods,” Golskyn said icily, “you are like all other men and so can serve me as the unsuspicious envoy you champion. I have one weakling; why do I require others?”

  “But Father—”

  “But son,” Golskyn mocked him, “you can find words to do no more than feebly try to justify your own failures. You see Waterdeep well enough but still fail to see yourself. Has your vaunted sorcery brought us one of the Walking Statues yet? And if it did, how would you then protect the rest of us against the alerted Watchful Order or this Lord Mage of Waterdeep everyone whispers of with awe? Or the energetic buffoons of the local Watch, who can call the clanking-armored Guard out to march on us from all sides, to say nothing of fly down at our very heads? Have you a plan to defeat them all? Or some mighty spell you’ve been hiding from me? ”

  Mrelder flushed, anger rising. Again his father was dismissing him with scorn. He should have known not to expect more. Hope, it seemed, was the latest of Golskyn’s victims.

  “Go and scheme some more,” Golskyn of the Gods decreed coldly, pointing at the door, “and come up with something useful.”

  The Meadows were lovely on a midsummer morn, fragrant with flowers, sweet grasses, and swift-drying dew. The cleared lands east of Waterdeep’s walls were a fine hunting ground. Pheasants and grouse nested in plenty in the tall, wind-rippled grass, and plump hares were easy prey for the bright-feathered hawks of nobles.

  Taeros and Korvaun rode without speaking, their glossy mounts trotting briskly. Korvaun’s invitation had come by messenger late the night before. Taeros had agreed to come riding at this ungodly hour—a mere two bells past dawn—mostly out of curiosity. On the pommel of his black mare’s saddle rode a hooded peahawk very nearly identical to the bird perched on Korvaun’s golden, white-maned stallion. The blue and green plumage of his friend’s bird was perhaps a shade more brilliant, but his, Taeros thought, was more pleasingly marked.

  He waited as long as he could before raising the subject that had no doubt prompted this outing. “You’re seldom as angry as you were last night,” he observed, as they halted on a little hillock they’d flown their hawks from hundreds of times before. “How did Beldar so offend you?”

  Korvaun unhooded his hawk and undid its jesses. The bright little raptor immediately hopped onto his gloved wrist, and he tossed her into the air.

  “Beldar’s a fine lad, make no mistake,” Korvaun said slowly, watching his hawk wing happily into the sky, “but he can be far too swift and loud in dismissal of common folk.”

  Taeros echoed Korvaun’s words over the casket: “The measure of a man is the worth he accords those around him.”

  Korvaun’s smile was faint. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I agree in the main,” Taeros replied cautiously, “and ’twas certainly tactless of Beldar to make such remarks in the presence of a servant girl.” He turned his head suddenly from following the flight of the hawk to add slyly, “Especially a little brown lark in the employ of a white dove.”

  Korvaun flushed, and Taeros whooped with laughter. “Aye, I thought you paid rather close court to the elder Dyre lass. Though, forgive me, she seems … singularly lacking in color, despite her red hair.”

  “No woman is half so fair in my eyes,” Korvaun said earnestly, “Naoni has a quiet and restful spirit, yet she’s quick to see what needs doing. She’s swifter to think of others than of herself, and as kindhearted as she is sensible.”

  Kindhearted? Sensible? Not words that sprang to the mind of Taeros Hawkwinter when he daydreamed of feminine perfection, but then, feminine imperfection was more to his liking. Take the servant girl, now: Lark was no more a beauty than was her mistress, but Taeros admired the keen edge of her tongue.

  “Her hands are touched by Mystra Herself,” Korvaun went on. “Only a blessed-of-the-goddess could spin gems into thread. Pretty Faendra says Naoni could spin broken dreams whole, if she took it in mind to do so.”

  “Perhaps so, but her father, the so-fierce stonemason, will have your guts for his next set of garters if you lay hand on the girl.”

  “I’m not worried about Master Dyre,” Korvaun said quietly. “Naoni’s her own mistress. Alas, there the matter ends: she stands adamant against any notion of romance.”

  Taeros regarded his friend with amused fascination. “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve sent her letters respectfully requesting her company. She declined, with equal respect.”

  “You’ve sent letters,” Taeros echoed disbelievingly. “Have you never heard bards sing ‘faint hearts ne’er won fair prize?’ Seek her out, man! Chase her down!”

  He shook his fist in emphasis, drawing a squawk from the hooded peahawk perched on it.

  “Was that my intent, I’d need a bigger bird,” Korvaun said dryly.

  Taeros chuckled. “What I meant was, woo her more heartily! Flowers and gifts, pretty words and poetry.”

  Korvaun roared out laughter. “Oh, and who’s to be my poet? You?”

  Taeros grew a slow grin. “Perhaps you’re wise not t
o be employ me as your envoy. Even so, you should speak to the girl at least.”

  Korvaun started to nod—and his hawk suddenly plunged to the meadow, disappearing into the grass. He kicked his steed toward her.

  “Fly your hawk!” he called back. “Mornings this fine are meant for hunting!”

  “Precisely, Korvaun,” Taeros murmured, releasing his bird. “Precisely.”

  She circled twice, then stooped—and almost immediately rose with a small, long-tailed grouse in her talons.

  Taeros stowed the kill in his game satchel and fed his little hunter her reward from the vial of diced giblets his hawkmaster always provided.

  The Helmfast had dismounted to collect the plump hare his hawk had slain, but sent her flying again without reward—a sure sign that something other than the morning’s hunt, perhaps something other than wooing the fair Naoni—rode his thoughts and heart.

  “Your mind seems a crowded place this morn,” Taeros said quietly.

  Korvaun swung back into his saddle. “Your father told you the talk of Lord Piergeiron’s death?”

  “Rumors—and like most such, more smoke than embers.”

  “I think the tales false, too, yet they’re troubling nonetheless.”

  Taeros chuckled in bewilderment. “You’ve never shown the slightest interest in politics! Why now?”

  “It’s time,” Korvaun said simply and whistled his hawk down from the skies.

  Taeros pondered that reply as they rode back to the city. Try as he might, he could think of none better.

  Later that morning, the youngest scions of Houses Helmfast and Hawkwinter traded glances in front of a heap of rotten barrel-staves and a small, sagging door beyond it, an inauspicious ending to a narrow alley.

  Korvaun shrugged and tapped on the door. There was no response.

  He rapped more firmly. Still nothing.

  Exchanging glances with Taeros again, the youngest Lord Helmfast shrugged. “The lad who sold this destination is doubtless snickering with his friends about now.”

  Whereupon the door swung open, and the two nobles found themselves face to face—or more accurately, waist to face—with a pair of grim-looking halflings who held daggers ready. They looked not at all like the plump, complacent Small Folk the Gemcloaks betimes saw drinking in the more squalid taverns: These two were lean, sharp-featured, and coldly alert.

  The curly head of a third halfling thrust between the two guards, eyeing the nobles’ glittering cloaks. “Gemweave; you’d be the Tall Folk who blundered by to ‘save’ the Dyre lasses and Lark a few days past. Your intentions are appreciated, even if your assistance was unnecessary.”

  Taeros blinked. “ ‘Unnecessary’? Three unarmed girls are hardly a battle-match for half a dozen roughblades!”

  “Perhaps not, but so few are no match for Mistress Dyre’s guard.”

  “I saw no guard in that alley!”

  The curly-haired hin grinned. “We do our work well, then, don’t we? ”

  Korvaun drew a deep breath and tried again. “I’d like to speak with Mistress Naomi Dyre. We were told she might be found here.”

  “What business have you with Mistress Dyre?” one of the guards demanded. His voice was low, gruff, and unfriendly.

  “Take ease, good fellow. We mean her no harm.”

  The guard sniffed. “You couldn’t harm her if you tried. Not in here, not anywhere in the city.”

  “Then you’ve no cause to object,” Taeros pointed out, reasonably enough.

  The curly-haired halfling studied Korvaun for a long moment. “She’s not here,” he said slowly, “but there is something within that you should see.”

  Taeros peered into the dimness beyond the doorway. “What is this place?”

  “The Warrens, home to most Small Folk in Waterdeep,” the hin replied. “Take a torch.”

  The nobles traded looks, shrugged, lit a torch each, and followed their guide.

  “This tunnel’s cobbled,” Taeros muttered, stamping his boot.

  “Used to be a street. You Tall Folk kept building up and up ’til this level got forgotten. Through here.”

  The hin led the Gemcloaks into a small room where seven well-armed halflings lounged at small tables, drinking and dicing. They came to sudden, silent alertness at the sight of the humans.

  “I need to show them something in Mistress Dyre’s safe-box,” said their guide.

  One of the guards went to a wall and busied herself with a complicated set of locks as two others stood like a wall to block the visitors’ view of what she did.

  When the door swung open, their guide ushered the nobles into the low-vaulted cellar beyond. Selecting a metal box from shelves of seemingly identical boxes, he took a single sheet of parchment from it and handed the page to Korvaun. “You’re the one who’s needing to see this.”

  The young noble read silently. Something like sorrow stole into his eyes, and he silently handed the parchment back.

  “You’ll not be coming back,” the hin said. It wasn’t quite a question.

  “No,” Korvaun agreed quietly. Nodding his thanks to the halfling, he strode quickly from the room.

  Taeros hastened after his friend, curiosity aflame, yet Korvaun was silent until they were out of the Warrens and blinking in the bright light of approaching highsun.

  Then he said two words: “Thank you.”

  A black Hawkwinter eyebrow lifted in inquiry.

  Korvaun smiled faintly. “For not asking. I can only imagine what that silence cost you.”

  Taeros draped an arm about his friend’s shoulders. “No sacrifice too great for friendship,” he said grandly. “Besides, when all’s known, won’t it make a grand broadsheet ballad?”

  “I’d not do that, were I you—not for fear of my wrath, but of unseen Small Folk blades.”

  The Hawkwinter chuckled but cast a quick glance into the alley shadows all around. He’d never before thought to check small places for lurking danger. Waterdeep held far more than his life, much less his fancies, had thus far revealed.

  Deep waters, indeed!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One of the things that made the library Taeros Hawkwinter’s favorite room in all Hawkwinter House—gods strike that, in all Waterdeep and the wider world beyond—was that it had a door that locked.

  He set that lock now and turned to regard the principal reason this was his favorite place, “the refuge of my soul,” as he’d declared it grandly to himself one summer evening years ago: his books. Rows and rows of them, precious tomes that had cost more than he’d ever in his life spend on gems or clothing, no matter how often fashions changed.

  Taeros ran a hand caressingly across the gilded, tooled, familiar spines of his treasures—tales of great men and women, of heroic deeds and glorious quests, the very fire, heart, and glory of what it was to be human. To matter.

  Here was Aldimer’s Histories of the Heroes, and there The Glory of the Dragon, Danchas the Scribe’s glowing history of Azoun IV of Cormyr.

  The Purple Dragon. Dead now, swept away in fittingly heroic sacrifice, dying in battle to save his realm, hewing down a dragon on a blood-drenched field.

  What wouldn’t he give to serve a man such as Azoun! Oh, not a king, but a leader whose name men murmured in genuine awe, a man so loved that those who wore his colors would unhesitatingly throw their lives away in his cause. To see that fierce loyalty like a flame in their eyes, to hear your lord’s name chanted because the very sound of it bolstered courage and gave a sense of purpose.

  Now, more than ever, Waterdeep needed such heroes—and to be shaken by the throat to open eyes and follow them, too. To lift Waterdhavian attention from daily coin-grubbing or the cut-and-thrust of proud noble rivalries, and look upon …

  Taeros snorted aloud. Who? No faces came to mind. And who was he to tell Waterdeep what it needed, and be heeded? After all, what great deeds had he done?

  He glanced at the locked, chained-to-the-table box wherein lay the precious parch
ments that would someday become Deep Waters.

  Nothing, yet. Nothing beyond pondering things a trifle deeper than the frivolities that consumed the lives of his friends and their noble elders, especially the older nobles. Arrogant, feuding emptyheads and gossips, wasteful, cruel, selfish, malicious when crossed …

  Enough. Suffice to say that he could point at nothing in all that parade of smeering faces and proud names to admire and emulate. Not one thing.

  So what would befall if Piergeiron was truly gone and Waterdeep left lordless? Oh, Masked Lords abounded, but what of the tall, striding figure in armor at whom citizens could roar approval?

  How went the song? Empty throne at the Palace …

  As he tried to recall words for that tune, an angry face swim up in memory to glare at Taeros: Varandros Dyre, standing behind his desk glowering at them all.

  The more Taeros pondered that stonemason’s anger, and Dyre’s snarls of a “New Day,” the more sense the man seemed to make.

  Not that Varandros Dyre was any sort of hero. A hard, grasping man, full of bile and indignation, and lowborn to boot.

  Yet heroes were just his own fascination, and it was so typically noble a mistake to let one’s own enthusiasms and views blind one to everything else. Perhaps, in crowded, bustling Waterdeep, it was men such as Dyre who could get things done. Small men, effecting small changes. Coin by coin, deal by deal … small tugs at the tiller of the great ship of a city, turning it slowly and ponderously on into a new sunrise, and … a New Day.

  Taeros Hawkwinter snorted again. If Varandros bleeding Dyre could turn Waterdeep, so could the youngest, hitherto most idle flower of the Hawkwinters.

  With Piergeiron dead or alive but with folk thinking he might be, it was time for change. The city needed a man to become a hero, or at least take the first longbooted stride toward glory.