The City of Splendors

by Ed Greenwood

  Taeros felt unaccustomed anger rising in him. “What my friend meant,” he said rather sharply, “is that the Lord Jardeth expected a drinking establishment to present a more inviting face to the world or lack for clients, just as I expect the Watch to keep the streets safe or at least stand aside to allow us to procure healing for our friend.”

  The Watch officer regarded him rather coolly. “Part of keeping the streets safe, Lord Hawkwinter, is ascertaining who’s to blame for bloodshed—and I note that two young lords stand before me unhurt, whereas over a dozen outlanders and citizens lie hurt or dead, many by wounds almost certainly made by your swords. If for some reason you feel it beneath yourself to answer a few questions …”

  “I feel nothing of the sort,” Taeros snapped, truly angry now, “yet as we seem to be noting things here, I note that you’ve not assisted these ladies to rise, nor asked after their health—or asked them anything at all, for that matter.”

  Another Watch officer snorted. “Ah, yes, shift eyes to your doxies; that’ll prove an effective distraction. D’you think we’re all dunderheads?”

  Surprisingly, it was Naoni who erupted from the cobbles like a leaping flame. “Doxies? DOXIES?”

  She flew at the man, heedless of his drawn sword, and delivered a slap that spun his head sideways and brought roars of laughter from other Watchmen.

  “We’re crafters,” she shouted at him. “Honest women doing an honest day’s work, not the playpretties of titled men!”

  By then, several Watchmen had tugged her arms down, and the swordcaptain she’d attacked had staggered back out of reach, more startled than angry.

  “Naoni,” Faendra cried desperately, afraid she’d see her sister stabbed right in front of her. “Have done!”

  Her sister heard and fell silent but didn’t stop struggling against the hands that held her.

  “Well, we seem to have touched some nerves here,” the grizzled rorden observed. “Not had your share of battle yet, m’dear?”

  That “dear” and the patronizing tone it was delivered in brought Faendra to her feet. She flounced over to put herself between Naoni and the graying officer, hands on her hips and blue eyes ablaze.

  “Surely Mistress Dyre, the daughter of a guildmaster, is worthy of more respectful address!”

  The officers exchanged glances, and the men holding Naoni released her and stepped back.

  “See now, young mistress, no harm was meant.”

  “Oh? Perhaps if your daughters and sisters were penned into a battlefield, left to fend for themselves, then mocked as dockside trulls,” raged Faendra, “less rust would have collected on your weapons! Speaking of which, my sister’s ‘battles’ are her own business, but no graybeard with ‘rusted weapons’ need apply as sparring partner.”

  A few uneasy chuckles arose. Faendra, however, was not quite finished. She turned and pointed at Naoni dramatically.

  “And know this: my sister is a sorceress, goddess-gifted with the ability to spin anything into thread! She could conjure every sword you carry into scraps of fishing line.”

  She cast a scathing glance over the gathered Watch and added, “Not that most of you would perceive the change.”

  A young Watchman stepped forward, eyes narrowing. “Threatening the Watch with sorcery, are you?”

  “Thellus,” an older swordcaptain hastily interrupted, “I think we’d better take these lasses in for some proper questioning. Separately. I’ll take—”

  “No, goodsir,” Korvaun announced then, his sword out and his voice even colder than his drawn blade, “you’ll not. These women are now under my protection, and I’ll fight any man who tries to—”

  “Oh, gods drown all,” the grizzled rorden said feelingly, “put up your steel, lordling! You, too, Lord Hawkwinter. There’ll be no taking anyone anywhere—by us, anyway. Stand back, men.”

  He looked down at Lark. “I can see by their, ah, liveliness that your friends here are unharmed. How fare you?”

  “Covered with the blood of a man whose weight prevents me from rising,” she replied, “but otherwise unharmed.” She turned her head to regard Taeros and added coldly, “Yet uncertain of what value lies in the protection of men who inherited titles rather than wits—and whose solution to all impediments seems to be drawing a sword.”

  A few Watchmen chuckled, at least one whistled in anticipation of fireworks to come, and everyone watched the face of Lord Taeros Hawkwinter redden.

  In that expectant silence, Taeros sheathed his sword, inclined his head to Lark, and replied politely, “I bow to the wishes of a lady whenever possible, and as the good officer here has promised you’ll not be imprisoned or interrogated, I’m content to let matters run their lawful course.”

  He turned to the rorden. “I assume you’ll wish to interview other witnesses to ascertain the true cause of this disturbance. If you’ve further need of me or my friends, kindly send word and we’ll happily answer any questions put to us.”

  “Prettily said,” the old Watchman replied. “Down blades, men. I think our work here is done—unless, milords, you’d like us to carry Lord Roaringhorn somewhere?”

  “I—I can carry myself,” a quiet answer startled him, from the bloodstained form at their feet. “I think.”

  Taeros peered down. “Beldar, how badly are you—?”

  “I’ll live,” was the curt reply, followed by a groan as Starragar hauled the Gemcloaks’ leader to his feet. “I’ll see him safe home,” Lord Jardeth announced. Korvaun Helmfast turned to Naoni. “If you’d not think it an imposition, we should serve you three likewise.”

  A Watch officer who stood safely behind his fellows chuckled. “Ah, now—who’ll be protecting who, hey?”

  Amid the mirth that followed, Naoni Dyre drew herself up and said with quiet dignity, “We accept your kind offer, Lord Helmfast. Courtesy and duty, it seems, aren’t always strangers to men of Waterdeep.”

  Taking the cue, Taeros extended a hand to Lark.

  “Help yon stormcrow take your friend to a healer,” she told him coolly, ignoring his outstretched hand to rise unaided. “Lord Helmfast’s protection will be quite enough for us. We helpless lasses might not be able to keep two of you from inciting bloodshed.”

  Beldar shrugged off Starragar’s helping hand and took a few tottering steps. The street blurred and tilted precariously, and he leaned on the nearest wall until his vision deigned to sort itself out.

  “The lass was right,” Taeros said, materializing out of the haze. “Let me call a carriage and take you to a healer.”

  Beldar lifted tentative fingers to his forehead. To his surprise, his wound was shallow, little more than a scratch.

  “It’s not serious,” he said, something of his surprise creeping into his voice.

  Starragar regarded him skeptically. “There’s a lot of blood. You were knocked senseless. Either alone, much less both, justifies a healer’s fee.”

  “Head wounds bleed freely,” the Roaringhorn responded shortly.

  It was hard to admit that most likely he’d simply fainted, like a swooning maiden in one of those foolish chapbooks his sisters were always reading. With an effort, he straightened and stepped boldly away from the wall.

  “I’ll have the wound tended,” he told Taeros. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to be alone.”

  There was understanding on his friend’s face. “I feel much the same way,” the Hawkwinter admitted quietly. “Never before have I taken a man’s life. It’s a grim and serious thing, not to be lightly regarded or easily forgotten.”

  Beldar stared at Taeros. What the Hawkwinter had just said was truth, of course—but it hadn’t even occurred to him. And what did that lack reveal of Beldar Roaringhorn?

  Still, the mask offered him was preferable to revealing his humiliation. He clapped the shoulders of both friends gently. “Thanks. Get you home, and we’ll talk later.”

  The Hawkwinter nodded and reached for the strings of his readycoin purse. “No a
rguments,” he said firmly, pressing the bag into Beldar’s hands. “The women of Waterdeep would never forgive me if I withheld the means needed to keep a scar from marring that face.”

  The Roaringhorn managed a smile. “You’ll have it back, to the last nib.”

  Black eyebrows arched in feigned amazement. “That knock on your head must have been harder than we thought!”

  Beldar chuckled, because it was expected, and waved Taeros and Starragar on their way.

  After the last swirl and glimmer of black and amber gemweave had disappeared around a corner, Beldar removed his own cloak and turned it so only the dark lining was showing. His task ahead would be harder if eyes marked him and wagging tongues repeated his name.

  He made his way purposefully along now bustling streets. Ducking down a particularly noisome alley, he picked his way through litter and offal to where it ended against the stout stone wall of a warehouse, adorned with crude graffiti and fading blazon-bills of events long past.

  Finding the stone that was lighter in hue than the rest, Beldar ran his fingers around its edges, widdershins. A stone door swung open reluctantly on silent hinges, letting him slip into a narrow, low-ceilinged passage beyond.

  The stairs at its far end glowed faintly. Beldar drew the door closed and proceeded cautiously; the glow came from a spongy lichen that made the steps slippery. The last time he’d traversed them, it had been in a bone-bruising tumble that his older brother had found highly amusing—yet Beldar smiled in grim satisfaction, remembering how he’d wiped the smirk off his brother’s face.

  Or rather, the necromancer’s prophecy had stolen that smile and put a swagger into Beldar’s step that hadn’t yet deserted him.

  Until today.

  His first real battle had been an utter disaster. He was destined to be a leader of men, a hero who could rise from seeming death. That was the prediction his brother’s coins had bought, yet to his utter mortification, he’d let some lout get a fish-gutting knife past his guard, then swooned at the sight of his own not-quite-blue-enough blood!

  He’d atone for this. He would win his next battle, which was why he was here again. It would be a simple matter for the necromancer to seek out the man who’d cut him and the names of those who’d caused the fray in the first place. Thus armed, Beldar Roaringhorn would seek vengeance on them all.

  The stairs ended in a small, dark stone hall. Its far wall was carved into the likeness of an enormous skull, a faint greenish glow emanating from the empty eyesockets.

  Beldar strode forward to put the purse Taeros had given him on the ledge of the skull’s nose.

  “I seek names. Their fates have already been decided.”

  A moment of silence greeted his boast. Then a dry chuckle came from behind the skull-wall, and a voice he knew. A crone’s voice. “Welcome, young Roaringhorn. Come in, and learn those you wish to slay.”

  The front four “teeth” swung inward, and Beldar ducked and climbed through that opening—and a tingling moment of warding magics and spells of darkness—into a surprisingly lavish room.

  Fabulous tapestries softened its stone walls, and a warm red glow came from a marble hearth. A winged imp, the necromancer’s familiar, was curled up before the brimstone-scented fire like a somnolent cat.

  A shapeless pile of black rags rose haltingly from a deep-cushioned chair. Beldar went to one knee—not out of respect, but from memory of the pain the old woman had inflicted at his last visit, when as a lad he’d been too proud to bend a knee.

  The old crone nodded approvingly and raised a wizened hand to remove the black mask concealing her face. Bright blue eyes gazed out of a maze of wrinkles. “So you’ve come to Dathran again.”

  He bit back a retort about stating the obvious, for the old woman’s calling was more a title than a name. Dathrans were rogue witches cast out of Rashemen for doing evil or using magic in a way proscribed by her sisterhood—in her case, death magics of Thay.

  Those dark spells and her second sight had earned “Dathran” a place in Waterdeep’s underground. Like many nobles, Beldar had more of an acquaintance with the dark underbelly of city life than he would admit to in polite society.

  “I want the man who did this,” Beldar said, touching the wound on his forehead, “and those who started the battle in which I received it.”

  Dathran nodded again and hobbled to a shallow scrying-bowl. “Blood,” she said, looking at him expectantly.

  The Lord Roaringhorn swallowed a grimace and came over to the basin. The necromancer mumbled a brief incantation as she reached up to touch his forehead, her fingers as dry and brittle as bird’s feet. They traced the wound, calling forth the memory of its making, and with it, a swift new flow of blood.

  Beldar leaned over the basin, letting the dark drops fall into the water. Light promptly began to rise toward the surface, like a glowfish rising from the depths of a cave pool. The water roiled briefly, then smoothed, a vivid picture forming: a roadside smithy, the South Gate of Waterdeep rising close behind it, where a leather-aproned man was tapping a new shoe onto a carthorse hoof. The man’s face was familiar, and the sign over his forge-wagon read “The Lucky Horseshoe.”

  All of Tymora’s luck, Beldar thought grimly, would not be enough to keep him alive. “And the instigators?”

  The necromancer bowed her head, spread her hands over the bowl, and rocked gently back and forth. Dreading what he might see, Beldar dropped his gaze to the bowl again.

  In the scene now floating in those depths, an elderly man was lowering himself into a vast tub of steaming water, a tiled indoor pool that already held several other men. This was common enough in a city of public baths, but there was nothing common about the bathers.

  Judging by their scales, clumps of fur, and odd limbs—talons, scales, claws and the like—most of them were mongrelmen.

  A few of the bathers, including the old man, seemed different. They looked to be pureblood humans who’d been deliberately mutilated to acquire monstrous limbs and features.

  The old man was quite possibly the strangest creature Beldar had ever seen. One of his eyes had been replaced with a glowing red orb. A pair of tentacles grew from his torso, which was armored with many-colored scales. A snake coiled around his forearm, seeming to grow directly out of his wrist.

  There were other oddities, too, but Beldar’s stunned mind could not make sense of them all, much less catalogue them.

  He looked at the other bathers who’d probably been born human. Even the most normal-seeming, a youngish man with dust-colored hair, had an odd-colored glass orb where one of his eyes should have been.

  A servant came into the room, bearing a tray. His words, not passed on by the scrying magic, seemed to displease the old man.

  A thin bolt of crimson light flashed from his glowing eye. The servant staggered back, staring stupidly at a black-edged, smoking hole that had suddenly appeared in—or rather, through—his forearm. The other bathers glanced at the wounded man but made no comment, as if this was no unusual occurrence.

  “Eye of the beholder,” murmured the necromancer, awe adding richness to her papery voice. “Skin of the yuan-ti, poison of the adder …”

  She went on at some length, but Beldar was no longer listening to anything but his own tumbling thoughts.

  He’d sworn vengeance against a villain who, through some fell magic, had augmented himself with the powers of monsters. Beldar had heard of monster cults, and both sorcerers and clerics who worshiped strange gods, but he’d never heard of people becoming monsters, piece by living piece.

  Such foes were beyond him, and Beldar Roaringhorn knew it.

  His despair was short-lived, for another of the Dathran’s prophecies came vividly to mind: His path to greatness would begin when he mingled with monsters.

  Beldar had tried to forget those words since that night in the Luskan tavern, tried to consign them to the crypt of lost opportunities. Now they sang through his mind as he gripped the scrying bowl with white-knuc
kled hands, studying the fading image as if it was a missive from the gods.

  Never once had he contemplated such a path, or seen this possibility in the old witch’s words.

  Mingling with monsters … yes.

  As twilight stole across the city, the harbor horns rang out, telling all that the massive harbormouth chains were being raised. Lamplighters hastened along the streets to fill and trim lamps, and three Gemcloaks strode the streets of Sea Ward, cloaks of amber, blue and black glimmering behind them.

  “You’ve inquired at all the houses of healing?” Starragar demanded. “All the temples?”

  Korvaun nodded grimly. “Not even the Roaringhorns have seen Beldar since you two parted from him. He’s not sought healing.”

  “Which probably means he can’t. He’s too vain to want a scar.” Starragar sighed thoughtfully. “Have you checked the jails?”

  Taeros snorted. “While you’re listing rosy options, why not the corpse haulers?”

  The youngest Lord Jardeth grimaced, as if chiding himself for this oversight. “Most likely he went seeking revenge; that’s why I suggested the lockups, yet—”

  “Such thoughts occurred to me, too,” said Korvaun, “and I inquired. No, he wasn’t arrested.”

  “Which brings us back to scouring taverns, clubs, and festhalls. For what remedy remains to him, but to get harbor-spewing drunk?”

  Taeros sighed. Even the finest boots start to chafe when one pounds the cobbles all night.

  Right ahead stood The Gelded Griffon, a new festhall popular with rising-coin dandies who had the wealth but not the cachet of the nobility. Ordinarily the Gemcloaks would never deign to step inside, which was precisely why Taeros had thought it should be their twenty-third place to search. They nodded to the doorkeeper, who was already bowing low, and swept inside.

  Korvaun dropped a few coins into obviously delighted hands, received the news they’d all been hoping for, and the trio of Gemcloaks traded grins and headed for the indicated row of curtained booths along the back of the dimly lit hall.

  A burly, stern-faced man in a Griffon-badge tunic was standing guard to ensure privacy, but when Korvaun dropped a dragon into his palm, the guard pointedly strolled away. Still watching him go with a cynical grin, Taeros gently parted the curtains of the first booth.