by Ed Greenwood
El tried all of those and some far more colorful ones on for size as he winced and hobbled his way down the greasy, narrowing, and increasingly refuse-choked way. Even the rats avoided that end of the alley, and the smell had long before forced the boarding-up and mud-sealing of all the windows opening onto it.
Alone in the graying tail end of night, the Sage of Shadowdale set his teeth and lurched on. His many bruises were stiffening, and his ribs felt on fire. He’d fallen twice, many alleys before, but it had been worth it to persuade the young and fastidious Dragon tailing him that he really was an old crazed-wits living on the streets, and make the man turn back. The soldier had fallen at least once, too, and Elminster hoped the young dolt’s bright uniform was so besmirched that he was gagging.
Nevertheless, the filth had its uses. Not the least of which was safeguarding what he was retrieving. At the end of the alley was a fly-swarming heap of dung, old topped by fresh, beneath a cracked tile protruding from the wall.
El tugged the tile out—it came away in pieces, just like last time, brown and dripping—and thrust his fingers into the hole it had come from. There was a cavity in one side of that hole, within the thickness of the wall, and—aye!—the reassuring smooth hardness was there. Or rather, hardnesses, five of them. He closed his filthy fingers around the uppermost and then the lowest, drew them both forth, and shoved the tile back into place, piece by piece.
When he was done, the vials, guarded against rust by their own magic, were entirely hidden in fresh, wet dung.
El sighed, wiped his hands on random nearby walls until matters had been reduced to what might delicately be termed “smeared,” then trudged back up the alley until he could find space enough to set the vials down on bare stone, spit on his hands so as to clean them enough to thrust them under his robe to reach his clout, and arrange himself so as to let fly all over the vials, washing them … well, not clean, but a lot cleaner.
So he could twist the uppermost open—an enchanted cap rather than a cork; well, the Art advanced in little things as well as large—and drink its contents down.
It tasted like cold, clear, mint sugar water, soothing all the way down … and brought in its wake that surging, warming thrill of healing, the banishment of the fire in his ribs, the stiffnesses, and all the small aches and pains he’d acquired since the last time he’d had to crawl down that alley.
When all of that was gone, El stood up straight, squared his shoulders, then thrust both vials—the lower one was reassuringly heavy with good Cormyrean coins he’d soon be needing—into his under-robe pouch and started for the street again. He felt whole and strong. Not to mention wealthier.
“See?” Arclath told her as triumphantly as if he were personally responsible. “I told you! Behold, dawn!”
Amarune nodded wearily, stumbling. Only his arm through hers was holding her up. For what seemed like hours they’d been walking the streets of Suzail together, a Purple Dragon plodding along behind tailing them as Amarune led her inanely chattering escort on a random meander across the city, waiting for his anger to rise.
Dreading the moment when Arclath stopped, refusing to go along with her obvious deception any longer and protesting that she was leading him astray. A protest that would reveal that he already knew where she dwelt.
A moment that hadn’t yet come, though there was a gleam in his eye that she was beginning to think meant he was grinning inwardly at her tactic and happily going along with it.
The noble had kept up a constant, never-flagging stream of light, inane—and one-sided—converse.
“Dawn,” she gasped, feeling she had to say something. “I’m … enchanted.”
“And so am I!” Arclath agreed with enthusiasm. “Charmed, even! I find you the most beautiful woman to ever adorn my arm, and await that moment of full glory when you reveal to me the full sparkle of your wit, the bright edge of your tongue—in the conversational sense of course, lady fair, for I would not want even the slightest misunderstanding to lead you to take offense at a slander that was not meant, no, no, not at all!—the full grandeur, as I was saying, of your happily attentive company! At a time when you are not tired, not shocked by the horrible events of earlier this night, and not grieving the loss of your longtime and staunchly loyal employer! In short, when you can be your full and engaging self! When you can—”
“Somehow shut you up,” Amarune snarled, in spite of herself. “Gods above, do all nobles carry themselves through their every waking moment of life on rivers of babbling drivel?”
“In a word, Lady: yes.” Arclath’s grin told her he wasn’t abashed in the slightest. “So, how would you contemplate shutting me up? No violence, please, you know how I abhor viol—”
“Yes, I noticed you abhorring it right skillfully, earlier,” Amarune sighed. “Though I probably owe you my life a time or six. So have my thanks, Lord Delcastle, and I’m done trying to deceive you. I no longer care if you learn where I live.”
“My lady! Has that been your concern, all this time? That I might discover the whereabouts of your abode? Has preventing that dark secret—though how it can truly be dark, I fail to conceive—been the pursuit that now has you nigh staggering with weariness?”
“It has,” Amarune said grimly. “Let’s go. This way.”
“Lady, your every command is my fond wish!”
“Really? How is it that you’re still alive, then?”
“Amarune Whitewave, you’re snarling!”
“Mask dancers snarl all the time, Lord Delcastle. Want to know what else we can do?”
“Lady, I thought you’d never be so bold! Of course I—”
“Of course you do,” Amarune said with the most withering sarcasm she could muster as she turned a familiar corner and headed into an even more familiar midyard that … seemed to be swarming with Purple Dragons.
Several of those officers were already giving them hard stares, and—gods above!—there were Dragons searching every alley, balcony, and outside stair in sight. There were even Dragons up on her roof.
Not to mention a large, grim cluster of them standing over … no. Oh, no.
A Purple Dragon moved to intercept them, two of his fellows walking to where they could surround the two. “Your names, and business here?”
“I am Lord Arclath Delcastle,” the nobleman snapped pointedly, “and I am escorting this lady to her home, by order of a Watch officer of the Purple Dragons. And yours?”
“My what?”
“Your name, soldier.”
“I’ll ask the questions here for now, my lord. You can have my name for your inevitable complaint later. Now, which officer would it be who gave you this or—”
“He’s telling truth, Randelo,” a gravelly man’s voice said rather sullenly from behind Amarune. “I can vouch for their whereabouts and deeds—seeing as they’ve been leading me all over Suzail for half the night.” It was the Dragon who’d been following them since their departure from the club.
He was giving the young couple a rather baleful glance as he added, “Stlarning boots hurt worse’n ever. Shouldn’t wonder if they’re full of blood down by my toes, right now.”
“Ah, the price of shining service,” Arclath remarked. Turning back to their questioner, he said with dignity, “Seeing as we’ve just been cleared of any involvement in this unfortunate, ah, death, please withdraw from us a pace or two, so as to accord us some small measure of privacy. This is a lady of high moral standing, despite what you may think—for I have found that far too many Purple Dragons have low, coarse minds—and I have no intention of damaging her reputation by entering her domicile at this time of night.”
That little speech earned him an eloquent eye roll and a mockingly elaborate bow from both Dragons, but they did withdraw, muttering together.
Arclath pointedly turned his back on them, shielding Amarune from their scrutiny with his broad shoulders, and murmured, “So, would you like me to leave you here, Lady, with a suspicious death—almost undoub
tedly a murder—hard by wherever you live, but with the dubious safety of Purple Dragons very much in evidence everywhere? Or—?”
“Or yield myself to your tender mercies in your noble mansion?”
“I do have some measure of honor, Lady,” Delcastle murmured, almost sadly.
They regarded each other in sober, unsmiling silence for a breath or two, before Amarune almost whispered, “Lord Delcastle, did you hear what the wizard called me?”
“The Silent Shadow? I had dismissed that from my mind. A wild, baseless accusation, that—”
“No,” Amarune said firmly, suddenly finding she did not want to lie to this man. “No, it’s not. I am the Silent Shadow, though my silence has been the quiet of inaction this past season.”
She gave him a glare, suddenly defiant. “So, are you going to denounce me to yon Dragons? See me flogged, stripped of every last coin, and jailed? There’ll be nobles enough wanting my blood, to be sure, and—”
“And I am not one of them,” Arclath interrupted smoothly. “Putting one over on my fellow highborn is what I do, whenever possible. I might add that occasionally I indulge in undertakings of low moral character myself … and I find that this is one of those times.”
He lifted a finger, almost as if he was a pompously lecturing tutor, and spoke even more softly. “So I’ll keep your secret, but in return I demand a price, Lady. No, don’t look at me like that; my price is one truthful answer, no more. Tell me plainly, now: Whom do you work for? Just who is interested in what I and Halance and Belnar were talking about, that you had to listen so hard?”
“I was interested,” Amarune told him truthfully, “because I’m curious. Too curious. And I’m working for no one but myself.” She hesitated, then added, “Though someone is now seeking to force the Silent Shadow to work for her, by threatening to unmask me to the Dragons. A woman every bit as agile as I am, who calls herself ‘Talane.’ ”
“Talane,” Arclath murmured, frowning. “Not a name I’ve heard before, but I’ve a feeling, by all the Watching Gods, that I’ll be hearing it again.”
“Swordcaptain Dralkin?” a Dragon telsword gasped then, trotting out of the night right past them. “We’ve found a word written in blood up on that rooftop.”
“From where the body probably fell, yes,” the swordcaptain agreed curtly, advancing from the group standing around the corpse sprawled in its pool of blood, and sending Arclath and Amarune a glare that told them clearly “move away and don’t listen.” When neither of them moved, he shrugged and asked the telsword curtly, “What word?”
“A strange one. Might be a name,” the telsword replied. “ ‘Talane.’ In Common: T-a-l-a-n-e.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
I USED TO BE A WIZARD
He was in another alley—which reeked almost as much as the one he’d left, but of mildew and old mold and rotting greens—out behind one of Suzail’s better eateries.
At that time of night, only the slugs, snakes, and rats were likely to overhear an old man who stood there talking to himself.
Which was why Elminster had chosen it. He had thorny matters to decide on and no one to debate them with but himself.
He should not, could not, do what he was contemplating doing to that young woman, blood of his or not, downward dead end of a life she’d landed herself in or not. Bed of thorns or not, ’twas the bed she’d chosen, and not for him to … to do what every last king or baron or petty lordling did every day—force changes on the lives of others, to get their own way. Sometimes, for mere whim.
Yet he was not so low. No, he was lower and had been for centuries.
Yet the task—the burden—was his, his duty, and he wanted to go on.
Wanted, but could not, not alone, not old and without firm control of his magic …
“No, I told that Dragon truth,” he growled at last. “Growing older … waiting to die. And if I wait too long and die without doing what’s needful, it all ends right then. All my work, all the paltry few protections I’ve been able to give the Realms down these centuries. And that must not happen. Ever. The work must go on.”
He paced a few scowling steps, setting a snake to hastily slithering away somewhere safer, then turned and snapped to the empty air, “Even if it costs one more young lass her life. Or at least the carefree, naive freedom to waste her life doing nothing much of consequence.”
He walked a few more steps and whispered, “ ’Twill kill her.”
He walked a few more.
“And I’ll do it to her. I will.”
Thrusting his head high, he strode off purposefully into the night.
Amarune’s hands tightened like claws on her arms, and he could feel her starting to shake.
After a moment, she hissed, “I have to see who … who got killed.”
“Lady,” Arclath murmured, “is that wise?”
The glare she gave him then was fierce indeed. “It is necessary. Just because I didn’t happen to have been born a man, it doesn’t mean I was born without a brain or a life or—”
“Easy, Rune, easy.” He turned her around, rotating them both closer to the body and somehow just not seeing Swordcaptain Dralkin’s arm thrust out like a barrier—until the officer was forced to withdraw it or strike a woman—with a casual deftness that made her blink. “Now?”
She nodded. “Now.”
“Deep breath and look down, then,” he murmured, making the last half turn. She looked down—square into the gaping, contorted, white face of a dead man, whose throat was sliced open in a great wound that had half-severed his neck and had spilled a good-sized pond of dark and sticky blood across the cobbles. The sliced neck was bent at a horrible angle …
It was Ruthgul.
She turned her head away sharply, starting to really shake. The Purple Dragon swordcaptain started forward with a frown, one arm rising to reach out to her, and Arclath spun her away again, turning her in his arms until he could see her paling face.
One good look at her, and his grip on her arms tightened. “Lady,” he said firmly, “you’re coming home with me.”
“N-no,” she replied with equal firmness, twisting free of him to back quickly away and raising her voice for the Purple Dragons to hear. “I’m not. I am going to my bed, Lord, and alone. Right now.”
The faces of Dralkin and several other nearby Dragons hardened—and they stepped forward every bit as swiftly and deftly as Arclath, to bar the young Lord Delcastle’s way to Amarune.
He eyed their stern faces, brawn, and hands ready on sword hilts for a moment, then shrugged, smiled, and gave the dancer an airy wave. “Until your next shift, then!”
“Until then,” she replied heavily—and hastened away.
Only to recoil in bewildered fear as she passed Ruthgul’s body, looked down at it despite herself … and saw that it was magically changing into the likeness of someone else.
A man she didn’t know at all.
Shaking her head—what, by all the gods, was going on? Had Ruthgul been someone else all those years, or was that someone who’d been impersonating him and had paid the price?—she ducked into a side alley and trotted hastily along it to reach the door to her abode on a side of the building the Lord Delcastle couldn’t see.
Arclath regarded the stone-faced Dragons, who were forming a wall of burly uniformed flesh to prevent him following the dancer or getting a better look at the dead man—whose change he’d half-glimpsed, and confirmed from some of their reactions—with a broadening smile. Giving them a theatrical sigh, he observed, “Women! I’ll never understand them!”
“Whereas they,” Dralkin told him warningly, “understand you all too well, Lord. As, now, do we.”
“Bravely challenged, good Swordcaptain,” Arclath replied airily, turning with a wave of farewell to stroll off back the way he’d come, “yet you don’t, you know. No one understands me! Save perhaps one person, a little.”
“That would be me,” a sharp voice said suddenly at his
elbow.
It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a wizard of war by the name of Glathra.
“I’ve listened in to a lot of what you’ve said and done this night,” she added briskly, “so spare me all the fanciful tales and instead yield me a few plain answers.”
“Not without something decent to drink,” he said, giving her a courtly bow. “So beautiful an interrogator deserves no less.”
“I believe we have water in the palace that doesn’t have too many squirming things floating in it,” she replied dryly, as war wizards and Purple Dragons appeared from all sides to close in around them. “Come.”
“Your command is my wish, Lady,” the Lord Delcastle told her lightly—almost mockingly—as he offered her his arm. She ignored it, but when she turned, pointed toward the distant royal palace, and started walking, he fell in beside her.
Amid the suddenly tight ring of their watchful Purple Dragon escort.
Amarune was half-expecting to find Talane waiting in her rooms, but there was no sign of her. Or anyone.
Not even under the bed.
Her heaps of soiled clothing lay just as she’d left them, the untidy little mountain range of her laziness. By the state of them, the undisturbed dust, and the way her other minor untidynesses reigned unaltered, it didn’t look as if any intruder had so much as thought of entering Amarune’s rooms.
When she finally dared to believe that and relax, weariness broke over her like a harbor storm, leaving her reeling.
She staggered across the room, suddenly very tired—yet still scared, a rising fear that got worse as her thoughts started racing through all the possibilities of Ruthgul’s murder, the drunken wizard of war who’d known who she was—did they all know? Why hadn’t they done anything to her, then?—and Talane …
Amarune was shaking so hard, she was almost a shuddering by the time she clawed at a certain hiding place until a bedpost yielded and she could haul out a slender and precious flask of firewine. Taking a long pull, she reeled across the room again, flinging back her head to gasp loud and long at its fiery bite.
