He stood and looked around, taking in the whole hall, making it clear that he spoke to all of them. Hard men and women, criminals all—more likely than not exiles from Waterdeep and other cities. They gazed at him with loathing. They hated guardsmen, but they hated vigilantes even more, and Kalen was both.
“Let me be clear,” he continued. “I did not choose vengeance, but neither did I choose mercy.” He touched the hilt of Vindicator, sending a gleam of silver along its blade. “I left my enemy broken and bleeding in a pool of his own blood, but I did not kill him. If he walks, eats, or so much as shits again without agony, it will be by the gods’ grace, not mine.”
That stayed them. Kalen could see their will faltering—could feel them backing away. He had cowed them and won himself—and the boy—a reprieve. He sat down slowly and took up his tankard. He sipped his mead, then set the tankard down with an audible click that made everyone start. Shortly, the din of tavern activities resumed.
“Gods,” Rhett said. “That—that, I’d like to do. I could do that, if you taught me.”
“This city brings something out in me,” Kalen said. “Something not to be envied.”
Rhett began to speak, but Kalen shook his head.
“There is nothing for you here,” he said. “Not for you and not for her.”
“But—”
“Kalen Dren.” Sithe stood at the stairs, her axe held low. The hideous head of metal clinked against the steps.
“We’ll talk later,” he said, rising.
“But”—Rhett reached for Vindicator—“you’ll need this.”
“I told you,” Kalen said. “That blade isn’t mine.”
“You’ll need it anyway.”
Arguing over it would likely undo any benefit from his speech, so Kalen gave in. “Tonight,” he said. “We’ll see to this derelict ship tonight.”
“Aye, saer.”
He leaned close to Rhett. “Without Myrin.”
“But—” Rhett sighed. “Aye, saer.”
Kalen crossed to Sithe on the stairs. They exchanged a silent look, and he followed her to the night-dark roof.
“Hrm,” the Coin Priest said, her fingers drumming on the desk. At least she wasn’t tapping her dagger on her coin holy symbol, as it so unnerved listeners.
Several of her bodyguards held the two bruised men in place before her. Their quarry had put up a fight, it seemed, and as a result, they hadn’t brought what—whom—she asked. The beaten men looked anxious, as though she might throttle them at any moment. Oh, how the Coin Priest wanted to do just that, but she had manners.
“Well?” she asked. “Speak, already.”
“They—she—the girl, she was too powerful,” said one of the men. “Sucked Drems right up into a cloud, so she did!”
“And the other one,” said the other, “with his sword of fire …”
“No matter,” said the Coin Priest. “The point is that I hired you to bring me the Golden Man—the Horned One—and you failed me. I am very disappointed.”
The men flinched back as though from a coiling snake.
“Fortunately, the Lady offers clemency.” She smiled agreeably.
She popped out her platinum coin and held it up for their inspection. Two faces, two aspects of luck—fortune and misfortune. She closed it in her hand and put her hands behind her back. She shuffled the coin around.
She looked—with her one eye—toward the larger of the two sellswords. He was far uglier than the other: a long scar reaching from one eye down to his chin curled his face in a perpetual hanging sneer. “Choose,” she said. “Quickly, please. If you choose the coin, you will be forgiven—even rewarded.”
The man looked to his compatriot, shrugged, and pointed to her left hand.
The Coin Priest smiled and drew out her left hand. When she opened her fingers, they held a shiny platinum coin, turned so that the homely, smiling face of Tymora shone in the candlelight. It glowed with golden light, which wafted over the ugly brute. Of a sudden, his wounds vanished—the bruises on his face smoothed over like sand under an ocean wave.
“You are well beloved of Lady Luck, sir,” the Coin Priest said.
The man loosed a tense breath and smiled.
The Coin Priest drew her right hand out, leveled the hand crossbow she had drawn, and shot the second man between the eyes.
“That one, not so much,” she said.
The sellsword stared in shock at his friend twitching on the floor, blood spurting into the air. His thrashing lasted only a breath or two. The Coin Priest gazed on her platinum coin—such a beautiful thing. It brought life with one side and death with the other.
“I shall say this once,” she raised her voice to the room, “and I shall use small words so you are all certain to understand.”
She lowered the crossbow to her desk and smiled at them.
“I—as your mistress and servant to the great smiling goddess—can put up with much. Brutality, murder, pillage, torture—these things are nothing to me. Indeed, I offer great reward to those who undertake them in the light of the goddess’s smile.”
She gestured to her coin, which gleamed in the candlelight with a radiance that matched her smile. Then her smile turned and she frowned at them.
“Then again, my goddess frowns upon those who fail me—or, worse, question me and her great works. And the reward of such disfavor, well … I shoot you in the godsdamned face. Thus.” She gestured to the body of the man on the floor, around which a pool of brackish blood was spreading. “Now. Are there any questions?”
The room was silent.
She smiled. “Go then, and bask in the smile of the goddess.”
The men crowded out of the room as fast as they could.
“Not you, however,” she said, to man who’d chosen the lucky coin. He jerked straight as though she’d stabbed him in the spine.
“Oh, don’t fret,” the Coin Priest said, rounding her desk. “That one fully deserved it, for bungling the mugging. That’s how Beshaba smiles.” She seized his arm and squeezed, her nails digging into his flesh. “But you won’t fail me again.”
The scarred man shook his head sharply, fear in his eyes.
“Good.” She leaned in and grasped the lucky sellsword by the chin, stroking his stubbly jaw. Dealing death always gave her an appetite. He trembled as she drew close enough to kiss him on the lips.
“Now, about that reward,” she said, and she pulled him into her embrace.
She loved the taste of fear.
23 KYTHORN (NIGHT)
THE PORT OF LUSKAN, IT WAS SAID, HADN’T SEEN ACTIVE service since the reign of the pirate kings of the old world, and Kalen could well believe it. In his childhood memories, it had been wretched, but what lay before him was worse: a graveyard for the hulks of ships murdered in century-old conflicts. Its headstone was Luskan’s chief landmark and the former power in the city, the legendary Host Tower of the Arcane, with its four spires like the trunks of an eldritch tree. It lay in rubble on central Cutlass Island, as it had for a century.
During summer nights such as this, a foul, humid fog gripped the bay, choking off breath and irritating the lungs. Anyone foolish enough to row out on such a night—like the two men in the shallow-bottomed skiff, with their pack behind them—would cough and sneeze and choke and generally suffer through a miserable journey.
At least his spellscar had grown quiescent, seemingly content in a way it had not been since he’d traded harsh words with Myrin in her chambers. Had he really avoided her all this time? He put that concern aside and focused on how much he hated Luskan—every dripping, moldering, disgusting finger-length of it.
“Tell me again,” Kalen said between oar strokes, “why we’re in this boat, braving these waters to climb aboard a derelict that’s been floating in the bay for a month?”
“Because a dead body told us to,” Rhett said. “Rather, the corpse said he—that is, the necromancer speaking through him—thought there was, how did he name it … a ‘s
ource of corruption’ in the bay. Then the man the corpse had been mugging—back when he was alive, that is—he was the one who told us about the derelict.”
“This is the man”—Kalen coughed—“without his own face.”
“The same.” Rhett snuffled. “Which I didn’t realize until after the corpse talked—hmm.” He grinned. “It didn’t sound much better the second time, did it?”
“At least it’s a lead.” Kalen coughed again, harder this time.
Kalen’s inquiries that day told him the derelict in question had drifted into Luskan’s harbor a month gone. It had borne black paint, which meant plague, so no one had touched it for twenty days—long after anything could be alive inside. Eventually, the desire for loot had gotten the best of several Luskar, who’d raced to get to the ship to pilfer what they could.
Kalen would have done the same fifteen years past. If he had and the plague had come from this ship, he might have been its first victim.
Now he and Rhett were in a rickety skiff, rowing through the sickly fog toward what could possibly be the source of Luskan’s scourge. This they did on the word of a dead man and at the suggestion of a man who’d been wrapped in illusions.
They drew up on the derelict and Kalen hammered a stake into the barnacle-encrusted hull. He was unconcerned with the damage. The ship would never again be seaworthy and they needed to tie the skiff off, lest it drift away while they were about their business.
“Saer Shadowbane,” Rhett said. “I’ve a question.”
Kalen knew what he would ask and feared it. “If you must.”
“Why did you make me Lady Darkdance’s guardian, when she clearly wants you?” Rhett cleared his throat. “For her guardian, I mean.”
“You’re the one with Vindicator,” Kalen said.
“That’s another question.” Rhett fingered Vindicator’s hilt. “This sword is yours—clearly yours. And yet I’m the one carrying it.”
“So it would seem.”
Kalen’s body ached from his earlier fight with Sithe, up on the roof. She’d thrashed him again, then walked away in silence.
“Saer, you’ve set me about those things you should be doing yourself.” Rhett visibly mustered himself. “And yet—”
“I won’t take you for my apprentice,” Kalen said.
Gloom enclosed the little skiff, filling the air between them and choking off their words. Silently, Kalen looped the skiff’s mooring rope around the stake.
Ultimately, Rhett gave up with a sigh. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“This isn’t the life you want. And even if it is …” Kalen’s eye fell on Vindicator—on the long flaw that ran through the steel. He remembered Vaelis and the words turned to dust in his mouth. “I am no master for you. I know that, even if you do not.”
The assertion hung between them. Ultimately, Rhett nodded.
“Well,” Rhett said, “at least we managed to leave Myrin back at the Rat.”
“True.” Kalen sneezed. “She does tend to make things … interesting.”
“Well that’s”—the boy sneezed as well—“certainly true.”
A third sneeze cut through the silence. Kalen and Rhett looked at one another. The half-elf dropped his hand to Vindicator’s hilt. Kalen waved him to peace and inclined his head toward the packs at the back of the skiff.
“Sorry.” Myrin shimmered into visibility. “The sea air is just so awful.”
Kalen found he wasn’t truly surprised. Her presence explained his spellscar’s serenity. Even now, he felt the calming influence of her own scar on his. From that, he really should have known she was there before they’d set out on the bay.
“We’re turning around,” Kalen said stiffly.
“Kalen!” Myrin protested, at the same time Rhett said: “Saer!” They looked at one another, both startled the other had cried out.
“Very well.” Kalen drew a loop of knotted rope from the back of the skiff and put it over his head and shoulders.
“ ‘Very well’?” Rhett asked. “You aren’t going to try to stop her from coming along?”
“Would it work?” Kalen drew out his two very sharp daggers.
“Not likely.” Myrin gave Rhett a smug smile.
Kalen ignored them both and turned to the ship instead. He stabbed one knife into the spongy wood, then the second higher up. Dagger by dagger, he made his way quickly up the ship’s hull. A quick check of the main deck yielded no obvious threat, so he tied off the rope to the main mast and threw the end back to the boat. He heard Rhett and Myrin arguing below and the rope pulled taut.
The ship hadn’t looked distinctive from a distance, but up close Kalen recognized the cut of the sails and the unusual configuration of ropes and cranks. He also knew some of the sigils from his days in Westgate, training with the Eye of Justice. This ship operated out of Akanûl—Airspur, if he guessed rightly—and he found it remarkable that it had come so far west of its berth. Kalen saw no corpses on the main deck. If the crew perished of plague, they must have done so below. He waved to the others.
Myrin came up second, followed by Rhett, huffing under the weight of the armor Kalen had recommended he not wear. When the half-elf got to the deck, his face red as a ripe beet, he gave Kalen an apologetic grimace.
“Fascinating,” Myrin said, looking around.
“You sense something?” Kalen said.
“Oh no,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t remember ever having been on a ship. There’s a certain rocking motion that I find soothing. What do you say, Rhett?”
The half-elf was leaning over the side, making gurgling sounds.
Wood creaked as the ship rocked, but Kalen heard something else. “Wait.”
A knife in either hand, he stalked toward the aftcastle, where he’d heard the noise. The angle blocked his sight of possible ambushs, so he crept up the stairs, pausing to distribute his weight on each step and avoid the telltale creak of weathered wood.
When he reached the top, he saw a figure at the wheel. He stepped forward to investigate and a black shape parted from the night. He ducked and leaped back, causing the axe to sweep over his head. He slashed forward, but his steel hit only darkness. He leaped back again.
They moved into the moonlight and Kalen saw Sithe, her axe whirling. By the genasi’s indifferent face, she was neither surprised to see him nor had she meant to stay her strike. She swayed aside as a streak of blue light—Myrin’s spell—flashed past her harmlessly. She swept her axe wide and crouched low, ready to spring.
“Be that you, Little Dren?” called a familiar voice.
“Toy?” Kalen called back.
“Why, fancy that,” said the voice. “Two slayers meet in the night, on the corpse of a ship half a mile from the shore no less. What be the odds?”
Toytere stepped out from behind the wheel stand, the moonlight gleaming in the silver brooch on his black tallhat. Kalen had barely noticed the brooch before: a crescent moon set into what looked like a harp. He knew the symbol, of course, and wondered if Toytere truly belonged to that organization, or if he wore it as a trophy. Knowing the halfling, it was probably the latter.
Rhett charged up the stairs, Vindicator in hand. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “This is our abandoned ship.”
“Funny,” Toytere said, his deadly eyes on Rhett. “The side of the ship say Genasi’s Pyre. Of us all, Sithe be the closest.”
Kalen made no move to lower his steel and neither did Sithe. The genasi stared at him, ready. For them, the battle had not ended, merely paused.
Then Myrin arrived, and Toytere’s dangerous smirk rose instantly into a brilliant smile. “Me lady!” He swept off his hat and bowed. “How fortunate it be that you’ve come, else”—he cast Kalen a meaningful look—“well, how fortunate it be.”
“Isn’t it? How fortunate I can be here to remind everyone to play nice.”
She cleared her throat in Kalen’s direction. With a grimace, he sheathed his blades. Sithe lowered her
axe. It seemed the betrayal would come a bit later.
“I know why we’ve come,” Kalen said. “But why are you here, Toytere?”
“Oh, the likely—I’m sure some swag be left over,” Toytere said. “We can work together, no? Lady Darkdance?”
“Oh,” Myrin said, her expression flustered. She’d been staring at Kalen and the question took her by surprise. “I suppose—yes?”
“Me lady be wise,” Toytere said. “Lady Darkdance and Sithe accompany me below, while the two fine gentles from Waterdeep stay above to keep watch.”
Kalen and Myrin both opened their mouths to speak, but Rhett beat them to the objection. “Nay!” he said. “Where Myrin goes, I go also. I’m her warder.”
“You heard the boy.” Kalen purposefully avoided Myrin’s eye. “He’s going.”
“Very well, my good guardsman,” Toytere said. “That be, if you’ve no problem with rats and cramped spaces.”
“Oh.” Rhett leaned toward Kalen. “I do have a … slight issue with rats. Their beady little eyes and scrabbling little claws. I just—”
“I know the feeling.” Kalen glanced at Toytere, then at Myrin, considering. He felt his spellscar draw toward her, not wanting to be parted. “I’ll go.”
The halfling did not look pleased at this pronouncement, though Myrin’s face brightened. “Perfect,” she said before Toytere could object.
“Well then,” the halfling said. “Beauty before the beast?”
He gallantly gestured to the stairs. With a smug look at Kalen, Myrin descended to the main deck. Toytere gave Sithe a meaningful look, and she drifted to his side.
Kalen gave Rhett a similar sharp look and the lad came closer. “Watch Sithe,” Kalen said. “Toytere might mean to betray us, and if he does, Vindicator is our last line of defense.”
“Not Myrin?” Rhett asked. “You should trust her more.”
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