Cold Steel and Secrets Part 3
( Neverwinter )
Rosemary Jones
Rosemary Jones
Cold Steel and Secrets Part 3
The whole art of the sword can be summed up so: to hit and to not be hit. The art of the spy: to discover and to not be discovered.
— Rucas Sarfael, sometimes of Neverwinter
1478 DR
Crawling Claws scrabbled across Montimort’s body as the boy rolled across the room, trying to dislodge them. Rucas Sarfael used his sword to pry one disembodied hand from Montimort’s throat, neatly severing the fingers, but barely missing Montimort’s jugular.
Elyne’s mad relative, Karion, screamed: “Pull him apart, my pets, pull him apart.”
The swordswoman swore, abandoning her entreaties to the aged seer to let the boy go, and rushed to Montimort’s aid. Like Sarfael, she hacked and slashed at the disembodied hands. But there were more than a dozen.
“This is too slow,” Elyne panted between thrusts at the claws, struggling to keep them off Montimort’s face and throat. “He’ll die before we can cut them all.”
Karion cried out again. The claws crawled between their feet and flowed over Montimort. With ungentle kicks and slashes of her sword, Elyne drove them back.
Sarfael shouted to Elyne: “Keep at it. I have an idea.”
Sarfael whirled on his heel. He lunged across the room, placing the point of his sword over Karion’s heart. “The boy dies, you die,” he snarled.
Behind him, Elyne shouted in protest, but there was no time to show pity. Karion’s tricks would kill the boy. He made his face hard and blank, and stared into the old man’s face.
“Can you truly see the future?” Sarfael said. “Do you see your own?”
Karion cringed back, collapsing into easy old man’s tears of frustration and fear. “Go away, go away,” he cried. But his cries seemed to be aimed at his grisly pets and not at Sarfael.
The dead hands scrabbled back from Montimort, retreating into the shadows.
“All the way out of the room,” said Sarfael, keeping the relief from his tone. He had to play the villain or the boy would be dead. “Send them far away.”
Karion flapped his own hands and the undead creatures skittered out of the room.
When the sound of the claws faded away, Sarfael stepped back, dropping the point of the sword.
Elyne helped the battered and bruised Montimort rise to his feet. Despite the beating he’d taken, Montimort still cradled Karion’s magic box safely in his arms. If everything that the old man had told them was true, speaking the spell etched into the box would recall the lost crown of Neverwinter from wherever it was hidden. Except they had to know where the spell started and stopped.
Karion pounded his hands on the arms of his chair and drummed his feet in rage against the floor. “You cut them and shattered them. It took me days and days to lead them out of the dark. Now they’ll leave me.”
“Cousin, Cousin,” Elyne said, dropping to her knees beside the old man. “Why attack Montimort? He meant you no harm. He’s a friend.”
“He is from Luskan.” Karion pouted. “They’re thieves and pirates. Why should he take my box? Why should they have the crown?”
“I am not a thief,” raged Montimort. “I live here. Whatever I do, I do for Elyne and the Nashers. I care for Neverwinter more than you!”
“But you don’t know its secrets!” Karion crowed. “Not like me. Up into the high places, down into the low. Round the wall and along the river. I go to places that others have forgotten. I find the words that others no longer speak. The art is lost, but not my memory. I remember all the enchantments, twisting end on end, from emerald to crown.”
Montimort turned the box around and around in his hands. The emerald centered on the lid winked in the dimly lit room.
“You should have let it go,” Sarfael said.
Montimort’s mouth thinned and he shook his head. “The Nashers need this.”
“Do you think those rebels would take such risks for you?” Sarfael knew the answer before Montimort spoke.
“Elyne,” the boy started, and then he stopped, the stubborn blush warring with the bruises on his face.
Sarfael sighed. A man could die for such foolishness. He waited for the memory of Mavreen to make some sharp disagreement or jesting remark. But there was silence in his heart. For how could he chide another for his own very special brand of idiocy?
“Get out, get out!” Karion waved his arms at them. He huddled down in his chair, mumbling into his chest. “Go on, I’m tired. Get out of my house.”
Elyne patted her aged, mad, and malodorous relative with a sigh. “I am sorry, Cousin,” she said, “that we caused you such distress. But this box will be safer with us and may help rebuild the city that we all love.”
Karion covered his face with his hand like a sleepy child. “Good-bye,” the old seer murmured. “I won’t see you again, but I thank you for the cheese.”
Sarfael herded Montimort toward the door, but rather than being glad to leave, the boy hung back. “No, wait, I want to ask him more.”
“Enough,” said Elyne. “We need to leave now. It will be twilight soon, and the Dead Rats will be out in force. We’ve saved you once from them today. Don’t risk my life and Sarfael’s again.”
“I didn’t! I wouldn’t!” Montimort squealed as Sarfael pushed him out the door.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Sarfael said to the indignant young man.
“Good-bye, pirate!” yelled Karion behind them. “You’ll regret everything you steal.”
“I am not a thief!” screamed Montimort back at him as Elyne and Sarfael hustled him out of the house.
On the street, Montimort stomped silently away, the box still clutched tightly to his chest.
Sarfael reached out to stop him but Elyne held him back.
“Let him go home,” she said. “I’ll follow and make sure that he reaches his rooms safely.”
“And the box?” Sarfael knew he probably should wrest it away from Montimort and take it to Dhafiyand. But such an action would end his time with the Nashers. As he stared down at the slender, red-haired swordswoman, he wasn’t ready yet to end his deception.
Elyne looked after Montimort with troubled eyes. “I’m hoping that the box turns out to be another of Karion’s mistakes. If it can truly call forth the crown, then it is a danger to us all. But it is for Arlon to decide how the Nashers will use it.”
“Do you think that wise?” he asked, remembering Arlon’s many calls for violent revolution at the last meeting of the Nashers.
“No,” Elyne admitted, “I do not think it wise at all. But I don’t know what else to do.”
Dhafiyand actually sounded pleased when Sarfael told him that the box was still in the possession of the Nashers.
“I thought you would want it here,” Sarfael admitted with a wary look at the spymaster. Dhafiyand purring over some unexpected twist meant trouble for someone, most likely himself.
“Not yet,” Dhafiyand said. “You think the young wizard from Luskan might know how to use it?”
“He says he has some knowledge of such things,” Sarfael said. “He’s locked himself away in his rooms for the past two days to study it. Elyne pounds on his door and forces him to come out and eat.”
“He sounds like an ambitious boy,” Dhafiyand said. “This Montimort might be useful to cultivate. The pursuit of the arcane arts creates such passions in the soul that temptations are easy to construct.”
“Such pursuits apparently drove Karion insane,” Sarfael said. “He seemed ready enough to murder us.”
; “It seems I’ve underestimated Karion’s abilities. The old man has been something of a joke in the city, given to standing on street corners and shouting out prophecies of doom when he’s not rummaging among the trash heaps,” Dhafiyand mused as he sorted through the papers on his table. “I wonder if he constructed the claws or simply acquired them somewhere. They breed in a fashion, you know, in the Underdark.”
Sarfael shuddered at that thought. His last sight of the ambulatory hands was of them fleeing down the hallway of Karion’s house, dragging the hacked remnants of their fellows with them.
A discreet knock sounded at the door. Dhafiyand called a command to enter and one of his dark-clad servants slid through the room to hand him a written message.
With a sigh, Dhafiyand rose from his chair. “You must excuse me. Soman Galt’s messenger needs an immediate answer. The mayor is making arrangements for Lord Neverwinter’s arrival.”
“So he is coming?”
“His ship will be in the harbor any day now.” Dhafiyand followed his servant from the room.
As always, Sarfael found himself roaming the too warm chamber, fidgeting with the various trinkets that littered every surface. The pearl-encrusted miniature of a moon elf sat upon a pile of paper on Dhafiyand’s table. In previous visits, Sarfael had noticed it on the mantel.
Sarfael moved the miniature aside and glanced at the folded slip of paper beneath, a spy’s habit. A single bold line of writing read simply: “Find the crown and bring it to me.”
Quite obviously from Lord Neverember, never mind the discreet lack of a signature. He wondered when the message was sent and for how long the spymaster and his lord had been hunting the crown.
Dhafiyand entered the room with a sigh. “I have much more important business,” he said to Sarfael, “than reassuring our mayor that his arrangements for Lord Neverember’s welcome are both satisfactory and safe. Now, what of this Montimort, can we bribe him or entice him into betraying the Nashers?”
“The boy would never betray Elyne,” Sarfael stated flatly. And attempts to make him turn traitor might endanger both Montimort and Elyne, never mind that Sarfael himself had had the same thought when first they met. But suddenly, he just wanted to keep the pair of them as far away from Dhafiyand as possible. They lacked his experience of dealing with the old man, and his ability to keep one step ahead of his treacherous games. “If you want the box, why not let me steal it? I can have it here within the hour and do the trick so none would suspect.”
“And what good would that do me? The current situation suits me very well.”
That answer surprised him. “Why? I thought you were eager to get your hands on the crown.”
“But they don’t have the crown,” Dhafiyand pointed out. “They have a box, an empty box, and until the spell is evoked, a most useless box.”
“What game are you playing now?” Sarfael let the words slip out before he reflected that such indiscretion was unwise near Dhafiyand.
But the spymaster seemed amused. “A balancing of many interests,” he said to Sarfael. “A waiting game. Timing, it is timing we must consider. And why I need you there to snatch it for Lord Neverember when the moment is right.”
As he left Dhafiyand’s chambers, Rucas Sarfael wondered why he had ever considered the lady in the miniature attractive. Her face was scored with lines of anger and the mad gleam of her eyes reminded him most uncomfortably of Karion’s expression when they parted.
That night, Elyne struggled to keep her students focused on the lesson.
“Charinyn, again,” she called as the girl circled her opponent in the center of the floor. “Stop fluttering with every motion. I want to see a quicker parry, either with the sword or that cloak. Or discard the cape immediately.”
The blonde girl pouted and then wavered during her attack again. Rucas Sarfael, growing bored with watching and, wanting to talk to Elyne, stepped casually into the circle, flattened Charinyn by stepping on her swirling cape, and then tripped up her opponent by carefully placing his foot where the other student wasn’t expecting it.
Elyne started to scowl at him, but it gave way to laughter when he whispered, “If she eats sawdust often enough, she’ll stop flouncing around and pay attention.”
Shaking her head at him, Elyne called her students to gather around. “Now,” she said, “since none of you can stop whispering in corners, and you’re all fighting as if you’re uncertain how to tell one end of the blade from the other, would anyone care to tell me why?”
The students jostled each other.
“Montimort says he’s found it,” Parnadiz finally admitted. “Or rather, he knows where to find it.”
“What?” questioned Sarfael.
“The key to the box. He says that it is back at Karion’s house. Something he saw and just remembered tonight.”
“He went there by himself?” Elyne interjected. “You let him?”
“He went tearing out of here, almost knocked me over,” Charinyn admitted. “We didn’t think to stop him.”
“Or to tell me,” Elyne said.
“He told us not to say anything,” Parnadiz said.
“Which, of course, is why you’ve been buzzing about it all evening,” Sarfael guessed.
“Parnadiz, take the lesson,” Elyne snapped. “Drills, defensive drills, all of them, until everyone gets it right.”
Her orders were greeted with groans but, after a hard stare, all the students hastily arranged themselves in the center of the room.
“Engage,” Parnadiz cried. “Fall back, thrust, counter, thrust again, disengage. Again.”
Elyne dropped the practice sword that she had been carrying onto the rack and snatched her own sword from the table where it lay. She buckled her harness as she hurried out the door.
Rucas Sarfael matched her step for step.
“You are going to Karion’s house,” he said, more statement than question.
“It’s almost sunset,” Elyne answered. “The Dead Rats will spot him, either coming or going. I have to find him and get him back here.”
“What about Karion?” Sarfael asked, remembering the old man’s murderous attack on Montimort. “He’s as much a danger to the boy as the Dead Rats.”
“More,” Elyne said. “The Rats want Montimort alive. Karion does not. We need to hurry.”
The door to Karion’s house was not bolted. As soon as Elyne began to pound on the panels, it swung open. The hallway beyond was lit only by the late evening sunlight coming through the door. Elyne would have rushed in, but Sarfael held her back.
“Wait,” he said. “An ambush doesn’t help the boy.”
She nodded, but still slipped past him, heading toward Karion’s room. Her sword was drawn and she looked ready for battle.
Sarfael checked the hallway carefully, but heard and saw no evidence of the crawling claws. He followed Elyne.
The place was torn apart, the old man’s chair tipped over, and his piles of rubbish strewn across the floor. Papers were shredded and long strips of parchment curled around their feet.
“Karion was no careful housekeeper,” Sarfael observed, “but this looks deliberate.”
Elyne stirred the shreds of paper with her booted foot. “These were ripped apart by claws. Do you think those things that attacked us earlier turned against him?”
“Perhaps. Do you see any sign of Montimort? Or Karion?”
She shook her head. “Downstairs, if anywhere inside the house. Karion lived as much in his kitchen as this room.”
“Ah, yes, the cheese.” Sarfael remembered Karion’s greedy snatching of the supplies they brought earlier and his stashing of his favorites around the kitchen and pantry. All watched by the stuffed remains of a former pet, a large cat left on the kitchen table to scare off rats.
They proceeded carefully under the painted eyes of the disapproving portraits and went down the stairs past the cityscapes of a more pleasant and long gone Neverwinter.
The old man lay on the hea
rth, one out-flung hand almost resting in the kitchen fire. A kettle boiled above the flames.
Elyne gasped and rushed down the steps. She turned the body over and recoiled. Karion’s face, chest, arms, and hands were shredded as if mangled by some wild beast. To judge by the deep claw marks in his flesh, the old man had struggled mightily before he died. His face was contorted into a bloody mask of fear and anger.
“What could have done this?” Elyne exclaimed.
Sarfael started to make some comforting but meaningless remark. He doubted any besides Elyne would mourn the murderous seer with his delight in undead pets and rubbish-stuffed rooms.
The firelight flickered in the glass eyes of the stuffed cat that crouched upon the stone floor. Blood dripped from the creature’s mouth.
Sarfael gave a shout of warning as the undead cat leaped for Elyne.
She ducked the attack, rolling to one side, and then reversing to strike with some force. Elyne skewered the undead creature precisely through the heart. The cat swiped at her with one paw. Elyne fell back. The creature followed.
“The head,” Sarfael shouted, “cut off the head. If you can’t hit that, go for the legs. Slow it down.”
He circled in the opposite direction, looking for a good hit.
With a silent snarl, the creature leaped to the top of the kitchen table and then whirled in the opposite direction. Elyne chased after it, but the undead creature moved with great speed, dodging her strikes and clawing out with one and then the other paw.
It leaped off the table, slashing right and left, and herding Elyne into one corner.
She parried with a lighting series of strokes, even cutting off the cat’s tail, which fell with a sawdust thud to the floor. But her rapier was too light to cut off the cat’s head, even as she notched its ragged ears and slashed deep cuts into its neck and legs.
Glancing around the kitchen, Sarfael saw the kindling tumbling from the stack next to the kitchen fire. One stick lay half in and half out of the fire, just outside the reach of Karion’s outstretched hand.
Cold Steel and Secrets Part 3 (neverwinter) Page 1
