“Clever,” Sarfael said. “You knew what was needed.”
He snatched the burning brand from the fire and vaulted the kitchen table to belabor the cat with it.
The undead creature recoiled from the fire but its dust-dry fur caught the spark. In moments, flames engulfed it.
Elyne leaped away, shouting, “Drive it into the fireplace or it will set the whole place alight.”
Sarfael hooked the beast under its belly with the burning stick of kindling and threw it across the room into the fireplace. With a mighty whumpf, it exploded into bits of fur and ash. One green glass eye rolled across the floor to stop at their feet.
After a moment of stunned silence, Sarfael said, “Do we keep searching? Do you think Montimort is still here?”
Elyne crouched on the floor, apparently studying tracks in the dust. “Cheese,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
She pointed to the pantry. “Montimort probably headed there when the cat attacked.”
Elyne walked into the long narrow room lined with shelves and packed with boxes and jars, calling Montimort’s name softly. Sarfael followed. The place smelled strongly of cheese.
Peering into one dark corner, Elyne crouched down. “Come out,” she said. “It’s gone. You’re safe.”
A muffled squeak responded.
“No more arguments,” Elyne said in the same firm tone she used when she told her students to practice again. “We need to leave now.”
A thin brown rat slid out from the corner. Sitting upright, it curled its forepaws into its chest. Its whiskers twitched in a familiar way.
“Montimort!” said Sarfael. The rat tilted his head in a manner very reminiscent of the boy. “That’s an interesting trick.”
“But dangerous,” Elyne said, holding out one hand so the rat could climb up her arm and disappear into the hood of her cloak. “If a fight goes badly, he drops into the rat form automatically and scurries away. But his mastery over the change is poor and he doesn’t always change back as quickly. It’s one of the reasons he ran from the Dead Rats. They kept trying to beat better control into him. Which, of course, is the worst way to teach anyone.”
“Do the other students know?” Sarfael asked as they left Karion’s house.
“No. That’s why he only practices with me after the others have left. First dozen times I thrust a sword at him, he changed instantly. Poof. Montimort gone, and away ran the rat. He’s gotten better since then. He managed to hold his form when those claws attacked, although that might have been because they had such a tight grip on him.”
The rat inside her hood, Montimort, popped up his head and snorted at her assessment.
“How did you acquire this student?” Sarfael wondered.
“He came to me,” Elyne said. “There he was one night, bruised and bloody, on my doorstep. He begged me to teach him how to fight. How could I turn him away?”
Mavreen had begged him too. Begged him to teach her all his tricks, so she could add a rogue’s fighting skills to her mastery over spells. So she could destroy the Red Wizard who murdered her family.
“You can’t,” he said to Elyne. “You can’t refuse. Not when you see their heart and soul in their eyes. Not when you know how much it means.”
Dawn faded into bright morning before Montimort regained his human form. Elyne hugged him fiercely when he sidled out of the storage closet where they’d left the rat.
Then she smacked him firmly on the side of his head.
“Don’t do that again!” she said. “Running off. Not telling me.”
Sarfael watched the scolding with tired amusement. He’d long ago trained himself to doze on his feet. Rather like his horse, when he considered it. But it had been a long night, made longer by Elyne’s nervous pacing alternating with her bouts of attacking the practice butts with any weapon close at hand. At one point, he suggested that she go home and he wait for the boy. But the look she gave him indicated that she could practice blows on his body as well as the straw-covered target, and he’d kept quiet after that.
“But I have it, the key, the word we needed,” Montimort said. “I can trigger the spell upon the box and summon the crown to us.”
“You’re sure?” said Elyne. “That the spell will work?”
“I’m certain,” Montimort replied. “But we need to be outside the city. And high. Upland Rise.”
“But I thought the box was for carrying the crown into the city,” Sarfael said, remembering Karion’s tale. Upland Rise was a wasteland outside the city, stripped of its trees in Lord Neverember’s recent rebuilding of the docks.
“I spent days studying it,” said Montimort. The excited boy nearly twitched out of his clothes with excitement. His voice rose and sweat gleamed on his face. “The spell will only work on Upland Rise. We have to go tomorrow night. At moonset.”
“After dark it’s not safe,” Elyne said. “Not without a large group.”
“We have to do it then,” Montimort insisted.
Sarfael looked at him with narrowed eyes. How could the boy be so sure?
“Very well,” Elyne said. Obviously she had no doubts about Montimort’s sudden revelations. “I’ll go to Arlon and we’ll assemble the Nashers. You’ll need protection out there. And we’ll need to leave the city throughout the day, in small groups, or we’ll attract the attention of one of General Sabine’s patrols. Sarfael, you bring him last.”
“Moonset,” repeated Montimort, sounding as if he were reciting remembered instructions. Sarfael wondered again where he’d learned that lesson.
“We will meet you there,” Elyne promised before she left.
Sarfael remained behind. The boy fidgeted under his regard.
“How did you find the key?” he asked. “The word that you needed?”
Montimort shrugged. “Karion knew it. He talked so much about the box, knew its history so well. I realized he had to have the key. He kept hinting as much when we were there.”
“So you figured that out,” Sarfael said. “But how did you get the word from him? Last time he saw you, he tried to kill you.”
Montimort bit his thumbnail and mumbled something.
Sarfael waited.
Finally, Montimort blurted out, “I scared him. I scared him into giving me the word. But I didn’t know the cat would kill him. Then it attacked me! It wasn’t supposed to do that! And when it came after me, I changed and ran.”
“You murdered him,” Sarfael said, trying to sort out the events in his own mind. Where had Montimort suddenly acquired the ability to animate the dead? From everything he had said, and everything that Sarfael had seen, the boy had never been so powerful a wizard. And Karion had struck him as something of a dangerous old rascal. It would have taken some true knavery to best him. Was Montimort truly the innocent he seemed? Or, as Karion accused him, more of a Luskar and a threat than Sarfael originally suspected?
“He would have killed me!” Montimort shouted. “And I had to get the key. I had to. With it, we gain the crown. And then she can be queen of Neverwinter!”
Startled out of his own dark suspicions, Sarfael asked: “Who?”
“Elyne!” said Montimort.
In that one word, Sarfael realized, were all the answers to Montimort’s unusual behavior. The boy merely acted to help Elyne.
“She’s the closest descendent of Alagondar left in the city.” The words tumbled out of Montimort. “Arlon Bladeshaper and even Lord Neverember can’t truly trace their lineage back that far. Everyone knows it. They all gossip about it. How she could lead the Nashers if she wanted to, that she has more right than Arlon, but she won’t push herself forward.”
Sarfael remembered Elyne’s explanation of how she formed her school of “elegant fighting” for the young Nashers, of how she wanted to keep her former playmates from being killed by their attempt at rebellion. But I, she had admitted, am a very bad Nasher. I wouldn’t know what to do with the city if I had it, she once said.
“Mon
timort,” Sarfael said very gently, because the boy shook with his passion and because he suspected that Montimort had paid a terrible price for his newly acquired skills. “Montimort, she doesn’t want to be a queen. She has no ambition in her heart for such a thing.”
“She must be queen,” Montimort cried out. “Elyne must take the crown. She’s the only one. If she doesn’t, it’s all for nothing. I murdered Karion for nothing.”
The boy collapsed in a heap, weeping in lost and wild abandon. After a long moment, Sarfael crouched down beside him and placed his hand on Montimort’s shoulder. “We will go to Upland Rise. You’ll try your spells. Perhaps it won’t work. Perhaps it will. Then let others decide what to do with the crown of Neverwinter.”
Let Dhafiyand have it, Sarfael thought. If the boy succeeds, I’ll steal it from them and give it to Dhafiyand. And make sure that Elyne and all the rest stay out of his net. Perhaps a trade: a pardon for them, in return for a crown.
“Step careful,” Mavreen warned him as he fingered the hilt of her sword and contemplated tricks to deceive a master deceiver. For Sarfael could think of no more terrible fate for Elyne than to be queen of that broken city, with its warring factions and its dark history of shifting and ever deadly politics. Those who ruled Neverwinter or sought its throne were doomed, Sarfael thought, and, like the boy who wept beside him, he would do whatever he could to save Elyne.
The wind blew cold across Upland Rise. In the gray gloom of the predawn morning, the treeless hill reminded Rucas Sarfael of a graveyard. The stumps of the trees stood as memorials for Neverwinter’s gentler past, when it had once been a wooded parkland for the amusement of its citizens.
The white fog off the river ringed the base of the hill, leaving them stranded atop like mariners shipwrecked upon some island. All the Nashers were there: Elyne, Arlon, his followers, and her students. Even plump little Virchez, the Neverwinter merchant with ties to rich relatives in Waterdeep, had screwed up his courage and stood with the rest, a lantern in one hand and a wavering sword held not too steadily in the other.
Glancing at the crowd, Sarfael almost regretted that he had not sent word to Dhafiyand to stop them. It would have been so easy for General Sabine to march out a few Tarnian mercenaries, arrest the lot, and confiscate the box. He could have slipped away in the confusion and later arranged for Elyne and Montimort’s release. Arlon, who was blustering at the others and shouting orders, he would cheerfully have left in some dungeon until his temper cooled.
But, of course, if he did that, then he wouldn’t know if Montimort’s spell worked. He wouldn’t know if the box could summon the crown. And Dhafiyand most explicitly ordered him to watch and wait, to not act. Oh, he was so sick of orders and waiting. But, oh, he did want to see if a crown would appear.
“Curiosity,” Mavreen mocked him once, “will kill you quicker than any sword thrust. You insist on sticking your nose around every dark corner just to see if there is something there that will bite it off.”
Well, he’d never paid any attention to her reproaches then and, as much as he missed her, he certainly wasn’t going to let the memory of his first and last student stop him now.
And, if there was a crown, and he could steal it, he gained a much more powerful stake in the game of Neverwinter’s dark politics. With a crown, he could buy freedom for his friends.
Montimort finally seemed to have the spell started. The boy stood in the center of a ring of nervous Nashers. Torches flared all around him as he directed them to cast their light on the box that he held straight out from his body.
He turned the box so the emerald glittering in the center of the lid faced him and began to read the words inscribed around it. Montimort intoned the spell slowly, the Thayan rite making his voice sound harsher and deeper than ever before. As he read the spell, the emerald began to glow brighter and brighter.
With a shout, Montimort ended the spell. The emerald flashed so brightly that Sarfael closed his eyes automatically.
When he opened them, he saw Montimort tumble back from a tall green figure holding the box in her two hands.
Dressed in vest and trousers, the emerald woman regarded them all without expression on her perfectly carved features.
Montimort seemed as stunned and surprised as the rest of them, but the boy visibly swallowed his fear and spoke sternly to woman. “Bring us the crown!” he commanded.
She nodded once with regal solemnity. A glowing green circle appeared at her feet. The jewel woman stepped through it and disappeared.
The wind ruffled their cloaks. The crackle of the torches was the only sound on the hill.
Then, because it was a gathering of Nashers, they all started speaking at the same time.
“What was that?”
“Who was that?”
“Did we get the crown?”
“Now what should we do?”
Arlon yelled at them all to be quiet, which made everyone talk in hissing whispers.
Elyne moved next to Sarfael and spoke in normal tones to him. “Perhaps that will be the end of it,” she said, and she sounded relieved. “The spell failed.”
“Not yet,” Sarfael said, pointing at the glowing green circle of light still visible on the top of the hill. Montimort watched it with narrowed eyes, paying no attention to the resounding rumpus around him.
The circle flashed and the Nashers fell back. The green woman again appeared on the top of the hill. She held out her emerald hands, the dark wood box balanced across her palms.
Montimort reached out and took it. Another brilliant flash, as bright as lighting but silent as the grave, and the woman was gone. The emerald on the center of the box gleamed for a moment with an internal light, but then the glow faded until it only reflected the glitter of the torches.
Stunned, the Nashers waited in silence for Montimort to speak.
Sarfael glanced at Elyne. Alone, of all of them, her eyes were on the boy’s face rather than the box in his hands. “He’s all right,” Sarfael reassured her.
Finally, the impatient Arlon blurted out, “Well, do you have it? Is it the crown?”
Blinking his eyes as if he had just woken from a dream, Montimort shook the box slightly. Something heavy rattled inside.
“Open it,” Arlon commanded.
“No!” Sarfael said, stepping forward. “Not here. Not in the open and the dark. Let’s take it somewhere safe.” Somewhere I can steal it, he added to himself, and before you can all get a good look at it.
Because, at the end of the day, a box was just a box. Even one that rattled. A story for the taverns. The sight of a true crown, one that had been seen and might even be placed on one of the heads in their group, that story would be far more dangerous for the teller and the listeners. Dhafiyand might even act to silence such a story with blood.
Shouts of the watchers on the edge of the hill startled them all. Sarfael turned away from Montimort to see watchers tumbling back toward them, torches waving in the air, pursued by grim and ghastly shapes.
“Ash zombies!” they yelled.
Out of the mist, the undead came up the hill, ringing the Nashers on all sides, shambling forward with outstretched, flailing arms. In the growing light of the day, their burned and ghastly features were clearly visible.
With a curse, Sarfael drew Mavreen’s sword from his scabbard. As much as he relished striking down the undead, the dawn was filling a little too quickly with problems. He still needed to get that box away from Montimort.
The black unicorn horn that formed the sword’s twisted hilt was cool and comforting under his hand. He had killed the wicked beast while Mavreen dispatched its rider, the first of many Thayan agents that they had destroyed along the Sword Coast.
With Mavreen’s name like a blessing on his lips, Sarfael waded into the undead attackers, striking left and right without pause, taking their heads from their shoulders. His whirling blade cut deep with every stroke.
Behind him, Elyne shouted orders, drawing her student
s close around her, taking down more than one zombie at time with spinning sweeps of her sword.
Parnadiz and Charinyn wedged Montimort between them. Following Elyne’s orders, they began to hustle him down the hill toward the city, even as Sarfael and Elyne cut a path open for them.
The ash zombies targeted the younger Nashers first. Luckily, they were as slow as Elyne’s students were quick, but the trail of ash each left in its wake created a fog almost as thick as the mist swirling at the base of the hill. The fighters coughed, and hacked, and sneezed, and struck, all in mad confusion.
The other Nashers fought as bravely, but poorer weapons and less training hampered many.
Arlon Bladeshaper charged without regard for his safety into the thick of the fight. He pulled little Virchez from a heap of the undead, lifting the wounded man onto his own broad shoulders and bellowing for them to head for the city.
In the mist, the zombies fell back, only to suddenly reappear from the side or harass them from the rear.
Sarfael realized they were being driven like sheep nipped at the heels by undead dogs. But where? He tried to step aside, to cut them a new road out of the crowd of harassing corpses, but the numbers were too great. And the creatures seemed to have his measure. Whenever he attacked, they faded back and turned their blows upon the others.
With raging frustration, Sarfael tried to engage the zombies, to force them into facing his blade. But still the others drew the bulk of the attack. He could hear their cries echoing in the night air. The night became a shambles, as terrible as that night when he chased Mavreen’s corpse into its final grave.
Elyne flashed by him. Her bright braid a pennant to rally the others to her side, her cries sounded above the calls of the others. Sarfael whirled to one side to drive down a creature about to flank her, but Elyne whipped around and she saved herself.
“Help the others,” she spoke as calmly as she called the moves in her school. “Go now, I’m fine.”
The Nashers stumbled on, until they reached the river. Arlon fought like three men, with sword, fist, and, in one memorable moment that even earned a shout of praise from Sarfael, butting straight into a crowd of attackers with his hard head.
Cold Steel and Secrets Part 3 (neverwinter) Page 2
