by Dale Lucas
“I’m not asking about the world,” Rem said. “I’m asking about you.”
“When I was a child—probably a century or more before you were born—Loffmari slavers raided the little woodland village I called home. They took all of the children—myself among them—raped our mothers and sisters and grandams before putting them all to the sword, then dashed out the men’s brains with maces and stones. Every hut was put to the torch. The great, ancient trees that bounded our enclave were licked by flames and reduced to ash. And the two dozen of us captured as prisoners were taken away, in chains, for thorning and sale. Every one of us felt the bite of the iron spike, and lost in an instant the supraliminal sight and sensitivity that was our birthright.
“Then, on to our new masters. Some became house slaves. Some were sent to mines, to navigate the narrowest and most dangerous of veins. Still more were installed as whores in brothels, flesh chattel for human males who thought the violation of elven flesh good sport indeed. I ended up as a bath servant to a rich young lady for a time. Then a body servant to her father. Then his … plaything.”
Rem was stunned when Masarda’s description of his plight faltered on that single word. He would not have guessed there was any pain—any true shame—left in the elf’s clearly fractured soul. But he heard it in his voice when he spoke that word—plaything. He heard the sadness, the bitterness, the contempt.
Masarda continued, trying to hide his pain beneath a mask of condescension, as though he were telling a tale to a dull-witted child. “Eventually, I could take no more of his attentions and murdered him in his sleep. I was tried and bound for the gallows, but a fellow from the southlands—dark and bloodthirsty and with a flair for the theatrical—bought me for use in his blood sports. He thought throwing an elf dressed in a ridiculous forest dweller’s costume into the arena to be torn to shreds by leopards or spitted on a spear by a pit fighter would be good drama. Instead, I slew every adversary they sent against me. He realized then that I had a value of another sort, and I spent the next ten years fighting for my life, three or four times a week.”
Rem was starting to understand now. He could hardly imagine anyone emerging from such an existence with their soul and—dare he say it, humanity—intact. Part of him wished that Ondego and the rest would return, soon, and end Masarda’s tale. Another part of him prayed they would not.
“Eventually, I bought my freedom, and I could go where I liked. But, of course, there was nowhere for me to go. My own kind would not have me, and your sort just looked upon me as a sad curiosity. They saw a pitiful freed slave or a displaced woodlander or a sort of road-bound orphan with no home to call his own—but they never saw me as a person—a sentient being—a creature worthy of their attention or affections. In time, I managed to make a living for myself buying exotic junk from the sunlands or my elven brethren and reselling it to gullible human buyers as fine imports and wondrous sylvan handicrafts. You copper-gobblers do love to commoditize the world—you sell with abandon, you buy as though your very lives depended upon it.
“By and by, I was fairly well-to-do. I spent decades wandering from place to place, buying, trading, selling, amassing a fortune, putting on the veneer of respectability—but never once was I truly embraced or accepted. I was—and remained—an orphan. A creature without a country or a tribe.”
“It was vengeance,” Rem said. “Wasn’t it? Vengeance upon men? And upon your own people?”
Masarda gave a sad, wistful little smile, as though nursing a bittersweet memory. “Perhaps it was, at that. Why not snatch the young and beautiful and hopeful from among your sort—the people that snatched and enslaved me—and sell their bodies and their futures to the very worst of my kind? And why not feed the unutterable vices of my fellow wood folk, be they here, on the continent, or off upon our isle of refuge? Even if there were not so many in search of my peculiar merchandise, their appetites and coffers both seemed bottomless. Let them do as they liked with your youngsters—I would reap the rewards, and watch, bemused, as human lives were destroyed and self-satisfied elven morals were tainted and debased—all while I fattened my purse. There was elegance in it, I thought. A serendipitous reciprocity that never failed to put a smile on my face.”
And with those words, Masarda did, indeed, smile. That smile made Rem shudder and feel vaguely sick. He had never been so sorry to be right in all his life.
But questions remained. He pressed on.
“The orc? Lugdum? What part did he play?”
Masarda shrugged. “Just a longtime companion. I bought him out of a blood-sport pit when he was young. He was so grateful—and so simple—that he followed my every order thereafter. Even when I required nothing of him, having his considerable bulk beside me in dangerous situations was a kind of security. And, if need be, I could set him loose on any who dared threaten me.”
“You had him follow us,” Rem said.
“Just so,” Masarda answered. “We spoke a private language between us—simple but effective. He was not terribly bright, but he was a good observer. More than once over the years I’ve sent him into the streets to surveil my enemies. Or my friends.”
“Do you know what became of him?” Rem asked, vaguely sickened by the memory of how he and Torval had abandoned the crippled orc to Gorn Bonebreaker.
Masarda shook his head. “Nor do I care. Clearly, he had outlived his usefulness—poor, pathetic beast that he was.”
Now Rem felt the urge to cross the table and beat the smug elf bloody. To use Lugdum for so many years as bodyguard and errand boy was one thing. But to be so indifferent to his ultimate fate? To care nothing for what became of him?
There really was a great, black hole in the center of this creature before him. Staring into that abyss, Rem had the unsettling feeling that the abyss itself stared back at him. It left him cold and covered in gooseflesh.
“Are you satisfied, Watchwarden?” Masarda asked. “Have you plumbed my depths and uncovered the truth at the heart of the riddle that you sought?”
He was teasing him. Rem did not appreciate that.
“You’ve been most candid with me,” Rem said slowly. “I thank you for that.”
“It was the least I could do,” Masarda said with a bent grin, “for one so young and ignorant of the world’s ways. Pray you never find such a bottomless well at the center of your soul, boy. We can run from many things in this world, but we can never run from our true selves.”
The door of the interrogation room opened. Torval, Ondego, and Hirk returned. Within moments, a more formal interrogation resumed.
It was Hirk who took the lead, with Ondego occasionally interjecting an inquiry of his own. Rem and Torval stood by, watching, listening, but both kept their mouths shut while their superiors teased answers from their lackadaisical prisoner. Rem noted that Masarda seemed to have lost the relish he evidenced when speaking to Rem alone. Likewise, the elf never acknowledged him. It was as though Rem had ceased to exist the moment the other watchmen returned. The elf answered almost every question posed to him, but usually with few words and little emotion. Rem had sensed a nasty delight in the elf’s confession when the two of them were alone in the room; now he saw only a creature eager to end a tiresome chore and once more be left alone. The idea that Masarda had taken some special interest in answering Rem’s questions—in baring his own fractured soul and exposing the true depths of his own evil and antipathy—gave Rem no comfort, but rather, left him more than a little shaken.
Why me? Rem wondered. Why did he deign to talk to me with such delight, while he now treats Ondego and the rest of them like beggars?
They questioned him about everything: the logistics of the operation, the profits generated, the ultimate destination of his victims and the uses they were intended for, even the nature and number of his associates. Masarda’s answers remained curt and brief, offered with a slow-gathering annoyance. After quite some time, with a great deal of information having been extracted, Hirk finally threw a glance at Torval, gave him a
little nod—as if in warning or silent agreement—then asked a new question, wholly unlike the others.
“What about Freygaf?”
The name seemed to stir something in Masarda’s reticent character. “Freygaf?”
Hirk nodded. “Barbarian. Northerner. Had a pentacle tattooed over his right eye.”
Masarda searched his memory for a moment, his attempts to couple face with name apparent. Then a slight smile crept onto his lips. He kept his face down, but he raised his eyes and met Hirk’s gaze. “Oh yes,” he said slowly. “A friend of yours?”
Rem looked to Torval. The dwarf’s face was set in a deep frown. His jaw was clenched so tightly it seemed he might grind his own teeth to dust. Anger was rising in him. He was struggling mightily to suppress it.
“He was a watchwarden, wasn’t he?” Masarda asked. “Yes, I do recall him saying something to that effect before we dispatched him.”
“So you confess to his murder?” Ondego asked.
Masarda held up his dainty, slender hands. “I see no blood, good prefect.”
“Cut the cack,” Hirk snapped.
“If you mean did I kill him myself, the answer is no,” Masarda said, sitting back comfortably and looking again, to Rem, like a man gladly about to share unpleasant information with an unprepared audience. “Though I’m afraid sending him home to his mountain gods was my idea. Others simply saw it through.”
“Why?” Torval suddenly spat, as though he could manage to eject that one word and no others.
Masarda’s icy sapphire gaze turned on Torval. “Because he was a fool,” Masarda said. “That blundering barbarian found poor Telura Dall in a winesink, out drinking with some low-class companions, flirting with sellswords and gamblers. He managed to talk her into accompanying him back to the Moon Under Water. When I saw that he had delivered us the daughter of one of my closest—and richest—social acquaintances, I knew he had to be made an example of. The girl was killed because she could not be allowed to live—she could have connected your late friend to our operations, after all. I ordered her drowned while still unconscious, her body dumped in the Fifth Ward, as far from her home as possible. Freygaf, meanwhile, was dispatched as a lesson to my other talent scouts—to urge them to pay closer attention to who they deemed fit for service. Generally speaking, rich young ladies with influential parents are to be avoided.”
Rem did not watch Masarda as he spoke. Instead, he watched his partner, Torval, and saw clearly the pain and grief and fury in the dwarf’s eyes. He thought that Torval would try to kill the self-satisfied elf, but Torval somehow remained silent and still all the while. Perhaps his anger was directed at Freygaf, for his deceit. Perhaps it was simply driven inward, at himself, for not seeing through his partner’s mask of friendship and virtue.
Everyone in the room was silent. A question suddenly bloomed in Rem’s mind and bade him inwardly to speak it aloud. Without thinking, he posed it.
“How could you?” he asked. “You were clearly close to the Dall family. You knew Telura—”
“From her birth,” Masarda confirmed.
“Then how?” Rem pressed. “I simply don’t understand.”
Masarda shrugged. “Business, boy. If I ever called anyone of your kind my friend, it was only because he was useful to me, putting money in my purse or lending me the respectability necessary to move in wider and richer social circles to maintain my position. Were my sentiments, earlier confided to you, not clear enough?”
This indication that he and Rem had spoken earlier caused Hirk, Ondego, and Torval to all turn their puzzled gazes on Rem. He waved them off. “Later,” he said, “when we’re out of this room.”
“Did you know,” Masarda broke in, and all eyes turned back to him, “that your compatriot tried to convince me that he was only working for my operation in an effort to fully expose it and dismantle it? That he had already made notes regarding it and that those notes would be delivered to you lot if anything happened to him?”
Ondego and Hirk exchanged glances. Rem looked to Torval. Torval glared at the malevolent elf.
“Then again,” Masarda added, “he made those claims after enduring a beating from Lugdum, whilst staring at the point of good Rhaegir’s dagger—Rhaegir being my bodyguard. You remember him, don’t you, boy? The one who nearly skewered you on the deck of my ship before your diminutive little friend there so unceremoniously split his skull?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Hirk said. “Just what did Freygaf tell you about this investigation of his?”
Masarda shrugged. “Just what I told you.”
“That doesn’t corroborate anything,” Ondego muttered.
“But that was precisely my point,” Masarda said. “The poor fellow was under duress and facing certain death. Perhaps his claims of investigating my operation with the intention of exposing it were simply desperate attempts at forestalling the inevitable. In any case, his throat was cut and Lugdum took the body through the sewers to be rid of it.”
The door to the chamber opened. The Fifth’s elven watchwarden, Queydon, stood there accompanied by a familiar vision of unearthly beauty and immortal desire, whose presence Rem found terribly jarring in the close, coarse confines of their watchkeep. He actually smelled her before he saw her, a cloying, heady waft of lilies and lilacs that made Rem’s vision go gray and his cock stand at attention. Thank the Panoply she was wearing actual clothes this time and not that sheer, diaphanous gown that she’d been draped in when they called at her pleasure garden.
The Lady Ynevena recognized him. She smiled, and Rem thought he might cry at how lovely she was, how desperately he wanted her.
Witch, he thought, ashamed of his own unbidden bodily responses to the elven ethnarch’s mere presence. Torval was right about you all along.
“Watchwarden Remeck,” the elven matron said, stepping into the chamber. “What a pleasant and most unexpected surprise. When last we met, you found me in my native habitat, and now, I get to see you in yours.”
Rem stood and faced her. He knew why she was there. Ondego and some of the other watchmen had already groused about it. She would question Masarda, she would argue for his swift rendition into the custody of his own kind, and then she would spirit him away to Aadrendrath or some other elven enclave, never to be seen by human eyes again—perhaps, not even punished for his crimes.
He wanted Ynevena to feel his disdain for her. He wanted her to see that despite the fact that he wanted to throw her down on the table that separated him and Masarda and ball her elven brains out, he also thought she was a rank weed in the garden of decency and civilization.
Ynevena studied him. Smiled again. She read him thoroughly, and she did not care.
When she spoke, it was to everyone, though her eyes never left Rem’s. “Good watchwardens, I beg your leave for a private audience with my kinsman. Leave a guard in the hall and I’ll make it known when our exchange is completed. No one should enter this room before that moment.”
Rem moved to grant her wishes. She stopped him, one soft hand falling on his forearm. “My invitation stands,” she said quietly.
Rem left the room in a hurry.
He found Torval lingering in the corridor outside, a stunned, sour look on his broad little face.
“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” Rem said. “But at least you know that Freygaf tried—”
“Bollocks,” Torval growled, not turning to face his young partner. “I know nothing. I know what he told me. He could be lying. Or telling the truth, and Freygaf was lying, just trying to buy himself a few more breaths.”
“Or,” Rem countered, “Freygaf was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn’t innocent, entirely … but it could be that what he discovered while trying to scrape up some extra coin in Masarda’s employ moved him to finally remember who he was and the service he was sworn to. He could have been compromised, yet still trying to find a way back—a way to redeem himself.”
Torval kept staring at the floor.
/> “There are always the necromancers in Mage’s Alley,” Rem said quietly.
“No,” Torval said with finality. “Whatever the truth, he needs to rest now. The gods knew, his life was hard enough.”
“But the truth, Torval …”
Torval raised his eyes to Rem. There were tears in them, glinting and ready to roll down his broad, ruddy cheeks. “The truth is, I’ll never know about his end. I only know that despite his many faults, he was a good mate. And now he’s gone.”
An awkward silence fell. Rem and Torval remembered that they were not alone. Both turned toward Ondego, still standing not far from them with Hirk at his elbow. The warden and his second had strange expressions on their faces: set mouths with ghostly bends at their corners—the merest shadow of smiles—along with narrowed eyes suggesting a conspiratorial bend to whatever they were about to say.
Silence persisted between them. Finally, Torval spoke.
“What is it?” he asked. “If you’re about to tell me I can’t be alone with that elf any longer, I’d wager you were dead right—”
“We need two hands,” Ondego said. “We think the two of you will do nicely.”
“Two hands for what?” Rem asked.
“Another interrogation,” Ondego said, then turned and walked back down the hall. Hirk followed. Rem and Torval, intrigued, brought up the rear.
In moments, they were down in the dungeons. The standard chorus of begged pardons and offers of remuneration began the moment the prisoners all saw Ondego’s face.
Prefect, sir, there’s been a terrible mistake …
Prefect, sir, someone must have spiked my ale, because the last thing I remember, I was enjoying an evening out with some mates …
Prefect, sir, I’ve a chest of treasure waiting back at my rooms at the Rusty Gibbet. A golden cup full of rubies and emeralds is yours, if you’ll just let me out of here …
Prefect, sir … Warden, sir …
Over and over again. The old litany almost made Rem feel at home.
Ondego and Hirk proceeded to a certain corner cell, where a fat, familiar face awaited beyond the cell bars. Rem felt a smile creeping onto his face and had to struggle to keep it from blooming. He looked to Torval. The dwarf’s own satisfied scowl was his version of a smile, and Rem knew he was delighted.
