I barely managed to restrain a painful scream, but I made my way to my room, put a poultice on the wound, and quickly fell into an exhausted sleep, disturbed frequently by dreams of giant black cats spitting fire, glowing green, and swinging axes whose blades were rows of fangs. I’d far rather have dreamed of Mayella or Kendra or even Sunfirth, but no. I had to dream about cats with axes.
9
The morning came faster than a werejaguar with a fire under it. My ankle ached, my eyes were stuck shut with sleep sand, and my stomach was queasy, I feared, from Shortshanks’s cod pie.
But when you’re a servant you don’t let little things like that get in the way of your duty. After a quick breakfast of a poached egg on blackbread, I hitched the two horses to the carriage and started off for Ghars. Stubbins fell in quickly enough, but Jenkus was quite put out about being made to work so soon after his service of the night before. Me, too, for all the good it did us.
Actually, it almost felt like the night before. The sun had not yet come over the horizon, but its light bathed the landscape in a pinkish glow. As the carriage rattled along, the egg and bread in my stomach churned a bit. My stomach wasn’t helped by the fact that Jenkus’s reluctance to pull kept getting the coach off course, requiring a firm hand on the reins. At last Jenkus seemed to accept his fate, and we went on a relatively straight path toward Ghars.
As we passed the spot where I had seen the apparition, I tried to avert my eyes, which wasn’t too difficult, since they were closed in half-sleep for most of the ride. But I thought that from the corner of my eye I glimpsed a shape on the ground, out near the swamp, and a dull sheen on it not found in nature.
Did I conquer my fears of seeing a hideous wight or zombie or meazel or even a gibbering mouther rise up out of the swamp to capture and devour me? Did I turn and look fully into what I prayed was only a mound of swamp muck with a wet sheen?
I did not. I buried my head down into my cloak like the coward I sometimes am, and shook the reins in the fruitless hope that Stubbins and Jenkus would increase their speed.
But nothing came after me, and a ways down the road I turned and looked back uneasily, half expecting to be pounced upon from behind by some stealthy pursuer. The mound was discernible, far back in the distance, and the rising sun glinted off something. But now was not the time for investigation. On the way back would be best, in the company of a War Wizard with a good many combat spells at his disposal.
That War Wizard, however, turned out to be a pretty unassuming sort. He was sitting on a bench outside the Sheaf of Wheat, his nose in a book and several small satchels at his feet. He wore a slouch hat, and a dusty brown cloak covered his thin body. When he stood, I could see that he was of only medium height, though half a head taller than me.
“Sir, are you Lindavar, the wizard Benelaius’s guest?”
He looked as though he had to think about it for a minute, but answered, “Uh, yes … yes I am.”
I introduced myself and started to load his bags into the carriage. He began to help, but I said, “Oh, no, sir. Please rest yourself. I’ll be happy to take care of everything.” I can lie perfectly when I have to. It’s a talent that everyone in service needs to have, along with a strong back and little need for sleep.
Then he started to climb up front with me, until I told him that he would sit more comfortably in the back. He demurred so delicately that he reminded me of a polite child. “But I should see ever so much better up here.”
I shrugged. “Very well then, sir, wherever you wish.” I didn’t know what he would find so visually appealing. The land southeast of Ghars is just farms and swamp, but he was the boss.
He spoke nary a word on the first part of the journey, and I respected the silence, like a good servant. Now and then he’d ask me what bird had just flown past, or what crop was growing in that field.
I was telling him as much as I knew about farming oats, which was minimal, when he suddenly stiffened. “What is that up there?” he asked.
For a moment I thought he had seen the ghost again, and my heart leapt into my throat. But then I saw the mound I had detected only briefly on the way. It was perhaps fifty feet off the road, nearly at the edge of the swamp itself, and now that I gathered the courage to look at it dead on (apt words!), it looked like nothing more nor less than a body clad in armor.
“Do you see it?” Lindavar asked me, and I nodded dully. When we were close to it, the wizard told me to stop the carriage. “It looks like someone lying out there,” he said, alarm in his voice, and stepped off the road onto the marshy earth at the swamp’s edge.
“Sir, be careful!” I said. “The swamp could pull you down if you don’t watch your step!”
If he heard me, he ignored me, and kept walking toward the figure, heedless of the mud that sucked at his boots. Like a good and idiotic servant, I followed him.
“Sir, I might add that only yesternight I saw a terrible specter clad in armor right at this spot. It could be a monster of some sort, sir, playing possum to draw you closer. Sir? Did you hear me, sir?”
“It’s no monster,” he called back. “It looks like a man!”
I wasn’t so sure. It looked to me as though it was wearing the same armor that I had seen garbing my ghost. “Sir, I beg you, as you must know from your calling, such creatures have the power to put on a piteous shape, and then leap up and grasp their would-be helper. It may not be a man at all!”
It was too late. Lindavar was already kneeling by the side of what I was convinced was a malingering ghost, and I expected at any second to see a pair of taloned hands come up and rend him to bits. But instead he straightened up, holding a large metal helmet on its side. It was the same one that I had seen Fastred’s ghost wearing the night before. He turned toward me and held out the helmet, from the base of which dripped a reddish muck.
Then he opened the closed visor, and I realized that the head was still in it.
“Is it not a man?” said Lindavar in grim confirmation.
A familiar face, now a sickly green, stared with bulging eyes through the opening of the visor. “It is,” I whispered.
“Dovo.”
10
“You know him?” asked Lindavar, coming closer with his dread burden.
I backed away. Maybe wizards are used to lugging around dead body parts, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. “Yes, I know … knew him. Look, would you please put that down?” My egg and blackbread were really churning now that I saw the reddish muck wasn’t merely swamp ooze.
Lindavar started to set down the helmeted head, but it tilted and the head slid right out the bottom of the helmet. It made a wet plop as it hit the swampy ground. “Ooogh,” I muttered, and looked away.
“Who was he?” Lindavar asked.
“His name was Dovo. He was the smithy’s assistant in Ghars.” I considered not speaking ill of the dead, then dismissed it. After all, Dovo had played a pretty rotten trick on me last night, and on a lot of people by the looks of it. “He was a dolt.”
Lindavar looked down at the head thoughtfully. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s been dressing up like a ghost and scaring people. I saw him last night. He was wearing that armor.…” I pointed at the headless body lying arms akimbo. A pool of blood had thickened into a brown-black custard at the corpse’s neck. “That’s probably luminous paint on his face.…”I nodded at the pale green color of Dovo’s skin. “And he was carrying that axe,” I finished quietly. That particular implement was lying near the body, its long curved blade dark with dried blood.
“How far is Benelaius’s cottage?” asked Lindavar. I thought it an abrupt change of topic.
“Another mile up this road,” I answered.
“Very well. You stay here, Jasper, and I’ll go and fetch him.”
The hairs on the back of my neck tickled. “What? Me stay here? Why?”
“Because there should be someone at the scene of the crime. If no one’s here, someone else could come alon
g and disturb the evidence, or beasts could come out of the swamp and devour the body, or the killer could return.”
“And if the beasts or the killer comes, what am I supposed to do about it?” I knew that as a good servant I shouldn’t question an order, but this one made me a touch edgy.
“If the killer comes back,” said Lindavar, “you can hide and see who it is, and if any beasts come … well, I shouldn’t be gone that long.”
“But—”
“Now, Jasper, as a great man once said, ‘A brave and steadfast heart can overcome any fear.’ So don’t worry. I’ll be back with Benelaius shortly. In the meantime, look about for clues, only don’t disturb anything.”
And without another howdydo, he trotted back to the road, hopped up onto the carriage, and set the horses toward Benelaius’s.
I knew only too well who that great man was whom he spoke of. Camber Fosrick. I had committed the quote to memory as well. So Lindavar, one of the War Wizards of Cormyr, was addicted to trashy literature too. I would have chuckled had I not been so scared.
So I thought about Fosrick’s quote and came to the conclusion that, although I greatly admired the detective, it was poppycock. What it said was, that if you were brave, then you would be brave. It didn’t tell you how to get that way. Cold comfort indeed, I can tell you.
I decided to follow Lindavar’s other piece of advice and use the time searching for clues. That would keep my mind off beasts and killers, and the investigation would be that much further along by the time Benelaius arrived.
So with great care I began to walk all around the corpse, being careful not to step on footprints. The sodden ground had held those of Lindavar and myself well, but earlier prints had nearly disappeared, the swamp pushing up against the indentations as if to deny that man had ever trod there. The few marks that were left appeared to have been made by someone with big feet, and I looked at the soles of Dovo’s corpse. They were big all right, like everything else on the man.
Since all the footprints were big, I figured that the feet of the killer had to be large also. All right, then, the killer had big feet. I felt Camber Fosrick would be proud of me, brave or not. Also, none of the footprints led farther toward the swamp, so whoever beheaded Dovo must have come from the road and left that way. Another brilliant deduction, I thought. Unless the killer flew, but the odds of that seemed long.
Then I searched the ground for things smaller than footprints, and found a few. The severed tips of three fingers lay closely together, and I shuddered as I glanced at Dovo’s corpse. The right hand was visible, with all its digits intact, but the left hand was covered by the corpse. I didn’t move it to look for stumps.
There were also some small shards of broken glass several feet away from Dovo’s body. I left them where they were, but I could see that they were clear rather than colored, and slightly curved as well.
The costume of the corpse was far less impressive than I had thought it the night before. I would have sworn, for instance, that my ghost had been wearing a full suit of gleaming armor, and a helmet with a crest that made the whole ensemble over twelve feet tall.
But the light of day showed only a worn breastplate, tarnished where it wasn’t dented, and mail leggings whose links had come loose in a dozen places. The helmet was small and squat, and had no plume at all. Only the axe was an impressive piece of metal, its blade curving a full two feet along its edge.
Dovo’s head was lying faceup, his wide eyes staring sightlessly at a blue Cormyrean sky. I summoned the courage to go closer to it and, using a leaf, wiped some of the green covering from the flesh. Then I held the leaf in one hand and made a circle with the other, peering into it. The green stuff glowed dimly, even with the sunlight pushing between my fingers. It was luminous, all right. The effect had been ghastly in last night’s darkness.
Now I walked up to the road to look for any clues, scanning the ground on the way. The road, though dry, was a confusion of hoofprints and cart tracks, and I could make nothing of them. Then I sat by the side of the road and waited, the farther from the corpse and the swamp the better.
I don’t know how long I sat there, but the sun was far up in the sky by the time someone came. And then it was like a party. Down the western road rode five horsemen, and much closer, rounding a bend from the east, Benelaius’s carriage approached. I could see Lindavar driving, and from the close proximity of the bottom of the carriage to the road, I could tell that my corpulent master was inside. At least now I knew what it would take to get him out of his house—a murder.
When the carriage pulled up next to me, the horsemen were still a few minutes away. I opened the door for Benelaius and, forgetting my station as I so often do, said, “What took you so long … master?”
He clucked at me patiently. “As you know, Jasper, I do not get out very often. I felt I should look my best.”
And so he did. His hair and long gray beard were neatly combed, and he wore a stylish, hooded dress cloak that I had not known he possessed, and a pair of nearly new high kid boots, instead of his usual fuzzy wool slippers.
He looked past me at the horsemen. “I see the authorities have arrived as well. Good. The more heads the better, even if some of them are a mite thickish.”
Now the riders were close enough for me to see who they were. In the lead was Captain Flim, the head of Ghars’s garrison of Purple Dragons, with two other Dragons flanking him. One of them led an empty mount that would, I assumed, bear Dovo’s body back to Ghars.
Behind the Dragons was Mayor Tobald, who looked as if he was having difficulty staying in the saddle, and the equally talkative Doctor Braum.
I turned back to Benelaius in surprise. “They know about the murder?”
He nodded. “As soon as Lindavar told me, I sent the bird.” He meant the carrier dove that sat in a hanging cage in his study. I’d never known him to use it before. He spoke to it at times, but he always let me think it was a pet. It was interesting to see that it had a talent other than extraordinary equanimity in the presence of dozens of cats. “In the message, I said only that Dovo had been killed, and that we suspected foul play.” Then Benelaius turned toward the party that came riding up. “Greetings, gentlemen,” he said.
“Is it true?” Tobald asked my master as he nearly tumbled off his steed. “Is it Dovo?”
Benelaius acknowledged me, and I nodded. “He’s down there by the swamp,” I said. “His head’s been cut off.”
It was hardly an apropos time for Benelaius to introduce Lindavar, but Captain Flim was looking at him curiously, so my master graciously did the honors. Then we went down to the body.
At the grisly sight of it, they acted the way I had expected. Flim and his Dragons’ attitude was that they had seen it all before (and they had); Doctor Braum was appalled by the sight but tried to act clinical; and Mayor Tobald seemed just plain shocked, finally at a loss for words. In fact, he had a little trouble keeping his breakfast down.
As Benelaius observed the corpse, however, he acted as though he were examining a new and interesting kind of bug rather than a dead smith.
“Why, uh …” Tobald said, belching and frowning at the taste, “why is he wearing that armor?”
“My servant Jasper can answer that,” said Benelaius.
I nodded. “It was part of his trick, his impersonation.”
“Jasper saw the ghost last night,” Benelaius said. “Fastred’s ghost, or so he thought. Something dressed in old armor and helmet, with an axe and a glowing green face. Care to draw any quick conclusions?”
“You mean,” Flim said slowly, as if trying to work out what letter comes after A, “this man was playing at being the ghost?”
“Apparently,” said Benelaius. “And his bogus appearance answers the description given by most of those who have seen the so-called haunt. I think you’ll find that unguent on his face … the green that’s not mold … is derived from glimmergrass.”
“Now wait a moment, Benelaius,” Tobald sa
id briskly. He seemed to have once more become his old garrulous self. “Are you saying that when I saw the ghost, it was Dovo I saw?”
“I believe so.”
Tobald shook his head firmly. “My friend, I have no doubt that I can tell the difference between a real apparition and an imposter such as this!”
Benelaius began to shrug, but since his body was not made for shrugging, he abandoned the effort. “Perhaps you did, Tobald. I know for a fact that ghosts exist, as do spirits capable of doing … what was done to Dovo here.”
Tobald’s face was as one who suddenly finds enlightenment. “That must be it, then! This”—he gestured to the corpse, then looked quickly away, swallowing hard—”this is supernatural vengeance. Fastred’s ghost has taken his revenge on the human who mocked him!”
“Maybe … or maybe not,” said Benelaius in a tone that told me he was on the maybe not side. “Tell me, Jasper, did you find any footprints other than your own, Lindavar’s, and Dovo’s?”
“Well, sir, as best I was able to make out, there were two people here, both with big feet. And Dovo had big feet.”
“Are you sure,” said the doctor, “that they weren’t just one set of big feet? I tend to favor Tobald’s theory.”
“As might I,” said Benelaius, “save for three things. The first is the extra set of footprints—I have more faith in Jasper’s evidence-gathering skills than you, you see. Here is the second.” He pointed a pudgy finger at the axe. “This is certainly the murder weapon, caked with Dovo’s blood. Why would not the ghost of Fastred use his own axe? And if he had lost it somewhere over in the spirit world, why would he not take this one along?” He smiled. “It certainly seems sharp enough.
Murder in Cormyr Page 5
