by Ed Greenwood
“THE DOOR,” SHAAAN informed whoever had just knocked, “is open. Enter.”
In unhurried near silence the door opened, and she found herself gazing at Manshoon, tall and sleekly handsome in his dark robes. He wore his usual gentle half smile.
“You will be wondering why I am here,” he stated politely, stepping into her room.
“You find me irresistible and are here to enter lifelong slavery at my feet,” she replied, matching his tone of voice precisely.
“I am here to offer an alliance. Here in Oldspires and beyond.”
She did not trouble to hide her sneer. “I can see how that would benefit you, but what possible advantage would I gain, in return for the inconvenience of having an overconfident, clumsily manipulative man underfoot, trammeling my freedom?”
“I am not so much of a liability as you seem to believe,” her visitor replied calmly. “And you are not inexperienced; you should need no soft warnings from me of what a vampire can do to the living, even when magic cannot be trusted.”
“Threats this swiftly, Manshoon? Have you not even bothered to assemble the barest beginnings of arguments for why we should work together?” Shaaan shook her head, her contempt suddenly boiling up inside her until it almost choked her. “I am part serpent,” she told him bluntly, “and fear your undeath not at all. Your physical strength even less. And as for your grasp of the Art—hah!”
That gentle, sardonic smile was still riding his face, but she could tell Manshoon was taken aback. Ah, he must have recovered the use of some of his vampiric powers, and his smugness along with them. Well …
She strode right at him, reaching out to grasp his nearest hand. Even if he was immune to all the poisons her fingernails could dispense, she could break his fingers with ease, and that left most men weeping like babies, helpless in their pain.
A moment before she would have touched him, he lapsed into a cloud of mist. She smiled and breathed a cloud of venom right into his midst, watching it roil through him—emerald in places and a sickly yellowish-green hue like diseased leaves in others. He started howling in pain, even before it forced him back into solidity, and tried to flee. Hunched over and stumbling, he fled out the door racked with pain—a burning agony that should subside by morning. If he was still alive.
Listening to his wails fading away down the passage, Shaaan permitted herself an unguardedly nasty smile.
Wearing it, wide and triumphant, she strolled to her door to close it again.
She was still a step away when someone raced into her doorway, to come to a hasty, lurching halt there and stand peering at her warily.
It was Calathlarra of the Twisted Rune. Well, of course, the locks on these doors might stop a clumsy child, but …
The Runemaster was hunched over as if expecting rejection and pain, and blurted out hurriedly, “May I come in? I would speak with you.” Then she added hastily, “Fear no treachery from me. I know you are more powerful than I.”
Shaaan smiled. “You are wiser than the rest of the current occupants of this house. Come in; I have uses for you.”
The Runemaster scuttled past, and Shaaan smiled even more broadly, and shut the door.
MIRT LIFTED THE lid. “She’s still dead.” One of Yusendre’s arms fell limply off the platter and dangled eerily; Myrmeen gave it a sour look.
“Then it’s the cold cellar for her,” Elminster decreed. “The end one, with the good lock.” As Mirt tucked in the errant arm and replaced the dome over the dead Nimbran, he took the other end of the platter and announced, “When we get back, we’ll help with morningfeast.”
“See that you do,” Alusair made the Lord of Oldspires reply. “Sardasper Halaunt is no man’s lackey.”
That brought a snort from all three of the other living occupants of the kitchen, whose day had begun. The bright morning sun was already lighting up the back kitchen where the wines and spirits used in the cooking were stored. They knew that because Mirt awakened with a dry mouth from all his snoring, and sought his own early morningfeast by way of remedy; an entirely liquid repast.
Wherefore he was now a happy man, and hummed a bawdy old tune as he and El set off with their grisly burden.
Myrmeen didn’t pause to watch them go. Soon the early risers among the guests would be stirring and inevitably wanting food; there were dozens of dishes still to ready, and she had a staff serving under her of precisely no one at all.
She built up the fires one more time and stirred the three cauldrons Elminster had tended overnight, swallowing a sigh. For years she’d swung a sword and snapped orders and rushed here and there doing things deemed dangerous or important or both, while others had slaved, overlooked, in kitchens or laundry rooms; it was only fair that the tables turn a time or two, in any life.
And there were two mouths fewer to feed since her arrival. How many more would drop off the roster?
Roast boar was filling the kitchen with sizzling goodness when Mirt and Elminster returned. “Wash that platter,” Myrmeen ordered them briskly. “You are not leaving it for me.”
Before anyone could reply, the cauldron at the back suddenly belched bubbles. She leaned forward briskly and stirred its contents, then raised her ladle high enough to sniff. What she smelled made her frown. “Unaccountable fetor,” she muttered.
“Oh?” Mirt reached past her with a ladle of his own, dipped out a small but steaming sample, and slurped at it, heedless of its temperature.
They all watched him move it around in his mouth, as he acquired a thoughtful, considering look. Then he swallowed, with visible discomfort, and pronounced decidedly, “Squamous. Very squamous.”
“Poison, do you think?”
Mirt shook his head. “Probably the shadeberries were too old. They ferment from within. We’ll have to toss it.”
“Over whose head?”
Rather than chuckling, he looked thoughtful. “We’ll have to see.”
ELMINSTER LED MIRT to the Summer Room, off in the northeastern corner of Oldspires, and examined the doors. Mirt watched him open them and check that the thin threads he’d strung across the door frames just inside the doors were undisturbed. The old moneylender said not a word until they were well away from there, headed for the guest bedchambers.
“Myrmeen’s hair?” he asked quietly then.
El nodded. “And a little wax, to stick it taut.”
“No invasions, I noticed.”
“None yet,” was all El replied before they started the rounds of the bedchamber doors, knocking and calling through the doors that morning feast would be served in the feast hall three gongs hence.
“So, who’s our murderer, d’you think?” Mirt muttered, once they were on their way back to the kitchen. “I can’t figure out who would be a common foe for the fallen—rival for the spell, yes, but enemy enough to slay?”
El shrugged. “I share thy bafflement. Which leads me to suspect we have more than one slayer.”
“Hmmph,” the old moneylender commented. “Cheery thought.”
They started setting out all the morningfeast dishes and condiments that didn’t have to be kept warm. When they were done, Mirt had rung the great gong that hung on the wall of the Blue Chamber; its reverberations had in turn set smaller gongs on the passage walls outside the bedchambers to echoing its call. Thrice, with a trot back to the kitchens for the two-man tray of hot dishes between each.
By the time the hot platters had all been set out, to leak steam from under their lids and make the feast hall smell delightful, the room had filled up with hungry, and in some cases, sleepy-looking wizards.
The two Elders of Nimbral were missing, of course, and the captive Calathlarra, which meant three empty seats.
But there were five.
Elminster counted them twice, and saw Mirt doing the same thing. They exchanged rather grim looks.
Two ladies were missing. Tabra and Alastra Hathwinter.
CHAPTER 10
A Sword Is Always Easier
&nbs
p; MYRMEEN LHAL HAD BEEN IN BETTER MOODS. KNOWING SHE WAS being foolish—the murderer or murderers could, after all, be lurking anywhere—but lost in the deepening feeling that the kitchen was becoming her prison, she’d seized a moment while the men were off rousing the guests to briefly go exploring. She was used to facing danger with a sword and dagger in hand, and a cleaver and a carving knife would do.
Armed and ready, she headed into the rooms beyond the Copper Receiving Room that lay behind its western door. The Green Audience Chamber, then the withdrawing room and parlor, and some guest bedchambers here in this end of Oldspires, well apart from those that had been given to the wizards. El had intended these rooms for her and Mirt and himself. With only four days of spellstorm left now, she wondered if they’d ever get a chance to use them.
There was a disused nursery opening off the room meant for her, right in the southwest corner of the mansion. Its windows were shuttered, and it had that dark, cavernous, slightly musty gloom of so many of the lesser-used chambers of Oldspires.
To Myrmeen, it seemed the house was waiting in silent, stubborn patience to be filled with the laughter and ragings of a large and willful family again—but until then, it endured slow rot and spreading mildew as it waited for one cantankerous old man to die.
Once, this had been the crowded, noisy mansion of a proud noble family who rode to the hunt whenever they weren’t riding to defend Cormyr. Now it held a larger crowd than it had done for many decades, but not of heroic riders. No, these menacingly malicious mages were far from heroism, or being square and direct about anything at all. They went through life slicing and stabbing at folk with their wit, as if it were a sharp dagger they couldn’t help lashing out with.
And didn’t care how much blood they spilled, along the way.
Shaking her head at that thought, Myrmeen went into the bedchamber meant for her. Nice tapestries, and a magnificent four-poster like an ornate wooden castle with doors—fastened back right now—that could turn it into a box against the winter chill. Once a Halaunt had slept here, but in the current Lord Halaunt’s much-shrunken household, it had housed his steward. Its shutters were open, and she could see the rolling sward of a meadow descending to the dark trees of Halaunt Chase. Somewhere between her and that wood was a wall of force, and somewhere beyond it, wizards of war on watch, but she could see neither—the one was invisible, and the others were probably sitting on chairs and benches back amid those trees, rather than on display for all to see. Waiting to see how many of us walk out of here again, and how many are carried in shrouds …
That grim thought came back to Myrmeen in the kitchen as she started chopping sausages to make sausage fingertarts for highsunfeast. They’d be greasy as anything, but there was nothing like a hot sausage fingertart to set mouths to watering …
Gods, but she was becoming domesticated! A right proper cook, where once she’d been the most warlike Crown lord in the land …
The kitchen door swung open, and she turned swiftly, cleaver up and ready.
It was Elminster, an empty platter in his hands.
“Chop me gently, lass, I’m an old man!” he said, so mournfully that she couldn’t help but giggle.
And how many years had it been, since last she’d giggled?
“El,” she asked him, pointing with her cleaver at the next tray ready to take out, “is the magic likely to turn reliable again soon? Inside these walls, I mean?”
Elminster shrugged. “I doubt it, but … ye’ve lived more than long enough to know that strange things happen. Why d’ye ask that now?”
“Before I started all the mess and fuss of baking a large batch of loaves,” Myrmeen told him dryly, “I was wondering how many mouths would still be around to eat them. Or to put it more directly, how many owners of those mouths would still be alive. I know how long it takes a good warrior to hack down other good warriors, but can’t just one of these archmages blast us all to jelly in a trice, if they get their spells back?”
El shrugged again. “They could, I suppose, if we all obligingly stood together in one spot, and let them leisurely conjure our deaths.”
Myrmeen lifted an eyebrow. “You’re telling me the realm needn’t have feared the war wizards all these years? Wizards can’t beat a boy with a slingshot, or a yeoman with his bow?”
“If ye want to go a-slaying, spells work, but a sword is always easier. Or thy fist. Ye cannot trust magic, for it has a mind of its own.”
“Oh? Whose?”
“The one belonging to whichever of the voices in the Weave gets there first, and is in the mood,” Elminster told her gravely.
“So, have the two missing women shown up yet?”
Elminster shook his head. “I’ve sent Alusair to look for them. It seems Lord Halaunt’s vitals are in uproar, and he has to visit garderobes often. The ones that have stout locks. She can drift in through bedchamber door keyholes in silence, and—”
“Do it invisibly, to boot,” the voice of the ghost princess interrupted smoothly, from the empty air by his shoulder. “So I can sneak around, and see folk when they’re unguarded and being themselves. Or hunting high and low for hidden Lost Spells.”
“Well?” El and Myrmeen demanded together.
Alusair became visible, leaning back against the counter in her usual arms-folded pose. “Both are still locked in their rooms, but I’m afraid Alastra is dead—murdered; there’s blood everywhere, obvious violence, and oh, El, I can’t back away from the thought that we doomed her, by hinting she’d be given the spell—and Tabra lives. For now. She’s alive, awake, and abed, but doesn’t look well.”
“Get back to Tabra and stand guard until morningfeast is done,” Elminster ordered grimly, “to stop her stealing out and getting up to anything, or anyone sneaking in to attack her.”
Without waiting for Alusair’s reply—which was a silent nod as she faded into invisibility again—he picked up the tray Myrmeen had indicated and went out into the feast hall with it.
At the door, he passed Mirt, on his way in for the next tray, and muttered grimly, “After the meal’s done, conclave in the kitchen, just the four of us.”
“Four?” Mirt asked.
Alusair’s smiling face melted into view right in front of his nose. “Four,” she confirmed, winking at him.
“Ye gods, woman,” the Lord of Waterdeep muttered, “my heart!”
A rude sound of derision answered him out of the empty air, and he grinned and walked right through where it had come from—encountering nothing at all—to pick up the tray Mreen’s cleaver was patiently pointing at.
Then he turned and took it out into the feast hall, to feed the folk he was increasingly thinking of as … the condemned.
They seemed to agree with that dark judgment this morning. There was little chatter and more than a few sidelong glances at empty chairs. Including the one at the head of the table that Lord Halaunt had hastily vacated.
It seemed death disagreed with the old lord. Or perhaps it was just the fried boar.
“THEY DON’T LIKE Halaunt walking out on them time after time,” Mirt growled. “Nor you sitting with them and not eating a thing. They don’t like that at all.”
Elminster shrugged. “I prefer their bruised feelings to our horrible, agonizing demises. We eat only what we prepare right here, as it’s ready. Overdone and no sauces, I’m afraid, but—”
Myrmeen shrugged. “I’ve eaten rough, with Purple Dragons riding to war. I can eat plain and dreadful for the few days we need to. I can even try to make it palatable for you two mighty lords.”
She and El both looked at Mirt, who sighed heavily and said, “So can I. Just let me at the cellars. I can avoid the casks, and tell when a cork’s been tampered with.”
Morningfeast was done, and everyone had hastened back to their own rooms without a suggestion of such prudence even having to be raised. The guests, it seemed, did not consider Oldspires a happy house right now.
“I wonder if they’re knifing each other
in the passages right now,” Myrmeen wondered, “while we do dishes.” And with that disgusted comment, she handed Mirt the first dish to dry.
The Lord of Waterdeep winced as his hand closed on it; it was still hot enough that steam was rising from it. And now from his fingers, too.
“If they are, we’ll soon hear about it,” Elminster told her. “Luse is wandering about watching right now.”
“As she did most of the night,” Mirt grunted. “But why, El? Why did you have her just spying? And why tell her to stay out of bedchambers and not even peer in at keyholes? This isn’t a house full of blushing ladies; they’re mean, nasty, powerful archmages who’ve blasted foes down many a time before! And if we don’t want to know what they’re up to in the wee hours, why waste Alusair’s time at all with setting her to work skulking down passages all night?”
“She was obeying me, as it happens,” Elminster replied. “I don’t want her going into a wizard’s bedchamber and discovering the hard way that the mage she’s visiting has some means unknown to me of rending ghost princesses!”
Alusair promptly turned visible, leaning against the countertop in her preferred pose, and favoring Mirt with a teasing smile. “Why, my Lord of Waterdeep,” she said sweetly, “I didn’t know you cared.”
Mirt rolled his eyes, growled some less than polite words under his breath, then raised his voice to normal audibility. “Well, you’re here, and it’s conclave time, so what did you see last night?”
“Many guests were … active. First, Yusendre picked the lock of Skouloun’s empty room—or was it? Someone could well have been waiting for her there—presumably looking for something. She was not in there long before returning to her own chamber. This was early on, of course, before her unfortunate demise. Then, after the spells and her death, when you two settled down to sleep, El and I chatted for a bit and I went out to patrol.”
“And our wizards visited back and forth like an overnight sampling tour in a brothel,” Mirt guessed aloud.
