by Ed Greenwood
“I doubt we’re done yet,” he muttered in reply, “but—”
He broke off to stare as an unexpected visitor glided into the room from the south stairs: the silent, ghostly shape of a sad-faced gowned woman holding her nearly severed, much-bandaged head on her shoulders with the one hand she had left, her other arm ending in a cloth-wrapped but dripping stump.
The chatter in the room died away as everyone noticed the gliding apparition. She paid no one the slightest heed except Elminster; she met his eyes with a fierce look, then pointed with her stump through the Copper Receiving Room, drawing back her truncated arm to thrust it forward repeatedly to make the fact she was pointing clear.
Even to dunderheaded old Chosen of Mystra, El thought wryly, and was rewarded with the briefest of grins crossing that ghostly face.
So this was Luse, but he knew who she was pretending to be.
“Gentles,” El announced calmly, “behold one of the hauntings of Oldspires: an early Lady Halaunt, who was hacked to death by brigands. She seems to require the immediate services of a steward.”
The apparition nodded emphatically and swept past him, through the copper-clad chamber and out into the entry hall. Elminster strode briskly after her, followed hastily by Mirt and Myrmeen.
Alusair did not slow when they reached the entry hall, but turned to its open main interior door, into the Blue Chamber, and led them through it, gathering speed as she went.
El, Mirt, and Myrmeen all looked at each other.
“Another death?” Mirt asked. “So who—and who did it?”
Myrmeen gave Elminster a meaningful look. “Whoever got there first, and was in the mood.”
“Secure the kitchen!” he snapped at her, by way of reply, as he broke into a run—after the ghost.
Mirt lurched and huffed along in his wake, as El raced down the passages in pursuit of the ghost princess, dashing to … Tabra’s room.
Its door was closed but—unlocked. El flung it wide.
Someone lay huddled and still on the floor. Calathlarra.
Dead, hard by Tabra’s bed. The Runemaster’s fingers were lacerated with what appeared to be her own knife.
El barely looked at her in his haste to see to Tabra.
Who met his gaze calmly, from under the covers. “I’m fine,” she informed him. “She never reached me.”
“Oh? Then what did happen?”
“She picked the lock and came charging at me with that knife, but tripped on the rug—see?—and stumbled, and fell on her own knife. Then she fell still, just as you see her.”
El and a heavily wheezing Mirt looked down at the rucked-up rug and the still and huddled Runemaster. There’d be no avoiding bloodstains on this rug.
“I see,” Elminster said gravely, meeting Tabra’s gaze squarely. “I quite see. The gods must have been smiling on ye.” He gave Mirt a silent look, and the Lord of Waterdeep bent to take Calathlarra under the armpits.
El took the dead Runemaster’s feet, and as he and Mirt started to carry the body out of the room, the bloody knife balanced atop its belly, asked Tabra, “Shall I bring ye thy highsunfeast shortly? Or are ye no longer hungry, after … this?”
“I’m never ‘no longer hungry,’ ” the woman in the bed replied flatly. “Bring me food as soon as you can, please.”
El nodded, bowed, and withdrew from the room.
Outside, he locked Tabra in and turned to a dark shadow lurking by the closed door into the lord’s robing room. “Luse, I thank ye for summoning us. Will ye stand guard over the last apprentice of Ioulaum again, for now? We have … business.”
Of course. Involving a fresh corpse. How … typical.
El gave the tart shadow a merry grin over his shoulder, as he and Mirt began the long, laden trudge down to the cold cellar. “My, but royal tongues have sharp edges!”
And even sharper points, Old Mage. And sharper points. Try not to forget that helpful little detail.
And with that, the ghost princess shrank down into something long, ribbon-flat, and sinuous, then plunged through the keyhole of Tabra’s door.
El stared after her for a moment thoughtfully, but Mirt grunted from behind him, “Come on, wise old wizard. You can stare at that keyhole all day, and it won’t change—and for all that time, this dead one here won’t get any lighter.”
So they set off, taking the long way through the dark cellars to avoid parading past the four highsunfeast-devouring wizards with the obviously dead Runemaster.
Soon enough, they were lowering Calathlarra down in the chill dark beside—Mirt named them grimly aloud—“Skouloun, Yusendre, and Alastra.”
“Well,” El growled, “what d’ye think?”
“That this cellar is going to get even more crowded before we’re done,” Mirt grunted.
El nodded, but said, “I meant about this one we’ve just carried in.”
“Tabra’s lying, and this one died by poison.”
“Agreed,” El replied, “but I doubt it was her own poison. This blade here was poisoned, but I can’t see a Runemaster using poison she hasn’t dosed herself with for years until she’s nigh immune to it.” Mirt nodded at that.
“I’d say she died from a different poison, probably on a blade wielded by Tabra,” El added, and Mirt grunted agreement and nodded more emphatically.
They retraced their steps to regain the ground floor and return to the two rooms where the wizards were eating highsunfeast. As they passed Tabra’s guarded door, Alusair emerged through its keyhole again, adopting her own likeness this time, and said, “Before I rushed in to play Lady Halaunt and summon you, I was patrolling, and saw something different than what Tabra told you.”
“Of course ye did,” El replied. “Tell.”
“Calathlarra picked the lock on Tabra’s door and charged at Tabra with her knife, all right, but Tabra had a fireplace poker under her bed. She hauled it out and dashed aside Calathlarra’s knife with it, probably breaking a few of the Runemaster’s fingers in the doing, then clawed Calathlarra across the face—and Calathlarra fell and never got up again. She twisted around on the floor a bit, groaning, then went limp.”
El nodded. “Tabra’s killing with poison she’s put on her sharpened smallest fingernails—certainly Calathlarra, and likely Skouloun. The question is, why?”
“She fell into the hands of the arcanists of Thultanthar, who tortured her for years to gain all her secrets,” Alusair reminded him. “Perhaps she’s killing anyone who’s ever been an ally of the Thultanthans.”
“But Calathlarra attacked her,” Mirt put in.
El nodded again. “If she’d figured out, or even suspected, that Tabra was after allies of Thultanthar—meaning Tabra would soon be after her—why not strike first?”
He turned swiftly then, to look down the passage; someone was coming, in a hurry.
It was Myrmeen Lhal. “Well met,” she greeted them dryly. “I almost fell over Maraunth Torr on my way back to the kitchen. Dead on the passage floor, without a mark on him, though his skin’s a mite green. Poisoned, I’d say.”
“Poison, poison, poison—amazing the things that become fads in Cormyr,” El muttered. “Luse, Tabra’s just going to have to take her chances—and everyone else take their chances with her. Get to the kitchens just as fast as ye can, to see if anyone’s in there! Myrmeen, ye rush there, too! And once there, search very carefully to make sure nothing is disturbed or missing, or there’s less or more of something in its container than there should be!”
Myrmeen nodded, spun around, and sprinted back down the passage. Alusair had already vanished around corners in the distance, like a racing wind.
Elminster and Mirt followed at a more leisurely pace. When they got to Maraunth Torr’s body, they found it cold and unbreathing, the skin having a decidedly green tinge.
“Poisoned,” they agreed, though El frowned down at the corpse suspiciously.
“Shouldn’t be death cold for days, with any of the poisons that turn the skin green r
aging in him; they generate their own heat, until they’ve finished liquefying the underlying tissue.”
Mirt shrugged. “Magic?”
El gave him a sour look.
The Lord of Waterdeep was unabashed. “So, what do you want to do with him?”
“Cart him down to the cold cellar and lock him in with the others, for now. Those still standing are our greater worries.”
Mirt grinned. “Spoken like a true scourge of the living.”
El and Mirt lugged the late Lord Torr down to the cold cellar and locked him in with the four other still and silent bodies.
Mirt looked them over. “Soon,” he grunted, “we’ll have a good idea of who’s doing this, just by how few are still standing.”
El gave him an unsmiling look. “Oh, I think I know who’s doing it, but I can’t prove a thing—and before I begin with accusations, I want to know why.”
They trudged back through the dark cellars again, and were just ascending the last few steps of the grand staircase back onto the ground floor when Alusair swept out of the air and stood facing them.
She was her ghostly self, and looked exasperated. “Mreen thinks, but isn’t entirely certain, that certain spices and cleaning oils in the kitchen have been handled and slightly depleted since she last touched them. More importantly, one of the rings of servants’ keys that was hanging in the butlery is missing from its hook.”
Mirt smote his forehead. “Gah! We should have hidden those keys,” he growled. “We should hide the rest of them right now!”
Elminster shook his head. “Nay. I wanted them found and taken. Their theft I expected, but earlier than this.”
“You wanted—?”
“When we were preparing highsunfeast, I coated all of the hanging keys with a little turmeric and then dipped them in deepfire—dwarven brandy. It surface-dries in a clear coat that makes the turmeric gray when seen through it, but won’t really be dry all the way through to the metal until around dusk—when the turmeric will make it fall away like dust. The turmeric will thereafter get onto the fingers of anyone handling the keys, and will be its proper ochre. So anyone you see with stains of that hue on their fingers, or someone who suddenly takes to wearing gloves … but let’s hurry back to the cellar! Luse, fly ahead of us, and watch to see if anyone goes in—or out!—before we reach it.”
Alusair turned her nod into a formless plunge down the stairs, passing between them like a chill wind.
Mirt shivered in the wake of her passing. “She’s enjoying this.”
“She’s dead; grant her that small pleasure, will ye?”
They hurried back through the sequence of dark cellars, and found Alusair waiting for them outside the cold-cellar door.
“Locked,” she reported, “and no one has entered or departed since my arrival. Yet I fear I came too late: two bodies are missing. Skouloun and Maraunth Torr.”
Elminster smiled mirthlessly. “Of course two are missing. But is one of them merely a decoy, or has the slayer a use for it?”
“Why don’t we manacle Tabra to her own bedposts, or go stand guard over her?” Mirt growled. “I don’t mind pulling her fingernails out by the roots, if it’ll make those of us who’re left safer!”
“She’s not the slayer I’m thinking of,” El murmured. “I suggest we all return to the kitchens, prepare an evenfeast from scratch and trust none of the spices and such that are there—so, aye, it’ll be rather bland; we’ll use boiled fruit peel instead—and spend some of the later evening, after everyone’s dined, searching the rooms in Oldspires we’re not using. I suspect we’ll find one of the two missing bodies hidden somewhere. If, that is, our slayer doesn’t get too ambitious and something spectacular ensues to interrupt us.” Mirt and Alusair grew frowns as they tried to pick holes in the Sage of Shadowdale’s planning, but both soon shrugged, giving up their attempts.
As the ghost princess summed up: “We the Force of Good can’t search during evenfeast without splitting up, as someone has to serve the food forth and keep poisoners from getting unobserved into the kitchen to tamper, and above all we mustn’t split up, what with murderers on the loose who might have left all manner of traps behind in their rooms. You who have vulnerable human bodies must stick together. And for evenfeast, I’ll be with you, playing old Lord Halaunt the host. So we stand together, or we fall separately.”
“Too late, too late,” Mirt and Elminster replied in unison, quoting the same old bawdy song, then chuckled together.
“ ’Tis never too late to chuckle at thine own pratfalls,” El added. “As it happens, I’ve gotten good at it, down all the years.”
“I’ve noticed,” Alusair replied dryly, and flew away.
CHAPTER 12
A Truce Among Wizards
THEY TOOK ALL THE PRECAUTIONS ELMINSTER HAD SUGGESTED—AND nothing untoward happened.
Evenfeast was served in the feast hall to Lord Halaunt and the three surviving guests, who had grown understandably wary. They shot sharp glares in all directions, often.
And were more sharp and difficult than ever.
As Myrmeen put it, peering through the doorway at them, “Just three now, but that’s still too many.”
“You don’t like wizards?” Mirt asked her. “Or you want them to choose the winner of the Lost Spell by whittling themselves down to just one mage still standing?”
“I don’t like these wizards,” Myrmeen replied. “The Harpell possibly excepted. And don’t tempt me; as cook, I can whittle by poison all too easily.”
Lord Halaunt was visibly dozing over his wine, down at his end of the table. Around the other end of it, Manshoon, Shaaan, and Malchor conversed in low tones, as if fearing being overheard. Mirt eavesdropped shamelessly anyway, as he set down steaming platters for them, and was roundly ignored.
The wizards were more interested in discussing the deaths here in Oldspires. As they recalled matters, in midbadinage Maraunth Torr had muttered, “Too much wine,” risen and set down his drink, walked out to seek a garderobe—and had never returned.
“This house around us,” Shaaan observed rather bitterly, “seems increasingly like a trap. Which we happen to share with a rather enthusiastic murderer.”
“Or two,” Malchor told the roll he was buttering.
“I,” Manshoon said darkly, “suspect Elminster.”
“I don’t,” Malchor replied flatly. “Not his way, any of this. He’s sly, but not when facing down foes. He’d have had it out with us one at a time, not here with us all gathered together, where we could make common cause and overwhelm him.”
“Let’s,” Shaaan suggested silkily.
Manshoon snorted. “And fall straight into whatever trap he’s prepared for us? He got here first, remember, and has had ample opportunity to prepare matters.”
“Forethought. Strategy. Bah! I’m growing sick of such things,” Mirt commented, setting down the last platter and boldly taking his place at the table among the wizards. “What splendor is there, in a life spent forever planning ahead, scheming for the morrow? Doing so leaves you no ‘today’ to enjoy!”
“And why are you here, Old Wolf?” Manshoon asked coldly. “When did you become a clever mage obsessed with Lost Spells?”
“Oh, that’s not one of my schemes yet,” Mirt replied, skewering a whole roast braerwing and transferring it to his plate. “I’m in no hurry to become a wizard. Not when I’m still wondering why wizards are all such arrogant fools, who miss so much joy while they’re shut up with their books and armored in their disdain for the rest of us.”
“Have a care, dullard,” Shaaan reproved Mirt coldly, but Malchor was chuckling.
“Well said, Lord of Waterdeep,” he commented, “if you are still a Lord of Waterdeep.”
“Never renounced the title,” Mirt said, “but quite a count of years slid past while I was caught in a magical trap.” He looked at Shaaan. “So I know a thing or two about traps.”
“And what do the likes of you do, when caught in a tra
p?” she asked in soft challenge.
“Set aside all feuds and grudges to work together and get out of it,” Mirt replied promptly. “You should try it sometime.”
“I agree,” Malchor said firmly. “Too many have fallen already not to think one of us will be next.”
“You propose a temporary truce?” Manshoon asked sharply.
Mirt carefully didn’t look at Elminster—who’d been keeping silent in his comings and goings, ferrying wine into the room and decanting it.
Keeping his gaze on his own reflection in the goblet he was holding, so as not to look at any of the three wizards and give them cause to take offense, Mirt asked, “Why temporary? Strikes me you’d all get a fair sight more done in your lives, if you all cleaved to the same code, or an accord like we in Waterdeep sign with cities and realms we want to trade with; a few clear, simple rules all can trust in.”
“A pretty notion, churl,” Shaaan told him coldly, “but your words contain one fatal flaw: that word ‘trust.’ None of us are foolish enough to indulge in it.”
“Oh?” Mirt looked back at her. “Strikes me the foolishness is in not seeing you’ve more than reached the point where all of you need to trust in a code.”
Manshoon smiled thinly. “You really think you can get archmages to behave? You are a fool, old man.”
Mirt snorted. “I don’t think I can get you to do anything. Nor can anyone armed with but words and a sword, for that matter, even if they gather a great armed host of their friends to stand with them. Accords between wizards only work if the wizards want them to, and do the agreeing themselves. Strikes me it’s all up to you.”
And he got up from his place, wiped grease from his chin with the back of his hand, sighed gustily, belched, and added, “That wasn’t a bad feed. Must go fetch your desserts now.”
And he left, not looking back. He knew the gazes watching him go would be less than friendly, and there was no novelty in being glared at. Lords of Waterdeep soon get used to it, if their fellow citizens know they’re lords.
