by Dave Gross
"I suspect Master Talbot left those," said Cale, "but perhaps you will ask him. He should be arriving directly."
"How do you know?"
"It is my duty to know, sir."
Thamalon clucked at his butler's uncharacteristic formality. Cale had long been more a confidant than a servant, but lately he'd seemed aloof. The narrowly averted war with the elves of the Tangled Trees had set everyone on edge, and the Uskevren family had suffered more than its share of crises in the past few years. Through it all, Cale had remained a bastion of calm. He seemed distant, more like a stranger than a trusted friend. Perhaps it was because the household had changed so much in recent months, especially with Thazienne's extended absence. Thamalon still worried about his daughter, though less so than before he commissioned the auguries that pronounced her safe. Even so, her departure seemed to mark the beginning of Cale's gloom.
Before Thamalon could broach the subject of his butler's distraction, someone thumped on the library door.
"That would be Master Talbot," said Cale as he went to the door.
When he opened it, Talbot Uskevren entered carrying a large coffer.
"May I take that, young master?" offered Cale.
"Better let me," said Talbot, hefting the box.
The dull clank of coins sounded from within the container. Cale arched an eyebrow but stood aside to let Talbot pass.
A few months shy of his twenty-second birthday, Thamalon's younger son was somehow still growing. He loomed over Cale, who was notable throughout the city of Selgaunt for his height. Yet where Cale was lean as a scarecrow, Talbot was built like a dock porter. He also dressed like one, with rough leather trousers and a homespun shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
Fresh paint stains on his clothes showed that Talbot had come from the Wide Realms Playhouse, where he served as actor, manager, and general handyman. Thick black hair curled on his arms and chest, and his whiskers looked three days old, though Thamalon had seen him clean-shaven just that morning.
There were days when Thamalon might have doubted he had sired the boy, except that he saw his wife's gray eyes beneath his own strong brow on Talbot's face. While he didn't look much like his elder brother, Talbot strongly resembled both his great-uncle Roel and Thamalon's late brother Perivel, another big man who moved with unaffected, predatory grace.
Talbot set the coffer on the floor before the desk. Thamalon felt its heavy impact even through the sturdy floor.
"I don't recall your being in trouble," said Thamalon, "and you have missed my birthday by seven months. What is this gift?"
"It's the loan," said Talbot.
Thamalon started for the second time since he'd entered his library, which he'd once considered his sanctuary from unpleasant surprises. With a glance, he dismissed the butler. While Cale was privy to all household business, the loan was an unusually personal matter. Cale slipped silently out of the room, and Thamalon knew the butler would stand guard against further interruptions until he and Talbot were finished.
Thamalon left his desk and beckoned his son over to the chessboard, where they settled into the matching chairs. They hadn't played in over a year, but the proximity of the board was a reminder of one of the few things they enjoyed together.
"You have until Tarsakh to make the first payment," said Thamalon. He tried to strike a jolly tone. "You are far more prompt than most of my debtors."
"It's the full amount," said Talbot. His eyes flicked over the mahogany and ivory chess pieces.
"What about your-?"
"It didn't work out," said Talbot.
"They wouldn't resurrect-?"
"They couldn't."
"But the High Songmaster assured me-"
"Yes, well, he was mistaken."
"Damn it, Talbot, stop interrupting me! And look at me when you speak to me."
Talbot was only a mediocre actor, despite a talent for mimicry. Thamalon saw anguish beneath his son's barely composed expression.
"The clerics couldn't even contact his spirit?"
Talbot shook his head.
"I am truly sorry, son," said Thamalon, because it was true.
He'd never liked the idea of spending so much Uskevren gold to resurrect Chaney Foxmantle. The gods granted clerics such power only for the most divine purposes, and Thamalon felt that mortals had no business making a business of restoring life.
For months after his friend's death, Talbot bargained without threatening, pressed without cajoling, and finally won a compromise from his reluctant father. On condition that High Songmaster Ansril Ammhaddan approve the casting, Thamalon agreed to lend Talbot the coin with the Wide Realms playhouse as security. Father and son drew up a private contract and agreed upon a modest interest and payment schedule based on future playhouse profits.
Still, despite his best efforts to teach his offspring the principles of sound financial dealings, Thamalon knew that coin meant nothing to this boy who'd lost his closest friend. The dark intrigue that had cost Foxmantle his life had still never been explained to Thamalon's satisfaction, and he was sure that Talbot harbored a few more secrets about the affair. Cale had suggested a few possibilities based on street rumors, but Thamalon found them too fantastic to accept.
A werewolf, indeed.
Father and son watched each other a while in silence, and Thamalon's eyebrows leaped as he combined those rumors with the titles of the books he'd just seen on his desk.
"Werewolf?"
Talbot nodded with a sad smile and a little snort, as if to say, What took you so long?
Thamalon took several long moments to form his next questions.
"You don't…"
"No."
"So you…"
"It's under control."
"Ah," said Thamalon. "That's good."
He couldn't think of anything else to say while his mind still reeled with the absurdity of the revelation. Best not to think on it too hard, he decided.
They sat silently a while longer. Thamalon entertained a feeble hope that he was the brunt of some preposterous joke that would be explained later, perhaps over a bottle of Usk Fine Old.
He set aside the revelation to concentrate on the matter of Talbot's unseemly mourning, but he knew there were no words to soothe the loss of a beloved companion. Forty years after Nelember's death, Thamalon still quietly mourned his own best friend. The prim old tutor had been the first to perish in the assault that razed the first Stormweather Towers. The old clerk had done more to nurture and shape Thamalon than had his own father, Aldimar.
Suddenly Thamalon feared that he'd worked so hard to avoid Aldimar's obvious vices, such as piracy, he'd fallen prey to his more insidious faults, like siring bastards and treating his children with biting contempt.
"A man needs a friend he can trust," Thamalon offered. "I am grateful that Chaney was there to watch my son's back."
Talbot's eyes glimmered, but he opened them wide to let them dry before tears could form.
"Thanks."
"I mean it, Talbot," said Thamalon. "Sometimes I wish I had been a better friend to you."
"Only sometimes?"
"Not very often, mind you. You must admit, you have only lately become interesting."
As he'd calculated, the remark surprised his son into a genuine laugh.
"Well," said Talbot, "I could use some help painting the backdrop for The Happy Bachelor before tomorrow's rehearsal."
It was Thamalon's turn to laugh. Still, he wouldn't be diverted from his argument.
"Seriously, my boy, I have begun to realize just how much time I have devoted to the House-and how little I have devoted to those within it."
"Now, just because you and mother keep sneaking into the linen closet doesn't mean you have to go all soft on the rest of us."
"Have done! I won't have you talking about the lady of the house that way." He laughed. "That reminds me, whatever became of that fetching young country girl? What was her name?"
"Feena." The name was a
charm to dispel Talbot's brief cheer. "She had to go home."
"I thought perhaps you and she-"
"Yeah. So did I."
Talbot's eyes wandered once more, this time to the gently twirling wings of an elven glass sculpture suspended from the ceiling.
"So why did she go?"
"Since her mother died, her village was without a cleric. She had to look after her people."
Thamalon paused before asking, "Why didn't you go with her?"
Talbot looked up and said, "Because I have to look after mine."
"Mm," grunted Thamalon. He knew that Talbot had many friends at the playhouse, but he wondered just how familial his loyalties ran.
"Will you be a friend to your brother?"
"Oh, come now, dear chap, you can't seriously mean that," drawled Talbot in a parody of his elder brother's voice.
The imitation was surprisingly good. Thamalon had once overheard the boy mimicking a wrathful Erevis Cale for an audience of giggling chambermaids, but he had no idea his son's repertoire was so wide.
"I'm afraid I do," said Thamalon, refusing to lighten his tone. "I know you two have never been the closest of siblings."
"That's putting it mildly. The only reason he survived to adulthood is because he's had that great lumbering ogre to protect him."
"Tamlin will inherit Stormweather Towers one day, and all the holdings of House Uskevren."
"I know," said Talbot, "and he's welcome to it."
Thamalon bristled. Talbot noticed.
"You know what I mean," said Talbot. "I have the playhouse, and Tazi is a free spirit. Besides, neither of us would dream of challenging your will."
"That isn't good enough." Thamalon slapped his hand on the table. "Tamlin will need your help one day. I want to know that you will support him, as a brother should."
"I don't like him very much." Talbot sighed. "There are days when I still want to throttle him."
"You must learn to suppress that desire."
"Oh, I am well practiced at that," said Talbot.
"Then I can trust you to watch his back?"
Talbot flinched at the phrase used earlier to describe his only true friend, but he nodded and said, "Why all this talk now? You sound like a man who-You're not ill, are you?"
"No, no, nothing like that," said Thamalon. "Perhaps I grow maudlin in my dotage. Maybe your sister's long absence has made me more keenly aware that you three must look to each other one day, when I have gone peculiar and need help eating my porridge. Or perhaps your mother's attentions have indeed made me soft. Why, just last evening she surprised me in the kitchen with a great spoonful of cake batter, and-"
"Have done!" roared Talbot in excellent imitation of his father's voice. He leaped from his chair and bolted theatrically toward the door with his big hands over his ears. "I won't hear you talk about the lady of the house that way!"
Thamalon laughed so hard he almost added incontinence to his roster of infirmities. He was still chortling when Cale peered into the room. Helpless with laughter, Thamalon dismissed his butler with a friendly wave.
When he recovered from his mirth, Thamalon realized that Talbot had left without a receipt for the returned loan. As much as he was coming to like his son as a young man, he couldn't understand how his three children could be so blithely unconcerned with matters of business.
Unlike his son, Thamalon couldn't bear to relax before business was done. He made a little space amid the clutter of his desk and wrote a bill of receipt in his meticulous hand. He spilled a handful of fine sand to dry the ink, blew it off, and fixed his seal to the document just below his signature before leaving it atop a neat stack of Talbot's books.
Alone at last, Thamalon luxuriated in the privacy of his library. Though it was open to all members of the household in his absence, including those servants who wished to better their positions through study, he still considered it his sanctum. It was there that he kept his most prized artifacts-sculptures, paintings, and art objects from all over the vast reaches of Faerun. Elven works were prominent, causing a mild scandal among those few outsiders who'd visited the library, for elves were not well loved in Sembia, even before the skirmishes of the past summer.
The misplaced globe crowded a small area devoted to some recent astronomical acquisitions. Thamalon had purchased them only a few days earlier, when Cale introduced him to a man called Alkenen, a street peddler whom Thamalon still suspected was more properly called a "fence." Regardless of the man's propriety, he offered an astonishing lot of curiosities to the amateur sky gazer. The centerpiece was a fine orrery that Alkenen swore had been made by artisans of the far isle of Evermeet.
The model of the planets had come as part of a small collection of astronomical oddities. Thamalon had hoped to spend a relaxing evening examining them at leisure, but Tamlin's ill-timed gift was sitting right in the middle of it all. He started to move the painting aside, but curiosity got the better of him. He pulled the ridiculous little tassel and unveiled the painting.
He couldn't have been more shocked had he revealed a nude portrait of his daughter. The swirling, monochromatic image fairly screamed "Pietro Malveen." The youngest son of the disgraced family was popular among the rebellious youth of Selgaunt's artistic community. No doubt because owning one of Pietro's paintings was just scandalous enough to be fashionable, Tamlin had purchased nearly a dozen of the impressionistic works to bestow as gifts.
What Tamlin didn't realize-or so Thamalon prayed-was that the Malveens were likely the source of at least one attempt on his brother's life, though Thamalon hadn't entrusted his children with that knowledge. There was no proof of the first attempt, only rumor passed from Cale's mysterious cousin, who walked the darker lanes of Selgaunt.
More damning was the circumstance of Talbot's adventure of the past year, which ended in the immolation of an old converted warehouse that had once been Malveen property.
Ever since that time, the famed swordsman Radu Malveen had been missing, leaving only his elder brother Laskar and their younger brother Pietro to carry the family name. Their sisters had wisely married away from their family's notorious reputation.
Despite Tamlin's ignorance of the recent offenses of the Malveen men, Thamalon was still irritated. The quality of the gift was one thing, but to think it would absolve him of his irresponsible behavior was so blatant a ploy as to be insulting.
Perhaps an insult was exactly what Tamlin intended, thought Thamalon. He was by far the most sophisticated of the children, but perhaps his courtesy was a mask for contempt.
The damned vein began to pulse again, and Thamalon breathed deeply to still it. He looked more closely at the painting.
There must have been a sale on brown paint, he mused. Malveen had used little else in depicting the dark edge of a forest looming over a hunting lodge. Flecks of red showed where the frightened inhabitants had lit torches against the darkness, but the flames dispelled no shadows. Instead, they picked out the glittering eyes of grotesque beasts creeping out from the forest. Their bodies were all rough knobs and acute angles, as were the trees, which leaned and swayed as Thamalon peered at them.
He tried to blink away the illusion, but some intangible force had locked his gaze upon the canvas. The movement was no illusion, as the brush strokes swirled and converged in a spiral that pulled Thamalon toward the painting.
That wasn't quite right.
The vortex was drawing him into the painting.
He struggled to turn away, but the only movement he could muster was a weak wave of his limp hands. Briefly he thought he must look pathetic staggering around in his housecoat and slippers. He didn't like to think he looked like one of the feeble old drunks who stumbled about the waterfront begging for charity from superstitious sailors eager to buy good luck for a few copper pennies.
The painting pulled him ineluctably closer. Thamalon could smell the pigment-earth and blood and dung. He could almost taste it as the dark colors flooded over and through him.
<
br /> His feet left the floor. He felt his body drawn apart.
In that last frantic instant, Thamalon Uskevren ceased to exist.
CHAPTER 3
ASSIGNATION
The stench of dung and urine soured the air, but neither of them smelled it. Steaming warmth from the sewage stream provided respite from the winter chill, but neither of them felt it. Any ordinary man in those wretched tunnels would have yearned to scramble back onto the streets, but not these two.
An assassin and a ghost skulked through the vaulted sewers of Selgaunt.
The living man strode along the cobblestone walkway, his steps no louder than the shadow of an owl's wing. The stiff collar of his cloak was laced up just beneath his eyes. The rest of his face hid behind a white enameled mask attached to a steel half-cap protecting his forehead. Behind the cap, a black shower of hair spilled down past his fine shoulders.
The man's shadow crooked upon the walls as he passed each of the eldritch lamps ensconced within its alcove. Eight other shadows rose and fell in turn behind him. Where they oozed along the walls, they left a clammy glimmer on the stones.
"Make a dog," said the ghost. He looked like nothing at all, and his voice echoed only within the assassin's head.
The man said nothing, didn't even break his stride except to slap the edge of his supple leather cloak behind the scabbard at his right hip. The hand that struck the fabric was gnarled and sclerotic beneath a calfskin glove.
"Rrruh! Ruh ruh!" barked the ghost. "Come on, here comes another lamp. You can make a wolfhound."
The man turned and stared at the point from which he must have imagined the voice emanated. In the flickering green light, the black spots of his eyes seemed to swallow up all the whites.
"Still a sensitive subject? I thought you'd moved beyond recriminations, Radu. After all, it's not as if he disfigured you so. You managed that handily enou-"
"Be silent."
Radu Malveen's voice was the sound of a dry wind shaking shattered reeds. It might have been a human voice, once.
