Prince of Ravens: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by Richard Baker

  The leader, none other than Jack’s former tormentor, Varys, met Jack’s eyes with a menacing smile. “Lord Wildhame,” he said with a mocking bow. “The marquise Dresimil sends her greetings and would like to extend her invitation to return to Chûmavhraele. The circumstances of your departure demand nothing less.”

  Jack stared at the dark elves in horror for several heartbeats. Varys grinned wickedly at him. Jack couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of tortures Dresimil might have in mind for him if the drow recaptured him; he might have been better off in Tarandor’s green bottle. Somehow he found his voice and said, “I am afraid I must decline at this time. As you can see, I am packed for a long journey. I promise I will call on your lovely marquise as soon as I return.”

  “Ah, but our lady insists,” the drow sergeant replied. He raised his hand-crossbow, as did the rest of his warriors. As they fired, Jack yanked open the door of the large wardrobe he was standing next to and ducked behind the improvised shield. The small quarrels thudded into the trunk, their points puncturing the door, but none struck Jack. The rogue searched himself for tiny poisoned quarrels, found none, and darted for the dining room doorway.

  Varys snarled in frustration. “After him!” he hissed. “Do not let him escape!”

  Jack dashed from the sitting room into the dining room. The drow pursued him at once, no more than four or five steps behind him. He dared not pause long enough to try a spell, and simply ran for the door from the dining room to the kitchen. Then sudden, absolute darkness filled the room, as if he’d run into a coal cellar on a moonless night. Jack stumbled over a chair and floundered blindly along the large table in the middle of the room as he tried to keep moving. “Shar’s black heart!” he snarled, groping blindly through the blackness. The drow might as well have blinded him with their accursed darkness spells!

  He found a doorway with one outstretched hand and hurried through, only to realize that he’d found the wrong door—he was back in the front hall. The pull-chain for the grand chandelier was under his hand, which meant that he was facing back toward the front door. Or was it on the other side of the hall? He couldn’t remember. The stealthy rush of feet whispered in the supernatural gloom behind him … but now he thought he could hear the dark elves ahead of him, too. They were surrounding him while he couldn’t see!

  “The front hall!” Varys called softly to the others. None of the other drow replied, which was even more intimidating than a chorus of answers would have been.

  This is insufferable, Jack raged silently. What harm had he ever done to the drow? Why were they so damned unreasonable about things? He couldn’t go back into the dining room, and he could hear soft movement approaching from the foyer. There was a dark elf there in the middle of the hall, perhaps two or three, closing in on him while he cowered by the wall. He could try to grope his way into the kitchen, but they’d be on him in moments unless he did something they didn’t expect—and that suggested a counterattack.

  With one quick motion, Jack seized the chandelier’s chain, undid it from the wall cleat, and let it go. The huge fixture was a magnificent piece of ironwork, easily eight feet in diameter and hundreds of pounds in weight. The chain rattled and clacked loudly for an instant, then the whole thing plummeted to the hall’s zalantar-wood floor with a resounding crash and the shrill tinkle of breaking glass. A drow cried out in pain, and others shouted in alarm; Jack felt a sudden wash of heat and the crackle of flame in front of him as the chandelier’s oil lamps broke and ignited, even though the fire was completely hidden by the darkness spell.

  “Hah! Take that, you fiends,” Jack called. He turned and stumbled toward the kitchen, hoping that the way to the back door was now open. He took two steps—and the darkness was abruptly gone. He stood in the kitchen doorway, with a hooded drow warrior blocking his way. Edelmon was lying unconscious almost right at his feet, several drow crossbow-bolts lodged in him, none in any particularly lethal spot. Jack barely noticed his valet, however—behind them both a spreading pool of lamp-oil burned fiercely under the wreckage of the chandelier. A drow soldier was lying in the burning oil, crushed under the fallen fixture. Varys and another warrior were right behind him, and the remaining drow warriors blocked the doorway to the dining room and the grand stairs leading to the upper floors.

  Varys skirted the flames and advanced with his hand crossbow trained on Jack’s midsection. “Clever,” the sergeant said. “I had hoped you might provide a little sport for us. Now place your hands on your head and hold still while my warriors bind you. I do not care to carry you all way back down to Chûmavhraele, but I will put you to sleep if I must.”

  “What do you want with me?” Jack demanded. “Are you in such sore need of dung-shovelers?”

  “I suspect you will soon beg for the chance to shovel dung, my lord,” Varys replied. “The marquise has something special planned for you. Your hands?”

  Jack glanced left and right, searching for some opening and finding none. The fire in the front hall was spreading to the room’s hangings and the fine paneling; acrid smoke filled the air. He could try a spell, but the dark elves would stick at least one envenomed quarrel in him before he finished, and then he’d be just as useless as poor Edelmon snoring on the floor. He briefly considered forcing the drow warriors to shoot him just for the spite of making them carry him back down to the Underdark, but then he realized that if he had any hope at all for escape, he would need to be conscious. With a shallow cough and watering eyes, he backed away into the kitchen and reluctantly raised his hands.

  The dark elves wasted no more time. In a flash two surged up to seize his wrists and bind them behind his back, while a third fitted him with a gag and yanked a thick black hood over his head. Jack twisted and fought in protest, to no avail. Hands closed on his arms and shoulders, and he was hustled out of Maldridge with the smell of smoke thick in his nostrils.

  Hooded and bound as he was, Jack could only guess at where the drow were taking him. They shoved him out the kitchen door and through the garden outside, keeping such a tight grip that when he inevitably stumbled and tripped over unseen obstacles they dragged him along with hardly a step missed. Jack thought he heard the rasping sound of the garden gate’s rusty bolt sliding through its brackets, and then Dresimil’s hunters hurried out into the unpaved alleyway behind Maldridge. They turned left, or so he thought, and led him down the alley some distance before another door creaked open. Then the rogue was manhandled through a doorway and down a short flight of wooden steps into a dark, damp place—a cellar, most likely. Something clattered and thumped; the dark elves whispered to each other. Although Jack strained to listen in, he couldn’t make out much of their strange Elvish, at least not with the heavy hood over his head.

  It seems the drow use the cellars and alleys to stay out of sight, he decided, or at least they took pains to avoid being seen on the open streets by daylight. How many abandoned cellars or secret boltholes did they have scattered throughout the city? A moment later, stone scraped on stone, and a whiff of cold, rank air came to his nose. The dark elves seized him again and maneuvered him through a doorway and down several more steps. He could hear the gurgle and splash of slow-moving water, and the sounds around him took on a hollow, echoing tone.

  “The sewers,” he murmured to himself—although the gag over his mouth rendered the remark into a muffled pair of grunts. Jack mentally added the excellent dwarf-built network of drainage tunnels beneath Raven’s Bluff to the dark elves’ routes for moving around the city unnoticed. He would have thought the drow too fastidious to spend much time in the dank, unhealthy tunnels, but then again, one could hardly come up from the Underdark without passing through Sarbreen, and one could hardly go from Sarbreen to the surface without passing through the sewers. The dark elves turned him toward the right, keeping to the somewhat drier ledge or walkway that ran close to the right-hand wall. Once or twice Jack stepped into cold, foul-smelling water. He found himself wishing they’d hurry up and leave the se
wer behind, until he remembered what was likely waiting for him when they reached Tower Chûmavhraele.

  He winced inside his hood. If he was lucky, Dresimil Chûmavh would have him put to death in some quick and spectacular manner. Otherwise she’d have her minions torture him for days or tendays before allowing him to die. “I refuse to give her the satisfaction of begging for mercy,” he resolved under his gag … but somehow he suspected that the dark elves had ways to break tougher men than he. Some morbid part of his imagination started worrying about which specific tortures the drow would employ, and no matter how much Jack fought against it, a whole array of fiendish devices and tactics filled his mind.

  Suddenly he was jerked to a halt and roughly pushed to his knees. He started to protest, but a drow close behind him cuffed him by his ear. “Still and silent!” the dark elf hissed.

  Jack bit back another cry of pain and did his best to keep still. He listened intently, hearing nothing but the dripping echoes of the sewer around him. The drow barely made a sound; he could imagine they were talking to each other with the clever sign language he’d seen once or twice in Chûmavhraele. Why would they stop here? he wondered. Had they met someone else in the sewers?

  He leaned forward, trying to hear something, anything at all—and suddenly complete chaos exploded all around him. Shouts of anger rang through the tunnels, steel whispered against leather as blades were drawn, bowstrings snapped, and frantic splashing and plunging broke the steady murmur of the drain water. “What? What’s going on?” Jack demanded of his captors, and of course succeeded only in producing more unintelligible grunts. Then he was shoved to the ground by a hand in the middle of his back, and the shrill ring of steel against steel filled the tunnel. Someone screamed nearby, and someone else roared in fury.

  “Fools!” shrieked Varys. “You dare to interfere with us? Slay them all!”

  Jack started working to free himself. Lying on the ground, he got one foot against the sewer wall and used the leverage to scoot his bound hands underneath his buttocks. A few heartbeats of desperate wriggling brought his hands up under his knees, then around his feet one at a time. The fight raged on all around him, with cries of pain and panic—some drow, some human. There was a strange crackling, tearing sound, and Jack sensed strong magic close by him. A body fell almost on top of him—a dark elf, judging by the slender build and light weight. Jack ignored the body and dragged the hood from his head, rolling to his feet to make a break for freedom.

  Several of the dark elves lay dead or unconscious around him, alongside a couple of human ruffians he didn’t recognize. More of the street toughs surrounded the rest of the drow, battling with knife and sling against rapier and hand crossbow. One of the dark elves went down under the impact of a sling bullet, and the fighting grew even more desperate. Jack decided that he wouldn’t get through the press in that direction, and turned to flee in the other direction—but there the drow sergeant Varys dueled none other than Myrkyssa Jelan. The elf wizard Kilarnan stood just a few steps behind the warlord, sword and wand in hand.

  “Jelan?” Jack said in surprise, except that it came out as “Jmm-wnnhh?” because he was still gagged. Angrily he reached up and yanked the gag from his mouth. What he needed was a bit of magic, perhaps an invisibility spell to steal away from this unexpected brawl before he was missed … but he was too late. Jelan parried two lightning-quick thrusts of Varys’s rapier, then stepped inside the dark elf’s reach and sliced his head three-quarters off his neck with a wicked draw cut. Varys reeled around and collapsed in a heap as Jelan’s thugs overpowered the remaining drow.

  Jelan eyed the dead drow in front of her with a small smile before she raised her gaze to Jack. “Well, then. I thought I told you to watch out for the drow, Jack.”

  The rogue stared a moment in surprise, relief, and no small amount of apprehension. Out of the frying pan and into the fire? he wondered. “Elana,” he finally said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I and my Moon Daggers have been engaged in something of a dispute with the drow for several tendays now,” Jelan replied. “They seem to think they have the run of the city. I disagree. I certainly saw no reason to let them take you back down to Chûmavhraele.”

  “But …” Jack’s natural loquaciousness was nowhere to be found. It seemed this day was full of surprises; he rallied and tried again. “How did you know they had me?”

  “I have my sources at Horthlaer’s. I received word this morning that a deal had been struck for the Sarkonagael, so I moved my agents into place to seize the book. One of my spies was watching Maldridge; when the drow stormed the house, he sent for help. I had an idea the dark elves would head for the nearest entrance to Sarbreen with you, so I moved to intercept them. Excuse me for a moment.” Jelan moved past Jack to check on the rest of her men. She knelt briefly by one of the fallen ruffians, and shook her head—it looked like the fellow had taken a rapier-thrust through the heart. She moved to the next, and pulled a small crossbow-quarrel from his shoulder. “Darrek should be fine,” she said to her ruffians. “He’ll wake up in an hour or two with a splitting headache. Drow sleep-venom is strong stuff.”

  “You were plotting to steal the Sarkonagael from me?” Jack demanded.

  Jelan shrugged. “I would have done it last night, but you and the book were nowhere to be found. Where were you hiding?”

  Jack frowned, wondering what had deterred Jelan for a moment before the answer came to him: She must have been looking for him during the time that he’d been confined in Tarandor’s accursed green bottle! Truly, events were moving at a dizzying pace; his rivals and enemies were falling all over each other in their eagerness to foil him. “I was inconvenienced by a completely unreasonable wizard,” he replied. More than that she probably would not believe.

  “You would be wise to choose your enemies with more care,” Jelan said. She indicated the dark elves lying dead in the sewer tunnel with a nod of her head. “Now, it seems to me that I have rendered you something of a service by snatching you out of Dresimil Chûmavh’s talons. The price of my assistance is, of course, the Sarkonagael. Where might I find the book?”

  Jack steeled himself; somehow he doubted that Jelan would like what he was about to say. “I no longer have it, Elana,” he answered. “I turned it in for the reward. Which I have not yet collected, by the way, so there is no need to rob me at the moment.”

  Myrkyssa Jelan frowned and stared levelly into his eyes for a long moment. “You turned it in?” she said. “Do not lie to me, Jack. I have been watching Horthlaer’s, and I know they do not have the book.”

  “That was likely true an hour or two ago, but if Horthlaer’s does not have it by now, they will by the end of the day. I arranged another counting house to represent me, and left the Sarkonagael in their hands.”

  The swordswoman muttered something to herself in a language that sounded like Shou, and turned away in frustration. Kilarnan looked at his employer. “Do we try to retrieve it from Horthlaer’s?” the elf asked. “It could be done.”

  Jelan shook her head. “We would need days to arrange it; Horthlaer’s is the next best thing to a fortress. And we would set the whole of the city against us. The prize isn’t worth the cost of the throw.” She looked back at Jack, who was suddenly very conscious of the fact that he still had his hands bound in front of him and was still surrounded by her henchmen. “Did I not warn you against allowing the Sarkonagael to fall into the wrong hands?”

  “Heeding warnings has never been easy for me, Elana.”

  “Yes, I think I’ve learned that about you.” She glared at him. “Do you know who has the Sarkonagael now?”

  Jack shook his head. “I did not determine the identity of the buyer.”

  “Well, I did,” Jelan replied. “You have delivered the Secrets of the Shadewrights into the hands of Lord Norwood.”

  “Norwood? Lord Marden Norwood?” Jack blinked in surprise. “What in the world would he want with it?”

  “That is the
question, now, isn’t it? The spell of shadow-simulacra is a potent weapon. It is a perfect tool for espionage, manipulation, or simple assassination. Do you know what might be done with that sort of magic in the wrong hands?”

  Jack refrained from pointing out that Myrkyssa Jelan possessed that knowledge because she had in fact been the wrong hands just a few short years ago, by his measure. He also refrained from pointing out that the spell in question was actually in his vest pocket. Why did Seila’s father want the Sarkonagael? Was he engaged in some secret skullduggery of his own, or was he in cahoots with the drow in some unexpected manner? Jack’s mood soured even more at that thought. As heartily as he disliked Marden Norwood at the moment, for Seila’s sake he hoped that the man was not a villain. “Why do you distrust Norwood?” he asked.

  “Have you seen how the nobles rule over Raven’s Bluff?” Jelan countered. “They control the city’s trade, its laws, the magistrates, the watch, the city officials, the Wizards’ Guild, everything. What do you think might happen when you give a man accustomed to using power as he pleases the sort of power the Sarkonagael holds?”

  “He might want it simply for safekeeping,” said Jack, even though he was not at all sure that was the case.

  “Possibly, but that is not a gamble I care to take.” The swordswoman motioned to her surviving mercenaries.

  “Let us be on our way—there may be more drow about. Jack, you will find a stair leading back to the streets about thirty yards behind you.”

  “That is it?” Jack asked. “You are letting me go?”

  “You have nothing I want,” Jelan replied. She drew a dagger from her belt; Jack flinched despite his best efforts to hold still, but she merely sliced the bonds on his wrists and returned the knife to its sheath. “However … you have access to Norwood Manor that I do not. If Norwood tires of your games or you decide that he shouldn’t have that book you gave him after all, I’ll reward you for bringing it to me. Ask for Elana at Nimber’s Skewer Shop—that is how I prefer to be known in the current day. And you’d best heed my advice about avoiding the drow in the future, Jack. It might not be in my interest to rescue you again.” Then she turned on her heel and strode off, her small gang falling in behind her.