City of the Dead

by Rosemary Jones

  THAT’S ODD. MUST BE RUST.

  Sophraea looked closely at the strange streaks marring the usually dull dark gray metal. Ten slender streaks curled around the bars, five on the left side, five on the right.

  Handprints.

  Sophraea barely breathed, looking at the marks so plainly visible and so clearly the color of dried blood, the marks of hands that had reached through the gate from the graveyard side.

  Can’t be. They leave us alone. They have always left us alone. The dead don’t bother Carvers.

  With careful backward steps, Sophraea retreated. Behind her, the bushes swayed, as if someone invisible brushed by them, returning to the center of the City of the Dead.

  ED GREENWOOD

  PRESENTS

  WATERDEEP

  BLACKSTAFF TOWER

  Steven E. Schend

  MISTSHORE

  Jaleigh Johnson

  DOWNSHADOW

  Erik Scott de Bie

  CITY OF THE DEAD

  Rosemary Jones

  THE GOD CATCHER

  Erin M. Evans

  February 2010

  CIRCLE OF SKULLS

  James P. Davis

  June 2010

  Also by Rosemary Jones

  THE DUNGEONS

  CRYPT OF THE MOANING DIAMOND

  DEDICATION

  Special thanks to Ed Greenwood and Susan Morris for loaning me the keys to Waterdeep and letting me play in the cemetery. A big electronic hug of gratitude to Erik Scott de Bie, James P. Davis, and Steven E. Schend, terrific authors all who shared their wisdom and said such kind words about the characters I sent adventuring earlier in the Realms.

  Thanks to Mike, Jacki, and Gayle for listening to the early drafts. And thanks to all the friends of the FORGOTTEN REALMS® who wrote to me about my first crypt: your comments, suggestions, and general insight are always welcome. I promise you that the dog lived a long and happy fictional life.

  This one is for Phoebe Matthews because she knows where the story started.

  INTRODUCTION

  I will never see the City of the Dead the same way again.

  Oh, I always knew it was a pleasant (if slightly creepy) park by day, walled off from the rest of the city and left to the birds, the mourners, and those who met in the vast, sprawling cemetery when the sun was high, to picnic and chatter, or romance each other, or just to talk (sometimes friendly gossip, sometimes exciting business deals, and sometimes matters far more sinister).

  I knew the City of the Dead very well. I created it, more than forty years ago, seeing it first under a cold, bright moon, silent stone statues staring down at two sinister wizards—one with a skull for a head, and the other having no head inside his cowl except restlessly writhing tentacles. The statues stared without moving, and were ignored. The ghosts of the dead, and a few undead who were floating skeletal hands and heads, moved to the best vantage points to watch the wizards confront each other—and also got ignored. It pleased me, in the very bad fantasy short story I was then writing (at the tender age of eight), to have one wizard entomb the other alive with a spell on the very spot where, the next day, some laughing young noble ladies spread their picnic cloth. Before long, one of them would inadvertently utter a word that would free the entombed wizard so that he rose straight up, in ominous silence, to bulge that cloth, spilling flagons and cheese and grapes in all directions, and sending those ladies shrieking among the tombs …

  Heh-heh. I knew the City of the Dead, all right.

  In my imagination, I can stroll around it (a little bit of Highgate burial ground in London, something of Mount Pleasant in Toronto, and a lot of little touches from other cemeteries in many places all over the world). I knew someone maintained the place (that is, beyond merely carrying off the bodies of those unfortunates who’d died of fright there during the night), but I hadn’t really thought more about it.

  Until now, when this wonderful book in your hands introduced me to the family who tends the graves of the City of the Dead, plucky young heroine and all, and I really got to know the place.

  I created Waterdeep, the bustling fantasy city around the City of the Dead, too, and down the decades have brought many a sneering, prancing, strutting, foppish, reelingly drunken, catty, or ruthless noble of the City of Splendors to life. In Realms books I wrote or read, or in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® games I played in, the nobles of Waterdeep seemed to demand the spotlight every chance they got, crowding their ways onstage. I loved them, swaggeringly fashionable warts and all—but I never met one of them who captivated me as thoroughly as Lord Adarbrent, in this book.

  Rosemary Jones has created a truly classic character in this lonely old lord, and given us a great heroine and hero team who aren’t all-competent, a suitably skin-crawling villain, and a great supporting cast, to boot. From the overgrown tombs and crypts to the grand rooms and kitchens of the wealthy, she has brought Waterdeep to life.

  Better than that, she has told a wonderful story. One I know I will want to read over and over again.

  Frankly, you don’t have to know anything more about Waterdeep to enjoy this book, though those who do will be delighted at what’s in these pages. Pay attention; if ever you should meet a skeletally thin, dark-clad old man with a cane striding among crypts, it’s always useful to know how to properly greet him.

  Ed Greenwood

  January 2009

  PROLOGUE

  SPRING 1467

  On such a day as this, a day of such good weather that people wandered in the streets with no more business on their minds than to dally in the warm sunshine, Waterdeep irritated Lord Dorgar Adarbrent.

  He walked muttering through the crowds, pushing the more aggravating pedestrians aside with his cane. He knew his irritation was irrational.

  After all, on a fine day, the city presented itself in its greatest glory: the gleaming statues, the marvelous buildings, the crooked streets, the busy harbor, the hustle, and the glamour. But there it was. The vibrant city, the noisy and argumentative city, annoyed him. Yet, for almost all his long life, Lord Adarbrent had loved Waterdeep more than any living thing.

  On such a day, Lord Adarbrent’s unquiet mind drove him to the quietest place in all of Waterdeep, the City of the Dead. At the Coffinmarch gate, he turned away from the southern end of the cemetery, avoiding the many visitors and public monuments there. Instead he trod the lesser paths leading north, toward the tombs emblazoned with the old names, the noble names, the names of families once known and now long forgotten by all but him.

  Soon his own footsteps crunching upon the gravel were the only sounds he heard. Oh, if he concentrated, there were the indistinct whispers that always filled the air in that silent place, but the sun was bright overhead and the shadows were driven into hiding beneath the bushes or in their graves and he had never been afraid of ghosts.

  At last he reached the tomb he sought. He unlocked the bronze door. A slight rustle stirred in the dark and a whiff of rose oil, faint as the memory of a dream, issued forth. His mind immediately soothed, Lord Adarbrent descended the mausoleum’s steps into the gloomy, peaceful depths.

  The ball sailed over Sophraea’s head and landed with a splat in the middle of a mud puddle. From her viewpoint as a goalpost, watching her various older brothers and many young male cousins scramble after the ball, five-year-old Sophraea could not tell if the boys had scored a point or incurred a penalty. It did not seem to matter. Everyone was sliding through the puddle, fists flying. The misshapen and much abused leather ball rolled away unheeded, stopped finally by an uncarved headstone.

  Above the little girl, the sky shone a cloudless blue, only the thinnest ribbons of white clouds scudding past the crooked gables of Dead End House.

  The ringing of hamme
rs against wood, iron, and marble echoed through the yard as Sophraea’s father, uncles, and older cousins began their morning’s work on the gravestones and coffins commissioned for the recently deceased of Waterdeep’s richest families.

  Sophraea’s mother, grandmother, and aunts had agreed that the first day of Tarsakh was a beautiful day for cleaning. The Carver women were busy turning over carpets, sweeping out dust, and generally scrubbing Dead End House from basement to attic.

  Swept out of the door with her brothers and younger cousins, Sophraea sat upon a stack of clothing abandoned by the boys, kicking her legs and wondering what to do. After designating her as a boundary marker in one of their endless ball games, Sophraea’s older brothers had told her to “stay put and don’t follow us,” an instruction she heard so often as the youngest member of a large and mostly male family that she forgot it immediately.

  While the boys fought and tussled for the possession of the battered leather ball, Sophraea grew more and more bored with her job as a coat weight. With a shout, her brother Leaplow jumped on her cousin Bentnor, who had just regained his feet after the last wrestling match, and the rest of the boys piled on top.

  Realizing that nobody was paying any attention to her, Sophraea slipped off the pile of the boys’ coats and wandered to the far end of the courtyard.

  The gate to the City of the Dead stood ajar, one of her bigger cousins having just carried a bronze marker through it. One of the black and white Carver cats slid through, intent on its own business in the graveyard. Beyond the gate, Sophraea could see the tangle of spring flowers, tall bushes, and gleaming marble tombs. A buzz of bright wings amid the flowers attracted her eye.

  Little Sophraea Carver stepped through the open gate and into Waterdeep’s great graveyard. No one saw the tiny girl with the head of black curls disappear into the haunted pathways of the City of the Dead.

  Behind her, the shouts and the thuds of the boys at play faded away. As she trotted down the crushed stone path, Sophraea passed beneath the shadow of a marble monument, the statue of a tall woman dressed all in armor weeping into the hand covering her face. Tears trickled through the stone fingers to fall into a simple basin at the woman’s feet. Sophraea kneeled and peered into the pool, trying to catch a glimpse of spring tadpoles or her own reflection. But the water was too brown and murky, stained by the remains of winter’s dead leaves.

  A quick search yielded a long branch, light enough to carry to the basin and long enough to satisfactorily rake the leaves out of the pool. Happy with her work, Sophraea forgot about her brothers and did not even notice when the hands of the statue moved, so the weeping woman now peeped through open fingers at the child laboring by her marble feet.

  Despite the bright sun, pale fingers of mist twined around the rooftop of the tomb behind the little girl. The statue raised its head and glared. The fog slipped back to a hole in the ground. Oblivious, Sophraea continued to clear the pond of debris.

  Eventually, the long evening shadows crept across the grass to touch the edge of the pool. Leaves stirred in the bushes surrounding the pool, although no breeze ruffled the little girl’s dark curls. Sophraea looked up. The sun had sunk low enough to be hidden by the great mausoleum before her.

  Having lived all her short life above the workshop where her family created such figures as the marble statue above her and the stone sarcophagus and barrel tombs surrounding her, these monuments to the dead did not worry the little girl. But the shadows growing darker in the corners and the bushes rustling around her made Sophraea think that the time had come to find her way home. Besides, she was hungry and if she didn’t get back quickly, the boys would probably snatch more than their fair share of supper.

  Setting off on the path as fast as her short legs could trot, Sophraea rounded the corner to face a brick and timber tomb built like a miniature Waterdeep mansion. The tomb’s bronze door swung wide open. Stepping carefully through the door was a tall man, who ducked his head a little to avoid knocking off his wide-brimmed hat against the marble lintel. The bronze door gave a mournful squeal as he pulled it shut behind him.

  Taking a large iron key from his pocket, the gentleman locked the door with a distinct click. He turned and Sophraea instantly recognized the face as exactly the sort of creature her brothers whispered about in the hallways of Dead End House late at night when they were supposed to be climbing the stairs to their bedchambers.

  Beneath the wide-brimmed black hat, the visage presented to the terrified child was a cadaverous mixture of yellow and white, the gentleman’s pale skin heavily pockmarked across the nose and cheekbones. His lashes and eyebrows were a mottled gray and the color of his eyes a muddier brown than the pool where she had been playing.

  Recently dared by her brother Leaplow to peek in a coffin after the occupant had been tenderly placed there, Sophraea did not hesitate to identify the figure now bending closer to peer at her as a corpse!

  “Are you lost, child?” said the corpse in a suitably creaky and cracked voice.

  “No,” whispered Sophraea, too terrified to either scream or run. Then she repeated something that she had heard a hundred times around the family table but never understood. “I am a Carver. Carvers can’t get lost.”

  “Of course.” The corpse nodded in solemn agreement. “But it is close to sunset. Perhaps you should go home now.”

  Sophraea just stared back, still frozen into place by this unexpected encounter.

  “You came through your family’s gate. The Dead End gate.” Each word that the corpse spoke was carefully enunciated, much in the manner very ancient relatives used to speak to the youngest Carvers. This mixture of not quite a question, not quite a statement was exactly like the type of conversation Sophraea endured during the visits of her grandmother’s elderly lady friends. Perhaps the gentleman was not a corpse, she thought, but simply the male equivalent of the wrinkled, white-haired ladies who sat around the kitchen table.

  “Did you come through the Dead End gate?” asked the elderly corpse man again. “Do you know your way there?”

  Sophraea bobbed her head in tentative agreement.

  “I will walk with you. It is time that I returned home.”

  One pale and age-spotted hand slid into a deep pocket. Slowly he withdrew his closed hand and extended it toward Sophraea.

  “Would you like a sweetmeat?” he said.

  Sophraea shook her head violently. Seeing the ancient face crease with an odd look of uncertainty, as if he knew he had said something wrong but wasn’t sure how to correct himself, she added, “I am not supposed to take sweets from strangers. And it is too close to my dinner time. Mama would scold me.”

  Stepping into the last full rays of the sun, the elderly gentleman leaned over the child. “You are a good girl.”

  He patted her awkwardly on the head, like a man more used to hounds or horses than children, and pocketed the sweet.

  That close, Sophraea saw the wrinkles and spots on his skin looked exactly like those on the hands of the old ladies who came to eat cake with Myemaw and gossip about how the city was once so much grander. Even the mustiness of the elderly man’s coat held the same smell of preserving herbs and old house dust as the ladies’ cloaks.

  “I thought you were a dead man,” Sophraea burst out in her relief and the old gentleman’s gray eyebrows rose to his scanty hairline at her pronouncement. “But you’re alive! I am sorry, saer.”

  Removing his wide-brimmed black hat, the old man bowed with exquisite courtesy and stated, “Lord Dorgar Adarbrent, most certainly alive and entirely at your service.” A rusty sound came bubbling out of his throat, something halfway between a polite cough and a chuckle, as he replaced his hat.

  “Sophraea Carver,” said Sophraea, dipping into a brief curtsy as she would to one of her grandmother’s friends.

  “Now, child, let me walk you home. You should never be in the City of the Dead after dark.” The old man scratched his chin as he stared at the child. “Hmmm … in fact
, even though you are a Carver, you are quite too young to be here alone at any time.”

  “That is what everyone says. Sophraea, stay here! Sophraea, don’t go there!” confided the little girl, turning obediently at the wave of the nobleman’s hand and leading him back along the path toward the Dead End gate. “But the boys were kicking their stupid ball. It is so boring! All I do is sit! So I left and nobody told me to stop.”

  Lord Adarbrent gave another rusty chuckle. “Ah, I see that the boys were the ones at fault.”

  Sophraea skidded to a halt. Although she was five, and growing up in the tail-end of a big family had left her with a large vocabulary, she wanted to make certain that she understood Lord Adarbrent.

  “Does that mean the boys are in trouble?” she asked carefully.

  “I rather suspect that they are.” Lord Adarbrent nodded, hooking one finger over his nose to hide a smile.

  “Oh, good!” cheered Sophraea. “I want to see that!”

  As she drew nearer the gate, Sophraea heard shouts, but in a higher and much different tone than when she had left. Recognizing her mother Reye’s cries, Sophraea quickly climbed the steps to the Dead End gate.

  “Wait for me, child,” cried the old gentleman.

  Sophraea paused at the top of the gate stairs. Behind her, Lord Adarbrent peered uncertainly through the twilight gloom.

  “Come along,” said Sophraea. “I must go in.”

  At the sound of her voice, his head swung up and he stared directly at her. “Ah,” he said with satisfaction, “I see the gate now.”

  “Are you coming?” Sophraea asked.

  “Certainly,” the old man said, climbing up the moss-slicked stairs.

  At the sound of another shout from her mother, Sophraea turned and ran to the center of the courtyard.

  All her brothers and all her younger cousins were lined up before her mother Reye. Her uncles Perspicacity, Sagacious, Vigilant, and Judicious stood in their workshop doors, attracted by the noise. All had worried lines creasing their big foreheads. Out of the windows hung at least two aunts and Sophraea’s grandmother, each adding her shouts to Reye’s scolding.