City of the Dead

by Rosemary Jones

  The doorjack stalked forward, head outthrust. Even in the dim candlelight, Sophraea could see how his bristly beard extended down his neck to disappear under his collar. Little tufts of coarse black hair even sprouted from his ears.

  “I see a moon elf,” growled the doorjack. “But I smell something else. Something human. Something young. Something scared.”

  “I am not scared!” Sophraea exclaimed, backing into the shadows. She raised up the basket, which was reassuringly heavy with the broken bricks inside.

  The doorjack chuckled. “What are you going to do with the poof of velvet?” he snarled. “Tickle me to death, elf-not-elf girl?”

  For a moment, Sophraea was confused. Then she realized no matter what he smelled, the hairy man could only see Gustin’s illusion. She clutched the basket more tightly, ready to swing it.

  “Come here!” snapped the doorjack and he lunged, one hairy hand outstretched. Sophraea leaped away but the man’s black nails caught the edge of her cloak and pulled her back.

  “Let go. My master is working for Stunk,” she said. And then, remembering the quiet power of Stunk’s wife in the hall, she added, “I have Lady Ruellyn’s approval and protection!”

  The doorjack ignored her protests.

  “I know that scent,” he muttered, hauling her closer and closer, like a wriggling fish hooked on a line.

  She tried to swing the basket, but her cloak entangled her arm and she was off balance. Her feet slipped on the dusty floor as he dragged her toward him.

  The basket barely grazed his ribs. He gave a grunt and a yank.

  Sophraea twisted around, trying to get more solid footing, but the doorjack was stronger than her. She couldn’t pull away. He stretched out one hand and fastened on her arm, pulling so violently that she stumbled. The rough floor scraped her open hands when she tried to catch herself.

  The doorjack continued to pull at her, trying to force her down upon the floor. Sophraea twisted, let the loose cape slip around her shoulders, and scrambled to her feet. He held on. The collar cut against her throat. Furious, Sophraea spun toward him and lashed out with one foot. He dodged her kick but the cape slid between his fingers. She was able to back up another step away from him.

  “I’ll get you!” he growled. He shifted, trying to get a better grip. She pulled one arm free and plunged her hand into the basket. Her fingers clamped around a half brick. Hauling it out, she thrust the brick with all her might at the man’s hairy face. It crushed his long nose with a loud snap. The doorjack let go with a wild howl.

  Sophraea dropped to the floor and rolled away. Once clear of the villainous servant, she sprang to her feet. She knew he was much stronger, but so were her brothers. Through the years she had learned that her small size let her dodge more quickly than a large man. As long as she could stay out of his grasp, she had a chance. Her best defense was to stay beyond his reach.

  He staggered back and forth, both hands clapped over the center of his face, blood flowing in a glittering ribbon down his chin. “You broke it,” he burbled through the mess. “You’re mine!”

  While he was distracted, she raced past him and jumped up to the second stair. He heard her. His head snapped up and he struggled to stand, his knees bent, one hand over his face and the other braced on the floor. For a terrible moment they both were motionless, staring at each other. She thought about running up the stairs, but they were steep, double height, impossible for her to do anything other than climb carefully. Knowing that, she hesitated, two steps up, facing him, unwilling to turn her back on him and chance the stairs.

  That was a mistake, she realized a moment later, as he sprang forward, leaping more like an animal than a man, covering the distance twice as fast as she expected.

  Terrified, she stumbled backward up a step. In her head, she heard Leaplow’s advice, “Whatever you do, don’t let a man pin you. Hit him, keep hitting him, don’t quit!”

  She swung the basket high and brought it down like a club on the top of the doorjack’s head. His feet slid on the tread and he landed on the floor at the bottom of the steps. From where she stood on the stairs, for once in her life, she was taller than her opponent. She took advantage of that fact. Sophraea thumped the heavy basket against his skull again and again.

  With a yelp, the doorjack smashed into the floor of the basement. He didn’t move.

  For a long moment, Sophraea just stood there, breathing heavily, her fingers clutched tightly around the basket’s handle. He still didn’t move.

  She edged back down the stairs, crept forward and tentatively put out a hand to see if he was dead or alive. The doorjack groaned and she jumped. But he didn’t open his eyes, just whimpered a little and curled upon his side.

  Sophraea circled cautiously around the unconscious man. She returned to the candle. With many glances back over her shoulder, she reached into the pile of lumber.

  But the glint of gold was nothing more than the edge of a broken picture frame. The shoe was not there.

  The doorjack groaned again. A quick search of the debris turned up several stout cords that had once been used to tie up sacks of flour. Sophraea lashed the man’s hands and feet together, using the best knots her brothers had taught her. All she needed was a little time to find Gustin and get out of this house. With some regret for the destruction of a favorite garment, she tore the muslin flounce off her petticoat and gagged the doorjack.

  Sophraea hurried back to the stairs. She looked up. The door at the top was firmly closed. She listened for a minute or two, but could hear nothing of the activity in the kitchen. With luck, nobody had heard her skirmish in the basement.

  She shook out her skirts, gathered up her basket, and started up the stairs, only to turn around and go back down.

  She scooped the half brick off the floor and dropped it into the basket. Gustin was right after all. You never knew when a good solid brick might come in handy.

  Then Sophraea fled up the staircase to the warm kitchen above.

  The cook, the laundress, and the other maids were still gathered around the table, gossiping amid a growing pile of peeled vegetables and folded linen.

  “Did you finish your job, dearie?” asked the plump cook.

  “Oh yes,” answered Sophraea, edging around the table toward the stairs leading to the upper rooms.

  “Thought I saw that Furkin go down the stairs to help you,” said the cook, continuing to peel with quick strokes of her knife and not looking up.

  Sophraea froze in place.

  “Good thing you didn’t stay down there with him,” the cook continued. “He’s not a nice man.”

  The other women were also intent on their work, none of them looking up but all nodding in agreement with the cook.

  “He was quite polite to me,” Sophraea lied, coming closer to the table. “In fact, he offered to stay down there and keep the rats away from our charms.”

  The cook raised one eyebrow at this statement. “Well, that was kind of him,” she said with no inflection in her voice. “We’ll just leave him alone then, down in the basement, to keep the rats away.”

  The other women chuckled and nodded.

  “Go on,” said the cook, shoving a chair toward her with one foot. “Catch your breath before you go back upstairs. You’re panting so hard they’re sure to ask questions. A suspicious lot, those guards of Stunk’s.”

  Sophraea collapsed into a chair and picked up a knife. She pulled a bowl toward herself and began to chop vegetables with the rest of them. “You are kind,” she said to the table at large.

  The plump cook shrugged. “Some of the master’s men are better than others. And some deserve a lesson or two.”

  “But won’t you get into trouble? If Furkin stays in the basement too long?” Sophraea asked. These women had been nothing but nice to her and she didn’t want to bring trouble down on their heads.

  One thin and elderly maid shook her head. “Stunk rules his men with a hard hand. But we serve his lady wife and ans
wer to her.”

  “And she dislikes Furkin as much as any of us,” piped up the pot girl from her corner by the sink, a mere child of thirteen with her hands sunk into the soapy bucket of dirty dishes. She earned several stern looks from the other women. Abashed, the pot girl went back to her scrubbing.

  “So you think your wizard can chase the ghosts away?” asked the laundress, rising above that brief incident.

  “We’ve promised Lady Ruellyn to do the best we can,” Sophraea answered. Then, looking around the table at the honest faces of the women gathered there, she decided to tell the truth. “It would help if we could find a certain shoe. A gold brocade dancing slipper, very old-fashioned in style.”

  The women waved away any knowledge of dancing slippers. “Now,” said one thin maid, “Lady Ruellyn has dozens of slippers, but none of gold brocade that I remember.”

  “My old mistress used to have little dancing shoes with a painted heel, but hers were silver lace and not gold brocade,” said another one. “She kept them in a box, with sprigs of herbs stuffed down in the toes to keep them fresh. She never wore them. But my old girl showed me the shoes once and said that they were her first dancing slippers and she meant to be buried in them. Poor thing, I’m sure the family forgot after she passed away.”

  The rest of the women murmured an agreement and slipped into discussions of past employers. Sophraea soon realized that all of the women had worked for noble families elsewhere in Waterdeep until their elderly employers had fallen upon hard times.

  Each woman told tales of how their elderly and aristocratic employers had eventually sold the family homes to Stunk, after the fat man had bought everything else of value from them.

  “He makes the old ones loans,” whispered one maid whose own hair was more gray than black. “And tells them that they can pay him back bit by bit. But it’s never enough some how, and they start selling off pieces of furniture to make the payment, and then the paintings off the walls, and then the jewels that their granny’s granny got for her wedding ever so long ago. And, quicker than you think, there’s just nothing left to pay Stunk. And then he comes by, all smiles and flattery, telling them not to worry, he’ll take the whole property off their hands, they won’t have to worry about paying us servants anymore, and he’ll set them up some place nice to live out their last days.”

  “Nice!” interjected the cook, who had moved over to the fire to stir a cauldron puffing out a spicy smoke. She pulled her dripping spoon out of the pot and waved it with little regard for the sugary splatters she sprayed across the hearthstone. “He put my old lady in one bitty little room down by the docks. It was horrid and dark and damp. If Lord Adarbrent hadn’t brought her some nice pieces from his own house and a good wool blanket for the winter, she would have been ever so miserable.”

  Just about to leave the table to look for Gustin, Sophraea picked up the peeling knife instead and innocently asked, “Lord Adarbrent?”

  “They may call him the Walking Corpse,” said the cook, “but he proved himself a kind friend to my mistress.”

  “And to mine,” answered the gray-haired maid.

  “He tried to talk my lord out of taking Stunk’s loans,” declared the laundress, shifting her basket to avoid the cook’s wildly waving spoon and stains on her clean tablecloths. “Would that he had listened to him, I wouldn’t be working here.”

  “But there’s no denying that Lord Adarbrent has a terrible temper,” added the cook as she stalked back to the table. “Why my old lady told me that he nearly horsewhipped a man to death once. When Lord Adarbrent was young, the nobles of Waterdeep were a different breed. Why just look at a man wrong in those days, and he’d be challenging you quicker than you could blink. I see you, saer, let us duel, saer, that’s what all the young blades would say when they went on the promenade. And people feared Adarbrents in those days. At least that’s what my old lady said!”

  “I thought Lord Adarbrent was all alone and had no family,” said Sophraea.

  “Well, they’ve all been gone for a long time,” the cook responded. “But they caused some stir more than fifty years ago, during one of the bad times.”

  Sophraea looked up at this.

  “Of course, I was just a baby then,” the cook went on. “But so much change was happening inside the city’s walls and outside in the world. The dark arts attracted certain nobles, especially those who had suffered great losses. Oh, most ladies played at séances at their parties, but there were some who took it a bit further than that. There were some who raised ghosts. The sort that had secret rooms, at the top of the tower or down in the basement, with vats of this and glass tubes of that, and nasty smells seeping out to drive the housekeeper crazy.”

  Outside, the thunder died away, leaving only the heavy splatter of rain against the high small windows of the kitchen. More rain hissed down the chimney and made the fire smoke. The cook snapped an order at the pot girl, who obediently left her bucket and rattled the damper and plied the poker until the smoke settled.

  Then the pot girl crept closer to the table. The laundress slid a stool across the floor to her. Perched on top, the child wrapped her arms around her knees and shivered with delight as the older women began to swap tales of hauntings in old Waterdeep. With an absentminded gesture, the cook handed the pot girl a biscuit to nibble while the stories continued.

  While their tales of dark deeds in the City of the Dead rarely matched what Sophraea knew to be the truth (one or two exaggerations nearly caused her to giggle), each mentioned more than once the fashion for ghosts that plagued Waterdeep’s finer homes for a brief time long ago.

  “So the Adarbrents called forth spirits?” Sophraea finally asked.

  “Not the current Lord Adarbrent,” said the cook with stout loyalty to the man who had rescued her old mistress. “But he had a cousin who frightened my old lady when she was girl. A truly nasty witch, if you know what I mean. She died from some ritual gone wrong and the family sealed up her rooms the very day that they buried her.”

  Sophraea remembered the sour, cold smell of Lord Adarbrent’s house. Perhaps something was dead behind the old noble’s wainscoting, something more sinister than a mouse, and something that needed a stronger cure than the gift of a kitten.

  Suddenly the tales of haunting were interrupted by a very live bumping noise below their feet. A crash, like a stack of lumber knocked over by a man rolling around, could be distinctly heard.

  “Old chimney flue,” explained the cook. “Carries sound up from the basement. Sounds like Furkin is having some trouble with those rats.”

  “Oh,” said Sophraea, jumping up from the table and starting toward the stairs. “Perhaps I’d better go find my wizard now.”

  “Good idea, dearie,” the cook agreed. “Furkin might be in a bit of temper later on.”

  “When he gets loose,” giggled the pot girl and was immediately shushed by the other women.

  With hurried thanks, Sophraea headed upstairs. As she left, she heard the cook remark, “Well, that’s a nice polite and helpful girl for you. Look at all the vegetables that she’s peeled and chopped. Of course, if anyone asks, we haven’t seen her for ages, have we?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Upstairs in Stunk’s mansion, Gustin made a great show of pacing back and forth, muttering the occasional odd phrase. He knew that true magic was much more than empty gestures, but, from his experience, the servants expected this kind of act.

  Stunk’s valet, a portly bald man given to wringing his hands and muttering “please don’t touch that,” met Gustin at the top of the stairs leading to his master’s private apartment. The young man supposed that the valet was watching to see that he wouldn’t steal anything. Two more of Stunk’s bodyguards stood stiffly on either side of the lacquered door leading into their master’s bedchamber.

  When one thin male servant turned the corner of the hallway and yelped to see a wizard down on his knees drawing cryptic symbols on the carpet with a piece of charcoa
l, Gustin gained the general impression that the whole household’s nerves were badly overset.

  He continued with his search, carefully lifting up curtains and peering under tables. The upper hallways were just as cluttered with bric-a-brac and expensive ornaments as the lower rooms. The brocade shoe could be almost anywhere and nearly invisible among all the other trophies that Stunk had displayed. Not for the first time, Gustin wished he had a spell that could reveal a desired object. That would be much more useful than many of the odd bits that his old teacher made him memorize!

  As he advanced down a hallway toward the door leading to Stunk’s chambers, Gustin noticed a silk cloth covered one enormous picture frame in an alcove just outside Stunk’s rooms.

  When he started to twitch the covering aside, the valet moaned and said “Oh do not! I wish the master would just have it destroyed.”

  The revealed painting showed the wealthy fat man and his aristocratic lady, expensively dressed in the finest materials and jewels, but the faces above the lace collars were the faces of corpses, rotting away.

  “Unusual choice for a portrait,” said Gustin, quickly letting the cloth fall back over the portrait. “I’m surprised the artist dared to paint him that way.”

  “It wasn’t always like that,” said the valet.

  “Did it start to change when the haunting began?”

  “Oh no, it’s been changing for much longer than that, getting worse every day.”

  “An early warning, one that wasn’t heeded,” Gustin speculated.

  “The master won’t have it removed,” the valet moaned. “He only covered it after my lady objected to seeing it every time she came up the stairs. My master said that he won’t be frightened by such tricks. He was keeping it to feed to whoever was doing this, scrap by canvas scrap until the jokester chokes. At least that was what the master said.”

  “After my interview with him, I would say that Rampage Stunk has very little sense of humor,” Gustin remarked.