In the quivering light of the chandeliers, he looked old, wan, and utterly alone. He moved in time to the death march, dignifying its overwrought strains with his patient stride. Khelben suddenly saw how acutely important this was to Piergeiron. He straightened in his seat.
The Open Lord’s demeanor had the same effect on the rest of the congregation. He moved slowly forward, a tiny boat drifting past waves that could easily swamp or overturn it. Eyes turned first to the bundle the man held, and then to his face, and last to the floor.
After a last agonized refrain of the dirge, the Open Lord reached Shaleen’s gold and glass casket. The music ended, echoing into silence. Not a breath stirred the air. The white-robed priest of Ao waited, eulogy in hand.
No one coughed. No one could be heard to breathe. Piergeiron stood a long while gazing down at the magically restored body of his first love, Shaleen. Her casket had been moved to the center of the funeral dais. Atop it rested a small case of gold and glass, fashioned in the same style as the larger box. This case lay open.
With great reverence, Piergeiron laid the bundle gently into the case. He drew back the silk and arranged it carefully around the hand and the diamond it clutched. Then, with a sigh, he fitted the glass cover down atop the case and turned the lock screws at the corners.
He lifted watery eyes to the priest of Ao, who inhaled deeply to begin his eulogy.
Then it happened. The diamond, bright already between the elegant fingers of Lady Eidola, grew brighter still. It was as though the facets within it were being aligned to focus the light they reflected. Folk gasped as the radiance built swiftly to a lantern-bright blaze. Eidola’s fingers, suddenly scaly and black against the glorious gem, caught fire and flared away to ash. Then the silk ignited in a flash that was almost unnoticeable beside the brilliant glow of the gem.
Piergeiron could do nothing but stand in dumbfounded astonishment, gazing at the starlike stone. Then he fell back, faint, into arms clad in black wool. The Blackstaff was behind him, having made his usual descent from the balcony. The mage was whispering into Piergeiron’s ear: “…no need to fear. I’d suspected as much. Why would Eidola have a soul-stone at all, unless it contained the very creature upon whom she was modeled? Eidola is gone forever, but another soul is emerging….”
The fire was so hot now that it was melting the gold base of the small casket.
“…used this soul-gem to create Eidola. This, now, isn’t her soul, but that of the woman after whom she was fashioned….”
Gold drops rained down from the case into the casket of Shaleen, forming a hot puddle between her feet.
“…they did it again. Yon candle sconces on the casket must be forged from the candlesticks that brought the bloodforge warriors here. They must’ve melted them down again—trust Waterdhavians—and made the coffer for the hand from some of it. It’s a conduit for the soul in the gem. The soul has sensed its own body….”
The gem tumbled through the hole it had melted, falling into the puddle of liquid metal. There, it flared so bright that even Khelben fell back, dragging Piergeiron with him. Shaleen’s casket became opaquely brilliant. All assembled Waterdeep winced away from it. Then just as suddenly the casket went black.
Piergeiron pulled free of the Lord Mage and stumbled to the foot of the coffin. He saw hands moving, pressing against the inside of the glass.
“Shaken!”
His heartfelt shout shattered the shocked silence, and a thousand throats took up the name in a thunderous chorus. The one they called on clawed at the inside of her coffin just as her husband had done before.
“Right,” Khelben called calmly, reminding all who heard it that he’d been through this before. “Crafters, bring your pry bars and augers! Priests: prayers and gauze.” He turned to smile at a mop-haired man-giant. “And, yes, Madieron, see if you can’t lay hands on a plow horse somewhere.”
In the ensuing bustle and excited roar, Piergeiron spun away from the coffin. His eyes were sharp again and piercing. The fog was gone from him. He sought one man: a certain silver paladin with a penchant for hidebound heroism and a hammer as large as all outdoors.
“Miltiades!” Piergeiron cried, reaching the man he sought and clapping him on one ornamental epaulet, “how’s about I have a look at your hammer?”
The paladin gaped at him, bewildered. “What?”
“Come now, Miltiades, don’t be stingy,” Piergeiron roared. “The lads and lasses of three continents are talking about this golden hammer you wield. It’s not as though I’d dent it.”
Blinking, as stiff as always, Miltiades blurted, “Well, of course not. It’s not as if… I mean to say, if you can’t be trusted… er, that is—” He unslung the mighty weapon. “Here.”
“Thanks,” said Piergeiron, his old humor sparkling in his eyes.
He strode back through the carnival of crafters and clergy and gawkers, crowded eight deep around the casket where his wife struggled. His very presence cleared a path.
Knees against the still-warm gold, Piergeiron hoisted the great sledge over his head and cried out, “If ever there was Justice, in the name of Tyr—!”
And the hammer fell.
Some say it was not the paladin’s golden hammer but a crack of lightning sent by Tyr himself that leapt down through the chapel to strike the glass-covered coffin. But such folk were often enough wrong about daily weather predictions to call into question their grasp of divine thunderstorms.
Others said Khelben the Blackstaff worked an enchantment so powerful that it not only left the Lord Mage drained for three days but gave Halaster in Undermountain a splitting headache and temporarily enhanced the power and endurance of another smaller though no less mythically proportioned hammer in the possession of one Old Mage of Shadowdale.
Those with honest eyes, more interested in one man’s simple passion than all the Tyr-storms and spells on Toril, say that the hammer blow was borne home by nothing more than Piergeiron’s love for Shaleen.
A crack like thunder… a burst of glass… and as the shining fragments flew skyward, Piergeiron lifted his lady free.
Glass showered down.
A great cheer fountained up.
Even Miltiades was elated. He would later describe the event as nothing less than a divine epiphany.
Piergeiron swung his lady around into an embrace. “Shaleen! You’re alive!” He clutched her tightly, driving the new breath from her lungs. “I went down into death to find you. I dreamed of you entrapped in a great diamond, and here you are!”
“Here I am,” she replied, wondering and solemn. There was a moment of distance, of silent abstraction, and then the wide, lopsided grin of old spread itself across her face.
Piergeiron buried that grin with a kiss, and the best and brightest of all high Waterdeep were reduced to hooting adolescents shouting out encouragements.
The dirge-musicians struck up a lively reel, and in moments all the room was dancing. The cries, shouts, and laughter made a greater din than the midnight battle that had started this whole crazed affair of diamonds and death and the Utter East. Flailing arms and tossing up gowns, the dancers spilled out into the halls of the palace, and from there into the streets.
With a spell that made his voice thunder, Khelben stopped the music. “Hold! What is this unseemly hurly-burly? Jigs? Reels? Dancing in the chapel? Kissing and cavorting? These are not seemly things for so reverent and auspicious a ceremony!”
“What ceremony?” shouted back Lasker Nesher sourly. He was perhaps the only Waterdhavian not cavorting. “This is the third time you’ve thrown a funeral, and each time the body gets up and dances. There’s no ceremony! I’m never coming to a funeral here again!”
“There’s no funeral ceremony,” Khelben replied, “but if those two keep kissing that way, there’d better be a wedding!”
This time it was an elated Piergeiron himself who answered, “What’re you squawking about, Old Crow? This is my wife!”
“Oh, no, she’s not
!” the mage thundered so definitively that a chill and cries of dismay ran through the crowd. “I was at your wedding to Shaleen. In my clear recollection, your vows involved the words ‘Until death do us part.’”
“Yes,” Piergeiron confirmed slowly, realization dawning.
Khelben shook his beard like a lion shaking out its mane. “Well, I don’t know a couple around here who’s been more dead than you two!”
“A wedding!” Noph shouted suddenly, and the cry carried through the crowd.
“Yes!” Khelben cried. “This began with two attempts at wedding Eidola—may she rest in peace—and ended with three tries at burying Shaleen. We can’t have the funerals outnumber the weddings! So to your seats, everyone! You two lovebirds: to me!”
The roar of the crowd redoubled as nobles and guildsmen clambered across benches, musicians tuned instruments like madmen, and the priest of Ao shredded his eulogy, hurled it into the air, and paced in a tight circle, trying to recall what he could of the wedding rite.
Through all this tumult, Piergeiron reached Khelben at the back of the chapel. “Well, Lord Mage, you were such an observant witness the last time I married Shaleen, I must ask you to be best man this time!”
Khelben’s gray-grizzled beard didn’t quite hide his rare but rueful smile. “Thanks, but nay. I want to keep my hands free. This is one ceremony I don’t want interrupted.” He put a hand on the Open Lord’s shoulder and pointed at a particular member of the crowd. “Besides, there’s a better candidate—”
“Better than the Lord Mage of Waterdeep?”
“Here’s a young man who single-handedly foiled an assassination attempt at your last wedding, rounded up the conspirators, bravely fought bloodforge warriors and fiends and his own fears, revealed Eidola for what she was, rescued Miltiades and his fellows numerous times, and has in this month done nothing but tirelessly fight for the people of Waterdeep. He’s even taught me a few things about heroism. In fact, I think so highly of Noph Nesher that I suggest he join us as a Lord of Waterdeep.”
Piergeiron smiled. “Noph Nesher? That man there? That tanned, brawny scrapper—the one rising just now to give his seat to yon fat lady? Wasn’t he just a boy locked away in my dungeon during the last wedding? He seems a completely new man.”
Khelben nodded. “So do you, friend. So do you.”
Postlude
Lord and Lady
How has this happened?
In one evening, I’ve been transformed from that inward-shrinking worm back into Piergeiron Paladinson, Open Lord of Waterdeep. The will of dust has changed. All of me sings. All that was once sundered has come together.
Ah, well, I should’ve expected transformations. I chose to orbit a changeable star. Shaleen. It is so good to hear your breath, to feel your warmth beside me.
Awake again? Heigh ho, girl, but when you rise from the dead, you rise!
Oh, to sleep…. But that’s not the point of honeymoons, is it?
WELCOME TO THE UTTER EAST!
THE DOUBLE DIAMOND TRIANGLE SAGA
The story continues…
The bride of the Open Lord of Waterdeep has been abducted. The kidnappers are from the far-off lands of the Utter East. But who are they? And what do they really want? Now a group of brave paladins must travel to the perilous kingdoms of this unknown land to find the answers. But in this mysterious world, nothing is ever quite what it appears.
Look for the other books in the series
The Abduction
J. Robert King
The Paladins
James M. Ward and David Wise
The Mercenaries
Ed Greenwood
Errand of Mercy
Roger E. Moore
An Opportunity for Profit
Dave Gross
Conspiracy
J. Robert King
Uneasy Alliances
David Cook with Peter Archer
Easy Betrayals
Richard Baker
About the Author
J. Robert King is the author of several Magic: The Gathering novels, and has walked paths leading through Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Ravenloft. In addition to Mad Merlin and Lancelot du Lethe, which he wrote for Tor Books, J. Robert King is the author of Blood Wars, an award-winning Planescape trilogy. He lives in Wisconsin.
Ed Greenwood is the creator of the FORGOTTEN REALMS® fantasy setting, an award-winning game designer, and a best-selling author whose fantasy novels have sold millions of copies worldwide in more than thirty languages.
Once hailed as “the Canadian author of the great American novel,” Ed is a large, bearded, jolly Canadian librarian who lives in an old farmhouse crammed with over 80,000 books in the Ontario countryside, and is often mistaken for Santa Claus in disguise. Many gamers think he resembles Elminster, but Ed insists he did not model the Old Mage on himself.
Ed was elected to the Academy of Adventure Gaming Art & Design Hall of Fame in 2003, and has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. His most popular series include the Knights of Myth Drannor trilogy and the Elminster Saga published by Wizards of the Coast, the Band of Four series from Tor Books, and the Falconfar books from Solaris.
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