Death Masks
Page 1
FORGOTTEN REALMS®
ED GREENWOOD
SAGE OF SHADOWDALE
Elminster: The Making of a Mage
Elminster in Myth Drannor
The Temptation of Elminster
Elminster in Hell
Elminster’s Daughter
Elminster Must Die
Bury Elminster Deep
Elminster Enraged
The Herald (Book VI of The Sundering)
Spellstorm
THE KNIGHTS OF MYTH DRANNOR
Swords of Eveningstar
Swords of Dragonfire
The Sword Never Sleeps
SHANDRIL’S SAGA
Spellfire
Crown of Fire
Hand of Fire
THE SHADOW OF THE AVATAR
Shadows of Doom
Cloak of Shadows
All Shadows Fled
THE HARPERS
Stormlight
THE CORMYR SAGA
Cormyr: A Novel (with Jeff Grubb)
Death of the Dragon (with Troy Denning)
ALSO BY ED GREENWOOD
Silverfall: Stories of the Seven Sisters
The City of Splendors: A Waterdeep Novel (with Elaine Cunningham)
The Best of the Realms, Book II: The Stories of Ed Greenwood
DEATH MASKS
©2016 Wizards of the Coast LLC.
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
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All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All Wizards of the Coast characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Cover art by: Richard Wright
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6593-9
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6606-6 (ebook)
620B6527000001 EN
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v3.1
in saecula saeculorum
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: A Nice Night for Murder
Chapter 2: Waterdeep Watches
Chapter 3: The Wagging Tongue is a Deadly Sword
Chapter 4: Castles in the Air
Chapter 5: Lording It Over a City of Vipers
Chapter 6: Bad For Business
Chapter 7: All Wizards Are Crazy
Chapter 8: No Shortage of Waiting Graves Yet
Chapter 9: Progress Through Diplomacy
Chapter 10: Storm Clouds Gather and Grow Dark
Chapter 11: Easy Coin, and Trouble
Chapter 12: We Touch Again At Last
Chapter 13: We All Do What We Can
Chapter 14: A Night’s Worth of Troubles
Chapter 15: A Memorable Feast
Chapter 16: Death Lists Grow So Swiftly Dated
Chapter 17: Little Secrets Kept
Chapter 18: A Luxury Not Worth the Price
Chapter 19: Having Second Thoughts
Chapter 20: Welcoming Opportunity
Chapter 21: A Reach Long and Strong
Chapter 22: When the Bodies Start to Fall
Chapter 23: We Go Down Again
Chapter 24: Weaving Much from Very Little
Chapter 25: The Gods Spinning Fun for Us All
Chapter 26: We Don’t Get Many of Those
Chapter 27: So Beautiful and So Deadly
Chapter 28: Treason
Chapter 29: The Howling Of One Angry Man
Chapter 30: Endgame
CHAPTER 1
A Nice Night for Murder
My lords, let us sport together a while
For the moon welcomes and the stars are out
The wine is at hand, and I do think me ’tis
A nice night for murder.
—Amlaric Amend-All, in Act I, Scene II, of the play Nine Lords Errant by Narelra Manecandle, Playwright of Athkatla, first performed in the Year of the Blazing Hand
“PART OF ME WANTS TO BE BACK HERE, SMELLING THE HARBOR REEK,” Mirt growled, “and part of me doesn’t want to set foot in Waterdeep again. Ever.”
The flickering glow of the gate that had brought them here was fading behind them, but was still bright enough to show the fat and wheezing man the side of Elminster’s face. The Old Sage was nodding in agreement.
“Going home is seldom as satisfying as one hopes, I’ve found,” he said in his dryly half-whimsical, half-mournful voice. “And it grows no easier as the centuries pass and I do it more and more often. I dwelt in the Deep for a time—long, long ago.”
“Before my time,” Mirt added, before Elminster could.
“Indeed. Yet it seems we are just in time, for once. Look yonder.”
Mirt didn’t need the old archwizard’s pointing forefinger to spot what had caught his friend’s attention.
He was already looking across the moonlit garden at his home—perhaps former home, for El had told him the Lords of the City had given it over to Laeral Silverhand, and despite it not being theirs to gift to anyone, he somehow doubted she’d want to share the best bedchamber with the weather-beaten likes of him—and finding it as unchanged as if he’d last left it only hours back instead of more than a century ago.
Except, that is, for the tasteful addition of the six men in tight-fitting, mottled gray leathers, complete with masks and hoods, who’d just broken in.
“Assassins,” he growled. “What has the Deep come to, whilst I was slumbering? What sort of dolts are Lords of the City now, to let teams of hrasted-near-uniformed assassins operate freely inside the city walls?”
“Why, in my time,” Elminster growled teasingly, “assassins knew their place, and it was well outside the City of Splendors, in lesser, meaner cities!”
“Well, it was,” Mirt snapped, lurching forward. “Come on, El! With my luck, they’ll have orders to play at being arsonists, too!”
He led the way along the winding garden path, feeling to make sure his Ironguard ring was on his finger. Assassins always were in such a hrasted hurry to throw knives and darts and other sharp and nasty things at anyone who saw them, and the moonlight was just strong enough to make a brightly lit stage of the few strides of moss lawn between the garden plantings and the doors the hooded slayers had just picked, or unlocked, to silently pass through.
Moreover, he wheezed so heavily these days that he couldn’t even stand quietly, let alone move about in anything approaching silence. Though as he stumbled out onto the moss, Elminster touched his elbow—and all the faint night sounds of the city went away.
Cloaked in utter silence, they approached the nearest door. El stepped deftly around Mirt, drew it open, and stepped inside, extending one arm like a bar to stop the old moneylender from passing him.
Stepping out of the silence, Mirt guessed. A moment later, El took firm hold
of his elbow and drew him to one side, into the lee of a life-sized blackstone statue of a heroically proportioned dancing lady Mirt had purchased in Calimshan long ago because he admired her pose and utter lack of modesty. They stood behind her and her tall plinth as still as two watchful statues while Mirt’s eyesight adjusted to the deeper darkness, and he realized they’d relocated themselves just in time.
One of the six assassins had just thought to look back and make sure no guards or anyone else was moving to block their escape route. His gaze went right past them, to the door, and then swept across the large open room ere returning to what was holding his five comrades rapt—not to mention Mirt himself.
Floating in midair at about head level for a man taller than Mirt was a sleeping woman, spread-eagled and horizontal and oblivious to all intruders. Her silver hair, the tresses long enough to reach to her ankles if she’d been standing upright, was spread out around her in a lazily restless cloud, almost a sphere of moving silver strands, and she glowed.
Not brightly, but brighter than the moonlight, here in this large and dark garden view room. It was Laeral Silverhand, and she wore only a light gown. A nightgown. Her bare feet were toward Mirt and Elminster as she floated on her back, her tresses drifting around her.
And if the assassins made any noise as they unclipped already-cocked hand crossbows from baldrics, fitted quarrels to them, and fired at her, Elminster’s conjured silence swallowed it.
Mirt’s shout of warning came out as silence, but even as he barked it, those quarrels were slowing in midair, coming to a halt as Laeral’s hair drifted and swirled unconcerned around them.
Only one of the assassins was foolish enough to snatch out a dagger and throw it to try to do what his slender poisoned quarrel had failed to manage. Even as it turned end over end with increasing lassitude, to glide to a halt in midair, five of the hooded slayers had launched themselves into running charges, their own knives—blades painted black to avoid any flashes or gleams of reflected light—held firmly in their hands.
Hastening to kill.
Yet a running man, no matter how strong, swift, and agile, can make little headway if snatched off his feet and ensnared by hair as swift as a striking snake and as strong as a swooping dragon. Hair that could strangle and suffocate with ease, but instead merely pinions, ensnaring wrists and ankles and tugging so powerfully that the five owners of those captured limbs were bent over backward in midair, curled up into helpless arcs, like bent and straining longbows.
The sixth assassin, the one who’d vainly thrown his dagger, hadn’t joined in the charge, but he sprinted now. After pivoting on one foot with his first stride, so he hurled himself not at the floating woman but back at the door he’d come in by.
And it was Mirt himself who had the great satisfaction of thrusting out one stout and rising leg at just the right moment to trip the running slayer into a face-first meeting with the doorframe.
Whereupon Mirt sat on the man’s nearest arm, hard. And had the satisfaction of feeling a wrist and an elbow crunch under his considerable weight. He could hear nothing. Even the man’s agonized shriek was utterly soundless.
Until Laeral came upright in the air, smiling wryly, and snapped her fingers.
Elminster’s silence was gone in an instant, but by then the man under Mirt was merely groaning. Mirt felt him all over for weapons, and plucked out everything he found and tossed it well away. After all, every last pointed or edged thing on an assassin’s body might be poisoned.
He glared at the man’s hands, seeking sharpened fingernails, but thankfully that seemed a nasty little tactic forgotten in the century he’d been elsewhere—by this particular band of assassins, at least.
“Well met,” Laeral said dryly. “You rushed to my rescue? How touching. Yet hardly necessary. I was in reverie, not asleep. None of Mystra’s daughters ever need to sleep.”
“Reverie?” Mirt grunted.
“Communing with the Weave, if you prefer. Replenishing energies and spells and monitoring the defensive magic of the house—a good network, Mirt, you must have hired the best—so as to watch these dolts attempt their stealthy invasion.”
“I did not expect ye’d need any assistance in besting them,” El murmured, “but mayhap I can be of aid steadying ye as ye defy Mystra’s recent commandment.”
“Ah. Well. As to that, you may be right,” Laeral agreed.
“Commandment?” Mirt asked, but the two Chosen merely shook their heads and said nothing.
The air around one ensnared and feebly struggling assassin started to glow, as if a window had opened to somehow spill moonlight into just that part of the room, and Laeral frowned, her eyes flaring blue-white for a brief moment.
And then her face grew pained, she started to tremble, and there was suddenly a heavy dew of sweat all over her face.
And then she sighed and looked down, the light died, and the trapped assassin went limp.
“Did you—?”
“He merely sleeps,” El replied, moving to take hold of the slayer’s body as Laeral’s tresses withdrew from him and tug off some of the man’s garments to bind his wrists behind his back and to his throat.
“I heard no incantation,” Mirt muttered as he knelt to help.
“Weave work, not spells,” El replied, his attention on Laeral.
She gasped, in pain this time, and the Sage of Shadowdale came to his feet in a frowning instant. But she waved him away as the second assassin slumped to the floor and was released, and a glow kindled around a third.
Even Mirt could tell she was struggling by the time she finished with that man; she was breathing as heavily as he did these days after climbing a ladder or steep stairs, and she moved restlessly in the air, buying time before she called on the Weave to assault the mind of the next man.
She was shaking violently by the time she lowered him to the floor, shuddering and spasming, doubling over with her face twisted in pain.
Mirt shot Elminster a questioning look, but the old archwizard merely looked grave and turned casually to look back at the doors behind them to see if any other intruders were in sight.
Laeral was writhing on the floor by the time she finished with her would-be slayers, twisting and groaning and drenched with sweat, her nightgown plastered to her. Mirt had seen people fished out of the harbor who’d looked drier.
El took her hand, but as far as Mirt could tell he was offering the reassurance of a friend to someone wounded or dying, not pouring any sort of healing magic into her.
“Can we do anything for her?” Mirt asked, almost exasperated.
“Change the mind of a goddess,” Elminster murmured. “If ye’ve nothing else to do for the next century or so.”
At that moment Laeral let out a long, shuddering sigh under him, and went limp. Mirt leaned forward anxiously, but she’d relaxed, not lapsed into insensibility.
“Well?” the old archwizard asked her, as calmly as if she’d just finished examining an everyday and rather boring ledger entry.
“I could learn nothing from them. They’re hired meat who’ve been disminded by priests of power. All that’s left in their memories, aside from endless echoes of Waterdeep so they recall its layout, is mental images of me, the filed-at-the-Palace plans of this house, and that they were to come here and slay me.”
Laeral tried to rise then, but her strength gave way. El caught her head before it struck the floor, and then put his arms around her and gently lifted her to a sitting position. “They’re far from the first,” she added calmly, patting his hand in thanks.
“Fresh gown?” he asked.
“In a breath or two,” Laeral told him. “Just let me bide here. I’m still …”
“I know,” El murmured comfortingly.
“Well, I don’t,” Mirt snapped. “What just happened to you?”
El cast a swift look at the bound assassins all around them, as if to reassure himself that they were all still unconscious, and said quietly, “These days, we Chosen
touch the minds of others with magic only when the need is dire. Doing so ruins most minds, so Mystra has absolutely forbidden us from invading the minds of anyone who can wield the Art.”
“I kept going, after the first man,” Laeral put in, “to try to learn all I could, and because there was no damage I could do—these minds were already ruined. In their greed, they traded a pile of coins for their selves; their memories and everything that made them who they were.”
Mirt frowned. “Is that why the War Wizards in Cormyr don’t cheerfully mind-ream everyone standing nearby these days?”
Elminster nodded. “Really thorough and prolonged attempts to read minds with the Art have always been risky, for the prober and the owner of the mind. If ye aren’t very careful …”
“You do harm,” Laeral offered. “Like a know-nothing warrior with a knife trying to help a wounded friend on the battlefield.”
“The likelihood of ruining the mind ye’re trying to explore, particularly if it’s awake and hostile, has soared over this last century,” El said grimly.
Laeral nodded. “So if you can’t call on the Weave to steady you, and provide some of the energy, ruination is now almost certain.”
“And it has always tired and harmed the wizard trying to mind read,” El added. “So Mystra made it hurt so dearly that a mage using spells without Weave-aid will collapse before they learn much of anything. We Chosen can keep going—so she forbade us to probe wizards, and strongly cautioned us against mindreading anyone else. Adding the pain to keep us to that.”
“Ah,” said Mirt. “So as wizards are now rarer and more precious than ever, you’re not to be driving any of them insane.”
“More insane,” Laeral joked—and promptly winced and clutched her head in fresh pain.
“We can still do it, but …” Elminster began.
“You’re all weaker now, aren’t you?” Mirt asked. “Not hurling spells around like you once did, being less bold to challenge or take up fights …”
He let his words trail away as he saw the same bland expression settle across the faces of both Elminster and the Lady Silverhand. A look that he’d once, long ago, termed the “Did you say something? Not that I’m listening or ever intend to answer you” expression.