Death Masks

by Ed Greenwood

  Jalester started peering at shop doorways as he ran past, trying to find one he might be able to defend, or even an open door he could dart through. Though that, too, was more the fancy-chance of a chapbook than likely reality, here in North Ward before dawn.

  The scrape of a hurrying boot on a cobble arose right behind him, and he swerved desperately aside, still not daring to slow enough to snatch out the little knife he bore sheathed down the inside of one boot, not when—

  A ruthless hand clawed at his shoulder and then his hair, trying to drag him to the cobbles. Jalester shrieked, more in an attempt to make someone hear than in fear or pain, and flung himself in the other direction, not caring how much hair his unseen assailant tore out by the roots. He had to keep moving, had to stay ahead of the rest so they couldn’t—

  But they could, and had, and there was a sudden icy feeling across his back that left a wetness in its wake, and someone sneered, “He bleeds easily enough!”

  “Think you can slice all his bits off before he goes down?” someone else asked gleefully.

  “Cut his tongue out, first,” a third and older voice grunted, “and shove garments we carve off him into his mouth. I’ve heard enough shrieking, and eventually it’ll bring down the Watch on us—”

  Jalester screamed, as loudly as he knew how. “Help! The Watch! A rescue! The Watch!”

  And suddenly, as another sharp blade sliced into his jerkin and slit one side of it into flapping ruin, a shop door opened and women with swords in their hands burst out of it, charging headlong into Jalester’s pursuers. Steel rang on steel, there was a startled curse, someone slipped on the cobbles and fell heavily, swords sang past Jalester’s ears on all sides, and he became aware that sprinting along in the heart of all the hard-eyed women and their swift blades was a gaunt old man in rather tattered robes, with a long white beard, twinkling eyes, and a hawk beak of a nose.

  “Well met,” this startling oldster said politely, as he rushed past and thrust a slender and ancient-looking long sword into the belly of the man who still had hold of a great tangle of Jalester’s hair. “Ye shrieked, so these Harpers I was meeting with took it to mean ye wanted a little assistance.”

  “W-who—?” Jalester managed to ask, as he stumbled, fell to the cobbles, and rolled hurriedly up to his feet again, boot dagger in hand.

  Even though he had that little blade up menacingly, the white-bearded man had positioned himself like a bodyguard, shielding Jalester from the nearest of his pursuers—most of whom were down and bleeding now, or turning to flee with Harpers right behind them. He smiled almost fondly at the little knife, and when Jalester stabbed it at him warningly, he batted it aside unconcernedly with the back of one long-fingered hand.

  “Thy great-grandmother was a good friend,” the old man informed him, clapping him on the shoulder like a jovial uncle. Then, still gripping that shoulder, he added a rather sad smile. “Mind ye sire children to carry on the Silvermane name before ye go and get thyself killed, now!”

  Jalester gaped at him, then ducked and twisted free of his grip, to wind up facing him from a sword’s-length away. “Who are you?”

  “They call me Elminster—and far worse things, too. Lad, will ye have a try at calling me friend?”

  Jalester gaped at him. “Elminster? As in the Sage of Shadowdale? That Elminster?”

  “Aye, indeed. Accept no substitutes.”

  Around them, the din of swordplay had died away; Jalester’s pursuers were all down or fled, and the Harpers were now forming a watchful ring around him and the old man.

  “But you must be …”

  “Hundreds of years old? Aye, I am. Yet still lusty.”

  Jalester gave him an incredulous grin. “Lusty? Are you, now? Is this how you lure lasses—and lads—to bed?”

  “It’s worked before,” Elminster admitted impishly. And then added, “But no, lad, I have no designs on thy body.”

  “Yet,” Jalester replied pointedly.

  El guffawed, and seemed so good-naturedly amused that Jalester found himself joining in. He was alive, delivered out of the very jaws of doom, and who cared how crazed this old bearded man was, if he’d managed that?

  Right behind Elminster, a red-haired and severe-looking Harper said to the shorter and more curvaceous Harper beside her, “So, this must be how he lures them all. That and magic, because it’s sure not working on me.”

  El whirled around, flinging his arms wide and then clapping one hand to his brow in dismay. “Ye’ve resisted the spell? Ah, this younger generation! Woe, woe! All my power and wickedness is gone!”

  “Tell me, are all wizards crazy?” the shorter Harper asked the redhead. “Or just all the ones we ever meet?”

  CHAPTER 8

  No Shortage of Waiting Graves Yet

  High hearts and brilliant plans so bright

  Give many a gallant good cause to fight

  Yet never any lack of black-hearted knave

  Keeps heroes from waiting, yawning grave.

  —from the ballad “Waiting Grave” in A Minstrel’s Whimsy lyric chapbook by Dezsmra Langrafarl of Iriaebor, published in the Year of the Black Blazon

  “VISITOR TO SEE YOU, LADY,” A MAID ANNOUNCED, SETTING A DECANTER of cordial and two glasses before her. “Says he’s a Lord.”

  Laeral lofted an eyebrow. “You have reason to doubt this, Danamra?”

  Before the morning maid could reply, a pair of pudgy-fingered, hairy hands closed around her hips, lifted her bodily aside, and their owner lurched past, wheezing, “Fair morn to you, Lady!”

  “Mirt,” Laeral greeted him, giving Danamra a look that mingled sympathetic commiseration and gentle dismissal, “you seem to have a keen nose for frying boar. Morningfeast arrives, and scarce have I picked up my fork when—wham!—here you are.”

  “Eh? No, lass, ’twasn’t my nose. No whiff of boar made it through that reek two rooms back. What is that smell?”

  “They’ve just oiled the floors in the Lordsmoot,” Laeral replied, applying herself to her nutmeg cup of almond-sauce-drenched rice before Mirt could. “Strong, but hardly a reek. It’s not unpleasant.”

  “Well, mayhap, but it’ll go up like a torch if anyone ever drops a lit lamp in there.”

  “I’ll command the staff to refrain from arson for the nonce,” she told him dryly, and steered the dish of eel hotspice in his direction. “Hungry?”

  “Nay, lass,” Mirt told her, belying his words by snatching up the dish with one hand and using the other to shovel its entire contents into his mouth. Laeral watched his eyes and cheeks bulge in sudden unison, and sat back in her seat in case he offered the hotspice back to her in one gagging spew.

  However, it seemed the longest-serving Lord of Waterdeep was made of sterner stuff. He chewed manfully as he set down the dish, snatched up a large vase of fresh flowers, plucked those blooms forth, and downed the flower-water in one long, throat-bobbing pull that evidently washed the hotspice right down. Laeral fought down an all-too-vivid vision of ring-shaped slices of fried eel wriggling and swimming down Mirt’s innards, as he whooped in a mighty breath, belched impressively loud, deep and long, and resumed his sentence with the air of a man who’s performed acrobatic wonders to regain his saddle in the galloping midst of a charge. “I came not for the food—I mean, eel? Really?—but to do my civic duty.”

  “Oh?” Laeral asked warily. “How so?”

  “Inform the Open Lord in a timely manner of grim news she should be apprised of without delay.”

  “Oh? What now?”

  “I had this from the High Harper they call ‘the Shepherd,’ ” Mirt rumbled, thrusting his head forward conspiratorially and lowering his voice to a whisper that barely carried three rooms away. “The Masked Lord Tolvur attended a revel last night at the Nandar mansion—and has gone missing.”

  Laeral sighed. She knew what that undoubtedly meant, but felt moved to ask, “Tam is sure of this? He didn’t just hie himself to a rented room somewhere else in the city w
ith a randy noblewoman or other who didn’t want her husband to know?”

  “You know Zawad?” Mirt sounded genuinely surprised.

  “I may be in my dotage, Old Wolf, but I’m not a simpleton,” Laeral told him, more gently than she felt like speaking just then. “Have some boar-fry.”

  Mirt eagerly accepted her invitation, crunching down on crispy-edged slabs of pan-blackened sliced boar like a starving man.

  Laeral didn’t quite manage to entirely quell her grin as she pushed more food at him—orange Tethyrian melons carved into the semblance of flowers, and little golden boats of hollowed-out potatoes filled with the steaming peppered yolks of goose eggs.

  He devoured it all, as Laeral rested both of her elbows on the table, leaned forward to let her gaze wander thoughtfully over the down-to-the-last-building burned-into-a-burnished-giant-rothé-hide city map that underlay its glass top, and mused aloud, “So they got Tolvur. No great loss—the man was a pig, despite his usefulness in debates among the Lords—but who’ll be next, I wonder? And is someone merely seeking to eliminate the rulership of Waterdeep? Or just remake it with new faces belonging to individuals more amenable to their direction?”

  “When I was a Lord,” Mirt rumbled, through the last of the goose eggs, “we used to call that possibility the Quiet Coup, and watch hard for it. As all of us hired our own favorite Watchful Order spellhurlers, just to second-guess Khelben.”

  “And me,” Laeral reminded him dryly. “And you’re still a Lord of this city, Mirt. Which makes you a target, being as you’re the one Hidden Lord I know isn’t sponsoring these murders. Not unless all the negotiable ladies you’ve been enjoying are taking your orders to the slayers. You haven’t been out and about enough to have managed Tolvur or Haelinghorse.”

  “Ah, but I could have a double,” Mirt suggested brightly.

  Laeral eyed him. “You could, but someone who could pass for you couldn’t escape the notice of the Watch—and the Watchful Order—and Lady Haventree’s Harpers, all of whom have been instructed to keep watch over you.”

  “What? Don’t you trust me?” Mirt teased, acting shocked, and fluttering his hands in overblown mimicry of a scandalized matron.

  “Trust you? Mirt, I know you! I trust you to get up to every crime set down under a plaint on our books! And to invent new ones!”

  That made Mirt sit back beaming in satisfaction. The huge silver morningfeast platter, Laeral noticed, was now empty.

  When her rotund table guest saw her gaze fall to it, he exclaimed, “By my garters! The food’s all gone! Would the kitchens run to more, d’you think?”

  “You wear garters?” Laeral inquired archly. “Show me that sight, and I’ll have them cook you up your very own morningfeast! They can do it while I’m screaming and trying to claw my eyeballs out.”

  “I believe,” Mirt said heavily, “I feel the need for strong drink coming on. Lots of strong drink.”

  Then he brightened. “Got any elverquisst?”

  • • •

  IT WAS SHAPING up into a bright and pleasant morning, and the breezes were quite pleasant in the dappled shade here at the back of Malankar’s garden.

  Even where she and Cuthbarrel were sitting, under the trees and safely hidden behind some shrubberies that looked like some clipped-to-a-fare-thee-well variety of juniper, Tasheene felt no hint of cold.

  She’d never been in this particular private garden before, but then she’d never felt the slightest desire to call upon non-noble Masked Lords she detested. Oszbur Malankar was the sort of haughty sneerer she regarded as an impostor. Why, the man was a Sembian, before all the gods! What right had he to give himself airs, here among the true nobility of Waterdeep?

  Still, this garden, though modest, was both lush and cozy, she had to give him that. Not that he’d live much longer to enjoy it, for he was next on Antler’s list, and that was why they were here.

  The walled grounds of Malankar’s North Ward mansion spanned the space between Hassantyr’s Street and the Street of the Manticore, three doors east of Vhezoar Street, and the garden end of Malankar’s spread was quite large enough for a nice marble bench, an even nicer fishpond surrounded by a decorative edging of cut and shaped flagstones, and all the cover his unannounced and almost certainly unwelcome guests needed.

  Tasheene had no idea why Roysark Cuthbarrel found it necessary to converse in whispers, but she didn’t mind humoring the man. The gods knew guildmasters got little enough fun, in their busy lives of grubbing for coin, fending off feuds within their ranks, and push, push, pushing the civic authorities for tiny advances and advantages for their members. For a single shiny copper nib Tasheene would happily have slaughtered her way through their ranks, every last guildmaster in the city, but they weren’t on Antler’s list and she had to admit that they did more good for Waterdhavians as a whole than the nobles as a group did.

  Not that that was saying much. But she’d best pay attention to what Cuthbarrel was hissing so conspiratorially at her, before he got angry.

  “Y’see,” he was saying, “I’m afraid the Lady Silverhand was picked to be Open Lord because she can magically mind-read the entire city!”

  “I’ve heard that same rumor,” Tasheene replied, “and it’s certainly making the rounds of the city, but just because something’s said often and by many doesn’t make it true. If Silverhand could read all of our minds, we’d all have been arrested and executed days ago!”

  Cuthbarrel frowned, then nodded slowly, and glanced over at Zaraela, who was lying on the edge of the fishpond watching the lazy fish drifting along under its waters, and ignoring them both. She’d just finished disrobing, and the guildmaster’s gaze left her bared body more than a little reluctantly. When his eyes drifted back to Tasheene, she took care to forbear from smiling or looking arch.

  “There … there’s truth in that,” he admitted slowly, nodding.

  Tasheene nodded back encouragingly. “I—and more than a few others in the city, some of them situated where they can know things for certain—think the mighty powers of the Chosen are more legend than truth. I think they can’t do much more than a senior Watchful Order mage these days, if they ever could do more. Tales have a way of growing wildly in the telling; have you actually ever seen an archwizard standing in midair above Waterdeep hurling spells across the city at a foe? Yet we’ve been told that very thing has happened, more than a score of times down the centuries. I’ll wager it was one man on a balcony blasting another in the street below. One or perhaps two spells each, and done. The bards and drunken tongues in taverns ever since did all the rest.”

  Cuthbarrel looked unhappy. “I like the old tales,” he complained. “They’re part of what makes living in Waterdeep special.”

  “So they are,” Tasheene agreed. “Now, got the sack? It’s almost time.”

  She and Cuthbarrel were waiting to slay, with a sack to muffle and then asphyxiate. Zaraela was to be the lure, to get their quarry within reach, and Darleth Drake was waiting in the vines and overhanging floral hangings of the arch atop the stone gate at the end of the path through the Lord’s garden. He was standing lookout for Watch patrols and other trouble, ready to pounce on the Lord and finish him off if Malankar somehow managed to flee.

  Even as Cuthbarrel helpfully held up his sack, Zaraela calmly rose, strolled through the garden and down onto the flagstone path, chose some of the smoother stones, and knelt on them in prayer.

  She’d timed it perfectly.

  A bare half-breath later, the city bells struck the hour, above North Ward and all over the city. And as the echoes started to come back off Mount Waterdeep, Oszbur Malankar promptly emerged from his mansion, dapper in long-tailed coat and new three-feathered hat, with a silver-mounted walking stick in hand.

  He was heading out to his usual club, to go and make deals there with fellow collectors, the procurers of curios who supplied them, and fellow investors and the needy who wanted their coin. He did so eight days in a tenday.

&nbs
p; • • •

  “I THANK YOU for the advice,” Laeral said gently, “but this is not the Waterdeep I knew. And Mirt, it is not the Waterdeep you knew, either. You mean well, but … you’re not helping.”

  Mirt regarded her unhappily. “And so?” he growled.

  “I need you to do what I can’t easily do. Go out into the city and be my eyes and ears and hands. I can’t spare the time away from the Palace to do all the skulking I need done, can’t spend magic on elaborate disguises, and will accomplish nothing at all but to make myself a target if I go as myself.”

  “Yer not happy,” Mirt said slowly, peering into her face. “Yer not happy at all.”

  “No,” Laeral admitted coolly. “No, I’m not.”

  Mirt reached out with one hairy hand and stroked Laeral’s cheek with the back of one stout finger.

  Laeral smiled at him. “If that’s an invitation, then I thank you, but no. I found my right man, and want no other.”

  “I meant to comfort, not more, but—forgive me, Lady—he’s dead,” Mirt growled gently. “These passing years. He can no longer warm you, give you pleasure, laugh with you, scratch that itch we all have …”

  “The Weave can scratch my itch, if I need that,” Laeral told him dryly. “Which is far more than you need to know. No one can be my Khelben, so I don’t want anyone to try. Forgive me.”

  And she gave him the saddest smile he’d seen in a long time before turning gracefully away.

  • • •

  OSZBUR MALANKAR WAS more than at peace with the world. He was eager and happy to devour a bit more of it, today, take another bite from the endless juicy apple that was Waterdeep, city of endless financial opportunities.

  And many of them his.

  Ah, to get to the Gold Crowns Galore, and fresh deals … it wasn’t even about the money anymore, now that he had more than enough, it was about besting others and imposing his will on the City of Splendors and becoming someone nobles and guildmasters alike fawned over and feared, not because he was a Lord but because he was Oszbur Malankar.