by John Shirley
From all he knew of Ambram Sarbuckho, alert warriors with crossbows would be massed in the forehall and every other room that had an exterior door. Zhentish mansions sported no ground floor windows, so defenders could concentrate where they were most likely to be needed.
Sarbuckho was a swindler from way back, and Elminster felt no compunction at all about blasting down men who fought for him.
So all he needed to do was get to the top of the great corkscrew staircase that spiraled down into the rear of the forehall, work a quiet spell, and stand well back.
As the floor heaved and shuddered, Wyrmhaven thundered and groaned all around him. A blinding flash flung a thick haze of smoke and dust into the air, and a rising roar from many Zhentilar throats told him he’d not only shattered the forehall and its defenders—he’d burst open its doors, letting them flood in.
Smiling, he waited until he thought the moment just right, and cast another blasting spell down the ruined stair, to claim Manshoon’s men, this time. Then he turned and strode along the hallway, seeking a servants’ stair down. He needed to get to Sarbuckho’s gate and alter it, without greeting a poisoned quarrel.
In the eddying aftermath of his magics, he could feel the mounting pulse of the Darkway as he got closer to it. Elminster gave a jubilant little gasp as he saw that it stood unguarded, all of Wyrmhaven’s guards gone elsewhere to fight the attackers.
He did what he had to do with swift ease, and teleported himself back to the alley. It was deserted, though a timid coinlass poked her head out a door to see if it was safe to emerge and seek business. At the sight of a Zhentarim mage, she hastily ducked back again.
El smiled thinly and started a careful circumnavigation of the embattled mansion, to make sure no Zhentilar got away. There should still be some poisoned quarrels left, if he knew his waylords …
Above all, he wanted no witnesses to tell tales about Cadathen or Sneel that would reach the ears of a certain First Lord of Zhentil Keep.
Neither his first circuit nor his second turned up anyone fleeing Wyrmhaven, where ragged shouts and the clash and clang of arms told him the fight was still raging.
That much vigilance would have to be sufficient. There were other things he wanted to do that night.
El stopped at Sneel’s body, turned it over, and looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then he conjured a little light to see by and carefully shifted his own likeness to match the unlovely looks of Lorkus Sneel.
Dragging what was left of the real Sneel to the jakes he’d earlier thrust Cadathen’s body down, he tipped Manshoon’s best spy down into the sewers.
The eels would soon devour it, beneath the reeking waters and drifting filth, and—
His eyes narrowed. Instead of the wet, sloppy splash he should have heard, there’d been a distinct thud. Hurriedly he conjured light again and looked down.
Bobbing in the waters below was a dead man, face up and palely staring, several threads of red gore trailing from him into the waters around. It wasn’t Sneel, or Cadathen for that matter.
It was Ambram Sarbuckho.
Elminster blinked. That fast, they’d got to him? Or was the Sarbuckho who’d come storming “back” to Wyrmhaven not the real Sarbuckho at all?
For a moment he contemplated just waving this mystery away and getting on with the business of undoing Manshoon’s evil just as swiftly as he could. Then he sighed, waved that thought away, and teleported himself back to a certain balcony.
The room it opened into was as dark and deserted as before. Cautiously he stepped out into the hallway beyond. No guards, no one lurking with a crossbow …
Here, deep in Wyrmhaven, things had quieted down. A lot of the shouters and sword-clangers had, it seemed, perished, and the survivors were running out of foes to loudly fight with.
Up on this high floor there were no signs of life—or any evidence that the fighting had ever reached this far.
El stood against a wall like a thoughtful statue for a breath or two, pondering. If he were Ambram Sarbuckho, where would his grand personal bedchamber be?
High in the mansion, probably on this floor—for the levels above must be smaller expanses, broken by the separations of turrets and towers rising apart, and it seemed only wizards preferred such smaller, rounded privacies—and most likely toward the back of Wyrmhaven.
In other words, right this way …
As he went, El turned one of the rings he wore, to call up a protective mantle that would make him like smoke to metal weapons, and turn back many magics, too. He moved along the hall as quietly as he knew how.
It made a right-angled turn, to eventually meet with the end of a parallel hallway running down the other side of the main bulk of the mansion—and in the center of that cross passage was an alcove, whose back wall was a pair of high, rounded, ornate doors.
Trapped and guarded or not, they were what he’d been seeking. On the far side of them …
He drew off Sneel’s boots, thrust his hands into them, and took a door handle between them, turning it. Locked, of course.
As he let the handle quietly return to its former position, he heard something he’d been expecting: faint feminine sobbing from the far side of the door.
Stepping smoothly to one side of the doors, he asked firmly, “Lady? Lady Sarbuckho? Are you in need of aid?”
The sobbing caught in a great gasping of breath and sniffling, then became a choked and tremulous voice replying in the negative—and furiously ordering him away.
Elminster frowned. Making no reply, he moved along the passage to its far corner, where he found what he’d hoped would be there: a much smaller, plainer, closed door.
It was locked, too, but a swift spell seared through it, leaving the lock holding a half-moon of door separate from the larger rest of it. El gently pushed that larger panel open and stepped inside, finding himself in a dark robing room lined with wardrobes. The weeping was louder now, coming from a gap in the wardrobes along the side wall, where a curtained archway obviously led into the main bedchamber.
Elminster peered through the gap where the two curtains met, satisfied himself that only one person was present—hunched over on the floor at the foot of a gigantic canopied bed, and trembling—in the room beyond, and glided soundlessly through the curtains.
His first act was to kick away the bloody knife in front of the sobbing woman. His second was to do the same to a black gem the size of his palm that positively crawled with magic. His third was to kneel swiftly and take her by the arms.
She raised a tear-streaming, bleeding face of misery to him, staring in fear. “S-sneel? Here?”
“No, I merely wear his shape. I’m not of the keep, Lady. Ye are Lady Sarbuckho, are ye not?”
She nodded, drawing her head up but spoiling the proud movement by sniffing like a young lass getting over a tantrum. “Yavarla Sarbuckho I am, saer. Are you here to kill me for what I’ve done—or for my jewels, or for who I am?”
“I’m not here to slay ye at all. But tell me now, what have ye done?”
By way of reply, she shook her head and looked away, trying to jerk free of his grasp.
“Ye sent your lord husband down dead into the sewers, did ye not? Using yon knife, aye?”
Yavarla Sarbuckho went rigid in his arms, then sagged limply and whispered, “Y-yes.”
“Why?” El asked, as softly as any comforting mother, gathering her against his chest.
She burst into fresh tears, in a flood of uncontrolled weeping, and struggled incoherently to say something through it. Elminster daubed at the blood on her face—one eye was swollen almost shut, and she might have a rather piratical scar down the line of her chin, if she lived long enough for things to heal—and murmured wordless comfort, rocking her like a child.
Eventually words came to her. “He-he—he burst in on me, in a rage … beat me! He’d learned … what I’d done!”
“And what have ye done?” El murmured into her ear, holding her tight.
> Yavarla drew in one shuddering breath, and then another, fighting for control. “L-lord Manshoon came to me … alone. He was very kind, comforting, the very sort of lord I wanted—ohhh, kind gods deliver me!”
She burst into tears again, sobbing wretchedly, and Elminster rocked her and murmured, “Ye and the First Lord lay together, and he was kind and understanding and tender, and ye talked. He asked questions, like a kindly friend, and ye answered them, and he learned much about the Darkways, and Lord Sarbuckho’s dealings in Sembia, whom he traded with, and who else in the city used their Darkways in like manner … am I right?”
She managed a nod as she shuddered her way through hard breathing again, fighting her way out of weeping once more.
“Just now, thy lord husband burst in on ye in a rage, and tried to force ye to—what?”
“G-go straight to Manshoon, and touch him with the gem.”
“Did he say what would befall then?”
“N-no. I knew. We both knew. He got it years ago from adventurers who plundered a Netherese tomb. When awakened, you touch it to the one you named when awakening it, and it will explode.”
“With force enough to turn Manshoon—and ye—and probably most of whatever tall keep ye’re standing in—to dust.”
“Y-yes. It’s awake now.”
“So ye both knew he was sending ye to death. Ye refused, and he beat ye, and ye snatched out his own belt dagger and stabbed him … and he died. So ye stuffed him down yon garderobe.”
“I did.” Yavarla was past tears now. She stared at him almost defiantly. “And I regret it not at all. I have hated him for a very long time.”
Elminster nodded. “With good cause, I have no doubt. Come—time is running out for us both.” He pointed at the robing room he’d come through. “Choose thy two most favorite coverings—everything, from toes to top of head, mind; gems and underthings, main garments, and the cloaks and wraps ye wear when stepping out into snowstorms—and thy least favorite wear; three entire outfits. Bring it all in and toss it on thy bed. Be swift and quiet, and run right back in here if anyone sees ye through the ruin I made of thy robing room door. Do not flee out into the house beyond, or ye’ll surely be slain. Brutally, by Zhentarim who have invaded thy halls, not by me.”
Yavarla stared at him for a moment, then rushed into the robing room. Elminster went straight to the gem and sent it somewhere far away and safer. Then he plucked up the dagger, wiped it on a white fur rug that was already spattered with much of Ambram Sarbuckho’s spilled blood, then kept the dagger and sent the rug on the same journey that the Lord of Wyrmhaven had recently made.
By then, Yavarla was done, and standing anxiously by the bed.
“Find thy most precious jewels, and all coins ye can lay hand on, that are in this room,” El told her.
She held up a small coffer already in her hands. “N-no coins would he allow me, and his are locked in vaults down below, not here.”
El nodded and waved at her to drop the coffer on the bed with the rest. She did, and he gathered up the thick coverlet, with its glossy shimmerweave skin around overlapped and sewn-together thick wool blankets, around all she’d gathered. The bundle was nearly as large as she was.
“Fight me not, now,” he murmured, settling the bundle on one hip and sliding his other hand around her waist. “Hold very still.”
She obeyed, and that gave his hands freedom enough to work a teleportation spell, and whisk them both to an alley that was becoming all too familiar.
We All Wear the Masks We Need
El looked up and down the gloomy alleyway. Seeing no one, he swiftly spread his bundle out on the filthy stones underfoot, in a spot where a shaft of moonlight fell fair upon it.
“Stand on that, strip, and get dressed in thy best,” he ordered, hurriedly unfastening his own garments.
Yavarla was trembling as she stared at him, eyes large with mounting fear. “What—who are you?” she whispered.
“A friend,” Elminster replied, his face and body melting and shifting under her stare, Sneel’s rippling garments falling away or hanging limply.
Yavarla fought back a scream. A moment later, she stared at a woman of very much the same size and build as herself, a rather plain woman she’d never seen before.
“Is … is this … am I seeing who you really are?” she blurted out.
“Nay,” the unfamiliar woman told her flatly. “We all wear the masks we need.”
At that moment, Yavarla felt her own flesh beginning to creep and crawl …
She did scream and try to flee, then, but deft hands whirled her around, carried her back to the midst of the moonlight, and tripped her.
She landed hard on her knees, grunted in fresh pain, then shivered. It was cold, out here in the night …
“Hurry,” her rescuer—captor?—said in her ear. “I’ll help; what need ye first? Clout? Dethma?”
Feeling dazed, Yavarla gave in, getting dressed in greater haste than she had for many a year. She scarcely noticed that whenever she made a choice of garment, the woman—or was he really a man, as he’d first appeared?—donned one of the two like garments she’d not chosen. It was all done in panting haste, and she’d barely gained steady breath before she was fully dressed, cloak and all, and being towed firmly by the hand along the alley by her strange escort, who now carried a rather smaller bundle.
They came out into a street and turned right. Despite it being deep night, quite a few quiet, furtive folk were walking purposefully along, hands on weapon hilts, or meeting side by side with their backs to a building wall, where they could look this way and that while they muttered whatever business they were transacting. A few cloaked and hooded women silently parted their cloaks to show bare leg or hip at their approach, but made no reaction when they hastened on past.
The noblewoman shuddered, perhaps wondering if her future included becoming a desperate streetskirts. Elminster gave her no time to ponder; the lamps of the inn he sought were only a block away.
He tugged her close for a moment, to murmur in her ear, “For now, ye are not Lady Sarbuckho. In fact, Yavarla, ye have forgotten how to speak at all.”
She made no reply, but went meekly with him and stood hooded and silent as the unlovely woman her escort had become briskly took a room for them both, snapping that they’d been forced to flee the place they’d been staying after it was “invaded by men fighting each other, with wizards and spells, too!”
They were behind a locked door and inside a warding spell stronger than any she’d ever seen cast before ere Yavarla caught sight of a mirror—and caught her breath, feeling herself on the verge of tears again. The face staring red-eyed back at her in the feeble light of the lone lamp was not hers.
“You have stolen my very self from me,” she gasped.
“Only for now,” the woman murmured from behind her, taking her under the arms as if to keep her from falling. “Sleep now, Yavarla.”
And Yavarla fell down a great dark shaft into an endless rushing abyss of hatefully shouting, then gasping in pain and horror Ambrams, a plunge from which there was no escape … ever …
New Lives, and Strangers to Go With Them
When Yavarla came awake, the light flooding through the filthy window told her it was near highsun, and she was lying in an inn bed answering questions. Whispering long, detailed, involved answers about every Darkway she knew of, and their owners, the names of the high houses that held those gates, and the names and whereabouts within the mansion walls of the chambers that held the flickering portals. Not that she knew much, but she heard herself eagerly spilling forth every hint and rumor and scrap of half-heard possible truth she remembered, and far more than she ever knew she’d remembered.
“You—you are using me,” she gasped then, coming fully awake and staring up into the eyes of … yet another stranger.
A bearded man whose eyes were sometimes as blue as a clear day’s sky, and at other times as silver-gray as a sword drawn in a fog, and most of t
he time somewhere in between.
“Aye, I am,” he replied gravely, “for it is needful. In return, I offer ye a new life, far from cold Zhentil Keep and its cruel lords and crueler wizards. Somewhere ye’ll never have to face death for slaying thy husband, or feel the sting of Manshoon’s betrayal—before that betrayal kills thee.”
“I … I …” Something welled up in Yavarla then and burst out of her, leaving her weeping as she thrust herself up and bawled at him, “No! Never! I am of the keep, this is my home, this is—Manshoon will never—”
Even as she said it, she knew otherwise. That cold and gently smiling man would break her in an instant if she stood in the way of his most idle whim. He had used her already, far worse than this man she did not know had used her, and—and—
Tears overwhelmed her again, and she covered her face with her hands and fought to cling to herself through them, fought until rage made her beat her fists on the bed sightlessly and cry, “I know how to do more than weep, damn all Watching Gods, I do!”
“Easy, lass,” the man murmured, touching her cheek gently. The pain that had been there since Ambram’s ring had laid it open vanished, and so did her grief, under a vast wave of weariness, followed by lighthearted cheer, a euphoria that came out of nowhere with the scent of lemons and vague visions of green trees and dappled sunlight and laughter …
“Magic,” she said calmly. “You’re using magic on me.”
“I am. I want ye calm, Yavarla, and happy. Clear-headed to choose.”
Yavarla drew in a deep, tremulous breath and said firmly, “I am calm. I can choose. And unless you intend to be my jailor, I tell you again: Zhentil Keep is my home. I want no new life far from here. I know full well how dangerous it will be, I know I love the First Lord but he loves me not … but I wish to stay. Even if it means my death, I am of the keep.”
“So be it. Ye shall stay. Or rather, return to Wyrmhaven—if there’s still a Wyrmhaven to return to—in a day or two, after I’m done causing a storm that may well sweep ye away, if ye are not kept safe. Think of this, then, as a vacation.”
