The City of Splendors

by Ed Greenwood

The man behind the bar scowled and drew back an empty mug threateningly, as if to hurl it. Then he took quick measure of the six or seven sailors turning to face him with the grim grins of men spoiling for a fight, despite a collection of scars that would have impressed any priestess of Loviatar or priest of Ilmater, and turned away.

  The sailors had barely started to jeer when another of their number, the foremastman of the Glorious Goblet out of Athkatla and the owner of the fastest fists in the crew, pointed out through the broken window-slats and barked, “Hey! Coupla fancynoses coming, see?”

  “No!” the steersman beside him corrected. “Four strutting codpieces, unbearded lads all, a-holding their noses and sneering at the likes of us. Well now—”

  Others peered, and chuckled eagerly.

  “Let’s be rearranging those noses for ’em—and whatever else we can reach of ’em, besides!” someone called.

  Whereupon the trustyhand who’d worked for Marlus the longest let out a sudden roar. “ ’Tis them, lads! The ones as put swords to us at Dyre’s site an’ had our rig down! Get them!”

  This became a general chorus, and the window-counter emptied in an instant, wooden mugs bouncing off walls, floors, and nearby patrons.

  “Loins of the Lion!” a Calishite sailor growled, clutching his bruised head.

  “S’why we make ’em of wood, sealord,” one of the barmen told him laconically, retrieving the mug that had done the damage. “Else ye’d be picking glass shards out of yer brain right now by way of your nose, eh?”

  One of the drunkards down in the darkest end corner roused enough to ask, “Awha? Whut’s befalling, hey?”

  “Some nobles’ve lost their ways and come prancing past, and the hammerhands an’ the sealegs of the Goblet have gone out to teach the young highnoses a thing or two.”

  A gap-toothed old sailor elbowed his friend awake, and made for the door. “This oughta be good. Got anything left to bet with, Suldyn?”

  The tingling warning behind Mrelder’s eyes became a red throbbing. He sprang up excitedly. Piergeiron was heading right toward them!

  His father’s door stood open. Golskyn had just returned from another mysterious errand, and was standing behind his desk still wearing his overcloak.

  “I’ve ordered the chains,” Lord Unity was telling Hoth, “but they tell me it’ll be at least a tenday before the first links are ready. For all the talk of coin and competition ruling Waterdeep, they don’t seem to work all that fast.”

  Hoth nodded. “Should I buy the cages?”

  Golskyn nodded. “Ironbar, and large enough to hold two horses, nose to tail. We’ll be wanting large beasts, not treecats.”

  “Any preferences?”

  “Thuldaar, but only if he has some in stock. Buy from anyone who has ready stock—in the barns nigh South Gate, nowhere else. Take Daethur’s wagon, and store them in the north warehouse. Don’t have them delivered here; this street has far too many curious eyes as it is.”

  Hoth bowed deeply, turned, and strode out, ignoring Mrelder.

  Golskyn did, too, until his son said insistently, “My spells tell me Piergeiron’s very close by and heading right toward us.”

  Lord Unity looked up sharply. “You’re sure?”

  As Mrelder nodded, sudden shouts, crashes, and the ring of swords striking swords erupted in the street below.

  Father and son rushed to the windows together and peered down at a chaos of yelling, brawling men, overturned handcarts, and running Watch officers. Folk were peering out of windows up and down the street, and spilling out of doorways to watch and cheer.

  At the heart of the fray, four well-dressed young men sporting glittering cloaks were beset by seemingly dozens of ragged sailors—and were plying their war-steel like desperate men, which is just what they were. If the Watch didn’t arrive quickly, that gaudy quartet was doomed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Swords flashed and clanged, men shouted and screamed, and Watch officers converged from all directions. Beyond them, far down the street, a small knot of armored men were striding purposefully toward the fray.

  “There!” Mrelder said excitedly, pointing. A head taller than those around him, magnificent in bright helm and armor, the Open Lord of Waterdeep paused for a moment to peer ahead and frown, trying to see just who was fighting whom and why.

  “I see him,” Golskyn replied. “This can only work to our benefit.”

  As he spoke, one of the bright-cloaked men struck aside a sailor’s cutlass and ran the man through. A breath later, another of the fancy-cloaks vanished under a swarm of punching, kicking laborers.

  Watchmen blew horns, shouted, and waded into the fighting, taking blows from fists and improvised clubs. Piergeiron snapped an order and trotted forward, pulling gauntlets from his belt and drawing them on as he plunged into the battle.

  Mrelder cursed softly. He had the right spell ready; he should have used it when Piergeiron stopped to survey the fight! Now, he might never—

  A sailor took the red-cloaked man’s slender steel through his gut and reeled, his scream fading into wet coughing as he sank to the cobbles to die. Another sailor punched someone else right back through the curtained window of a rental carriage whose runners had long since fled, then jerked open the door and dived in at his victim. The carriage swayed, received the enthusiastic charges of several more sailors anxious to join in the fun, rocked violently … and slowly crashed over onto its side amid screams and splinterings.

  Piergeiron had to leap for his life as the falling coach loomed over him. He slammed right into a handcart. It crashed over onto a wounded sailor with the Open Lord riding it. The paladin wallowed atop the cart-cage, trying to get his balance, his bodyguard still far behind him …

  Now! Mrelder spread his hands, vaguely aware that his father was no longer watching at the windows beside him. He hissed out his spell, gaze intent on Piergeiron. A sailor was charging the armored Lord, whose best route away would be—

  The Open Lord found his footing and met the sailor with a raised arm that blocked the man’s wild swing and an uppercut that started near his knees and ended up over his head, with the sailor flung away senseless.

  So great was the force of Piergeiron’s blow that the paladin staggered sideways on the slippery cobbles toward a nearby shopfront.

  Just as Mrelder had hoped.

  Pointing at the shop’s signboard —“Ye Happy Harlot” it proclaimed to the world, in shabby, peeling paint on wood carved into the shape of a buxom reclining woman—he carefully said the last, triggering word of his spell.

  Rusted chains flew apart. The faded Harlot happily plummeted to the street below, crashing down on Piergeiron’s helmed head and shoulders, driving the Open Lord of Waterdeep to the cobbles in a crumpled instant.

  Golskyn was suddenly back at the window, a lit candle in his hand. “Hold this,” he ordered.

  As Mrelder took the little candle-lamp, the Lord of the Amalgamation raised the first of three egg-shaped bundles of clay he’d fetched. It bristled with wicks, sprouting in all directions like a potato gone to seed. Golskyn held these into the flame, one after another, until wisps of thick smoke curled up. Then he opened the window, tossed out the egg, and calmly drew the sash down against the sudden billowing of smoke.

  Without pause the priest moved to the next window, lit his second smoke-egg, and hurled it. He did the same for the third before pinching out the candle and waving Mrelder impatiently toward the door.

  “But Father, how’ll we see?”

  Golskyn tapped his eyepatch. “I will see for us both. You will listen for my orders.”

  They hastened out and down to the street together.

  Mirt’s old, flopping seaboots flapped as he strode along, humming to himself. Sune and Sharess, if he wasn’t but a few indolent days away from turning entirely to jelly! If ’twasn’t for these little sallies forth to see Durnan about which warehouse to buy and what cargo to sell, he’d have long ago—

  Been fell
ed by his own failing heart and some unlooked-for tumble, thanks to the unpredictable cruelty of Faerûn, which was whirling around his head now, smashing wind out of him and dashing him to the hard cobbles in a bewildering instant—

  Mirt rolled over and up, blinking. He’d just been literally run over by a trio of running, battling men. Their swords sang and struck sparks from each other and the nearby walls as they fought on, faces twisted with anger and effort.

  Well, Blood of the Whale, if young sailors and Dock Ward louts thought they could trample and ignore the Old Wolf himself—

  Mirt rose like an enraged and puffing walrus, drew his curved saber and favorite dagger, and lumbered after the trio, who were reeling back out of the alley into the street they’d evidently come from … which seemed rather noisy and crowded, come to think of it.

  Mirt frowned. The cobbles were crowded with dying, groaning, hacking-at-each-other men—and billowing smoke, too! Through those spreading clouds, the street seemed to be a veritable slaughterhouse of a battlefield! Ye gods and little fishes!

  He thrust his head out of the alley, peering through the thickening haze at a fallen signboard and a magnificently armored, somehow familiar leg protruding from under it.

  Someone charged at him out of the smoke, shouting in anger and swinging a glittering sword. Mirt knew the man at a glance: one of Piergeiron’s bodyguards. So that must be old Steelhead himself, lying there like—

  The glittering sword slashed open one of Mirt’s sleeves, and the wheezing moneylender ducked away and forward, to rise suddenly behind the guard’s backswing.

  He clouted a helm solidly with his saber hilt, snarling, “Young puppy! More fancy armor than a dancer doing the Lady Knight Surrenders, and this is the best you can do?”

  The man fell untidily and did not get up.

  Someone else came sprinting out of the alley, and Mirt lurched around to face this new foe, puffing and blowing through his mustache, just in time to have a Dock Ward roughblade—stormhowl it all, someone else he recognized!—slam into his capacious gut and send him staggering.

  Whereupon a handsome man in fine clothes and a swirling ruby-red cloak lunged out of the smoke to slash open the man’s throat, neck, and shoulder with one vicious cut of his blade.

  The Dock Warder fell, gurgling, and the nearest of Piergeiron’s still-living bodyguards turned in time to entirely misread the situation and leap at Beldar Roaringhorn with a shout of anger and a wildly thrusting sword.

  Suddenly sailors and Watch officers and everyone else afoot in all Dock Ward, it seemed, were converging on the fallen paladin and swinging steel as they came.

  This being Dock Ward, windows had already flown open to let folk peer down through the rising smoke. Some hurled insults, and others preferred to toss small, expendable objects or the contents of chamberpots. Bets were shouted from window to window as sailors and Watch officers groaned, thrust, parried … and died.

  The last and most drunken of the Glorious Goblet‘s crew came staggering out to join the battle, roaring and swinging their blades wildly. One of them promptly reeled into a handcart and sent it crashing over. Its owner erupted out of the shop he’d been delivering to with a rising scream of fury, spitting out insults and curses as he smashed the sailor to the cobbles with a three-legged stool the shop owner had just rejected.

  The sailors all around the stool-seller growled in menacing unison—and the bustling little man growled right back at them, drew his belt-knife, and flung himself at the nearest one, wielding knife and stool with deadly ruthlessness.

  Overhead, in an attic not far above the tumult, the smoke and noise had awakened two elderly, dozing sisters: Rethilda, who called the bat-infested rooms home, and Undaera, from the farm crossroads of Windy Hill nigh Secomber, who was visiting her sister in the big city for the first time.

  She’d been horrified at the filth, noise, and dangers of Dock Ward and had said so, colorfully and at length, almost causing a rift between them.

  So it was with a certain satisfaction that Rethilda surveyed the brawl now filling the street and turned triumphantly to the gaping, trembling Undaera to ask, “Well, sister? Does Windy Hill offer this sort of free entertainment? Hey?”

  “Too many people are watching from above,” Golskyn snapped, as swearing, snarling sailors clawed at the ruby-cloaked man and the splendidly armored bodyguard. “Far too many blades here, too!”

  Mrelder nodded. “There’ll be no dragging Piergeiron through our front door—not unless we want half the Watch, and the Guard, too, coming in after him!”

  “We don’t need him,” Golskyn said sharply, “just the Gorget—but folk must not notice us taking it!”

  A dying bodyguard reeled back, with three burly sailors stabbing him so swiftly and repeatedly with their daggers that it looked like they were drumming their fists on his armor, leaving Golskyn’s path to the paladin clear.

  Two bodyguards who now lay sprawled and very dead in their own spreading blood had earlier dragged the signboard off the Open Lord. Piergeiron lay on his back, eyes shut and mouth open, dead or unconscious; the Lord of the Amalgamation didn’t care which. Just now, all he cared about was that Piergeiron was so cursed big that he didn’t think he could drag the man anywhere.

  “Mrelder!”

  “Here, Father!” Mrelder gasped, fighting his way free of the heavy body of the Watchman who’d been trying to throttle him. He’d spell-frozen the lawman long enough to slice open the Waterdhavian’s throat with his dagger.

  “Stop amusing yourself and help me, here!”

  Mrelder leaped to obey, and the paladin’s armor struck sparks from the cobbles as they dragged him, limp limbs bouncing and rattling, into a doorway.

  More bodyguards were bearing down on them, but Golskyn could bark orders as grandly as a king when he wanted to. He drew himself up to block their view of Mrelder tearing at the Gorget and commanded, “The Open Lord lives! See that you keep him safe!”

  The foremost bodyguard promptly burst past the priest—and saw what Mrelder was doing.

  He raised his blade with a yell, but Golskyn whirled and drove his own dagger into the man’s throat from behind, dragging it viciously crosswise and spraying Mrelder with more blood.

  Without slowing the priest whirled around again to face the second bodyguard, who stood horrified, and told the man sternly, “Fear not! We’ve nothing against you—or Lord Piergeiron, either! This is a personal matter involving his villainy!”

  Golskyn pointed grandly at the bodyguard he’d just murdered with his dripping dagger—and so did Mrelder, who was clutching the Gorget behind his back with his other hand.

  The bodyguard raised his sword and bellowed, “Blayskar a villain? He’s me cousin, you murdering bastards!”

  Mrelder whirled and fled, and the bodyguard plunged after him. Golskyn coolly swept his overcloak off and over the man’s head, then throat-punched him as he stumbled.

  The stumble became a topple, and Golskyn swept his cloak away again as he plucked up the bodyguard’s sword, dragged the man’s helm off, and brained him with the hilt. Tossing the blade down, he ran after Mrelder.

  The smoke was thick enough above them now to set people to coughing and prevent anyone at a window from clearly seeing where they went. It was high time to retire from this field of victory.

  A new crowd was wading through the smoke now, almost all of them Watchmen. Mirt knew them—and more to the point, they knew him, even through all the blood and heaped sailors’ bodies.

  “Old Wolf, let’s be having you on your feet,” one grunted, heaving and dragging. Mirt let out a roar of pain that ended in a sob.

  Gods, he was hurt … hurt bad!

  “Get me,” Mirt gasped raggedly, as Watchmen rolled dead sailors aside, “back to my house: There’s healing there!”

  They raised him to their shoulders almost tenderly, but the Old Wolf nearly fell out of their grasp in his eagerness to point across more bodies at a gleam of armor, and gasp, “
Grab Piergeiron there, too! Bring him to my place! If that damned squarejaws goes down, some fools’ll start a war in the city to get onto his throne, sure’s sure!”

  Watchmen rushed to do just that, the Open Lord’s helm and one gauntlet rolling away forgotten as they hoisted him and began the swift trot to Mirt’s Mansion.

  The street was empty of both moneylenders and Open Lords even before a father and a son finished groping their way through their own doorway with a stolen gorget and got the door safely bolted and barred in their wake.

  “Perhaps the tunnel repairer moved away,” Naoni sighed, “or died; dwarves are long-lived, not immortal.”

  “Perhaps,” Faendra sniffed, “the folk at the rooming house were lying to us!”

  Lark chuckled at the girl’s indignant tone. “Of course they were, but that might have nothing at all to do with Buckblade. Some people lie for no better reason than to keep in practice.”

  “Mayhap we were given the wrong address in the first place,” Naoni said—and then stopped abruptly and threw up her hand in warning.

  The others looked along her pointing finger, down the street ahead, where men were spilling out of doorways and rushing at each other. There were shouts and the flash of swords. There were far more familiar flashes, too: bright gemweave cloaks!

  Lark rolled her eyes. “Watching Gods above, are those men everywhere?”

  “Perhaps they’re following you, sister,” Faendra teased, staring in fascination at toppling handcarts and clattering blades.

  Lark laid firm hands on Dyre elbows. “We don’t want to be here, mistresses,” she warned, even as loud crashings erupted behind them.

  The three whirled around and found themselves staring at more Watchmen than they’d ever seen together before. Forty or more hard-faced lawmen were hastily dragging handcarts and carriages together to form a barrier.

  “Excuse me,” Lark called, dragging Naoni and Faendra forward, “but—”

  “Sit you down out the way and keep silent, lasses!” a Watch armar barked back. “There’ll be no getting past us this way!”