The City of Splendors

by Ed Greenwood

  “Aye, that’s always the way of it when trouble befalls. All the day long, folk’ll be seeking each other out.” Dyre seemed to shake himself and added briskly, “I should be off to see how many workmen remain to me.”

  Faendra caught at his sleeve. “Should we stay here, Father? Or go back to the inn?”

  The guildmaster sighed heavily. “There’s no truly safe place in this world, lass, and I’d rather have you both home than tossed about by mobs and spirits. I’ll have some of my men bring your things back here.” He started to stride off down the street, and then turned and gave Korvaun a nod that was almost a bow.

  Leaving Lark facing several cool, measuring gazes.

  She turned to Korvaun. “If your friend’s named Roaringhorn, I’m not the one to guide you.”

  “Who better?” Faendra snapped. “Yestermorn, you and Lord Roaringhorn lingered in the club after we left. Since you didn’t return here to see to highsunfeast and the cheesemaking, as you’d said you would, I’m thinking you might indeed have some notion of what befell him.”

  “None whatsoever. We exchanged words, yes, and that delayed me. When I got here, you’d all left already—for an inn, apparently.”

  Naoni frowned. “We should have left a note, but Father was in such a hurry …”

  “Another building fell,” Faendra explained. “The worksite on Redcloak Lane.”

  Lark winced, seeing quite well why Master Dyre had hauled away his daughters with such haste.

  “You know nothing of Beldar?” pressed Taeros Hawkwinter. “We’ve not seen him since we departed the club.”

  Lark didn’t have to feign anger. “I know not where he is, nor do I care!”

  Plucking forth her ready-cloth from its belt pouch, she swiped most of the unguent from her cheek. Lifting her chin, she stared defiantly at Taeros and let him read what he would from her bruised face.

  His expression grew grim. “Beldar?”

  Lark nodded.

  “Are you … otherwise unharmed?”

  “I am, though I think you’ll find your friend somewhat the worse for wear.”

  Korvaun sighed. “Beldar’s not been himself of late. We’re all grieving over Malark, but …”

  “When it seemed you went off with him …” Naoni murmured.

  “After all that talk about Elaith Craulnober,” Faendra added tearfully, and then threw her arms around the maid. “Oh, Lark, I’m so sorry!”

  “It … matters not,” Lark replied, patting her younger mistress awkwardly on the back before disentangling herself from the embrace. “You were right to be cautious. I take no offense, and only hope your minds are at ease.”

  Faendra nodded happily, but Naoni … glowed.

  Lark looked at that smiling face. Then her elder mistress moved her hand, and Lark saw the glint of gold on one finger.

  Gods above! No good can come of this. She glanced at Korvaun, and what she saw there did not put her mind at ease.

  “One matter remains unresolved,” Korvaun said carefully. “It appears Lord Hawkwinter here has lost a silver charm on a neck-chain. Lark, know you anything of this?”

  Lark’s heart beat a little faster, but she knew nothing showed on her face. No lass raised on the Luskan docks escaped accusations, and when death or maiming could reward a guilty face, one learned fast.

  Looking at all of the watchful faces, she decided to cleave close to the truth. There was no knowing what magic trinkets the lords might carry, and if she was caught in a lie …

  “After you all left in such haste, I found such a thing, fallen on the stair—snowflake and hawk.” Then she told them rueful truth. “It didn’t occur to me until now that the design meant ‘Hawkwinter.’ ”

  “Where is it now?” Taeros demanded, with far more interest than one might expect from a wealthy nobleman over a simple silver charm.

  Lark faced him squarely. “Lord Roaringhorn had lingered in the room, so I asked him to help me learn more about the charm. He took me to an old woman, a mage or priestess of some sort who tried to read its secrets. If you’re concerned about losing valuable magic, Lord Hawkwinter, be at ease. The charm has none that she could find.”

  Taeros sighed in exasperation. “Did it not occur to you to simply ask who among us might have dropped the charm?”

  Lark risked a lie. “Of course. I asked Lord Roaringhorn.”

  The nobles exchanged frowns. “He’d not know,” Taeros mused, “but why’d he take it to some witch-woman or other, rather than simply follow us and ask?”

  “That was my idea,” Lark said. “Serving in taverns, I’ve seen such charms before. Some men give them as gifts—to girls whose virtue might otherwise be unassailable.”

  Everyone stared at her.

  Lark shrugged. “Such things happen.”

  “Not among the Gemcloaks, I assure you,” Korvaun said firmly.

  “What became of the charm?” Taeros asked.

  “Lord Roaringhorn was … acting strangely. He talked of The Serpent liking such things. We struggled, and he seized my belt-bag. I got it back from him and fled. What became of him after, I cannot say, but the charm’s no longer in my belt-bag.”

  That was true enough. The charm now rode in a small cloth bag sewn firmly to her shift and hidden beneath her kirtle. If the two lordlings concluded the charm was in Lord Roaringhorn’s possession, all the better. He’d deny it, but the frowns on their faces suggested they might now be as disinclined to believe his words as those of a maidservant.

  Still, there was little sense courting discovery. Touching a finger to her bruised cheek, Lark turned to Naoni. “By your leave, Mistress, I’d like to use this morn to tend to personal matters.”

  Naoni promptly proffered her smallcoin-purse. “Take this and see a healer.”

  Lark backed away, putting her hands behind her. “I can’t take your coins for so trifling a hurt! I need rest, nothing more.”

  Her mistress’s smile was weary. “As do we all. Take the day, or two if you see fit.”

  “This is all fine and well,” Taeros murmured in a tone that suggested it was anything but, “yet it serves nothing in retrieving the charm.”

  “Perhaps,” said Korvaun slowly, “there’s a way it could be traced …”

  Lark bobbed a curtsey and hurried off, Lord Helmfast’s words speeding her step.

  If magic could track the charm, better the hunt end at Elaith Craulnober’s door than at her own!

  Varandros Dyre set aside another many-times-amended chart of the sewers and rubbed his eyes wearily. His daughters sporting with wastrel nobles—sneering emptyheads who knew best how to insult people and break things—buildings crashing down and taking good men to their deaths, and now he’d drawn the baleful eye of the Lords of Waterdeep.

  Laughing at him behind their masks, preening as they plotted to reach out and smash down one more man who’d been fool enough to stand up to them.

  Yet how was a man to make honest coin—in Waterdeep, too, gods cry all? This wasn’t Thay or Calimshan or Zhentil Keep! Here the guilds were a man’s shield against tyrannical clerks or spiteful Lords—weren’t they?

  Or was it all a game, and every hard-working merchant of Waterdeep a dupe left to scramble like an ant, as his “betters” sneered down at him?

  If they reached out to crush him, as a man swats a stinging fly, what would befall Naoni and Faendra? Who’d stand with them, against … oh, gods.

  Who but those nobles: Helmfast, Hawkwinter and the rest? Men who wanted but two things from his daughters, their charms and their coins—and would be gone the moment they’d snatched both.

  “Tymora keep me alive,” Varandros muttered under his breath.

  “Father?” Naoni’s voice was sharp with concern.

  Dyre’s head jerked up. How’d she opened the door without him hearing?

  Both of his daughters were standing before him, Faendra bearing a tray holding three tankards of steaming mulled cider. Aye, three, not just his own.

&nb
sp; Varandros frowned. “Yes?”

  “Are you … well?”

  “Well enough.” He glanced at the tankards. “You’ve something to discuss with me?”

  “Yes,” Faendra told him firmly. Dyre snatched away a pile of building plans as she lowered the tray. Naoni was already moving two chairs to face him across his desk.

  “Father, Faendra and I have eyes and ears,” Naoni began. “We can’t help but notice when things go awry.”

  “I’m doing well enough,” Dyre said gruffly. “When was the last time either of you lacked for anything you needed, or the little fripperies you fancy?”

  Naoni grimaced. “This isn’t about pretty gowns and trinkets, Father. We’re not children. I haven’t been a child since my twelfth winter.”

  The double-edged truth of that struck deep. “Sit then,” Dyre growled, “and speak.”

  The girls sat in smooth unison, gray eyes and blue regarding him gravely.

  “You’re worried about the Lords of Waterdeep,” Naoni said bluntly, “and thinking they’re behind the building collapses. You think they’re targeting you and your friends in the New Day.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What know you of the New Day?”

  “I heard it shouted like a battle cry as the City of the Dead went mad,” she told him. “I saw people die with ‘New Day’ on their lips. By highsun, not more than a handful of folk in Waterdeep won’t have heard of the New Day.”

  “And these worries are eating at you, Father,” Faendra put in, lifting a tankard. “Time and again you stare at yon cellar and sewer maps, thinking the Lords are tunneling under—”

  “Yes, yes,” Varandros snapped. “So I do! And what affair—”

  “Is it of ours?” Naoni broke in. The cold ring of sudden steel in her voice cut through her father’s bluster, leaving him gaping at her in silence. “Faendra and I might not actually put mallet to stone, but we manage your home and offices, offer hospitality to your guild friends, run your errands, visit your worksites—and bury your workmen. Why don’t you ever confide in us, when there’s so little we don’t already know? Speak to us.”

  “And hear our advice,” Faendra put in, the quaver in her voice betraying her nervousness. Varandros rounded on her out of long habit; pounce on any weakness in negotiations, and press it—

  “You always told us a prudent man enters no tunnel alone,” Naoni declared. She tapped the sewer plans. “Yet that’s what you’re planning, yes? If you’re right about the Lords, they’ll be waiting … and you’ll die.”

  “And if you take a crew down without a city contract,” Faendra added, looking at the ceiling as if trying to remember her lines and say them precisely, “they’ll know, and others will notice—and one way or the other, the Lords will have to move against you.”

  Varandros Dyre drew in a deep breath and reached for his tankard with a hand that was not quite steady. Then he set it down again, untouched.

  “So, now,” he said heavily, “you lay out my choices as clearly as I see them myself. Yes, I see those same roads before me. So, now, your advice?”

  Naoni stared straight into his eyes and said softly, “You need men to go down into the tunnels with you, men whose status will be your armor and shield. Noblemen.”

  “Not your—”

  He bit off his own snarl to stare at both of his daughters. Mayhap there was something to that notion …

  “The Lords Helmfast, Hawkwinter, Jardeth, and Thongolir,” said Faendra, “men of proven honor, Father.”

  “Men of powerful houses,” Naoni pressed. “The Lords would have to want you very badly indeed to risk angering so many nobles.”

  “One of those young lords is the heir of his house,” Varandros mused. “Two more aren’t far behind. The Lords would hesitate to spill blood so blue.” He frowned again. “But what if they’re the very Lords who’re after me? Or are working for them?”

  Faendra hissed in exasperation, but Naoni made a slashing gesture to cut her off. A familiar gesture. His own. Varandros blinked as sudden affection rose in him. Suddenly his serene, quiet elder daughter was not so unknowable as she’d always seemed.

  “If they’re what you fear, then you’re right where you are now, Father, except that they’ll be standing within your reach, if you … dare to try that way.”

  “You were going to say if I was foolish enough to try that way, weren’t you?” he asked quietly.

  She nodded, meeting his gaze squarely, then raised her chin and said, “Yes, because you would be.”

  Varandros gave her a crooked smile. He sat back, his tankard warm in his hands, and told the ceiling huskily, “Thank you, gods, for giving me two daughters such as these.”

  He sipped soothing cider and then asked, “Can you bring your young nobles here? Or would it better if I went to meet them?”

  The Dyre girls exchanged surprised glances.

  “Well, ah …” Naoni began.

  “We hadn’t reckoned on getting this far so swiftly, Father,” Faendra said sheepishly. “We’d expected to be wearing that cider by now.”

  Varandros Dyre stared at her for a moment and then bellowed with laughter. His roars of mirth echoed back to him off the ceiling, louder than he’d laughed in many a year.

  After a moment, with a hesitation and uncertainty that made him suddenly want to weep—gods, were they that afraid of him?—Naoni and Faendra Dyre started to laugh, too.

  Elaith Craulnober stalked through the tunnel, his mood darkening with every stride. It boasted a dry floor, fine stonework, and an arched stone ceiling high enough to allow his little band to walk upright, but it was still a sewer. Worse, it was a new sewer, so new that it wasn’t on the most recent maps.

  He turned to face the two roughblades dragging the dwarf. Their captive’s just-broken legs trailed limply, and his gray beard was matted with dried blood, none of which had dimmed the defiance in his rheumy old eyes. Nor did the dagger Elaith drew from a wrist sheath.

  “Who ordered this work?” the Serpent demanded, waving his fang in a sweeping circle at the tunnel all around.

  Battered and swollen lips cracked into a sneer. “Bunch of stinkin’ drow. Said they knew yer mother real well.”

  “Very amusing.” The elf looked at his men. “Kill him.”

  Knives flashed, and the dwarf who’d for years been Waterdeep’s most knowledgeable tunnel builder thudded unceremoniously to the stones.

  “Heavy bastard,” one of the slayers observed, cleaning his knife on his victim’s tunic. “Not much for talking, though.”

  “Indeed,” Elaith agreed. The dwarf had been his “guest” for some days now, and in all that time had adamantly refused to say a useful word about recent activities beneath the city streets.

  No matter. Living or dead, they all talked in time. Elaith nodded to the pale woman in black and purple at the rear of their small procession. The symbol of the god of the dead, the Bonehand clutching golden scales, was emblazoned on her tabard in glittering thread—perhaps the gem-spun thread now creating an uproar in Waterdhavian fashion, and clear proof he was paying this priestess far too much.

  This whole affair was becoming damnably expensive. His recent adventures in Tethyr had strained his coffers, and he’d lost two valuable properties this tenday. There must be an end to this, and soon.

  Elaith watched intently as the Kelemvorite knelt by the body, held out her hands, palms-down, and chanted an eerily tuneful prayer.

  A faintly shimmering cloud rose from the corpse, swiftly taking on the shape of the dwarf—but whole, showing no signs of the injuries inflicted on him over the last few days.

  The apparition stared at the priestess with contempt and then glared at Elaith impatiently. “Well? Get on with it. I got places to go, friends to meet, tankards to drain.”

  “Three questions,” the Skullsister intoned, as if she hadn’t heard the spirit. “The Lord of the Dead grants me the power to hold you until three questions are answered fully and truthfully.”

>   The ghostly dwarf snorted. “Ask away.”

  The priestess looked to her employer.

  “Who laid this stonework?” Elaith snapped. The priestess echoed his words exactly.

  The spirit sneered at that.

  “I told you I knew not. Use truth more often, Slyboots, an’ you might know the sound of it.” The apparition seemed to grow a little fainter. “Stones well-trimmed and tight-fitted, not half-bad work. It’ll hold a good long time. Not up to dwarf standards, of course, but close as Tall Folk are likely to get. Done by either folk new-come to Waterdeep—stoneworkers I never heard of—or Varandros Dyre. One or ’tother.”

  Elaith bit back a curse. Witless humans, endangering their own properties—and infinitely worse, his as well! “If the tunnel’s sound, what brought the building down?”

  The dwarven spirit’s reply was swift and firm. “This digging’s too close to one of Ahghairon’s old wards. There’s a warren of sewers under this city, and under that levels upon levels of caverns and dungeons and what-have-you. D’you think Waterdeep stands on that anthill thanks to human ‘stonecraft’? Bah!” The ghostly form was noticeably fainter now.

  It was Elaith’s turn to sneer. Stonecraft? Hardly. Ahghairon? Well, perhaps the human had renewed or augmented the high magic he’d found, left behind from Aelinthaldaar. That was what kept half of Waterdeep from tumbling into the depths …

  A remembrance of his long-ago fosterage rose unbidden to mind. A particularly creative nurse once brought to the royal nursery a wonderfully complex toy made of hard-spun sugar in rainbow hues. As she told a tale about a powerful human wizard whose spells bored through the depths beneath his city seeking gold, the children had taken turns breaking off and eating bits of candy, until the toy collapsed into fragments—a lesson, of course, about the fragility of magic and the dangers inherent in hasty greed.

  That game had fixed the tale in his memory so firmly that Elaith still saw it clearly, all these years later. He’d known enough to break off small bits, not pieces that were part of the supports, but little Amnestria, her sapphire hair a curly halo around a face sticky from the treat, had known less restraint. Her sweet tooth, impatient nature, and grasping little hands had brought the sweet wonder down in short order.