Murder in Cormyr (13 page)

“Back in there?” I asked, pointing to what looked like impassable swamp.

“Aye, sor,” said Darvik. “Ye’d be surprised, ye would, but ye can step through this swamp even if ye weigh a near ton. Just so’s you know where to step.”

The little gnome sounded confident, but it was with some

trepidation that I followed. Darvik led the way, then Lindavar, me, and Captain Flim bringing up the rear, his hand on his sword hilt. Even though it was daylight, the Vast Swamp was still the Vast Swamp.

We had left our cloaks with the horses, for as soon as you entered the swamp itself, the temperature rose at least ten degrees, the result of all the rotting, all that vegetable death. I could feel the sweat break out on my skin, and hoped that the fluid flowing out of my pores would prevent any of the stench of the swamp from flowing into them.

As nasty as the Vast Swamp is, the worst thing about it is the smell. The reek of decaying vegetation—and other rotting things you’d rather not think about—hangs in the air as heavy mist, and goes up your nostrils and into your sinuses like snakes dipped in acid. It permeates your clothes and your hair as well, even your skin. After a trek through the Vast Swamp, you want to live in the bathtub for a week.

The feel of the swamp beneath your feet isn’t too pleasant either. Even the rocks are covered by a shallow layer of marshy soil that your boots press down. When you move on, the footsteps fill up again in seconds. The place was filled with nature’s dangers, patches of quicksand and sucking pits that could make a person vanish forever.

All the trees looked dead, even the living ones. Their bark and leaves were black. I wondered if their buds in spring were green, or if even those were black, tinted by the foul sediment pulled up through the roots. Moss festooned their branches, but there was no sense of gaiety in the hangings. They seemed rather to be strips of green, pocked flesh, dangling from decaying corpses. Marsh-reeds picketed the surface, and cattails thrust up like fingers of the drowned. And everywhere the mist drifted, clung, hung, surrounded and claimed us.

“Watch this tree up ahead here, sors,” said Darvik softly. “A thornslinger it is. Just move slowly by it, and speak not…” I didn’t know what a thornslinger was, but its name gave me an idea, and the foot-long thorns that extended from its white, spidery branches gave me a further clue. Needless to say, I did as Darvik suggested.

Suddenly, we came into a large open space, and I looked across what might have been a half mile of sodden marsh, but with few trees. The spaciousness of it was disconcerting, and I hoped we wouldn’t have to walk across the expanse. Being in the middle of all that space would make me feel more vulnerable than I had ever felt in my life.

To my relief, Darvik slogged off to the left, and we picked our way around the perimeter of the marshy lake. When we had gone perhaps a hundred yards, he parted a curtain of hanging moss to our left, and we entered the dimness again, leaving the open mere behind. The moss clung to me like wet, filthy hair as I went through the opening, and I continued to wipe my face with my sleeve for several minutes afterward.

At last we saw the two soldiers ahead, standing on top of a small mound that protruded from the swamp like the back of a submerged beast. They tried to look official as we approached, but I could tell that their vigil had been a tense one.

“Anything happen while I was gone?” Captain Flim asked, and one of the soldiers shook his head.

“Not a thing, sir, except… well, we did as you commanded and searched farther back in the cave, and… we found something, sir.”

“The killer?” Lindavar asked.

The soldier got a funny look on his face. “I hope not, sir.” Captain Flim wasn’t a man who liked riddles. He pushed

past the soldier and descended the stone stairs. We followed, lighting the lanterns we had brought. The steps were slimy, so we trod slowly, and twenty steps downward brought us to the floor of the cave. There was a small chamber there. Its walls were stone, and the striations showed how the levels of rock had been deposited many centuries ago, rock so hard that it stood against the encroachment of the Vast Swamp even to this day.

The floor was stone as well, except for where pockets of moisture had eroded it into a sickly claylike substance. The stone was gray, but the place where Grodoveth had bled away his heart’s blood was a flat brown-red. It was the second beheaded corpse I had seen, and much more gruesome than the first. Unlike Dovo’s decapitation, this one had been far from efficient.

Instead of the axe striking him in the fleshy part of the neck, the blade had hit on the left shoulder and had torn through part of Grodoveth’s collarbone before taking off his head. The blow had continued downward, and the top part of Grodoveth’s right shoulder was still attached to the head and neck. The torso was equally hideous to look upon, with a huge gash that had nearly severed the right arm as well as the neck. I could see the spongy interior of the lung.

“Has anything been touched?” Lindavar asked, and the soldiers shook their heads. “Darvik?” he asked the gnome, who was standing halfway down the steps, as though afraid to descend.

“No, sor. I just saw the dead man and I run. Never even made it all the way down.” He gave an apologetic half smile. “Still don’t care to, sor.”

An axe lay on the floor against the wall, several yards from the body, and Lindavar and I knelt to examine it. There was no doubt that it was the murder weapon, for it was

coated with fresh blood and bits of gore. It was much larger and heavier than the one that Dovo had been carrying and that had killed him. The iron was rusty, but the blade still appeared to be very sharp. Near the top of the curved blade, there was a spot where the rust was chipped away and the blade was dulled, and I pointed it out to Lindavar.

He nodded. “Looks as though it’s been hit against stone, or possibly strong armor,” he said, though I knew of no armor that could have turned a blow struck from that axe. “Do you see any marks of hands upon it?” he asked me, turning it over so that we could see both sides of the handle.

I shook my head but pointed to several marks on the handle. The first was on the inner part of the handle near the blade. It was a deep gouge that had been dug into it, and recently, for the wood exposed was untouched by the grime of years. There were two other marks, one in the center of the blade, and one near the end, as though the axe had been in a wall holder for many years. But no finger marks were visible on the wood.

“Perhaps the killer wore gloves,” said Lindavar, and I thought it highly likely.

We straightened up and looked around the small chamber. Except for the now-extinguished torch that Darvik had mentioned, there was nothing of note save for the layers of stone. As I casually looked at the roll of years that they represented, I thought that one layer gleamed more than the others in the lantern light. Greater porosity, I fancied, and wondered how many years it had taken for that inch-wide layer to be deposited, and what creatures had walked Faerűn in that bygone age.

I was about to touch it, as though the contact would make me see in my mind’s eye the behemoths of that long-ago eon, when suddenly Captain Flim appeared from around a

dark corner, startling me.

“I think you should see this,” he said, beckoning with his blazing torch. His face looked somber, almost pale.

We followed him down a twenty-foot tunnel that had long ago been cut by water, for its sides were smooth, with no trace of a stonemason’s tools. We had to crouch as we walked, and it was with relief that we came into a chamber larger than the first, so large in fact that Captain Flim’s torch and our lanterns only partially illuminated it.

There seemed to be a dais of some kind at the far end, and we walked slowly toward it, the only sound the scrape of our shoes and the dripping of water from the roof of the vault onto the stone floor. I gasped as I saw what sat on that dais, in a massive chair of rotting wood and rusted iron, whose cushions and cloths had long ago moldered away.

The skeleton of a giant seemed to look down at us from empty eye sockets. It was clad in rusted armor, bony forearms still resting on the arms of its rotting throne, fingers curled clawlike over the ends. Its jaw hung down onto the yellow shaft of its neck, and a helm sat lopsided on the bare dome of its skull. On its feet were what was left of its boots, leather strips through which the ivory toe bones peeked. The smell of death had long since vanished. Only dampness and the chill of the grave remained.

Runes were carved on the wall above the seated skeleton, two lines and then a single word. I started to speak to Lindavar but had to clear my throat before the words would come. “Do you… can you read it?”

The wizard nodded, and when he spoke, I heard awe in his tone. “The runes say, ‘Bought with blood. Paid for with blood.’ And then the name.

” ‘Fastred,’ ” Lindavar read. “This is Fastred’s tomb.”

“Fastred?” said Captain Flim. “The ancient brigand? The

ghost?”

“None other,” said Lindavar, still gazing as if hypnotized at the seated relic.

“Gods save us,” muttered Flim. “Maybe Mayor Tobald was right. Maybe the ghost did it—did for both of them.”

“Why hasn’t he done for us then?” I said, glad that my voice didn’t break. In truth, I was scared. I expected to see the skeleton leap up any second, run down the passageway for his axe, and behead all of us tomb despoilers. “He looks like he hasn’t gone anywhere for, oh, at least five hundred years. Give or take a decade,” I added Ughtly to try to keep my fear at bay.

“That is true,” said Lindavar. “We’re dealing with some physical body here. Among the undead, a ghost might madden its victim or age him ten years; a lich might paralyze his victim; and I have never heard of a wight using a weapon. So wherever this one’s spirit now dwells, I greatly doubt that it

lies within anything that swings an axe, in spite of its habits in life.”

That made me think of something. “Lindavar,” I said, “why wouldn’t Fastred’s axe be with him? Wasn’t it the custom in the old times for warriors to be put to rest with their weapons in hand for the next world?”

“So one might think,” said Lindavar. He stepped toward the dais then and stopped a foot away, examining the skeleton’s hands. “But that appears not to be the case with this burial. I see no sign that any axe has ever rested here.”

“I’ve got another question,” said Captain Flim. “What I want to know is, there’s supposed to be a treasure here, and what those runes said makes me think that even more. So where is it?”

Lindavar looked at a spot by Fastred’s bony feet, just off the dais. There was a square approximately one foot deep by a foot and a half wide that was free of the dark dampness that clung to the rest of the stone floor. “It was there, I expect. I also expect that whoever killed Grodoveth also helped himself to the treasure.”

Captain Flim dubiously eyed the small bare space where a box had sat. “That’s all the bigger it was? I thought Fastred’s treasure was supposed to be more, somehow.”

“Perhaps he had it all changed to precious gems,” I suggested. “You can hold a king’s ransom in the palm of your hand that way. Besides, Fastred doesn’t seem to have been the showy type. I mean, look at this place—a chair, a brief message, and possibly a treasure. The soul of efficiency. Makes sense to boil all the gold and silver down to a box of jewels.”

“Maybe the gnome took it,” Flim said frowning. ‘Took it and hid it before he came and got us. Maybe he even killed Grodoveth and made up his story when he saw us.”

“I doubt if there is a gnome in all of Faerűn,” said Lindavar, “capable of beheading a chap the size of Grodoveth. And if you had caught him, why wouldn’t he have had the jewel box with him?”

While Lindavar was giving Darvik an alibi, I was examining the floor. ‘There’s another thing,” I said, straightening up. “I believe Darvik when he says he never went any farther than the stairs. The footprints are messed up, since your two soldiers were blundering around in here first, Captain, but there’s enough for me to see no prints of shoes the size of Darvik’s. He’s got a much smaller foot than any of us, you know.”

“Can you see the footprints of the killer? The one who stole the treasure?” Captain Flim asked. I think he seemed more concerned about the missing cash than the murder of the king’s envoy.

“Lindavar’s and my footprints are the only ones here, but there is another… blurred though…” Then I saw a depression in one of the puddles of loamy clay. It was deep, and though it had retained none of the details of the shoe that had trodden in it, not even the size, I thought it might have marked the man’s general weight. But the only way to know for sure was to tread in it myself and see how far down my foot went. I sighed and stepped into it.

It went perhaps only half as deep as the previous foot that had stepped into it. “It was a large man,” I said.

“Or woman,” Lindavar corrected, and I nodded.

“Or woman. And that’s about all.”

But that wasn’t all. As I looked down at the indentation, I glimpsed a bit of white on the floor nearby. Kneeling, I saw that it was a small amount of chalky powder. Some granules were larger than others, though none were greater than one-sixteenth of an inch. I touched my finger to it, tasted it,

and spat it out It was neither sugar nor salt but tasted bitter. I swept it onto a piece of paper I had brought for making notes, folded it tightly, and put it back into my pocket.

“Find something?” Lindavar asked.

“Powder. Benelaius might want to examine it.”

We searched the floor of the chamber but found nothing else. Back at the bottom of the stairs, Captain Flim turned to Lindavar. “Is there anything else you want to do, or can we bundle up the body?”

Lindavar glanced at me and I shrugged. “I think we’ve seen enough, Captain,” Lindavar said.

“All right then, we’ll take it back to Suzail for burial. Shall we take that axe along too?”

“Please, and lock it up as evidence.”

The soldiers wrapped Grodoveth’s corpse in a thin but strong canvas. I didn’t envy their toting that dead weight back through the swamp to the road. As we went up the stairs, I looked curiously at the trapdoor, wondering about the mechanism of it.