The Dream Spheres (26 page)

Arilyn led the way through the narrow streets of Skullport, with Danilo following close on her heels. Although the city lay directly beneath his native Waterdeep, and though both were port cities, she could not conceive of two places more different.

Here all was squalid, sordid, and ugly. Ramshackle buildings leaned and listed as precariously as scuttled ships. Creatures from at least twoscore races, many of them outlawed in the city above, shoved past each other on the crowded streets. A one-legged beggar was toppled by the rude throng. He made no call for help, obviously realizing that none would be forthcoming, but struggled to right himself with the aid of a home-carved crutch. But like most of Skullport, the man’s appearance was deceiving. Far from helpless, he nimbly sliced the ear off a sly-faced goblin who sought to pick his pockets. Like his intended victim, the goblin did not seek aid. He merely snatched up the bit of living leather, clapped it to his head, and reeled off in search of a healer—or possibly just a mirror and a needle.

Arilyn’s companion took this in with growing dismay.

She’d had misgivings about bringing Danilo into this dank, dismal, lawless place. Though at her insistence he had donned rough clothes more suitable to a dockhand than a gentleman bard, he looked thoroughly, miserably out of place.

“I must say, this is no improvement on Oth’s cistern,” he commented. “At least that was dry.”

Arilyn could see his point. In Skullport, water was everywhere. Although it was a port city, it was entirely underground, far below sea level. Water dripped from the cavern ceilings and puddled on the walkways. It gave sustenance to the strange creeping molds and glowing fungi that writhed on the walls of the ramshackle buildings or inched along the walkways. The scent of rot and mildew permeated everything, and foul mist clung to the lamplight. Even after a few minutes in the city, Arilyn’s clothes clung damply to her, and her companion’s mood was becoming nearly as oppressive as the thick air.

“You wanted to be part of my world,” she said with only a moderate degree of exaggeration. “This is the sort of place I end up going.”

Danilo glanced pointedly at her sword, which was dark and silent. “I would wager there are few forest elves in these parts. Shouldn’t we go find some? Elsewhere?”

She pulled the neck of her clinging shirt away from her throat and dashed a damp lock off her forehead. “The sooner we’re finished here, the sooner we leave.” She nodded toward a row of dangerously tilting wooden buildings, lined up with all the precision of a patrol of drunken orcs, and started toward the narrow street that snaked between them.

Behind her Danilo cursed with impressive creativity. “For what, exactly, are we looking?”

“Perfume,” Arilyn said dryly as she skirted a rather suspect pile. She recognized it as the spoor of a manticore and quickened her pace. It was relatively fresh,

and she had no desire to confront a monster with the body of a lion and the face and cunning of a man.

“Perfume. Good thinking,” he congratulated her. “Given our current surroundings, I suggest we purchase it by the vat.”

She shot a glare over her shoulder. “Do you intend to whine the entire way there?”

“Back, too, I should think. No sense doing half a job.”

A trio of kobolds scuttled toward them from behind a pile of crates. They were hideous creatures, goblinkin whose bald heads came not much higher than Arilyn’s sword belt. Their bulging yellow eyes held a frantic look, but their ratlike tails wagged in an eerily precise imitation of hounds eager to please their master. Their arms were full of fabric, not weapons, but Arilyn did not slow her pace.

“You look, maybe buy,” one of them pleaded as it jogged alongside the half-elf. “Got lotsa good cloaks. Not much worn. Only one gots blood and guts on it, and them’s already dried.”

“Now there’s a vendor’s cry that any of Waterdeep’s roving merchants might envy,” Danilo murmured. He slowed down to address the kobold. “Blood and guts, eh? Does one pay extra for that sort of ornamentation?”

“Sure, sure. You want it, we put.”

“Ah. An admirable arrangement, provided one is not the source of that particular decoration.”

This bit of locution clearly baffled the small merchant. He settled back on his heels, and his rat’s tail lashed about in apparent consternation, but the moment passed quickly, and the kobolds pressed in.

Arilyn elbowed one out of the way. “Don’t encourage them,” she told Danilo in a low voice. “Do you plan to die down here?”

“Oh, surely not Three kobolds are no threat.” “Neither is one mouse. Problem is, there’s never only one mouse. More are always hidden nearby. How do you

think ‘three kobolds’ got their merchandise in the first place?”

This excellent reasoning prompted Danilo to pick up his pace. He kept step with the half-elf as she wove her way through the squalid town, toward the small shop where assassins purchased death by the drop.

“Pantagora’s Poisons,” Danilo said, reading the sign aloud. “Right to the point. No pretense, no dissembling. I find that quite refreshing.”

Arilyn sent him a warning look and pushed open the door. The scene beyond was like something from a North-man’s battlefield or a butcher’s nightmare.

The air was thick with a distinctively sweet, coppery scent. Flies buzzed over sodden shapes. Dark pools seeped into the old wood of the floor. Somehow, blood had been spattered as high as the rafters. Here and there it had dried even as it dripped down, making it appear that the sodden timbers had wept long, black tears over the poison merchants’ fate.

Never had Arilyn seen anything quite like it. She kicked at an empty boot, wondering how it had happened to come loose of its wearer. On impulse, she made a quick mental tally of bodies and footwear. This boot was an extra. To all appearances, its former wearer had been dissolved as surely as if he’d been hit by a blast of dragonfire. From the inside.

She stooped beside one of the dead men. To someone who had seen death as often as she had, a corpse could talk without benefit of spell or prayer.

The signs were there, but they were conflicting and deeply disturbing. Thin, precise cuts marked the man’s body. Arilyn rolled the dead man over and tugged up his shirt. There was little bruising on his back. Small wonder. By the time he died, there had been little blood left in his body to settle. The fine, thin sword that had killed this man had left layers of wounds, dealing death by the inch, by the trickle and drop. Someone had toyed

with the man, taking time to kill him so he lingered far longer than she would have imagined possible.

Strange behavior for a thief. It was possible, of course, that the killer was an assassin by trade, perhaps a regular customer whose skills and habits made it easier to kill than to pay. It seemed to Arilyn, though, that any assassin prompted by survival would never risk such an expenditure of time and vitriol. This killing held all the hallmarks of vengeance—or rage, or insanity, or an evil so intense that it no longer considered proportion or consequence.

Stranger still was the nature of the weapon. No human-made blade was so thin or so keen. The man had been slaughtered with an elven weapon. Of that Arilyn was grimly certain. Her mother’s people were fierce, often merciless fighters, but few were given to such depravity. She knew of only two or three elves who would do such a thing. Just recently, in fact, she had seen Elaith Craulnober toy with a tren assassin, in very similar fashion.

Her sharp ears caught the sound of furtive footsteps on the walkway outside the shop. She rocked back onto her heels and rose in a single, swift move. Gliding over to the door, she drew her sword and gestured for Danilo to move to the other side of the frame.

Slowly the door eased open, and a small, furtive faced peered around the corner. Arilyn stepped in and pressed the tip of her blade against Diloontier’s throat.

The perfumer shrieked and squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could block out the double terror of the looming sword and the carnage beyond. His face paled to the color of old parchment, and the bones of his legs seemed to melt to the consistency of jellied eel.

Before Arilyn could speak, Danilo seized the swaying man by the front of his shirt and jerked him into the room. He shook the perfume merchant as a vermin hound

might worry a rat. This served to bring some color back to the man’s face. When he started to struggle with a resolve and vigor that suggested he could stand on his own, Danilo released him.

Diloontier cracked open one eye and shuddered. “Too late,” he mourned. “Gone, all of it!”

“That raises some interesting questions. Well get to them in time,” Arilyn assured him. She lifted her sword to his throat again. “What do you know about the tren?”

The man’s eyes slid furtively to one side. “Never heard of them.”

She gave her sword an encouraging little twitch. “Odd, that tunnels riddled with tren markings should converge beneath your shop. Strange that a door from the sewers leads into your drying shed. You can talk to me about this, or you can sit before the Lord’s Council.”

“Talking!” he conceded in a high-pitched voice. “Yes, it is true that sometimes I act as a broker for wealthy men and women who desire the tren’s services. I make arrangements, but only through a second or third or twenty-fourth party! Truly! That is the agreed-upon method. It ensures I cannot give you or anyone else the name of my clients.”

Arilyn wondered how the man might respond if presented with a name. She sent Danilo a look that mingled inquiry and apology. His lips thinned, but he gave a slight nod of agreement. She turned back to Diloontier.

“All right, then. If you can’t name your clients, I’ll do it for you. Lady Cassandra Thann.”

“I am a perfumer. Many of the noble folk patronize my shop,” he began evasively. His explanation broke off in a surprised yelp of pain, and he looked down in horror

at the stain on the half-elf’s gleaming sword and the

blood dripping onto his shirtfront.

“Not an important vein,” Arilyn said evenly, “but I know where those are.”

“I cannot tell you anything! My customers prize confidentiality!” he protested.

“More than you prize your neck?”

Diloontier didn’t need long to balance that particular scale. “Potions of youthfulness,” he said, speaking so quickly that the words almost tripped over each other in their eagerness to emerge. “The Lady Cassandra has been buying them for ages, with the coming of each new moon. Forgive me, but how else could she keep the passing years from wresting her beauty from her?”

“I take it that you are not well acquainted with the lady,” Danilo said dryly. “If anyone could stare down Father Time and win, it is she.”

Arilyn lowered her sword. “What did you come here to buy?”

“It hardly matters, does it? There is nothing more here of value. Clearly, I did not kill these men. For all I know, you did!”

The half-elf’s eyes went hard, but she realized at once that this was no idle threat. She was not the only one who would recognize the marks of an elven sword, and once again, here she stood over the work of an assassin. Fortunately, Diloontier had his own reputation with which to contend. “Mention our presence here to anyone,” she snapped, “and the Watch captain will be reading an anonymous letter about your visit to this little shop. Now go!”

Diloontier darted for the exit. His boots beat a frantic, stumbling rhythm upon the wooden walk. The half-elf sighed and sheathed her sword.

Danilo looked sharply at her. “You let him go. Do you believe him?”

“About Lady Cassandra? Not a word of it. What does she need with youth potions, if she has elven blood? Although I suspect she would support Diloontier’s lie rather than lay claim to her heritage.”

He did not refute her. “There is nothing more to be seen here.”

Arilyn was silent for a long moment. Actually, she suspected there was much, much more to be gleaned in this city. The tren came from these tunnels. So did poisons, which had most likely been used to kill Lady Dezlentyr. Arilyn had gone to considerable trouble to find out Diloontier’s supplier, visiting acquaintances she had not seen for years and creating markers that she dreaded paying.

However, at the moment there was little more that they could do. This place had yielded not answers, but new and disturbing questions. “Whatever Diloontier came to buy is long gone,” she agreed. She nudged at one of the corpses with her boot. ‘Whoever killed these men has it.”

“Killing to procure poison,” Danilo mused. “Seems rather an indirect way to go about things, doesn’t it? This is not my sphere of expertise, mind you, but it seems to me that the affair would run much smoother all around if the middle merchant were removed from the transaction.”

That was precisely what Arilyn intended to do, but she was not yet ready to voice her intentions. In many ways, Danilo embraced elven ways more wholeheartedly than she herself did. He trusted Elaith Craulnober and the pledge of Elf-friend. She could not bring herself to destroy that until she knew for certain that her suspicions described truth rather than her own bias.

Nor was she quite ready to confront the old patterns and roles into which she was falling with such ease. Every time she turned she was slapped with reminders of her dark reputation. If truth be told, she felt more at home in Waterdeep’s underbelly than she did at a nobleman’s ball. Her human side was coming grimly to the fore, while the elven magic of her moonblade was oddly sporadic. At the rate she was going, Danilo might not

have to worry about the inconvenience of life with an elven hero.

Arilyn glanced down at the moonblade, half hoping that it would summon her to duty with faint green light. Of course it did not.

She wondered if it would ever do so again.

When they returned to the city above, Danilo took at once to his bathhouse. After an hour in a hot tub, the memory of the underground city’s fetid stench began to fade. Danilo was soaking still when his steward came tapping at the door.

“Your pardon, sir, but you have received a most urgent message from Lord Rhammas.”

News of an invading flight of dragons would not have been more unexpected. Danilo all but leaped from the tub, sending bathwater and soap flying like a flock of small, startled birds. He seized a towel and strode from his dressing room. “Is someone hurt? Sick? Or is it Judith? Gods! Her babe is due at any time. Her first!”