Authors: Ed Greenwood
“ ’Tis the thought of food that does it,” Myrmeen teased. “Suddenly you can hew your
way through hosts.”
“Well, if they stand between me and a goodly feast, yes,” Mirt replied, starting down
the passage.
They had almost reached the door where the passage gave into the entry hall when it
swung open and a dozen of Torr’s hireswords started through it.
“Halt,” Elminster barked, “in the name of Maraunth Torr!”
Warriors blinked at him, mouths falling open and drawn swords wavering.
“It’s a trick,” the oldest among them snapped. “
That’s
not the master!”
“You sure?” another asked, frowning. “He changes shape, y’know—uses spells and all
to do it. I seen him.”
“Of
course
I’m sure! Doesn’t sound like him, doesn’t act like him—”
“Oh, for Mystra’s sake,” Mirt growled, striding into their midst and grabbing one
warrior off his feet to use as a shield as he thrust his sword up into the throat
of another. “Let’s be
about
it!”
And as the dying man staggered backward into his fellows, blood spurting, Mirt swung
the struggling man he had in a chokehold around in a great kicking arc, jostling one
hiresword into the next. Curses and shoving erupted everywhere—and Myrmeen darted
in to stab and slash at faces and throats in the armored crowd.
Elminster dodged to come in behind her, lunging like a swordsman at warriors who’d
started after her but promptly stumbled over their dying, falling fellows. The hireswords
were all still hemmed in at the doorway, which could take three slender, disciplined
servants walking
abreast but only two large and armored men carrying weapons, and he meant to keep
things that way.
“More will be coming up fast behind these,” the voice of Alusair warned. “You made
enough noise and tumult that all of them in the entry and feast halls heard you. They’re
all setting aside what they were eating and scrambling to get into the battle. ’Ware
thrown axes.”
Mirt was tired of whirling around the weight of his choking captive and let go of
the man, putting his hip into the falling back and depositing the shouting man against
the thighs of three of his fellows; they all went down in a heap. Giving Mirt time
to turn and put the entire weight of his body behind a backhanded slash that drove
two men helplessly into Elminster’s reach.
Myrmeen was a whirlwind of deft stabs, in under chins and through helm slits, but
as Torr’s warriors slowly sorted themselves out and the fallen gave them room to ply
their steel, the fray became a frantic ringing clangor of slash and parry—and she
was the one who panted, “Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“A little late for that
now
, lass!” Mirt bellowed from beside her, as hireswords pressed in at him from several
sides and he struck aside their reaching blades with his own sword and one he’d snatched
up from the fallen. “Besides, that one over
there
—see?—has a book shoved down his breastplate, and I’m mightily curious to see what
it is.” He was looking at a dead hiresword atop a heap of fallen fellows, whose slit
throat was bleeding down and away from the half-exposed tome.
“
Better Swordplay for the Masses
?” Elminster suggested, striking aside a blade with one of his swords and running
its owner through the throat with his second, just-snatched-up sword. “Some of these
jacks could use such a read.”
“If,” Myrmeen called to him, “they know how to read.” She added a heartfelt “
Hah!
” as she broke her sword free of a warrior’s blade-binding, shoved with all her weight
and forced him back a step—and used his off-balance moment to feed him a dagger right
up through his jaw.
Mirt ran up a heap of the dead to leap feetfirst down into the side of a warrior already
struggling for footing, and the man crashed into two men trying to get past, which
slammed them all against the wall, where Mirt cut them all new red grins and then
whirled to face other nearby hireswords and give them a triumphant, teeth-bared bellow.
And suddenly what was left of Torr’s army was running, fleeing back the way they’d
come with fearfully hissed curses and in an untidy stumbling thunder of boots, leaving
their dead—a
lot
of dead—behind them.
“Only twelve left now,” Alusair reported, “assuming Shaaan has taken care of the two
who fell through the floor of her bedchamber, but hasn’t harmed any others.”
“Ah,” Elminster responded, pointing with a sword that was running dark red with the
blood of others, “but she has. Look yonder.”
The high-ceilinged and gloomy entry hall had a three-servant-wide door in the center
of its western wall. That part of the west wall between door and the corner where
it gave into the Copper Receiving Room was cloaked in a dusty, faded, gray-cobweb-shrouded
old tapestry of impressive size—that was now stirring, as two former warriors of Torr,
now helmless and wearing only a few plates of their armor, here and there, so their
sweat-stained and supple underleathers were revealed, came slithering out from underneath
the moldering edge of the tapestry, and undulated across the floor.
Their faces were gray with death, the eyes milky-white and filmed over, and they wore
no boots or weapons—but metal finger sheaths had been fitted to their fingertips to
give them talons, and they were dragging themselves along by means of them. Those
curved metal points, everyone knew, would be coated with venom.
“Busy little murderess, isn’t she?” Myrmeen murmured. “I won’t particularly enjoy
dismembering them, but if it’s that or die horribly …”
“Let’s just close the door on them, and leave them in here for now,” Mirt suggested.
“The entry hall links the kitchen and the Halaunt family apartments with the rest
of the ground floor,” Elminster pointed out. “So unless you want to go down into the
cellars or up into the open air every time you want to traipse from cook hearth to
guest bedchambers … or break holes through walls—between the Green Audience Chamber
and the Blue Chamber, for instance—we must deal with these. And forcing them outside
just sends their menace out into the arms of Purple Dragons and war wizards who won’t
be expecting them, and perhaps out into all Cormyr, beyond …”
“All right,
all right
, my civic duty beckons,” Mirt growled. “So, the plan?” He hefted his sword in one
hand and a hand axe he’d selected from the arsenal of the fallen in the other.
“How about we close the door on them
for now
,” Myrmeen suggested, “until we concoct a plan?”
“Fair enough,” Elminster agreed, and the door was closed. “Luse?”
“Yes?”
“Could ye check on Manshoon again for us, and then try to find Shaaan and what she’s
up to?”
“Of course. I go.”
Myrmeen bent and plucked out the book Mirt had noticed earlier, from the body of the
hiresword who would no longer be needing it.
She opened it, flipped a few pages, and snorted. “Poetry,” she said dismissively.
“Verse need not be bad, lass,” Elminster reproved her. “The best incantations are
elegant poetry.”
Myrmeen looked up at him, her expression severe. “This is not elegant poetry,” she
informed him, then cleared her throat, lifted her chin like a dowager duchess, and
declaimed grandly, “It was indeed a dark and stormy night, in which there were many
dark and stormy knights.” Then her voice returned to its norm, as she added in disgust,
“Gods, who writes this chamberpot-wipe drivel?”
El chuckled. “There are worlds full of scribes, lass. Remember, whate’er the result,
they put pen to paper out of love. There are saner ways to make a living.”
“Oh, like playing adventurer?” Mirt grunted. “Or trying to be a wizard, in a place
where magic can’t be trusted?”
“Lord of Waterdeep,” Elminster said gently, “ye would do well to remember this always:
magic can never be trusted.”
R
IGHT, LASS
, I’
M READY
. O
PEN THE DOOR
.”
Myrmeen obliged, and Mirt threw one hand axe through it at the envenomed undead in
the room beyond, leaning low into his throw and raising one leg like a dancer posing
in a tavern. Then he hurled another.
The undead reeled, unbalanced by the force of the whirling axes. Severed fingers flew,
and half-severed digits bounced and dangled. Mirt lurched sideways, picked up the
next pair of salvaged warriors’ axes, and threw them. More fingers flew.
Then the undead he’d maimed was shouldered aside by its fellow envenomed, sliding
into view from one side of the doorway to move through it. Myrmeen slammed the door
into it, hard, then sprang free and ran to snatch up axes of her own from the long
line she and Mirt had arranged. He was already burying two hand axes in this new target,
pinning one arm to the undead warrior’s thigh with one of his throws.
Myrmeen’s throws weren’t as hard as Mirt’s, but they lopped off poisoned fingers with
precision, metal talon sheaths and all.
By the time the undead were too close to throw more axes at them, they were down to
a few dangling fingers each, so Mirt and Myrmeen dismembered them with relative ease.
“Well, that was easier than I’d thought ’twould be,” Mirt growled, looking down at
a litter of severed fingers and a still-rolling head. Both of Shaaan’s envenomed undead
lay strewn across the floor of the entry hall in grisly pieces.
“You’re the only one who’s found gauntlets that fit, so stop gloating and scoop them
into this coffer for me,” Myrmeen snapped. “We still have to fight our way into the
kitchens, clean up whatever we find there, hope the Serpent Queen hasn’t poisoned
everything, and get cooking. I’m getting ravenous.”
Mirt smiled, bent down, then scooped up and held out a handful of fingers. “Magically
invigorated meat fingers cloaked in mystery sauce?”
“Your sense of humor needs work, Old Wolf, really it does. Just put them in the damned
coffer, before I decide a better use for this is hurling it at your head.”
“My, my, the lady bites!”
“No, we don’t know each other that well, yet.”
Mirt winced. “El?”
The long-bearded wizard’s face was suddenly severe, his expression’s falsity betrayed
by twinkling eyes. “Don’t look to me for protection or support, old friend. Ye dug
the pit, and ye leaped into it—and I’m not now inclined to rush past thee and lie
down to serve as a mattress to soothe thy landing.”
“But you’re so good at that! You’ve done it so often, for so many others before me!”
“They were prettier,” Elminster told the moneylender, “and less massive, too.”
“Coffer,” Myrmeen reminded patiently, holding it up. Mirt carefully stowed all the
fingers he could find within it, then looked at the larger remnants still adorning
the floor. “And these?”
“There’s a large crock in the larders that should serve,” she replied, “but we’ve
got to reoccupy all those rooms first, and that’ll probably involve fighting the last
few Torr men. Being as they haven’t tried to fight their way past us, and out of Oldspires.”
Mirt shook his head. “What a crazed way to build a house. All this space, room upon
room like the high house of one of the richest and most powerful Waterdhavian families—and
only one door to the outside. Just the one.” He shook his head. “Is this, ah,
usual
among the country architecture of Cormyrean nobility?”
“You mean, are they all this mad?” Myrmeen’s voice was wry. “They are, but no, this
is not the norm. Homes do burn down in Cormyr like everywhere else, so most people
prefer to have more than one way out.
I’ve visited many country mansions where every last ground-floor room in some wings
had its own outside door. Keeps the servants right busy digging away snowdrifts all
winter long.”
Mirt nodded. “And how is it there happened to be a handy coffer sitting on yon table?
You didn’t just dump out the ashes of past Halaunts, did you?”
“No, I dumped out some pipeleaf that had moldered to near powder decades ago. It seems
this Lord Halaunt didn’t smoke, but earlier Halaunts did. Now, are we done here? I
want to get back into that kitchen!”
“Fight our way back into that kitchen,” Elminster warned. “Two Torr men have been
watching us from the door on the far side of the Copper Receiving Room from the first
swing ye took at their Shaaan-animated fellows.”
“So do we march right over and have at them?” Mirt asked. “Or try the kitchen door
right here in yonder wall?”
“This one here,” Myrmeen decided. “Otherwise we don’t know how many of them could
burst out and come around to shove their blades up our backsides.” However, she looked
to Elminster for his approval.
He nodded and smiled. “With magic chancy, thy preferences rule, for ye have the blade
skills, and are the swiftest and most agile of we three.”
“Oh,” Myrmeen teased, “
thank
you, saer, said she!” Then she whispered, “Ready?”
When they both nodded, she strolled over to where she could slide the coffer full
of fingers down out of sight behind a carved stone umbrella stand in the shape of
a wood nymph clad only in strategically placed grapes and the entwining-her-limbs
vine they were growing on.
And then took two swift sidesteps, and hauled open the kitchen door.
It swung in well-oiled ease, neither locked nor barred, and the charging Mirt got
a glimpse of three startled warrior’s faces, two of them dropping their jaws and the
third yammering, “They’re over here! Two of the three the master ordered us to behead!”
Then the Torr warriors wasted precious time grabbing their helms and jamming them
on their heads—by which time the lumbering Mirt, who could move quite fast once he’d
wheezed his way up to top speed, had crashed through the doorway, stepped on a greasy
roasting pan amid the ankle-deep litter of ransacked cookware, ladles, and the like
that now covered the kitchen floor, and slid right up to them.