Mistshore (6 page)

“Could have been gibberish he was talkin’. A dyin’ man might say things that don’t make much sense,” Sull said.

“No, he was very specific. He said it was in a box.”

“If you say so. But we don’t have time to be solvin’ riddles, lass. What do you need?”

Icelin thought about it. “A sledgehammer,” she decided.

Sull blinked. “Wasn’t expectin’ that.”

“Over here.” Icelin went behind the counter, where a narrow stretch of floor fronted a bookcase containing her great-uncle’s favorite volumes. They were bound in leather, with red ribbons draped over the spines. He loved to read them on slow days. Tipped back on his wooden stool, he’d lay the pages open on his lap. When she was a child, Icelin had perched on the counter to listen to him read to her.

“I need to break through these boards,” Icelin said. She wanted to smash them with her bare hands, to howl out the rage boiling inside her. But she would need her hands, her whole body’s strength, in case she had to cast spells. “Do you think you could break them?” she asked Sull.

The butcher hiked up a leg and brought it down against the floorboards. The old wood splintered and gave way.

“There’s dirt here,” Sull said. “I don’t feel anythin’ else.”

“Let me in there.” He made way for her to crouch over the small hole. She felt with both hands in the.musty darkness.

“Hurry, lass,” Sull urged her. “Someone will have heard that noise.”

“Found it.” The box was small and narrow. She could feel the ridges of some kind of scrollwork running along the outer edges. When she brought it up, Sull’s gasp drowned out her own.

“Bring the light,” Icelin said.

Sull held up the lantern. The box shone, eclipsing the moonlight in the glow of flame. “Is that—”

“Gold,” Sull confirmed. “Or I’m no judge of beef. A small fortune’s worth of it, at least. You have a dragon’s hoard of mysteries about you, lass, and that’s a certainty.”

“Let’s hope this is the last one,” Icelin said. Escape was her greatest concern. She had no time to ponder what the box contained or why her great-uncle had concealed it from her. She buried it at the bottom of her pack and blew out the lamp.

Cerest didn’t bother to light the lamps in front of his Sammarin Street home. He bypassed the front entrance of the blocky stone structure, with its single tower braced against the main building. He headed instead for his private garden.

He’d spent the largest share of his hoarded coin here, where he could be among the wild things and the quiet. It was his place to think, and where he often met the two women whose company he sought now.

Moonlight cast milky shadows over the cobblestone path leading to the small gladehouse. It was not as grand as those found at a high noble’s mansion. The long sheets of glass that formed the circular cage were expensive and fragile, but they ornamented his most exotic blossoms: pantefiower, with its bell shape and dark red stems; yellow orchids, the most fragrant; and all the rose varieties he could afford.

He lifted the latch on the door and stepped inside. The elf women were waiting, perched on stone benches on either side of a long rectangular pond. A fine layer of green scum covered the water. He would have to tend it when he was alone. Cerest looked forward to such tasks, but the Locks would have to come fitst.

Ristlara and Shenan, the Locks of North Ward, were sisters, or so they claimed. Privately, Cerest wondered if they were lovers. Not that it mattered, as long as they came to his bed.

Both had fiery gold hair, bronze skin, and moss green eyes. They were too beautiful and knew it, but they were also the richest pair of professional thieves living openly in the City of Splendors. That position demanded respect.

The Locks had defined the market for rare antiquities in the city, and Cerest knew what pleased them best: magic, the older the better. Their private mansion resembled more of a museum, stocked with artifacts either stolen or recovered from

tombs across Faerűn, all of it carefully tagged and catalogued. It was a concise history of thievery that covered almost two centuries.

The sisters were mostly retired, preferring to commission their raids among the eager treasure-seekers who passed through the city. They weie still tabid collectors, and to date, Cerest was their most successful contact. But for all his dealings with the sisters—both in the bedchambet and out of it—he’d never been invited to see inside their residence.

With this venture, Cerest vowed, things would change.

“Clearly, you don’t see the need to maintain your business contacts, Cerest, since we haven’t heard from you this tenday, but my sister and I were hosting a dinner party when you dragged us away to your swamp.” Ristlara leaned back on the bench, crossing her shapely legs and scowling at him. She looked like a bronze sculpture against the stark gray stone. Her hair was upswept and bobbed at the back of her head, giving her face and neck a long, elegant line.

“Let him speak,” Shenan told her sister. The older elf wore her hair loose, almost wild, and was as sedate as her sister was furious.

“Ladies, I appreciate you coming on such short notice,” Cerest began. “You know I wouldn’t have contacted you after such an inexcusable absence—rousted you from tea with boorish human muckrakers—if it wasn’t important.”

“How did you know who we were meeting?” Ristlata demanded.

Her sister smothered a chuckle with the back of her hand. “Those are foul words to use, Cerest,” Shenan chided him. “The humans led a legitimate expedition—a feat you have not achieved in some yeais.”

“Digging in farm fields and wastelands where no real magic has dwelled for a century, you mean.” With a melodramatic flourish, Cerest slid onto the bench next to Ristlara. He pulled the bronze

she-cat onto his lap. “No thank you. I don’t take up after the spellplague’s leavings. Your lovely human pets are wasting your coin, sucking you dry like parasites. I have something better for you,” he said against the squirming female’s ear.

He felt her face grow warm against his cheek. Cetest nuzzled her neck until she stopped thrashing. “Are you interested, Ristlara? Or should I be coddling your sister?”

“Will it make us a lot of coin?” Shenan asked.

“Darlings, you won’t believe me when I tell you,” Cetest said. “I’ve found Elgreth’s granddaughter.”

Ristlara turned in his arms. Their faces were inches apart, but she’d stopped flinching at his scars a long time ago. “Are you jesting?”

“Not a bit.”

“Have you spoken to her?” Shenan asked. She eyed Cerest shrewdly. “Will she work with us?”

“Not yet,” Cerest said. “She needs time. I made a terrible first impression, I’m afraid.”

“Poor Cerest,” Ristlara cooed. She tipped her head back against his shoulder, so he could not help but catch the scented oil in het hair, or notice the full effect of her cleavage in her green lace gown. “Did you frighten her away? Did she think she was seeing a mask and not a face at all?” She teached up to touch his melted skin.

Cerest caught her wrist before she could touch him. He laid his other hand casually around her throat. For a moment, the elf’s eyes widened fearfully. The irony of where she sat only then dawned on her.

The Locks were well aware of the change in Cerest’s demeanor since his disfigurement. One of his former servants, a retired fence named Tolomon Shinz, had been unable to keep from staring at Cerest’s scars. Cerest had been too ill at first to respond with any censure, but later, when the immediate pain and horror had abated, a general wildness of temper took its place.

He was known to react with violent outbursts to any insult, real or perceived, and so when Tolomon Shinz had looked too long at his crooked ear one Ky thorn morning, Cerest had reacted decisively… most would say harshly.

Cerest had since mastered his emotions to such an extent that he could ignore most people, no matter their reaction to his deformity. But that didn’t change the fact that Tolomon Shinz was entombed beneath Cerest’s fish pond, and Ristlara’s shapely toes dangled above the water scant inches from where his skull was decomposing.

The pretty elf, staring up at him while his hand noosed her neck, was most likely wondering, if only for a breath, if a similar fate awaited her. Ristlara’s uncertainty was Cerest’s power, and the elf reveled in it.

Shenan cleared her throat, and the tense breath passed.

Cerest relaxed and pushed the golden bitch off his lap.

“I was insensitive to Icelin,”-Cerest admitted, continuing their conversation as if nothing had happened. “Too greedy for my own good.”

“You made the same mistake with Elgreth,” Shenan reminded him.

“That was different. We had history between us. I expected more from Elgreth. But Icelin—”

“How lovely. It has a name,” Ristlara purred.

“I think he’s smitten, Sister,” Shenan said. “I wonder if the lady will feel the same.”

“She will,” Cerest assured them. “I’m eliminating all her safe places. The life she knows is ending. When she has nothing left, she’ll come to me gladly. I will be the only one who can protect her.”

“And we will turn a tidy profit besides,” Shenan said before he could. “It is a tempting offer.” She swept a hand down beside the bench to caress one of the rose blossoms. She took hold of a thorny stem and severed it from the bush with her nail.

“Shall we agree to be partners again?” She offered the rose to Cerest.

Cerest took the flower and clenched it in a fist. Blood welled where its thorns pierced his flesh. Shenan watched in fascination as the droplets ran down his golden skin.

It was just the sort of poetic, gruesome gestute she preferred. In bed, she was no different, her nails digging blood trails into his skin until he cried out.

Dangerous, sadistic cats, these two. Cetest couldn’t help adoring them both.

“We are in agreement,” he said. He held out the bloody rose and watched Shenan kiss the stem.

Glass shattered behind them. Cerest turned, his hand on his sword hilt.

Melias lay sprawled in the doorway of the gladehouse. He’d collapsed against the structure and shattered the fragile door panel with his weight. Blood trailed from a blunt strike to the elf s head.

Cerest crouched next to the dazed elf. Melias’s pupils were huge. His mouth moved, but the words that came out made no sense. He’d suffered too much damage to his head to live.

“Melias.” Cerest shook the elf, trying to get him to focus. Melias whimpered, and his head lolled to one side.

“I think you might be in for more of a game than you thought, Cerest,” Shenan commented.

The small elf crouched next to Melias and cradled his head in her lap. “Dearest,” she cooed in his ear. “Who did this to you?

“She… ran,” the elf murmured. He was looking past Shenan, up at the gladehouse ceiling and through it to the stars. “We’re dead… butchered… us.” A slack, vacant smile passed over the elf’s face.

“Yes, my sweet. Unfortunately, she did.” Shenan took the elf s chin and forehead in her hands and jerked his head to the

side. The sharp crack echoed off the gladehouse walls.

“You take too many liberties, Shenan,” Cerest told her. “He was my man. I wanted him questioned.”

“It was a kindness to end it,” Shenan said, rising to her feet. “Pain is only alluring when there is the possibility of surviving it.”

“I have to leave,” Cerest said. He headed for the main building, leaving Melias’s body concealed in the gladehouse.

The death of his men complicated matters with the Watch. They would not easily believe a waif of a girl could overpower two armed elves. How in the names of the gods had she done it?

She must be more powerful than I imagined, Cerest thought. The idea gave him a thrill of excitement and trepidation all in the same moment.

So much the better he declaim her a murderess, Cerest thought. He would tell the Watch that his men had been killed trying to retrieve his stolen property. They would have no proof to the contrary, as long as Icelin kept running.

The she-elves trailed behind him. “Do you intend to track her down by yourself?” Ristlara said.

Cerest stopped at the door to his house. Another idea occurred to him. On the surface it seemed perfect: efficient, clean, and with no way it could be traced back to him. But could he trust the Locks?

When he turned, he addressed Shenan. “Those human muckrakers you’re employing—how many are there?”

“Seven,” Shenan said. “But they can muster the strength of twelve or more for longer expeditions. Why?”

“What say you put them to a different use, something that might actually end in profit?”

He could sense Ristlara gearing up for a fight, but Shenan’s look was speculative. “How much of the profit would be for us?” she asked.

“If I get Icelin—unharmed—the percentage will twice exceed what you take now, ” Cerest promised.

Shenan smiled. “You truly are smitten,” she said. “We’ll bring the men. I want to watch this spectacle.”

Watchman Kersh Tegerin turned off Copper Street, crossing a footbridge linking Dailantha’s Herbs and Exotic Plants to Breerdil’s Fine Wines. A small, man-made stream ran under the bridge. Breerdril and Dailantha spent a small fortune to keep the water enchanted to appear midnight blue.

Kersh counted the paces from one end of the footbridge to the other. It was a habit from childhood that he’d never quite broken. Meren, his old friend, used to tease him for it.

The bell for gateclose had rung long ago, but he still had a little time before he needed to join up with his patrol. Kersh wasn’t looking forward to the night’s work. The word had gone out when he’d left the barracks: the Watch had orders to bring in Icelin Team for questioning.

How in the names of the gods did the girl get herself into these situations?

Kersh nodded to the lamplighters as they passed him on the street. The trio of men waved back, their iron reaching-hooks resting against their shoulders. They were sooty standard-bearers. The soft glow of flickering lights followed in their wake.

This time of night always made Kersh think of Meren, and tonight the feeling was heightened. They’d been on patrol together ten winters ago and had become fast friends. Meren had been young and, with all the wisdom of youth, had believed the quiet streets of North Ward held no threat for someone as spry and as skilled as he.