Nael swallowed, lifted his chin, swallowed again, then said, 'I've brought neither gems nor my deed here with me, but-'
Without waiting for a signal, one of the crossbowmen fired, and Aldurl Nael's left eye was suddenly a bloody profusion of sprouting wood and flight-feathers. The brass-merchant reeled in his seat, head flopping back and mouth gaping, and did not move again. Crimson rivulets of blood spilled from his mouth, seeking the floor.
'-but how unfortunate,' Caethur said mildly, finishing Nael's sentence for him. 'For Nael, and for all of you. After all, we can't have any witnesses to such wanton butchery, can we?'
The other guard calmly fired his crossbow, and Hammuras died.
As the three surviving merchants shouted and surged desperately to their feet, both guards tossed their spent crossbows aside and plucked cushions off a shelf affixed to the back of Caethur's chair. Four more hand- crossbows gleamed in the lamplight, loaded and ready. Coolly the guards snatched them up-and used them.
Kamburan groaned for a surprising long time, but the rest of the room was still in but a breath or two.
'The bolts my men use, by the way,' the moneylender told the corpses conversationally, 'are tipped with brain-burn, to keep prying Watchful Order mages from learning anything of our meeting-and how you happened to so carelessly end up wearing war-darts in your faces. After all, we wouldn't want to start one more irresponsible city fashion, would we?'
Caethur rose from his chair, nodded to his two guards, and waved a hand at the gem-coffers on the table. 'When you're done stripping the bodies of all deeds and coins and suchlike, bring those.'
As he strode to the door and slipped out, he took something from a belt-pouch. It looked like a beast's claw: a grip-bar studded with a row of little daggers. When Caethur closed his hand around the bar, the blades protruded from between his fingers like a row of sheathed talons. With his other hand, the moneylender drew a belt dagger and used it to cautiously flick away the sheaths that covered every blade of the claw. Something dark and wet glistened on each razor-sharp point.
Thrusting the dagger through a belt-loop and putting the ven-omed claw behind his back, Caethur waited, humming a jaunty tune softly under his breath.
When his two laden bodyguards came to the door, he gave them a frown as he blocked their way and pointed back into the room.
'You've missed something,' he said sharply.
His bodyguards gave him astonished and displeased looks but whirled to look at the dead merchants; the moneylender was not a master to be crossed.
The moment they turned Caethur took a swift step, slashed them both across the backs of their necks with his claw, and sprang away to avoid the thrashing spasms he knew would follow.
The guards were young and strong. After they stiffened with identical grunts of astonished agony, they managed to whirl toward their master, glaring, and claw at the air wildly for some seconds ere the venom stilled their limbs, and sent them toppling into the long dark chill of oblivion.
Caethur applied another knife, this one slaked liberally with brain-burn, to both of the men he'd just slain, and calmly set about collecting everything of value in the room full of corpses. After all, brain-burn was expensive . . . and after word got around of this night's deaths, the hiring-price of guards agreeing to work for him was bound to go up sharply.
Still, the cost of just one man informing the Lords of Waterdeep of his deeds would be much higher. Kamburan's cloak, still draped over the back of his chair, was unstained, and when bundled around Caethur's takings, served well as a carry-sack. He drew his own cloak around him with not a hair out of place nor any change in his easy half-smile at all.
It wasn't the first time Caethur the moneylender had walked away alone from a room full of dead men. Such things were, after all, a regrettable but all-too-often inevitable feature of his profession.
Outside, the shadow moved, swinging up and away from the shutter, seeking the edge of the roof. A booted foot slipped, a curse blazed sudden and bright in a mind that kept its dangling body coldly silent-and with a sudden surge of effort, the shadow gained the roof and scrambled away.
* * * * *
As soon as he entered the portal, he felt it: a disturbance in the flow of the Weave, straight ahead. Someone or something was casting a spell on his intended destination or had laid a trap of enchantment on it already. Only those like himself, highly attuned to the Weave, could feel it-and move to avoid whatever danger was waiting.
Chuckling soundlessly, the archmage stepped aside, moving through the drifting blue nothingness to emerge elsewhere, from a portal linked to neither the one he'd entered nor the imperiled one it reached.
* * * * *
Narnra crouched in the lee of a large but crumbling chimney, wincing at the burning ache in her shoulder. She'd torn something inside, it seemed. Something small, thank the gods.
Ah, yes, the watching, all-seeing gods. She glanced up, and thought another silent curse upon the enthusiastically devout idiots who enspelled the Plinth to glow so brightly by night. Thieves don't welcome beacons that illuminate their working world well.
And a thief was what Narnra Shalace was. That had been her profession since her mother's mysterious death and the rush of neighbors, clients, and Waterdhavians she'd never laid eyes on before to snatch all they could of what had belonged to her mother. Only frantic flight had kept a frightened and furious Narnra from being taken herself, doubtless to be sold as a slave by whichever noble had set his men to chasing her.
Everyone knew there were laws in Waterdeep that touched nobles and many more that-somehow-did not. Moreover, noble and rich merchant families had ships and wagons in plenty and outlying lands beyond Waterdeep's laws to travel to, where anything or anyone could be taken.
Leaving a suddenly coinless, bereft Narnra Shalace hunted through the alleys and rooftops. So she'd become what she was being treated as-one more thief scratching to survive in a city that was not kind to thieves.
So here she was, aching and scheming on a decaying rooftop in Trades Ward. A lonely young lass, fairly nimble in her leaps and tumblings but not particularly beautiful, with her slender, long-limbed build, her hacked-off dark hair, black-fire eyes, and beak of a nose. 'The Silken Shadow,' she billed herself, but still she saw men smirk when she uttered that title in the dingy, nameless taverns near the docks where odd stolen items could be sold for a few coppers-and no questions.
The winter had been hard. If it hadn't been for chimneys like this one, the cold would have taken her before the first snows-and one had to fight for the warmest rooftop spots in Waterdeep.
As it was, Narnra spent much time hungry these days. Hungry and angry. Fear was with her at every waking moment, keeping her glancing behind her and knowing it was largely in vain. She could not help but be uncomfortably aware of how skilled other thieves in this city were … to say nothing of the Watch and the Watchful Order and the Masked Lords alone knew how many powerful wizards. She was a match for none of them and not even a laughable challenge to most.
To come to their notice-save as a passing amusement-would be to die.
So here she crouched, desperate for coins to buy food for her belly and all too apt, these days, to fall into rages.
Rage is something a thief who expects to live to see the dawn can ill afford.
She sighed soundlessly. Oh, she was lithe and acrobatic enough to prowl the rooftops, but not comely enough to seek the warm and easier coin-hers if she could dance unclad inside festhalls. No, she was just one more lonely outlander scrambling to make a dishonest living on the streets of Waterdeep. Scrambling because she lacked the weapons of a noble name or a shop of her own to make forging a dishonest living comparatively easy.
Scowling, Narnra drew forth the purse she'd snatched earlier in that street fight in Dock Ward. A gang of thieves, that must have been, to set upon two merchants that way, and she'd raced in and plucked their prize, so they'd be looking for her. . . .
All for three gold coins-mismatched, from as many cities, but all heavy and true metal-six silvers, four coppers, and a claim-token to a lockbox somewhere in Faerun that she knew not. Well, they would have to serve her.
