incident.
'We've promised Lady Ruellyn to do the best we can,' Sophraea answered. Then, looking around the table at the honest faces of the women gathered there, she decided to tell the truth. 'It would help if we could find a certain shoe. A gold brocade dancing slipper, very old-fashioned in style.'
The women waved away any knowledge of dancing slippers. 'Now,' said one thin maid, 'Lady Ruellyn has dozens of slippers, but none of gold brocade that I remember.'
'My old mistress used to have little dancing shoes witha painted heel, but hers were silver lace and not gold brocade,' said another one. 'She kept them in a box, with sprigs of herbs stuffed down in the toes to keep them fresh. She never wore them. But my old girl showed me the shoes once and said that they were her first dancing slippers and she meant to be buried in them. Poor thing, I'm sure the family forgot after she passed away.'
The rest of the women murmured an agreement and slipped into discussions of past employers. Sophraea soon realized that all of the women had worked for noble families elsewhere in Waterdeep until their elderly employers had fallen upon hard times.
Each woman told tales of how their elderly and aristocratic employers had eventually sold the family homes to Stunk, after the fat man had bought everything else of value from them.
'He makes the old ones loans,' whispered one maid whose own hair was more gray than black. 'And tells them that they can pay him back bit by bit. But it's never enough some how, and they start selling off pieces of furniture to make the payment, and then the paintings off the walls, and then the jewels that their granny's granny got for her wedding ever so long ago. And, quicker than you think, there's just nothing left to pay Stunk. And then he comes by, all smiles and flattery, telling them not to worry, he'll take the whole property off their hands, they won't have to worry about paying us servants anymore, and he'll set them up some place nice to live out their last days.'
'Nice!' interjected the cook, who had moved over to the fire to stir a cauldron puffing out a spicy smoke. She pulled her dripping spoon out of the pot and waved it with little regard for the sugary splatters she sprayed across the hearthstone. 'He put my old lady in one bitty little room down by the docks. It was horrid and dark and damp. If Lord Adarbrent hadn't brought her some nice pieces from his own house and a good wool blanket for the winter, she would have been ever so miserable.'
Just about, to leave the table to look for Gustin, Sophraea picked up the peeling knife instead and innocently asked, 'Lord Adarbrent?'
'They may call him the Walking Corpse,' said the cook, 'but he proved himself a kind friend to my mistress.'
'And to mine,' answered the gray-haired maid.
'He tried to talk my lord out of taking Stunk's loans,' declared the laundress, shifting her basket to avoid the cook's wildly waving spoon and stains on her clean tablecloths. 'Would that he had listened to him, I wouldn't be working here.'
'But there's no denying that Lord Adarbrent has a terrible temper,' added the cook as she stalked back to the table. 'Why my old lady told me that he nearly horsewhipped a man to death once. When Lord Adarbrent was young, the nobles of Waterdeep were a different breed. Why just look at a man wrong in those days, and he'd be challenging you quicker than you could blink. I see you, saer, let us duel, saer, that's what all the young blades would say when they went on the promenade. And people feared Adarbrents in those days. At least that's what'my old lady said!'
'I thought Lord Adarbrent was all alone and had no family,' said Sophraea.
'Well, they've all been gone for a long time,' the cook responded. 'But they caused some stir more than fifty years ago, during one of the bad times.'
Sophraea looked up at this.
'Of course, I was just a baby then,' the cook went on. 'But so much change was happening inside the city's walls and outside in the world. The dark arts attracted certain nobles, especially those who had suffered great losses. Oh, most ladies played at stances at their parties, but there were some who took it a bit further than that. Thete were some who raised ghosts. The sort that had secret rooms, at the top of the tower or down in the basement, with vats of this and glass tubes of that, and nasty smells seeping out to drive the housekeeper crazy.'
Outside, the thunder died away, leaving only the heavy splatter of rain against the high small windows ofthe kitchen. More rain hissed down the chimney and made the fire smoke. The cook snapped an order at the pot girl, who obediently left her bucket and rattled the damper and plied the poker until the smoke settled.
Then the pot girl crept closer to the table. The laundress slid a stool across the floor to her. Perched on top, the child wrapped her arms around her knees and shivered with delight as the older women began to swap tales of hauntings in old Waterdeep. With an absentminded gesture, the cook handed the pot girl a biscuit to nibble while the stories continued.
While their tales of dark deeds in the City of the Dead rarely matched what Sophraea knew to be the truth (one or two exaggerations nearly caused her to giggle), each mentioned more than once the fashion for ghosts that plagued Waterdeep's finer homes for a brief time long ago.
'So the Adarbrents called forth spirits?' Sophraea finally asked.
'Not the current Lord Adarbrent,' said the cook with stout loyalty to the man who had rescued her old mistress. 'But he had a cousin who frightened my old lady when she was girl. A truly nasty witch, if you know what I mean. She died from some ritual gone wrong and the family sealed up her rooms the very day that they buried her.'
Sophraea remembered the sour, cold smell of Lord Adarbrent's house. Perhaps something was dead behind the old noble's wainscoting, something more sinister than a mouse, and something that needed a stronger cure than the gift of a kitten.
Suddenly the tales of haunting were interrupted by a very live bumping noise below their feet. A crash, like a stack of lumber knocked over by a man rolling around, could be distinctly heard.
'Old chimney flue,' explained the cook. 'Carries sound up from the basement. Sounds like Furkin is having some trouble with those rats.'
'Oh,' said Sophraea, jumping up from the table and starting toward the stairs. 'Perhaps I'd better go find my wizard now.'
'Good idea, dearie,' the cook agreed. 'Furkin might be in a bit of temper later on.'
'When he gets loose,' giggled the pot girl and was immediately shushed by the other women.
With hurried thanks, Sophraea headed upstairs. As she left, she heard the cook remark, 'Well, that's a nice polite and helpful girl for you. Look at all the vegetables that she's peeled and chopped. Of course, if anyone asks, we haven't seen her for ages, have we?' npstairs in Stunk's mansion, Gustin made a great show of pacing back and forth, muttering the occasional odd phrase. He knew that true magic was much more than empty gestures, but, from his experience, the servants expected this kind of act.
Stunk's valet, a portly bald man given to wringing his hands and muttering 'please don't touch that,' met Gustin at the top of the stairs leading to his master's private apartment. The young man supposed that the valet was watching to see that he wouldn't steal anything. Two more of Stunk's bodyguards stood stiffly on either side of the lacquered door leading into their master's bedchamber.
When one thin male servant turned the corner of the hallway and yelped to see a wizard down on his knees drawing cryptic symbols on the carpet with a piece of charcoal, Gustin gained the general impression that the whole household's nerves were badly overset.
He continued with his search, carefully lifting up curtains and peering under tables. The upper hallways were just as cluttered with bric-a-brac and expensive ornaments as the lower rooms. The brocade shoe could be almost anywhere and nearly invisible among all the other trophies that Stunk had displayed. Not for the first time, Gustin wished he had a spell that could reveal a desired object. That would be much more useful than many of the odd bits that his old teacher made him memorize!
As he advanced down a hallway toward the door leading to Stunk's chambers, Gustin noticed a silk cloth covered one enormous picture frame in an alcove just outside Stunk's rooms.
When he started to twitch the coveting aside, the valet moaned and said 'Oh do not! I wish the master would just have it destroyed.'
The revealed painting showed the wealthy fat man and his aristocratic lady, expensively dressed in the finest
