'It will be safe here with me. Look.' Sephris hurriedly scribbled a formula on the slate that filled it only halfway. He held it up for Cale and said, 'Do you see? It will be safe until at least the nineteenth day of this month.'
The scribblings meant nothing to Cale, but he needed an answer, and that meant abiding by Sephris's rules. They could keep watch from the street.
'Eighteen hours then,' he agreed.
'Excellent. You may go.'
At that, Riven scoffed. Under his breath he said, 'By your leave, milord.'
Cale said nothing. They turned, opened the door and exited. The priest-caretaker greeted them in the hall.
'Did you find what you sought?'
Cale deflected the question. 'We'll return tomorrow evening.'
'Very well,' said the priest, content not to press. 'I'll expect you then.'
And that was that.
When they reached the street, Cale eyed the nearby buildings. One of them, a three story stone tallhouse, had a roof with only a slight pitch.
Cale pointed and said, 'There. We'll keep watch in shifts, in case Vraggen makes another grab for the half- sphere.'
In truth, Cale didn't think the mage would risk another attack, but he wanted to be certain. The tall-house roof offered a nice vantage of the entire street.
'Good,' Jak said.
'I'm in,' Riven said, 'but there's something I need to tend to first. I'll be back before nightfall.'
'Describe the something,' Cale said.
'My concern, Cale.'
They exchanged glares. Cale knew it would be pointless to press.
'Act as though you're being watched,' he said.
Riven sneered and laid a hand on one of his enchanted sabers.
'I always do,' the assassin said. 'I'lll be back near sunset.'
As Riven walked away, Jak said, 'I don't trust him, Cale. Not as far as I could throw a troll.'
Cale made no comment, just stared into Riven's back. He was not sure if he trusted the assassin either. Obviously Mask did, but that gave Cale no comfort-Mask was a bastard, after all, and always had his own agenda.
'Let's get situated on that roof.'
Riven hurried through the streets, his left hand on a saber hilt, heading for the Foreign District. After he'd left the Zhents a few months earlier, he'd purchased a nondescript flat there. It still felt strange to him to have somewhere to go, somewhere he considered his home. While in the Network, he had made a habit of changing the location in which he slept at least twice per tenday, more out of a sense of professional caution than genuine fear. Riven rarely left enemies alive, and the dead didn't often carry grudges.
After he'd left the Zhents, he hadn't seen the point of moving around so often. In truth, after he'd resigned he hadn't seen the point of much at all. He had saved enough coin to keep him in whores and luxury for years, but that kind of life didn't appeal to him. If he'd been a weak man, he might have turned to a weak man's vices-drink and drugs-but those things had never held a draw for him either. So for a time, he'd felt aimless.
To his surprise, that had changed the day he found his girls, and changed still more when he had heard the Lord of Shadows's Call in his dreams.
Riven reached under his tunic to touch the onyx disc that hung from the chain around his neck. He had taken it from the corpse of the last hit he'd performed for the Network: a fat merchant who had run drugs into Cormyr for the Zhents, but had compromised an operative when he was captured by the Purple Dragons. For Riven, the disc symbolized two things: the end of his relationship with the Zhents, and the beginning of his relationship with Mask.
While he wasn't a priest like Cale-Nine Hells, the mere thought of that made him sneer-he also wasn't the man he once was. His mind was opening, he knew; something was happening, though he didn't yet know what. He knew only that he served Mask, and for the time being that knowledge was enough. That his service made Cale uncomfortable only made it more satisfying. Riven respected Cale, but didn't like him.
Still, Riven knew the Lord of Shadows had a purpose for Calling him and Cale almost simultaneously. Mask whispered that purpose in his dreams. Riven understood it when he first awakened, when his skull felt as though it was filled with squirming snakes, but the basis for that understanding fled from memory as the dreams faded out of his consciousness. Still, the understanding remained, the certainty, and Riven didn't question further.
He supposed it was faith, and that thought made him laugh.
For most of his life, Riven had thought that faith made men weak, made them dependent upon the divine rather than their own resources. He had held men of faith in contempt, even those in the Zhents. Especially those. In fact, the return of the Banites to authority in the Network had been the very reason he'd left it. The Zhents under the resurgent Banites would not be the Zhents in which Riven had flourished. The new Church of Bane was too fanatical. But Mask had taught Riven to make distinctions among faiths. Faith didn't have to make a man weak or mad, though it often did-he thought of Gauston, The Righteous Man, Verdrinal, and that fool Sephris. In Riven's case, faith was making him stronger. He could feel it changing him. Mask didn't make demands of Riven. Mask said to him, Here is a way to strength. Take it if you will. Riven had taken it, for he respected strength-those who had it, and those who shared it with him.
When he neared his flat, Riven circled the block a few times to determine if he had a tail. He didn't. Satisfied, he headed for home.
His flat shared half the space in a one-story wooden building with a scribe-for-hire's shop. The scribe-Riven had never bothered to remember his name-owned the building and had let it to Riven only because he was afraid to refuse. The scribe made his living notarizing bills of lading and shipping contracts, and drafting documents for the illiterate. He also sold paper, ink, and writing quills. He and Riven had exchanged exactly one sentence since Riven had taken the flat and that suited Riven fine. Riven made the scribe so nervous that the man's ink-stained hands visibly shook anytime Riven walked in his direction. That too suited Riven fine. No conversation meant no questions.
The building stood at the corner of Mal's Walk and Drev Street, both narrow, dirty little cart roads near Selgaunt's western wall. Most Selgauntans held those who lived 'under the wall' in contempt, but Riven felt at home there. He could have afforded a much nicer location, of course, but denied the urge. Luxury made a man soft, he knew, and needed only look to Cale for an example of the phenomenon.
The thought of betraying Cale and that little bastard Fleet had entered his mind, of course, but he had dismissed it. Mask clearly wanted him and Cale to work together, and Riven still owed Vraggen a handswidth of steel in his gut for that spell. More than a handswidth. He thought of the dark place that spell had taken him, full of shadows….
He shook his head. In any event, the surest way to get a go at Vraggen was to pair up with Cale, and if the half-drow and the rest of his crew got in his way, all the better.
He strode past the door to the scribe's shop, past his own door, and ducked down Mal's Walk. He didn't see the girls-they'd be along-and no one else was in sight. He pulled a slim dagger from a boot sheath, slid the blade between the shutters of his only window, and carefully lifted the latch. Silently, he pulled open the shutters and slid through the window.
Good habits, he told himself. Unless absolutely necessary, he tried to avoid obvious entrances and exits. With all the corpses he'd left in his wake, it paid to stay sharp.
No one was inside the two room flat. Riven's spartan furnishings took up little space. In the front room, a plain wooden table and chair stood near the hearth. An oil lamp and a water jug sat upon the table. Other than the hardware for the hearth and the girls' buckets beside the door, the room contained nothing else. His bedroom contained a wood framed bed with a feather mattress-his lone indulgence-with a wagon-trunk at its foot. That trunk held most of his personal belongings.
Around the room he had secreted the wealth he'd accumulated throughout his career in the Network: several
