hurrying now that concealment was impossible.
Beldar came back down the steps to meet his shadow. 'You have business with me?'
The halfling's reply was to hurl a small cloth bag at Beldar's face-a bag that flew open as it came, spilling sand in a flurry intended to blind. Beldar leaped up and back, catching his heel on the next step and almost falling as he came down hard.
A second bag was already bursting blindingly across his gaze, its onrushing hurler behind it.
Beldar raced a few steps higher, whirled as he snatched down his eyepatch-and glared at the hin.
The running halfling faltered. Beldar drew his sword from its scabbard and took another careful step up and back, his eyes never leaving the halfling's face.
That face wore a deepening horror now, staring back at him with eyes going wild. Suddenly, the hin whirled to flee.
Beldar flung his sword under the blur of gray boots, and the little spy crashed to the steps, bouncing with a loud gasp.
Beldar sprang down the stair like a hungry wind. Before the hin could roll to its feet, the Roaringhorn seized a gray shoulder, clawed the winded spy over, and glared into the sharp-nosed, paling face.
A small hand tried to snatch at a belt-dagger, but Beldar was ready for that and slapped it away, hard.
Winds rose around them as the man and the halfling stared into each other's eyes-Beldar smiling grimly as the hungry warmth arose in him… and the halfling sagging into slack-jawed darkness as Beldar's beholder eye worked its wounding magic.
'Who are you working for?' Beldar snarled, pinning the spy against the steps and thrusting his head forward until their noses were almost touching. 'What were you after? My life?'
'N-nay,' the dying halfling whispered. 'Something you stole, high and mighty lorrrr…'
That last word became a gurgling rattle, and the flickering light in those doomed eyes faded.
Leaving Beldar Roaringhorn holding a dead halfling on the side of Mount Waterdeep in a cold, rising breeze-and uncomfortably aware of the City Guard lookouts somewhere above and behind him and the watching city spread out below.
Stunned, Beldar cradled the body of the hin as if comforting a chilled friend.
He'd just murdered someone. In the space of a few breaths. A stranger, who didn't seem to be carrying anything more than two daggers-just small knives, for all their wicked sharpness. Someone trying to recover something he, Beldar, had stolen?
That made no sense. The gauth whose eye he now possessed was dead, sliced into dozens of bloody cantels to yield up eyes and innards to the Amalgamation. Beyond that, Beldar couldn't think of anything he'd taken, beyond a few kisses at the Slow Cheese, before…
Before everything had fallen, and Malark had died.
Beldar shivered and thrust the halfling away from him. Head lolling, the body started to topple. In sudden horror Beldar caught hold of it and arranged it hastily in a lounging position on the steps. The head lolled over again.
He put it back in a reasonably lifelike pose, and it slowly lolled to one side. Again.
Sickened, Beldar stood up, fetched his fallen sword, and hurried on up the steps, trembling in revulsion. He'd just done murder.
So swiftly, so easily.
'Gods,' he whispered aloud to the wind, 'what have I become?'
Behind and below him was a city full of mages and priests who could snatch secrets from the newly dead, Watchmen who arrested murdering young lords, and black-robed Magisters who pronounced sentence with the full force of Waterdeep's laws…
As he came up onto the City wall-deserted here, with no guardpost near-Beldar realized he'd been whispering his question over and over.
He clapped a hand to his beholder eye. It was magical-and all too powerful: Its wounding magic could slay. An appendage of his, now, and not the other way around.
Right?
It felt warm, and-though he knew this was impossible-larger than his entire head. Hastily Beldar slipped his eyepatch up into place.
The world seemed to shift slightly, some of the color going out of it. Beldar stumbled, reeled, and muttered, 'What in the name of all the Watching Gods is happening to me?'
He strode a few paces, passing a dark dome beyond the battlements: the top of the great stone head of one of the Walking Statues of Waterdeep. It stood in its niche below the wall-walk, staring blindly out to sea.
Staring blindly. Beldar almost envied it.
Something warm and dangerous stirred behind his eyepatch. The dead hin would soon be found; he must get down off this wall in all haste.
No, that was craven… unworthy. He'd done what he'd done, and must face the consequences.
But a fierce voice rose within him, filling his head and spilling out of his mouth. 'Move,' Beldar muttered. 'Get you gone, idiot! Move!
Just ahead, the next Walking Statue stirred.
Beldar's heart jumped. The Guard had seen his crime! They were causing the Statue to turn and smash him, right here!
'Turn around, blast it all!' he snarled. Must run…
The Statue turned and settled back into its niche.
Beldar gaped.
Staring at it in bewilderment, he found himself wondering just what it was that looked different about this Statue.
Oh. This was the Sahuagin Statue.
He'd see its cruel, monstrous stone face more clearly if it turned a bit that way…
Obediently, with a few grating sounds as it brushed against the mountainside, the titanic stone sahuagin turned to show him its profile.
For a long time Beldar Roaringhorn stood as still as the Statues along the wall he stood on, as the wind whistled past and chilled him thoroughly.
He'd become someone important, after all. The voice commanding the Walking Statues of Waterdeep was coming from his own mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The sky was fading from black to sapphire as Elaith Craulnober strode up the mountainside, his mood as foul as the cold, damp seawind blowing into his face.
He was in Waterdeep, gods cry all! Not Evermeet, not even Suldanessellar. He should have no lord's duties here, not in this noisy, stinking pile of humans and their coins!
Yes, he'd been born noble and raised as a royal ward. Yes, he'd honed skills bright enough to merit command in the royal guard. Yes, he'd been betrothed to a princess of Evermeet-and yes, he was heir to the Craulnober moonblade.
There it all ended. Hadn't he done enough dark work by now to break with all of that?
It must be bred into his bones, this sense of duty. Why else would the slipshields trouble him? Amnestria's ring told him when and where they were used, and slipshield magic-elven magic-had recently been flitting about Waterdeep like starving will o' the wisps rushing to mass drowning.
Though it irked, a few humans could be trusted with such power: oh-so-noble Piergeiron, and even that fat blusterer Mirt. The moneylender might resemble a walrus and outmass a boar, but his wits were almost elder-elf shrewd. Almost.
But now the latest litter of untrained noble whelps held not one, but two slipshields. This was intolerable.
It was also dangerous. They were empty-wits, a flock of bright-feathered, squawking goslings, prancing about blithely and brainlessly unaware that one among them was running with foxes.
