accessed. Then, while still wondering if she’d merely imagined a talking canvas, an alarm tripped. Probably an alarm wired into the hook on which the painting had rested. A horde of pig-straddling vampires roared into the gallery. She’d fled, and they gave chase. Even through the empty air! When Riltana realized she wasn’t going to lose them, she headed to Demascus’s home. The deva had helped her out of binds before, though never one so serious. She blinked. It was too late to change what’d happened. All she could do was deal with any consequences from House Norjah. Later. After she and Demascus handled the arambarium situation and Riltana received her reward from Queen Arathane. It might not even be too much to imagine that Carmenere could receive Arathane’s letter within just a couple of tendays!
She pitched forward off the cable and dove past an entire cliffside neighborhood in mere heartbeats, braking on wings of wind at the last instant. She came down like a honeybee on a petal, her boot heels barely clicking the shingles of a warehouse roof.
The queen had identified this warehouse. Thanks to her dawdling on the bridge, Demascus was probably already down along the wharf talking to potential ship owners about a charter. She’d have to make up for lost time.
Riltana dropped from the rooftop into the middle of the busy street. A gaggle of dockworkers glanced at her. Most likely they saw just one more courier wearing Airstepper Guild robes on her way to deliver a package to a captain or merchant in the dock district. The robes perfectly concealed her newly enchanted leather armor. Pricy, but paid for with the reward she’d earned when helping the queen with the plague demon hiding beneath the Firestorm Cabal several months earlier. She sauntered through the open front door of the warehouse. Sweat-soaked workers were wrestling crates into compact rows that stretched back to the far wall and halfway to the ceiling.
A genasi with a quill and scroll noticed her. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a message to deliver.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s a document. I’m supposed to deliver it directly to the owner of this place.”
The genasi shrugged and pointed at a short flight of stairs leading up to a landing halfway up one interior wall. “Lord Pashra isn’t here.”
“Mind if I wait?”
“Fine. But stay out of the way.” The genasi returned his attention to the workers.
Riltana sidled up to the foreman. He was totaling cargo manifests. Apparently this Lord Pashra did a mean business in turnips, potatoes, and onions. That explained the pungent odor. Nothing mineral related. Not that she had expected it to be so easy.
“Yes?” the genasi said, noticing her still standing next to him and ogling his tallies.
“You know what? The smell of all these onions is making me sick to my stomach. Mind if I go wait up by the office?”
The genasi waved a hand. “If that will get you out from under my feet.”
Riltana took the stairs. When she reached the landing at the top and peered back, neither the foreman nor the workers spared her so much as a glance. They were absorbed in their task of finding a more efficient packing configuration to make room for a “mess of beets” from Turmish. If they were acting unconcerned to throw off suspicion, they were doing a damn fine job … Too good. Riltana had the sinking feeling she was on the wrong track and wasting time. Well, she was here. She should at least take a quick look around to make certain.
She faded back from the railing until she was right next to the office door. She tried the handle. Locked. But not for long. Riltana pulled a thin wire and a couple of other oddments from the cuff of her robe. With her back to the door and her eyes on the warehouse floor, she tried to give the impression that moving crates was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. She inserted the pick into the lock by touch. It was an exploratory poke, to see how many pins she was dealing with … and whether or not Lord Pashra had fortified the lock with a trap. But the telltale tightness of a mechanical trigger connected to something nasty, or the faint tingle that usually warned her of a hex, was absent. All she needed for the simple mechanism was a tension wrench, a slight turn, a few taps with the wire used like a pick … and click.
She opened the door just enough to slip through, and entered. She didn’t quite shut it behind her; she wanted to hear if anyone came up the stairs-
A flicker of movement by her boots made her freeze. She let out her breath as she watched a spider scuttle away across the scratched plank floor, probably terrified she would stomp it flat.
The space was too big to have originally been an office. Pashra must have converted an ancillary storage room. A ramshackle table squatted in the center of the chamber, surrounded by stools. Another table was shoved into the far corner, creating a makeshift desk. It was layered with a mess of open scrolls and parchment pages. A lantern bolted to the wall over the desk bathed the room in yellowish light. Shelves in one corner held a litter of colored stones, books, scroll cases, and what apparently was a collection of dining plates from all over Toril. Then Riltana caught sight of a map on the wall between the desk and shelves that showed both the continent of Faerun and a land mass to the west labeled “Returned Abeir.” The word “Menzoberranzan” was written in red ink on the map some miles northeast of Waterdeep. The name seemed vaguely familiar, but Riltana couldn’t place it. Something to do with elves, maybe?
“Now,” she murmured, “If I were secretly funneling a super-rare elemental mineral out of Akanul, where would I hide my secret ledger describing my treachery in exact detail?” She chuckled. Finding such a record wasn’t out of the question. Criminals had at least as much cause to keep track of their merchandise as did legitimate merchants. In her experience the difference between legal and illegal wares was mostly dependent on how richly bribed the public officials were.
She sorted through paperwork. Manifests, lists of ports, projected prices for various vegetables, notes of intent to buy or sell various amounts of said vegetables, and upkeep costs for boats and warehouses … didn’t this Pashra have some sort of filing system? The disarray was almost comical and definitely ordinary.
Something came into focus about a foot in front of her, its shadow large on the clutter of documents. She leaped back with a curse even as she saw it was another spider, this one hanging on a slender web she’d missed in the lantern’s dull light. She’d never been especially afraid of spiders. Until she’d seen the nightmare called Murmur feed several people to its pit of bugs. They’d been devoured alive, swarmed by hungry spiders and other insects … Her stomach felt funny. She swallowed, and focused on the tiny arachnid dangling in front of her. It’s just a spider, she told herself. It can’t hurt you. Unless it’s poisonous.
Either way, it was an ugly bastard with a body nearly as thick as her thumb. She could even make out its little eyes, like tiny buttons, fixed on her.
“All right, blister, that’s how you want to play it?” She grabbed a handful of papers and rolled them up. As if it guessed her intent, the spider sprinted down its web line and disappeared somewhere behind the desk. She leaned across the morass of papers and noticed a hollow she’d missed in the wall. As she peered inside, her eyes widened.
The hollow crawled with spiders. Too many to count, boiling over each other and across some kind of bulky object. A … person, wrapped in a shroud of lacy webbing. She could make out features frozen in a rictus of open- mouthed terror, beneath a suffocating white layer.
“Oh, shit!” Most of the spiders were coin size, but a few were larger than her palm. She eased back.
“Greetings,” a voice said.
Riltana spun. A watersoul genasi stood just inside the door, now closed. Damn.
“Who’re you?” she said. Something wasn’t right about him. The sea-foam hue of his skin was unnatural, as if the watersoul suffered some kind of sickness or blight.
“I’m Pashra. The question is who’re
She swallowed, and forced herself not to glance back down into the hollow.
“I, uh, got a message to deliver. A document. For you, I guess, if you’re the owner.”
The genasi said, “That’s me. Can I ask why you’re going through my desk?”
She raised the incriminating papers she’d rolled into an impromptu spider-swatter. “What, these? I thought I saw a bug.”
The man uttered something that almost sounded like a curse, but not in any language she knew. “Put those down, give me whatever you’ve got, then get out.” The genasi smiled. He sure had a lot of teeth …
And what was with the way his shadow was so much larger than his frame? The jagged silhouette on the
