Darien pushed the coin across the table. His voice resonated with intensity.
'Tell me.'
For a long moment Bent-Nose eyed the gold piece and his empty ale pot in turn. At last he reached out his still-shaking hand and closed it around the coin. Within the shadows of his hood, Darien smiled. He leaned forward to hear the other man's whispered words.
As the hours wore toward midnight, Darien moved through the inn, swathed in his disguise, approaching others who he thought might be compelled, with a gold coin or a pot of ale, to speak. They were more than plentiful. He asked each the same question. Who, better than any other, might go deep into Undermountain and find what he was charged to seek? Many names were given in answer. Some were heroes who had never existed other than in legends. Others were sots who at present snored drunk-enly in a corner of the inn. Neither were of any use to Darien. However, there was one name that was repeated again and again in awed voices.
Artek the Knife.
Darien had heard of the scoundrel before. Artek Ar'talen, known also as the Knife, had once been Waterdeep's most famous and elusive criminal. He had preyed most often upon the nobility, which made him all the more abhorrent in Darien's eyes, if not those of the common folk. It was said that there was no tower so high, no vault so secure, and no crypt so deep that Artek the Knife could not penetrate it and rob it clean. That made him the perfect candidate for Darien's task. There was only one complication. Artek the Knife had mysteriously vanished over a year ago.
At last Darien found one who knew why.
'The city watch finally caught him,' the woman said, quaffing the ale Darien had bought her. By her leather garb and the myriad knives at her hip, she styled herself some sort of rogue. 'I guess Artek wasn't as slippery as the stories claimed. The Magisters have him locked up in their prison.' She clenched a hand into a fist. 'And he can rot in there forever!'
'Let me guess,' Darien replied musingly. 'Ar'talen enlisted your help in a robbery, promising to cut you in on the take, only to disappear with all the loot.'
Anger twisted her face, and by this he knew he had hit close to the mark.
'He won't do you any good either,' she spat. 'The Magisters will never let you near him.'
'I wouldn't be so certain,' Darien purred. 'I am rather accustomed to getting what I want.'
Just then a burly freebooter careened drunkenly into Darien. The noble swore hotly, but the man only lurched onward to join several compatriots at a nearby table. Darien turned back to the woman to see that her eyes had narrowed in sudden suspicion. Too late he noticed the silken ruffle now revealed where his cloak had been knocked aside.
She grabbed the cloak, ripping it away. Even to one who did not know his identity, his high forehead and striking features clearly marked him a noble, as did his long coat of rich purple velvet and his ruffled shirt of silvery silk. The rogue hissed the words like venom.
'A nobleman.'
Instantly, a deathly silence settled over the common room. All eyes turned toward Darien. Inwardly he cursed the insolent woman.
'I have no quarrel with you,' he said coolly. Yet, he added to himself.
She drew dangerously close to him. 'No? Well, I have one with you-you and all your kind. I was only a child at the time, but I will never forget the day a nobleman cast my family into the street. He took everything we owned. Then he had my parents hauled away by the city watch. They were thrown into prison, and they died there. I remember standing in the gutter, crying. I didn't understand what was happening. And do you know what the nobleman said? 'Do forgive me.' ' She shook with seething fury. 'As if that could bring my parents back!'
Darien stared at her flatly. 'You must understand, my dear,' he said in a bored voice. 'A lord can hardly be expected to indulge a tenant who fails to pay his rent. You see, if one allows but a single maggot into his meat, he will soon find it putrid with flies.'
For a frozen moment, the woman stared at him in pale-faced rage. Then she reached for one of the curved knives at her belt. But Darien was faster and raised his right arm. Three barbed steel prongs sprang from the end of the Device. They spun rapidly, emitting a high-pitched whine. With a fluid, casual motion, Darien stepped forward and thrust the whirling prongs deep into the rogue's gut. He let them spin there a moment, then withdrew his arm. With a click, the blood-smeared barbs slid back into the Device.
Her eyes wide with shock, the rogue sank to the floor. There she writhed in soundless agony as she slowly died. Just as the insect had on the end of the Device. With a fey smile, Darien whispered, 'Do forgive me.'
He spun on a boot heel and strode through the silent common room toward the tavern's door. The rabble made no move to stop him. They didn't dare. And it did not matter that his disguise had been revealed. He had already gotten everything he needed.
'So you have managed to land yourself in prison, Artek Ar'talen,' he murmured to himself. 'Well, that is a small enough problem. For me, if not for you.'
Laughing softly, Lord Darien Thai stepped out into the balmy spring night.
Heir to Darkness
What a fool he had been to think that he could truly change.
With your fingers, trace every crack and crevice in the walls of your prison cell. A dampness may signify weakened mortar, a puff of air an opening beyond. Notice how insects and other vermin come and go. Their paths may lead you to freedom, my son.
He had thought it would be such an easy thing, like shedding an old cloak to don one of new cloth. After all, he didn't choose this course for his life. Since childhood, he had simply known nothing else. For a time it had seemed enough, though not because of the gold coins pilfered from velvet-lined purses, or the rings slipped from slender noble fingers, or the jewels spirited from guarded stone vaults. Money had always been the least of the rewards of his nightly work. Far more intoxicating had been the thrill. It flowed through his body Шее fine wine as he stole through darkened windows, crept down shadowed streets, or strode boldly across brilliant candlelit ballrooms toward his next unwitting quarry.
Dissatisfaction had come upon him so gradually that for a long time he had scarcely noticed it. Even after the thrill of the hunt had dulled into boredom, habit had propelled him onward. It wasn't until he was nearly captured that he understood how reckless he had become.
One moonlit night he had strolled along the silent avenues of Waterdeep's City of the Dead, wearing the expensive silken robes he had just lifted from a recently deceased nobleman. Only when the hue and cry sounded on the air did he realize that he had not even bothered to conceal himself as he walked. Struck by sudden terror, he had cowered in the embrace of a decomposing corpse in a half-filled grave as the City Watch ran past. He had escaped them, for the moment. Yet he knew it was only a matter of time before he grew so careless that even he could not elude the Watch when the alarm sounded.
The truth was, part of him wanted to get caught. He was weary-weary of scheming, of running, of watching dread flare in the eyes of others when they recognized who it was that stood before them. That night, in the bottom of the muddy grave, wrapped in the rain-soaked garb of a dead man, he finally made a choice. From that moment on, he was a thief no longer.
Now to the floor. Press your ear right against the stones. Then rap sharply with some hard object-a spoon, a pebble, even your bare knuckles if you have nothing left. Move a half-pace to one side, then rap again. Listen well as you do. A change in sound may indicate a space below. And a way out.
He had not considered that nobody would believe him. But it made perfect sense, naturally. He had robbed the citizens of Waterdeep for years. What cause did they have to trust him? When the rumor spread across the city that he had given up his thieving ways, another rumor raced hot on its heels: it was all an elaborate ruse to lure the nobility into a false sense of security. They would leave their wealth unguarded, and Artek could thereby relieve them of it all the easier. Finally, he had realized there was only one way to make the people of Waterdeep understand that he had truly changed. He had to show them.
His chance arrived unexpectedly. He was gloomily pacing the night-darkened streets of the North Ward,
