Orsini tugged on Uther’s arm, hoping to move him toward the barred carriage waiting up the alley at the main thoroughfare. The guardsman might as well have tried pulling the Stalwarts Club from its magically secured foundation. “Don’t waste your time, Cimber,” he said. “The city watch will do its own investigation.”
Uther stared briefly and sternly down upon Orsini’s bald pate. “That is precisely the reason I need someone with a feathersweight of intelligence to find the true killer.” The words were snarled in such a way that the soldier was left to ponder just how deep the butler’s demonic facade ran.
“I’ll do my best,” Artus said. “I hope my lack of standing in the club doesn’t cause a problem.”
“That you are not a Stalwart is all the more reason for me to desire your aid,” the butler replied. He easily shrugged off Orsini’s now halthearted grip and placed his hands on Artus’s shoulders. “This will not be an easy defense to build. There are the side effects of my condition to consider, as well as the location of the murder.”
“Which was?”
“The Treaty Room.”
With that, Uther started down the narrow alley. Orsim had to hurry to keep pace with him, taking three steps for each of the butler’s two long strides. Artus watched them go, though only vaguely. His mind was already focused on the complexities of the task before him.
The misfired spell that had warped Uther’s form left him immune to any and all further magic, including those incantations the city watch used as a truth test against a suspect’s claims. Magic would wrest no clues from the crime scene, either. The Treaty Room had been rendered “magic dead” just days after Uther’s misfortune, and by the same world-rattling events that had caused the innocent spell to misfire and transform him. The instability in magic caused by the crisis known as the Time of Troubles had left the Treaty Room a magical void, a place where no spell could be cast and enchanted items simply failed to function.
Artus was still considering ways in which he might get around those obstacles when he entered the Stalwarts Club.
A few members milled in the entry hall, but most had gone back to whatever had drawn them to the club that day. A mournful fellow from Armot named Grig the Younger debated the finer points of Mulhorandi entrapment spells with a pair of dwarf women, twins who had both been named Isilgiowe for some reason that eluded even them. Sir Hamnet Hawklin expounded upon the hunting rituals of the Batiri goblins of Chult to Gareth Truesilver, newly commissioned as a captain for his heroics during the crusade against the Tuigan horde. In a nearby corner, an elf maid named Cyndrik tallied the money she’d gathered for the Lord Onovan Protection Fund, even though that hapless Dalesman had been quite fatally bitten in half by a gigantic lizard several months earlier.
They wrangled over topics and championed causes for which few outside the club spared even a moment’s thought. It was that collective energy that drew Artus to the Stalwarts. The intellect and effort focused upon obscure matters by those famous explorers, those noted seekers of adventure, quickened his mind and reinforced his commitment to his own consuming quest-the search for the legendary Ring of Winter, the existence of which had been written off as utter fantasy decades past. At the moment, the passion for the esoteric that Uther found so chilling about his employers was, in fact, bolstering his ally’s resolve to prove him innocent.
Artus threaded his way between the people in the entryway, but found himself facing a loud and impassable obstruction just a few steps down the corridor. A beautiful mountaineer named Guigenor, her temper stoked to the intensity of her long red hair, confronted one of the most influential of the Stalwarts’ inner circle. Her wild gesticulations kept Artus from trying to slip past; the ceaseless, seamless character of her tirade yielded no opportunity for him to politely ask her to let him by.
“Are you feeble?” she snapped. “Are you blind? Uther had the motive and the opportunity for murder. He was standing at the Treaty Room door, alone, when I came across him. You could still hear Leonska moving around in there-drunk, but very much alive.”
Without slowing for the space of a single syllable, Guigenor repeatedly battered the oak paneling with her fist. It wasn’t a very good simulation of the noises she’d heard from the Treaty Room, but she was aiming for impact, not accuracy As such, the dramatics proved a success; there were suddenly people lined up four deep on both sides of the blockage, listening to her prosecution.
“But does Uther use his strength to break down the door?” Guigenor continued. “No! He sent me for keys, for Torm’s sake! What’s Uther doing without his keys? It’s obvious-he had them all along. He sent me off, used his set to unlock the door, slipped into the room, and slaughtered Leonska. Then he sauntered back out, relocked the door, and waited for me to return with the spares. Any dolt-except you, perhaps-would see that there’s no other explanation!”
There was a moment of stunned silence at the tirade’s end. The placid-seeming older man at whom this verbal barrage had been aimed simply shook his head. “You are overwrought at the death of your mentor, my dear,” said Marrok de Landoine. “Otherwise you would not address me in such an impudent manner.”
Guigenor sputtered for a moment, struggling to put together a reply. Her anger at the casual dismissal, at the murder of her friend, boiled over into tears. She roughly shoved Artus out of her way and bulled through the crowded hallway much as she had many a snowbound mountain pass.
The look on Marrok’s face appeared full of fatherly concern for the young woman, but Artus had seen that smirking, fatuous expression before. Marrok reserved that empty smile for those he found distasteful, below his notice as a person of wealth and influence. Marrok was a man of remarkable resources, position, and accomplishment, even in a group as thick with decorated military heroes and titled aristocrats as the Society of Stalwart Adventurers. And, to him, Guigenor was quite unalterably an upstart.
The smile didn’t alter when Marrok first noticed Artus standing there. Then it abruptly faded, transformed into a look of utter weariness. “Mystra save me from the rabble,” the nobleman muttered. Artus opened his mouth to reply, but Marrok turned his back on the young man and walked away.
Grumbling through clenched teeth, Artus made his way back to the Treaty Room. He followed a route he would have found difficult to map, despite his years of practice in the field, for the Stalwarts Club was labyrinthine in design and cut loose from architectural logic by the amount of magic utilized in its construction. In some places angles did not operate as angles should. In others, straight lines were not necessarily the shortest distance between two points.
All that strangeness made the Treaty Room a haven to those few Stalwarts unimpressed by mages and spell-craft. Hidden in one of the most isolated sections of the club, the room could be generously described as four walls and a single stout door. It lacked secret passages, magical gateways, even windows. Its floor and ceiling were identical to their counterparts in most mundane homes-more carefully constructed and, at most other times, quite a lot cleaner-but essentially commonplace. The two things that most obviously set the Treaty Room apart from those average places now were the amount of blood splashed on the walls and the poorly dressed and rather overweight corpse laying atop the conference table at the room’s exact center.
“Well, let’s take the gorgon by the horns,” said Sir Hydel Pontifax-mage, surgeon, sometime War Wizard, and full-time Stalwart. He gestured to the Purple Dragon stationed by the door, who was doing quite a good job of refusing Artus admittance. “Be a good soldier and let my scribe in. I rather need his help if I’m to complete the medical examination your sergeant requested.”
Artus tore a few pages from the journal he always carried tucked into his wide leather belt; the wyvern-bound book was magical, so it wouldn’t even open in the magic-dead room. Then he ducked under the guard’s outstretched arm and hurried to the table. “Thanks, Pontifax. I was hoping you’d be here.”