Emptying his stomach into the street made him feel just a bit better, but it still seemed like a stinking, reeling eternity before he found his own gateposts. The stone lions stared patiently out into the night, not bothering to give him the disgusted and incredulous stares several of his neighbors had favored him with as he'd reeled past, knowing he was wearing a sick smile and raging inside, He muttered a heartfelt curse upon the heads of all hermit priestesses, High Ladies, and stupidly honest cloth merchants, wherever they might be, and kicked and hammered at his own front door until he felt better.
That got him one thing. When the last of his three keys clicked in its lock and the door groaned wide, both of the young, empty-headed maids he'd had to hire to replace Alaithe were awake and in the hall, wide-eyed and clutching garden shears and fire tongs in their trembling hands. They were wearing two of his dressing gowns, and had obviously been too stupid-fortunately for him-to think of together lifting the door bar into place.
He cursed them all the way up the stairs. Nalambra and Karlae-Stonehead and Clumsyhands. Ardent and curvaceous they might be, but they were also slow and lazy everywhere but in bed. Anticipate his needs? Think at all for themselves? Bah! Now he'd have to shiver naked in the cold metal bathtub for hours as they pumped water and gasped their way up the stairs with hearth fire-warmed rocks to heat it.
Alaithe would have had a hot bath waiting, and if he'd not bothered with it, she'd have had fresh rocks ready to heat it anew in the morning, without a murmur of com shy;plaint. For perhaps the seven hundredth time he regretted strangling her and burying her in the garden, but he'd had no choice. She'd been suspicious of him from the first, and set about devising little tests and traps to see if he wasn't the "real" Blandras Nuin. Once he'd smelled the kaurdyl in his morning broth, he'd had no choice. If she was trying to kill him, it was time to slay her. Fat and unlovely she may have been, but what a housekeeper! Perhaps, to Blandras, more than that. Hadn't it started that first night, when he'd bolted his bedchamber door and pretended to be asleep when she'd tried to open it at dawn?
Ah, gods, but none of it mattered now. "Nalambra! Karlae!" Labraster snarled. "Stop all that screaming and get up here and pump." Gods, but he smelled. He unlatched the window that overlooked the garden and started hauling off sodden, dung-caked garments and hurling them out into the night. Out with it, out with it all!
Even the boots went, and the belt with the dagger built into its buckle. No one would scale the high, barred gate or force a way through the thornhedge to steal things so foul anyway. All he left-in an empty chamber pot, not on the table-were his coin-purse, his belt-knife, and the rings from his fingers-all of them. As they clattered into the pot, he shoved it away with his foot, stepped into the bath, and grimly crouched down to wait. He knew he was going to have some long, cold hours yet before morning.
The worst of the dung was gone from his hair and his skin, at least, but the bath Auvrarn Labraster sat in was brown and covered with a swirl of bubble-adorned white scum. It smelled as if it was more liquid dung now than water. Worse than that, it was cold, and getting colder by the minute, and his two lazy maids with the stone-sling and the hot stones that would make this bearable were nowhere to be seen.
"Nalambra!" he bellowed. "Karlae! Where in all the yawning pits of the Abyss are you?"
As if his shout had been a signal, two throat-stripping screams erupted downstairs. A chair fell over, or maybe a table-the whole house shook-and fainter crashes fol shy;lowed, one of them the bang of his front door trailing all of its chains and bolts as it slammed shut, then rebounded. The splintering crash that came on the heels of that booming sounded as if someone had burst out of the kitchen midden chute without waiting to open it.
Then came the silence, stretching out in the cold as Labraster waited, and shivered, and waited.
"Nalambra?" he called, when he could wait no longer, "Karlae?"
He rolled out of the bath and stood up to hear better, leaning forward with one arm on a chair. Shivering thus, he waited until the water he stood in stilled again, and lis shy;tened intently for any sounds of movement in the house below. Even stealthy sounds that meant he'd best find the blade under the bed would tell him something, but there was nothing more than the faint whisper of the sea breeze blowing through open doors and windows below.
"Blast all smugly blazing gods and their sky splitting thunderbolts!" Auvrarn Labraster snarled at last, as his wet hands slipped and he fell on the cold lip of the bath, before crashing back down into its depths with a helpless, mighty splash, that emptied the top foot or so of its con shy;tents all over the room around him.
His candle lamp went out.
Labraster stared into the darkness in real alarm. There'd been no breeze, the thing had full shutters to keep water-even a wave of dung stained bathwater-out, and the candle had been less than a third burned down. What, then, had …?
Something that glowed faintly glided past the door shy;way, and Auvrarn Labraster's heart froze. He struggled to swallow, to rouse himself to rise and run for his sword, but the blade was in his bedchamber, and the bedcham shy;ber was through that door.
The glow was out there, somewhere off to the right, but he knew all too well what he'd seen. It was the image of a burly woman-Alaithe-bobbing along just as she'd always bustled along the upstairs hall. An image that glowed, that he could see through, and that moved in utter silence.
It came back again, and he bit his lip to keep from screaming. The ghost of his housekeeper moved more slowly this time, as if carrying something he could not see. She did not look in his direction or appear to know he was there, but on her throat he could clearly see the dark, deep grooves of fingers.
Auvrarn Labraster shivered, snatched up the only thing he could reach that might serve as a weapon-the bath stool-and cowered down in the icy, noisome bath shy;water. He would not scream. He would not die here this night, if he didn't leap out the window or do something stupid. It was only an image, nothing that could harm him.
When Alaithe's sad, hollow-eyed, glowing face rose up out of the waters between his knees, Auvrarn Labraster discovered that he could scream. Quite well.
She loomed forward as she emerged from the water, swaying over him like a snake, her face coming ever closer to his. He tried screaming again, enthusiastically, and again.
"Be silent, master," she said, her white lips moving, "or I'll touch you."
Quite suddenly Labraster discovered that he could keep very quiet. He whimpered once, deep in his throat, but the ghost came no closer-not that six inches from his own nose was a comfortable distance. For just a moment, the face so close to his melted into skin shriv shy;eled over a skull, with a fat white worm crawling out of one eye socket. Labraster struggled on the shrieking edge of howling out a scream, then the face was Alaithe's again, plump-necked, familiar, almost motherly, and somehow reassuring.
"The dead rise because they need to know," Alaithe whispered, her voice the same husky drone, "and I have a need to know why you slew me, and more-much more. I will haunt you forever, no matter where in all Faerun you run, unless you release me to my rest by telling me all. Speak freely, man, so long as you don't scream or shout."
"H-haunt me?" Labraster stammered, raising the stool up out of the water like a shield.
"Haunt you, man, freezing your heart and your loins, so that you always feel cold. Appearing at your shoulder for others to see, whenever you try to court, or make deals, or speak to priests. More than those, you shall never sleep again unless I desire to let you sleep, and never share a bed again unless it be with someone who is blind, and deaf, and feels not the cold. Yes, I shall haunt you, man."