“Lady Amandon,” Etreth said, weeping. “Oh, the gods are merciful!” Then he froze, brushed aside tears with one gnarled, impatient hand, and turned to look up at Elminster.
“Nay,” he said slowly,” ‘twas thou who conjured her up. Why, lord? Why help one who’s stood against you—a longtime foe?”
Elminster replied, “Even evil men can be useful. Your lord was useful to me as well as to his city—and as we old men know, if long years are to be ours, debts must be paid.”
He turned toward the window and Etreth saw that his hands were shaking with weariness. One of those hands rose to salute the faithful servant as the Old Mage gained the windowsill, squared his shoulders, and turned back to face him. Elminster smiled and added softly, “No matter how high the price.”
ONE COMES, UNHERALDED, TO ZIRTA
Now in all the lands ‘twixt bustling Waterdeep and the sparkling waves of the Sea of Fallen Stars, no men were more loved—and feared—than the stoic swordsman Durnan, the blustering old rogue Mirt, and the all-wise, ancient wizard Elminster.
Wherefore all conversation in The Banshee Laid Bare came to a sudden, startled halt when the puffing man lurching down the steps into the flickering, none-too-well candlelit gloom of the taproom snarled back over his shoulder, “Write it down yourself, man! Mirt the Moneylender is no man’s lackey!”
More than one head turned oh-so-casually to look at the gasping, pendulous-bellied arrival in his flopping, battered old swash-boots, and more than one eyebrow lifted as its owner quelled a sneer. This was the Old Wolf of Waterdeep? The man even that coldly gliding, sinister elf men called the Serpent feared to cross?
Mirt the Merciless, if it truly was he, drew himself up like the prow of a weary ship sliding into dock—a stout old cog splitting its seams, by the look of him—and peered around.
Espying an empty table with a little sigh of satisfaction, he made for it, and had scarce settled himself with a groan of contentment onto a bench whose answering groan was rather more heartfelt when a bald-headed, beak-nosed man at the next table wheeled around in his seat.
“That,” he announced with soft menace, “is my table, see? I likes it always empty, to give standing room for m’empty tankards. So move thy lard, hog-head!”
Mirt gave no sign of having heard the man, and with a grunt of effort levered one of his muddy-booted feet up onto the tabletop with a crash. “Ho, wench!” he called. “I thirst!”
The bald man blinked, glared at the fat man who was now studying the toe of his raised boot with a critical air, and growled, “I’m speaking at ye, boar-belly!”
Mirt studied his nails, let his gaze wander casually in the bald man’s direction, nodded an affable wordless greeting, and looked down the room at the other drinkers, most of whom were now hunched forward in glitter-eyed anticipation.
Mirt gave them all that vague, easy-going smile of greeting, and called, “Ho! Ale, by Tempus Stormhelm! A keg at least!”
With a rising growl of anger the bald man rose to stand over the fat merchant, revealing shoulders as broad as a small wagon and bared arms bulging with muscles a-crawl with green veins. Hands like shovels reached forward as Mirt watched with what seemed like mild interest, and closed with cruel force on the merchant’s leg, at ankle and knee.
“Ye seem hard of hearing, lardpot,” their owner snarled, the rough humor gone from his eyes now, despite the snickers and snorts rising in chorus from the bravos around the table where he’d been sitting. “I wonder if that’ll continue when ye make close acquaintance with pain, swift and soon!”
Mirt blinked at the man, let his gaze drop to the hand on his knee then lifted his head to almost brush noses with the angry face thrust close to his—and belched, long and thunderously, in the man’s face.
With a roar of rage the man hauled hard on the merchant’s leg, pulling the moneylender into the air, table and all (thanks to Mirt’s other arm and leg, which maintained their holds thereon). As the table creaked upright onto its end, the merchant drove one fat fist hard into his newfound foe’s throat. The bald head whipped around with a sickening gurgle.
Mirt planted his other hand on that face and sprang free as the man slid to the floor in a boneless wobble, and the table crashed over atop him. The Old Wolf’s vault ended atop the next table with a tankard-rattling crash, hurling spatterings of drink and spitting, swearing men—the bald man’s drinking brothers—in all directions.
With a general roar of startled or delighted oaths and a flashing and ringing of dozens of blades leaping out of their scabbards, the taproom erupted. Mirt kicked out, hard, at the one man at that table who had a pillar behind him. He heard that unfortunate’s skull thump off it, deep and damp, then sprang the other way, atop another man whom he bore to the floor, stabbing viciously with a foot-long dagger that had somehow appeared in his hand. They bounced, then the man under the fat merchant lay still.
Swords clanged on swords, men shouted challenges and snarled intentions to rekindle old or imagined grudges, and someone threw a chair.
On the stairs a hastening serving wench screamed and dropped her wineskin, only to have it deftly plucked from the air inches from where it would have split on the rough, sand-strewn floor by a long, tanned arm whose owner said, from somewhere behind her ankles, “My thanks, lass. Now take thy wailing up to the sun again, there’s a good maid, and give me room!”
Wild-eyed and as swiftly as a startled falcon a-wing, she complied, leaving the man with the wineskin to unstopper it and sample appreciatively of what sloshed therein. He promptly made a face, put the stopper back, and set the skin down on the steps beside him.
In the tumult of battle, with chairs crashing over and the corners of tables being shoved into the bellies of enthusiastically-cursing men, no one heard his cheerful utterance. But when the newcomer plucked up the nearest table and hurled it the length of the taproom to crash in splintered ruin against a pillar and the shrieking bodies of a dozen frantically struggling men, general notice was taken of this second arrival.
“B’yr Lady of the Moon!” one man gasped into the second sudden silence to befall the taproom that evening. Men stared—and gaped—and froze.
Standing on the bottom step smiling a small, catlike smile and looking around the room with the promise of death awake and eager in his eyes was a man who wore leather breeches, boots, and a vest that left his chest and arms bare. An outlander, for sure. His flesh was tanned the hue of honeyed wood, and the muscles rippling beneath it made him look like a great hunting cat as he stared around the room. He twisted his lips into something that was part sneer and part eager smile.
“Ye might have waited until I was done wenching my way through our room-taking, Old Wolf!” he said in mock-complaint. “I’ve been so deprived on our journey thus far!”
“Six necks wrung and four men slit open from vitals to throat?” Mirt replied, puffing his way forward with someone else’s blood all over his hands. “That’s deprived? Well, now. Aye, I suppose ‘tis, for ye.” He frowned and looked back over his shoulder, brightening in an instant.
“Well, look ye!” he said, jerking his head hard enough to make his brustling moustaches quiver. “I’ve saved ye some, Durn—most of’em, strike me!”
“Durnan!” a man gasped somewhere down the room. “Durnan of Waterdeep!”
“DurnanK’ another man took up the cry, his voice almost a sob of fear.
“Well, so ye have,” Durnan observed delightedly, as if no one had gasped his name, and those long, corded arms closed around the massive table as if it were a lady’s cap-feather, and hurled it down the room.