The crash that heralded the end of its brief flight was almost drowned out by the screams and terrified yells of men seeking to flee, almost claw-climbing over each other in their scrabbling haste to reach the unlit, narrow servants’ stair in the farthest back corner of the taproom.
For the space of a breath or two, the room was a-stream with wailing men. Then it was empty and quiet again, save for the pair of large and softly chuckling friends.
“Well, well,” Durnan said, striding forward as smoothly as any panther, “it seems ye still can’t do something as simple as order a little throatslake without starting a bloodletting brawl!”
“My reputation,” Mirt replied with simple dignity, drawing himself up, “precedes me.”
He looked around as a sudden thought struck him. “I wonder if someone left drink behind that didn’t get spilled, hey?”
Durnan looked up at the rafters. “O watching gods,” he said fervently,” ‘twould be overly kind of thee, I grant, if…”
“Hey!” Mirt rumbled in sudden delight. “Look ye!”
Three forms were huddled at a table in one of the darkest corners of the room, without benefit of candle or lamp, and there were decanters among them, and tallglasses, and slender, elegant hands wrapped around fluted glass…
“Ho!” Mirt roared happily. “Wenches! And all for us!”
Three long-tressed heads turned to regard him, their expressions impossible to discern in the gloom—but the testy male voice that came from their midst was flatly unmistakable in its sentiments: “I think not.”
Mirt’s eyes narrowed as he stalked forward. “I’ve heard yon tongue before… who are ye?”
The wench in the middle—the one with smoky eyes and the frankly incredible bosom emblazoned with a bright tattoo of a dragon snaking its lucky way down out of sight—seemed to melt and waver for a moment before the Old Wolfs eyes. When its shimmer was done, he was looking at a gaunt, white-bearded old man in a battered Dointed hat and tattered robes.
“Men generally call me Elminster,” the wizard said sourly over the rim of his raised glass, “if they dare to call me anything at all.”
He made a gesture with the glass, as if toasting the two warriors, and Durnan let his hands fall away from the hilts of the daggers strapped to the insides of his bracers, and breathed once more.
Mirt chuckled uneasily. “And the wenches? Are they with thee?”
“So it seems,” one of the women pressed against the Old Mage of Shadowdale purred, in the instant before her overpainted face whirled and spun—and became a darkly-smiling thing of beauty framed by long silver hair that stirred lazily around her shoulders like the tentacles of a restless octopus. “But why don’t you see if you can win us free, valiant moneylender?”
“Storm!” Mirt gasped roughly. “Storm Silverhand!”
Durnan looked at the lass pressed against Elminster’s other shoulder, and asked lightly, “And you are—?”
The whirl was momentary this time, and the eyes that looked back at him were a trifle more demure, but the hair was silver, again, and stirring as if dancing in a breeze that was not there.
“Men generally call me Alustriel,” she said, teasing Elminster with a look, “when they find their lips free long enough to call me anything at all.”
“Gods above!” Mirt swore, as three glasses were raised in his direction. “What’re the three of ye doing down here?”
“Well, we were listening to some very interesting converse,” Storm said severely, “before your ah, valiant arrival. A little slaving, a little fell magic, plots of a regicide or two; this is a slightly better tavern than most for the sort of entertainment we crave.”
A smile had been playing about the corners of Durnan’s mouth for some little time now, and it widened as he asked smoothly, “If I share the cost of that wine, may I also share a glass or two?”
“Ye may,” Elminster grunted. “Our work here in Zirta is done for now.”
Mirt frowned, lifting one bristling brow in bewilderment. “Tis?”
“Aye, so.” The Old Mage pointed across the taproom. His long forefinger was indicating a corpse lying half-crushed under the splintered ruin of a table. “Look ye.”
The outflung arm of the body ended in a hand that glistened with scales. Two of its fingers had lengthened into cruel, hooked talons and the blood running out across the floor from between them was a vivid blue.
“Ye might think on this,” Elminster said pointedly, pushing a decanter across the table to Mirt, “when next ye bluster and swagger into a tavern, or a town. How much evil—or daring gallantry, or tight-fisted dealing—could be done by one who comes unheralded into Zirta, hmm?”
Storm whirled and spun and became a lushly-painted tavern dancer again, her bosom clad only in a sparkling sheen of false gems, and her earrings dangling beside her black, blossoming lips like fist-sized black stars. “Or two?” she asked.
Alustriel’s whirlwind was almost too fleeting to see, but left her long, bared flank displaying lurid tattoos as she let her cloak fall away to display an almost burly body, with quite a different pert face, eyes that challenged—one encircled with a painted-on glow-ring—and an old sword-scar puckering her lips and chin permanently. “Or three?” she asked, eyes on Mirt’s.
Mirt shook his head as if to clear it with what might have been a wince, and, somewhat reluctantly, looked down from the show to peer at the dead taloned hand. “How many of these d’ye think’re walking around Zirta right now?”
Elminster shrugged. “Why don’t ye come with us and see?”
Mirt looked at Durnan, who looked at the Old Mage as he made a shrug of his own. “Why don’t we?” the tanned swordsman replied, reaching for a decanter.
It was halfway to his lips when a slight sound from the stairs behind him made the warrior whirl around, tensed.
A woman was standing alone on the steps, a cloak drawn tirfit around her. eves eleamine almost merrilv down at
them all through a full mask. Durnan’s hand stole toward his sword hilt.
“That won’t be necessary,” Elminster said gravely, lifting a finger. As some sort of spell went singing up the stairs in a cloud that sought out every corner of the taproom, he added gently, “Be welcome, your Majesty.”
“Why, thank you, Old Mage,” the masked figure replied, throwing open her cloak and doffing her mask to let golden tresses spill forth amid Mirt’s rumbled oath of amazement.
“May I present Queen Filfaeril of Cormyr?” the wizard added, gesturing grandly. Mirt and Durnan stared at the Purple Dragon glistening in amethysts on a breast softly draped in cloth-of-gold.
“Gods strike me!” Mirt roared. “What’reye doing here?”
The Queen of Cormyr shrugged as she deftly took the decanter from his hand and lifted it to peer at the contents within. “It seemed the right thing to do,” she told it lightly, turning it in her grasp critically. “If one desires guidance, or forewarning of plots against a throne, or intelligent converse on the whys and morrows of the world, well… one comes, unheralded, to Zirta.”
Mirt shook his head. “When I was younger,” he complained to the gods who once again had failed to strike him down, “the world was much simpler.”
Elminster sighed. “I fear that’s a common experience,” he told the Old Wolf. “Ye seem to have lost thy decanter. Here, have another.”
* * * * *
Beldrim Taruster worked long, hard days in the dust of the warehouse yard, staggering under the weight of sacks heavier than he was and casks no man should be asked to lift. One slip, and he’d have pain for the rest of his days and no more coins with which to fill his belly, as he’d sit sourly watching a younger man staggering under the casks.
Such dark thoughts rode his shoulders like a heavy cloak, and at the stumbling end of a weary shift he was wont to eo to the Banshee, and down the dark stairs into the welcoming gloom of the taproom and his favorite firewine.