“So while Ilnezhara is at her showing, you would have us visit her home?” Jarlaxle asked.
“Or you, you alone, could go to the showing,” Tazmikella explained, indicating the drow. “Ilnezhara will find one of your … beauty, quite interesting. It should not be difficult for you to elicit an invitation to her private home.”
Jarlaxle looked at her skeptically.
“Easier than breaking into her tower,” Tazmikella explained. “She is a woman of no small means, rich enough, as am I, to buy the finest of pieces, to hire the most skilled of guards, and to create the most deadly of constructs.”
“Promising,” Entreri noted, but though he was being sarcastic with his tone, his eyes glowed at the presented challenge.
“Get that flute,” Tazmikella said, turning to face Entreri directly, “and I will reward you beyond your grandest dreams. A hundred bags of silver, perhaps?”
“And if I prefer gold?”
As soon as the words left his mouth and Tazmikella’s face went tight with a fierce scowl, the assassin figured he might have crossed over the line. He offered a quick apology in the form of a tip of his hat, then looked at Jarlaxle and nodded his agreement.
Artemis Entreri never could resist a challenge. He was supposed to hide outside the singular stone tower and await Jarlaxle’s appearance beside Ilnezhara, if the drow mercenary could manage an invitation there, as Tazmikella had hinted.
The front of the thirty-foot gray stone tower had a wide awning of polished stone, supported by four delicate white columns, two carved with the likenesses of athletic men, and two with shapely women. The tower door beneath that awning was of heavy wood, carved in its center to resemble a blooming flower-a rose, the assassin thought.
Both the pull ring and the lock were gilded, and Entreri couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between that place and the modest house of Tazmikella.
Entreri knew that the door would be locked and probably set with devilish traps, perhaps even magical wards. He saw no guards around, however, and so he moved under cover of the waning daylight to the side of the tower, then inched his way around. At one point, he noticed the sill of a narrow window about halfway up, and his fingers instinctively felt at the stone blocks. He knew he could climb up, and easily.
Realizing that, he went instead for the door.
In short order, Entreri found a trap: a pressure plate in front of the handle. Following the logical line to the front left column, he easily disarmed that one. Then he discovered a second: a spring needle set within the lock’s tumblers. He took a block of wood from his pouch, an item he had designed precisely for that type of trap. The center was cut out, just enough to allow him to slide his lock pick through with a bit of play room. He slipped it in, wriggled it a few times, then nodded his satisfaction as he heard the expected thump against the block of wood. Retracting the block, he saw the dart, and saw that it was shiny with poison. Ilnezhara played seriously.
And so Entreri played seriously for the next few moments too, scouring every inch of that door, then rechecking. Satisfied that he had removed all of the mechanical traps, at least (for magical ones were much harder to detect), he went to work on the lock.
The door clicked open.
Entreri leaped back, rushing to the column to reset the pressure plate. He moved fast and sprang to the threshold, moving through suddenly and pushing the door closed behind him, thinking to relock it.
But as he bent with his lock picks to reset the tumblers, the door burst in, forcing him to dive aside.
“Oh, for the love of drow,” he cursed, continuing his roll off to the side as the carvings from the columns strode through, slender stone swords in hand.
Out came Charon’s Claw, Entreri’s deadly sword, his jeweled dagger appearing in his other hand. With little regard for those formidable weapons, the two closest of the stone constructs charged in, side by side. Charon’s Claw went out to meet that charge, Entreri snapping the sword left and right to force an opening. He shifted sidelong and rushed ahead, between the stone swords, between the statues, and he managed to snap off a quick slash at one with his sword, and stabbed hard at the other. Both blades bit, and for any mortal creature, either might have proved a fatal strike. But the constructs had no life energy for Entreri’s vampiric dagger to siphon, and no soul for Charon’s Claw to melt.
They were not his preferred opponents, Entreri knew, and he lamented that no one seemed to hire flesh and blood guards anymore.
He didn’t dwell on it, though, and pressed past the two male statues.
The two females came at Entreri fast and hard, leaping at him and clawing the air with stony fingers.
Entreri hit the floor in a sidelong roll. He got kicked by both, but accepted the heavy hits so that he could send both tumbling forward, off balance, to smash into their male counterparts. Stone crumbled and dust flew in the heavy collision, and Entreri was fast to his feet, wading in from behind and bashing hard with his powerful sword.
As the statues unwound and turned on him in force, Entreri called upon another of Charon’s Claw’s tricks, waving the blade in a wide arc and summoning forth a black wall of ash as he did. Behind that optical barrier, the assassin went out to the side, then reversed and charged right back in as the lead statues crashed through the opaque screen.
Again his sword went to work ferociously, chopping at the stone. And again, Entreri waved a wall of clouding ash and rushed away.
In the temporary reprieve, he noted that two of the statues were down and crumbled, and a third, one of the women, was hopping toward him on one leg, its other lying on the floor. Beside it came one of the males, seemingly unscathed.
Entreri rushed ahead to meet that charge before the male could get far out in front of the crippled female. In came the stone sword, and Entreri hooked it expertly with his dagger and turned it out, then jerked it back in as he went out, slipping past the male and going low, then cutting across with his sword, taking the remaining leg from the hopping female. She crashed down hard and Entreri came up fast, planting his foot on her face and springing away just in front of a mighty downward chop from the male’s sword.
A downward chop that split the female’s head in half.
Entreri hit the ground in a spin and came right back in, one against one. He slipped Charon’s Claw inside the blade of the thrusting stone sword, then lifted as he turned to drive the weapon and weapon arm up high. He stepped forward and jabbed his dagger hard into the armpit of the statue, then disengaged Charon’s Claw at such an angle that he was able to crack it down across the statue’s face as he moved off to the side. The statue turned to pursue, but Entreri was already reversing his direction, moving with perfect balance and sudden speed.
He hit the statue across the face again as he passed, but that was merely the feint, for as the statue threw its sword arm up to block, Entreri turned and rushed under that arm, coming out the other way in perfect balance and position to slam Charon’s Claw against the upper arm of the already-damaged sword arm.
That arm fell to the floor.
The statue came on, clawing at him with its one hand. Entreri’s blades worked in a blur, expertly taking the fingers from the statue’s hand one at a time.
Then he whittled the hand to a stump in short order. The statue tried to head butt him, but its head fell to the floor.
“Stubborn rock,” Entreri remarked, and he lifted his foot up, braced it against the torso, and shoved the lifeless thing away and to the floor.
His weapons went away in the flash of an eye, and he turned to regard the room, taking in the sight of treasure after treasure.
“I’m working for the wrong person,” he mumbled, awestricken.
He shrugged and began his search for the driftwood flute of Idalia. Before long, he realized that the destroyed statues were deconstructing, their essence and materials drifting back out the open door to the columns-as he’d expected they would.