Shadow's Witness (12 page)

The ghouls did not even move to defend themselves. The surviving Uskevren house guards brandished then* long swords and began to chop them down tike farmers harvesting wheat. <3ale dropped the ice-cold dagger and rushed to Thazienne’s side.

As though freed to return by the absence of the demon, the white vapor that clung in wisps around her body—her soul, Gale now knew—flowed back into the slash in her chest. Immediately, the wound knitted itself shut to leave only an ugly pink scar. He knelt beside her and brushed the hair from her forehead. She looked so pale. Her body felt as cold as Oeepwinter snow.

Ignoring the pain of his own wounds, Gale pulled her limp body close and cradled her to his chest. She still breathed, he realized, but only barely. His eyes welled as he rocked her back and forth. Please, gods, not her, please.

Thazienne,” he murmured. “Please come back, Thazienne.” He buried his face in her dark hair and tried to warm her cold body with the heat of his own.

Moments later—it seemed an eternity to him— Meena Foxmantle’s sobs brought Gale back to himself. She lay on the floor near him, curled into a fetal position, trembling so badly that she looked as if she were convulsing. Her terrified eyes stared vacantly at him. He reached out and gently placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She grabbed at bis arm like a drowning person clutching a lifeline and held so tight that he lost all feeling in his hand within moments.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.” He wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince her or himself.

While Captain Orvist and the house guard finished with the remainder of the ghouls, Thamalon and Shamur charged across the feasthall, the Foxmantles close behind.

Gale saw them coming and lifted Thazienne from the floor.

Tazi!” they shouted in shared alarm. They rushed forward and touched her hands and face. Upon feeling the coldness of her flesh, Thamalon recoiled in shock. Shamur’s already tear-streaked face went white. She

clutched her husband’s wrist with one hand, raised the other to her mouth, and looked; upon the limp form of her daughter.

“Gods,” Thamalon oathed, and tears formed in his eyes.

Gale’s knees trembled. Tears welled in his eyes. A house guard tried to relieve him of Thazienne but he refused to let her go.

“Send for a priest, Lord,” he said to Thamalon, his voice quavering with emotion. “Send for a priest now.”

•Š••Š• •Š• •Š• •Š•

Riven glared at the gate guard of the manor house and stormed past without a word, violence on his mind. The sleepy, bearded house guard took one look at Riven’s scowl and apparently thought better of challenging his entrance to Whitebirch.

Fortunate for you, Riven thought. He would have welcomed an excuse to vent his anger by gutting one of Verdrinal’s lackeys.

His foul mood only worsened as he strode through the neatly landscaped, illumined grounds and approached Whitebirch Manor itself Verdrinal’s manse exuded decadence, which of course fit the man perfectly. The front was bedecked with winter shrubs, perfectly hedged, statues of nude women frolicking with leering satyrs, snow dusted benches, and a wooden veranda. Riven found the whole sight vaguely offensive, as though the very air here somehow soiled him. Not for the first time, he marveled that a fool such as Verdrinal could have risen so far within the Zhentarim. The bastard actually equaled him in rank!

You get born to the right family and anything’s possible, he supposed with a scowl. The only heir of the Isterin family fortune, Verdrinal Isterin provided a

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legitimate face for many otherwise illicit Zhentarim operations. Apart from his wealth and family name, Riven thought Verdrinal a useless, incompetent man. Equal in rank or not, Riven held him in contempt.

Not bothering to use the bronze doorknocker, he kicked open the main doors and walked into the foyer. Not a guard in sight.

“Verdrinal!” he shouted up the main stairway. “Get out of bed and get down here!” He deliberately had come in the small hours, just to inconvenience Verdrinal the more. He must have caught the house guard unawares as well—Hov usually did better work.

Muffled voices and a shuffling from upstairs told him that he had been heard. In a few moments, a dark-haired young man in the purple uniform of an Isterin house guard emerged from the hallway and leaned over the banister. He scowled when he saw Riven.

“What do you want?”

“Get out of my sight,” Riven retorted. “And tell Verdrinal to get down here, now.”

The house guard’s eyes narrowed. Riven assumed he was trying to be intimidating. “Hell be along soon enough” ;

Riven said nothing. Verdrinal was no doubt upstairs with a woman. The nobleman went through women the way other men went through clothes. The man’s insatiable tastes made him weak—he lacked focus, lacked discipline.

“Why don’t you fetch Hov, boy. Keeping an eye on me is no job for a little puke like you.”

The house guard snarled and stepped back from the landing. He stomped down the stairs, a white-knuckled grip on his sword hilt. He walked up to Riven, face to face.

“Don’t ever burst in here again or I’ll put you down. I don’t need Hov for the likes of you.”

Before the guard could move, Riven whipped free a dagger and stabbed him through the gut.

The surprised house guard grunted in pain, tried to draw his own blade, but doubled over instead. Warm blood coursed over Riven’s hand and stained the house guard’s purple uniform black. Riven jerked the dagger free and kicked the guard to the floor.

“Never say don’t to me, boy.” He knelt and wiped his blade clean on the dying house guard’s uniform.

“Drasek!”

Verdrinal’s voice from atop the stairs pulled his gaze upward and wiped the satisfied smile from his face. The tall, brown-haired Zhentarim nobleman had taken the time to don a shirt and blue pantaloons. He pointed a long finger at the groaning house guard.

“What have you done? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good men?”

Riven ignored both the question and the house guard’s dying spasms. He stared into Verdrinal’s eyes.

“If he was a good man, he wouldn’t be dying on the floor. And if you ever call me Drasek again, Verdrinal, I’ll leave you bleeding beside him.”

Verdrinal smiled distantly at the threat and descended the stairs. “But Riven sounds so formal,” he said with a phony smile. “And the two of us such old friends.”

Riven spat on the foyer floor, sheathed his dagger, and said nothing.

The house guard gasped and finally expired. Verdrinal looked down at the expanding pool of blood on the hardwood floor. His smooth, handsome face creased with a flash of anger. “What a blasted mess.” He stared ice at Riven. “Varra,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Varra!”

After a moment, a pretty brunette maid in a white nightdress scurried into the foyer through an adjacent

doorway. Upon seeing the corpse, she gasped.

“Clean this up please, Varra dear.” He shot Riven an ingenuous smile. “Mister…Riven and I will be in the study.”

The girl gave a frightened nod, whirled in a cloud of white nightdress, and ran from the foyer. Riven watched her go, aroused by the way the thin cotton hugged her slim hips as she ran. Verdrinal’s voice stopped her at the doorway.

“Oh, and Varra …” She turned, eyes wide. Riven leered at her.

“Please let Hov know that I have company.” She nodded again and ran off.

Riven glanced at Verdrinal and didn’t bother to hide his derision. Hov, a brick wall of a warrior with a two-handed broadsword and a mean temper, headed Verdrinal’s houseguards.

“Afraid?” he asked Verdrinal.

“Merely cautious, Riven, as always.”

Cautious or not, Riven knew that he could put Hov down one-on-one, but the big bastard probably would bring along additional men. That could create problems.

Stay sharp, he reminded himself. Though Verdrinal was incompetent, he was also reasonably cunning, and he resorted to bloodletting almost as readily as Riven. He’d turn the house guard loose if Riven pushed him too hard.

Taking a deep breath, Riven struggled to quell the anger that had brought him here. Killing one of Verdrinal’s house guards had helped.

Verdrinal strolled into the study off the foyer and lit an oil lamp. Plush chairs and expensive rugs covered the floors. Beautiful, Riven acknowledged, but decadent and useless, like Verdrinal himself. Bookshelves towered from floor to ceiling, filled with leather bound tomes and ribbon-tied scrolls. Riven doubted Verdrinal

had read many of them. He collected books just as he collected women—pretty tilings to decorate his home and impress visitors.

Verdrinal pulled forth a decanter of liquor from a cherrywood hutch and poured himself a glass. “Drink?” he asked Riven.

“No.”

Verdrinal shrugged and sauntered back to where Riven stood in the study’s doorway. Neither man sat. Verdrinal eyed him over the rim of his glass.

“What is it you want, Riven? What time is it? Second hour? By Cyric, it’ll be dawn in five hours.” As if to make his point, he staged a theatrical yawn.

Riven forced down the urge to punch Verdrinal in his open mouth. No doubt Hov and his men were already watching from some secret room nearby.

“What I want is an explanation. And since Malix has gone underground, that leaves only you.” Malix, Riven’s handler and the highest-ranking Zhentarim agent in Selgaunt, had vanished soon after Riven had sabotaged the Righteous Man’s summoning of the dread. “You know anything?”

Whirling the liquor around in his glass, Verdrinal regarded Riven shrewdly. His green eyes reminded Riven of a viper’s.

“Malix has returned to headquarters to personally report recent events to Lord Chembryl. In the meantime, he’s left me in charge.”

Riven stiffened. “You!”

“Me.”

“Temporarily, no doubt.”

“Temporarily,” Verdrinal said, conceding with a nod. He quickly added in an arrogant tone, “But until then, I’m your superior.”

At that, Riven’s anger boiled over. He no longer cared about the Zhentarim hierarchy or whether Hov

and the guards were watching. He stepped close to Verdrinal and hissed into his face, “Well then, you arrogant little bastard, if you’re the one in charge, then you can explain to me what in the dark is going on! I’ve lost six operators to this demon. Six.’ And every one of them sucked dry as a prune. Malix said the dread would kill the Righteous Man and then leave. Leave!” He clenched a fist before Verdrinal’s handsome face and barely restrained the impulse to beat the man to pulp. “Godsdamned mages never know what they’re talking about!” -

Verdrinal endured the tirade without expression, even the insult and fist in his face. He waited to be sure Riven had finished, then replied in the tone of voice used to explain something to an angry child. “Things have changed, Riven.”

Riven stared at him, amazed that Verdrinal could say something so obvious, and so stupid. “Really.”

Verdrinal winced at the sarcasm, took a sip from his

“The dread has somehow managed to remain on our plane. Malix is not sure how. He is sure that it has summoned lesser minions,” here he smiled, “and is now doing what demons do.”

Riven found Verdrinal’s self-satisfied tone infuriating. The man was speaking casually about demons, as though they prowled Selgaunt every other tenday! He forced down his anger only .because he needed information. “So what are we going to do about it? I can’t keep losing men to this thing.”

Verdrinal gazed at him condescendingly. “Manx’s orders are to do nothing about it.”

“Nothing! Did his brain turn to dung? It’s killing my men. Our men. Good operators.”

“True, but it is also killing the heads of certain noble families and a multitude of rival leaders. It

appears to have taken the Righteous Man’s enemies as its own.” He smiled and waved his hand, a weak gesture. “Dent you see? It’s doing our work for us. Well let it purge the underworld and only then move against it. That’s why Malix went to see Lord Chembryl personally, to determine when to take the next step.”

Riven had to admit the logic of the course. A few dead low-level Zhentarim operaiaves were copper pennies to the gold fivestars of dead patriarchs and rival guudmasters. Malix had been hoping merely to eliminate the Night Knives with the dread, but the creature was doing far better than expected; it was single-handedly securing Selgaunt’s entire underworld for the Zhentarim.

“How do we know we can get rid of it?”

Verdrinal ignored the question. “It attacked Stormweather earlier tonight.” He grinned smugly, took a sip of his drink, and said nothing more. Verdrinal knew Riven’s hate for Erevis Cale. He wanted him to ask for details.

Riven could not help himself. “And?”

“And at least twenty guests present for one of Thamalon’s balls were slaughtered.” Casually, he took another sip from his glass. “Did you know that I was invited to that ball?”

Riven ground his teeth together. You should’ve attended, he thought, but didn’t say. “Cale?”

“Lives. Apparently drove the dread off himself, though the Uskevren daughter was gravely hurt. Quite a man, this Erevis Gale. Quite a man, indeed.”

Riven realized that he had been clenching his fists. He released them and said, “IH take that drink now.”

“You know where it is.”

Riven walked to the cabinet and surveyed the many bottles Verdrinal kept there. Able to read only with difficulty, he could not tell the vintage of any of the wines,

but he’d be damned before he let Verdrinal know of his illiteracy. He grabbed a bottle at random and poured himself a glass. “Hell be looking for a cause,” he said, and gulped the wine in a single drink. “Cale, I mean.”

Verdrinal nodded. “I hope so. If all goes well, hell find his cause. That’ll solve another of our problems, won’t it?”

Riven nodded stiffly and poured himself another glass of wine. He gulped it down too.

A month earlier, Cale and that little halfling rat Jak Fleet had ruineoVRiven’s otherwise perfect plan to kidnap the youngest Uskevren whelp, Talbot. In the process, they had marked Riven with a scar on his back that had yet to heal fully. More importantly, the failed operation had dealt a harsh blow to Riven’s aspirations for rising within the Network.