The Inquisitives [4] The Darkwood Mask (23 page)

Soneste’s eyes returned again and again to the alley across from her where a hovering ball of light flickered with tiny threads of electricity. She kept her back to a building with shattered windows and questionable occupancy, wondering if the buoyant light was a spell effect or some sort of urban fey. It was distracting.

She had confirmed the Midnight Market’s existence with one of the Justice Ministry’s less savory prisoners. For his cooperation she was able to convince his keepers to lessen the man’s sentence—to a faster and more painless death than General Thauram, commander of the White Lions, had planned for him.

It was then a matter of finding one of the criminal’s old acquaintances and following him to the Market as the hours grew late. The attraction she’d planted in the thief’s mind to find spiderdust hastened her quest. Soneste had a good eye for addicts.

It had been a gamble. The Midnight Market didn’t cater to the lowliest of Korth’s criminal elements, but her mark evidently knew where a dangerous substance like spiderdust would be available. Soneste silently thanked Olladra for the goddess’s favor so far. She’d had enough setbacks and humiliation already in this uncouth land.

She’d spent the rest of her day scouring the city, plying her skills among the seedier echelons of Korth society. Tallis’s name was known by many, but none she had questioned knew definitively where he could be found. He had a reputation as a burglar and saboteur of discriminating taste and expensive rates. Most of the time, he could be contacted at the Midnight Market. Soneste wondered if this was how Lord Charoth had once found him.

Soneste studied the crowds from beneath a low-hanging hood. With a spoken word, she’d altered her shiftweave clothing into one of its four other nested outfits. She’d used this kit before in the lower districts of Sharn, emulating the attitude of a shadow-dwelling mercenary. Having studied and apprehended city scum so many times, she knew how to adopt their manner and body language. Whenever a passerby looked at her for more than a couple
of seconds, she returned the glare with hostility.

Aegis sat upon the ground beside her with a sheet of canvas thrown over him. If he walked free, there would be no concealing his construct nature—the Host knew, in this land he would inevitably attract attention.

Given the nature of the Market, she was comforted knowing the warforged was near. The magewright had managed to make some repairs. He wasn’t fully restored, but he looked a lot less like someone’s damaged property.

“How much longer must I wait, Mistress?” Aegis said, his whisper alarmingly loud.

“Not long,” she whispered back.

Indeed, Soneste did not have to wait long. After scrutinizing every face in the crowd for the last half hour, she finally spied a man of Tallis’s bearing, though his attire gave her pause. He wore a fine coat of deep green with silver buttons and brooch, a tricorn, and an elegant rapier at his belt.

“This might be him,” she said quietly to Aegis. “Stay here unless I call you.” She heard an unhappy grunt in response.

The man approached along the street, eyeing the crowds as carefully as she. Soneste tossed one of the daggers she’d purchased earlier onto the cobbles in front of him. The action garnered a few twitchy glances, but the man in the green coat merely stooped to retrieve it. She immediately stepped away from the wall to approach him, her hood and scarf concealing most of her face. In her left hand she held two more daggers by their blades, as though she’d been juggling the three of them.

“Sorry,” she called out, forcing an impassive tone and an Aundairian accent.

Giving her only a cursory glance, the man handed the dagger back to her, hilt first. She saw a stylized dragon’s head on the ring of his right hand.

“Not a good place for throwing blades around, lady, as I’m sure you know.” He moved on without another word.

It
was
Tallis, and how different he looked. His face was clean-shaven
now. The coat and hat were obviously recent purchases, and the longer hair might have been the work of illusionary magic.

Feigning interest in browsing the Market, she fell into step far enough behind him to remain unnoticed. Tallis moved slowly himself, making an effort to talk to various parties. He looked like a Lyrandar dandy in his kit, but Soneste suspected it served his need to look less like his infamous self.

As she scanned the vendors arrayed on either side of the narrow street, Soneste was again amazed at the audacity of the Midnight Market. Scores of men and women of disparate races carried out illegal transactions of every kind. A fur-cloaked Lhazaarite captain argued with a Karrn huckster, a manacled young man kneeling beside them. A wiry shifter was purchasing glowing bottles from a haughty, loud-mouthed artificer. Soneste even saw a group of surprisingly well-dressed goblins exchanging coffers with a man who might have been a priest of the Dark Six.

Tallis soon stopped to inquire among a cluster of men who looked better suited to the cells of Thronehold Prison than freedom on the streets. Soneste paused at a vendor’s table so as not to draw suspicion, feigning interest in the wares before her.

“What is your need, lady?” a sibilant voice asked. Soneste looked up to see a woman swathed from head to toe in saffron garments. Her eyes, the only part of her body unconcealed, were vivid yellow with black, slitted pupils.

Soneste’s stomach lurched. The woman was yuan-ti, serpent-blooded folk from Xen’drik and the far south. The true severity of the Midnight Market finally took hold within her. She felt a strong desire to quit this place and call the White Lions down upon the whole affair.

No. The Market would endure despite her. The Justice Ministry could not effectively locate it or stamp it out. She felt blasphemous thinking it, but Soneste wondered if perhaps Korth
needed
the Market.

Certainly the Sharn Watch, itself rife with corruption, could never expose every vice in the City of Towers. Crime was everywhere
back home. Soneste been in this city for two days, and already she’d seen a world of difference. Korth was a place of extremes. The streets were safer, yes, but martial law engendered in the Karrnathi populace a dichotomy of moral choices. The Midnight Market and all its lawless indulgences had undoubtedly spawned under the unforgiving Code of Kaius.

Soneste examined the small vials the yuan-ti had revealed under a velvet cloth. Poisons, all of them.

“Blue whinnis,” she said.

Without hesitation, the snake woman selected one small jar and held it up to Soneste. The paste within was darker than she was used to seeing, but it was at least two applications of the incapacitating poison. “Platinum, twenty-six pieces,” the yuan-ti said, her accent sharp.

Sovereign bitch, she thought. Twenty-six dragons! She could get it for eighteen back home.

“Twenty,” Soneste said in turn. “Your formula is unfamiliar to me.”

“Stronger,” the snake woman hissed. “My people make it better. Twenty-five.”

Soneste prepared to bargain further, but she saw Tallis was moving on. “Twenty-five,” she agreed, hoping she wouldn’t regret the purchase. She made the exchange quickly then hastened after her mark.

For the next fifteen minutes, she shadowed Tallis as he moved among the crowd, dispensing coins—and unless she was mistaken, threats—among the knaves of the Market. When he thought no one was looking, he produced a vial of liquid from his coat and drank its contents quickly. A potion? She half expected him to fade into invisibility, but there was no apparent effect. Protection of some kind, perhaps? He moved as if he were expecting trouble.

Soneste’s instincts brought her closer to him as he approached a group of Lhazaarite sailors in fur-trimmed cloaks. Just beyond them, she spied the north end of the curtain of shadow that
blanketed the Market. From the inside, one could see out into a visible if muted world. Not for the first time, she wondered if the curtain also blocked sound.

Soneste moved close enough to overhear their conversation.

“Tallis?” The largest of the Lhazaarites leaned in closer to get a better look at the Karrn.

“Javey. Yeah, it’s me. I’ve cleaned up and become another arrow in the bunch, see?” Tallis stroked his smooth chin and grinned.

“Walk out of here, Tallis. I’m serious. Haedrun doesn’t want to see you.” He hefted a massive cudgel in two hands.

Haedrun
. The name was unknown to Soneste. Someone complicit in the ir’Daresh murder, or someone Tallis knew who could help him escape the city? Perhaps another Lhazaarite who could give him passage by ship?

“Sorry, I’ve got to talk to her.”

Ahh, a woman.

“She didn’t tell you why, did she?” Tallis continued. “Help me out, Jave. This is important.”

“No! Walk away.” Javey glanced around as his three comrades began to fan out around Tallis.

One of their number was a well-muscled woman with a heavy cutlass in hand. All of them wore thick leather armor and fur-lined capes and the other two carried well-worn short swords. From what Soneste had heard back home, Lhazaarites did not go down easily.

Tallis tapped the silver brooch on his coat. “I’m part of the Windwrights Guild now. Better sailors—even the lowliest of Lyrandar cabin boys—than the
greatest
of Lhazaar princes. Did you know?”

Javey, a bigger man than Tallis by far, swung his cudgel at the Karrn’s midsection. Tallis sucked in his stomach, barely avoiding the rib-crushing swing.

“Come now! Sleights we can forgive, Jave!” Tallis shook his head. He gripped the hilt of his rapier with one hand, but did not draw it. “Debts we can forget, but take another swing at me, and
we’ll never share another drink again.”

The big man actually seemed to take the words to heart, pausing as he hefted his cudgel back against his shoulder. “No,” he said at last, maintaining his stance. “Walk Tallis!”

“Fine.”

Tallis started to turn away then spun back sharply. He pulled at the grip of his sheathed rapier and the whole shaft pivoted at his hip. The tip of the sheath, evidently weighted for just this purpose, slammed hard into the big man’s groin. Javey sucked in air as he stumbled, groaning, to his knees.

The other three raised their weapons and spit Lhazaarite curses. Soneste tensed and gripped the hilt of her rapier, uncertain whether to let this play out or reveal herself by helping the Karrn follow this lead.

Tallis drew out his weapon at last. In place of a blade, a slender glass vial half the length of the sheath was attached to the hilt. Some sort of cloudy gray liquid swirled within.

Full of tricks, isn’t he? Soneste mused. Tanglefoot bags, false weapons. What next?

Growling, the Lhazaarite woman closed in first. A seasoned warrior, she made a few wild swings merely to test Tallis’s skill. The other two sailors maneuvered slowly at his back. Soneste almost called out in warning, but held her tongue and watched.

“I don’t think that trick will work the same on you,” Tallis said to the woman, looking down at Javey who still lay on the ground, coughing. “Or … 
would
it?”

“You had your chance,” the woman snarled, diving forward with a well-aimed strike.

Tallis had taken his measure of her as well. He jumped back a pace—putting himself dangerously close to the other two—and held out his strange hilt-vial to intercept her blade as though parrying with a blade of his own. The glass reservoir, predictably, shattered—

A cloud of thick, nubilous mist exploded from the impact.

The air was muddied with the gray fumes, obscuring all sight.
Soneste couldn’t make out Tallis or his three opponents, but she heard the slap of metal against leather, and the solid rap of a fist against flesh. Several times.

“Blunted!” was all she heard from Tallis.

Soneste looked around to see if any of the Market’s other attendees planned to intervene. The scuffle had attracted some spectators, but even those looked on with only passing interest. She tried to make herself appear as one of them, relaxing her hands and pretending to inventory her pockets.

The alchemical cloud dispersed quickly. Tallis stood panting, only a single cut along one arm showing that he’d been attacked in turn. A blade had sheared through the fine green coat, but the wound bled only lightly. Even Tallis’s tricorn hat was unmoved. The Lhazaarites lay upon the ground, ushered swiftly into unconsciousness. He knew where to hit and how to hit hard. Soneste felt a pang of empathy for the sailors. She noted the blackened eyes, the bloody noses, and the red welts on the Lhazaarites. Tallis had obviously exhibited restraint with Soneste when he’d defeated her. He was capable of considerable violence.

Tallis didn’t tarry. He sat down casually beside Javey, who looked at his fallen comrades in despair. Tallis picked up the big man’s cudgel and turned it over in his hands.

“One more time, Javey. This is bigger than you and me, not worth losing
all
you have. Haedrun.”

The Lhazaarite’s sickly face looked up at Tallis. “I can’t …”

Tallis looked around to gauge the onlookers. His eyes passed right over Soneste, but he made no indication that he recognized her. Then he looked back at Javey and jabbed the butt of the cudgel into the man’s mouth, splitting his lip.

“Haedrun?” he asked calmly. “Or did you not wish to keep your teeth?”

“Kol … Korran!” the man cried, spitting blood. “Stop, Tallis … I’ll tell you.”

“That’s quite enough! Leave the man alone.”

Soneste and Tallis both turned their heads at the bold voice
of the newcomer. He wore a chain hauberk and held a long sword readily in one hand. Though the man carried himself like a professional soldier, she could see no insignia upon his uniform. His hawkish features were indistinct in the gloom of the Market, but he looked a little older than Tallis.

The expression of hostility on his face drew Soneste’s hand back to the hilt of her rapier. By the Sovereigns, how many enemies did Tallis have?

“I know why you’re here,” the man said, “but this is your mess. Leave Haedrun out of it.”

Tallis stood and faced the soldier. “It surprises me to see you here, Bentius, but it sounds like you know where she is.”