Elminster's Daughter - Ed Greenwood [11]
Oh Mask and Tymora, aid me now.
* * * * *
Elminster cast three illusory disguises, one atop the next, saving his shapechange in case it became necessary to fly or swim out of this gathering in haste. The company he'd be keeping in a moment would be neither savory nor safe.
He was taller, now, in his outermost seeming, and scarred, with the jet-black hair of the older branch of the Cormaerils. He selected a tiny token from a belt-pouch, murmured a word over it-and was suddenly holding a scabbarded sword in his hands. A needle-slender blade of the sort favored by many at court in Suzail, mirror-bright, its ornately swept and curved basket hilt studded with small, glossy-smooth sapphires like so many ever-curious eyes.
Strapping it on, he strode across a dark, pillared hall, where rotten barrels moldered and rats scurried in the dimness, and up an old, worn flight of steps. The Marsemban harbor-stink grew stronger with the faint light ahead. Quite suddenly, he was in a better-lit yet still gloom-shadowed room where grim guards stood watching a throng of laughing, drinking, loudly talking people, who were sporting under lamplight in a much larger chamber beyond.
Elminster sighed inwardly. Revelry was the same everywhere, and he'd managed to enjoy it for the first thousand years or so… but no more. Too much noise, too much pretence and sneering and nasty rumors-and too many wonderstruck lovely young things, all hope and excitement and bright laughter, who lived now only in his memory, gone in their countless legions to graves. He'd even helped to put a few of them there.
Yet he strode on, not hesitating for a moment. Meddling and stepping into distasteful danger was, after all, what Elminsters did.
Threading his way through the guards with the purposeful stride of a man who has every right to be present and considers himself greater in rank than all others, he advanced-and was two long strides from the archway that opened into noise and full lamplight when the challenge came.
Blades suddenly slid out to bar his path and rise up behind him. "Down steel," he ordered curtly.
The swords menacing him moved not a fingerwidth.
"And who are you," an unpleasant voice hissed from the other end of one of them, "to be giving us orders? Or coming up from cellars we searched very thoroughly?"
The tall, scarred man with the jet-black hair and the grand rapier at his hip turned his head coldly. "My name is Cormaeril, my lineage noble, and my patience limited. Who are you to be stopping me?"
"You're older than the other Cormaerils," a different voice observed coldly from behind another sword.
"Easy, now! They said they hoped some of the older branches would make an appearance," a third voice said hastily. "Some Cormaerils were out of the realm long before the order of exile, with no chance to make claims nor set affairs in order. Let him pass-there's only the one of him."
"Have you any magic on you?" the first voice demanded.
"Of course," the scarred newcomer replied icily. "But no spells up my sleeves nor things I can hurl doom with, if that's what you fear."
Reluctantly, the blades drew back, and Elminster was aware of a lot of armed men drifting disappointedly away into the far corners of the room again. There wasn't going to be the fun of watching a little bloodletting after all.
The scarred Cormaeril glanced all around to make sure no covert blades were within reach, gave the grim bladesmen a wordless nod, and stepped out into the revelry.
* * * * *
The Silken Shadow reached into the bodice of her leathers and drew forth the black cloth hood she'd made several seasons ago but so rarely used. It made her look like some child playing at being hangman, with its eyeholes and ragged edge, but it covered the pale flash of her skin in dim light and might hide her femininity for a few moments from an inattentive observer. Which was most folk, really.
Narnra pulled it on, sheathed her knife, and flexed the too-long-clenched fingers that had held it. She stretched like a lazy cat and hunched down