Elminster's Daughter - Ed Greenwood [2]
Caethur rose from his chair, nodded to his two guards, and waved a hand at the gem-coffers on the table. "When you're done stripping the bodies of all deeds and coins and suchlike, bring those."
As he strode to the door and slipped out, he took something from a belt-pouch. It looked like a beast's claw: a grip-bar studded with a row of little daggers. When Caethur closed his hand around the bar, the blades protruded from between his fingers like a row of sheathed talons. With his other hand, the moneylender drew a belt dagger and used it to cautiously flick away the sheaths that covered every blade of the claw. Something dark and wet glistened on each razor-sharp point.
Thrusting the dagger through a belt-loop and putting the ven-omed claw behind his back, Caethur waited, humming a jaunty tune softly under his breath.
When his two laden bodyguards came to the door, he gave them a frown as he blocked their way and pointed back into the room.
"You've missed something," he said sharply.
His bodyguards gave him astonished and displeased looks but whirled to look at the dead merchants; the moneylender was not a master to be crossed.
The moment they turned Caethur took a swift step, slashed them both across the backs of their necks with his claw, and sprang away to avoid the thrashing spasms he knew would follow.
The guards were young and strong. After they stiffened with identical grunts of astonished agony, they managed to whirl toward their master, glaring, and claw at the air wildly for some seconds ere the venom stilled their limbs, and sent them toppling into the long dark chill of oblivion.
Caethur applied another knife, this one slaked liberally with brain-burn, to both of the men he'd just slain, and calmly set about collecting everything of value in the room full of corpses. After all, brain-burn was expensive… and after word got around of this night's deaths, the hiring-price of guards agreeing to work for him was bound to go up sharply.
Still, the cost of just one man informing the Lords of Waterdeep of his deeds would be much higher. Kamburan's cloak, still draped over the back of his chair, was unstained, and when bundled around Caethur's takings, served well as a carry-sack. He drew his own cloak around him with not a hair out of place nor any change in his easy half-smile at all.
It wasn't the first time Caethur the moneylender had walked away alone from a room full of dead men. Such things were, after all, a regrettable but all-too-often inevitable feature of his profession.
Outside, the shadow moved, swinging up and away from the shutter, seeking the edge of the roof. A booted foot slipped, a curse blazed sudden and bright in a mind that kept its dangling body coldly silent-and with a sudden surge of effort, the shadow gained the roof and scrambled away.
* * * * *
As soon as he entered the portal, he felt it: a disturbance in the flow of the Weave, straight ahead. Someone or something was casting a spell on his intended destination or had laid a trap of enchantment on it already. Only those like himself, highly attuned to the Weave, could feel it-and move to avoid whatever danger was waiting.
Chuckling soundlessly, the archmage stepped aside, moving through the drifting blue nothingness to emerge elsewhere, from a portal linked to neither the one he'd entered nor the imperiled one it reached.
* * * * *
Narnra crouched in the lee of a large but crumbling chimney, wincing at the burning ache in her shoulder. She'd torn something inside, it seemed. Something small, thank the gods.
Ah, yes, the watching, all-seeing gods. She glanced up, and thought another silent curse upon the enthusiastically devout idiots who enspelled the Plinth to glow so brightly by night. Thieves don't welcome beacons that illuminate their working world well.
And a thief was what Narnra Shalace was. That had been her profession since her mother's mysterious death and the