Murder in Cormyr - Chet Williamson [18]
I introduced myself and started to load his bags into the carriage. He began to help, but I said, "Oh, no, sir. Please rest yourself. I'll be happy to take care of everything." I can lie perfectly when I have to. It's a talent that everyone in service needs to have, along with a strong back and little need for sleep.
Then he started to climb up front with me, until I told him that he would sit more comfortably in the back. He demurred so delicately that he reminded me of a polite child. "But I should see ever so much better up here."
I shrugged. "Very well then, sir, wherever you wish." I didn't know what he would find so visually appealing. The land southeast of Ghars is just farms and swamp, but he was the boss.
He spoke nary a word on the first part of the journey, and I respected the silence, like a good servant. Now and then he'd ask me what bird had just flown past, or what crop was growing in that field.
I was telling him as much as I knew about farming oats, which was minimal, when he suddenly stiffened. "What is that up there?" he asked.
For a moment I thought he had seen the ghost again, and my heart leapt into my throat. But then I saw the mound I had detected only briefly on the way. It was perhaps fifty feet off the road, nearly at the edge of the swamp itself, and now that I gathered the courage to look at it dead on (apt words!), it looked like nothing more nor less than a body clad in armor.
"Do you see it?" Lindavar asked me, and I nodded dully. When we were close to it, the wizard told me to stop the carriage. "It looks like someone lying out there," he said, alarm in his voice, and stepped off the road onto the marshy earth at the swamp's edge.
"Sir, be careful!" I said. "The swamp could pull you down if you don't watch your step!"
If he heard me, he ignored me, and kept walking toward the figure, heedless of the mud that sucked at his boots. Like a good and idiotic servant, I followed him.
"Sir, I might add that only yesternight I saw a terrible specter clad in armor right at this spot. It could be a monster of some sort, sir, playing possum to draw you closer. Sir? Did you hear me, sir?"
"It's no monster," he called back. "It looks like a man!"
I wasn't so sure. It looked to me as though it was wearing the same armor that I had seen garbing my ghost. "Sir, I beg you, as you must know from your calling, such creatures have the power to put on a piteous shape, and then leap up and grasp their would-be helper. It may not be a man at all!"
It was too late. Lindavar was already kneeling by the side of what I was convinced was a malingering ghost, and I expected at any second to see a pair of taloned hands come up and rend him to bits. But instead he straightened up, holding a large metal helmet on its side. It was the same one that I had seen Fastred's ghost wearing the night before. He turned toward me and held out the helmet, from the base of which dripped a reddish muck.
Then he opened the closed visor, and I realized that the head was still in it.
"Is it not a man?" said Lindavar in grim confirmation.
A familiar face, now a sickly green, stared with bulging eyes through the opening of the visor. "It is," I whispered.
"Dovo."
10
"You know him?" asked Lindavar, coming closer with his dread burden.
I backed away. Maybe wizards are used to lugging around dead body parts, but it wasn't my cup of tea. 'Yes, I know… knew him. Look, would you please put that down?" My egg and black bread were really churning now that I saw the reddish muck wasn't merely swamp ooze.
Lindavar started to set down the helmeted head, but it tilted and the head slid right out the bottom of the helmet. It made a wet plop as it hit the swampy ground. "Ooogh," I muttered, and looked away.
"Who was he?" Lindavar asked.
"His name was Dovo. He was the smithy's assistant in Ghars." I considered not speaking ill of the dead, then dismissed it After all, Dovo had played a pretty rotten trick on me last night, and on a lot of people by the looks of it "He was a dolt"
Lindavar looked down at