The City of Splendors_ A Waterdeep Novel - Ed Greenwood [101]
"Lord Korvaun Helmfast," the dagger-lass chuckled. "My, he must drink fast?"
The sailor's dirty laugh broke off in a grunt as the guards went inside and a sudden singing shimmering sprang from rune-pillar to rune-pillar. "They've set the night-wards," he growled in surprise. "That's it, then. No one'll be leaving 'til morn."
The girl spat thoughtfully out the window as Mirt's carriage rumbled past, and Mrelder sat frowning and thinking.
Then he sprang to his feet and hurried down and out, following the carriage. About half the watchers who'd been loitering in Tarnished Silver Alley had suddenly found good cause to be elsewhere; Mrelder saw only two others oh-so-casually strolling from shop to shop along the route he was taking.
"This window's the best," a hoarse voice came down to him, as he passed under the open windows above one ramshackle shop, "and a good arrow's a small price to pay for a new Open Lord who's not quite so firm and upstanding, if ye take my meaning."
Mrelder hurried on. Best to pretend he'd heard nothing and keep in close under awnings and downspouts, where no arrow might find him. Of course there'd be folk in Dock Ward who'd want Piergeiron dead and welcome all the accompanying tumult. Why-
He stopped. Ahead, Mirt's carriage had halted outside a large, new-looking building. Mrelder vaguely recalled that an old rooming-house, its roof sagging into collapse, had stood there as sahuagin had raged down the streets. Newly rebuilt, it now sported steps up to elegant double doors flanked by formidable-looking doorguards, beneath a truly splendid signboard.
"The Gentle Moment," he read, then deciphered the more fanciful script below: "Skilled hands to tend all your hurts and needs."
The horses, their heads tossing, were already unhitched and being led around to the near end of Mirt's carriage, to draw it right back down the street to the moneylender's stables.
Mrelder frowned. His purse was now slender enough to make the prospect of following some drunken noble blade-whose connection to the Lords of Waterdeep was probably nonexistent-into a brand-new and surely overpriced house of healing and pleasure rather less than appealing.
A woman who wore little more than a collar adorned with long strips of glittering cut-glass "gems" suddenly burst out of the doors, planted herself on the steps in a pose that showed Mrelder and everyone else on the street all the charms the gods had given her, and blew a horn.
A Watch horn.
Before Mrelder's jaw could even drop, she'd vanished back up the steps in a flashing of false gems and a bouncing of trim flesh, and voices could be heard shouting inside the Gentle Moment-angry male voices.
A brawl must be brewing. Mrelder strolled away from the house of healing to somewhere he could lean casually against on the far side of the street. Mirt's carriage rumbled away, and from the east came the hasty jingling of scabbard-chains and the bobbing of torches.
The doorguards stood motionless, staring coldly at Mrelder and several other curious Dock Warders who'd heard the horn and come to see the trouble-or being as this was Dock Ward-the fun.
They stared back and forth, the guards on the steps and Mrelder and the others across the street, both casually ignoring the Watch patrol who rushed up the steps into the Gentle Moment, then sent out two Watchmen to blow another horn-call.
The Watch wagon that responded to that summons was rather less elegant than Mirt's carriage and sported enough window-bars and firequench-glowing metal plates to seem part of a fortress rather than a conveyance.
The doors of the Gentle Moment opened again and another unconscious young noble-this one wearing a gem-bright cloak of a soft rose hue-was carried out, unconscious, and stuffed through a hastily slammed hatch into the armored wagon.
"Where's he off to, I wonder?" Mrelder murmured aloud.
An old salt standing near