The City of Splendors_ A Waterdeep Novel - Ed Greenwood [85]
Well, Blood of the Whale, if young sailors and Dock Ward louts thought they could trample and ignore the Old Wolf himself-
Mirt rose like an enraged and puffing walrus, drew his curved saber and favorite dagger, and lumbered after the trio, who were reeling back out of the alley into the street they'd evidently come from… which seemed rather noisy and crowded, come to think of it.
Mirt frowned. The cobbles were crowded with dying, groaning, hacking-at-each-other men-and billowing smoke, too! Through those spreading clouds, the street seemed to be a veritable slaughterhouse of a battlefield! Ye gods and little fishes!
He thrust his head out of the alley, peering through the thickening haze at a fallen signboard and a magnificently armored, somehow familiar leg protruding from under it.
Someone charged at him out of the smoke, shouting in anger and swinging a glittering sword. Mirt knew the man at a glance: one of Piergeiron's bodyguards. So that must be old Steelhead himself, lying there like-
The glittering sword slashed open one of Mirt's sleeves, and the wheezing moneylender ducked away and forward, to rise suddenly behind the guard's backswing.
He clouted a helm solidly with his saber hilt, snarling, "Young puppy! More fancy armor than a dancer doing the Lady Knight Surrenders, and this is the best you can do?"
The man fell untidily and did not get up.
Someone else came sprinting out of the alley, and Mirt lurched around to face this new foe, puffing and blowing through his mustache, just in time to have a Dock Ward roughblade-stormhowl it all, someone else he recognized!-slam into his capacious gut and send him staggering.
Whereupon a handsome man in fine clothes and a swirling ruby-red cloak lunged out of the smoke to slash open the man's throat, neck, and shoulder with one vicious cut of his blade.
The Dock Warder fell, gurgling, and the nearest of Piergeiron's still-living bodyguards turned in time to entirely misread the situation and leap at Beldar Roaringhorn with a shout of anger and a wildly thrusting sword.
Suddenly sailors and Watch officers and everyone else afoot in all Dock Ward, it seemed, were converging on the fallen paladin and swinging steel as they came.
This being Dock Ward, windows had already flown open to let folk peer down through the rising smoke. Some hurled insults, and others preferred to toss small, expendable objects or the contents of chamberpots. Bets were shouted from window to window as sailors and Watch officers groaned, thrust, parried… and died.
The last and most drunken of the Glorious Goblet's crew came staggering out to join the battle, roaring and swinging their blades wildly. One of them promptly reeled into a handcart and sent it crashing over. Its owner erupted out of the shop he'd been delivering to with a rising scream of fury, spitting out insults and curses as he smashed the sailor to the cobbles with a three-legged stool the shop owner had just rejected.
The sailors all around the stool-seller growled in menacing unison-and the bustling little man growled right back at them, drew his belt-knife, and flung himself at the nearest one, wielding knife and stool with deadly ruthlessness.
* * * * *
Overhead, in an attic not far above the tumult, the smoke and noise had awakened two elderly, dozing sisters: Rethilda, who called the bat-infested rooms home, and Undaera, from the farm crossroads of Windy Hill nigh Secomber, who was visiting her sister in the big city for the first time.
She'd been horrified at the filth, noise, and dangers of Dock Ward and had said so, colorfully and at length, almost causing a rift between them.
So it was with a certain satisfaction that Rethilda surveyed the brawl now filling the street and turned triumphantly to the gaping, trembling Undaera to ask, "Well, sister? Does Windy Hill offer this sort of free entertainment? Hey?"
* * * * *
"Too many people are watching from above," Golskyn snapped, as swearing, snarling sailors clawed at the ruby-cloaked man and the splendidly armored bodyguard.