The Diamond - J. Robert King [1]
Get your thumb away from my eyes! Ge-aughh, darkness again!
That's the most frustrating thing about being dead. Whenever one of my eyelids shrinks back enough to let me see what's going on, somebody slides them closed. They'll probably sew them shut one of these days.
What good'll a glass-topped coffin be then?
Chapter 1
Death Comes for the Open Lord
Four young acolytes solemnly lit their tapers.
Piergeiron is dead. Khelben Blackstaff Arunsun, the Lord Mage of Waterdeep, sighed in defeat as the trumpets, glauren, longhorns, and drums began their solemn dirge. It was chilly where he sat, on a bench of polished marble in the balcony of the palace chapel. The stone was cold and hard after the dark-stained wooden pews. The whole chapel had turned cold and hard. It had died along with its lord.
I can scarce believe, after all these years, that he's truly gone.
Yet there he lay, in a gleaming casket of gold and glass, master-work by the best crafters in all the Sword Coast. Cold and beautiful and dead. Sages said beauty and truth were the same thing. If that was so, the Open Lord, arrayed in silks and wools, gold and gems, was beautifully and truly dead.
Interesting, thought Khelben, watching four acolytes and four candles drift in stately procession up the chapel aisle, that beauty and truth are so coldly meaningless without life.
Shaleen, so long dead and long mourned, lay in her own coffin beside her husband. The Lord Mage himself had exhumed and restored her body to beauty. Khelben Arunsun could make her whole and beautiful again, but without the aid and approval of Holy Mystra, he could not give her life. And with Shaleen, as with so many others, Mystra had given him only her holy silence. In the days and years to come, Piergeiron and his bride would lie side by side in the center of the chapel.
Khelben sighed again. His breath ghosted in the chill air, rising past fresh-painted plaster to disappear among polished ribs of white marble. Yes, the chapel was beautiful in its gold, silver, and limestone, aglow with bejeweled chandeliers. Its aisles lay like brushed snow under white carpets from Shou Lung, stretching past ranks of bleached oak panels, reaching up between each pillar to round windows of gem-studded stained glass. Once more, the Eye of Ao stared out in radiant perfection from the greatest window above the gathered throng. The artisans had done well. Damnably well.
Khelben had ordered the chapel refurbished to delay this funeral, the official proclamation of Piergeiron's death. It would take months, he'd thought, to haul away the cracked and fire-blackened pews, the sword-scarred panels of mahogany, the shards of shattered stained glass, bloodstained rugs and twisted, ruined lanterns. It would take longer still to replace them all. Until the chapel stood bright and complete once more, the Lord Mage could hold off the hordes of glint-toothed nobles and finger-cracking guildmasters hoping to personally replace their dead Open Lord.
But here it was, a month hence, and the work was finished.
The nobles and guildmasters had done well… aye, damnably well.
They sat below, crowding the pews: nobles, guild-masters, magistrates, diplomats, secret lords and not-so-secret lords, senior guards: the best and brightest of Waterdeep. A gleaming, glittering forest of ermined shoulders, diamond necklines, high-coiffed hair, waxed mustaches, peacock feathers, whalebone stays, and features held just so by toning salves, minor magics, and even tiny clips and hidden strands of silk. The best and brightest.
Khelben had spent more than enough time among them to glimpse the monsters behind these masks.
Lasker Nesher was here, lord of an illicit logging empire. He was one of the most vocal contenders for the Open Lord's seat, stirring the rabble of Waterdeep with speeches that were half truth and all theater. Lasker had personally provided the bleached oak panels, rails,