The Diamond - J. Robert King [5]
"We certainly showed him the depths of our regard," said Lasker Nesher, bitterly. The listeners dropped their heads, chastened that they'd valued Piergeiron's bride so little.
Kern snapped, "We chose a small strike team instead of an army because this crucial task required a small, delicate tool."
Khelben rolled his eyes. Kern's diplomacy was certainly no delicate tool. The eyes of the crowd turned from the golden warrior to a more ragged, common hero.
"Hosts of fiends overran the city," Noph said. "In the fighting, King Aetheric broke free of his dark pool. He slithered to the top of his palace and fought there like a god from the Time of Troubles! He killed friends in their thousands before he died from the fresh air-see, he breathed poisonous salt water, not air!"
He leaned forward in remembered excitement, and the crowd leaned with him. "With Aetheric dead," Noph added, "the city was helpless. Fiends were all over the place, while we were trapped in the dungeons of the palace. Worse yet, the bloodforge was unguarded!"
Kern gestured toward Entreri. "The assassin Artemis Entreri, scourge of Justice everywhere, was among those who tried to gain control of the foul forge, hoping, no doubt, to sell it to the highest bidder. Instead, the flesh of his left arm was scorched away, leaving only bare bone… a fitting punishment for ever-grasping avarice. Be warned, though: his fingers of bone are as deft as his fingers of flesh have ever been!"
In the silence that followed, Khelben thoughtfully stroked his black beard. "Where are the other paladins from your party? Dead? And where is Eidola?"
"Some are dead," Noph said regretfully. "Some are pursuing Eidola; we don't know where she's led them."
"'Led them'?" interrupted Lasker Nesher. He glared at his disowned son. "What nonsense is this? Since when does a kidnap victim run from her rescuers?"
Khelben's look was keen and level, his eyes testing Noph's response.
The young man rose to his father's challenge. "Not all of us were rescuers, Father. This assassin"-he gestured toward Entreri-"led a party of pirates, natives of the Utter East, to slay Eidola. She knew folk were out to kill her. Of course she ran; you would have, too. In the confusion of a fiend war, it's easy enough to mistake a friend for a foe. I'm certain once Miltiades catches her, though, everything will be set right."
"Eidola is alive!" the Brothers Boarskyr shouted in gleeful unison. Becil, the more verbal of the two, waded forward through the mob, his half-wit brother capering in his wake. "Which means she's inheritable to the Throne of King Pallidson!" he roared, "And we're her most conjugal relations, now that the king's reclining in the slumberous arms of the bucket he just kicked…"
Khelben shook his head, motioning them to silence.
The gesture was too subtle for the likes of Becil and Bullard.
"… And if she's become mortified of late, due to the felicitous aptitudes of eternal wherewithal and so forth, the throne is destined to languish beneath our collective posteriors into perpetuous posterity-"
"First," Khelben roared, "Piergeiron is not king, but Open Lord. Second, he has no throne. And third, the funerary rites are not completed, and therefore he is not officially dead. As for Eidola, she was never officially married to the Open Lord, and even if she were, the office of Open Lord is not hereditary-and even if it were, it wouldn't be passed to shirttail relations!"
Blinking at the volume and fury of this sudden outburst, Becil and Bullard glanced down at their shirt-tails, which flapped about their waists, and tucked them before striding on.
"Well," Becil returned smoothly, "we are entitled to certain entitlements due to the titular title of our cousin as regards her impending matrimony to this impending deadman, especially if she herself is found to be in a status symbol wanting of breath and other indications of livingness."
It was not Khelben's