Cold Steel and Secrets Part 3

1478 DR

Crawling Claws scrabbled across Montimort’s body as the boy rolled across the room, trying to dislodge them. Rucas Sarfael used his sword to pry one disembodied hand from Montimort’s throat, neatly severing the fingers, but barely missing Montimort’s jugular.

Elyne’s mad relative, Karion, screamed: “Pull him apart, my pets, pull him apart.”

The swordswoman swore, abandoning her entreaties to the aged seer to let the boy go, and rushed to Montimort’s aid. Like Sarfael, she hacked and slashed at the disembodied hands. But there were more than a dozen.

“This is too slow,” Elyne panted between thrusts at the claws, struggling to keep them off Montimort’s face and throat. “He’ll die before we can cut them all.”

Karion cried out again. The claws crawled between their feet and flowed over Montimort. With ungentle kicks and slashes of her sword, Elyne drove them back.

Sarfael shouted to Elyne: “Keep at it. I have an idea.”

Sarfael whirled on his heel. He lunged across the room, placing the point of his sword over Karion’s heart. “The boy dies, you die,” he snarled.

Behind him, Elyne shouted in protest, but there was no time to show pity. Karion’s tricks would kill the boy. He made his face hard and blank, and stared into the old man’s face.

“Can you truly see the future?” Sarfael said. “Do you see your own?”

Karion cringed back, collapsing into easy old man’s tears of frustration and fear. “Go away, go away,” he cried. But his cries seemed to be aimed at his grisly pets and not at Sarfael.

The dead hands scrabbled back from Montimort, retreating into the shadows.

“All the way out of the room,” said Sarfael, keeping the relief from his tone. He had to play the villain or the boy would be dead. “Send them far away.”

Karion flapped his own hands and the undead creatures skittered out of the room.

When the sound of the claws faded away, Sarfael stepped back, dropping the point of the sword.

Elyne helped the battered and bruised Montimort rise to his feet. Despite the beating he’d taken, Montimort still cradled Karion’s magic box safely in his arms. If everything that the old man had told them was true, speaking the spell etched into the box would recall the lost crown of Neverwinter from wherever it was hidden. Except they had to know where the spell started and stopped.

Karion pounded his hands on the arms of his chair and drummed his feet in rage against the floor. “You cut them and shattered them. It took me days and days to lead them out of the dark. Now they’ll leave me.”

“Cousin, Cousin,” Elyne said, dropping to her knees beside the old man. “Why attack Montimort? He meant you no harm. He’s a friend.”

“He is from Luskan.” Karion pouted. “They’re thieves and pirates. Why should he take my box? Why should they have the crown?”

“I am not a thief,” raged Montimort. “I live here. Whatever I do, I do for Elyne and the Nashers. I care for Neverwinter more than you!”

“But you don’t know its secrets!” Karion crowed. “Not like me. Up into the high places, down into the low. Round the wall and along the river. I go to places that others have forgotten. I find the words that others no longer speak. The art is lost, but not my memory. I remember all the enchantments, twisting end on end, from emerald to crown.”

Montimort turned the box around and around in his hands. The emerald centered on the lid winked in the dimly lit room.

“You should have let it go,” Sarfael said.

Montimort’s mouth thinned and he shook his head. “The Nashers need this.”

“Do you think those rebels would take such risks for you?” Sarfael knew the answer before Montimort spoke.

“Elyne,” the boy started, and then he stopped, the stubborn blush warring with the bruises on his face.

Sarfael sighed. A man could die for such foolishness. He waited for the memory of Mavreen to make some sharp disagreement or jesting remark. But there was silence in his heart. For how could he chide another for his own very special brand of idiocy?

“Get out, get out!” Karion waved his arms at them. He huddled down in his chair, mumbling into his chest. “Go on, I’m tired. Get out of my house.”

Elyne patted her aged, mad, and malodorous relative with a sigh. “I am sorry, Cousin,” she said, “that we caused you such distress. But this box will be safer with us and may help rebuild the city that we all love.”

Karion covered his face with his hand like a sleepy child. “Good-bye,” the old seer murmured. “I won’t see you again, but I thank you for the cheese.”

Sarfael herded Montimort toward the door, but rather than being glad to leave, the boy hung back. “No, wait, I want to ask him more.”

“Enough,” said Elyne. “We need to leave now. It will be twilight soon, and the Dead Rats will be out in force. We’ve saved you once from them today. Don’t risk my life and Sarfael’s again.”

“I didn’t! I wouldn’t!” Montimort squealed as Sarfael pushed him out the door.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Sarfael said to the indignant young man.

“Good-bye, pirate!” yelled Karion behind them. “You’ll regret everything you steal.”

“I am not a thief!” screamed Montimort back at him as Elyne and Sarfael hustled him out of the house.

On the street, Montimort stomped silently away, the box still clutched tightly to his chest.

Sarfael reached out to stop him but Elyne held him back.

“Let him go home,” she said. “I’ll follow and make sure that he reaches his rooms safely.”

“And the box?” Sarfael knew he probably should wrest it away from Montimort and take it to Dhafiyand. But such an action would end his time with the Nashers. As he stared down at the slender, red-haired swordswoman, he wasn’t ready yet to end his deception.

Elyne looked after Montimort with troubled eyes. “I’m hoping that the box turns out to be another of Karion’s mistakes. If it can truly call forth the crown, then it is a danger to us all. But it is for Arlon to decide how the Nashers will use it.”

“Do you think that wise?” he asked, remembering Arlon’s many calls for violent revolution at the last meeting of the Nashers.

“No,” Elyne admitted, “I do not think it wise at all. But I don’t know what else to do.”

Dhafiyand actually sounded pleased when Sarfael told him that the box was still in the possession of the Nashers.

“I thought you would want it here,” Sarfael admitted with a wary look at the spymaster. Dhafiyand purring over some unexpected twist meant trouble for someone, most likely himself.

“Not yet,” Dhafiyand said. “You think the young wizard from Luskan might know how to use it?”

“He says he has some knowledge of such things,” Sarfael said. “He’s locked himself away in his rooms for the past two days to study it. Elyne pounds on his door and forces him to come out and eat.”

“He sounds like an ambitious boy,” Dhafiyand said. “This Montimort might be useful to cultivate. The pursuit of the arcane arts creates such passions in the soul that temptations are easy to construct.”

“Such pursuits apparently drove Karion insane,” Sarfael said. “He seemed ready enough to murder us.”

“It seems I’ve underestimated Karion’s abilities. The old man has been something of a joke in the city, given to standing on street corners and shouting out prophecies of doom when he’s not rummaging among the trash heaps,” Dhafiyand mused as he sorted through the papers on his table. “I wonder if he constructed the claws or simply acquired them somewhere. They breed in a fashion, you know, in the Underdark.”

Sarfael shuddered at that thought. His last sight of the ambulatory hands was of them fleeing down the hallway of Karion’s house, dragging the hacked remnants of their fellows with them.

A discreet knock sounded at the door. Dhafiyand called a command to enter and one of his dark-clad servants slid through the room to hand him a written message.

With a sigh, Dhafiyand rose from his chair. “You must excuse me. Soman Galt’s messenger needs an immediate answer. The mayor is making arrangements for Lord Neverwinter’s arrival.”

“So he is coming?”

“His ship will be in the harbor any day now.” Dhafiyand followed his servant from the room.

As always, Sarfael found himself roaming the too warm chamber, fidgeting with the various trinkets that littered every surface. The pearl-encrusted miniature of a moon elf sat upon a pile of paper on Dhafiyand’s table. In previous visits, Sarfael had noticed it on the mantel.

Sarfael moved the miniature aside and glanced at the folded slip of paper beneath, a spy’s habit. A single bold line of writing read simply: “Find the crown and bring it to me.”

Quite obviously from Lord Neverember, never mind the discreet lack of a signature. He wondered when the message was sent and for how long the spymaster and his lord had been hunting the crown.

Dhafiyand entered the room with a sigh. “I have much more important business,” he said to Sarfael, “than reassuring our mayor that his arrangements for Lord Neverember’s welcome are both satisfactory and safe. Now, what of this Montimort, can we bribe him or entice him into betraying the Nashers?”

“The boy would never betray Elyne,” Sarfael stated flatly. And attempts to make him turn traitor might endanger both Montimort and Elyne, never mind that Sarfael himself had had the same thought when first they met. But suddenly, he just wanted to keep the pair of them as far away from Dhafiyand as possible. They lacked his experience of dealing with the old man, and his ability to keep one step ahead of his treacherous games. “If you want the box, why not let me steal it? I can have it here within the hour and do the trick so none would suspect.”

“And what good would that do me? The current situation suits me very well.”

That answer surprised him. “Why? I thought you were eager to get your hands on the crown.”

“But they don’t have the crown,” Dhafiyand pointed out. “They have a box, an empty box, and until the spell is evoked, a most useless box.”

“What game are you playing now?” Sarfael let the words slip out before he reflected that such indiscretion was unwise near Dhafiyand.

But the spymaster seemed amused. “A balancing of many interests,” he said to Sarfael. “A waiting game. Timing, it is timing we must consider. And why I need you there to snatch it for Lord Neverember when the moment is right.”

As he left Dhafiyand’s chambers, Rucas Sarfael wondered why he had ever considered the lady in the miniature attractive. Her face was scored with lines of anger and the mad gleam of her eyes reminded him most uncomfortably of Karion’s expression when they parted.

That night, Elyne struggled to keep her students focused on the lesson.

“Charinyn, again,” she called as the girl circled her opponent in the center of the floor. “Stop fluttering with every motion. I want to see a quicker parry, either with the sword or that cloak. Or discard the cape immediately.”

The blonde girl pouted and then wavered during her attack again. Rucas Sarfael, growing bored with watching and, wanting to talk to Elyne, stepped casually into the circle, flattened Charinyn by stepping on her swirling cape, and then tripped up her opponent by carefully placing his foot where the other student wasn’t expecting it.

Elyne started to scowl at him, but it gave way to laughter when he whispered, “If she eats sawdust often enough, she’ll stop flouncing around and pay attention.”

Shaking her head at him, Elyne called her students to gather around. “Now,” she said, “since none of you can stop whispering in corners, and you’re all fighting as if you’re uncertain how to tell one end of the blade from the other, would anyone care to tell me why?”

The students jostled each other.

“Montimort says he’s found it,” Parnadiz finally admitted. “Or rather, he knows where to find it.”

“What?” questioned Sarfael.

“The key to the box. He says that it is back at Karion’s house. Something he saw and just remembered tonight.”

“He went there by himself?” Elyne interjected. “You let him?”

“He went tearing out of here, almost knocked me over,” Charinyn admitted. “We didn’t think to stop him.”

“Or to tell me,” Elyne said.

“He told us not to say anything,” Parnadiz said.

“Which, of course, is why you’ve been buzzing about it all evening,” Sarfael guessed.

“Parnadiz, take the lesson,” Elyne snapped. “Drills, defensive drills, all of them, until everyone gets it right.”

Her orders were greeted with groans but, after a hard stare, all the students hastily arranged themselves in the center of the room.

“Engage,” Parnadiz cried. “Fall back, thrust, counter, thrust again, disengage. Again.”

Elyne dropped the practice sword that she had been carrying onto the rack and snatched her own sword from the table where it lay. She buckled her harness as she hurried out the door.

Rucas Sarfael matched her step for step.

“You are going to Karion’s house,” he said, more statement than question.

“It’s almost sunset,” Elyne answered. “The Dead Rats will spot him, either coming or going. I have to find him and get him back here.”

“What about Karion?” Sarfael asked, remembering the old man’s murderous attack on Montimort. “He’s as much a danger to the boy as the Dead Rats.”

“More,” Elyne said. “The Rats want Montimort alive. Karion does not. We need to hurry.”

The door to Karion’s house was not bolted. As soon as Elyne began to pound on the panels, it swung open. The hallway beyond was lit only by the late evening sunlight coming through the door. Elyne would have rushed in, but Sarfael held her back.

“Wait,” he said. “An ambush doesn’t help the boy.”

She nodded, but still slipped past him, heading toward Karion’s room. Her sword was drawn and she looked ready for battle.

Sarfael checked the hallway carefully, but heard and saw no evidence of the crawling claws. He followed Elyne.

The place was torn apart, the old man’s chair tipped over, and his piles of rubbish strewn across the floor. Papers were shredded and long strips of parchment curled around their feet.

“Karion was no careful housekeeper,” Sarfael observed, “but this looks deliberate.”

Elyne stirred the shreds of paper with her booted foot. “These were ripped apart by claws. Do you think those things that attacked us earlier turned against him?”

“Perhaps. Do you see any sign of Montimort? Or Karion?”

She shook her head. “Downstairs, if anywhere inside the house. Karion lived as much in his kitchen as this room.”

“Ah, yes, the cheese.” Sarfael remembered Karion’s greedy snatching of the supplies they brought earlier and his stashing of his favorites around the kitchen and pantry. All watched by the stuffed remains of a former pet, a large cat left on the kitchen table to scare off rats.

They proceeded carefully under the painted eyes of the disapproving portraits and went down the stairs past the cityscapes of a more pleasant and long gone Neverwinter.

The old man lay on the hearth, one out-flung hand almost resting in the kitchen fire. A kettle boiled above the flames.

Elyne gasped and rushed down the steps. She turned the body over and recoiled. Karion’s face, chest, arms, and hands were shredded as if mangled by some wild beast. To judge by the deep claw marks in his flesh, the old man had struggled mightily before he died. His face was contorted into a bloody mask of fear and anger.

“What could have done this?” Elyne exclaimed.

Sarfael started to make some comforting but meaningless remark. He doubted any besides Elyne would mourn the murderous seer with his delight in undead pets and rubbish-stuffed rooms.

The firelight flickered in the glass eyes of the stuffed cat that crouched upon the stone floor. Blood dripped from the creature’s mouth.

Sarfael gave a shout of warning as the undead cat leaped for Elyne.

She ducked the attack, rolling to one side, and then reversing to strike with some force. Elyne skewered the undead creature precisely through the heart. The cat swiped at her with one paw. Elyne fell back. The creature followed.

“The head,” Sarfael shouted, “cut off the head. If you can’t hit that, go for the legs. Slow it down.”

He circled in the opposite direction, looking for a good hit.

With a silent snarl, the creature leaped to the top of the kitchen table and then whirled in the opposite direction. Elyne chased after it, but the undead creature moved with great speed, dodging her strikes and clawing out with one and then the other paw.

It leaped off the table, slashing right and left, and herding Elyne into one corner.

She parried with a lighting series of strokes, even cutting off the cat’s tail, which fell with a sawdust thud to the floor. But her rapier was too light to cut off the cat’s head, even as she notched its ragged ears and slashed deep cuts into its neck and legs.

Glancing around the kitchen, Sarfael saw the kindling tumbling from the stack next to the kitchen fire. One stick lay half in and half out of the fire, just outside the reach of Karion’s outstretched hand.

“Clever,” Sarfael said. “You knew what was needed.”

He snatched the burning brand from the fire and vaulted the kitchen table to belabor the cat with it.

The undead creature recoiled from the fire but its dust-dry fur caught the spark. In moments, flames engulfed it.

Elyne leaped away, shouting, “Drive it into the fireplace or it will set the whole place alight.”

Sarfael hooked the beast under its belly with the burning stick of kindling and threw it across the room into the fireplace. With a mighty whumpf, it exploded into bits of fur and ash. One green glass eye rolled across the floor to stop at their feet.

After a moment of stunned silence, Sarfael said, “Do we keep searching? Do you think Montimort is still here?”

Elyne crouched on the floor, apparently studying tracks in the dust. “Cheese,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

She pointed to the pantry. “Montimort probably headed there when the cat attacked.”

Elyne walked into the long narrow room lined with shelves and packed with boxes and jars, calling Montimort’s name softly. Sarfael followed. The place smelled strongly of cheese.

Peering into one dark corner, Elyne crouched down. “Come out,” she said. “It’s gone. You’re safe.”

A muffled squeak responded.

“No more arguments,” Elyne said in the same firm tone she used when she told her students to practice again. “We need to leave now.”

A thin brown rat slid out from the corner. Sitting upright, it curled its forepaws into its chest. Its whiskers twitched in a familiar way.

“Montimort!” said Sarfael. The rat tilted his head in a manner very reminiscent of the boy. “That’s an interesting trick.”

“But dangerous,” Elyne said, holding out one hand so the rat could climb up her arm and disappear into the hood of her cloak. “If a fight goes badly, he drops into the rat form automatically and scurries away. But his mastery over the change is poor and he doesn’t always change back as quickly. It’s one of the reasons he ran from the Dead Rats. They kept trying to beat better control into him. Which, of course, is the worst way to teach anyone.”

“Do the other students know?” Sarfael asked as they left Karion’s house.

“No. That’s why he only practices with me after the others have left. First dozen times I thrust a sword at him, he changed instantly. Poof. Montimort gone, and away ran the rat. He’s gotten better since then. He managed to hold his form when those claws attacked, although that might have been because they had such a tight grip on him.”

The rat inside her hood, Montimort, popped up his head and snorted at her assessment.

“How did you acquire this student?” Sarfael wondered.

“He came to me,” Elyne said. “There he was one night, bruised and bloody, on my doorstep. He begged me to teach him how to fight. How could I turn him away?”

Mavreen had begged him too. Begged him to teach her all his tricks, so she could add a rogue’s fighting skills to her mastery over spells. So she could destroy the Red Wizard who murdered her family.

“You can’t,” he said to Elyne. “You can’t refuse. Not when you see their heart and soul in their eyes. Not when you know how much it means.”

Dawn faded into bright morning before Montimort regained his human form. Elyne hugged him fiercely when he sidled out of the storage closet where they’d left the rat.

Then she smacked him firmly on the side of his head.

“Don’t do that again!” she said. “Running off. Not telling me.”

Sarfael watched the scolding with tired amusement. He’d long ago trained himself to doze on his feet. Rather like his horse, when he considered it. But it had been a long night, made longer by Elyne’s nervous pacing alternating with her bouts of attacking the practice butts with any weapon close at hand. At one point, he suggested that she go home and he wait for the boy. But the look she gave him indicated that she could practice blows on his body as well as the straw-covered target, and he’d kept quiet after that.

“But I have it, the key, the word we needed,” Montimort said. “I can trigger the spell upon the box and summon the crown to us.”

“You’re sure?” said Elyne. “That the spell will work?”

“I’m certain,” Montimort replied. “But we need to be outside the city. And high. Upland Rise.”

“But I thought the box was for carrying the crown into the city,” Sarfael said, remembering Karion’s tale. Upland Rise was a wasteland outside the city, stripped of its trees in Lord Neverember’s recent rebuilding of the docks.

“I spent days studying it,” said Montimort. The excited boy nearly twitched out of his clothes with excitement. His voice rose and sweat gleamed on his face. “The spell will only work on Upland Rise. We have to go tomorrow night. At moonset.”

“After dark it’s not safe,” Elyne said. “Not without a large group.”

“We have to do it then,” Montimort insisted.

Sarfael looked at him with narrowed eyes. How could the boy be so sure?

“Very well,” Elyne said. Obviously she had no doubts about Montimort’s sudden revelations. “I’ll go to Arlon and we’ll assemble the Nashers. You’ll need protection out there. And we’ll need to leave the city throughout the day, in small groups, or we’ll attract the attention of one of General Sabine’s patrols. Sarfael, you bring him last.”

“Moonset,” repeated Montimort, sounding as if he were reciting remembered instructions. Sarfael wondered again where he’d learned that lesson.

“We will meet you there,” Elyne promised before she left.

Sarfael remained behind. The boy fidgeted under his regard.

“How did you find the key?” he asked. “The word that you needed?”

Montimort shrugged. “Karion knew it. He talked so much about the box, knew its history so well. I realized he had to have the key. He kept hinting as much when we were there.”

“So you figured that out,” Sarfael said. “But how did you get the word from him? Last time he saw you, he tried to kill you.”

Montimort bit his thumbnail and mumbled something.

Sarfael waited.

Finally, Montimort blurted out, “I scared him. I scared him into giving me the word. But I didn’t know the cat would kill him. Then it attacked me! It wasn’t supposed to do that! And when it came after me, I changed and ran.”

“You murdered him,” Sarfael said, trying to sort out the events in his own mind. Where had Montimort suddenly acquired the ability to animate the dead? From everything he had said, and everything that Sarfael had seen, the boy had never been so powerful a wizard. And Karion had struck him as something of a dangerous old rascal. It would have taken some true knavery to best him. Was Montimort truly the innocent he seemed? Or, as Karion accused him, more of a Luskar and a threat than Sarfael originally suspected?

“He would have killed me!” Montimort shouted. “And I had to get the key. I had to. With it, we gain the crown. And then she can be queen of Neverwinter!”

Startled out of his own dark suspicions, Sarfael asked: “Who?”

“Elyne!” said Montimort.

In that one word, Sarfael realized, were all the answers to Montimort’s unusual behavior. The boy merely acted to help Elyne.

“She’s the closest descendent of Alagondar left in the city.” The words tumbled out of Montimort. “Arlon Bladeshaper and even Lord Neverember can’t truly trace their lineage back that far. Everyone knows it. They all gossip about it. How she could lead the Nashers if she wanted to, that she has more right than Arlon, but she won’t push herself forward.”

Sarfael remembered Elyne’s explanation of how she formed her school of “elegant fighting” for the young Nashers, of how she wanted to keep her former playmates from being killed by their attempt at rebellion. But I, she had admitted, am a very bad Nasher. I wouldn’t know what to do with the city if I had it, she once said.

“Montimort,” Sarfael said very gently, because the boy shook with his passion and because he suspected that Montimort had paid a terrible price for his newly acquired skills. “Montimort, she doesn’t want to be a queen. She has no ambition in her heart for such a thing.”

“She must be queen,” Montimort cried out. “Elyne must take the crown. She’s the only one. If she doesn’t, it’s all for nothing. I murdered Karion for nothing.”

The boy collapsed in a heap, weeping in lost and wild abandon. After a long moment, Sarfael crouched down beside him and placed his hand on Montimort’s shoulder. “We will go to Upland Rise. You’ll try your spells. Perhaps it won’t work. Perhaps it will. Then let others decide what to do with the crown of Neverwinter.”

Let Dhafiyand have it, Sarfael thought. If the boy succeeds, I’ll steal it from them and give it to Dhafiyand. And make sure that Elyne and all the rest stay out of his net. Perhaps a trade: a pardon for them, in return for a crown.

“Step careful,” Mavreen warned him as he fingered the hilt of her sword and contemplated tricks to deceive a master deceiver. For Sarfael could think of no more terrible fate for Elyne than to be queen of that broken city, with its warring factions and its dark history of shifting and ever deadly politics. Those who ruled Neverwinter or sought its throne were doomed, Sarfael thought, and, like the boy who wept beside him, he would do whatever he could to save Elyne.

The wind blew cold across Upland Rise. In the gray gloom of the predawn morning, the treeless hill reminded Rucas Sarfael of a graveyard. The stumps of the trees stood as memorials for Neverwinter’s gentler past, when it had once been a wooded parkland for the amusement of its citizens.

The white fog off the river ringed the base of the hill, leaving them stranded atop like mariners shipwrecked upon some island. All the Nashers were there: Elyne, Arlon, his followers, and her students. Even plump little Virchez, the Neverwinter merchant with ties to rich relatives in Waterdeep, had screwed up his courage and stood with the rest, a lantern in one hand and a wavering sword held not too steadily in the other.

Glancing at the crowd, Sarfael almost regretted that he had not sent word to Dhafiyand to stop them. It would have been so easy for General Sabine to march out a few Tarnian mercenaries, arrest the lot, and confiscate the box. He could have slipped away in the confusion and later arranged for Elyne and Montimort’s release. Arlon, who was blustering at the others and shouting orders, he would cheerfully have left in some dungeon until his temper cooled.

But, of course, if he did that, then he wouldn’t know if Montimort’s spell worked. He wouldn’t know if the box could summon the crown. And Dhafiyand most explicitly ordered him to watch and wait, to not act. Oh, he was so sick of orders and waiting. But, oh, he did want to see if a crown would appear.

“Curiosity,” Mavreen mocked him once, “will kill you quicker than any sword thrust. You insist on sticking your nose around every dark corner just to see if there is something there that will bite it off.”

Well, he’d never paid any attention to her reproaches then and, as much as he missed her, he certainly wasn’t going to let the memory of his first and last student stop him now.

And, if there was a crown, and he could steal it, he gained a much more powerful stake in the game of Neverwinter’s dark politics. With a crown, he could buy freedom for his friends.

Montimort finally seemed to have the spell started. The boy stood in the center of a ring of nervous Nashers. Torches flared all around him as he directed them to cast their light on the box that he held straight out from his body.

He turned the box so the emerald glittering in the center of the lid faced him and began to read the words inscribed around it. Montimort intoned the spell slowly, the Thayan rite making his voice sound harsher and deeper than ever before. As he read the spell, the emerald began to glow brighter and brighter.

With a shout, Montimort ended the spell. The emerald flashed so brightly that Sarfael closed his eyes automatically.

When he opened them, he saw Montimort tumble back from a tall green figure holding the box in her two hands.

Dressed in vest and trousers, the emerald woman regarded them all without expression on her perfectly carved features.

Montimort seemed as stunned and surprised as the rest of them, but the boy visibly swallowed his fear and spoke sternly to woman. “Bring us the crown!” he commanded.

She nodded once with regal solemnity. A glowing green circle appeared at her feet. The jewel woman stepped through it and disappeared.

The wind ruffled their cloaks. The crackle of the torches was the only sound on the hill.

Then, because it was a gathering of Nashers, they all started speaking at the same time.

“What was that?”

“Who was that?”

“Did we get the crown?”

“Now what should we do?”

Arlon yelled at them all to be quiet, which made everyone talk in hissing whispers.

Elyne moved next to Sarfael and spoke in normal tones to him. “Perhaps that will be the end of it,” she said, and she sounded relieved. “The spell failed.”

“Not yet,” Sarfael said, pointing at the glowing green circle of light still visible on the top of the hill. Montimort watched it with narrowed eyes, paying no attention to the resounding rumpus around him.

The circle flashed and the Nashers fell back. The green woman again appeared on the top of the hill. She held out her emerald hands, the dark wood box balanced across her palms.

Montimort reached out and took it. Another brilliant flash, as bright as lighting but silent as the grave, and the woman was gone. The emerald on the center of the box gleamed for a moment with an internal light, but then the glow faded until it only reflected the glitter of the torches.

Stunned, the Nashers waited in silence for Montimort to speak.

Sarfael glanced at Elyne. Alone, of all of them, her eyes were on the boy’s face rather than the box in his hands. “He’s all right,” Sarfael reassured her.

Finally, the impatient Arlon blurted out, “Well, do you have it? Is it the crown?”

Blinking his eyes as if he had just woken from a dream, Montimort shook the box slightly. Something heavy rattled inside.

“Open it,” Arlon commanded.

“No!” Sarfael said, stepping forward. “Not here. Not in the open and the dark. Let’s take it somewhere safe.” Somewhere I can steal it, he added to himself, and before you can all get a good look at it.

Because, at the end of the day, a box was just a box. Even one that rattled. A story for the taverns. The sight of a true crown, one that had been seen and might even be placed on one of the heads in their group, that story would be far more dangerous for the teller and the listeners. Dhafiyand might even act to silence such a story with blood.

Shouts of the watchers on the edge of the hill startled them all. Sarfael turned away from Montimort to see watchers tumbling back toward them, torches waving in the air, pursued by grim and ghastly shapes.

“Ash zombies!” they yelled.

Out of the mist, the undead came up the hill, ringing the Nashers on all sides, shambling forward with outstretched, flailing arms. In the growing light of the day, their burned and ghastly features were clearly visible.

With a curse, Sarfael drew Mavreen’s sword from his scabbard. As much as he relished striking down the undead, the dawn was filling a little too quickly with problems. He still needed to get that box away from Montimort.

The black unicorn horn that formed the sword’s twisted hilt was cool and comforting under his hand. He had killed the wicked beast while Mavreen dispatched its rider, the first of many Thayan agents that they had destroyed along the Sword Coast.

With Mavreen’s name like a blessing on his lips, Sarfael waded into the undead attackers, striking left and right without pause, taking their heads from their shoulders. His whirling blade cut deep with every stroke.

Behind him, Elyne shouted orders, drawing her students close around her, taking down more than one zombie at time with spinning sweeps of her sword.

Parnadiz and Charinyn wedged Montimort between them. Following Elyne’s orders, they began to hustle him down the hill toward the city, even as Sarfael and Elyne cut a path open for them.

The ash zombies targeted the younger Nashers first. Luckily, they were as slow as Elyne’s students were quick, but the trail of ash each left in its wake created a fog almost as thick as the mist swirling at the base of the hill. The fighters coughed, and hacked, and sneezed, and struck, all in mad confusion.

The other Nashers fought as bravely, but poorer weapons and less training hampered many.

Arlon Bladeshaper charged without regard for his safety into the thick of the fight. He pulled little Virchez from a heap of the undead, lifting the wounded man onto his own broad shoulders and bellowing for them to head for the city.

In the mist, the zombies fell back, only to suddenly reappear from the side or harass them from the rear.

Sarfael realized they were being driven like sheep nipped at the heels by undead dogs. But where? He tried to step aside, to cut them a new road out of the crowd of harassing corpses, but the numbers were too great. And the creatures seemed to have his measure. Whenever he attacked, they faded back and turned their blows upon the others.

With raging frustration, Sarfael tried to engage the zombies, to force them into facing his blade. But still the others drew the bulk of the attack. He could hear their cries echoing in the night air. The night became a shambles, as terrible as that night when he chased Mavreen’s corpse into its final grave.

Elyne flashed by him. Her bright braid a pennant to rally the others to her side, her cries sounded above the calls of the others. Sarfael whirled to one side to drive down a creature about to flank her, but Elyne whipped around and she saved herself.

“Help the others,” she spoke as calmly as she called the moves in her school. “Go now, I’m fine.”

The Nashers stumbled on, until they reached the river. Arlon fought like three men, with sword, fist, and, in one memorable moment that even earned a shout of praise from Sarfael, butting straight into a crowd of attackers with his hard head.

The dead pressed all around them, forcing them back into the warm flowing waters of Neverwinter’s namesake river. Across the water, so close and yet so tantalizingly far, the city’s buildings began to glow with lit lanterns and torches, as the people woke to a new day.

Many of the Nashers were down, exhausted, wounded, dropping from the effort of continuous fighting amidst the undead ash.

Crimson light bloodied the mist and the undead drew back. Sarfael slashed and hacked at the far edge of the fight, still trying to push a path through the zombies to let the Nashers escape, when the Red Wizard appeared.

Sarfael spotted him first and, with a shout of warning, tried to drive through the crowd of undead to reach the figure draped in scarlet robes. The undead gathered around their master, moving as his hands indicated, pressing the Nashers away from Montimort as the Red Wizard advanced.

Screaming, furious to see that ancient enemy so close and yet so unreachable, Sarfael literally climbed up and over the bodies of the undead, scrambling to reach the man.

Before him, the ash zombies separated Montimort from his protectors and dragged him toward the Red Wizard. Parnadiz and Charinyn were tumbled aside.

“No!” Montimort screamed as he struggled to stay on his feet and hold onto the box. With a flick of the Red Wizard’s fingers, a dozen zombies fell upon Montimort, dragging him to their master.

Elyne, like Sarfael, lunged for the boy. She cut the leg off one of his attackers but as the creature fell, it fastened brutal teeth on Montimort’s arm.

With a scream, the boy dropped the box.

The Red Wizard reached out one long, ink-stained hand and grabbed it before it hit the ground.

Too far away, Sarfael thought, even as he leaped over the undead. Too far away. So it had been the night that Mavreen died. Too far away, and too slow, to save her before she fell. The cries of the others faded behind him as he made one last effort to reach his goal.

The Red Wizard turned his disguised face to Sarfael, his dark eyes gleaming through the slits of a black mask. He raised his hands and mist boiled out of the river, flowing up the banks and blinding them all.

In the fog, Sarfael stumbled over a wounded Nasher. Blind as the rest, he pushed forward, trying to find the Red Wizard.

The sun rose, breaking free of the mist. The light sparkled upon the placid river. And only wounded Nashers lay huddled on the bank.

The undead, the Red Wizard, and the box were gone.

“We were betrayed,” shouted Arlon Bladeshaper. He was propped up on a makeshift bed in the Nashers’ meeting room. His wounded head was bandaged and Sarfael considered it a shame that the ash zombie hadn’t managed to bite through Arlon’s vocal cords.

Instead his roar rose above the groans of the other wounded.

“Oh, be quiet,” said Elyne in an uncanny echo of Sarfael’s thoughts. She was stitching the deep bite on Montimort’s arm. The boy’s eyes were screwed shut, but he made no sound.

Sarfael sat slumped on the floor, his back against the wall, trying to fight down the angry bile. Just a few steps closer and he could have unmasked the Red Wizard. Just a few steps closer and he could have killed the man.

“How did they know where to find us?” Arlon yelled. He pounded his fist on the bed, upending a bowl filled with bloody water and rags, sending it spilling to the floor. “Somebody told them that we would be on Upland Rise. Somebody told them about the crown. It was no random attack. They came directly for us, they snatched the box, and then they retreated. It was all carefully planned.”

For once, Rucas Sarfael thought, Arlon’s suspicions sounded correct. The whole thing stank of ambush, but how? And, more importantly, who?

He looked around the room. Did any of the Nashers seem unusually nervous? Well, they were all shaken by the attack. A good many of Elyne’s students had never done such serious fighting and it was a credit to her teaching and their courage that the whole group hadn’t been cut up worse.

Still, if there was a traitor in their midst, he or she should be simple to spot. If someone passed word of the meeting at Upland Rise to the Red Wizard who ambushed them, then that someone would have expected the attack. So, the informer would probably be ready to hang back. The Red Wizard most likely would not direct the attack against an ally. So the informer might well be unwounded… except the only ones who had escaped any serious wound were himself and Elyne. And no one could suspect Elyne.

“Look at him,” Arlon roared. “Not a wound on him. A stranger until recently and now we must ask: is he truly a son of Neverwinter?”

Shaken from his reverie, Sarfael glanced at Arlon, wondering who was catching the blunt of his tirade. The man was pointing straight at him.

“Why is he not wounded? Who is this Rucas Sarfael?” Arlon shouted. “Seize him, question him, make the traitor tell us where the crown has gone and who holds it now!”

Rough hands grabbed Sarfael before he could draw his sword and the maddened group of Nashers forced him to his knees by Arlon’s bed. Behind him, he heard Elyne and Montimort cry out.

The wounded Arlon grabbed a knife from another supporter and waved it at Sarfael.

“Go on,” he said. “Tell us. Tell us who attacked us. Tell us who took the crown.”

“I wish I could,” said Sarfael. For once, he was speaking the truth to Arlon but he doubted the man would believe him. Which meant, Rucas Sarfael thought, that his life was probably over… unless he could think of a very good lie. Arlon leaned forward. The blade pressed against his throat…