The good captain slid his chair back from the table and stared out across the battered city. Several fires still burned in parts of Luskan, their smoke feeding the perpetual gloom. Wide, flat carts moved along the streets, their drivers solemnly clanging bells as a call for the removal of bodies. Those carts, some moving below Deudermont’s window, carried the bodies of many dead.
“I knew Lord Brambleberry’s plan would exact a heavy price from the city, yes,” the captain admitted. “I see it—I smell it! — every day, as do you. And you speak truly. It has weighed heavily upon me.” He kept looking out as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze across the dark roads and buildings.
“This is much harder than sailing a ship,” Deudermont said, and Drizzt glanced at Robillard and smiled knowingly, for he knew that Deudermont was going down the same philosophical path as had the wizard those tendays ago when the revolt against the Hosttower had first begun. “When you’re hunting pirates, you know your actions are for the greater good. There’s little debate to be had beyond the argument of sink them and let them drown out there in the emptiness, or return them to Luskan or Waterdeep for trial. There are no hidden designs behind the actions of pirates—none that would change my actions toward them, at least. Whether they serve the greed of a master or of their own black hearts, my fight with them remains grounded in absolute morality.”
“To the joys of political expediency,” Robillard said, lifting a mug of breakfast tea in toast. “Here, I mean, in an arena far more complicated and full of half-truths and hidden designs.”
“I watch Prisoner’s Carnival with utter revulsion,” said Deudermont. “More than once I fought the urge to charge the stage and cut down the torturing magistrate, and all the while I knew that he acted under the command of the lawmakers of Luskan. High Captain Taerl and I once nearly came to blows over that whole grotesque scene.”
“He argued that the viciousness was necessary to maintain order, of course,” said Robillard.
“And not without conviction,” Deudermont replied.
“He was wrong,” said Drizzt, and both turned to him with surprise.
“I had thought you skeptical of our mission here,” said Deudermont.
“You know that I am,” Drizzt replied. “But that doesn’t mean I disagree that some things, at least, needed to change. But that is not my place to decide in all of this, as you and many others are far more familiar with the nature and character of Luskan than I. My blade is for Captain Deudermont, but my fears remain.”
“As do mine,” said Robillard. “There are hatreds here, and designs, plots, and rivalries that run deeper than a distaste for Arklem Greeth’s callous ways.”
Deudermont held up his hand for Robillard to stop, and shifted his open palm toward Drizzt when the drow started to cut in.
“I’m not without consternation,” he said, “but I will not surrender my faith that right action makes right result. I cannot surrender that faith, else who am I, and what has my life been worth?”
“A rather simple and unfair reduction,” the always-sarcastic wizard replied.
“Unfair?”
“To you,” Drizzt answered for Robillard. “You and I have not walked so different a road, though we started from vastly different places. Meddlers, both, we be, and always with the hope that our meddling will leave in our wake a more beautiful tapestry than that we first encountered.” Drizzt heard the irony in his own words as he spoke them, a painful reminder that he had chosen not to meddle in Longsaddle, where his meddling might have been needed.
“Me with pirates and you with monsters, eh?” the captain said with a grin, and it was his turn to lift a cup of tea in toast. “Easier to kill pirates, and easier still to kill orcs, I suppose.”
Given the recent events in the North, Drizzt nearly snorted his tea out of his nose at that, and it took him a long moment to catch his breath and clear his throat. He held up his hand to deflect the curious looks coming at him from both his companions, not wanting to muddy the conversation even more with tales of the improbable treaty between Kings Bruenor and Obould, dwarf and orc. The drow’s expectations of absolutism had been thoroughly flattened of late, and so he was both heartened by and fearful of his friend’s unwavering faith.
“Beware the unintended consequences,” Robillard said.
But Captain Deudermont looked back out over the city and shrugged that away. A bell clanged below the window, followed by a call for the dead. The course had been set. The captain’s gaze drifted to Cutlass Island and the tree-like structure of the Hosttower, the masts of so many ships behind it across the harbor and the river.
The threat of the ghouls had diminished. Robillard’s wizard friends were on the verge of recreating the seal around Illusk, and most of the creatures had been utterly destroyed.
It was time to take the fight to the source, and that, Deudermont feared, would exact the greatest cost of all.
CHAPTER 15
FROM THE SHADOWS
T he ground shaking beneath his bed awakened High Captain Kurth one dismal morning. As soon as he got his bearings and realized he wasn’t dreaming, the former pirate acted with the reflexes of a warrior, rolling off the side of his bed to his feet while in the same movement grabbing his sword belt from the bed pole and slapping it around his waist.
“You will not need that,” came a quiet, melodic voice from the shadows across the large, circular room, the second highest chamber in Kurth Tower. As his dreams faded and the moment of alarm passed, Kurth recognized the voice as one that had visited him unbidden twice before in that very room.
The high captain gnashed his teeth and considered spinning and throwing one of the many daggers set in his sword belt.
This is no enemy, he reminded himself, though without much conviction, for he wasn’t certain who the mysterious visitor really was.
“The western window,” the voice said. “It has begun.”
Kurth moved to that window and pulled open the heavy drapes, flooding the room with the dawn’s light. He looked in the direction from which the voice had sounded, hoping to catch a glimpse of its source from the shadows, but that edge of his chamber defied the morning light and remained as dark as a moonless midnight—magic, Kurth was certain, and potent magic, indeed. The tower had been sealed against magical intrusion by Arklem Greeth himself. And yet, there was the visitor—again!
Kurth turned back to the west, to the slowly brightening ocean.
A dozen boulders and balls of pitch drew fiery lines in the air, flying fast for the Hosttower, or for various parts of the rocky shore of Cutlass Island.
“See?” asked the voice. “It is as I have assured you.”
“Rethnor’s son is a fool.”
“A fool who will prevail,” the voice replied.
It was hard to argue that possibility, given the line of ships throwing their missiles at Cutlass Island. Their work was meticulous. They threw in unison and with concentrated aim. He counted fifteen ships firing, though there might have been a couple more hidden from view. In addition, another group of wide, low boats ferried along the line then back to Whitesails Harbor to get more ammunition.
Whitesails Harbor!
The reality hit Kurth hard. Whitesails served as the harbor for Luskan’s navy, a flotilla under the auspices, supposedly, of the five high captains as directed by the Hosttower. The ships at Whitesails were the pretty front to the ugly piracy behind Luskan’s riches. Deudermont knew those pirates, and they knew him, and many of them hated him and had lost friends to Sea Sprite’s exploits on the open seas.
Despite that, the nagging thought—reinforced as more and more masts lined up beside Sea Sprite and Brambleberry’s warships—was that the Luskar sailors might well desert. As improbable as it seemed, he couldn’t deny what he saw with his own eyes. Luskan’s fleet, and the men and women of Whitesails, were directly involved in supporting the bombardment of the Hosttower of the Arcane. The men and women of Luskan’s fleet were in open revolt against Arklem Greeth.