The Diamond (8 page)

fictitious fireball had blasted Artemis Entreri and Trandon into twin piles of ash—this wood ash, by

his boots.

Noph growled to himself. Appearances, facades, deceptions; how could Khelben nod so sagely at

Piergeiron’s morality tale when the Blackstaff himself had just perpetrated a treasonous deception

on the entire city? “Being a hero is the most confusing job in the world,” Noph complained aloud.

“Well now, getting down to the brass, you hit the snail on the prosuberbial head there,” a basso

voice answered, from disconcertingly nearby.

Noph looked up into the tragicomic mope of Becil Boarskyr’s face, the cell bars stretching his red

jowls back into a doglike grimace. It was not a pretty sight. “Mayhap,” Becil added, “that’s on

account of because it’s not a job.”

“What are you talking about?” Noph snapped wearily.

“A job’s something they give you compensatory damages for doing it. But heroes don’t get any

monetary renunciation. If they did, they’d be just missionaries.”

“Mercenaries,” Noph corrected reflexively.

“Yes, that’s it, mercy killers—”

“Mercenaries!” Noph snarled. “People who fight for money: mercenaries!”

Becil nodded amiably. “Yes, mammonaries. Which is why being a hero doesn’t provide a fellow the

fine emnities of lordly life.”

“Amenities.”

“Amen to that, yourself. Anyway, when a hero does his goodliness, it’s like he doesn’t get fiscal

repercussions because it’s not him who gets paid but the whole world.”

Noph suddenly understood. The whole world gets paid. He stared at the twin dust piles.

Khelben hadn’t benefited from the jailbreak. He’d nothing to gain from keeping Eidola’s identity a

secret. He’d not seized power during Piergeiron’s long incapacity. In each case, Waterdeep had

been made the richer, not the Lord Mage. He was a hero because he acted on behalf of everyone

but himself. The whole world got paid.

“Now, as long as we’re conversating about those of us who worship mammon getting the chance

to go prostate before the sanctuary of our golden god—”

“Prostrate,” Noph corrected irritably. “Don’t throw around words you don’t know.”

“I’m planning to expose myself about the jailbreak unless I get some commercial satisfaction.”

“You what?” Noph asked, emerging from the empty cell to glare at Becil.

“I observated the deception you and that Blackshaft perpetuated on the Waterdousians,” Becil

said. “And so, I’ll need twenty thousand gold for you to buy the pleasure of me keeping my mouth

shut.”

“You’re going to blackmail Khelben?”

“Blackboil is such a dirty word—”

“No one will listen to you.”

“I have the truth.”

“It can’t be called truth when put to such purposes.”

“You’ll see.”

“I already see,” Noph assured him darkly, and then stiffened. An insistent thumping echoed down

the hall, followed by muffled shrieks and curses.

Noph ran toward the sound, passing along corridors to a solidly barred floor hatch. He pulled the

bar and flung back the hatch. Beneath was a latched iron grating, its bars as thick as his wrist,

and beneath that a deep well. A rickety ladder clung to one side of its shaft. The shouts and

screams came from the depths below: desperate human voices.

“I wonder how much the world’ll be paid for this,” Noph mused grimly, as he yanked a lantern

from a wall hook, undid the latch, swung back the grating, and started climbing down the well.

His legs made long shadows in the lantern light. He felt like a spider scuttling down a hole. Real

spiderwebs broke as he descended through them; they clung to him in a gossamer net.

Ancient rungs cracked under his feet. The lantern light didn’t reach the bottom of the well. How

deep did this shaft go? The dungeons under both castle and palace were below the sewers, he’d

once been told, and he’d come another two hundred feet, at least. The chill made fleeting smoke

of his breath.

This could only be a way into Undermountain.

The cacophony of shouts, roars, and shrieks grew deafening. It sounded as if whoever was down

there wouldn’t survive much longer.

A smooth stone floor became visible below. It belonged to a small chamber, sporting only a door

of iron-banded oak in one wall. Leaping from the ladder, Noph landed in a crouch. His feet stirred

thick dust as he rushed toward the door. A fat oak beam was cradled across it; the brackets that

held it glowed with blue motes of power.

The circling sparks settled into letters, spelling out a clear warning: DO NOT OPEN UNDER PAIN

OF DEATH.

“Open up!” a man shouted, from just beyond the barred door. It shuddered with blows from fists

or hammers or axes but did not give way. There was a slim crack between the boards, and an

eye glared at Noph through it. “Open up, or we’ll die!”

Noph looked again at the stern inscription. “You’ll have to find another way out!”

“There is no other way out, blast you! We’re barely holding off a pair of deep ogres. Open up!”

“Then I’ll be barely staving them off,” Noph pointed out. “Besides, there’s an inscription. A

prohibition. A law. I can’t compromise the security of—”

“Yes, yes, Piergeiron’s Palace! We know! We’re agents of his

or some of us are!”

“But under penalty of death—”

“It’s the death of four or the death of one, lad. Save your own skin and you’ve doomed ours.

Open the door, and we can fight side by side.”

The choice was obvious. It was written large in enchanted letters before him. If the folk trapped

on the other side really were agents of Piergeiron, they’d not ask him to defy laws and jeopardize

the security of the palace. What if the deep ogres won past, and climbed up to rampage through

the palace? More likely there were no deep ogres, and this was a band of villains wanting to trick

their way into the palace. What were the lives of four unknowns worth in the balance against his?

The choice was obvious.

A terrible scream came through the door, followed by a wet thrashing sound.

“I feel like a gods-damned traitor,” Noph hissed, heaving the beam out of its bracket.

The enspelled timber had not even struck the floor before the door crashed open. Noph fell back,

sword hissing out.

A moon-faced man tumbled through first, his fancy clothes much slashed and beribboned with

blood. Stumbling over him came a soot-besmirched dwarf.

“Belgin! Rings!” Noph gasped. “What—?”

A slender woman in glimmering armor staggered out next.

“Aleena!” Noph yelped.

A weak, answering smile showed through the blood and grime on her face as she collapsed beside

the others. There was a man behind her, a silver-garbed paladin. Miltiades! The paladin backed

slowly into the room, his warhammer ringing and swinging with the profound, determined motion

of a blacksmith’s maul.

His anvil was a gigantic creature. Its eyes—dinner plates awash in blood—glowed furiously from

grimy folds of flesh. The sheer weight of the ogre’s lips shaped a permanent scowl around jagged

green teeth. Hands as big as men groped from the darkness, snatching at the paladin’s armor.

Only the persistent, ringing blows of the hammer kept those hands at bay.

If the ogre emerged from the cramped passage, they’d all be slain. And another beast would

follow the first.

A sudden flare of flame drew Noph’s eyes. The oak beam he’d pulled from the door was afire. It

rattled and gave off a high whistling as the magics laid on it did their work. The heat coming off it

was already enough to shrivel the cobwebs clinging to Noph into smoky tracers.

The choice was obvious.

The young hero dropped his sword, bent, and hefted the hissing beam. Fire raced across his

hands and up his arms. Agony stabbed through him. He snarled, heaving the timber above his

head, and lunged at the ogre, thrusting it like a spear into the monster’s gaping maw. One end

distended the squalling beast’s throat. Green teeth clamped on blazing wood.

“Down,” Noph shouted, shoving Miltiades to the floor. They fell together and rolled.

A corona of fire flared from the ogre’s astonished face, and its mantle of hair ignited with a

whoosh, standing away from its head. The beast’s throat bulged out like a bullfrog’s. The log in its

chattering teeth flared bright red, then white, and then exploded.

What was left of the beast fell, minced and bloody meat now. It was followed, with a slowly

growing roar, by a rush of dust, rocks, and rubble.

When the shaking ended and the echoes faded, dust hung thick in the antechamber. The passage

was closed by rubble. Noph rolled stiffly off the pile, looking grimly at the fire-blackened flesh

below his wrists. He’d be a match for Entreri, now, but missing two hands instead of one.

There was much coughing. Miltiades and Aleena rose, and after some grunting moments, the

dwarf Rings and the moon-faced sharper Belgin followed.

The latter squinted at Noph. “A long shot, youngling, but a gamble that paid off.” His was the

voice that had implored Noph through the doorway.

Noph did not reply. Bloodied and battered, he slumped beside the lantern. In its light, his figure

seemed sculpted in gold.

“Noph?” growled Miltiades, coughing. “I should have known you’d be alive to rescue us like this.”

*

Piergeiron’s quarters were far from the dark and dusty grave of the ogre. Bright and filled with a

sea breeze, looking out at the clear blue air above Waterdeep, the chambers seemed as high as

golden griffons and white stacks of cloud. Outside one set of tall windows, the Sea of Swords

glimmered with morning sunlight. Past another sprawled Waterdeep in all its splendor, roofs of red

and green tiles glowing like rubies and emeralds in the sun.

The company, too, was an improvement on headless ogres. Noph and the four who’d stumbled

through the door had been bathed, bandaged, and healed. Noph’s new hands tingled from time to

time; he’d been restored by the same priest who’d given Entreri his arm back.

The palace healers had given the heroes loose white robes, similar to those of Piergeiron. They all

looked like monks, or devout priests, fitting in this place of white marble and silver trim. Only

Khelben wore black. That, too, seemed right. He was black thunder to Piergeiron’s white lightning.

Now both listened to a silver paladin. “—Unwise in the extreme, I’d say, for a young man charged

with guarding the dungeon to open it to attack from Undermountain.”

“Yes, Miltiades,” the Blackstaff soothed patiently. While the others hovered in an uncertain circle

around the Open Lord’s sickbed, Khelben lurked by one of the windows, his attention on a bronze

kettle perched in a quietly hissing brazier. “Yet if he hadn’t, you’d all be dead now, correct?”

The warrior seemed irritated. “Better we die than let ogres into the palace to kill the Open Lord.”

“I’ve been dead before,” Piergeiron noted wryly. He drew in a deep breath of tea-scented air. “I’ll

be dead again, too.”

“Better that none but an ogre die,” Khelben added. His deft hands slipped into a window seat and

drew forth teacups. “Noph made a decision. An heroic decision, and in the end the right one.”

Belgin nodded agreement. “Sometimes you’ve got to place your bets and roll the dice.”

Miltiades steamed, a human counterpart to Khelben’s kettle. “That wall of rubble won’t keep them

back for long. The security of the palace—”

“Is being taken care of,” snapped Khelben. “Have the courtesy not to pillory the man who saved

your life.”

“Enough,” Piergeiron said wearily. “I called for a report, not an argument.”

Miltiades visibly caught hold of his temper. “Yes,” he said. “Well, the company of paladins was

necessarily parted in the dungeons of King Aetheric III. Half our folk, my comrade Kern among

them, remained behind to heal young Kastonoph and to seek out and destroy the bloodforge. I

understand they succeeded in the former, but not the latter.”

Khelben was suddenly at the paladin’s side, a cup of tea steaming in his grasp. “And did you

succeed in your task, to rescue Eidola? Tea?”

Flustered, Miltiades took the cup. “Yes, thank you. I mean, no, we didn’t. But we found out

the

rescue was not

that is—”

Sipping from his own cup, Piergeiron said gently, “Take a moment. Gather your thoughts.”

Miltiades took one swallow and set his cup aside. “I led the group seeking Eidola. We pursued her

from the dungeon beneath the palace of Aetheric III, even, as I’m told by Kastonoph, as the squid

lord struggled in his death throes.”

The young man nodded confirmation, brushing the crumbs of a biscuit from his lips.