Elminster's Daughter

With a snarl of fury he plunged his hand into the open front of his plastered-to-his-hide silk shirt, found the tiny trinket riding on its thong there—and tugged.

It took three wrenches before the gods-be-blasted thong broke. By then his arm was hauling the weight of six or more finger-thin tentacles along with it. Rhauligan fought to raise his hand high, his eyes on the struggling thief he was hunting. She had a knife out now and was using it with frenzied viciousness—but there seemed to be no end to these tentacles.

There were more rising up around him now, too, some of them festooned with weed-clocked human bones . . . and some bearing partial skeletons. Small wonder the warehouse and barge were so deserted!

Rhauligan muttered the word Alusair herself had taught him.

He hated to lose this magic, one of the few things the Crown Princess had ever given him—and with a lovely, avid kiss, too!—but on the other hand, he'd hate to lose his life, too, so ...

He threw the trinket down the barge, snapping his wrist to spin it farther even as the clinging tentacles dragged at his arm. It bounced once and skittered into some refuse. He closed his eyes hastily.

Sudden heat warmed his face an instant later, even before the flash and the roar that sent the barge heaving upward under him . . . and the tentacles spasming into a wild and frantic dance of their own. A chaos of wriggling, flailing, shivering tentacles tumbled him over and erupted past him, desperately seeking . . .

Some impossible escape from the fire that was now raging along the barge, burning even underwater thanks to the magic, cooking the unseen heart of the tentacles. Rhauligan scrambled to his knees as the wet, ropelike things fell away from him by the dozens and saw Narnra half-flung off the far end of the barge.

She landed with a splash in the filth of the basin but churned the water in her haste to swim up and out of it, and in less time than it took Rhauligan to catch his breath and bound toward the dock she was ashore at the street end of the basin, ru

Hurling hearty mental curses at the dying tentacled thing, the Harper hound raced past the burning barge after her, bursting out onto the street almost under the wheels of a handcart being trundled by a half-asleep fishmonger.

The cart promptly crashed over onto him—but thankfully was empty at this time of the morning. The man who'd been pushing it erupted in startled rage, clawing aside his ramshackle boxes in his haste to get at Rhauligan and do damage.

The Harper greeted him with a charge up from the ground that brought one balled fist in under the fishmonger's chin and thrust him off his feet to bounce halfway across the street—bowling over a Watch patrolman who with his fellows had just formed a ring of drawn swords around a dripping and furious Narnra.

The Watchman's fall allowed her to bolt through the space he'd been standing in—which meant she came sprinting out of the mists right into Rhauligan's arms.

Ducking and twisting at the last moment, she slid under his grasp—though his fingers raked a bruising trail along Narnra's slick, slimy-wet flank—and ran down the street, dodging twice as she heard his boots thundering on the cobbles right behind her.

The Watchmen were ru

The Watchmen skidded to a stop at the edge of the churning, dock-slapping water, shook their heads, and turned away. "Report 'em as drowned—lovers' dispute gone ugly, both fell in with the fishes. Unidentified outlanders, the both of them, so retrieval not our duty. Write it down, Therry," Rhauligan heard one of them growl, as he followed Narnra's dark, wet head around a corner into a narrow side-canal. He was recalling, with ever-increasing verve, just how much he'd never liked Marsember.

Steam was curling out of various windows and hatches in the stone buildings that rose on both sides of the canal—straight up out of its waters, most of them, without jetties or perch-porches, though crumbling scars of stone here and there marked where such features had once been ere barge collisions, gnawing waves, and the claws of winter ice removed them. Rusting crane-arms festooned with the decaying remnants of ropes, pulleys, and wooden block-and-tackles jutted from some of the building walls, but to reach them from the water even the most nimble of Waterdhavian thieves would have had to fly—or had a boat much taller than any barge to clamber up.

Much of the steam roiling and eddying its way into the thickening pre-dawn mist was coming from lighted windows, for the hours of darkness are work-time to many in cities all over Faerun who craft things or prepare things fresh. The smells borne on much of the steam told Rhauligan—whose alerted stomach rumbled enthusiastically more than once, as he swam grimly on—that many of these buildings were cookshops and bakeries preparing for the flood of hungry morning workers who'd descend at dawn to snatch something more or less edible before hurrying to where they worked. Eel pie, Rhauligan recalled sourly, was the dish of choice for working Marsembans. Almost made one want to become an adventurer or a Purple Dragon assigned to the Stonelands, where eels were no more than a disgusting word used in bad jests.

A flood of refuse suddenly hurtled out of one lighted window, pelting down into the water around him. Rhauligan ducked his head under the filthy water just in time. Eel pie, indeed—and as such dishes used every last possible part of the slimeworms, the only trimmed parts to be discarded would be bits too diseased or rotten to be hidden by a thick, hot-spiced gravy, or devoured without immediate convulsions and collapse of diners. The same bits that were now sharing the waters under his very nose.

Gods, but I hate Marsember!

There was a splash ahead, and Rhauligan had a brief glimpse of Narnra's hand closing on a doorsill that hung over emptiness, the work of either a particularly stone-skulled builder or the remnant of a way down onto some now-vanished dock.

A moment later, the dark and dripping figure of Narnra surged out of the water like some man-sized eel, wriggling momentarily in midair as she snatched for a handhold that wasn't where she needed it to be, clinging to the outside of the back door that belonged to the sill. It sported a well-lit, steam-spewing open upper half, and by the sounds of sizzling and chopping and snatches of brief conversation coming out of that large opening, it belonged to a cookshop.

A moment later, a bucket of eel waste-trimmings took Narnra full in the face. Rhauligan didn't even have time to shape a grin before she plunged through the window. Gods spit, but she'd grabbed hold of the bucket in mid-fling and been pulled into the room with it! In with the cooks—and their cleavers!

He set his teeth, ducked his head down, and charged through the water, hoping he'd be there in time.

Eyes smarting from eel-guts and guck better not thought about, Narnra slithered belly- down through the door hatch, catching a glimpse of a startled, yelling cook's face on the other side of the bucket, as well as a lot of swaying candle-on-chain lanterns. Hitting the floor and sliding wetly along it, she found herself passing along a row of ovens, each sporting the behind of a stoking-lad beneath it who was shoving in kindling for all he was worth.

One stoker put a boot into her face backing up, so she plucked a scrap of wood from his pile and rammed it into his behind. He howled, halting in alarm, and she was past and rolling frantically away from the ovens to avoid the boots of the bellowing cook with the bucket as he kicked and stomped at her head and hands, his shouts turning startled heads all over the kitchen.