“I do believe you’ve scared the man,” Rensharra said reprovingly, discovering that she was genuinely enjoying herself-and her company-for the first time in, well, years …
“I, lady?” Mirt protested in mock horror. “I said nothing to him, nothing at all!”
“You, lord, don’t need to!” Rensharra replied, lifting her hand to him in the court manner.
A moment later, her always-cold fingers were clasped in a warm, hairy, yet gentle paw that did not tug at her, but conveyed her fingertips to lips ringed with a long, sweeping mustache that … tickled.
She giggled helplessly, whereupon Mirt released her, proffered his fourth bottle-the only one that wasn’t already empty-and inquired, “Will you begin getting drunk, lady? Just for me?”
Rensharra burst into a guffaw. The man was outrageous! Like a playful boar, or a gruff old minstrel lampooning a flamboyant noble a-wooing-and, by all the gods, she loved these coarse flirtations. She was, after all, in Thessarelle’s, where the staff knew her rank and position; one scream from her could have this man hustled away in a trice, so she was quite safe. Moreover, she’d spent too many lonely, melancholy evenings here toying with food that was superb, yet … wasted, somehow, when one dined alone. Bah! Let this be a night of adventure, where she would give as good as she got.
“I believe I will, Lord of Waterdeep,” she announced. “Providing you answer me truly, gallant Mirt. Is it true, what they say about men of Waterdeep?”
“Which saying, lady?”
“The one about driving hard until the tide turns?”
Mirt coughed briefly, startled-by such a query from so demure a source-into taking some wine up his nose. Recovering, he grinned.
“Yes, lady. It is. I believe in candor, between friends.”
Rensharra looked at him over the rim of the just-filled tallglass he’d handed her. It had been clean, because he’d been drinking directly from the bottles.
“I accept you as my friend of the table, Lord Mirt, and quite likely my friend, period. Were you hoping for something … closer?”
“You do believe in candor, lass! Well, now, I do believe I am. Do yer hopes run along similar trails?”
“If you drink me under the table,” Goodwoman Ironstave told her tablecloth demurely, “you may have me under the table.” She set down her glass and looked up. “Or more sensibly, being as this is Thessarelle’s, under another table, elsewhere, of your choosing. Or, perhaps, wherever else we may both devise. After we eat and drink sufficiently for you to prove that saying true, of course.”
“Of course,” Mirt agreed, sketching a deep bow. Being as he was still seated, his dipping gesture merely planted his nose in the platter in front of him.
He straightened up, dripping, wearing an expression of long-suffering martyrdom, and snorted most marvelously like a boar backing away from a trough. Rensharra burst out laughing again as he reached for what little was left in his fourth bottle.
Only to hurl it hard and accurately past Rensharra’s shoulder, into something that squealed in wet and wordless pain.
“Down, lass!” he roared. “Under yer table, and keep going!”
The lady clerk of the rolls ducked in her chair, but turned to look at what was behind her as she slid out of it-so she was in time to see the elegantly dressed man with not much left of his face but blood and bottle shards collapsing back against the drapery-bedecked wall. His hand-which held a knife in it-fell away from a rope it had failed to slice.
The rope led up-she was under the table, but still peering-to a pulley lost in the shadows of the lofty ceiling, from which dangled a wicker basket about the size of a coffin.
Something flashed, out of an upper gallery, right at that rope.
Mirt gave a growl and came up out of his seat in a lumbering rush that sent his table over on top of Rensharra’s table, toppling it.
The heavy, metallic crash that slammed into those improvised shields a moment later splintered one tabletop before the basket spewed its deadly contents all over the vicinity: scores of cleavers, carving knives, cooking spits, and skewers, accompanied by broken glass and a glistening sea of lamp oil. Followed by racing flames, as the lit lamp that had been balanced atop it all met that flowing oil.
Rensharra was too startled to scream, but she managed a strangled peep as Mirt snatched her out from under the tables, tore the flaming half of her gown right off her and flung it into the growing conflagration. He took the instant necessary to comment, “Nice!” … then spun and towed her across the room.
“But-but-” she gasped, seeing other diners gawking, “this isn’t the way out!”
“Nay,” Mirt growled, bounding up the stairs and dragging her along like a child’s toy, “but ’tis the way to the gallery!”
Halfway up that stair, they met a man hurrying down. A man armed with a murderous snarl and a knife. He slashed at Mirt, who flung up his arm to take the blow-and sprang upward to turn that fending movement into a hard punch just above the man’s knee.
The man hopped, howling in pain, and Mirt’s slashed and bleeding arm crashed home, landing a hard punch in the man’s crotch. The knife clanged somewhere down the stair, the man shrieked and collapsed, and Mirt let go of Rensharra long enough to take the man by the throat and one knee, turn, and heave.
This was not a man meant to fly. Instead, he plunged and struck the knife-studded, blazing basket and tables with a crash even louder and heavier than the one that had ended the deadly basket’s fall. He struck, spasmed once, then lay still, his arms and legs dangling, his body impaled and starting to drip. Rensharra winced.
Mirt turned and offered her his arm. It was bleeding copiously, but she took it as if nothing were amiss. Mirt grandly led her back down the stair to where servers and a cook and Thessarelle herself were scurrying. Diners were fleeing or craning to see, buckets of potato water from the kitchens were being flung onto the flames, and the man sprawled in the heart of that fire, with several knives through him, looked very dead.
“I do hope,” Mirt said politely to Thessarelle, as that pillar of hauteur started to scream and sob, “you won’t be charging for the floor show.”
Pressing a small but bulging purse into the nearest hand of the dumbfounded proprietress, he led Rensharra toward the kitchens.
“The entrance is-”
“Never use a front entrance after a slaying’s gone awry,” Mirt growled. “That basket was meant for you, lass. Someone with coin enough to hire others … you haven’t angered any nobles lately, have you?”
Rensharra managed a weak smile as he hustled her through kitchens where pots neglected too long were starting to steam, and sauces to scorch, out into an alleyway.
“I–I’m the head tax collector of the kingdom,” she told him, as they hastened through its noisome gloom together, Mirt peering this way and that. “I anger nobles daily. And when I tire of it, I irk them some more.”
“Good lass,” he replied fondly. “You look much better with half yer gown gone, by the way.”
“My reputation-”
“Lass, lass, if yer head tax collector, yer reputation can only be helped by a little bouncing bared flesh! Yer precious reputation only has one way to go!”
They turned a corner at the end of the alley, out into a lamplit street, and Mirt added, “That’s a little better! The farther we get-”
A Watch patrol came out of the next alley, and promptly rushed to surround them, unhooding lanterns.