Robillard ignored him and leaned forward. “Captain,” he called, getting Deudermont’s attention. “Would you have half your subjects fall ill from the wet and cold?”
Deudermont smiled at the not-so-subtle hint.
“Go to your homes, now, and take heart,” Deudermont bade the crowd. “Be warm, and be filled with hope. The day has turned, and though Talos the Storm Lord has not yet heard, the skies are brighter in Luskan!”
That brought the loudest cheering of all.
“Three times he put me to the bottom,” Baram growled, watching with Taerl from a balcony across the way. “Three times that dog Deudermont and his fancy Sea Sprite, curse her name, dropped me ship out from under me, and one of them times, ’e got me landed in Prisoner’s Carnival.” He pulled up his sleeve, showing a series of burn scars where he’d been prodded with a hot poker. “Cost me more to bribe me way out than it cost for a new ship.”
“Deudermont’s a dog, to be sure,” Taerl agreed. He smiled as he finished, nudged his partner, and pointed down to the back of the square, where most of the city’s magistrates huddled under an awning. “Not a one o’ them’s happy at the call for the end o’ their fun.”
Baram snorted as he considered the grim expressions on the faces of the torturers. They reveled in their duties; they called Prisoner’s Carnival a necessary evil for the administration of justice. But Baram, who had sat in the cells of the limestone holding caves, who had been paraded across that stage, who had paid two of them handsomely to get his reduced sentence—he should have been drawn and quartered for the pirate he was—knew they had all profited from bribes, as well.
“I’m thinking that the rain’s fitting for the day’s events,” Baram remarked. “Lots o’ storm clouds in Luskan’s coming days.”
“Ye’d not be thinking that looking at the fool Suljack, sitting there all a’titter at the dog Deudermont’s every word,” Taerl said, and Baram issued a low growl.
“He’s looking for a way to up himself on Deudermont’s sleeve,” Taerl went on. “He knows he’s the least among us, and now’s thinking himself to be the cleverest.”
“Too clever by half,” Baram said, and there was no missing the threatening tone in his voice.
“Chaos,” Taerl agreed. “Kensidan wanted chaos, and claimed we five would be better for it, eh? So let’s us be better, I say.”
As gently as a father lifting an injured daughter, the lich scooped the weathered body of Valindra Shadowmantle into his arms. He cradled her close, that dark and rainy evening, the same day Deudermont had made his “I am your god” speech to the idiot peasants of Luskan.
He didn’t use the bridge to cross from blasted Cutlass Island to Closeguard, but simply walked into the water. He didn’t need air, nor did Valindra, after all. He moved into an underwater cave beneath the rim of Closeguard then to the sewer system that took him to the mainland, under his new home: Illusk, where he placed Valindra gently in a curtained bed of soft satin and velvet.
When he poured an elixir down her throat a short while later, the woman coughed out the rain, blood, and seawater. Groggily, she sat up and found that her breathing was hard to come by. She forced the air in and out of her lungs, taking in the many unfamiliar and curious smells as she did. She finally settled and glanced through a crack in the canopy.
“The Hosttower…” she rasped, straining with every word. “We survived. I thought the witch had killed…”
“The Hosttower is gone,” Arklem Greeth told her.
Valindra looked at him curiously then struggled to the edge of the bed and parted the canopy, glancing around in confusion at what looked like the archmage arcane’s bedchamber in the Hosttower. She ended by turning her puzzled expression to the lich.
“Boom,” he said with a grin. “It’s gone, destroyed wholly and utterly, and many of Luskan with it, curse their rotting corpses.”
“But this is your room.”
“Which was never actually in the Hosttower, of course,” Arklem Greeth sort of explained.
“I entered it a thousand times!”
“Extradimensional travel…there is magic in the world, you know.”
Valindra smirked at his sarcasm.
“I expected it would come to this one day,” Arklem Greeth explained with a chuckle. “In fact, I hoped for it.” He looked up at Valindra’s stunned expression and laughed all the louder before adding, “People are so fickle. It comes from living so short and miserable a life.”
“So then where are we?”
“Under Illusk, our new home.”
Valindra shook her head at every word. “This is no place for me. Find me another assignment within the Arcane Brotherhood.”
It was Arklem Greeth’s turn to shake his head. “This is your place, as surely as it is my own.”
“Illusk?” the moon elf asked with obvious consternation and dismay.
“You haven’t yet noted that you’re not drawing breath, except to give sound to your voice,” said the lich, and Valindra looked at him curiously. Then she looked down at her own pale and unmoving breast, then back to him with alarm.
“What have you done?” she barely managed to whisper.
“Not I, but Arabeth,” Arklem Greeth replied. “Her dagger was well-placed. You died before the Hosttower exploded.”
“But you resurrected…”
Greeth was still shaking his head. “I am no wretched priest who grovels before a fool god.”
“Then what?” Valindra asked, but she knew….
He had expected the terrorized reaction that followed, of course, for few people welcome lichdom in so sudden—and unbidden—a manner.
He returned her horror with a smile, knowing that Valindra Shadowmantle, his beloved, would get past the shock and recognize the blessing.
“Events move quickly,” Tanally, one of Luskan’s most prestigious guards, warned Deudermont. The governor had invited Tanally and many other prominent guards and citizens to meet with him in his quarters, and had bade them to speak honestly and forthrightly.
The governor was certainly getting what he’d asked for, to the continual groaning of Robillard, who sat at the window at the back of the spacious room.
“As well they must,” Deudermont replied. “Winter will be fast upon us, and many are without homes. I will not have my people—our people—starving and freezing in the streets.”
“Of course not,” Tanally agreed. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“He means other events,” said Magistrate Jerem Boll, formerly a leading adjudicator of the defunct Prisoner’s Carnival.
“People will think to loot and scavenge,” Tanally clarified.
Deudermont nodded. “They will. They will scavenge for food, so that they won’t starve and die. And for that, what? Would you have me serve them up to Prisoner’s Carnival for the delight of other starving people?”
“You risk the breakdown of order,” Magistrate Jerem Boll warned.
“Prisoner’s Carnival epitomized the lack of order!” Deudermont shot back, raising his voice for the first time in the long and often contentious discussion. “Don’t sneer at my observation. I witnessed Luskan’s meting out of justice for much of my adult life, and know of more than a few who met a grisly and undeserved fate at the hands of the magistrates.”
“And yet, under that blanket, the city thrived,” said Jerem Boll.
“Thrived? Who is it that thrived, Magistrate? Those with enough coin to buy their way free of your ‘carnival’? Those with enough influence that the magistrates dare not touch them, however heinous their affronts?”