Murder in Cormyr (3 page)

But the volume that I most delighted in was the one that my master most scorned. It had been left behind by a visiting mage “in his dotage,” Benelaius insisted. “Why else would he have read such drivel?”

I found the drivel fascinating. It was a thin book bound in cheap felt called The Adventures of Camber Fosrick, written by Lodevin Parkar. In it were half a dozen thrilling tales of the great “consulting cogitator,” Camber Fosrick, who could solve any mystery, bringing the darkest corners of crime to blazing light through his brilliant deductive reasoning. The stories of robbery, smuggling, and even murder held me spellbound, and I read them over and over again, enchanted as much by the character of Camber Fosrick as by the intricate plots he successfully worked out.

“You’ll rot your brain with that tripe,” Benelaius said whenever he saw me with the book.

“On the contrary,” I argued, “this is quite good stuff, master. Deductive reasoning, logic, using disparate clues to come to a reasoned conclusion—the same sort of thing found in Trelaphin’s Thought and Its Processes.”

“Theft, rapine, and slaughter!” thundered Benelaius as best as a man practically wider than he is tall could thunder. Needless to say, this was one literary subject on which we did not see eye to eye.

But I did as he said, and continued to read and learn, and after I had been with him the better part of a year, I began to yearn even more for my freedom. With the knowledge I had accrued from his lessons and books, I was sure I could make a grand start for myself in the world, perhaps as a scribe, for my writing and my method of expressing myself had increased a hundredfold under his tutelage. So I couldn’t wait for the year to be up and my indentureship to come to an end.

Benelaius occasionally hinted at what my future plans might be, suggesting that perhaps I might like to stay with him, at a slight increase in salary. But my pursed lips and slight smile told him unmistakably that I wanted to be his servant no longer, no matter how much he had come to

depend on me. There were other potential slop boys about, and I was sure he would be able to lure one into his service. I was bound for the great world of Faerűn, to see all the things I had only read about, and to seek my destiny.

My heart was growing lighter this Eleint, despite the drought, the ghost, and the secret agents populating the land. For in only four more days I would be free. Still, my time was not yet up, and I had decided to serve Benelaius faithfully to the end. For one reason, he had always treated me fairly, and for another, I did not want any slippage on my part to warrant his demand of a legal extension of my services due to some loophole in our agreement. I simply did as I was told, served him well, and waited for my deliverance.

So when Benelaius gave me two golden lions and told me to go into Ghars to get a cask of clarry, I sprang to my task, despite my discomfort at having to return in darkness. “I’m sorry to make you go out now,” he said, “but I just realized that I had no spirits at all for Lindavar’s visit on the morrow, and he was terribly fond of clarry back in Suzail.” He slipped me an extra half falcon. “Have something for yourself as well, but don’t drink enough to prevent your return sometime before dawn, yes?”

I knew he was joking. I cared little for spirits, though perhaps if I had had more familiarity with them, things might have been different. You don’t become a drunkard on one silver falcon a month. A pauper perhaps, but not a drunkard.

My master had two horses in his small stable. Jenkus could be saddled and ridden and set a good pace, but the huge and ill-tempered Stubbins would throw any rider. He was good only in harness. Benelaius used the two horses to pull his carriage on the rare occasions when he left the cottage. I thought he would likely have crushed any single mount.

As Jenkus trotted toward Ghars, I wondered what else Benelaius might have forgotten that Lindavar required. The young mage had never visited Benelaius, though they corresponded frequently. A week seldom went by without an exchange of letters between the two, and from the thickness of the envelopes that I carried back and forth to the messenger service in Ghars, they were quite long.

Lindavar was Benelaius’s handpicked successor in the College of War Wizards. My master confided to me that his former pupil was having some “problems of a professional nature,” and that was the reason for the visit. I confess that I felt only indifference for Lindavar’s plight, and looked on his visit as primarily an inconvenience, although my extra busyness would help keep my impatience for freedom at bay.

But as I rode west toward Ghars, the Vast Swamp on my left growing more and more distant, I thought about neither Lindavar nor my freedom, but of Fastred’s ghost, and prayed that I would not be confronted by the sight of it as I returned home that evening. A great many people around Ghars had seen it, and it seemed to haunt the northwest swampside. It was, if the stories were true, easily seen from the road that connected the farms on the swamp’s north and west with each other and Ghars.

Farmers returning home late from market had spotted it, as had weary drinkers leaving the Swamp Rat, a tavern recently opened to quench the thirsts of those farmers who didn’t like having to ride all the way into Ghars for an ale and companionship. Unfortunately, the Swamp Rat’s business had fallen off severely after the appearance of Fastred’s specter. Even Mayor Tobald himself, coming back from a dinner with the Rambeltook family, had come across the threatening revenant.

Even though no one had claimed to see the creature in the daylight, I still breathed a sigh of relief when I struck the fork in the road. I turned northwest toward town, and saw no one on the southwest road that led to the farms on the west of the swamp.

Another twenty minutes brought me to Ghars. The first thing an approaching rider noticed was the large cistern that had been built once the drought had gained its dry and dusty foothold. This was nothing more than a gigantic barrel on stilts, really, but it was the tallest edifice in town, and water from every producing well in the area was brought to it.

I rode past Aunsible Durn’s smithy and stables, and saw him still at work, banging away at something on his anvil. Whether he was making horseshoes or plowshares, or one of the more impractical products of his calling, I couldn’t tell. Once Durn brought his impressive skills to Ghars, many of the local squires took a fancy to outfitting their farmhands with Durn’s sturdy pikes and halberds, and themselves with fancy armor, just in case we should ever be invaded, you see. I’ve always believed that the squires, vain fools that they are, just liked to wear the armor on wedding

and feast days.

I didn’t see Dovo, Durn’s large but less than breathtakingly brilliant assistant. Well, it was nearly six. Maybe Durn had let him off early. Or maybe he had just got tired of Dovo’s idiotic presence.

The Bold Bard was the only place to purchase clarry. The Swamp Rat was much closer, but its inventory was limited to ale, beer, cider, and table wine fit only for cleaning paint brushes. The Bold Bard was surrounded by other buildings in the heart of Ghars, and I saw that it was already bustling, with merchants and farmers going in and coming out its door. The coming out was a bit more unsteady than the going in, a tribute to the power of the tavern’s spirits.

I tied Jenkus to a stout post of the colonnade and went in to the common room. There I bought the cask of clarry and had Shortshanks, the dwarven owner and proprietor, place it behind the bar until I was ready to go. The air of camaraderie was contagious, and I sat at the bar and ordered a cod pie and a Golden Sands Orange, the sweetest, least bitter brew I knew of.

Thus fortified, I relaxed and watched the rest of the world go by, at least that part of it that lived in or stumbled into our little piece of it. The talk that wasn’t about the Merchants’ Guild council meeting seemed to be about the ghost.

“Ah, it’s just an illusion,” said the tailor. “People seeing things.”

“You mean a delusion, and it’s not,” said the chandler. “It’s real, right enough. My Uncle Fendrake saw it once, years ago, and Uncle Fendrake never seen anything in his life that wasn’t there.”

“Dunno about that,” returned the tailor. “He musta seen some beauty in your Aunt Magda

“

Most, like the chandler, held out for the ghost’s authenticity. It’s not like there’s never been a supernatural manifestation in Faerikt before, and there was no good reason not to believe in its existence.

The hubbub died down for a moment when Barthelm Meadowbrock came in. Though he was probably the richest merchant in town, the hush wasn’t so much for him as for his daughter, Mayella. She was one of the fairest flowers of Cormyr, and when you added in her daddy’s money, she became an even greater prize.

Hair as golden as corn silk, eyes as blue as the Dragonmere in summer, lips as red as… well, you get the general picture. Not a man in the Bold Bard did not wish himself in the place of the little lap dog that Mayella tenderly caressed. And along with her looks, she had a marvelous personality as well, though she always seemed a bit shadowed by the presence of her father.

That was no cause for wonder, since nearly everyone seemed shadowed by the presence of her father. He was a mountainous man, peaked with a wavy mop of hair that once must have been red-orange, but that was now diluted by white-blond hairs to the shade of the Sheaf of Wheat’s butter-tomato soup. None of that particular dish’s sweetness sat on him outwardly, however, for he was a most demanding man. Money can do that to a person. Or so I’m told.

Barthelm required the best table, the best bottle of mead, the most delectable viands, and the most scrupulous service possible, or the proprietor and everyone else within earshot would hear about it. He owned the local grist mill (ox driven, due to the shortage of running water, so he would never be impoverished by drought), as well as a fleet of fast wagons to take the produce he bought from the local farmers to Suzail and Marsember before it spoiled. In those cities, his agents sold the edibles for up to ten times what he

had paid for them, and the buyers were glad to get them at any price.

But today I could see that Barthelm had more on his mind than finding a suitable suitor for his lovely daughter, or worrying about how the drought was going to affect his bottom line. In three days the Grand Council of Cormyr’s Merchants’ Guild, of which Barthelm was the district representative, would be coming to little Ghars for their annual meeting.

This important group, comprising the wealthiest and most powerful merchants in the realm, always met in one of Cormyr’s major cities—Suzail or Arabel or Marsember. Occasionally they would deign to gather in a smaller resort town like Gladehap, for the fine food, drink and accommodations. But for them to gather in such a little rattrap as Ghars, where the forgettable fare at the Sheaf of Wheat and the Silver Scythe are the best to be offered… well, it was unheard of, and was a great testament to Barthelm Meadowbrock’s perseverance.

But once the die was cast, Barthelm was going to leave nothing to chance. This meeting was going to be the best ever. The council would be lodged in both the Sheaf and the Scythe, since neither inn had enough rooms to accommodate them all, and Barthelm had, out of his own pocket, given Garnet Pennorth, owner of the Silver Scythe, enough gold to add a large and impressive meeting room onto his inn.

The merchant had likewise overseen every detail of the provisioning of the meeting’s larder and cellar, including bringing in chefs from Suzail, and now his grumbling thunderclap of a voice called out to Shortshanks behind the bar. “Dwarf! Did you get the butt of Westgate Ruby that I ordered?”

“Coming in tomorrow,” Shortshanks grumbled back. He

didn’t like being called “dwarf.” In fact, he didn’t like being called anything.

“It better,” Barthelm said. ‘The welcoming dinner is Beef and Oysters Barnabas, and Westgate’s the only wine to go with it.”

Closer to the dwarf than Barthelm, I overheard Shortshanks’s muttered comment as to what liquid Barthelm could drink with his Beef and Oysters Barnabas. I wasn’t the only one, from the titters that swept down the bar. But Shortshanks didn’t crack a smile. Dwarves, sullen and cranky as they are, are miserable choices for tavern keepers, but Shortshanks had come into possession of the Bold Bard by inheritance. It had been left to him by its former owner, a jolly gnome whose will said he bequeathed it to Shortshanks solely in the hopes that it would finally make the dwarf smile. It didn’t work.

“Better watch your tongue, dwarf,” said Barthelm, not as angry as he would have been had he actually heard the comment, “or I’ll take my business to the Swamp Rat.”

As he whirled round on the merchant, Shortshanks’s expression changed from one who has bitten into a pickle to one who has just sucked up the entire barrel of brine. “The Swamp Rat?” the dwarf said with as much disgust as he could muster. “Aye, go there! Serve your fancy guests with sour cider, watered wine, and ale as flat as a duergar’s head! I’ve known horses to make a better brew than Hesketh Pratt serves. And give my curse to Fastred’s ghost on your way!”

With that final riposte, Shortshanks turned back to polishing his bar glasses, no doubt wishing they were gems from dwarven mines.

Barthelm, for once, contained his anger. He knew, as we all did, that he had touched a sore spot. Before Hesketh Pratt opened the Swamp Rat, Shortshanks’s tavern was the

only game in town for those who wanted an informal atmosphere in which to drink, since the Silver Scythe and the Sheaf of Wheat concentrate more on Ghars’s definition of “fine dining,” which basically means food that won’t bite back. But the Swamp Rat had taken away much of Shortshanks’s business, or at least it had until the ghost came along.

“Pretty full place tonight, Shortshanks,” called out Tobald, the mayor of Ghars, as he strode into the tavern with a big, burly man I recognized but could not name.

Shortshanks, true to dwarven form, did not acknowledge Tobald’s merry hail, but Tobald went on anyway, seating his slightly overweight frame in his usual booth and inhaling deeply the scent of tobacco smoke and rich ale with his red, bulbous nose. “That ghost must be good for business, eh? Scared the willies out of me, I’ll tell you. I’ll not ride that swamp road at night if I can help it.”