Spinner of Lies

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANUL

17 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

Riltana flew among the hovering citymotes. The wind caressed her like a lover’s arms. It bore her up when she asked, but only for a breath, before gently letting go.

She paused on a rusting bridge cable to take in the grandeur of the city.

The streets wound switchback paths up the cliffs, and steep stairs cut nearly vertical ascents between buildings. Suspension bridges arced between earthmotes above and below. Titanic pillars of stone rose from the sea, and gleaming elemental spires hung with crystalline clarity throughout the middle air. But today, the normally sunbaked streets and bright cliffs were dim beneath a shroud of clouds. An approaching storm darkened the iron sky, threatening a downpour of torrential strength. Normally she hated the rain, the dark, the sun-concealing clouds.

But not today.

Today, Airspur smelled sweeter than it had in months. The piling thunderheads looked like fairy castles. She wanted to fly up to them and see who lived inside. She wanted to sing. Maybe do a little jig. The queen was going to write to Carmenere on Riltana’s behalf! All Riltana had to do was help Demascus check out some moist piece of rock off the coast and see what kind of idiocy the miners had got up to. Easy. She imagined a gold-foil envelope, stamped with the queen’s seal in red wax. The envelope would be delivered to Carmenere’s rooms in faraway High Imaskar. She could see Carmenere breaking the seal, then reading her royal aunt’s message that pled for the estranged silverstar to make peace with Riltana …

She pumped her fist and grinned at a pigeon roosting on a nearby suspension line. If Arathane put in a word for her, the stubborn silverstar was bound to see reason! Carmenere would never have taken the diplomatic post so far from Akanul if she and Riltana hadn’t quarreled. Probably …

The sooner she and Demascus accomplished Queen Arathane’s little job, the sooner the message would be dispatched. Riltana had volunteered to investigate the warehouse while Demascus chartered a ship in the dock district. Demascus had wanted them to stick together, but she’d insisted they split their efforts to save time. Patience wasn’t one of her strengths. Besides, she wanted to distract herself from thinking about the near disaster of last evening. I was so close! she thought. That damned painting was supposed to have been in the House Norjah gallery. Her black market inquiry, courtesy of Chant’s connections, had finally produced a lead. The odd woman who’d responded had seemed so legitimate, knowledgeable, and convincing. She’d known things only someone familiar with the painting of Queen Cyndra could’ve described. Why had a stranger pretended the missing painting was in that shadowy gallery?

Riltana frowned. Eventually she’d get that painting back, oh yes. And Hells help anyone who stood in her way. Or maybe not. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Having Carmenere’s queenly aunt on Riltana’s side was a surer road to reconciliation than anything Riltana could hope to accomplish on her own. Maybe she didn’t need the royal painting to impress Carmenere …

Frankly, given what’d gone down at Demascus’s apartment the previous evening, it was lucky things had turned out as well as they had. The goddess Tymora must be smiling down on Riltana. So why do I feel so guilty?

She knew why, of course. Because of her own damnable impulsiveness. She couldn’t help herself when certain situations reared their heads. Like finding herself alone with a surfeit of valuable and easily transportable goodies. Riltana smacked a fist into her palm. The pigeon on the suspension cable startled and winged off. She hadn’t been completely honest with Demascus. The Norjah vampires were right to call her a thief. When she’d slipped into their gallery and found no sign of the painting she’d sought, well, she helped herself to one hanging there instead. As compensation, of course; she’d paid a pretty sum to the woman who’d given her the tip. Riltana couldn’t be expected just to eat that coin, right? She’d only realized that she might be diving off a higher cliff than she’d reckoned when she lifted one of the paintings from its hook. The illustrated figure began whispering to her secrets of thievery and concealment-

Reflexively, in the moment of surprise, she transferred the framed canvas to the nonspace her gloves accessed. Then, while still wondering if she’d merely imagined a talking canvas, an alarm tripped. Probably an alarm wired into the hook on which the painting had rested. A horde of pig-straddling vampires roared into the gallery. She’d fled, and they gave chase. Even through the empty air! When Riltana realized she wasn’t going to lose them, she headed to Demascus’s home. The deva had helped her out of binds before, though never one so serious. She blinked. It was too late to change what’d happened. All she could do was deal with any consequences from House Norjah. Later. After she and Demascus handled the arambarium situation and Riltana received her reward from Queen Arathane. It might not even be too much to imagine that Carmenere could receive Arathane’s letter within just a couple of tendays!

She pitched forward off the cable and dove past an entire cliffside neighborhood in mere heartbeats, braking on wings of wind at the last instant. She came down like a honeybee on a petal, her boot heels barely clicking the shingles of a warehouse roof.

The queen had identified this warehouse. Thanks to her dawdling on the bridge, Demascus was probably already down along the wharf talking to potential ship owners about a charter. She’d have to make up for lost time.

Riltana dropped from the rooftop into the middle of the busy street. A gaggle of dockworkers glanced at her. Most likely they saw just one more courier wearing Airstepper Guild robes on her way to deliver a package to a captain or merchant in the dock district. The robes perfectly concealed her newly enchanted leather armor. Pricy, but paid for with the reward she’d earned when helping the queen with the plague demon hiding beneath the Firestorm Cabal several months earlier. She sauntered through the open front door of the warehouse. Sweat-soaked workers were wrestling crates into compact rows that stretched back to the far wall and halfway to the ceiling.

A genasi with a quill and scroll noticed her. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a message to deliver.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s a document. I’m supposed to deliver it directly to the owner of this place.”

The genasi shrugged and pointed at a short flight of stairs leading up to a landing halfway up one interior wall. “Lord Pashra isn’t here.”

“Mind if I wait?”

“Fine. But stay out of the way.” The genasi returned his attention to the workers.

Riltana sidled up to the foreman. He was totaling cargo manifests. Apparently this Lord Pashra did a mean business in turnips, potatoes, and onions. That explained the pungent odor. Nothing mineral related. Not that she had expected it to be so easy.

“Yes?” the genasi said, noticing her still standing next to him and ogling his tallies.

“You know what? The smell of all these onions is making me sick to my stomach. Mind if I go wait up by the office?”

The genasi waved a hand. “If that will get you out from under my feet.”

Riltana took the stairs. When she reached the landing at the top and peered back, neither the foreman nor the workers spared her so much as a glance. They were absorbed in their task of finding a more efficient packing configuration to make room for a “mess of beets” from Turmish. If they were acting unconcerned to throw off suspicion, they were doing a damn fine job … Too good. Riltana had the sinking feeling she was on the wrong track and wasting time. Well, she was here. She should at least take a quick look around to make certain.

She faded back from the railing until she was right next to the office door. She tried the handle. Locked. But not for long. Riltana pulled a thin wire and a couple of other oddments from the cuff of her robe. With her back to the door and her eyes on the warehouse floor, she tried to give the impression that moving crates was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. She inserted the pick into the lock by touch. It was an exploratory poke, to see how many pins she was dealing with … and whether or not Lord Pashra had fortified the lock with a trap. But the telltale tightness of a mechanical trigger connected to something nasty, or the faint tingle that usually warned her of a hex, was absent. All she needed for the simple mechanism was a tension wrench, a slight turn, a few taps with the wire used like a pick … and click.

She opened the door just enough to slip through, and entered. She didn’t quite shut it behind her; she wanted to hear if anyone came up the stairs-

A flicker of movement by her boots made her freeze. She let out her breath as she watched a spider scuttle away across the scratched plank floor, probably terrified she would stomp it flat.

The space was too big to have originally been an office. Pashra must have converted an ancillary storage room. A ramshackle table squatted in the center of the chamber, surrounded by stools. Another table was shoved into the far corner, creating a makeshift desk. It was layered with a mess of open scrolls and parchment pages. A lantern bolted to the wall over the desk bathed the room in yellowish light. Shelves in one corner held a litter of colored stones, books, scroll cases, and what apparently was a collection of dining plates from all over Toril. Then Riltana caught sight of a map on the wall between the desk and shelves that showed both the continent of Faerun and a land mass to the west labeled “Returned Abeir.” The word “Menzoberranzan” was written in red ink on the map some miles northeast of Waterdeep. The name seemed vaguely familiar, but Riltana couldn’t place it. Something to do with elves, maybe?

“Now,” she murmured, “If I were secretly funneling a super-rare elemental mineral out of Akanul, where would I hide my secret ledger describing my treachery in exact detail?” She chuckled. Finding such a record wasn’t out of the question. Criminals had at least as much cause to keep track of their merchandise as did legitimate merchants. In her experience the difference between legal and illegal wares was mostly dependent on how richly bribed the public officials were.

She sorted through paperwork. Manifests, lists of ports, projected prices for various vegetables, notes of intent to buy or sell various amounts of said vegetables, and upkeep costs for boats and warehouses … didn’t this Pashra have some sort of filing system? The disarray was almost comical and definitely ordinary.

Something came into focus about a foot in front of her, its shadow large on the clutter of documents. She leaped back with a curse even as she saw it was another spider, this one hanging on a slender web she’d missed in the lantern’s dull light. She’d never been especially afraid of spiders. Until she’d seen the nightmare called Murmur feed several people to its pit of bugs. They’d been devoured alive, swarmed by hungry spiders and other insects … Her stomach felt funny. She swallowed, and focused on the tiny arachnid dangling in front of her. It’s just a spider, she told herself. It can’t hurt you. Unless it’s poisonous.

Either way, it was an ugly bastard with a body nearly as thick as her thumb. She could even make out its little eyes, like tiny buttons, fixed on her.

“All right, blister, that’s how you want to play it?” She grabbed a handful of papers and rolled them up. As if it guessed her intent, the spider sprinted down its web line and disappeared somewhere behind the desk. She leaned across the morass of papers and noticed a hollow she’d missed in the wall. As she peered inside, her eyes widened.

The hollow crawled with spiders. Too many to count, boiling over each other and across some kind of bulky object. A … person, wrapped in a shroud of lacy webbing. She could make out features frozen in a rictus of open-mouthed terror, beneath a suffocating white layer.

“Oh, shit!” Most of the spiders were coin size, but a few were larger than her palm. She eased back.

“Greetings,” a voice said.

Riltana spun. A watersoul genasi stood just inside the door, now closed. Damn.

“Who’re you?” she said. Something wasn’t right about him. The sea-foam hue of his skin was unnatural, as if the watersoul suffered some kind of sickness or blight.

“I’m Pashra. The question is who’re you?”

She swallowed, and forced herself not to glance back down into the hollow.

“I, uh, got a message to deliver. A document. For you, I guess, if you’re the owner.”

The genasi said, “That’s me. Can I ask why you’re going through my desk?”

She raised the incriminating papers she’d rolled into an impromptu spider-swatter. “What, these? I thought I saw a bug.”

The man uttered something that almost sounded like a curse, but not in any language she knew. “Put those down, give me whatever you’ve got, then get out.” The genasi smiled. He sure had a lot of teeth …

And what was with the way his shadow was so much larger than his frame? The jagged silhouette on the wall almost looked like it had horns …

“You’re no genasi,” she said.

The man sighed and glanced sidelong at something on the door frame; another spider. This one was big, too. It had a black abdomen and a white head.

As if addressing it, he said, “You see? She’s a spy. Now help me silence her-your wall-crawling pets are good for more than watching me, aren’t they?”

Piss on a shingle! You just had to tell him you pierced his disguise, she thought. Did it make you feel smart? ’Cause now …

Pashra sucked in breath so large his chest visibly expanded. Then his body followed suit. He ballooned outward and upward, growing larger and larger, until he was the size of an ogre. It was his true size, she guessed, though his skin color remained unchanged. Coarse black hair was tied in a braid down his back, horns protruded from his forehead, and his mouth was so filled with oversize teeth that it didn’t even properly close. Oh yeah, plus he’d somehow come into possession of a sword that could pass as an oversized meat cleaver.

“What are you?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not.” She loosed the tie on her Airstepper robe. It fell, revealing her ebony armor and providing easy access to her sword and daggers. She leaped. The air hurled her like a ballista spear across the chamber. If she could stun Pashra, knock him away from the door-

Pashra uttered a mystical word. Vapor swirled from the tip of his cleaver and caught Riltana before she was halfway across the wide office. Cold like the inside of an ice cave painted a frost glaze across her armor and skin.

She fell out of the air. When she hit the central table, two of its four legs buckled. She rolled behind it, putting its sloped face between her and Pashra. The leech-son could cast spells! Her teeth chattered as the shock of Pashra’s magical chill slowly abated. It doesn’t mean he won’t bleed, she thought. Let’s see how he likes daggers. Two small blades, one from each glove, appeared in her palms. All right-

A spider the size of Chant’s pet cat dropped on her. She stabbed it through the abdomen before it could fasten its pincers. It tumbled away and twitched on the floor, legs curling up around the leaking wound. A glance back at the desk showed a swarm of the spider’s siblings emerging from their hollow and scuttling toward her. Most weren’t nearly as large as the one she’d just dispatched, but there were so many she could hear the patter of hundreds of tiny legs.

“Damn web-spitting offal eaters!” she cursed. She flicked the dagger away, replacing it with a mountaineer’s spike from her gloves. Then she jumped straight up and punched the spike into the wooden ceiling and dangled from the attached carabiner. She hoped it would keep her out of reach of the spiders on the floor. At least until they figured out they could climb up the walls and across the ceiling.

And there towered Pashra, horns pointed at her like swords, much closer than before. When he saw her looking at him, he grinned and raised his weapon. What was he? An ogre, yes, but a smart one.

She hurled a dagger with her free hand. Its point plunged into Pashra’s right eye. The creature howled, a terrifying sound halfway between a wolf’s night call and a hunting panther’s roar. The sound rippled through the air, knocking Riltana from her handhold. It roiled the spider swarm and blew out the tiny office window. Rain from the storm outside blew in.

The windsoul managed a half-graceful landing, despite a trickle of blood from her left ear. A residual ring hung in the air-or maybe that was in her head. She worked her jaw and blinked, trying desperately to gain her bearings. There was two of everything …

Where was Pashra? She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them. Her double vision merged back to normal, thank Tymora. She fixed her gaze back on Pashra. He hadn’t advanced, but neither was he down. Instead, the blue-green hulk was carefully working the dagger out of his eye. Red fluid oozed from the socket, but when the blade came free, Riltana watched with horrified amazement as the punctured eye gradually re-inflated, until it was completely whole once more. Pashra swung his rejuvenated gaze on her and said, “I’m an oni mage. And you’re overmatched, little spy.”

Yells of concern filtered through the closed office door. By the sound of it, the workers wondered if Pashra was all right. Apparently they didn’t know his secret identity as a monster. She needed to distract him. So Riltana fished.

“What’s your connection to the arambarium mine?”

The oni’s overlarge features stretched into an expression of surprise. “You know we’re after the arambarium?”

She grinned. “We do now, chump. Thanks for confirming.”

Pashra scowled, then said, “Who exactly is ‘we?’ ”

Riltana carefully straightened. She’d managed to gain a little time with her spontaneous falsehood. Maybe she should try to extract a little more information before she fled. “Let’s just say,” she said, “we’ve had our eyes on you for quite a while now. Your efforts to panic Akanul into a premature strike aren’t going to work. We know you’re trying to stampede the Crown of Majesty into some kind of overt action against Tymanther.”

“Ah. You think that’s what I’m doing?”

“It’s obvious.”

The oni shrugged with lazy insolence and said, “You’ve figured me out. Oh, no.” The last dripped with so much sarcasm that Riltana knew she had missed something.

“I mean,” she said, “it’s obvious that’s your cover story.”

Pashra laughed, and it wasn’t a mirthful, happy sound. He glanced back at the lone spider nearest him and said, “She knows nothing, Chenraya.”

A voice-female, disdainful, and cold-seemed to issue from the tiny arachnid on the door frame. “Take her alive. She obviously knows something or she wouldn’t be here. Then bring her to me in person-this homunculus body is good for scrying and communication, but little else. We’ll drain her mind as easily as pouring out a cup. Then we’ll know.”

Shit! I might be out of my depth, Riltana thought. Despite the oni’s spell and obvious size advantage, she figured she was fairly evenly matched with the thing, assuming she could stay clear of the spiders. But the presence of a talking arachnid, or someone who was apparently using the arachnid to talk remotely, suggested Riltana didn’t really know the score.

Time to get gone. She glanced at the broken window-

And saw a spider the size of a street vendor’s cart bearing down on her.