Troy Denning - The Sentinel

“I want the thieves who gave this to you.” Yder spoke in a low, wispy voice that the prisoner would hear as much inside his head as in his ears. “And I want the Eye.”

“The … eye?” the prisoner croaked. He had an arched nose and close-set eyes, and when he spoke, it was in a strained voice. “ Whose eye?”

Yder shook the satchel in the man’s face. “The stone they were carrying in this bag,” he said. “The Eye of Gruumsh.”

At the mention of Gruumsh, a flash of terror shot through the prisoner’s eyes, and Yder knew he recognized Gruumsh as the name of the orcs’ one-eyed god of savagery. But if the man understood the significance of the Eye itself, he didn’t let it show. He merely studied Yder in confusion, then finally raised his brow in a practiced expression of deferential helpfulness.

“A stone?” he asked. “And just how large … might the Eye of Gruumsh be?”

The prisoner let his gaze slide back to the satchel, silently suggesting that perhaps the stone might still be inside, and Yder realized that the fool took the Eye of Gruumsh to be the name of a mere gem-something akin to the Titan’s Tear or the Star of Halruaa .

Yder tightened his grasp on the man’s throat. “I am weary of hearing questions in the place of answers,” he said. “Where are the contents of the satchel?”

The prisoner’s eyes bulged. “There.” He pointed to a forge hammer lying on the deck next to the gold-armored buffoon Yder had killed just a few minutes earlier. “They … your thieves … they said it would protect Farnig from … your kind.”

Yder recognized the grand duke’s name and knew that his father-Netheril’s ruler, the Most High Telamont Tanthul-would be pleased that Yder had killed a Cormyrean royal. But Yder hadn’t come to Marsember to please his father or kill Farnig-and so far, he wasn’t having much success doing what the Mistress of the Night had sent him to do.

He tossed the empty satchel aside, then lowered his free hand toward the forge hammer and extended a shadow finger to retrieve it. He studied the tool for a moment and, feeling no magic in it, held it before the prisoner’s eyes.

“Who said this trifle would protect the grand duke?” Seeing that his captive was about to pass out, Yder loosened his grasp. “Describe them.”

The prisoner took a ragged breath, then said, “It was a red-haired beauty and her manservant.” His voice was hard, as though he was angrier at the ones who had deceived him than at his tormentor. “She introduced herself as Lady Emmeline of Berdusk, but I knew the moment her servant arrived that she was no lady. A true gentlewoman would never tolerate such an odor.”

Yder nodded and returned the prisoner’s feet to the deck. His spies had already identified Joelle Emmeline as an accomplished Berduskan jewel thief with unusual powers of beguilement. Her foul-smelling “servant” was actually an accomplice, a barely competent spy and murderer who went by the name Malik el Sami yn Nasser.

There were reports of Malik claiming to be a Chosen of the dead god Myrkul, but Yder had his doubts. The spy’s name was the same as that of the Seraph of Lies who had served Cyric the Mad a hundred years earlier. Besides, with the entire world on the verge of a new age, the gods were vying for worshipers like rival crime guilds fighting for turf, dispatching their Chosen to advance their interests and sabotage the plans of their rivals. And sending an impostor to steal another god’s domain seemed like exactly the kind of scheme that Cyric-the god of strife-would relish.

Still holding the prisoner by his neck, Yder turned to study the main deck. Soaked in blood and strewn with corpses and moaning wounded, the Wave Wyvern looked more like a charnel house than a ship. Most of the casualties wore tabards over chain mail, but Yder had suffered losses, too. A long row of dusky bodies lay atop the center cargo hatch, their severed heads tucked under their arms and wisps of shadow still seeping from their neck stumps.

He saw no sign of Malik or Joelle-or the Eye.

He began to seep black wisps of shadow, a sign of his growing frustration. He had brought along only fifty of his Night Guards, believing that number more than adequate to hunt down a single pair of thieves. But the big watchman had proven a nasty surprise-first by stepping forward to protect the thieves at all, then by killing a quarter of Yder’s company almost by himself. It was not the kind of resistance his spies had led him to expect from the Marsember Watch, and he could not help seeing the hand of his goddess’s enemies in the unanticipated interference-and especially in that blue agate on the watchman’s sword. The way it glowed when he and his warriors came near, the way it weakened and blinded them, pointed to divine favor.

And now the hulk had sounded the alarm and was actually leading a hunt for him and his warriors. It would be a simple matter to summon reinforcements from Shar’s Hall of Shadows in Thultanthar, but that carried even greater peril. Less than two years earlier, Yder’s brother Rivalen had attempted to initiate Shar’s world-destroying Cycle of Night, and now many of Netheril’s most important figures-including the Most High himself-feared her power over the empire. If Yder removed too many warriors, someone was certain to raid her temple and undermine her power in Netheril.

And that was a risk Yder dared not take. Rivalen had failed to bring the Cycle to a successful close, but Shar remained one of the most powerful deities on Toril-and one who intended to grow even more powerful by eliminating the boundary that separated her Shadowfell from the world of stone and soil.

After a few moments, Yder grew certain that the thieves could not be among the dead. Had they been, one of his warriors would have informed him by that point. He turned back to the prisoner.

“Where are these liars now?” he asked. “Why can’t we find them?”

A look of confusion came to the majordomo’s face, and he glanced forward. “They should be here,” he said. “They were right behind us when we boarded.”

Whispering through the shadows, Yder ordered the survivors of the battle to continue the search for the thieves and their prize below decks, then turned back to the majordomo.

“Did you actually see them board?” he asked. “Or do you assume?”

The majordomo’s eyes widened. “I didn’t see them, no,” he admitted. “The situation was chaotic, and they were behind me.”

Yder resisted the temptation to crush the man’s throat. “Then why do you believe they followed you aboard?”

“Where else could they have gone?” he asked. “You were coming right behind us.”

“And they knew it,” Yder said, more to himself than the prisoner. “That was my mistake.”

Yder looked aft, debating the wisdom of returning to shore. Cyric’s blessing-at least he assumed it was Cyric’s blessing-kept the Eye and its bearers hidden from the divination magic of even the Mistress herself. So if he lost track of his quarry now, there was a chance he would never be able to find them again.

But the big watchman had no doubt sounded the alarm, and that meant the entire Marsember Watch would soon be mustering to hunt down his company. If he returned to the city to search for the thieves, his Night Guards would be outnumbered ten-to-one. And that meant he would lose a lot more of his force-probably most of it.

Fortunately, Yder saw no reason to believe that he needed to find his quarry in Marsember. Contrary to what the prisoner had seemed to think, the Eye of Gruumsh was not a giant gem, and the thieves had not come to the city to sell it. They had probably come to Marsember because it was a port-and that meant they intended to board a ship.