Kate Novak - Masquerades

"Dragonbait!" Alias screamed. "Victor! Olive!"

She spotted the paladin first, still clutching his flaming sword. Olive bobbed alongside him. "Where's Victor?" she shouted. "Here," the nobleman called from just behind her.

Alias strained to face the young lord's direction, relieved to see that he seemed to know how to stay afloat. Her chain mail shirt made treading water tiring enough. She didn't think she could manage helping a fully grown man as well.

"Try to stay close to the near wall," the swordswoman shouted to the others. "There have to be some side passages we can-"

Alias gasped. Something large had pushed against her, and she knew what it had to be.

The quelzarn's head broke the water just beside Drag-' onbait, attracted perhaps by the light from the paladin's sword. The sea serpent's teeth gleamed in the flaming light.

Alias screamed the paladin's name in his own tongue. The quelzarn dived down, taking the saurial with it. The sewer darkened, but a dim light shone beneath the water's surface.

The female warrior took a deep breath and plunged beneath the surface, heading for the light. As long as it shone she knew Dragonbait had not yet been swallowed.

The foul water stung her eyes, and visibility below the surface wasn't more than a few feet, but that was enough to detect a great shadow looming before her. Alias grabbed the monster's fin and hung on with all her might as it wriggled and writhed beneath her. With her arms aching from the strain, the swordswoman pulled herself along the length of the fin, making for the quelzarn's head. Just when the fire in her lungs grew too intense to bear, the creature broke the surface of the water again, and Alias was able to gasp for air. A dark stain seemed to be flowing from the light beneath the surface. Alias was sure it was blood, but whether the saurial's or the sea serpent's she could not tell. The creature looped backward on itself, and Alias had a clear glimpse of Dragonbait. The saurial had one clawed foot jammed against the beast's lower gum and one hand tbrust between two needlelike teeth of the upper jaw so that the monster could not snap its jaw shut and swallow its prey. Blood poured from the paladin's foot and hand as well as from a gash in his thigh. With his flaming sword the paladin was lacerating the monster's upper palate.

Alias pulled her dagger from her boot and launched herself at the quelzarn's head. She managed to catch the fin beside its gill. She could still not reach the beast's eyes, so she tore a V-shaped gash into the flesh behind the gill. Then she began pulling back on the flesh, stripping it away like whale blubber.

The beast breached from the water with a shriek and slammed itself and the swordswoman against the sewer wall, dislodging the saurial in its mouth and the human woman at its gill.?.

Alias wasn't sure what happened in the moments she was stunned, but when she next opened her eyes, Dragonbait, his hands clenched in her hair, was holding her head out of the water. The saurial was a powerful swimmer, and he was towing the swordswoman toward a side sewer where Olive and Victor stood shouting.

The side sewer was eight feet in diameter; the water level in it was only two feet high, so the adventurers' could work their way against the current. The halfling and the nobleman helped pull the warriors inside. They moved down the tunnel about ten feet, but had to stop to catch their breath and tend to their wounds.

Dragonbait, after first assuring himself that Alias had suffered no life-threatening injury, handed his weapon to the swordswoman and turned his attention to the wounds the quelzarn had given him.

As the scent of the paladin's prayer filled the air, a great roar blasted down the tunnel. The quelzarn thrust its head a few feet into the side passage. Victor, who stood directly in its path, fumbled in the tangles of his cloak, trying, Olive thought, to reach his sword in its scabbard.

The halfling was sure the young lord was about to become the last of the Dhostar line when the quelzarn slid back out of the tunnel and disappeared.

Victor gulped and backed farther from the tunnel exit. "That was too close for comfort," the nobleman said. "If the tide were in and the water higher, it would have come in after us for sure," he said.

Olive nodded, her eyes wide with amazement at the young man's close call. She followed him down the corridor, wondering with suspicion what he seemed to be holding with his hand, which remained buried in his cloak pocket.

"I believe we should be able to follow this sewer to an opening near a street," the nobleman said.

"Yes," Alias added. "And if we're lucky, the fog will still be thick, and no one will notice us." "They’ll smell us before they see us," Olive predicted.

The sewer passage surfaced in a storm drain. After taking a moment to I get his bearings, Victor pointed them in the direction of an outdoor ale garden called the Rosebud. There the I merchant noble sent a runner for his carriage, and tipped the proprietor generously for the use of his well in the back. Pouring buckets of fresh water over each other, the four managed to scrape all of the sewer muck and most of the smell off their skin and clothes. Olive, gathering up her sopping cloak, excused herself, declaring she had a previous engagement. Alias didn't argue. She was anxious to grill Victor about the source of his key, and she knew the merchant lord would say nothing in Olive's presence.

Shortly after the halfling had gone, a young serving boy brought them three mugs of mulled wine. Alias allowed herself a few minutes to enjoy the sensation of warmth creeping back into her bones, then she forced herself to return to the business at hand.

"Victor, you have to tell me where you found the key," Alias insisted. Victor stared hard into his mulled wine as if an answer might appear in the mug. "I began thinking about what you said last night, that maybe Father was paying the Night Masks on the side but was too proud to admit it. I started searching through his desk in secret. I couldn't find anything about payoffs, but I found this key. It was in an envelope with instructions on how to use it." "And the instructions?" Alias asked. "Were they written in your father's hand?"

"Yes," Victor admitted. "I thought I should check it out by myself, in case it wasn't anything important." "Or in case it was," Alias commented.

"It doesn't prove anything," Victor insisted. "There could be a perfectly good reason why he had the key. You have a key, too?" Alias nodded. "How did you get it?" the noble asked.

"I took it from Melman shortly before the Night Masks blew up his home with him in it," the swordswoman explained.

Dragonbait looked at Alias with surprise. She was deliberately misleading the noble to believe that Melman was dead.

"Victor, did you tell your father I was checking up on Melman?"

"When I got home last night. We had this stupid argument. He said I was distracting you from your duties. I told him what you told me at the party about Melman." The young man's eyes widened in surprise. "You don't think-he couldn't. It's just a coincidence. My father is not involved with the Night Masters!"

Now it was Alias's turn to look down into her mulled wine for a reply.

"You said yourself, last night, that you didn't think Father was the Faceless, that he had no reason to be involved with them. He hired you to get rid of them," Victor argued. "Wait! He could have gotten the key from Kimbel after Kimbel tried to assassinate him."

"Then why didn't he turn the key over to Durgar?" Alias asked.

Unable to come up with a ready excuse, Victor shifted tactics. "What would you do if you found the key in the possession of someone you loved? If it were, say, in Drag-onbait'e purse?"