Murder in Cormyr

Forgotten Realms

The Mysteries: Murder in Cormyr

By Chet Williamson

I don’t know what was more alarming that autumn in Ghars—the drought, the roving agents of the Zhentarim and the Iron Throne, the ghost, or the upcoming visit of the Grand Council of Cormyr’s Merchants’ Guild. In retrospect, I guess it was the murders.

Not that those other occurrences weren’t matters for concern. The farms around Ghars had had no rain for weeks. Most of the wells had dried up, the crops were scanty, and the local squires were eyeing their account books the way a hungry man looks at the broken woodwork of his false teeth, with much dismay and worry over what comes next. What water remained was diverted into a public cistern, a huge wooden tank zealously guarded by Khlerat, the nearsighted retiree who served as Ghars’s unofficial master of public works. And since Ghars is a market town that serves a farming community, a long dry spell was about as welcome a visitor as a slimy Zhentarim agent at a meeting of Cormyr’s War Wizards.

Speaking of slimy Zhentarim agents, the crack contingent of Purple Dragons stationed in Ghars had apprehended two of them in as many months, no doubt plotting to invade Cormyr, overthrow King Azoun, or at the very least assassinate some noble of renown. They’re like that.

The Dragons also captured one agent of the Iron Throne secret society, a group that I viewed as far less of a threat. I mean, come now—a secret society of merchants? Ooo, scary… Still, Azoun had banished them from the kingdom for a year, so he must have had a good reason.

By the second week of Eleint, I was wishing that he would have banished the Cormyrean Merchants’ Guild along with their wicked Iron Throne counterparts. Every other word out of the mouths of the local merchants and farmers concerned how honored little Ghars was to host the high mucky-mucks of the guild a few days hence.

My master’s taciturn ways seemed most welcome after a shopping trip to the town, where the greengrocer and the butcher and the clothier would natter on for hours about the guild council’s eagerly anticipated arrival. What the big deal was I didn’t know, since if these officials were like most merchants I’d known, they’d be sour of face, tight with their purse strings, and sober as judges.

And pale as ghosts, most of them, which brings us to the subject on the minds of most of the residents. Fastred’s ghost, to be exact. To give you the proper spirit of things, pun most definitely intended, let me quote from a writer far more highly skilled than myself—that great historian Carcroft the Long, who, in his Anthropologic and Folkloric History of the Settled Lands (Volume III), states: find in those days in the land between Sembia and Cormyr, there dwelt within the Vast Swamp a reaver and a chieftain high Fastred. He lived in the swamp with his people, heedless of the monsters and beasties that also resided therein, such, as the men lyfa unto lizards, the goblins and trolls and grells.

He and his band of cutthroats and murderers would sweep down upon the caravans that travelled the Way of the Manticore, looting them of gems, gold, and silver. With his great battle axe would he cleave in twain those who refused to yield to him and his reavers.

Though he was pursued, even by small armies, his knowledge of the Vast Swamp was so great that he lost his pursuers always, finding solid land where others saw only muck, into which the hooves of their steeds would sink and they would quickly drown.

Fastred lived as a king within the Vast Swamp for many years, protected by the treacherous sands and muck that surrounded him, until Death came upon him, from whose fell clutch was no escape. Half his treasures did he, bequeath to his warriors to share amongst them, while the other half, wealth beyond measure, was sealed With him in his tomb, an isle of rock in the swamp.

It is told by those in the district how his glowing ghost, still clad in armor and bearing his great axe, guards his hoarde, threatening any who may come nigh by mischance or by purpose. Of all the terrors of the Vast Swamp, those who dwell in the Settled Lands do agree that Fastred’s Ghost is the most to be feared.

And that’s that. A bit old-fashioned, and I wouldn’t give a copper for his spelling, but Carcroft sums it up pretty neatly. A hidden treasure in the swamp and a glowing, protective ghost with an axe. There—I think I just summed it up even more neatly, and my spelling’s better too.

Though why this ghost was “most to be feared,” I couldn’t have told you. As far as I knew, he had never actually severed anyone in two with that big axe of his, and the Vast Swamp has more real horrors than you can shake a stick at Along with the lizard men, goblins, trolls, and grells that old

Carcroft mentioned, there are also dragons, measles, hydrae, beholders, and probably even the occasional tax-gatherer, so a simple axe-wielding ghost doesn’t seem too daunting.

But you wouldn’t have thought it from the reaction he got in Ghars once a few people started spotting him on the edge of the Vast Swamp after nightfall, his gaunt face glowing green, his ancient armor shining on his massive body, swinging his axe and coming toward them like the inexorable death that awaits us all, the death that had claimed him centuries ago.

And the death that claimed him again, this time wearing the grim face of murder.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is something that I’m apt to do. If my master Benelaius has told me once, he’s told me a thousand times, “Jasper, put your mind and your thoughts in order, or the results will be ordure.” And since he has given me permission to record his activities in this particular matter for posterity, I shouldn’t jump about like a rabid feystag but should take matters as they came.

So, from the beginning.

My grandfather was born in a little log hut–-

Well, perhaps not quite so far back a beginning, although knowing about my grandfather leads to why I became Benelaius’s indentured servant. Old Grandpaw Hurthkin was a halfling, you see, one of those little people whose primary joy in life is taking advantage of humans. He took advantage of the human Guirath Moondock by running away with and marrying his daughter, a woman so small she seemed near halfling herself. The result of that union was my mother, a petite woman

herself but with qualities more human than halfling. My father was human, so I am only one quarter halfling. And before you think of me as an eighthling, let me tell you that I have heard that old wheeze told by innumerable drunken wits in an infinitude of taverns. Spare me this time.

My possession of halfling blood was what led me to try to burgle the wizard Benelaius’s house, and that sorry attempt was what got me…

Ah, but there I go again. An arrow-straight, nondivergent narrative, that’s the ticket.

I and some of the other local lads were wondering about the old man who had just come to live on the outskirts of Ghars. He was more than an old man, really. I had heard that he was one of Cormyr’s War Wizards who had for some reason chosen to retire to this unspeakably weary little town and environs. I couldn’t have vouched for it myself. My knowledge of Cormyrean public servants was limited to King Azoun, Sarp Redbeard, and Ghars’s own Mayor Tobald, who, as far as I could see, did nothing but chuckle at babies and pretty girls and cut ribbons to open the occasional new store.

I had only a rough idea of what the College of War Wizards did. I pictured them as patriarchal old duffs who, when Cormyr went to war with one of its neighbors, would rain down magical thunder and lightning on the heads of the enemy. And I pictured this retired codger as someone older than old, a creaky relic who had lost his magic and just sat around hoping to shift his bowels once a week.

So when my chums expressed their fear of this new neighbor, I was quick to scoff. “Afraid of an old geezer?” I said. “What a bunch of lily-flowers!”

“Lily-flowers are we?” said Cedric Buckenwing. “And I guess you’d be anxious to go and make this wizard’s acquaintance, would you? You’re that brave, are you, Jasper?”

I wasn’t that brave, but I was that foolish. I had no one to say me nay, since I was of age, my mother had died that spring (my old man had been crushed by a wagon when I was seven), and I was working as a slop boy at the Sheaf of Wheat and sleeping in the buttery. I guess I was about as bright as the usual slop boy too, since I didn’t finesse my way out of the situation but dug myself in deeper.

‘To walk up to his door and bid him good day?” I said. “Why would I want to do that? There’s no profit in it. But to enter his house by stealth”—I nodded sagely—”there’s a real thrill.”

I was proud of my halfling blood, you see, and, although I had done no more mischief than most young men my age, I allowed my friends to think that I was the scourge of Cormyr, burgling manor and merchant alike with my halfling skills. Why they should have believed this, since I was as impoverished as any other slop boy, I’ll never know. Perhaps they only humored me. But this time Cedric was going to put me to the test.

“All right then,” he slurred, the smell of cheap beer on his breath. “Let’s go out to this old bloke’s house, and you can prove what a great burglar you are once and for all.”

And take me for a turnip if I didn’t agree to do it. I had fantasized about the romance of thievery for so long that it seemed to me a chance to realize my destiny.

We waited until night, then rode out, two to a mount, to the edge of the Vast Swamp where this wizard had had his cottage built. To me, the location was another sign of addlepatedness, since the dangers of the Vast Swamp were all too real. I was more concerned about what might be lurking in the darkness around the cottage than in the dwelling itself.

But we made the ride unscathed, and left the horses a

good quarter mile from the cottage. I was to go the rest of the way on foot, break in, take something to prove it, and return to my friends, who, if they had been real friends, wouldn’t have let me do such an idiotic thing in the first place.

A sickly, gibbous moon pushed its weak rays through the thick mist that lay over the ground like a mildewed blanket I could barely see my feet in front of me as I crept toward the spot where I thought the cottage would be.

Despite the drought, the ground near the swamp squelched underfoot, so that my worn shoes made a soft sucking noise with each step, a sound impossible to prevent. Although the time of summer’s fading had come, the heat near the swamp was oppressive, and I imagined the Vast Swamp as a huge graveyard filled with dead things, the heat caused by their slow, miasmic rotting.

With such pleasant thoughts in my head, I was almost glad to see the outlines of the dwelling I was supposed to break into. In truth, it looked more like a large farmhouse than a cottage, but I thought that might have been a trick of the night and my imagination. No light shone through the windows of the two-story structure, and I went around to the rear of the house, which unfortunately looked out upon

the swamp.

I paused for several minutes, looking into the darkness in the direction of the Vast Swamp. Seeing nothing and hearing only the sounds of night insects, I turned my attention back to the cottage. A back door that I assumed led to the kitchen was locked. But a window had been left slightly open. The opening was not large enough for a full-grown man to get through, but it proved no obstacle to a spindly young man with halfling blood.

In a trice I was in a small room in which I could vaguely make out several baskets of apples and shelves with jars of food. Again I listened for sounds of alarm, but heard nothing. I thought of taking a jar and scuttling back out the window but was sure that Cedric would mock me, suggesting that I had merely rifled an outbuilding. Besides, my presence in a place where I most definitely should not be emboldened me, and my heart pounded in an ecstasy of fearful and excited joy. I had to explore farther. I was a rogue, a thief, a night stalker.,.

An idiot.

A small kitchen, as I had guessed, lay beyond the open doorway, and I felt my way around its perimeter until my fingertips brushed against the wood of a door. I pushed gently and followed it as it swung into another room.

I didn’t have to worry about light here. The coals from a dying fire on the hearth lit the large room with a dim red glow, and although the absence of insect songs indicated no windows were open, the temperature was comfortable, as if the muggy warmth were commanded to remain outside.

In the weak light, I could make out several pieces of what looked like large, overstuffed furniture. On them, and on the floor near the fire, were dozens of what looked like round or oval cushions. On many of these I saw what I took

to be metal or glass buttons reflecting the red coals’ light. Here, I thought, was an old man who liked his comforts— wall to wall cushions so that he could plop his tired body down whenever the desire took him.

One of these cushions, I realized, would be the perfect thing to take. There were so many that one would probably never be missed, and therefore there would be no pursuit. Yet a cushion was a personal and homely enough thing to offer as proof to my friends that I had indeed breached the wizard’s sanctum. I selected a particularly fluffy-looking one on the outskirts of the fire’s glow, where its absence would not be noted, and reached down and grabbed it, sinking my fingers into its puffy depths.

The scream that ensued was even louder than my own. The pillow twisted and writhed in my hand, and grew teeth and claws that savaged the soft flesh of my palm and fingers and wrist.

I shook my hand desperately, and the creature dropped to the carpet, where it made one final, blood-drawing slash at my ankle and retreated, its eyes still on me, its back arched, and the fur along its spine standing straight up. Its hiss was swallowed up by the deep, throaty growls that filled the room as thickly as what I had mistaken for cushions.

Every one was a cat, a cat that had been curled and resting, but with one or two glasslike eyes open, watching the interloper foolish enough to enter their master’s home. Dozens upon dozens of cushiony cats, that now uncurled their bodies as one, their eyes and fangs glaring, hundreds of razor-sharp claws unsheathed to slice to ribbons the stranger in their midst.