Barrabus the Gray fished through the bag, tossing aside the various implements Herzgo Alegni had given him to “aid” in his craft. The assassin had to admit that the tiefling had some powerful friends and did indeed manage to gather many useful items—like the cloak Barrabus even then wore. Fine elven handiwork and enchantment were woven into every thread, and its dweomer aided in keeping the already stealthy Barrabus hidden from view. The same was true of the elven boots he wore and his ability to step silently in them, even through a field of dry leaves.
And of course, the belt-buckle dagger showed the very finest craftsmanship and enchantment. Never once had it failed to spring open to Barrabus’s command. Its poison delivery system, real human veins etched along the five-inch blade that pumped poison to the edges and the point, was one of the more remarkable weapons the assassin had ever carried. All Barrabus had to do was fill the “heart” of the knife, set in the hilt, and with the slightest of pressure, he could make that poison flow to its deadly blade.
Still, to Barrabus’s thinking, there was a danger to so many enhancements. His art, assassination, remained a test of skill, wisdom, and discipline. Reliance on too many magical aids could bring sloppiness, and sloppiness, he knew, would mean failure. Thus he had never worn the spider-climbing slippers Alegni had once offered him, nor the hat that allowed him to disguise himself nearly at will. And of course he had pushed aside the gender-altering girdle with a derisive snort.
He brought forth from the trunk a small coffer. The poisons inside it he had purchased himself; Barrabus would never allow a third party to deliver his most critical tools. He used only one poison merchant, an alchemist in Memnon he had known for many years, and who personally extracted the various toxins from desert snakes, spiders, lizards, and scorpions.
He lifted a small green phial before the candle and a wicked smile creased his face. It was a new one, and not of the desert. The toxin had come from the bay beyond Memnon’s docks, from a cleverly disguised, spiny fish. Woe to the fisherman who stepped on such a creature. Any who walked the beaches of the southern coastal regions had heard tales of the most exquisite screaming.
Barrabus held his knife hilt up. He flipped back the retractable bottom half of the ball counterweight at the base of the knife, revealing a hollow needle. Onto this he jabbed the rubber stopper of the phial. Barrabus’s eyes sparkled as he watched the translucent heart of the knife fill with the yellow liquid.
He thought of the fisherman’s screams, and almost felt guilty.
Almost.
When all was ready, Barrabus gathered up his cloak. He passed a small mirror on his way to the door and was reminded of Alegni’s order that he trim his beard and hair.
He walked out of the room, just another visitor to Neverwinter on a fine night with a warm sunset over the water, a simple, small man, walking openly and apparently unarmed. He had just one belt pouch, on his right hip, which lay flat against the side of his leg, seeming empty, though of course it was not.
He stopped at a nearby tavern—he didn’t know its name and didn’t care—to get a single drink of harsh BG rum, the Baldurian concoction that had become the favorite of sailors all along the Sword Coast since it was quite inexpensive, and tasted so wretched few would bother stealing it.
For Barrabus, who downed it in one gulp, the rum served as his transition, the moment when he moved himself into a higher state of being and consciousness, when all those years of training and expert work crystallized in his thoughts. He closed his eyes a few moments later and felt the inevitable cloudiness of downing so potent a drink, and refocused his attention many times over in tearing through that dullness, in coming to the very edge of preparedness.
“Ye want another?” the barkeep said to him.
“He’ll be on his back if he does!” one smelly brute insisted, to rowdy laughter from his three companions, all of whom outweighed Barrabus by a hefty amount.
Barrabus looked at the man with curiosity. The fool obviously didn’t understand that Barrabus was wondering if he might kill all four of the ruffians and still complete his task as planned.
“What’re ye thinking?” the man demanded.
Barrabus didn’t blink and didn’t let a hint of a smile, of any expression, come forth. He placed the glass down on the bar and started to walk away.
“Ah, but go ahead and have another,” one of the man’s friends said, stepping up beside Barrabus. “Let’s see if ye can swig it and still stand, eh?”
Barrabus did stop, for a heartbeat, but never bothered to look at the man.
And for that insult, the drunk shoved against Barrabus’s shoulder, or tried to. The moment his hand touched the assassin, Barrabus knifed his own hand up behind it, over it, and hooked the man’s thumb with his own then jerked down with such force that the ruffian lurched to the side and down, his hand twisted right over backward.
“Do you need two hands to pull fish into your boat?” Barrabus calmly asked him.
When the man tried to wriggle free instead of answering, Barrabus expertly added another quarter twist and re-angled his pressure just enough to keep his opponent from gaining any balance.
“I suppose you do, so for the sake of your family, I will forgive you this once.” With that, he let the man go. As the fool stumbled, Barrabus started for the door.
“I got no family!” the man shouted at him, as if that was some kind of insulting retort, and Barrabus heard the charge.
He turned at the last moment, his hands coming up to deflect the awkward grabs of the drunken fool, his knee coming up to abruptly halt the man’s bull rush. The many tavern patrons watching the incident weren’t sure what happened, just that the ruffian had stopped suddenly and was clenched with the much smaller man.
“And likely now you’ll never have one,” Barrabus whispered to the man. “And the world will be a better place.”
He gently moved the man back and even helped him regain his balance, though the man’s stare was blank and his thoughts surely spinning as his hands moved center and down as he bent, trembling fingers trying to help secure his crushed testicles.
Barrabus paid him no heed and just walked out of the tavern. He heard a crash as he exited, and knew that the fool had tumbled. Then he heard, predictably, the outrage of the man’s three companions as the shock of his bold move wore thin.
They burst out onto the street, all spit and curses, leaping up and down, looking this way and that and shouting into the empty night. They shook their fists and promised revenge, but went back inside.
Sitting atop the tavern, legs dangling over the edge of the rooftop, Barrabus just watched and sighed at their utterly predictable idiocy.
He was at the lord’s grand four-story home soon after, in the shadows and trees behind the back of the house. Hugo Babris was a careful man, it seemed, and Barrabus was surprised to see so many guards patrolling the grounds and moving along the balconies. Barrabus had seen that sort of thing before, where a leader perceived as weak had surrounded himself with substantial protection. What that usually meant, the assassin knew, was that the leader served as a mouthpiece, a puppet, for the true powers behind him, though what those powers might be in the strange and fast-growing city of Neverwinter, Barrabus could not be certain. Pirates, likely, or a merchants’ guild getting fat off the policies of Lord Hugo Babris. Certainly someone was paying a hefty sum to provide that level of protection.
Barrabus glanced around, thinking that perhaps he should be on his way. He understood why Herzgo Alegni had gone out of his way to send for him, but it occurred to him that perhaps the tiefling had set him up to fail.
With that thought in mind, Barrabus moved, but not away. He wouldn’t give Alegni the satisfaction.
The assassin slithered up the wall and peered into the courtyard, noting one patrol in particular, a pair of guards each with a very large, angry-looking dog.
“Wonderful,” he silently mouthed.
Back down the wall, he walked a perimeter outside of the compound several times. He saw only one possible approach. A tree hung its branches into Hugo Babris’s compound, though getting from the branch to the house would require a great leap, and that to the edge of a patrolled balcony.
Again, Barrabus thought it might be time to go speak with Herzgo Alegni.
And again, the thought of admitting any limitations to the tiefling had him moving up the wall onto the tree, and up to the higher branches. He paused and noted movement in the courtyard and on the balconies, marking the moment of greatest opportunity. It seemed desperate, ridiculous even, but that was ever the way of it.
He ran out on the branch and leaped out, coming to the edge of the second story balcony at the corner of the house. He ducked back behind the corner when the sentry came around the opposite corner. Barrabus was tucked tightly underneath the balcony as the man paced past, then he was over the rail and up the wall, over the next balcony, and continuing until he sat on a narrow window sill on the highest floor.
He reached into his “empty” pouch, which was actually an extra-dimensional space, and brought forth a pair of suction cups set on narrow poles and joined end to end by a small cord. Once he had them in place on the window glass, he tapped open a catch on one of his rings that released a line of wire, attached on one end to the ring and capped on the other end with a diamond tip.
Barrabus began to draw a circle on the window with the diamond tip, etching the glass a tiny bit more with each rotation. He worked furiously, hid himself as the guards crossed below, then went right back. It took him many, many heartbeats to weaken the glass enough so that he could hold the suction cups and tap lightly, three times, to break the circle of glass free. He pushed the cut circle into the room and gently lowered it to the floor so that it leaned against the wall. With a glance around to make sure the room was clear, Barrabus hooked his fingers on the top of the window frame, gracefully and powerfully lifted his legs, and slid them through.
He rocked back, his feet almost exiting the hole, then went forward with such speed and grace that his momentum carried him fully through without so much as a brush of the remaining glass, and not so much as a whisper of sound.
He knew that the fun had only begun, of course—Hugo Babris kept many guards inside as well—but he was committed. His focus grew narrow and pure, and it was as though he were a ghost; ethereal, silent, and invisible. He had to be perfect, and that was why Herzgo Alegni had summoned only him.
It was said of Barrabus the Gray that he could stand in the middle of a room unnoticed, but of course the man’s trick was that he didn’t stand in the middle of the room. He knew where alert sentries would look, and so he knew where not to be. Whether the optimum hiding place was behind the open door or above it, behind a canopy or in front of one, in the right place to appear as no more than another figure in a mural, Barrabus knew it and found it. How many times over the decades had a sentry simply looked right past him?
Hugo Babris had guards—so many guards that Barrabus changed his mind about how he might influence the man’s thinking—but not enough guards to do more than slow the inexorable progress of Barrabus the Gray.
Soon enough, he sat atop the back of an unconscious sentry who was sprawled across Lord Hugo Babris’s desk. Barrabus stared at the nervous, trapped, helpless lord.
“Take the gold and go, I-I beg of you,” Hugo Babris pleaded. The lord was a bald, round, thoroughly unimpressive little man, and that only reinforced Barrabus’s belief that he was no more than a front for far more dangerous men.
“I don’t want your gold.”
“Please … I have a child.”
“I don’t care.”
“She needs her father.”
“I don’t care.”
The lord brought a trembling hand to his lips, as though he was going to be sick.
“What I want of you is simple, simply done, and at no cost—nay, but at great gain—to you,” Barrabus explained. “It’s a simple matter of changing the name of a bridge.”
“Herzgo Alegni sent you!” Hugo Babris exclaimed and started out of his chair. He reversed direction immediately, falling back and throwing his hands up in front of him when a knife appeared in Barrabus’s hands, seemingly out of nowhere.
“I cannot!” Hugo Babris whined. “I told him I couldn’t. The Lords of Waterdeep would never—”
“You have no choice,” Barrabus said.
“But the lords, and the pirate captains to the n—”
“Are not here, while Herzgo Alegni and his shades are—while I am,” said Barrabus. “You need to recognize the gain, and understand the potential loss resulting from inaction.”
Hugo Babris shook his head and started to protest further, but Barrabus cut him short. “You have no choice. I can come here anytime I wish. Your sentries are of no concern to me. Are you afraid to die?”
“No!” Lord Hugo Babris said with more resolve than the assassin would have imagined him capable of mustering.
Barrabus rolled his dagger in his hand, letting Hugo Babris see the veins. “Have you ever heard of the rockstinger?” he asked. “It is an ugly fish possessed of a beautiful and perfect defense.” He hopped from the desk. “You will announce the Herzgo Alegni Bridge tomorrow.”
“I cannot,” Hugo Babris wailed.
“Oh, you can,” said Barrabus.
He flashed the knife near to Hugo Babris, who shrank back pitifully. But Barrabus didn’t stick him. Long experience had taught the assassin that the anticipation of pain provided more incentive than the pain itself.
He turned and lightly poked the unconscious sentry, just a gentle stick, but one that delivered the rockstinger venom.
He offered a nod to Lord Hugo Babris and said again, “I can return to you anytime I wish. Your sentries are of no concern to me.”
He strode from the room, disappearing into the hall, and was halfway out the hole in the window when the poison jolted the sentry from his semi-conscious daze. The man’s agonized screams brought a resigned sigh to Barrabus.
The assassin countered a wave of self-loathing with a silent promise that one day, Herzgo Alegni would feel the bite of the rockstinger.