Mirt the Moneylender took the broad steps that curved up to the upper floors of his mansion two at a time, puffing like a brace of harnessed boars dragging a heavy wagon.

"Ha-ha!" he roared, in full gloat. "Has ever a man strutted and swaggered in Dock Ward with more just cause than I?"

He rubbed his hands together in glee as his old, flopping boots found the uppermost step, and took him briskly past the frankly buxom wench of glossy ivory and fully life-sized stature that crowned the stairpost. Beyond, on a tray of gleaming silver large enough for Dambrathan slavers to serve up bound slaves upon-for they'd done just that, ere a certain fat and fiercely mustached mercenary swordlord relieved them of it-stood a sparkling forest of finely etched and smooth-blown glass decanters.

Snatching up the tallest and unstoppering it for a healthy swig without wasting time on such fripperies as a goblet, the Old Wolf of Waterdeep hurtled onward, borne along on a hearty trail of chuckles.

"Asper, m'gel," he roared, "I'm a very prince among thieves-a deal-master among merchants! Old Thaglon surrendered all his fine steel-and-silver Amn-work for half what he should have asked-all because they're nigh-starving down there, and I threw in those two warehouses full of rotting nut-marrows I've been trying to get rid of. Ha-ha! Even if he delivers half the amount he promised, at a third the quality he claims, I'm ahead several wagonloads of coin! Come here and kiss this bottle with me!"

He roared with gusty laughter and swung around a cabinet carved into the fanciful likeness of a wyvern's head, its eyes being doors, each fashioned of a shield-sized slab of smooth-carved amber, into the sun-drenched open space at the center of the chamber where furs and cushions lay thick (with Asper betimes lounging upon them, though she wasn't lying there now).