by Ed Greenwood
Very soon, he’d have two of them. The Flying Blade had long been a treasure of his family, and he knew where the Wyverntongue Chalice was.
He could almost taste the power.
Lothrae had promised. Until together they controlled four or more of the Nine, those they did have would be Marlin’s to command as he saw fit—and, by the Dragon Throne, there was a lot he planned to do with them before that fourth ghost was found!
Below, in the deep gloom, Marlin Stormserpent and his band of hirelings advanced cautiously along the great passage that ran down the heart of the haunted wing.
Princess Alusair turned from the rail of the balcony where she’d been watching them, as swiftly as if she’d been thrusting a sword.
“I could kill all these fools in less time than it would take you to get down yon stairs to hail them,” she hissed. “Why shouldn’t I? Why, Old Mage?
Why?”
The chill emanating from her made Elminster’s teeth chatter, but he stood his ground. “I know how ye feel, lass.”
“Seething,” she snapped. “That’s how I feel, right now. So put an arm around my shoulder and soothe me, wizard. Or by my father’s sword, I’ll be down from this balcony and killing them all, before you can—”
“Easy, Alusair. Easy,” he murmured, doing just as she’d bade him. His arm encountered nothing solid, only a terrible cold. A flesh-freezing chill that made him stagger, yet he tried to hold her comfortingly. And failed.
Alusair watched him stumble back against the nearest pillar, gray and gasping. Her face was not friendly.
“Not yet, lass,” he muttered at her when he could speak again. “There’ll come a time to smite these worms, to be sure. Probably not long from now.”
She glared at him. “Not yet, not now, await the right time … how can you be so farruking patient, Old Mage?”
Elminster shrugged, looking back at her with eyes that blazed with the same rage that was almost choking her.
“It helps,” he whispered fiercely, “to be insane.”
“They seem rather disappointed to find only dark emptiness, shrouded furniture, and a distinct lack of chained maidens, imprisoned nobles, and heaps of gold,” Alusair said tartly, a little later. “Poor little pillagers.”
She peered down from a high balcony in the last room of the haunted wing. Young Lord Stormserpent seemed to be tugging something out of an inner pocket in the breast of his darkly fashionable jerkin. “What’s he up to now?”
Elminster shrugged. “That’s a map, so I’d say he’s now going to tour the palace in search of a magic he thinks is hidden here.”
“One of his precious Nine? Can’t I kill him now? Really, El! You may not care what is stolen or despoiled in these halls, but this is my home—I care very much!”
Then she saw that the old wizard’s hands clutched the balcony rail so hard they were white and shaking.
It seemed Elminster had discovered that he cared very much, too.
“Heartened, saer?”
“Of course,” Marlin replied, smiling a real smile. “Not a man lost, and all the undead who dared stand against us destroyed with admirable ease and swiftness. We’ve time left to try to accomplish something that should prove much easier than facing down hauntings.”
“Oh, aye?” The hiresword’s voice held a subtle note of disbelief. He’d survived being hired by many overconfident patrons before—and hoped to live long enough to be hired by many more again. “So we’re bound deeper into the palace?”
“Of course. I must check the accuracy of these maps and find the way to the legendary Dragonskull Chamber.”
“Where the Royal Magician died?”
“That’s the place,” Marlin said cheerfully, consulting his map again and then waving at the armed men around him to turn down that side passage.
Most of Suzail knew no one dared enter the Dragonskull Chamber.
Most of Cormyr knew that name belonged to a heavily warded spellcasting chamber hidden somewhere deep in the royal palace, that was shunned because the Royal Magician Caladnei, ravaged by the Spellplague, had died inside it one night eighty years before.
Among courtiers and nobles, it was said that not even the most powerful war wizards could penetrate its mighty wards. Dragonskull still stood dark, empty, and shunned, its never-locked doors closed, because of its many warding spells. Those magics had been so twisted in the Spellplague that all spellhurlers avoided them; they still worked and were linked to so many other spells laid on the palace down the centuries that they couldn’t be destroyed without a lot of careful, exacting quelling and dispelling—for who still alive knew or remembered all that those magics were holding up, or binding in check?
The twisted wards still roiled constantly, in a way that unsettled the minds of all mages. Marlin himself had once seen a white-faced war wizard spewing up a good meal before collapsing on his face in his own mess, and had been told the man had ended up that way by merely trying to walk across the infamous chamber—despite giving up and fleeing right back out again after only a few steps.
However, neither he nor any of these hireswords, unless they’d been lying to him—and deserved any doom they tasted, thereby—were spellcasters.
He and all Stormserpents had a very good, longstanding reason for wanting to get past the roiling wards around the Dragonskull Chamber. Unfinished family business that even in his youth had excited him. Something he’d long dreamed of taking care of …
Seizing the Wyverntongue Chalice.
Alone among living men—thanks to the unfortunate demises of certain of his kin, Marlin Stormserpent knew where the chalice was hidden. A secret not even Caladnei and Vangerdahast had known, something hidden, presumably, even from the very ghosts of the palace. Behind a false wall—and those tainted, roiling wards that had so effectively kept nosy war wizards at bay—in a forgotten room behind, but not actually in, the Dragonskull Chamber.
So, thanks to years of energetic and handsomely paid spies and informants, he had maps of the palace, many accounts of where the room he was seeking must be, and a strong band of armed men around him, inside the palace and moving fast.
Oh, yes, Marlin let himself smile more broadly than he’d beamed for many a day. He was trembling so much that Thirsty shifted recklessly inside the breast of his jerkin, his stinger grating along the metal plates he wore across his chest.
Lord Marlin Stormserpent, who might soon be so much more, allowed himself an eager chuckle. He could almost feel the chalice in his hands …
CHAPTER
EIGHT
MUCH BRAZEN CREEPING ABOUT
Where are they heading, d’ye think?” Elminster gasped, as he fetched up against a doorframe and clung to it, fighting for breath.
Where the ghostly princess could fly, he had to walk. Even when he sprinted, he couldn’t move nearly as fast as Alusair.
She’d long since taken to repeatedly racing off to check on Stormserpent’s band and then returning to the Old Mage, as he panted his way along dark palace passages, hoping he’d not meet anyone.
If he did, he planned to pose as old Elgorn—with the aid of strips torn from some linens he’d purloined in the undercellars and had just wound around most of his face in a false bandage—and tell some tale or other about discovering how long it had been since certain footings had been checked. “Mustn’t let this grand place fall down about our ears, look ye!” he’d growl.
For years around the palace, he’d been old Elgorn Rhauligan, “repairer and restorer of the ever-crumbling stone, plaster, tapestries, and wood of these great buildings.” Not to mention a descendant of the famous Glarasteer Rhauligan. Who didn’t usually work alone, of course; Elgorn trusted in his scarcely younger sister, Stornara, to remember things and calculate stresses for him. Hardly anyone ever told her she looked like the old portrait of the Lady Bard of Shadowdale anymore, with Elminster’s masking magics to make her appear as old as he.
Not that Elgorn Rhauligan was in any better sh
ape to go rushing around the palace than Storm would be if she wore herself out racing back there from her farm kitchen in distant Shadowdale.
“Dragonskull, for all the gold in the upper treasury,” Alusair answered him disgustedly. “Unless their thoughts are captivated by old and broken furniture.”
Then she stiffened and lifted her head like a hound sniffing the wind. “Ganrahast and Vainrence, coming through the palace by different ways, both in a howling hurry! Both bound for the north turret … and Vainrence will get there first.”
Elminster peered at her. “Ye can track anyone moving about the palace?”
“Of course not. Just these two, usually; I can feel all the magic they load themselves down with,” Alusair snapped. “They often meet in a room right at the top of the north turret, where I can’t go, presumably for discussions they want to keep very private. Want to listen in on this one? I’ve never seen them in such wild haste before!”
Elminster nodded thoughtfully, a fire kindling in his eyes. “I believe I do.”
The eyes of the palace maid, staring ardently into his over their hungrily joined mouths, widened in sudden fear, and Lord Arclath Delcastle felt her stiffen all over.
He listened hard.
A man who was muttering to himself was trudging up the last few turns of the north turret steps before the topmost bedchamber.
Arclath left off kissing and cuddling the lass in his arms long enough to clap a swift hand over her mouth before she could so much as squeak, drag her around behind the wardrobe, and then silently—but fiercely—curse.
Last time, he’d distinctly heard the two wizards growl agreement that they were never going to climb all those stairs again, as they set off back down them.
Yet here they were again.
With furious energy, Arclath indulged himself in snarling the most flowery and fervent oaths he knew, but his profanities were utterly silent, blazing only in his mind.
Over his hand, the maid was staring at Arclath in stark terror as the wizard on the other side of the wardrobe went from murmuring to saying the clear—and distinctly irritated—words, “Come on, Gan. Let the courtiers see to their own tasks for once. We’ve important matters on our platters.”
Arclath tried to give the chambermaid a reassuring look, but it didn’t seem to work. And no wonder; they’d both recognized the voice of the wizard Vainrence, one of the most feared spellhurlers in the kingdom. The enforcer among the war wizards, the mage who could—and had—shattered the walls of a castle keep to get at traitors within.
“I heard you,” another voice replied sourly from farther down the steps. The maid recognized it as well as Arclath; her eyes promptly rolled up in her head as she fell into a dead faint, sagging heavily in Arclath’s arms.
On the other side of the wardrobe, the Royal Magician Ganrahast came into the bedchamber, breathing hard. The top of the north turret was a long climb.
“Yes?” he gasped.
“ ’Tis urgent,” Vainrence replied flatly, wasting no time on greetings.
“Always is.” Gasp. “Urgent what?” Gasp.
“One of our informants just told me the nobles Rothglar Illance, Harmond Hawklin, and Seszgar Huntcrown are plotting treason. They plan to unleash what they refer to as a ‘ball of spellplague’ that they have locked in a small coffer, to flood the room with harmful wild magic at the Council of the Dragon.”
Ganrahast didn’t spend breath on a curse or a sigh. “Presumably the three are immune to its effects,” he gasped, “and believe it will do harm—instantly debilitating harm—to their fellow nobles and the royal family, we mages, and courtiers.”
“We war wizards, at the least,” Vainrence agreed. “I can’t see them as self-sacrifices to any cause. They intend to survive this unleashing.”
Finding that that particular noble trio harbored treason was no news at all, but it was the first Delcastle had heard of a flying ball of spellplague. Was such a thing even possible?
“If this information is anywhere near truth,” Ganrahast pointed out.
Vainrence shrugged. “Like you, I suspect the veracity of anything I’m freely told. Yet can we dare not take this seriously?”
“When we could be dooming the king? And most of the senior nobles of the realm with him? Hardly.”
Vainrence spared himself enough time to curse. After a moment, Ganrahast joined him.
“I’ll put the hilt in my mouth,” Elminster whispered, settling himself on his side on the cold stone floor, “and share what my mind sees with thine, for as long as the magic holds out.”
Alusair nodded and put out her hand to him.
Her touch was no more solid than a whisper, but her chill was deep, plunging him into uncontrollable shiverings in an instant.
Yet his word was his word, and she’d led him to a hidden Obarskyr dagger and offered him its magic without hesitation, so …
There was an instant of whirling nausea as El unleashed the spell and found it caught up in strong new wards that tore and twisted …
Until he could ride them, become one with them, and melt through them.
Typically unsubtle, brute force magework.
Wizards, these days …
Ganrahast started to pace. The windowless room near the top of the north turret held only an empty wardrobe, plain wooden bench, and a table along the wall beside it where a row of storm lanterns were kept ready, so he had plenty of room to stride.
That, the cloaking spells they’d cast on the chamber long before, and the room’s deserted remoteness were why the two men liked to use it.
Vainrence was right, of course. They couldn’t ignore the tip, even if it had come from someone quite likely paid to pass it on by a disguised someone else who likely intended it as misdirection. There was very little they could do about that; since the Spellplague, the mind-reaming that had once made Cormyr’s wizards of war so feared—and effective—was useless.
The Crown’s decreed death penalty for trying a mind-reaming was quite beside the point. Attempts by any wizard to use the reaming spells always resulted in that mage being driven to idiocy or instantly and severely spell-scarred. So regardless of Foril’s laws and the longtime refuge of no war wizard facing trial for what no king or courtier learned about, not a single war wizard dared mind-ream anyone—unless the mage was already dying and did it as a “last loyalty.”
If things had been otherwise, a lot of sneering noble heads would probably long since have left their shoulders … but things weren’t otherwise, and all Cormyr knew it.
“My turn,” Ganrahast said quietly. “I overheard something interesting at the feast. Rumors about some nobles trying, sometime in the near future, a little foray into the haunted wing. What I could not learn—because the gossipers didn’t know—was whether this was to be a lark, some sort of dare or rite of passage, or yet another attempt to get at all the treasure and prisoners and chained pleasure maidens we’re supposed to keep hidden away there.”
“You mean there aren’t any pleasure maidens?” Vainrence joked. “Years I’ve been serving the Crown, years, man, in hopes of …”
“Har har har, Rence. Think about it. We’ll double the guards on all ways in, of course. Who’s behind it, that’s what I’d like to know.”
As everyone in the palace and most who worked in the royal court knew very well, the haunted wing of the palace really was haunted. Even war wizards avoided it as much as they could. The Blue Fire had twisted layers upon layers of wards cast down the centuries into dangerous magics no war wizard dared tamper with.
The Spellplague had wrought one good thing in the royal quarter of Suzail, and one thing only. No portal or any other sort of translocation magic worked properly anywhere within, into, or out of the palace, court, or royal gardens anymore, so the Crown was spared one worry. No one could magically whisk marauding monsters, would-be assassins, or small armies into the haunted wing or anywhere else near where the council would be held.
Ganrahast, Vainre
nce, and the most senior courtiers had already talked about raising spells to seal off the haunted wing during the council. The war wizards would have done so without wasting breath on a single word of discussion if they’d quite dared to cast wards that powerful inside the palace or had known the best web of spells to try to construct.
“The Shadovar, perhaps?”
With that quiet murmur, Vainrence voiced the longtime fear of both men: that Shadovar wizards had killed and were now impersonating the heads of many powerful noble families of Cormyr, and doing the same with courtiers, so they’d soon gain control of the realm by stealth, without a sword being drawn or a spell hurled.
These dark thoughts had already made them suspicious of certain efforts, promoted by the War Wizard Baerold, to collect items of magic said to house the trapped essences of the Nine.
After all, Baerold just might be a Shadovar trying to use—and use up—the war wizards as his agents to get his hands on what three now-dead wizards had written of as the “blueflame ghosts” the Nine had become, which could be commanded by one who held the items that contained them, and who knew how to compel them.
Might be, but might not be, either. Ganrahast and Vainrence were the most powerful of the current wizards of war, and their spells—that fell far short of the mind-reaming of old—could find no hint of Baerold being anything more than a young, ambitious, rather romantic mage of middling skills and training. So they watched him very closely and were careful not to advance his training with any sort of alacrity.
Like most Cormyreans with ears, Ganrahast and Vainrence had heard legends of the Nine, the legendary band of adventurers destroyed more than twoscore-and-a-hundred summers earlier, when Laeral Silverhand—later famous as the Lady Mage of Waterdeep, and consort of the Blackstaff, Khelben Arunsun—was possessed by the fell Crown of Horns.
Being war wizards, they knew a little more about the Nine. Most nobles of Cormyr had heard rumors that some of the Nine still existed, trapped in magic items, and could be summoned forth from those items by those who held them—and knew how—to fight as the item-bearer’s slaves.