by Ed Greenwood
Not that Seszgar Huntcrown was one whit as important as Seszgar Huntcrown believed himself to be. However, he’d hated Seszgar because the Huntcrown heir had bullied and humiliated him when they were both young, and still sneered at him.
Moreover, Seszgar would be no loss to anyone. And, overconfident as he was, he was all too apt to trust in his formidable skill with a blade and go swaggering out alone, dismissing his bodyguards, and so could more easily be caught alone than most other nobles.
The two ghosts of the Nine scared Marlin, but they might know almost nothing about Suzail—and all they knew about their quarry was his name, his nobility, and that he was probably carousing somewhere in Suzail. Marlin didn’t want to lose these useful weapons before they accomplished anything at all, by setting them a task that would keep them scouring the city until every last war wizard in the realm descended on them hurling blasting spells.
Smiling, they’d marched right out, wreathed in their ceaseless blue flames, but that meant nothing. After all, what did he really know about them, aside from a few lines of speculation from various dead men, and what they’d told him themselves?
What did he really know about them at all?
Suddenly shaking worse than ever, Marlin snatched up his sword belt in feverish haste, wanting to be gone.
He fled from the room a breath later, and the death knight Targrael detached herself from the darkness of the wall and glided after him, unnoticed and as silently as she knew how.
Manshoon was smiling in the depths of both of their minds.
He was learning at last. Even if it was only to fear, young Lord Stormserpent was learning at last.
Manshoon made his Lady Dark Armor lurk silently, well in the wake of what his newly bold lordling had unleashed.
Ahead of her, two men whose bodies blazed blue stalked the dark streets of Suzail in menacing silence, keeping together.
Langral and Halonter of the Nine were quite capable at reading the will of the one commanding them, when they stood close and those thoughts were fierce—and young and fearful Marlin Stormserpent had wanted them to stay together.
Well enough; that suited both of them. They were busy finding Seszgar Huntcrown, and it was proving to be slow work.
Every few paces they came upon someone hurrying along who couldn’t outrun them, or who blundered out of a door or alley too preoccupied with something else to notice blue enshrouding flames in time to run.
“Have ye seen the noble Seszgar Huntcrown?” Relve would ask.
“Recently?” Treth would add, leaning forward to rumble that word.
Usually the answer was a stammered denial, sometimes of even knowing what Lord Huntcrown looked like. Less than helpful—but then, their orders had come from a noble, and nobles weren’t known for sparing underlings work or calling on overmuch thought when crafting orders in the first place.
No matter what answer Langral and Halonter got, they promptly slew the answerer if there were no nearby witnesses, or just stalked on in search of someone else if there were.
It was a good thing night hadn’t fallen all that long before. Questioning and butchering their way across Suzail might take most of the dark hours. They briefly entertained the notion of keeping count of how many killings would be necessary before they found Huntcrown, but hadn’t thought of it until after they’d slain six—or was it eight?—already. Suzailans died quickly these days.
In Targrael’s head, and managing to read the thoughts of the two men in flames faintly through endless and silently snarling blue fire, Manshoon smiled. He’d noticed the very same thing.
Belgryn Murenstur blinked. Well, there … ‘twasn’t every night you saw the likes of that. Wreathed in flames they were, from head to toe, two men with drawn swords, striding along the street as if they felt nothing at all.
“Ho, man!” the shorter one called—to him Belgryn realized. And blinked again, coming to a sudden halt in his rush to be home. In another two paces, he’d have walked right into them, flames and all.
“Have ye seen the noble Seszgar Huntcrown?”
“Recently?” the taller flaming one added, in a deeper voice. They were both smiling.
Were those swords in their hands wet? As in, with blood?
With a rush of relief, Belgryn realized he had. “Yes, yes, I just laid eyes on him, as it happens—and all he carouses with, too. They were going into the Bold Archer and were more than a bit merry.”
Something was happening in his head … as if he was being watched from the dark corners of his own mind. Yes, a dark, coldly smiling presence, Manshoon by name, that he promptly forgot all about.
He blinked again. The shorter man, wreathed in flames he didn’t seem to feel, was thrusting himself closer to Belgryn to ask another question.
“What is this Bold Archer? A tavern?”
“A club. Uh, four streets back, you can’t miss it—”
Belgryn was turning to point when he saw the swords come up.
“Ye will take us there,” the taller flaming man rumbled, still wearing his smile. “Now.”
“I—uh, I’m in some haste to be ho—,” Belgryn started to stammer.
And abruptly stopped, because the swords rising to menace his throat were wet with blood, and because a door had just been flung open down the street, letting light spill out onto the cobbles.
Even before whoever moved to stand in that light started to scream, Belgryn saw clearly what was lying in the street where the two flaming men had just come from: two sprawled bodies that had blood running in slow, dark ribbons out from under them.
Two citizens of Suzail that the flaming men now smilingly flanking him had just slain.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
A NIGHT OF SWORDS AND BLOOD
After one long look that he knew had left him hotly blushing, Delnor kept his eyes on the rush-strewn floor as he hastened through the tables of the Dragonriders’ Club. By the Diligence of Torm, when had the trip grown so long?
He was acutely conscious of his palace messenger’s uniform, and of the dozens—scores—of eyes that must be following him as he made his way right up to the front table where Lord Delcastle was lounging.
In the brightest lights of the stage right above Arclath’s easy smile, the same mask dancer was performing—with an air of defiance, no less!—posing and pirouetting around a glossy-smooth prowboard that had been thrust into the edge of the stage. It allowed her to move her body out until it overhung the wine-sipping noble.
Delnor firmly closed his eyes and groped his way the last few steps to the empty chair across from Arclath, who considerately removed his feet from it in the last instant before the crimson-faced palace messenger sat down both heavily and with great relief.
“Well met,” came the noble’s sardonic greeting as Delnor thankfully closed his hand around a proffered flaretop goblet and drank deeply. “What news?”
The mask dancer thrust her face in the new arrival’s direction for long enough to tender Delnor a brief, hard stare before returning to deftly catching Arclath’s steady stream of tossed coins out of the air, and putting them into dozens of small clips she’d braided into her long hair. Delnor saw her attach a gleaming golden lion then whirl away to smile at the next table, long hair swirling and sleek hips …
He swallowed again and looked away into the darkness—straight into the expressionless gaze of Tress, who was standing with her arms folded, keeping steady watch over her prized dancer and Lord Delcastle’s front table from a dark alcove beside the stage.
Delnor gave the club owner a weak, wavering smile and transferred his gaze to Arclath, who leaned forward through the sudden din of music that arose just then to accompany the dancers—a merry rhythm of longhorn, lute, tantan, and hand-drum, being played somewhere above their heads and coming down through holes around the pillars—to murmur, “So, now, what banners have you seen coming through the gates? What word has reached the palace of this or that noble’s arrival for this
Council of the Dragon?”
For his part, Delnor was almost itching with curiousity as to what the Lord Delcastle had learned about the eavesdropping dancer, who was at that moment almost insolently performing right above them again. Something had obviously happened between them.
He risked the swiftest of glances up at the dancer—long enough to see quite vividly that she wore only sparkles, sweat, and her mask—and resigned himself to hearing about it later. Leaning forward until his nose was perhaps a finger’s length from Arclath Delcastle’s, he started muttering names across the table.
When a noble wants to hear which fellow nobles have come to town, and is paying for the drinks, the duty of a lowly courtier is clear.
“… And so she opened her arms for meeeee!” Broryn Windstag roared, off-key and more shouting than singing but too drunk to care.
Spreading his arms wide in a dramatic flourish, he crashed bodily through the doors of the Dragonriders’ Club as his fellow nobles stumbled on through the next verse of the song, words slurred and half-forgotten. Lord Dawntard was drunk, but then Dawntard was always drunk. Delasko Sornstern was the soberest of the three, but that wasn’t saying much, and he was drinking hard to try to overtake his hero Windstag in the race to oblivion.
Arclath peered hard back over his shoulder at the disturbance. Windstag, Dawntard, and Sornstern. Trouble. The crowd of loud roisterers with them were either their bodyguards or the hangers-on that any nobles who spend coins like water in the finer taverns of Suzail will attract, when said nobles will cheerfully buy anyone who howls approval at them wine—flagons and skins and bottle after bottle of wine.
“Full trouble!” Tress snapped, striding out of her alcove to wave a warning to all of her bodyguards. By then Windstag had spotted the reason he’d just gotten up from the floor—the bare-bodied dancers up on the distant stage. He promptly kicked a chair out of the way with a wicked grin, with no heed at all for what might become of its half-drunk occupant.
When the others at that table shouted at him angrily, he flung the half-full bottle in his hand into the face of the loudest one, then used that freed hand to pluck up the table and overturn it on all their heads, roaring with laughter.
Men sprang up on all sides, some of them just bolting away from the unfolding trouble, and others to find room to snatch out sword or dagger.
“Hah, so it’s blades, is it?” Dawntard snarled. “Well, we know that game!” Behind him, a dozen bodyguards and well-wishers drew steel in singing unison.
“That table, that one, and that one!” Windstag bellowed, pointing at the three tables closest to the stage—at one of which Delnor sat, huddled in his seat and staring at the drunken nobles in open-mouthed horror. “They’re ours, now! Get clear of them, or die!”
Arclath was waiting, with sword out and a rather dangerous smile growing across his face. Windstag’s roar brought the wealthy merchants at the other two tables to their feet, too, some of them busily snapping orders to their own bodyguards.
“The Watch!” Tress barked at someone. “Get the Watch! Now!”
Then Windstag let loose a wordless shout of exultation and charged.
Dawntard and Sornstern hastily joined in, and all the intruders were trotting and lurching forward, shouting and hacking furiously and wildly at everyone and everything in their way. Someone threw a chair, someone else hastily drained a bottle and then hurled it—and the Dragonriders’ erupted.
On the stage, some of the mask dancers screamed and fled, others cowered, and the one at the front with the coins in her hair, bare as she was, crouched down behind the prowboard as if it were a castle rampart and she were a warrior awaiting the right moment to spring over it into battle.
A merchant screamed and gurgled as he was hacked at, another shrieked as a sword seeking his life sheared away one of his ears, and bottles shattered against pillars and tables, showering the surging men with glass as patrons slipped, fell, swore, and stabbed at each other.
A large, much-scarred sailor went down, a richly dressed merchant staggered away weakly spewing out both his dinner and all the wine he’d drunk, and a club bouncer threw a chair at a noble he couldn’t reach, felling two bodyguards who got in its way.
As if that had been a signal, the air was suddenly full of hurtling chairs. With many wounded groaning and sagging, men slugged each other with fists and bottles and dagger pommels, bodyguards rushed to hurl aside anyone who got too close to their clients, and tables got upended.
Merchants fled in all directions, and Tress and her staff seemed to have vanished. Resistance melted away from in front of Windstag and Dawntard and their hard-faced bodyguards.
Leaving a panting, wild-eyed palace messenger, a few merchants who were more angry than frightened, and the coolly unruffled Lord Arclath Delcastle between the sword-swinging intruders and the stage.
“Stand aside, unwashed vermin!” Windstag roared.
“Go home, drunken disgraces!” Delcastle snapped back. “You stain the families you belong to, and will answer to the king for it!”
“Yes!” Delnor shouted desperately. “Leave this place, in the name of the king!”
Ignoring Delcastle, Windstag sneered at the palace messenger. “And who are you to call on the Crown for aid? Jumped-up commonborn lout! When our day comes, we’ll not have to put up with the likes of you! We’ll just order you beheaded and sit and sip wine and watch from the farruking palace windows as you scream and wet yourselves and die!”
“Since when,” Arclath Delcastle inquired icily, “did your drunken lawlessness have anything at all to do with anyone’s rank or birth? Windstag, you’re a bully and a coward, and—”
With a wordless roar of rage, Broryn Windstag went for Delcastle, six bodyguards at his side. Almost casually one of them tripped Delnor, and he hit the floor hard, gurgling out a vain plea. Arclath Delcastle cursed as he ducked, darted, and slashed as swiftly as any mask dancer, buying himself room to spring up onto the stage.
“That was a palace messenger, you fool,” he spat at Windstag. “You’d better start for the docks right now, before—”
“Before what?” Kathkote Dawntard sneered. “You think a noble lord will face the slightest punishment for felling some palace lackey who dared to offer us violence? Without every noble in all Cormyr rising to rid themselves of all courtiers—and any Obarskyr foolish enough to stand up for such dross, too?”
“Not that we should leave any noble witnesses to this little unpleasantness,” Windstag snarled. “Kill him!”
He was pointing at Delcastle.
“Carve him apart, so there won’t be enough left for even the keenest war wizard to enspell and interrogate, then snatch the dancer and bring her. Search those rooms back there, and haul out all the other dancers, too! I find I’ve a hunger for more than dancing!”
There was a general shout of mirth as everyone joined in his bawled laughter, and men with drawn swords rushed the stage.
Across which Lord Arclath Delcastle raced and spun and sprang and hacked like a wild thing, seeking to just stay alive.
One man reeled back, blinded by a blood-spurting cut across the forehead; another clutched at his punched throat and crashed to his knees, choking; and a third staggered back and fell heavily off the stage, clawing at where Delcastle’s slender sword had burst through his shoulder.
But by then Delcastle battled a vicious storm of steel, beset on all sides by men made wild by drink and wilder by bloodlust and eagerness to impress their noble masters.
“A rescue!” he shouted, parrying desperately. “Anyone! A rescue!”
A man in front of him shrieked and fell, his toes pinned to the floor by a dagger that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Then the man beside him toppled, his eyes bulging in astonished pain, as something very hard struck him in the back of the head.
By the time that man fell, Delcastle’s attackers were turning to see who his ally was—the person the beset lordling was already grinning at as he went right
on fencing for his life.
It was the mask dancer—who wore only sparkles, sweat, and copious spatters of blood—none of it her own. She’d tossed aside her mask, her hair swirling free, and there was a blood-drenched, dripping sword in one of her hands and a clean dagger clutched pommel-foremost in the other.
She faced them, panting—and promptly sliced the face of a bodyguard who’d foolishly lowered his sword to leer at her.
“Kill her!” Windstag roared drunkenly. “I can rut with her corpse!”
Heads turned as his men stared at him in disbelief, even in the midst of furiously clanging steel.
“W-well,” the nude dancer hissed at him, “now that we all know how certain noble lords prefer to spend their dallying time …”
“Get her! Get her! Get her!” an enraged Windstag bellowed loudly enough to make the roofbeams echo. “Kill them both! Kill them all!”
He sprang onto the stage, his bodyguards hastening to follow. Windstag and his men came up from behind the men fighting Arclath Delcastle and crashed into them, shoving them helplessly forward in sprawling chaos.
For just a moment, through a gap in all the onrushing bodies, Lord Delcastle caught sight of Delnor’s senseless, staring face.
Then it was gone behind the looming brawn of men trying to kill him, and he was fighting for his life again.
And somewhere behind him, so was she, this Amarune whose name he’d only just learned.
Just in time for them both to lose their lives together, it seemed, when such trifles would no longer matter. Ever.
In the darkest back corner of the royal crypt, three levels below any part of the palace where the sun ever reached, the lone old wizard stiffened, his eyes momentarily flashing blue fire.
“Something’s happened,” Elminster said grimly. “Something’s been awakened. Strong magic, old magic. Hmmph. Like me.”