by Ed Greenwood
“Lady fair,” he announced, “Suzail seems all too full of brawling nobles—and worse—this night. Menaces who may well reappear, despite the vigilance of these dedicated Dragons. Pray, allow me to escort you safely to your place of rest!”
Amarune eyed him for only a moment ere shaking her head wearily. “No, Lord Delcastle, not there. The kindness of an escort back to the Dragonriders’ forthwith, however, I’ll not refuse.”
“But of course!” Arclath replied with a smile, bowing low. Far wealthier and more respectable women didn’t want lords to know where they lived—neither location nor depth of squalor. Well enough.
“I can promise you, Lady Dragonrider, that you’ll be quite safe. There won’t be just one upright and well-bred man guarding you; there’ll be me, my title, and my honor—so that’s three!”
Amarune rolled her eyes amid amused snorts from several of the Dragons. “I’m not Lady anyth—oh, never mind.”
“Of course not,” Arclath told her jovially. “I barely ever use my mind at all!”
Heralded by a louder chorus of snorts, the two of them set off back down the street. Elminster kept his eyes on the Dragons and was not surprised to see the telsword point at one of his men and then at the departing noble’s back.
That Dragon nodded and started to drift off down the street after the lord and the dancer, walking casually to a nearby doorway and standing in its shadow until Amarune looked back. When she was done doing so and the pair walked on, Delcastle airily declaiming something about local architecture, the Dragon strode a little way down the street into another, deeper doorway to await their next look back.
Throughout all of this, the rest of the Dragons studiously failed to notice their departing fellow, returning instead to their aimless back-and-forth strolling and muttered conversations.
Elminster let them get well and truly into these before he slid out from behind the crates and walked slowly out of the alley, hunched over, affecting a rolling limp, and paying the milling Dragons not even a glance. They returned the favor.
So as the Dragon skulked down the street from doorway to doorway, a hunched and limping old man followed him.
Around the curve of shuttered shopfronts, as the street bent in a southerly direction, all four went.
Elminster considered the Dragon’s shadowing about as subtle as a series of warhorn blasts, but Arclath, at least, never looked back.
Neither did the Purple Dragon, so when the Dragonriders’ was a little more than a city block away, the stooped old man limped a little faster.
Which meant that he calmly caught up to the Purple Dragon in the space of a few breaths to murmur in the man’s ear, “Have my apologies, loyal blade, but I fear common thuggery is about all I can manage, these days.”
“Err—uh?” the startled soldier grunted intelligently, turning to face Elminster—and receiving a well-worn dagger pommel hard and squarely right between his eyes.
As the senseless Dragon slumped heavily into Elminster’s arms, leaving him staggering under the sudden weight, Lord Arclath Delcastle decided it was finally time to look suspiciously behind him.
However, all he saw was a drunken Purple Dragon staggering down to a wavering chin-first meeting with the cobbles, a sight that evidently didn’t strike him as suspicious at all.
As he shrugged, opened the door of the Dragonriders’ Club, and waved Amarune inside with another low and florid bow, Elminster rolled the Dragon against the nearest wall, out of the way of any wagons or carts, and ducked into the nearest alley that came furnished with a handy heap of refuse to hide behind. After all his years, he knew the night streets of Suzail very well.
With a grunt or two, El leaned his weary limbs against the alley wall and settled down to wait for Amarune to reappear.
“Pleased, Lord?”
“Indeed, Gaskur. It went well,” Marlin replied, making the gesture that told Gaskur he was dismissed for the night.
Smiling, the younger Lord Stormserpent watched his servant vanish down the back stair, then strode into his own rooms and started locking and securing doors.
He was just about done when blue flames erupted from a nearby wall, as the two ghosts of the Nine stepped into the room with dripping bundles in their hands. The thief, Langral, plunged one hand into his bundle—someone’s cloak, darkened with blood—and drew forth a head that stared blindly past Marlin’s shoulder, features frozen in terror.
The face of Seszgar Huntcrown; its look of fear was certainly preferable to its usual sneer.
Satisfaction became triumph. Deed done, that swiftly and easily.
“Take all that to the furnace,” Marlin commanded, staring hard into their cold smiles and repeatedly visualizing the room, the way there, and tossing their bundles down into the flames. If the writings spoke truth, they should be able to see what he was thinking in his eyes. “Then return here to me without delay.”
After what seemed like a long time, the two flaming men nodded, turned, and walked through his wall … at just the right spot for the shortest journey to the furnace.
Marlin surveyed the trails of blood they’d left behind, then went to his board—his private one, far better stocked than the one most guests ever saw—selected a flask of Rhaenian dark he’d noticed going cloudy, and used it to sluice away the blood. Gaskur could scrub away the faint results in the morning.
“Farewell, Lord Huntcrown,” he murmured. “My, my, the dismembered bodies are piling up. I must remember to have Gaskur rake the bones out of the furnace ashes before a servant who might report them to Mother sees to that little chore.”
He selected a clean flagon and the decanter that held his latest preferred throatslake: Dragonfire Dew, a fiery amber vintage from somewhere barbarous in upland Turmish. Cleansed throat and nose, kindled a fire below, and left a taste like cherries and blackroot on the tongue between. Ahhh …
He was well into his second flagon when his blueflame ghosts returned. He set it down, took up the Flying Blade and the chalice, and told them, “Well done.”
Did those wide, steady, cold smiles waver a little when he began to will them back into their prisons?
It was hard, that much was certain, thrusting back an imponderable darkness in his mind that might have been their silent resistance or might just have been the weight of the magic. He was sweating when he was done—but he managed it, setting blade and cup, flickering an angry blue, on the table in a room suddenly empty of grinning, blazing men.
Right. I am the master of Langral and Halonter … and soon, of many thousands more.
Taking up his flagon, Marlin made for his bedchamber. High time to snore a little and dream of being a mighty and ruthless king of Cormyr.
As he unbuckled and shrugged off garments and kicked them away across the floor, Marlin sipped more Dragonfire Dew and pondered the part of his scheme he’d neglected to tell his fellow nobles.
He controlled no long-lost Obarskyr, but he was going to make one.
His two blueflame ghosts—they were hardly ghosts, really, but he liked the phrase—would one by one, at his direction, slay all the highknights and war wizards. He’d replace those dear departed with his hirelings, one by one as they fell, until the Obarskyrs had no one attending them who was truly loyal.
Then, of course, it would be their turn. He’d slay them all, every last living Obarskyr, and then present one of the Nine he commanded—Halonter looked the more Azoun-kingly of the two—to Cormyr as a “true Obarskyr” from the past.
Throughout all of that, he’d keep his fellow conspirators handy, up to their blood-besmirched elbows in the killings and ready to be framed as scapegoat “traitors”—and slain before they could implicate him—at any point in the proceedings where other Cormyreans became suspicious or any of his deeds got inconveniently witnessed.
Even if Lothrae produced more of the Nine and wanted to call a halt to his use of his two … well, Lothrae would hardly be eager to pass up the chance to rule Cormyr from behind the sc
enes.
It was, after all, one of the richest kingdoms in all the Realms.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
A STORM IN SHADOWDALE
It had been a glorious day in Shadowdale, but the sun was lowering in the deep forest of the hills around the dale. Long shafts of light stabbed in under the trees to gild ferns and set aglow the broad leaves of the asthen-thorn and halabramble bushes that cloaked the toppled trunks of fallen forest giants.
Storm Silverhand crossed a glade like a slow and patient shadow, making as little noise as possible. She’d meant to be there much earlier, but the need for stealth and leaving no clear trail conquered all else. She’d draped the wizard’s cloak over her distinctive hair to make herself a cowled, anonymous figure.
Twice she’d sunk to her fingertips to crouch in motionless silence as foresters with ready bows came stalking through the trees, following the trapline trails aseeking dinner. Their bows were more to keep off bears and worse than to bring down game, but it seemed there was always one who’d loose a shaft first and worry about what it had hit later.
It had been years since Storm had been the Bard of Shadowdale in anything more than legend; she farmed her land and mothered Harpers under her roof no more. The folk of the dale would think her a ghost or a shapeshifter or perhaps an accursed reminder of the Spellplague—and try to put an arrow through her or set their dogs on her, as likely as not.
And it had been years since such violence would have been a passing annoyance to her and no more. Increasingly she was more forlorn grim wisdom than mighty power. Alone, most of the time, too, though that bothered her less and less.
From the glade, it was a short way up through close-standing trunks and rising rocks to where a shoulder of rock reared out of the trees, moss-girt and dark with seeping moisture. Cracks and crevices aplenty gaped in its flank, some impressively large. Two were big enough to be termed “caves” to a passing man’s eye.
One, she knew, was a niche that went in no deeper than the length of a short man lying down. The other was her destination.
Or would be, after she’d turned at the last tree to look back and bide silent, listening long enough to make sure no one was following her.
Storm held still as gentle breezes stirred leaves above and around, until the birds started to call and flit about unconcernedly again, and she decided no one was on her trail. Whereupon she set the cloak down on the toes of her nondescript old boots, shrugged off her robe, undid the jerkin beneath it and doffed it, wrapped the cloak around herself, donned her clothing again over it—and strode straight to that deeper cavemouth.
Where she stopped, put her left foot carefully on a little ledge about shin-high up one side of the jagged opening, and kicked off, to leap forward into the darkness, taking care not to put her other foot down anywhere on the rocks by the lip.
As a result, the spring-spear mechanism remained still as she ducked past it, rather than slamming its long metal boar spear right through her body.
Several human skulls—that she’d helped gather, a lifetime ago—adorned the narrow and uneven floor of the natural cleft she was suddenly standing in, that ran deeper into the solid rock. Mere warnings.
She strode past them and into the real guardian of the cave, hoping its magics hadn’t decayed enough to kill her.
Harper mages had woven it long before, Elminster among them; a magical field to keep intruders out of this waystop hidehold in the forest. The Blue Fire had turned the ward into a roiling chaos that made living bodies shudder and terrified most who felt its touch, but the menaces it offered were meant to scare, not slay. If, that is, they still worked as intended and hadn’t become something worse.
First came the blistering heat that robbed her of breath and drenched her in sweat in two steps. Storm closed her eyes to keep her eyeballs from cooking, gasped for air through clenched teeth, and forced her way on.
On, as the inferno grew and all her garments hissed, the moisture baked and blasted out of them, into—in midstride—icy cold, a chill that froze the sweat on her skin and plunged her into helpless shivering. A cold that seared nostrils and lungs, stabbing at her like countless spikes—Storm had nearly died, too many years earlier, on hundreds of sharp-pointed metal needles, and knew what that felt like—then faded into the next part of the ward, the curtain she disliked the most.
Mouths formed in the air all around her, maws she didn’t bother to open her eyes to see, blind eel-like tentacles that saw her without eyes. Worms ending in jaws with great long fangs that struck at her like snakes, then bit and tore, savaging her as she hastened on, trying to get through them without losing overmuch blood. The maws hissed and roared or gloated wetly nigh her ears as they drooled her gore … as Storm stumbled across what she’d been expecting to find, heavy chain that clanked and skirled on stone beneath her.
The manacles, lying discarded on the passage floor. She kicked them and plucked them up, through all the vicious biting, and clung to them as she fought her way on.
Then the biting mouths and their roaring were behind her, and she was walking in air that crackled and snapped as many small lightnings stabbed at her, raking their snarling forks across her skin, her muscles trembling in their grip, spasming and cramping painfully as she lurched on.
Out of that torment into another, a nightmare of half-formed, shadowy coils that tugged at Storm, tightening like so many ghostly yet solid snakes of titanic size, coils that always, despite her upflung and clawing hands, managed to encircle her throat and start to strangle her, until she was walking arched over almost backward, caught beyond sobbing or gasping for breath, fighting through gathering dimness to—win free and snap back upright into a last torture of sharp, unseen points that jabbed at her eyes, solid shards of air that struck only at eyes and throat and mouth … to let go of her at last, leaving Storm staggering forward spitting blood from her many-times-stung tongue to regain breath and balance in the widening mouth of a cavern.
Alone and almost blind in near darkness, the only light coming from faint, fitful pulsings of the roiling ward behind her, Storm gasped and stretched and panted, seeking an end to her trembling as she tore off robe and jerkin again, to take off the war wizard cloak so she could wrap it firmly around the manacles and keep them from clinking.
After what seemed a very long time, she felt her body would obey her again. Not bothering to dress again, Storm caught up her clothes, the magics she’d brought, and the muffled manacles, and strode through the deepening darkness for a long way, across the level stone floor of a great cavern, until a faint glow became visible ahead.
She headed for it, and it became several glows, close together and down low and flickering feebly, at about the same time as the smooth stone under her boots started to slope down and the faint echoes of her progress changed, making it clear that the unseen ceiling of the cavern was descending as she went on, to hang close above her, the cave narrowing, descending, and getting damper.
And starting to stink, too. Not the smell of decay or earth or stone, but the musky stench of an unwashed and filthy human.
Then, at last, Storm reached the source of the glows and the reek.
Her sister Alassra, once queen of Aglarond and forever infamous in legend as the mad Witch-Queen and slaughterer of Red Wizards, the Simbul, was sitting alone, naked and filthy, with her feet in a pool. The water that fed it dripped down the cave walls in a dozen ceaseless flows.
Still shapely under the filth, still silver-haired, Alassra looked perhaps a lush and well-preserved forty-odd winters—but also, by the same scrutiny, seemed an utterly mad, keening wreck.
Gibbering and drooling wordlessly, she rocked and swayed back and forth, eyes staring wildly but seeing nothing.
A long, heavy chain that Storm knew ended in a shackle around her sister’s ankle rose out of the water past her, to end at a massive metal ring set deep into the rock. It had been forged by dwarves but enspelled by Elminster and all of Alassra’s sister
s who could work magic powerful enough, its links bearing Alassra’s blood slaked in her silver fire, let out in wounds they’d gently made. It called to her across the world, a ceaseless whisper she could ignore when lucid, but that lured her slowly but irresistibly whenever her mind collapsed. A binding she could easily remove but would not want to; the only comfort and companion she would crave. When her mind was in ruins, it could make her feel wanted and not alone, as long as she embraced it.
It was doing that right now.
So Alassra wasn’t dying or under attack. She was just … more mindless than ever before.
Storm set down the magics and her discarded clothing, laid the manacles on the garments and unwrapped them with infinite care to avoid telltale rattlings, then left those shackles lying, draped the magical cloak around her neck, and went to her sister, embracing her wordlessly.
The Simbul stiffened in alarm and wonder then gasped in pleasure as she felt the cloak against her skin where it was pressed between them.
The cloak began to glow—the same eerie blue as the blue fire from the skies had been—as her body started to absorb its enchantments. Alassra clawed and clutched at it like a desperate, starving thing.
Her gasps became moans of pleasure then groans of release as her arms tightened around Storm, and she kissed her sister with dreadful hunger.
“El!” she cried, in a raw, rough-from-disuse voice. “El?”
“Sister,” Storm said gently between kisses, “ ’tis me: Astorma. Ethena.”
“Esheena,” the Simbul hissed in mingled disappointment and gratefulness, relaxing as awareness returned. The wild fire faded from her eyes, and she stared into Storm’s gaze as they lay on the wet rock nose to nose.
Then she wrinkled her nose.
“Faugh!” she spat. “I stink!”
And she flung herself into the water, dragging Storm with her.
The pool was every whit as cold as Storm had expected, numbing her instantly. She’d be chilled for a day or more, thanks to her soaked breeches and boots, but that was a worry for later.