by Ed Greenwood
Watching that bloody, ongoing game would be great entertainment.
Wherefore it was almost time for young Stormserpent’s guide Lothrae to fall silent—which meant, of course, a certain meddling Manshoon would be departing the mind of Understeward Corleth Fentable, too.
Something moved in the distant darkness, a boldly striding, curvaceous shadow. Targrael, there at last and offering him the double-bladed dagger precisely as he was compelling her to—with one of its points held against her own throat and her other arm behind her, so he could destroy her with ease with the gentlest of shoves.
“It’s not just a matter of avoiding detection as the wizards of war start prying in earnest, just before the council,” he told her with a smile as he took the proffered dagger. “I’ll soon be too busy to move my pawns around, with nobles galore arriving in a great flood of highborn scorn and pomposity. My attention will be on a series of subtle mind-invasions of lords and ladies of the realm, to decide who will be my future tools, and who—in a land burdened with far too many troublesome nobles—is swiftly expendable.”
“Of course, Lord,” Targrael murmured, going to her knees before him.
Manshoon smiled down at her, seeing in her mind as well as her eyes that if he wasn’t compelling her to this subservience, she’d be trying to swiftly and savagely slay him right then.
“Let’s get you back to your nice cold tomb to await more slavery to me,” he murmured, letting go of decanter and goblet.
Both floated contentedly where they were, in midair, as Manshoon drew his Lady Dark Armor to her feet and waved her away on her last stroll through the palace—for a while.
A part of his awareness went with her, riding and compelling her, but her part was done; almost all of Manshoon’s attention was back on what he’d conjured at the center of the cavern; his scrying scenes, his many eyes on Cormyr.
In a wider ring outside their glows, his living beholder slaves hung still and silent in the air, eyestalks hanging as limp as the fronds of dead plants. He’d given some of them bone-shearing pincers, too. They were ready to be unleashed up into the palace whenever necessary to make Foril’s courtiers, wizards, and guards alike very busy.
Or sent out to guard the ways into this cavern, relieving their undead counterparts, his death tyrants, to spread slaughter and mayhem in the halls and chambers of state above.
Yet that was the same brute force approach that had failed Manshoon time and time again down the centuries, before Fzoul—and, gods blast the man, a certain Sage of Shadowdale—had taught him patience.
Not to mention deftness and subtlety. Never use a mace to smash what an apparently random breeze could topple.
Wherefore it was time to watch and learn and do the right subtle things, as befitted a future Emperor of Cormyr, Sembia, Westgate, and Amn, too. Or wherever he chose to rule.
Oh, there were formidable foes standing in his way, to be sure … but there was only one Manshoon.
“One Emperor but many bodies,” he murmured. “None of them the copies of myself Elminster could so easily find and destroy. Neither he nor the foes of my future will be able to recognize me as easily as the Sage of Shadowdale did. That’s one mistake behind me now, forever.”
The nearest of his scrying scenes was a view of a small and nondescript office among a trail of similar offices at the rear of the palace, where Sir Eskrel Starbridge was sitting sourly behind his desk.
Manshoon sent his mind racing out. He’d prepared the highknight’s mind already, and his arrivals had become deft; Starbridge should feel only a slight irritation, if Manshoon did nothing but eavesdrop on the thoughts rushing past …
The desk was, as usual, littered with scraps of paper covered with encoded scrawls. Starbridge gazed at them idly as he listened to the last of his agents and contacts reporting in. Two more senior highknights had been slain in as many days, leaving Eskrel Starbridge right where he’d dreaded ending up—behind that desk.
The desk had a spell on it cast by the legendary Vangerdahast, one barely understood by his successors. That spell empowered a faint, almost ghostly voice to speak to whoever sat at the desk, all the way from distant Shadowdale, where the stone linked to the spell on the desk had been carried on mission. Through the link, Starbridge’s predecessor had given commands to that northern dale and had heard reports. All of them, like the one just ending, saying the same thing.
Shadowdale had been hunted high and low for any sign of the legendary Old Mage, but it seemed Elminster couldn’t be found at the moment.
Bah. Shared failure was no easier to swallow than a personal failing.
Not that sitting exasperated in this stuffy little room was going to mend anything.
“Must I do everything myself?” Starbridge growled. “Am I doomed to spend my life surrounded by blundering incompetents?”
At least two of the wizards and highknights crowded into the office stiffened, but most grinned wryly, and young Baerengard even dared to jest, “Well, you did choose to dwell in Cormyr, sir.”
Starbridge gave the youngling a sour look. When he’d been Baerengard’s age, idiots this callow would never have been considered for the mantle of highknight, but these dozen-some filling his office were almost all the highknights the Forest Kingdom had left. Untrustworthy, insolent puppies.
“I will lead an expedition to hunt down Elminster,” he declared. “I’ll take nigh all of you, plus a few of the more competent wizards of war—those with brains enough not to get themselves killed if they try something so difficult as camping, and who’re capable of enough basic civility that we can stomach their company. Those here in this room, for instance. We leave tonight.”
Several highknights stirred as if they wanted to speak, but only one plunged into dispute with him. Young Narulph, of course.
“I think an expedition is far less than wise—is, in fact, a very bad idea, given that Ganrahast and Vainrence still can’t be found. Is it right and prudent that we depart the palace at this time, when the Obarskyrs may need our aid at any moment, with all the nobles of the realm gathering here for the council?”
Highknights had always owned the right to speak bluntly to superiors—even the reigning monarch or regent—without fear of reprisal, and the open debate this fostered had time and again served the realm well, but Starbridge had little time for Narulph’s usual “Do nothing is best” stance.
“I’ll have none of that,” he snarled. “If the roof above our heads fell in and killed us all right now, there are still plenty of wizards of war left to defend Cormyr. Some of them—Arbrace, Belandroon, and Hawksar, to name three—are even almost as competent as they themselves think they are.”
The handful of mages present all grinned at that.
“If we’re not here to save their precious little behinds for them, again,” Starbridge added, before Narulph could think of some other idiocy to spout, “perhaps—just perhaps—they’ll grow some backbone, and we’ll all discover they’re good for something besides strutting around muttering darkly about how the realm would fall every tenday or so, but for their oh-so-secret efforts.”
One wizard lost his smile, another snorted back laughter, and the rest winced.
“Anyone else?” Starbridge barked. “Speak out now, because once we’re at work, I’ll take a very dim view of anyone trying to confound the results I’m seeking, or deciding on their own to just change things a little.”
No one said a word. Not even the sullen-looking Narulph.
“Right,” Starbridge said heavily. “Hear then my orders: Everyone is to depart the palace, starting now and leaving by ones and twos. We’ll all meet again—before highsun, if you want to stay a highknight—at the Stone Goat paddock marker out on Jester’s Green. Mounts, provisions, weathercloaks, and all have been gathered ready there long since, under guard. Fetch only the weapons you most want with you, and tell no one where you’re going or what you’re about. If anyone follows you to the Goat, I’ll deal with them. Swift, now!
The sooner gone, the sooner back again—whereupon Narulph here will be able to sleep on his bed of fears a little less fitfully. Dismissed.”
Everyone broke into chatter and headed for the door, and Sir Starbridge rose from his chair with an air of quiet satisfaction. He’d be in a saddle soon, rather than this gods-stlarned chair behind this triple-be-damned desk, and that was worth any number of urgent all-hands missions.
So, where had he put that blasted cloak?
Manshoon turned away from both Starbridge’s mind and that scrying, enjoying the same satisfaction that the gruff head highknight was feeling.
Another deft manipulation bearing fruit, another piece in the building mosaic …
On to the next piece, over there in that scene …
Shrouded in the gloom where moonlight was feeble, the muddy midyard was deserted.
Or almost deserted. It was furnished with a few small, moving shadows.
It was the same city mid-yard where Arclath Delcastle and the Crown messenger Delnor had seen a certain mask dancer carrying her nightsoil bucket to a dung wagon.
There were no wagons in the yard at the moment. The prowling shadows belonged to cats out hunting—and a few furtive, smaller, scuttling things that darted from crevices across the yard’s few strips of uneven cobbles to handy heaps of fallen refuse, then on into tangled, thorny clumps of weeds, in hopes none of the cats would manage a successful pounce.
High above the midyard, a much larger shadow moved. The size of shadow that would attract the interest of Purple Dragons on Watch duty, had there been any in the midyard.
Dark, lithe, and somehow feminine, it swung down from the roof to hang against a stretch of house wall where it could peer at a certain dark, shuttered window.
Amarune’s window.
After a long, silent time of watching and listening, it slipped silently back up onto the roof again.
Where almost immediately there arose a brief disturbance, a choked-off sound of startlement—and a body plunged from that rooftop to splat and bounce heavily on the cobbles, its throat slit.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
BLOOD ON THE ROOFTOPS
I thank you, Lord Delcastle,” Amarune murmured gravely, sliding into Arclath’s arms to look into his eyes from very near, expecting him to want at least a kiss, “and remain mindful of … the debt I owe you. Yet if you have any kind regard for me at all, I would ask that you depart this place now and let me go my own way until at least dusk on the morrow, when—”
Arclath was already using the arm that wasn’t around her to push open the Dragonriders’ street doors. Amarune broke off abruptly at what she saw inside.
At the look on her face, Arclath spun around to see what was the matter, letting the door start to swing closed again, and in so doing whirled Amarune away from what she was facing. With the briefest of angry growls, Amarune swung him around again and forward into the club.
Where amid a quiet cluster of Purple Dragons and servants still cleaning up and a few tables of newly arrived drinkers, Tress was helping a rather tipsy-looking man to his feet. Not one of the nobles who’d brawled so messily in the club earlier, but a rather haughty-looking wizard of war in full palace robes who had evidently just risen from a table and sprawled on his face and was showing signs of doing so again the moment he lost the deft support of the womanly shoulder under one of his armpits.
“Thank you, wench,” he was growling rather blearily at Tress. “Know that you have aided a ver’ important wizard of the court, who enjoys the ear and confidence of the king himself! Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake am I, and urkgh … I’m going to be sick, s’what I’m—”
He promptly demonstrated the truth of his words, with force and enthusiasm.
Arclath and Amarune both raised their eyes to the ceiling in disgust and parted to glide well aside as Tress steered her burden firmly through his own filth and straight to the door.
Two steps away from which the weaving, green-faced Mreldrake caught sight of Amarune, gave her a nasty grin, pointed one shaking finger, and spat maliciously, “You! You’re the Silent Shadow, you are!”
“I’ve skulked in the dark long enough,” Elminster growled under his breath. “Time to play the befuddled old man and walk right in there and get to hear just what terms our jaunty young lordling is on with the most important lass in the worl—”
Playing a stooped graybeard to the hilt, he was still three age-shuffling strides away from the doors of the Dragonriders’ Club and starting to reach for the nearest smooth-worn door handle, when Amarune Whitewave burst out of those doors, sprinting like the wind, with the bellowed “Stop! Stop and stand!” shout of a Purple Dragon pursuing her.
Elminster blinked, straightened up far too hastily for the decrepit elder he was trying to portray—and slipped. Which left him unable to get out of the way.
Amarune did not try to get out of the way either.
Even as he flung his arms wide to fight for balance, she slammed into him, running hard. The impact snatched the Sage of Shadowdale off his feet and dashed him down on the cobbles in a crash that drove all the wind out of him and brought sharp and instant pain. As she trampled him and ran on, not slowing in the slightest.
Leaving the man who had been the mightiest Chosen of Mystra flat on his back on the cold cobblestones of the street, half-dazed and struggling to breathe through what felt like broken ribs. He couldn’t even think of a spell to hurl, not that he had wind enough left to cast anything …
He couldn’t even roll over, let alone crawl aside, as a fresh tempest burst out of the Dragonriders’ and roared over him, a storm of hard-running Purple Dragons with lungs far healthier than his own, swords glittering in their fists, and very heavy boots.
He did, in their wake, manage a groan or two.
One of which caught the attention of a telsword who obviously hadn’t been given orders to pursue the fleeing woman. Coming out of the club to stand and watch the chase dwindling into the night, he glanced down at the sound of pain then bent to lend the huddled old man a hand.
“Come on, old drunkard! You can’t lie here; you’ll get trampled, you will!”
“I’m not drunk,” Elminster snarled through his pain. Ribs gone, to be sure. “I’m hurt. Some woman ran right through me.”
“Which way did she go?” the telsword snapped back, excited in an instant.
“Down the street,” Elminster replied dryly. “If she turned off it, I didn’t see. I was too busy lying stunned to notice.”
“All right, all right, old jester.” The telsword sighed, helping Elminster to sit up against the club wall. He peered down at the weathered old face out of sheer veterans’ habit—and frowned. “Have I seen you before? Who are you?”
“No one important, anymore,” Elminster said gruffly. “Just another old man.”
“Oh? Living on the streets?”
“When I can’t make it home before dark.”
“Oh, so you have a home, then.”
“Aye.”
“So, graybeard, how do you usually spend your days?”
“Growing older,” Elminster told him wryly. “And ye?”
It was almost dawn, and a weary and heartsick Amarune Whitewave didn’t know what to do.
She was standing in a dark street surrounded by grim-faced Purple Dragons, listening to Lord Arclath Delcastle glibly explain to them all once more that the dancer couldn’t possibly be the Silent Shadow, because she’d been with him more than once when that notorious thief had performed a daring theft, and that she must have fled out of sheer fear of being enspelled by a drunken wizard of war. Not only was he of noble birth, he himself had suffered thefts at the hands of the Shadow, and so, believe me …
Oh, gods. And he was again, oh-so-gallantly, offering to escort Amarune home.
She wanted to hit him. Or lose herself to sobbing in the warm comfort of his arms, and … she didn’t know what she wanted to do.
And she couldn’t stop ya
wning.
The Dragons believed him, nodding and looking at her with faces a little less unfriendly, and lowering the swords that had been pointed her way.
Which meant they’d soon leave her alone with him. A young and spirited noble lord who suddenly knew, whatever his clever tongue was saying to them that moment, that she was the Silent Shadow.
She remembered full well she’d stolen from him more than once. So, obviously, did he. Should she just deny all and claim the wizard must have mistaken her for someone else? Finding proof wouldn’t be easy—so long as he didn’t come upon Ruthgul or any of her other clients, and tie what they said to where she lived—but driving away his suspicions would be harder still. Suspicion always died a slow death.
“Go with the Lord Delcastle, lass,” a Purple Dragon was saying in her ear then, kind but firm. “He’ll see you safe home.”
That’s just what he could not do—but she dared not admit it.
Wearily she nodded, half-numb, and accepted Arclath’s attentive arm.
All she could think of doing was wandering the streets of Suzail until full day ran him out of time and into the jaws of some important business or appointment or other that he dared not miss. If her legs held out that long and she could keep her eyes open, that is …
“Trust me,” Arclath murmured, giving her that bright grin that she couldn’t tell if she loved or hated. “Dawn will be breaking soon enough. If you don’t happen to live next door or in the rafters above us, we’ll have time to see it—and sober, too!”
The stench at the end of the alley was indescribable. “Man-strangling” wasn’t a strong enough description. Nor was “forty sick snails lying dead in their own fresh vomit,” or “the heaped wet offerings of a hairy garrison all in the throes of the runs, brought on by eating lots of candy and mustard.”