When the retching was done, Crimmon roused himself blearily and walked toward the bunkroom. “No more for me, I think. I’d best be getting back, Jhaele.”
“Yes, dearie,” Culthar said in disgusted mockery.
Crimmon passed into the bunkroom and another splintering crash came. Malark chuckled despite himself. After a moment, Culthar joined in. Crimmon’s curses trailed away.
Shaking his head, Malark put down the bucket, closed the bunkroom door, and turned to face Culthar, who frowned at him.
“And how much have you had to drink?”
Malark let his face shift back to his own features for two slow, deliberate breaths before he said, “Nothing, Culthar. Sorry to disappoint you.” When he grinned, an instant later, it was Rozsarran’s own lopsided grin.
Culthar stared at him in astonishment. “Lord, why are you here?” he whispered. “Is Roz …?”
“Sleeping. I’ve little time for talk. Take this!” He pressed a ring into Culthar’s palm. “Hide it well, on your person, and do not part with it. Magics on it serve to hide it from normal scrutiny by one of the Art, but wear it openly only when you intend to use it. Its command word is the name of the first dracolich you served. Speaking that while wearing this will instantly take you and one other creature you’re touching flesh-to-flesh to Thunderstone—specifically, a hill above that town where one of us lives as a hermit, Brossan by name. If he’s not there, go to …” Several more instructions followed, then: “One thing more. I may appear to you and give the sign of the hammer, or a redcrest may fly into this guardroom—an illusion, mind. These both are signals that you’re to swiftly take Shandril Shessair and escape with her by means of the ring. Otherwise, you’re to take her when you think best—you guessed the task before I said it. Good. You’ll do this?”
Culthar swallowed. “Aye, for the glory of the Followers.”
Malark nodded, smiled grimly, and picked up the reeking bucket. “Before your fellow watchmen return, I believe I’ll go be sick outside.”
Holding the bucket before him, he staggered out and down the hall, every inch the drunken Rozsarran.
It was a white-faced and thoughtful Culthar who drew off his boot and slid the brass ring onto his little toe where he’d feel its reassuring presence at every step.
A loudly and realistically sick Rozsarran staggered between the guards at the gate, out into the night—but a coolly efficient night cat loped from where bucket and clothes had fallen, heading for a certain spot in the trees. The night cat became a rat, crept close to the waiting cultists, and listened.
“Do you hear anything?” Suld asked suspiciously.
“Probably the master, coming back,” Arkuel said. “Just sit quiet, now, or we’ll both catch it.”
“Sit quiet, yourself, cleverjaws. It wasn’t me who bought a wagon whose seat was as full of splinters as a carpenter’s beard!”
“Pierced your wits, did they? You shouldn’t carry them so low down,” Arkuel said smugly.
“Well met,” said Malark dryly, stepping from the darkness in a spot neither of them faced. “I’m glad to hear you both so happy and good-natured.” He pointed at the sleeping Rozsarran. “Take up our sleeper and come. Hood the lantern, and I’ll carry it.”
When the light was hidden, the mage dispelled his darkness and set off back toward the tower. There he raised darkness again, and within its ring, they dressed Rozsarran and left him with the bucket in his hands, for the other guards to find.
“Back to the inn,” Malark commanded simply, banishing the darkness. He raised his arms, and his fingers flowed and grew, and then branched and branched anew. In moments, Malark’s upper body looked like a large bush. A mouth opened high on one of the branches. “Come! Stay behind me!” Together they crept through the night to behind the inn stables.
“The dogs sleep,” Arkuel whispered.
“Yes, but the stable master does not,” Malark hissed back. Withdrawing a few paces, he became himself again and murmured a spell. Arkuel and Suld stood guard, swords drawn. Rejoining them, Malark eyed their blades with contempt. “Put those away. We’ll not be carving roasts.”
“The stable master, then?” Arkuel asked hopefully, but his blade slid back into its sheath.
In the hills to the north, a wolf howled. Axe in hand, the stable master stood and glimpsed a faint, bobbing glow.
“He’s watching something of my making, by the well,” Malark replied. “Come, now—quick and quiet!”
He crept across the inn yard, his underlings at his heels. At the base of the wall, the archmage’s body shifted shape again. He rose into a long pole with broad rungs—a ladder that gripped the windowsill of their rented room with very human hands. The ladder sprouted two eyestalks that peered across the inn yard.
“Hurry,” commanded a mouth that appeared on the cross-brace Arkuel was reaching for.
He flinched back and almost fell from the ladder. “Don’t do that.”
“Move!” the ladder responded coldly. “You, too, Suld. Our luck can’t hold all night.”
They all reached the chamber and closed the shutters without incident.
As he cast a wall of force between himself and his underlings, Malark wondered what would go wrong when the time came. Everything had gone smoothly, yet he could feel in his bones that spellfire was not fated to come within the grasp of the Followers.
Such hunches had given him sleepless nights before, but this time he fell asleep before he could fret. Soon he was falling endlessly through gray and purple shifting mists, plunging toward something he could not quite see that glowed red and fiery below.
“Horse cobbles,” he said to it severely, but the scene did not go away. He went on falling until he reached morning.
“I would speak with the cook,” the traveler said. “I eat only certain meats and must know how they are prepared. If you’ve no objection—?”
“None,” Gorstag rumbled. “Through there, on the left. Korvan’s the name!”
“My thanks,” the dusky-skinned merchant said. “ ’Tis good to find a house where food’s deemed important.” He strode off, leaving Gorstag staring after him in bemusement.
After a moment, the innkeeper caught Lureene’s eye and nodded at the kitchens.
She straightened from a table where a fat Sembian merchant was staring into her low-laced bodice. Turning with her hand on her hip in a way that made the eyes of every man at the table involuntarily follow her, she glided toward the kitchen.
Within, a silky voice asked in Korvan’s ear, “What news have you for the Followers?” A dusky hand helpfully took up a bowl of chopped onions and conveyed them to the board beside a pan of mushrooms sizzling in bacon fat.
Korvan shuddered, looked up, and nodded briefly. “Well met,” he muttered, as he added the onions to the pan. “Little news, but important. A herder saw a girl who used to work for me here, a little nothing named Shandril who ran off a few tendays back. She was in the Thunder Peaks with the Knights of Myth Drannor and Elminster of Shadowdale. She’d just wielded spellfire, and with it burned ‘a dragon or suchlike;’ Rauglothgor the Undying, I fear. The man heard the Shadowsil’s name and said there were gold pieces all around—”
“There will be, indeed, Sir Cook, if you do the boar just so,” the merchant replied smoothly.
Korvan, looked up with knife in hand and saw Lureene gliding into the kitchen. He glared at her. “What keeps you, girl? Can’t seduce patrons as fast as you used to? I’ll be needing butter and parsley for those carrots, and I need the fowl-spit turned now, not on the morrow!”
“Turn it yourself,” Lureene replied crisply, “with whatever part of you first comes to hand.” She swept rolls from the warming shelf into a basket and was gone with an angry twitch of her behind.
The merchant chuckled. “Well, I’ll not keep you. Domestic bliss, indeed. My thanks, Korvan. Is there anything more?”
“They all went off north, from near the Sember. Nothing more!” The onions sizzled
with sudden enthusiasm. Korvan stirred them energetically to keep them from sticking.
“Well done, and well met, until next time.”
When Korvan turned to reply, the merchant was gone. On the counter beside Korvan were three gleaming red gems, laid in a neat triangle. The cook’s eyes bulged. Spinels! A hundred pieces of gold each, easily—and three! Gods above!
Korvan snatched them up in one meaty fist, and then his eyes narrowed in suspicion. What if this were some trick? He’d best not be caught with them about the kitchen.
The outside door banged. Korvan glared all around until he was satisfied no one watched. With a grunt, he put his shoulder to the water barrel beside the back door. Ignoring the water slopping down its far side, he tipped it so that he could lay the gems, and a dead leaf to cover them, in a hollow beneath the barrel’s base. Carefully he lowered the barrel again and straightened to look about for spying eyes. Finding none, he rushed back into the kitchen—where the smell of burning onions greeted him.
“Gods blast us!” he spat as he raced across the kitchen.
Lureene stuck her head in at the door and grinned at him. “Something burning?” she inquired sweetly, and withdrew her face just before the knife he hurled flashed through the doorway and clattered off the passage wall.
Korvan was still snarling when Gorstag found the knife, minutes later. “How many times have I told you not to throw things? And a knife, man! You could’ve killed someone! If you must carve something to work off your furies, let it be the roast! The taproom is filling up right quickly, and they’ll all want to eat!” Gorstag tossed the knife into the stone sink and left.
Seeing his face as he went behind the bar to draw ale, Lureene sighed. Gorstag smiled all too seldom now, since Shandril had run off. Perhaps the tales whispered in Highmoon had been true—the ones that insisted Shandril was Gorstag’s daughter. He’d brought her with him as a babe when he bought the inn. Lureene shrugged. Perhaps someday he’d say.
Lureene remembered the hard-working, dreamy little girl snuggling down on the straw the other side of the clothes-chest, and wondered where she was now. Not so little, anymore, either …
“Ho, my pretty statue!” the carpenter Ulsinar called across the taproom. “Wine! Wine for a man whose throat’s raw with thirst and calling after you! The gods gave us drink—will you defy them by denying me my poor share of it?”
Lureene chuckled and reached for the decanter she knew Ulsinar favored. “The gods also gave us patience, to cope when drink is not at hand. Would you neglect the one in your haste to overindulge in the other?”
Other regulars in the taproom roared their approval. “A little patience! A good motto for an overworked inn, eh?”
“I like it!” another laughed. “I’ll wait with goodwill—and a full glass, if one’s to be had—for Korvan’s stuffed deer or his roast boar!”
“Oh, aye! He makes even the greens taste worth the eating! Wh—”
The man fell silent as his wife turned a cold face to him. “And I do not?”
Ulsinar—and not a few other men—laughed. “Let’s see you wriggle, Pardus! You’re truly in the wallow this time!”
“Wallow! Wallow!” others called enthusiastically.
The wife turned an even stonier face on them all. “Do you ridicule my man, who’s worth more than all of you, twice over?” she inquired icily. “Would you like to lose the few teeth you collectively own?”
The roars died away.
Gorstag strode over. “Now, Yantra,” he said with a perfectly straight face, “I can’t have this sort of trouble in the Rising Moon. Before I serve all these rude men who’ve insulted you and your lord, will you have the deer or the boar?”
“The boar,” Yantra replied, mollified. “A half-portion for my husband.” Gorstag stared quickly around to quell the roars of mirth. The innkeeper winked as he met the eye of Pardus, who, seated behind his wife, was silently but frantically trying to indicate by gesture and exaggerated mouthing of words that he wanted deer, not boar, and most certainly not a half-portion.
“Why, Pardus,” Gorstag said, as if suddenly recalling something. “A man left word here for a saddle maker—that he’d like a single piece, but a good one, for his favorite steed. I took the liberty of recommending you, but did not presume to promise times or prices. He’s from Selgaunt and will call by again in a few days, on his way out from Ordulin to Cormyr. Will you talk with me, in the back, over what I should tell him?” He winked again, lightning-swift.
“Oh, aye,” Pardus replied, understanding. There was no Sembian saddle-coveter, but he’d get his half-portion of boar out here, in the taproom, and as much deer as he wanted in the back, with Gorstag standing watchful guard, a little later. He smiled.
Good old Gorstag, Pardus thought, raising his flagon to the innkeeper. Long may he run the Rising Moon. Aye, let it be long, indeed.
Late that night, when all at last were abed and the taproom was red and dim in the dying firelight, Gorstag sat alone. He raised his heavy tankard and took another fiery swallow of dark, smoky-flavored wildroot stout. What had become of Shandril?
He was sick at heart at the thought of her lying dead somewhere, or raped and robbed and left to starve by the roadside … or sweltering in her own sweat and muck in slave-chains, in the creaking, rat-infested hold of some southern slave-trader wallowing across the Inner Sea. How much longer could he bear to stay, without at least going to look?
His glance went to the axe over the bar. In an instant, the burly innkeeper was up from his seat and vaulting a table. Another quick whirl, and he soon stood behind the bar, the axe in his hands.
There was a little scream from behind him—a girl’s cry! Gorstag whirled, snake-quick and expecting trouble. Slowly, he relaxed.
“Lureene?” he asked quietly. He couldn’t go. They needed him here, all these folk … oh, gods, bring her safe back!
His waitress saw the anguished set of his face and came up to him quietly, her blanket about her shoulders. “Master? You miss her, don’t you?”
The axe trembled. Abruptly it swept into the crook of the innkeeper’s arm. With whetstone, oil-flask, and rags, he came around the bar in almost angry haste. “Aye, lass, I do!” He sat.
Lureene came on silent bare feet to sit beside him.
He worked, turning the axe in his fingers as if it weighed no more than an empty mug. After a long silence, Gorstag pushed the tankard toward her. “Drink, Lureene. ’Tis good … you’ll be the better for it.”
Lureene sampled it, made a face, and then took another swallow. She set the tankard down, two-handed, and pushed it back. “Perhaps if I live to be your age, I’ll learn a taste for it.”
Gorstag chuckled. The axe blade flashed in his hands. Firelight glimmered down its edge.
Lureene watched him work. “Where do you think she is?”
The strong hands faltered and then stopped. “I know not.” Gorstag reached for the brass oil-flask and stoppered it. “I know not,” he said again. “That’s the worst of it.” Abruptly he clenched his hand; the flask in his grasp was crushed out of shape.
“I want to be out there looking for her, doing something!” he said fiercely, and Lureene put her arm about him impulsively. She could tell Gorstag was on the edge of tears. She’d never heard his voice like this before. “Why did she go? What did I do wrong that she hated it here so much?”
Lureene had no answer, so she kissed his rough cheek. When he turned his head, startled, she stilled his sobs with her lips.
When at last she withdrew to breathe, he protested weakly, “Lureene! What—?”
“You can be scandalized in the morning,” she said softly, and kissed him again.
14
SHADOWS CREEP
The hawk circles and circles and waits. Against most prey, he will have but one strike. He waits for the best chance. Be as the hawk.
Watch and wait and strike true. The People cannot afford foolish deaths in battle. War to slay, not to figh
t long and glorious.
Aermhar of the Tangletrees
advice before the council
in the Elven Court
Year of the Hooded Falcon
“I—I’m too tired, Lady,” Narm apologized. “I can’t concentrate!”
Jhessail nodded. “I know. That’s why you must. How else will you build your will to something sharper and harder than a warrior’s steel?” Her smile was wry. “You’ll find, even if you never again go adventuring, that you’ll almost never have quiet, comfort, good light, or space enough to study. You’ll always struggle to fix spells in mind whilst overtired, or sick, or wounded and in pain, or in the midst of the snoring, groaning, talking, or crying of others. Learn now, and you’ll be glad of it then.”
“My thanks in advance, good lady.”
Jhessail grinned. “You learn, you learn. Well, why stare you not at the pages before you? The spells won’t remember themselves.”
“Aarghh!” Narm struck the table with his fist. “I can’t think with you talking to me! Always talking! Marimmar never did this! He—”
“Died in an instant because his foolishness far outstripped his Art,” Jhessail replied. “I expect more of you than that, Narm. Moreover, you must expect different ways of mastering Art with each tutor. Question neither their methods nor the opinions freely given, even if they make you flame within, or they’ll shut off as a turned tap, and you’ll get no more for all your pleading and coins. You’d be a mage, and know not what sort of pride you’ll have to deal with? I know. I’m dealing with your pride right now!”
“I—my apologies, Jhess—Lady Jhessail. I’ve no wish to offend. I—”
“—can avoid such offense by looking to your pages and trying to study through my jabber, and not wasting my time! I’m older than you by a good start, lad; I’ve less left to me than you do, if you’ve wits enough to live to full growth—an increasingly doubtful prospect, ’tis true—”
Narm flung up his hands in wordless despair and bent his head to the open spellbook.
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