The Simbul's Gift

by Lynn Abbey

  “No, my lord.” The spy master gave her employer the customary form of respect, but not the content. Never again the content. They were enemies now, though he didn’t know it. She would bring him down. “The silver-eyed bitch slew everyone, hers and ours alike. She wanted no witnesses to her thievery.”

  Thrul offered her the plate as if nothing had happened between them. “Show me.”

  Once the spy master would have been pleased to cast the variation of Deaizul’s final sight that would animate the tarnish. It wouldn’t have bothered her that Thrul needed to invade her mind to see what she saw. Once it had seemed reasonable that a zulkir should have the means to possess another wizard’s mind; reasonable that he never committed the final sight spells—of which he had a complete set, written on parchment, embellished with gold leaf and the tattoos of the Invoker whose duplicity had inspired Deaizul to create them—to his memory.

  Now, with hatred souring her judgment, the request and its consequential invasion of her consciousness flooded the spy master with another passion: contempt. She bowed her head anyway, invoking the spell with precise gestures and a single word, submerging her passions into the needs of the moment. No one knew better than a spy master that vengeance required time.

  Thrul’s thoughts mingled with the spy master’s as the spell played out the last moment of four lives. Three had died suddenly, blindly, in a skirmish of lightning and fire, but the fourth had survived the initial carnage. Laying low, he’d watched the witch-queen search each ramshackle barn until she found one that held her attention. He was creeping closer when his attention swung to one side: two more survivors, a village youth—a mongrel from the forest—and one of Mythrell’aa’s minions, fought each other. The wizard was exhausted; the mongrel, lucky. Another Thayan died and the mongrel, carrying a small human girl, headed into the barn the witch-queen hadn’t left. Using the youth as his stalking-horse, the spy followed.

  The last image the spy’s mind had held was a frozen scene: the queen and the gray horse, the mongrel and the little girl. The queen and the mongrel argued—the tone was unmistakable, though the words were garbled—until the silver-eyed queen noticed the spy. His life ended in flame and terror.

  “Is there more?” the zulkir asked.

  The spy master nodded, triggering the darkest spell of Deaizul’s devising. After-death vision was deeply shadowed and without color. It saw the living world through a narrow slit in a floating sphere: a mangled corpse, an empty stall, footprints in the dirt, all pointing in the same direction. The trail led outside, to a large blackened circle. There was no trace of the witch-queen, the horse, the mongrel, or the human girl.

  Thrul sucked his teeth pensively as the necromantic vision ended.

  The spy master spoke first, to break the silence. “Something went wrong. Wherever she was headed, it’s likely she didn’t arrive.”

  “Rest assured that she did, woman. The silver-eyed bitch has Beshaba’s luck: her misfortune never falls on her head. Those others paid the price.”

  The spy master shrugged. “Our spies along the coast will send word when she reappears, or if she doesn’t.”

  “Good, woman. Why a horse, though? If she saved anything, she saved that horse: it’s what she went after in the first place. Find out what was special about it … or that boy. He wasn’t human—one of those forest mongrels.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  She needed no instructions in her craft from Aznar Thrul. The zulkir’s arrogance propelled her to a decision not to reveal the true reason for her visit: There had to be a connection between that gray horse and the gods-brewing mystery that had lured Deaizul into the Yuirwood, a connection that now involved the witch-queen herself. Deaizul wasn’t a particularly potent wizard, no match for the witch-queen. The spy master feared that he might need help and had hoped that the Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir of the Priador would agree to provide that help.

  Now she wouldn’t bother to ask, but she needed some explanation, some quick excuse to account for her unscheduled visit. One that had already crossed her mind and might even cross Aznar Thrul’s mind. “I wonder, my lord, how Mythrell’aa knew where to place her minions, how she knew that one particular horse in that one particular village would draw the bitch-queen’s attention.”

  Thrul stroked his beardless chin. “Yes,” he said slowly. “How, indeed. Better spies, woman?”

  “Unlikely, my lord. These were the first minions she’s sent into Aglarond since you came to Bezantur, and half were castoffs from other schools. She had help, my lord, of one kind or another.”

  “Help inside Aglarond or inside Thay?”

  The spy master nodded. “One kind or the other,” she repeated. “To find out which, there must be pressure here in Bezantur.”

  “That can be arranged, woman. Easily arranged. I’ve waited for this day! I warned her when I took the Priador tharchionate that her time was up. Two zulkirs cannot live in the same city. She swore no interest in politics and broke her oath last winter. She thought Szass Tam had me on the rocks, but he’s the one who foundered in the spring. He’s not the lich he was! I’ll tighten the noose; you watch who runs where, and then we’ll call everyone in to account.” Thrul straightened in his chair. “Well done, woman. I expect nothing less of you.” He returned her carnelian token. “No hard feelings?”

  She fastened the token to her gauze gown, pointedly ignoring the stains where she’d bled after the fall. “None at all, my lord.”

  10

  The city of Velprintalar, in Aglarond

  Afternoon, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

  Alassra’s chambers were in chaos. Artifacts were strewn everywhere, as if a restless child had played with each for a moment, then discarded it. Spellbooks, some of them older than she and written in languages unknown in the realms, were heaped haphazardly in the middle of her work chamber. Every table top was clear for the first time since she created this bolt-hole. The walls were bare, the shelves emptied of all but her most fragile mementoes, none of them magically useful—gifts from her sisters, a lock of her mother’s hair, the thorn branch she’d taken from Lailomun’s pillow.

  She’d learned the domestic cantrips for cleaning centuries ago, but simple magic never intrigued her. The storm queen had always been better at whipping up the weather than containing the dust that burst from an ancient tome. She sneezed—which didn’t help her or the spellbook she held—and got to her feet, a feral growl rumbling in her throat.

  “Where did all this come from? Who brought it here?”

  The most rhetorical of rhetorical questions: No one else was in the room. No one else had ever been in the room. Even her sisters and Elminster, back when the Old Mage accepted her invitations, went no further than the antechamber where the little Sulalk girl was now sleeping on a gilded daybed that had once belonged to a queen of Chondath. (Alassra hadn’t wanted to disturb the palace with her return when she expected—or had expected—to be leaving quickly. When she had everything back under control, when she could spare a thought for the little girl’s care, then would be soon enough to throw the royal household into an uproar.)

  Alassra had accumulated, abandoned, and forgotten the entire mess herself. She’d never had a permanent home before Velprintalar. She’d cached her few possessions throughout Faerûn in warded boxes, none of them larger than a seaman’s chest. Her life had been the pursuit of knowledge and adventure, not things, not until she became a queen.

  Royalty acquired and accumulated. From her deathbed, Queen Ilione had warned her apprentice and heir: Clean out the past. Don’t let it pull you under. Alassra had taken the words metaphorically, ignoring many of Aglarond’s dearly held traditions as she established her reign, but Ilione had intended a more literal interpretation.

  If dust had market value, the queen of Aglarond was the richest woman in Faerûn.

  She muttered another cantrip at the opened tome. Parchment sheets broke loose from the brittle
binding. Two fluttered out the window, the spells written upon them lost for eternity, if Alassra didn’t catch them before they vanished in the ether.

  She didn’t.

  “Cold tea and crumpets! Where does the dust come from?”

  Tucking those sheets she had rescued beneath the back cover, Alassra began a page-by-page examination of the spellbook. A spell for the transmutation of sand into glass caught her attention. The other variants she knew produced crystal-clear glass, no matter the color or coarseness of the sand. This one, cruder in concept, yielded glass as mottled as its component sand. A little tinkering and it might yield stained glass panels.

  Alassra growled again. After the dust, distraction was the worst part of cleaning. She hadn’t meant to read her spellbooks, merely look at them, examine the pages for some vagrant mote of magecraft placed there or exploited by an enemy. There could be no other explanation for the ambush she’d triggered in Sulalk. Outside this chamber, only her sisters knew of her interest in the twilight-colored colt, because no one else could be trusted not to tell the Old Mage. She’d spied on the village in utmost secrecy from this chamber and someone, somehow, had spied on her.

  On her! On Alassra Shentrantra, the Simbul, the witch-queen who’d mastered every kind of magic but was—perhaps—a bit behind in her housekeeping and careless with all these things she scarcely remembered acquiring.

  Not totally careless, she assured herself. Alassra routinely examined everything she touched for magic and malice. The way she attracted enemies, vigilance was an absolute essential, but the Simbul rarely resorted to artifice. When she needed to eavesdrop, she’d transform herself into a spoon and ride the soup tureen up from the kitchen. Not many mages, though, shared her sense of humor; fewer still had the skill and imagination to bind themselves into a nonliving shape.

  The mirror had been the most likely suspect, since the ambushers had been Red Wizards and the mirror was the artifact she used to keep an eye on both Thay and the colt. As soon as she’d gotten the little girl bedded down, Alassra had subjected it to a thorough examination. It had come up innocent of any tampering. She’d thrown a quilt—also examined—over it to keep the dust off while she probed the rest of her artifacts. Confronted with the prospect of scrutinizing every page in her considerable library, Alassra decided to give the mirror a second going-over. She dribbled patterns of salt and rainwater across the dome.

  “All right.” She cracked her knuckles. “East, to Thay! Show me the tharchions and zulkirs. Show me Thrul and Szass Tam. Show me that damned Mythrell’aa. Show me Lauzoril last.”

  If any one of them had a connection with the mirror—if they knew anyone with a connection—the water would become steam and the salt would burst into brilliant yellow flame. Alassra watched as familiar patterns swirled in the glass. She marked a mutation in the Bezantur pattern: Aznar Thrul and Mythrell’aa were probing each other. When rivals squabbled, enemies paid attention. Otherwise Thay was unchanged until the end. Where she expected to see Lauzoril’s rogue-handsome face, there was only a spiral as green as his eyes.

  Alassra glanced anxiously at the salt and rainwater patterns. Short of the mirror itself, smiling Lauzoril was her prime suspect. She wasn’t at all relieved to discover that a day after the Sulalk ambush, his reflection had gone abstract. But there was neither steam nor flame.

  “Show me everyone who wishes me harm.” The mirror went black and began vibrating. “Sorry—bad question. Set it aside.” The vibrations ceased. Alassra restored the patterns. “Show me Aglarond. Show me those who would work knowingly for the Red Wizards.”

  The mirror revealed a handful of faces. Red Wizardry had been Aglarond’s dread enemy for generations. There were few households that didn’t memorialize someone slain by Thayan magic, fewer still with members who would openly consort with the enemy, and the Simbul’s mirror knew them all. Alassra used Aglarond’s traitors as bloodhounds, letting them flush out the Thayan plots and minions that penetrated her realm.

  They did very little that wasn’t discreetly observed, by her or by her living accomplices, but it was possible that mistakes had been made. A traitor might have made a Thayan connection without her becoming aware of it, but that wouldn’t account for Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk.

  Waiting.

  Alassra considered the implications. She’d known her attackers for what they were by the reek of Thayan wizardry surrounding them, but none of the villagers had her skills. To them, the Red Wizards had been strangers. What might an ordinary Aglarondan say to a curious stranger? The mirror couldn’t tell her what the Sulalkers might have said yesterday or the day before, but the question still seemed worth asking:

  “Show me Aglarond. Show me those who speak ill of me or wish me the same.”

  The Simbul anticipated more faces than before: She was Aglarond’s queen, not the bosom friend of each Aglarondan. Being fair meant everyone’s fur got rubbed the wrong way once in a while.

  “Gods! I’ll be here all night!”

  Alassra laughed without appreciating her own humor. It was one thing to know she wasn’t loved as her sisters were loved and cherished by those who knew them—even Qilué was beloved by those who worshiped the drow goddess, Eilistraee—but the sheer number of faces flickering within the dome depressed her. And these were only the folk displeased with her at the moment. The mirror couldn’t show the folk who’d cursed her name over breakfast or would do so at supper.

  There were Fangers swearing in their squalid boats, revanchist Cha’Tel’Quessir muttering her name in the Yuirwood. Their numbers dismayed her, not their attitudes. No, the surprise and sadness came from the truly ordinary folk who blamed her for whatever misfortune had befallen them: a fishmonger whose eels had escaped from a broken basket, a wet nurse with a teething infant, a cook whose sauce had clotted, a baker with bad yeast.

  Their queen was the mightiest wizard in all Faerûn. She could destroy armies with a single spell. Why then—they demanded in words easily read from their lips—were her taxes so high? What did she do with their hard-earned coins? Why was it raining when a farmer wanted dry weather for cutting his hay? Why was it so hot—couldn’t the Simbul do something about the weather? Why was she always somewhere else, but never in Glarondar … Emmech … or wherever the mirror captured their reflections.

  The mirror clouded; Alassra sighed and covered her eyes. Aglarond was a predominantly human realm, and humans were old when they’d lived as long as she’d been queen. They were ready to turn their affairs over to children, perhaps grandchildren, and, deep in their hearts, they expected their queen to do the same.

  When she’d accepted the crown and throne, the Simbul had assembled her court from the best men and women she could find. They served competently, loyally, and the Simbul replaced them with equally capable folk only when they died or retired. It was fair to say that Aglarond was a better ruled realm than it had been during any other reign; but it was also fair to say that it was ruled by gray-beards and crones.

  “Elminster,” Alassra said ruefully and the mirror obliged by displaying the Old Mage’s Shadowdale tower. “I need someone to inherit all this from me. I’m human, you’re human—but we’re immortal, too. We’re old. All the Chosen are old. Think of it, El: we’re older than some of the gods! I’m not my sister; I’m not Laeral. I can’t go away and come back pretending to be my namesake. And even if I could, someone has to be king or queen of Aglarond while I’m off being nobody.”

  The tower door opened and the Old Mage emerged for a stroll. Alassra could have called him, could have transported herself to Shadowdale in an instant. He might have agreed, and today she didn’t care where her child was conceived. Then Lhaeo came through the door and young Azalar, the nephew whose unexpected birth had gotten Alassra thinking about heirs in the first place.

  She certainly wasn’t going to plead her case in front of Azalar. This meant that since the mirror hadn’t solved her problems, she was going to have to deal with that heap of dusty sp
ellbooks. Squaring her shoulders, Alassra cleaned the topmost book with her sleeve. The script was all dots and sharp angles; she’d have to cast a spell if she wanted to read it, which she didn’t, so it was a good place to start, except …

  “I’ve had this book for three hundred years. No one this side of the Outer Planes even knows it exists.”

  Alassra riffled the pages once. Nothing, literal or magical, leapt out at her. She shoved it on a shelf to gather dust again.

  A wizard would need more than luck and a few potent spells to slip a spy-eye past her defenses. He or she would need patience, and while Alassra had patient enemies—enemies who’d been lurking decades, hoping for her to make an exploitable mistake—she didn’t think she had any patient enemies in Thay. The Red Wizards weren’t a subtle lot, a by-product, the Simbul assumed, of their reliance on slaves, goblin-folk, and undead minions to carry out their commands: their armies were fearsome, but as spies or slaves, orcs and zombies were absurd, and the Red Wizards knew it.

  Red Wizards were predictable, not foolish, and—little as she liked to admit it—they knew their magic. Their academies churned out competent, albeit unethical, wizards year after year. The handful she’d dispatched yesterday would never be missed. They were, in all likelihood, already replaced.

  Already replaced …

  The Simbul cursed her own foolishness, her own subtlety. She’d assumed that because there were journeymen Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk, one of their zulkirs had been spying on her, had learned of her interest in the village and the colt. But it was much more likely that a zulkir had simply sent a team of expendable journeymen across the border in the faint hope that they’d trip over something useful. They’d been disguised as grain merchants, after all, not horse traders.

  She’d spent the best part of the day covered in dust, while the solution to her mystery—if there was a mystery to be solved—was attracting flies in the ruined village.