by Lynn Abbey
Alassra cursed again before digging out the spellbook where she kept the spells she used to interrogate the dead. A glance or two refreshed her memory; it took little longer to assemble the reagents. It might take forever to get the chamber put back together. She made the mess worse looking for a little book of cantrips. She’d devised them centuries ago, the last time she’d been tempted to add a child to her life.
Three bone-rattling sneezes and a torn sleeve later, Alassra was standing in the antechamber with the open book in her hands. Tay-Fay was sleeping peacefully, almost exactly as they’d been when Alassra tucked her beneath a cobweb shawl hours ago. The child had every right to be as exhausted as she appeared to be. Sleep was the best healing for children: That’s what Alustriel said, and where children were concerned, Alustriel, the mother of twelve, was the authority. Alassra sang two of her cantrips, enough to keep the child asleep until she returned; then she transported herself to Sulalk.
The village was a reeking, smoldering ruin. If any inhabitants had survived, they’d wisely departed for somewhere else, but it seemed likely, as the Simbul walked past charred cottages and swollen corpses, that Bro and his sister were the only Sulalkers left. She came upon a child’s body, so badly mangled that she couldn’t guess whether it had been a boy or girl.
“Vengeance,” the Simbul vowed as an oval disk appeared, hovering on level with her knees.
She laid the corpse gently on the disk, which followed her to a grassy knoll, unharmed by yesterday’s events. Time would wash away the ashes, restore the greenery, and, if no one came to resettle the village, revert its cultivated land to wild meadows and woodland. Sulalk wouldn’t be forgotten, though. The dead would become their own memorial as, one by one, Alassra brought the victims to the knoll.
Not all were innocent villagers, to be treated with a queen’s reverence. There were Red Wizard corpses scattered through the ruins. They weren’t carrying the metal disks such as Boésild had found in Nethra. No surprise but, unlike her tall nephew, the Simbul didn’t need tokens to separate the wheat from the chaff. A spell she’d devised and stored in a finger-sized wand had never failed to unmask a Red Wizard.
The first corpse she examined proved to have illusionist tattoos pricked into her skin. With the thought that Mythrell’aa was responsible, the Simbul’s simmering rage boiled over. The corpse became stone, and the stone collapsed into dust before she was calm again.
The second wizard corpse bore the marks of abjuration. The third appeared to be a conjuror. A mixed party, then? A sign that the Red Wizards had set aside their rivalries for true alliances and cooperation? All Faerûn was at risk if the zulkirs ever spoke and acted with a single voice: Thayan anarchy was Aglarond’s staunchest ally. The risk was small. Once they mastered middling spells, Red Wizards were on their own. Only the best—and some of the worst—remained directly bound to their zulkir. The rest worked for whomever would hire them.
Alassra’s gut continued to hold Mythrell’aa responsible for the carnage. Her heart knew it could have just as easily been Szass Tam, Lauzoril, or one of the many troublesome Thayans who weren’t zulkirs or Red Wizards but shared their conquering ambitions. Then she came upon a corpse that made her anxious.
The man’s magic tattoos became clearly visible when she cast a simple revelation spell over his charred flesh: minor protections against fire and steel, major immunity to poison, none of which had saved him from her wrath. But the palm-sized area directly over his heart where each Red Wizard bore the mark of his or her specialty revealed nothing. She cast another more complicated and powerful spell with the same result.
It would be a chore to haul the corpse back to Velprintalar and a waste of reagents once she got him there, but resurrection—which the Simbul wasn’t prepared to perform on the Sulalk knoll—followed by interrogation and execution might be the only way to find out how the man had obliterated his affiliation. Others had tried, with secondary tattoos, with their own magic, with acid and fire. Nothing had ever defeated her until now.
Until a few days ago in Nethra? Boésild didn’t know the revelation spell; it was one of many the Simbul kept strictly to herself. Could she have raised that woman’s affiliation, or would the corpse at her feet be the second unbranded Red Wizard she’d encountered?
And which zulkir had devised the spell—nothing but magic could erase the brand—that bested a spell of hers? Szass Tam sprang immediately to mind. The lich was as far removed from his so-called peers as she and Elminster were from theirs: Where magic was concerned, immortality was an unadulterated blessing for humanity. But Tam was laired up, purging the effects of a failed attempt to enslave a tanar’ri lord. That left … who? Mythrell’aa, again? Aznar Thrul, Tam’s opportunistic rival? The suddenly faceless Zulkir of Enchantment?
A twig snapped. No accident. The two pieces were in the hands of a survivor wearing a face guaranteed to make Alassra Shentrantra’s blood freeze in her veins.
“Lailomun?” she whispered as she raised the little wand.
Alassra would never forget the patterns of Lailomun’s tattoos. They were very different from the light-drawn lines emerging from the survivor’s scorched and tattered clothes—except for the interlaced circles over the man’s heart. He was, as Lailomun had been, an illusionist. Logical conclusions cascaded through the Simbul’s racing thoughts:
The survivor was Mythrell’aa’s confidant, not some mere journeyman.
Mythrell’aa hadn’t forgotten Lailomun.
Mythrell’aa knew who Alassra Shentrantra had become after Lailomun died …
After Lailomun disappeared.
After her beloved disappeared, not after he died, because Alassra’s final conclusion—tenuous, yet almost inevitable, given what stood before her—was that Mythrell’aa had taken Lailomun back to Bezantur and held him captive for the rest of his life.
The urge to kill, to dissolve herself into the pure, violent stuff of lightning that would leave a crater where the false Lailomun stood and propel her own essence into the void where she would neither think nor feel, set Alassra’s body trembling. She restrained the urge with no little difficulty. The false Lailomun, sensing his mortal danger, came no closer.
“Who are you?” the Simbul demanded.
“Vazurmu,” the survivor answered, a woman’s name in a woman’s voice. She shed Lailomun’s face. Her own was bruised and bleeding. Where unmarked flesh could be seen, it was a morbid shade of gray. “I served Mythrell’aa, Zulkir of Illusion, as you have, no doubt, guessed.”
“Served?”
“We were sent here to watch a horse grow and wait for you to come to claim it.”
Mythrell’aa had spied on her, Alassra thought numbly. Mythrell’aa had a spy-eye in her chambers. Alassra saw it in her mind’s eye: the thorn branch. It was the first thing she had brought into the tower chamber after she became Aglarond’s queen, setting it on a shelf where she could always see it. Where it could always see her … and the mirror.
Mythrell’aa must have been spying, if not from the beginning of her reign, then certainly not long after. Yet Mythrell’aa had waited until now to spring her trap. Why? Because the spy-eye had shown her not only the colt reflected in the mirror, but the reasons Alassra wanted it?
Vazurmu couldn’t say. The woman didn’t know about the mirror, didn’t know the man whose face she’d borrowed—except that the zulkir had told her, in better days, that if she were ever face to face with the witch-queen, that man’s countenance would buy her enough time to escape.
It didn’t, of course. Vazurmu wasn’t going to escape anything. Mythrell’aa had shredded Vazurmu’s internal organs. She’d kept herself alive with a pair of healing potions and a burning need to avenge herself. That was done, or almost done; Vazurmu fell to her knees, her voice a whisper Alassra had to strain her ears to hear.
“We were betrayed. O Mighty Simbul. After you arrived. There were other Red Wizards here. Watching us. Waiting for you. Them.” She pointed a trembling hand at th
e two corpses Alassra planned to drag back to Velprintalar. “I saw their faces. I could find out. Who they were. Who sent them.”
“Who?”
Vazurmu shook her head. “Don’t know. Saw their faces. That’s all. Never forget a face. Someone knows. I’ll find out. Go back to Thay. To Bezantur. Find out.”
“If you live that long.”
“If I live. O Mighty Simbul.”
Vazurmu might live a bit longer. It wasn’t unthinkable. Alassra had come prepared with a greater store of minor healing potions and poultices. She could spare one for Mythrell’aa’s traitor. Maybe more than one. Aglarond’s queen had a few other Red Wizards stowed in pockets throughout Thay. One never knew when such creatures might be useful.
Nethreene!
Alassra’s name—the private name only her sisters, Elminster, and a very few others knew—broke like a storm wave in her mind.
Nethreene, come home—NOW!
She couldn’t be certain which sister had summoned her or why, only that it had to be important, had to be heeded. The afternoon had become a time for quick decisions, quick actions. Four unfinished tasks surrounded her: Vazurmu’s interrogation, the memorial to the slain Sulalk villagers, the unbranded corpses, and Ebroin, somewhere in the Yuirwood with a strand of her hair tied around his wrist.
In her present state, Vazurmu wouldn’t survive a sudden translation to Velprintalar. Alassra couldn’t stay in Sulalk long enough to heal her. The two unbranded Red Wizards were nothing more than weight. Hauling them back to the palace wouldn’t damage them any more than they already were. But the thought of resurrecting them after leaving Vazurmu behind and the memorial uncreated stuck in the Simbul’s craw. Besides, if there were two unbranded wizards in Aglarond, there’d be more—and she’d find them.
One decision, then, would resolve three of Alassra’s unfinished tasks. She slew Vazurmu with a word of power—more mercy than execution—placed her corpse with the villagers, and the two unbranded corpses as well. Then she cast shapeshifting magic to mold them all into a statue of Chauntea, the golden goddess of grain and summer. A second spell made the transformation permanent, and a third—she was squandering her spells at a prodigious rate—sent her back to Velprintalar.
She’d done nothing about Ebroin, except decide that she’d have to find him. She’d considered letting him stay in the Yuirwood as he so clearly wished to do, but if Mythrell’aa had known about the colt, then she knew about Bro. With Lailomun’s fate a reopened wound in Alassra’s conscience, she’d not leave the young man wandering beyond her protection.
11
Thazalhar, in eastern Thay
Early evening, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)
Thazalhar, the wild and empty easternmost province of Thay, was a place to be endured by the wizards, soldiers, and slaves compelled to serve there. It was a place ignored by the rest of Thay, and loved only by the very few who chose to live among its rolling hills. That small number included the Zulkir of Enchantment, twenty leagues away from home and riding hard along the old Mulhorand trunk road out of Pyarados on the west bank of the River Thazarim.
The zulkir leaned into the gallop of his favorite mount, a stallion carved from green and black marble and brought to life by the twelfth Zulkir of Enchantment a hundred years ago. The stallion was inexhaustible and unfazed by whatever magic a zulkir or his enemies cast across its path. Whether the road curved or straightened, turned glassy black or shimmering silver, the stone horse took everything in stride.
While his rider suffered.
Lauzoril had begun his journey before dawn in Tyraturos, deep in the Thayan plateau, crossed the Thazarim at noon and expected to be sore, but home in time for supper. A roomy saddle with a flying carpet folded carefully around it cushioned the zulkir from the worst of the stallion’s hammer-legged gait. An assortment of magics kept him awake, alert, and free from the inconveniences of hunger and thirst, but nothing could spare him the headache born of continually enchanting the road in front of him so that wherever in Thay his journey began, it would end a half-day later.
Lauzoril could have used a spell to speed his travel and eliminate any discomfort. Indeed, he had used magic to leave the Tyraturos garret where he’d spent the previous evening trading rumors and favors over dinner with a disgruntled diviner.
The dinner was at the diviner’s request. His zulkir, Yaphyll, a woman who’d been allied with Lauzoril and Aznar Thrul until last year, was apparently ready to change sides again. The diviner offered a gift: a token of Yaphyll’s restored good faith: a true copy—or so the diviner claimed—of a spell that would reveal not only the properties of an enchanted object, but the precise spells that had enchanted it. A useful thing, if it were a true copy, and, even if it was, insufficient proof that Yaphyll could be trusted.
If she couldn’t and the diviner had been looking for advantage with Tam’s enemies, then trailing Lauzoril’s after-dinner spell would have gained him nothing. Lauzoril had destroyed the shed where he’d concealed the stone horse and it left no trail for either hounds or magic to follow. No one knew precisely where enchantment’s zulkir made his home, and that was not about to change today.
To the best of his considerable ability, Lauzoril had erected an impenetrable wall between his life as zulkir and the Thazalhar estate where an undistinguished Lord Tavai dwelt in obscurity. With the arsenal of enchantment to draw upon in addition to his own personality, he kept his children, slaves, and domestic retainers ignorant of his public life. His Red Wizard peers assumed that he spent his private hours in pursuits best left unimagined.
Lauzoril’s peers weren’t entirely wrong. Their lives were rooted in Thay’s stifling cities with their dark pleasures and illicit markets. When deceit and intrigue were called for, Lauzoril rose to the challenge, but between acts in the zulkirs’ endless drama, he escaped to the countryside, proving—he supposed as he reined the stallion to a halt—that enchanters were romantics at heart and that their zulkir was the greatest romantic of all.
Once, long before Lauzoril was born, all that would become Thay had been farmland where every valley was under plow and every ridge supported a flock of sheep. The farmers had been as poor as their land was rich. Everything they produced went to Mulhorand to please the god-emperor. In those days the Red Wizards were persecuted revolutionaries, firebrands for liberty in all its seductive guises. Driven from the Mulhorandi heartland, they fled north, past Thazalhar, to Delhumide, where they found themselves surrounded by unlikely, but stalwart, allies. Together, the wizards and farmers declared their independence from imperial laws and taxes … with predictable results.
Mulhorand sent its armies north to destroy the rebels and replant their feet on the farmers’ necks. Facing certain death or slavery if they lost, the wizards and farmers waged a desperate war for freedom that culminated on the rolling hills of Thazalhar.
They won the battle of Thazalhar, but at tremendous cost. The Red Wizards fought with magic and minions from the elemental plains; the farmers fought with steel. Fighting was fierce—a score of Mulhorandi soldiers went down for every wizard or farmer who died. Mulhorand lost half of all its armies in that one battle; two-thirds of Thazalhar, women and children in addition to fighters, lay dead as well. Yet the land had suffered most. Scorched by spellcraft and soured with blood, Thazalhar’s bountiful farms became blackened ruins where nothing grew or could be grown for generations.
Even now, four centuries later, though Thazalhar was fertile again, it remained largely uninhabited. Each spring thaw raised a crop of grisly relics from their ancient graves. The boundary walls of Lord Tavai’s estate were built from moldered bones and rusted armaments; they discouraged intruders. Visitors thought Thazalhar was haunted; residents knew.
Lauzoril dismounted. He exchanged his Red Wizard robes for a gentleman farmer’s comfortable leather and linen. Then the Zulkir of Enchantment and Charm dug a small hole beside the road and filled it with scraps from his Tyratu
ros dinner: crumbs of bread, a slice of roast pheasant, two green grapes, and a bit of cloth stained with wine.
“For the dead,” he said, tamping the loosened soil back into the hole. “For Thazalhar and the dreams we’ve all forgotten.”
It was customary for Red Wizards to pay lip service to some god in Faerûn’s pantheon. In his youth, Lauzoril had divided his infrequent prayers equally between Beshaba, Maid of Misfortune, and her sister, Lady Luck. The strategy served him well until he became Zulkir of Enchantment—more importantly, until he took possession of his predecessor’s Thazalhar estate. Then Lauzoril’s view of life and death began to change. Though he’d publicly continued his dual devotions, the private man sought a worship more appropriate to the scarred land he’d come to love.
In those days, The Reaper had been the deity most often seen, most often invoked in Thazalhar, but Lauzoril never warmed to him, perhaps because Myrkul was his father and grandfather’s god-of-choice. Bhaal and Moander had appealed even less to his romantic temperament. Recently Kelemvor had appeared as the new Lord of the Dead. Lord Tavai approved of the new god’s notion that death was the natural end of life. He began performing his private rituals in Kelemvor’s honor.
Whether Kelemvor appreciated or approved of the offerings meant nothing. Like any Red Wizard who’d survived his education and gone on to acquire power in the Thayan hierarchy, Lauzoril believed in himself above all else—zulkirs couldn’t afford the slightest doubt in that regard.
Lord Tavai remounted. He guided the stone horse off the road. They were on his land now, where a score of enchantments hung in the air, guaranteeing that even if he were seen riding across the ridges, neither he nor his unusual stallion would be remembered.
A small woods, framed with graveyard walls, abutted the fields where the lord’s men and women tended his grain. Lauzoril’s shadow, long and dark in the sunset light, preceded him into the trees where a marble statue awaited his return. The statue was identical in all ways to the stallion the zulkir rode—except that it was pure glamor and dissipated as the real stone horse planted its hooves on the dais.