by Ed Greenwood
“So it is! After we taste its beauty, mind, for beauty is its own reward and a life spent cultivating beauty is the life a noble deserves!” another oily voice agreed.
Stolen guards’ knives were flourished, as the noble smiles above them widened.
“Come up to play, little drow beauty,” the first escaped prisoner beckoned mockingly. “Why, Gustravus, she seems almost eager!”
Eyes blazing but saying not a word, Elminster raced up the stair. When the hands reached for her, she didn’t slow in the slightest.
The prisoners barely had time to scream.
“Relrund! Torz! I’ve work for you!”
Lady Dawningdown bit off those words like she wanted to gnaw something. Her two eldest bullyblades exchanged glances, keeping their faces carefully expressionless. Someone was soon going to die.
“Take the two younglings with you, go straight to the office of Rensharra Ironstave—the lady clerk of the rolls, they call her, as if she was remotely worthy of carrying a title, even an empty one—and beat her to death. Make it last and see that she suffers, but keep her fairly quiet or you’ll have half the guards in the palace down on your necks. Just so you’ll show no mercy, be aware that she’s the kingdom’s chief tax collector.”
Fixing them with a glare that left no doubt at all in their minds that she was neither drunk nor fooling, their employer settled herself into her usual seat in the back corner of her coach and slammed the door so fiercely that things rattled all over the conveyance.
Relrund and Torzil bowed in her direction with careful precision—she’d be watching, of that they had no doubt at all—did off their swords and put them in the front seat of the coach, collected their two fellow bullyblades and had them do the same, and strode into the Palace.
They were still wearing their daggers, both visible and hidden, and the short iron bars they carried inside their left boots. And though they said not a word aloud to each other, they were thinking the exact same thoughts as they strode.
A tax collector. This was going to be fun.
“Stay,” Farland ordered Amarune and Arclath curtly, as the horrid gurgling faded. “I’ll go and see.”
The young couple nodded obedience.
“So,” the lord constable muttered under his breath as he hurried along the passage, his drawn sword in hand, peering at prisoners in their doorways and heeding their fingers pointing him onward, “behold the brave and stalwart lord constable of Irlingstar, arriving for the latest viewing of a victim of the unseen slayer.”
This time, the throat-slit noble sprawled in his blood in his cell doorway was Bleys Indimber. Well, no loss, he, and—
Something slid into Farland’s wrist, a sudden kiss like fire and ice.
He jerked away as blood spurted.
Naed! The very air was slicing at his sword wrist!
He swung his sword at his invisible attacker, or at least where his attacker must be standing—but slashed only empty air.
Farland cut at the air wildly in all directions to try to keep his unseen foe at bay. His eyes told him there was nothing there, that his sword was cleaving emptiness, but … was that something solid, just for a moment, brushing against his arm?
Farland spun and grabbed, lunging with his free arm and trying to grasp whatever it was, the unseen solidity that—
“Eeeearrgh!”
It stung like fire this time, as more blood spurted and some of his fingers flew off! An invisible blade had cut them—but there was nothing for him to grab.
His own sword had just chopped and backswung and hacked and there was farruking nothing there.
Farland spun around and fled back down the passage as fast as he could sprint. Wizards … he needed the wizards, or he was a dead man! The prisoners called taunts or encouragement or shrank back in fear as he pelted past them, running for his life.
A few running strides later, the unseen blade bit into his sword hand, hard, above his half-sliced wrist. He roared in pain, stumbling with the sheer burning fire of it, but he didn’t slow. He didn’t dare slow. His sword clanged on the flagstones behind him. Most of his hand, he knew, was still clutching it.
He had to keep running, had to …
Rensharra looked up. “Can I help you? This is the office of the Clerk of the Rolls, not …”
The four men wore rather ruthless smiles. They had quietly and carefully closed her office door in their wake, and strolled toward her.
“Are you Rensharra Ironstave?” the foremost, oldest-looking man asked her. “Who just now spoke with Lady Jalassra Dawningdown?”
No. Oh, no. Rensharra put her foot on the pedal that would ring the alarm gong, stood up and stamped on the pedal again, then slid around behind her chair.
“What are your names, gentlesirs?” she snapped sternly. “Are you behind on your taxes?”
The nearest man gave her an unlovely sneer and said over his shoulder, “She’s the one. If we cut out her tongue, it should quiet her a bit.”
Then he flung his cloak. Its edges were weighted to make it swirl fashionably—which would help it encircle her head and shoulders.
“I like what I see,” said one of the younger three. “Can we play with her a bit? After we separate her from her tongue?”
Rensharra snatched up her chair in desperate haste, intercepting the cloak. Then she ducked aside as its wielder came around one side of her desk, slashing at her wildly.
His knife got caught in the cloak, of course, and Rensharra dragged the chair free and brained him with it. Which left her exposed to a hard punch from the man coming around the other side of her desk.
“Help!” she screamed as she staggered back to the wall with her head ringing and one eye watering, the chair up in front of her like a shield. “Ruffians! Murderers! Help!”
The third and fourth men, their grins wide and delighted, came right over the desk.
“That’s Farland,” Arclath snapped, listening hard.
“He’s running this way,” Rune agreed tensely, peering down the passage.
Then they saw him. The lord constable was running full-tilt toward them, his eyes wide. He was streaming blood—gods, his sword hand was gone!
“Gulkanun! Longclaws! Stop your spells!” Arclath barked, as firmly as any Crown oversword or battlemaster. “Now!”
Farland was cursing, or trying to through his frantic gasping. He was close, and getting closer fast, his eyes wide with pain and fear.
“Stay back! Guard yourselves! I’m under attack!” he panted. “Invisible blaae—”
The air beside Farland’s head thickened into a knifelike edge, and they saw the merest shadowy suggestion of two dark eyes and a scowling, sweating brow above them, a malevolent, determined presence …
As that edge whipped in and around, and Farland’s throat burst open in a shower of gore.
“Elminster!” Arclath and Amarune shouted together, in desperate unison—but the sinister presence beside the lord constable was gone in the next instant. Farland stumbled, sagged while still running, and crashed untidily to the flagstones.
He slid to a bloody stop at their feet, his legs still moving feebly, his life-blood spurting in all directions.
It was a solid chair, of olden style, with a high back and long, thick legs—which was all that kept the knives from her face. For a breath or two, until one of them ducked down and stabbed at her legs.
“Help! A rescue!” Rensharra screamed, as loudly as she could. The man she’d hit with the chair was rubbing his head and giving her dark looks, and the other three were close around her, crowding in against the chair. In a moment they’d grab her arms from both sides, and it would all be over—
Behind them, her office door opened.
Her underclerk’s astonished face appeared, his mouth dropped open in astonishment—and that was all she saw of him, as one hairy hand appeared from behind him and shoved his head down and out of the way. Its owner trampled him with a roar of obscenities and hurled a dagger that thun
ked solidly home into the shoulder of the gloating attacker on Rensharra’s left.
Who stopped grinning to shriek and reel away from her along the wall, cursing and groaning.
“Mirt!” she sobbed. “Save me!”
Before the words were out of her mouth, a second dagger hit the man right in front of her in the back of the neck. He spat blood at her, his eyes wide and staring … and he started to slump, dragging her chair with him.
The third man backhanded Rensharra hard, tumbling her onto the floor atop the second man and the chair. Her eyes blurred with tears and a sudden burbling in her ears. Then he ignored her in favor of facing the new and bellowing threat who’d just felled two of his fellows.
The man she’d first hit with the chair also turned, bent to tug something from his boot—and straightened up again with a short iron bar in one hand and a long, wicked looking dagger in the other. “Just who the tluin are you?” he growled, stalking back around the desk.
“Mirt, Lord of Waterdeep,” came the reply, “and your death!”
The man with the iron bar burst out laughing, and waved his two fellow bullyblades forward. The one who’d taken Mirt’s dagger in his shoulder was moaning in pain and cursing, but he got on his feet and headed menacingly toward Mirt.
Rensharra got up, picked up her chair, and swung it hard.
The man with the iron bar never saw it coming. The chair slammed into the back of his head, splintering one of its legs, and he went down, toppling on his face with a crash.
The nearest bullyblade looked back over his shoulder, startled by the sounds. Rensharra threw her chair, as high and hard as she could.
It hit the floor right in front of him, bounced, and crashed down onto his foot.
He howled and hopped in pain—right onto Mirt’s blade. Who used it like a handle to swing the gutted man around into the last one, slamming them both against the wall.
Then the stout and wheezing Lord of Waterdeep snatched up the fallen iron bar and brained both bullyblades several times, just to make sure. When they lay still in their spreading blood, he turned back to the man Rensharra had felled and battered the back of his skull, thoroughly.
“Are you all right, lass?” he panted, straightening up from his bloody work. “Did they—?”
“Hit me a time or two, that’s all,” the lady clerk of the rolls replied, her voice quavering just once. “But they were going to cut out my tongue, and then—and then—”
Her voice soared into tears, and she rushed into his arms.
“Have some fun,” Mirt grimly finished her sentence for her, holding her tight. “Pity we’ll need a priest, now, to make what’s left of them talk. I’m taking you out of here, the moment I’ve collected my steel. And this iron bar—handy, this.”
So it was that Lady Dawningdown was very soon thereafter brusquely evicted from her own coach, where it stood in the palace foreyard waiting for her bullyblades to return with word that Rensharra Ironstave had been satisfactorily dealt with.
She took one look at the face of the old fat man hauling her forth from her back corner as if she weighed nothing at all, and another look at Rensharra Ironstave’s stern face, and then looked away. Without a word, she took herself off across the palace yard as fast as her cane could help her scurry.
A moment later, her coachmaster and both coachjacks all came hurtling down face-first onto the cobbles, bouncing in the dust and cursing and clutching bleeding and broken noses—and her finest day coach was rumbling away as fast as the fat old man could whip its horses, out onto the Promenade with a rising rumble.
“Stop, thief!” she dared to call, then, shaking her cane at the dwindling conveyance. Not that anyone heeded, of course. The palace doorjacks merely gave her shrugs when she informed them what had befallen, so she crisply told them all something stern and clear, and started walking.
By the time she reached the eastgate, to complain to the Purple Dragons on gate guard duty and demand fast riders be sent after the stolen coach, she thought better of demanding anything of them at all. The coach had almost run over those guards as it raced out of the city, and they were still muttering about arrogant nobles and telling each other they’d recognized the Dawningdown arms on the doors, oh, aye, to be sure …
Muttering some choice curses of her own, Lady Dawningdown marched over to the nearest rental coach, to hire passage home across half of Suzail.
Prudence, even for expendable mindslaves of the future emperor of Cormyr, was occasionally desirable.
So it was that for the last leg of his journey, Wizard of War Jarlin Flamtarge had let his horse go and departed Orondstars Road for the concealment of the trees bordering it.
Now, however, the walls of Irlingstar loomed above him. He stepped down into the road for the last few trudging strides uphill to the nearest gate, where he swung the great clacking knocker, identified himself to the guards, and was admitted.
The lord constable, it seemed, was busy in an upper passage. He told the anxious guard he’d find his own way there, and set off up a stair. At its head was a long passage running the length of the fortress, or so it seemed. There was also another stair, leading higher, but for the moment, Flamtarge ignored it in favor of strolling down the long passage.
The first cell doorway had a bored-looking noble standing in it. Who spat at the passing war wizard the moment Flamtarge was close enough.
With a sneer, the Crown mage hurled a blasting spell into the noble’s face. It flared into harmless brilliance as it was intercepted by an unseen ward that stretched across the doorway. The noble decided it was his turn to sneer.
Well, well. This would not do at all. Manshoon cast a spell Flamtarge did not know, burning a hole in the ward for just long enough to immolate the sneering noble.
As smoldering bones collapsed in a heap of swirling ashes, he gave them a jaunty sneer, and proceeded on down the passage.
Former Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake tried to appear calm. He was sitting alone in his locked and spell-sealed prison, but of course his captors were watching everything he did, and listening, too.
Their requirements had been clear. So it was that despite the successful string of Irlingstar deaths, Mreldrake was making minor adjustments to perfect a means of magically wielding his conjured, wraithlike shearing edge of force from afar. This blade could bypass wards by being willed to manifest within them, but his captors wanted it to be able to shear through wards, or at least pass through them without delay or impairment.
Yet despite their carping, their dozens of tiny criticisms, what they’d ordered had been accomplished. The lord constable of Irlingstar was dead.
So it was with satisfaction, albeit weary satisfaction, that Rorskryn Mreldrake took a break from dealing death in Irlingstar and making future slayings more elegant to stretch his cramping fingers and sip some tea.
He was no traitor. What he’d done was for the good of Cormyr—and so, both just and right. Many courtiers and nobles wouldn’t see it that way, of course, but they were the villains, not he. Ah, this tea was … comforting. Yes.
Only their families might decry his judgment that the imprisoned nobles of Irlingstar were utterly expendable. Why, he’d heard even timid backroom palace scribes describe them as wastrels and troublemakers that Cormyr—and everywhere else—would be better off without. So there was nothing at all wrong or villainous about using them as the subjects of his … experiments.
The explosions had been unfortunate, but such things happen when one is experimenting. They were no more than the unforeseen results of trying to shape his cutting edge of force into handlike shapes, to try to wield magic items from afar. Every such attempt had been disastrous. Contact between his edge and enchanted items always made the magic items explode. And the backlashes always left him unconscious and mentally reeling for quite some time thereafter.
Even the most stubborn of his captors seemed to have seen enough of such disasters. He’d unwillingly and unintentionally proven that i
t wouldn’t work—his edge couldn’t be used to work other magics from a distance. However, just using the forceblade to slice throats worked quite well. So, let the throats to be sliced henceforth belong to foes who mattered.
Such as Manshoon, and the one called Elminster, too …
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
ECHOES IN THE WEAVE
I … I did not know dragons took such an interest in the doings of humans,” Harbrand said feebly. “Aren’t we just, uh, food, to you?”
“Belt up, idiot,” Hawkspike suggested, beside him.
The dragon chuckled again, with a deep thunder that shook the cavern—and their back teeth.
“I did not begin life as a black dragon,” it told them. “I call myself Alorglauvenemaus now, but in truth I’m a man—a wizard, transformed by my own Art. Once, I was feared within the Brotherhood and unknown outside it.”
“The Brotherhood? The Zhentarim?” Harbrand asked.
“Yes. I am Hesperdan of the Zhentarim. I took dragon shape nigh a century back to keep watch over the mage Vangerdahast, the self-styled guardian of Cormyr. He had been the kingdom’s Royal Magician and its court wizard and its true ruler, all at once—and when he deemed the time right, he retired from it all to take dragon shape. I was suspicious of him then, and I am suspicious of him now.”
“Oh?” Harbrand asked, starting to become genuinely interested. He’d begun talking just to try to buy a few more breaths of life, but …
“Oh, indeed. Despite being lesser in Art, he’d quietly become the most dangerous tyrant mage of us all, his reach even greater than Manshoon’s thanks to the wizards of war he commanded. I believed curbing his schemes was the most important life work any mage could concern himself with. I still believe that.”
“And so?”
“And so, along came the Spellplague and changed everything. The gods laugh at us all.”
“So how did it change you? Are you trapped in dragon shape?”