by Paul S. Kemp
"Good riddance," grunted Elgan, standing on the wall-walk with Mirt and everyone else, as they all watched the four horsemen dwindle over the flank of the nearest hill. "Now at least the killings will end, and we can try to decide what to do about yonder approaching army, before they butcher us all."
As he spat thoughtfully down over the wall into the moat below, a shrill scream split the air behind them-a scream that ended in a wet splattering-in the courtyard of the darm-fruit trees.
It seemed Elgan had been mistaken.
Mirt looked down at the shattered body sprawled in a puddle of blood that was still spreading. Larl Ambror, or had been. Amn now held one fewer wine merchant-or, perhaps, one fewer wine merchant's double.
Lady Roselarr had taken one look at the corpse, shrieked, and fled up the grand staircase like a whirlwind.
"Seems someone wanted her newfound love to fly," Deln muttered.
Mirt smiled sourly. "Think Ongalor's wizards did it, from afar? Some compulsion spell or other?"
Deln shrugged. "Why him? Taking you down would be his best strike against us."
"Oh? Wouldn't that be the best way to scare everyone into fleeing Ombreir?"
"If we can. I'm thinking they threw up barrier spells we haven't even guessed at yet, to make this place a pris-"
Deln stopped speaking in astonishment. Darmon Halandrath had mounted the stair. Gaping, everyone watched him ascend, a great rolling mound of struggling flesh surging upward.
"Tymora and Tempus preserve us," Tauniira muttered.
"Or Yurtrus gnaw our bones," Hargra added.
Panting and sweating, Halandrath reached the upper level and lurched in the direction of his bedchamber. Before he was out of view, Helora Roselarr reappeared, coming back down the stairs with her arms full of gleaming, gilded-and obviously heavy-coffers. Her face was white as bone and set hard with determination, her eyes red from the tears still streaming down her cheeks.
"Whatever," Ralaerond Galespear drawled, "are you doing?"
"What you should be doing," she snapped back. "Fleeing this deathtrap just as swiftly as I can!" She tried to push past him, toward the open front gates, and found herself surrounded by frowning Amnians and Mirt's warriors.
"We're going to die here, every one of us!" she cried, voice rising. "I doubt these Just Blades-if they're truly anywhere near here at all! — will find anyone left alive here in Ombreir, when they do come riding in! Someone hiding among us is butchering all the rest of us, and smiling up his sleeve all the while! I-"
Words failing her, she launched into a shriek of frustration, rammed a blinking Torandral out of her way with one of the coffers she was cradling, and shouldered her way through the rest of the warriors-who looked to Mirt for instructions. He waved a hand to indicate they should let her pass.
In her wake, Darmon Halandrath came thundering back down the stairs, clutching a leather satchel to his gigantic belly and howling for breath, sweat streaming down his nigh-purple face like a river. "M-make way!" he tried to bawl, but lacked the breath to make it more than a hoarse wheeze. "Make-"
Mirt gestured curtly, and his warriors cleared a path for the gigantic Amnian.
One or two of the other Amnians started to follow Roselarr and Halandrath in their march to the gates-only to halt in horror, and stare.
As she passed through the gatehouse, Helora Roselarr seemed to catch fire.
She shrieked, took two blazing steps, then seemed rooted to the spot, held up from falling by the sudden roaring fury of flames streaming up from her to the sky.
Blinded by sweat and trotting hard, Halandrath almost blundered into her, lurching to one side at the last moment-and bursting into flames of his own. "No!" he cried wetly, flinging his fat arms wide. "Nooooo!"
Mirt and the others watched in grim silence as the flames rose higher, two bright columns licking black smudges of smoke into the sky.
In mere moments Roselarr and Halandrath became ashes on bones, then bones straining to run on, then collapsing bones. One of Roselarr's coffers sagged open, spewing out a wet flood of melted gold, but the other burst with a little pop, sending forth an assortment of gem-adorned rings, bracelets, hairpins, and other small items that winked and glowed with magical radiances. . that seemed to get ensnared in the air by an unseen hand or current, that sent them flying away in a common direction, along the front of the mansion wall. Faster and faster they streamed, curving to hug the wall at its every bend, and before the watchers had found time to draw more than a few breaths, they came into view again, racing along, having circumnavigated Ombreir. They sped past once more, a glittering stream, and in their wake something small and golden amid the blackened and guttering ruin that had been Darmon Halandrath rose to join them… followed by other… somethings.
"Those are magic items, aren't they?" Torandral asked.
Mirt nodded.
"Why… why are they circling the walls like that?"
"They're caught in the barrier Ongalor's wizards left behind," Mirt replied, "cast all around Ombreir, to trap us all inside."
As if his words had been a cue, a plume of smoke rose into the sky from the far side of a nearby hill. Up over the brow of that hill, with the swiftly thickening smoke behind them, came riding an armed and glittering host, with a banner flapping at their fore.
It was a black, five-spired crown on gold, the Crown of Prince Uldrako. The Just Blades had come at last.
"They must have finished looting the Narthaen mansion, and set fire to it," Mirt mused aloud. "Which means they have every intention of sleeping here tonight."
As his warriors muttered and readied their weapons around him, Gralhund and Gauntyl banners unfurled alongside the pretender's banner, to fly openly.
Tauniira shook her head at the sight of them. "They mean to make you rue your choice of employers, Mirt."
"Won't the magical barrier protect us?" Torandral asked, fear and excitement making his voice shrill.
Mirt and his veterans shook their heads.
"It'll go down the moment they reach it," Mirt growled, "and they'll have us surrounded by then. Even if they lack a wizard with any wits about him, Ongalor and his spell hurlers are scrying us from afar. They'll take it down, and soon, now."
"The barrier," Harlo Ongalor said, staring into the moving scene he could see in the sphere of glowing radiance that floated in the air in the middle of the glade. "Get ready to take it down."
The three wizards who'd conjured that sphere no longer looked like a trio of wealthy Amnians. They had been staring intently at the spell-spun scene back at Ombreir, and continued to do so, saying not a word in reply.
The vizier was not accustomed to being ignored. "Jaelryn!" he snapped, choosing the weakest mage, the one he knew was more afraid of him than the others. "Did you hear me?"
Jaelryn kept silent, and the vizier glared at him, suddenly aware that all three wizards were standing motionless, staring fixedly into the sphere as if enthralled.
"Jaelryn?" Ongalor shouted, alarmed. "Orauth? Maundark?"
"They can't hear you," a calm feminine voice announced from right behind the vizier.
He whirled, jumping back as he did so, the rings on his fingers winking into life.
A barefoot woman in the tattered, filthy remnants of a rotten but once-grand black gown stood facing him, her long, wavy silver hair coiling and lashing around her shoulders like a nest of restless snakes.
"Who are you?" Ongalor snarled, feeling the tingling that meant the greatest smiting magic of his rings was almost ready. "And what have you done to my wizards?"
The woman stared at him with open contempt in her eyes. Those eyes flared silver-and the vizier's rings exploded, taking Ongalor's fingers with them.
Gods, the pain!
He found himself on his knees, screaming, waving his hands violently to try to dash the pain away-and failing.
"You should tend 'your' wizards better, Vizier," the silver-haired woman sneered. "Just now, they're entranced by
the Weave, and their fates depend on what I find in their thoughts. As for me. . most folk know me as the Simbul. I serve Mystra, and the land of Aglarond. I've been watching you for a long time, Harlo Ongalor, and am quite happy to be your doom."
"My-? What did I ever do to you?" the vizier sobbed, trying to struggle to his feet and reach the wand at his belt with the bleeding ruin of his right hand.
"When I wore the guise of Alathe, you had me flogged to the bone for disputing your trade dishonesties with you in Athkatla."
The Simbul took a step closer and added calmly, "When the prettiest of the bedchamber-lasses you rented out in Murann died of her treatment at your hands-glass shards thrust into someone will do that, Ongalor-I took her place, and you promptly had me fed to your dogs."
The wand at the vizier's belt slid itself up, past his desperately grabbing hand, and turned in the air, just out of his reach, to menace him.
"And in Crimmor," the silver-haired woman continued, "when I posed as that trade envoy from Sembia and refused to be threatened into signing the deal you wanted, you had me felled in the street with a slung stone to the back of my head, and drove your wagon over me-three times, Ongalor, just to make sure you'd broken as many bones as you could. Then you laughed in my face and snatched my purse."
The Simbul bent closer and added, "Your life is so full of such cruelties that you may not recall just three slain women out of so many, yet I'm sure if I bother to give you time enough, you'll remember at least one of those slayings. Even if, just now, you can't put a.. finger on it."
And she smiled at Harlo Ongalor as the wand began to glow.
It was a soft smile that held all the mercy of the grin on the face of a hungry wolf.
As the Just Blades rode down the hill, those standing ready inside the gates of Ombreir were shocked to see a dead herald hanging limply in the air at their fore, head lolling, spitted on a trio of lances.
"A herald! There'll be trouble over that," Mirt muttered.
"There will, indeed," Ralaerond Galespear said softly at his shoulder. Something in the heir's drawl made Mirt look at him-in time to see the horse breeder's handsome good looks melt away into taller, broader-shouldered, feminine beauty.
A silver-haired woman who looked somehow familiar snatched Mirt's sword out of his hand, handing him Galespear's rapier with the words, "Here. Sorry it's such a toy."
A moment later, he was missing his best dagger, too, and she was striding away through the gates.
"No one should follow me past the gatehouse," she snapped, silver hair swirling. "The barrier stands."
It shimmered around her as she spoke, but she walked through it unharmed to meet the advancing army.
"We come to parley!" one of the younger Gauntyl knights shouted. "See you not the herald?"
"There will be no parley with you, who dared to treat a herald so," the lone woman told him. "I'll grant you only one gift: swift death."
The knight sneered. "How generous! Just you, against us all?"
She shrugged. "If some of you would like to be gallant and retire while I butcher the rest, be assured I'll get to you all eventually."
"You're mad!" barked a Gralhund warrior, stalking to meet her.
"That's true enough," the woman agreed. "So, shall we?"
Reluctantly, shaking his head, the Gralhund warrior swung his axe at her-and she danced aside, sprang behind his swing to thrust steel into his armpit, and spun to slice open the throat of another warrior with her dagger.
"Doomed," Loraun murmured-but stared, jaw dropping, as the stranger with the silver hair slashed, thrust, leaped, and slew, a tireless butchery that took her into the heart of the Just Blades.
Everyone in Ombreir watched in deepening awe, waiting for her inevitable fall… a fall that did not come.
"Twenty or more, already," Mirt mumbled, shaking his head. He could see some sort of warding magic was turning aside hurled lances and fired arrows from the woman, but still. .
Sheer weariness should drag her arms down soon, and they'd overwhelm her.
"I weary of this," they heard her say, through some trick of her magic-in the instant before beams of silver fire lashed out from her eyes, to blast to ashes Prince Uldrako and the senior Gauntyl and Gralhund knights riding with him. "Now begone, or I'll slay you all!"
She buried her steel in another two warriors-and the rest of the Just Blades shouted, turned, and fled, leaving more than sixty fallen on the hill.
The woman watched them go, then turned and walked back to the gates, drenched in blood not her own and leaking silver flames here and there where she'd been wounded.
"The barrier still stands," she warned those gaping at her.
"I'd not seek to depart, were I you."
She handed back Mirt's bloody sword and dagger, and told him, "I need a bath, and trust your cooking best. Make me some of that shieldfry of yours. There's still enough of Ambror left for a good meal, I think."
Mirt gave her a hard look, as men gagged or winced around him, and decided she was jesting. He hoped.
"Cook for me up in South Tower," she ordered. Then she commanded everyone else, "Where not one of you will go, until Mirt and I come down out of there."
The fire quickened. Mirt set two pans to warming over it. No need to weaken a shield when he had cookware. He laid Ombreir's best leg of lamb on the cutting board, hefted the cleaver, and set to work.
Silver hair swirled in the doorway, shedding a fine mist of water. Her bath was done already. "You know who I am, don't you?"
He nodded. That night, years ago, had just come back to him. "Dove, of the Seven," he growled. "Saw you once, dancing at the Bright Bared Battlelass, in Waterdeep."
Dove grinned. "Couldn't resist the name of that place. Pity 'tis gone. So you've seen all of me."
Mirt nodded. "Thews and thighs to out-muscle mine," he said. "So what brings a Chosen of Mystra into the endless war that is Amn?"
"Serving the goddess. In this case, hunting down Red Wizards who repeatedly offend against her wishes."
"Tell me," Mirt said, cutting up garlic. "Please."
"Klellyn, a Thayan agent. Silver fire-put my tongue in his mouth, left no mark. He cast a wildfire spell you were close enough to feel."
Mirt nodded. "Wildfire's bad?"
"He was trying to forever make magic 'go dead' in one tower here, as a trap for other mages. Lured there, a simple dagger thrust could end them. That sort of deliberate damaging of the Weave is something we Chosen are sworn to try to prevent."
Mirt set the lamb to sizzling, turned to face Dove, and asked simply, "Are you going to let me live?"
"Of course. You, I like and trust. You're no misuser of the Art."
"Was the vizier?"
"Small, puny. . Ongalor is a vindictive fool, about half the astute schemer he thinks he is. The five wizards who work with him, though… Orauth is formidable, and Maundark's deadly enough."
"Why the doubles, for all of us? Why didn't he just blast us?"
"He wanted the Just Blades to slaughter all of you. The doubles obey him and can be used in many swindles. Later, he'll let others capture those doubles. When those others put forward the doubles or their remains, the five wizards will end the magical disguises on the doubles, and Ongalor's rivals will be discredited, not to be trusted by anyone in Amn."
Mirt nodded, then frowned. "Five. . three gone with Ongalor, Klellyn dead-did you kill Ambror, too?"
"Yes. Another Thayan I was after. He'd just cast a life-draining magic that would have withered away two folk here and used their life force to allow him to mind control others at will. You're penned in with more serpents than Loraun. The fifth wizard is still here in Ombreir."
"Who?"
Dove drew Mirt's sword out of his scabbard, turned to the door and flung it wide-and drove the sword deep into Tauniira, who'd been leaning against the door listening.
Spitting blood, Tauniira staggered forward into the room.
"Behold the wizard Vare
ssa," the Chosen said. "Ongalor's lover-and commander."
Mirt gaped at his dying comrade.
"She killed the real Tauniira months ago," Dove added. "Just as I've now killed her. After all, in war, people die."
THE SIEGE OF ZERITH HOLD
Jess Lebow
The Year of Shadows (1358 DR)
"For nearly the entire Year of Shadows, the goblin hordes of the High Peaks and the Kuldin Peaks attacked Erlkazar, laying siege to Duhlnarim fir over three months. The war against King Ertyk Uhl of the Starrock goblin tribe seemed endless…"
— Count Gamalon Idogyr of Spellshire, A Report to Her Majesty on the State of Erlkazar
"Fire!"
Arrows vaulted over the wall of Zerith Hold. The twang of bowstrings drifted off just in time to hear the entire volley slap to the ground like a wind-driven steel rain.
"Again!" shouted Lord Purdun, the rightful ruler and keeper of Zerith Hold. His red hair and the long-healed scars on his left cheek shone bright in the afternoon sun as he stood atop the wall, looking out over the ruined battlefield.
The archers responded with another chorus of buzzing from their bows.
The half-elf, half-steel dragon ranger, Jivam Tammsel, crouched behind the crenellation, beside Purdun, winded from the fight. The ashen scales that ran down his neck, shoulders, and back slid effortlessly over one another with each gulp of air.
The two men had been inducted into Elestam's Crusaders together, and both had sworn an oath to protect the people of Erlkazar-even before there was such a thing as Erlkazar and the land had been ruled by King Alemander of Tethyr.
"How long can we keep this up?" asked Tammsel. He scratched at the thick stone with his powerful claws, dislodg shy;ing a small chunk. "Korox has been gone for nearly a month, and we're running out of supplies."