Tulbard crashed onto the table, then to his knees, trying to sob out something. Probably a spell.
“Just die, annoyingly persistent Crown mage,” Manshoon murmured, advancing out of his corner.
It was perhaps a dozen strides to where Tulbard struggled on the tiles, but before the future emperor of Cormyr had taken two of them, a noble who’d been dining at a table not far away had lifted his fingers from his fingerbowl, dried them, taken a scepter from his belt—and walked across the room to shield the stricken war wizard.
Manshoon now faced a stern-looking lord who was going gray and running to fat. Lord … Tauntshaw, wasn’t it? One of the wealthy city lords, an investor and landowner. Who was aiming that scepter as if he knew how to use it.
With a sigh of disgust, Manshoon sent a spell at him that should have him shrieking in fear, wetting himself, and fleeing headlong through the club. A noisier frill than most archmages sought, when indulging in murder, but—
Hrast it if the meddling lord wasn’t protected by a shielding spell, too! Was everyone in Suzail a dabbler in the Art, or did they all just have spare coins enough to buy small arsenals of magics they fancied they might just need someday?
Lord Tauntshaw’s scepter spat howling death at Manshoon.
Who sneered, as his many-layered shieldings easily foiled it, and kept walking. He’d have that scepter, and leave two victims rather than one …
Men hastened nearer from all over the club, and Manshoon saw wands in the hands of several house wizards, and nobles brandishing all manner of toys.
No. Another time. Sraunter’s cellar beckoned.
The unknown mage who’d been stalking toward Lord Tauntshaw—and the moaning, weeping wizard of war on the floor behind him—vanished in mid-step.
A house wizard cast a swift spell. It made a soft white radiance blossom where the man had been, a glow that roved around hastily, then faded away.
“He’s gone,” its caster announced. “Not lurking and invisible. Nor will he or anyone else soon be able to teleport back into where I just searched.”
Many crowded around the wounded man, and around Lord Tauntshaw, offering congratulations. Lord Phaelam gave Tauntshaw a friendly pat on the arm. “Deadly little toy you have there. Well done. I didn’t think you even liked war wizards.”
“I don’t,” Lord Tauntshaw said shortly. “Yet I like even less attacks upon the institutions of our kingdom. To attack a wizard of war is to assault Cormyr—and if we don’t defend our fair realm, it will fall, and we shall have nothing.”
He turned back to his own table, and the dressed roast that would be cold by now, and added over his shoulder, “Fittingly, for we shall deserve nothing.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
UNTIL You CAN REST FOREVER
Unnh,” Mirt told the whirling-past world, wincing as his thighs started to really ache. “I’m getting too old for this. Hrast that interfering noble! I want that coach back!”
The world offered no reply.
’Twas being just as helpful as it usually was. Underneath him, his borrowed horse merely tossed its head and relieved itself one more time, not slowing in the slightest.
Not that he wanted it to. Mirt turned for another cautious look back. Aye, they were still right behind him, still hot for his blood.
He’d ridden far and fast, and that had to be Halfhap ahead, just over the rise.
Ah, so it was—but, hrast and damn, there was a mounted Purple Dragon patrol, outbound from Halfhap, on the road beyond the rise.
They moved to stop him, of course. Mirt bellowed at them and waved wildly at them to move aside, but his spent horse was slowing and shying already, he wasn’t going to manage it—
“Curse you!” he shouted at the Dragon officers who closed in to intercept him. “Don’t you let folk use the roads you build?”
“Hold!” they both commanded sternly, rather than answering him.
Mirt looked back over his shoulder. The pursuit was thundering right along, and he could see Purple Dragons among them. Naed.
“I’m holding,” he growled at the patrol blade who’d just taken hold of his horse’s bridle, “but I need you to listen.”
The thunder of hooves behind him grew, and some of the riders were shouting to the patrol, to catch and hold this “dangerous thief, this noble slayer!”
Noble slayer? Oh, aye, the coach …
Mirt shouted Durncaskyn’s message into the faces of the frowning Dragons who were surrounding him.
Some of them at least were listening. He could tell that from their faces—in the last few moments before his pursuers, riding hard, crashed right into the midst of the patrol.
Horses reared, kicked, screamed, and bucked, men fell off everywhere, other men cursed or shouted orders, someone blew a war horn, someone else drew his sword and started hacking, a dozen Purple Dragon blades sang out of their scabbards, and—
“Bugger this,” Mirt growled to himself, somersaulting forward out of his saddle into the ditch. If he could roll and manage not to break anything, come up and relieve one of these stoneheads of his horse, and get past …
The spell that struck him made everything seem to hush, so it was in an eerie peace that Mirt noticed that everything—shouting men pointing at him, rearing horses, swords being swung—was happening slowly. Very slowly.
Then his gaze was caught and held by the dark, level eyes of a man riding with the Halfhap patrol, who had to be a war wizard. The young, severe-looking man who’d enspelled him.
“Listen to me,” Mirt tried to call to him. “I need you to … to …”
The silent, slowing world went away, except for those severe and disapproving eyes. The mouth beneath them wasn’t smiling, not at all …
“You have a visitor, saer,” the Purple Dragon murmured, unlocking Mirt’s manacles. “He’s been searched thoroughly, but beware—some of these nobles have poison hidden away in right sly places.”
“Nobles?” Mirt asked, with a frown. He remembered many stern questions, stern and then dumbfounded Purple Dragon faces ringing him as they heard his answers, and Halfhap abruptly erupting in a flood of shouting, hurrying men. It seemed Durncaskyn would be getting the help he needed, at full gallop.
Then he’d been chained to the wall in a cell for “later questioning,” his tales of the king and Lady Glathra and Rensharra seeming to strain credulity more than a bit too much.
When the spell that made the world seem faint and far away wore off, he intended to get himself out, somehow. He’d been chained with his wrists well away from his belt, so the little lockpicks there and in his boots might as well have been back in Waterdeep … but unless they were going to spoon-feed him, they’d have to unshackle him sometime.
The cell door opened again, and the same Purple Dragon looked in and then turned and announced expressionlessly over his shoulder, “I’ll be down the passage, beyond where I can hear anything less than a shout. With your four bodyguards, lord.” He turned his head again and gave Mirt a distinct but stonefaced wink.
Ah, nobles. Specifically, his visitor was the one who’d deprived him of his coach on the road. Striding into the cell looking spitting angry, too.
“Coach thief!” Mirt roared at him.
The noble’s eyes bulged, he went from red to dark crimson, and cords stood out in his neck. All in the instant before he whirled around and caught hold of the departing guard’s elbow. “Introduce me to the prisoner,” he snapped.
The Dragon looked startled. “Uh, ah … lord, this man calls himself Mirt, Lord of Waterdeep. Mirt, this is Lord Austrus Flambrant, uh, head of House Flambrant of, ah, Cormyr.” He fled.
“Horse thief,” Lord Flambrant snarled, not even waiting for the cell door to close, “what have you done with Lady Dawningdown?”
“Put her out of her coach for urgent Crown business,” Mirt snapped. “Why did you poke yer long nose into things and try to stop me, anyhail?”
“What? How dare you�
�”
The last of Lord Flambrant’s temper fled, and he went for Mirt, raining a flurry of blows into the paunch and hastily raised forearms of the prisoner who promptly sat back down on the bench. Launching a kick up between Flambrant’s legs that parted noble from codpiece and sent the lord’s head into a swift and hard greeting with the low stone ceiling, Mirt deftly brought his knee up as the stricken noble descended. It managed a satisfactorily solid meeting with His Lordship’s chin—and if Flambrant hadn’t been senseless before, he certainly was now.
Collecting Flambrant’s purse for travel expenses and his dagger for troubles ahead, Mirt clapped the unconscious, blood-drooling noble into the manacles and strode out and down the passage.
Only four bodyguards? Huh. He could be on a horse fast enough to catch up with the relief force, and get back to Immerford as soon as they did. If this was the competence of Cormyr’s nobles and soldiery, he trusted no one but himself with guarding Rensharra.
“This is … exhausting work,” Gulkanun said grimly. “Even when you’re doing it all.”
The drow gave him a nod that was both angry and weary, as they headed for the next cell.
Elminster, Gulkanun, Arclath, and Amarune had searched Irlingstar from dungeon to battlements. Unless someone was buried alive in the great collapsed heap of rubble where the south tower had been, no one was hiding anywhere inside the castle who wasn’t already accounted for. Then the mind-touching had begun. The kitchen staff first, then the castle staff, then all of the guards. No murderous slayer.
Which left only the noble prisoners. Who had been resecured in separate cells, warded away from each other by invisible walls of magic that brought silence, so the painstaking mind-touching could continue without interruption or delay. The nobles were willful, unpleasant men, even when they weren’t confined and angry—and now they were also deeply afraid. They resisted the touch of a drow furiously, even a shapely female drow who purred flirtatiously at them as she approached … and El had found it necessary to take a few bruises from some of them before she could get into their minds and render them docile.
She was uncovering a lot of unsavory things—including not a few murders—but finding no unseen slayer. Seven men hadn’t been the murderer they sought, so far, and she wasn’t sure how many more hostile minds she could wade through, before—
She and Gulkanun parted the wards, to deal with the eighth noble. Who lay sprawled face down on the floor in a spreading pool of fresh blood.
“Oh, naed,” El breathed. “To the next one! Hurry!”
They were too late. The tenth and eleventh lordlings, too, were dead.
“At this rate, Foril won’t be needing this prison any longer,” Elminster snapped. “ ’Tis time to try something else.”
“What sort of something else?” Arclath asked. For safety, he and Rune were staying with El and Gulkanun as they worked.
El frowned. “A spell I dimly recall, intended for another purpose entirely, that might locate and highlight the killer’s magic as it manifests, but before anyone else gets slain.”
“If you’re fast and lucky,” Rune murmured.
El shrugged. “That goes for almost everything in my life. Weapons, everyone.”
She enspelled the blades they were carrying. “These should all now serve to parry the air blade we saw at work. Gulkanun, be ready to shield me; I’ll cast the tracing spell now.”
The war wizard nodded grimly, flexed his fingers, and stepped back to the wall, to watch Elminster narrowly from there. El backed to the wall beside her to begin casting. Arclath and Amarune stood back to back on El’s far side, trying to peer at everyone intently.
As El gestured and started to speak her incantation, the air in front of her promptly thickened into a blade—but struck at Gulkanun first. The war wizard shouted, his ready spell flashing into a bright parry.
Arclath ducked around Elminster in a lunge, the tip of his sword encountering that thickness of the air, just for an instant, but otherwise slicing or spitting nothing at all.
Then something icy slid into his shoulder, and Rune cried his name and started hacking desperately at the empty air there.
Arclath spun around and thrust out, parrying the unseen edge for another fleeting moment. Then they were hard at it, panting and whirling, desperately fighting something they could barely see—until a soft and golden glow rushed from Elminster’s hands, making the forceblade darting through the air shine forth clearly. They saw something else in the spreading golden radiance, too: the blade’s wielder, behind it, a ghostly figure that was clear enough for them all to identify him.
“Mreldrake!” Elminster and Arclath snarled in unison.
Everwood had been watching what was unfolding in Irlingstar for some time. Manshoon had long since joined him, to stand behind his chair and observe. Matters were growing … interesting.
The shapely drow spread her hands, the golden glow flooded forth, and—
“Mreldrake!” Manshoon snapped. “And Elminster must be either the drow or the war wizard! Time to take care of them all at once!”
He snatched out one of his eyeball beholderkin, cast a mindscrambling spell on it that when triggered should stun everyone who got too near it, and teleported the little flying sphere to the corpse of Jarlin Flamtarge.
Duth Gulkanun blinked. A tiny beholder, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand! It had just appeared in the air, right there—
Without thinking, he used his shielding spell to try to thrust it back into the slicing edge of the Slayer’s forceblade.
An unfamiliar, disembodied voice murmured something, and a tiny whirling glow erupted from the flying beholder.
Elminster knew that voice.
So, now … before whatever magic Manshoon was trying to visit on them could erupt, let’s just send it elsewhere—along the magical link binding this forceblade to Mreldrake, for instance!
Smiling grimly, he spent a little silver fire to do just that.
Oooh, Symrustar applauded. Nasty.
The sealed doors of Mreldrake’s room were flung open. His three captors burst in, not troubling to hide from him that they were shades in their frantic haste.
They were just in time to be caught, along with Mreldrake, in the spell lashing out from the tiny beholder.
The mindscrambling made Mreldrake and the closest Netherese shriek helplessly, as pain stabbed through their heads.
For everyone in that room, the world stretched impossibly, and started to swirl …
As he was swept away into madness, the slowest, farthest-back shade managed to snap out a ready spell.
The eyeball beholderkin was small, and close, so it had no chance to escape.
It burst, sending a harmful backlash to the one who’d sent the mindscrambling.
The backlash howled into the cellar, into Manshoon—and his head exploded.
Or rather, Sraunter’s body was beheaded. The alchemist was already standing behind the war wizard, his hand on Everwood’s shoulder, so Manshoon simply left one expendable pawn for another.
He flooded into the dazed, brains-bespattered Crown mage’s mind and seared it to nothing.
Everwood trembled and spasmed for what seemed forever, but was in truth no more than a few fleeting instants.
Then he grew still again—burnt out, a vessel for the future emperor of Cormyr.
Who made Everwood smile more cruelly than the young war wizard had ever smiled in his life.
This new body was young and strong, and fairly competent in Art. In less time than it took Manshoon to swallow his own anger—or Sraunter’s headless body to topple to the floor, forgotten—Manshoon gathered all the magic he could bring to hand, that he could link together with a spell already in his mind.
And he hurled it all at the three shades in Mreldrake’s room.
The shades clawed at each other, their mad shouts slurred, as they staggered helplessly and nigh mindlessly around Mreldrake’s prison.
Hostile magi
c suddenly erupted into the room, lashing them with emerald flame that snarled and rebounded off the walls—and was gone again, just as suddenly, as its fury overwhelmed the tenuous linkage between the room and its distant source.
Mreldrake and the shades gasped in agony, but their pain passed as swiftly as it had come.
Whatever the flame attack had been, it had failed—and shattered the mindscrambling afflicting them in doing so.
Wincing and groaning, the shades hurried out of the room and spell-sealed it again, to cast shielding spells on themselves as fast as they could.
They paid no attention to their unconscious captive, left behind sprawled on the floor.
Above Mreldrake’s unconscious body, his spell collapsed.
And in distant Irlingstar, his forceblade silently faded away.
“We’ve got to get out of here! All of us!”
If the kitchen staff or the guards of Irlingstar were unwilling to take orders from a dark elf—even a beautiful female one—they didn’t show it. Elminster rushed up and down the passages, parting the wards to let prisoners out of their cells. She was ordering the abandonment of Castle Irlingstar immediately, regardless of what Ganrahast or anyone else might say or think later. No one argued.
A few of the freed prisoners promptly attacked her—or Gulkanun, or Rune and Arclath—and there were several brief, nasty tussles, but every one of them ended with the nobles defeated. Nor were hostilities renewed; the promise of getting out of “this deathtrap,” backed up by the fear of being left behind, alone and warded into a cell without food or water to face the unseen slayer, convinced everyone.
In a surprisingly short time, they were gathered at the main gates, and then spilling out of the castle together—cooks, guards, prisoners, staff, and all. Only to come to a dismayed halt.
Something blocked Orondstars Road. Something large, dark, and scaly.
The black dragon Alorglauvenemaus was waiting for them, and it was smiling. Its first spew of acid melted the frontrunners into wounded, dying agony.
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