“That’s peculiar. Can’t warn anyone off unless an example’s made.”
“There are some things, where if you make an example, you give the young ones ideas,” Mehen pointed out. “Pandjed is nothing if not canny. He knows the difference.”
“So what did you do?” Khochen asked.
Mehen held her gaze. “I told you,” he said. “I told Verthisathurgiesh Pandjed he could exile me.”
“Does Verthisathurgiesh Pandjed do everything you tell . . .” Khochen trailed off and peered into the distance over Mehen’s shoulder, down the hillside and into the depths of the darkening forest.
Mehen traced her gaze—nothing there. Not at first. Then the flash of magic, purple and gold, far into the distance peeked through the trees once more. He narrowed his eyes as it flashed again.
“Company,” Khochen noted, coming to her feet and retreating to Daranna’s side. A few quick, whispered words and the four scouts were on their feet once more, slipping through the trees toward the strange lights.
“Goodman,” Daranna said softly. “Hold. Let them do what they do best and get us information before we decide whether to strike.”
Mehen didn’t look back at her, watching the faint lights instead, and trying to pick out where the scouts had vanished into the fortress. He had no way to gauge the time this deep into the forest, but it might have been another seven and a half years before the four scouts returned one by one with the sort of answer Mehen was craving.
Thayans.
“What in the name of every dead god are Thayans doing in the High Forest?” Vescaras asked. Daranna remained silent, pondering the point between the trees where the lights had flashed.
“They’ve had trouble with them up in Neverwinter,” Khochen noted. “Maybe whatever they’re after’s not there but here.”
Mehen tapped the roof of his mouth with his tongue. Karshoji Harpers. “Are they supposed to be here?” he demanded. Daranna looked up at him through her hair.
“No.”
Mehen slid his falchion from its sheath. “Then let’s get rid of them.”
The sun has started its downward path, when one of the apprentices returns, his robes scattered with a constellation of blood droplets. Farideh studies them as he crosses the room, her pulse speeding with every step. Whose is it? The old woman’s? The tall man? The woman wrapped in red light? He bends his head in conversation with his fellows, his voice rushed and excited. Something has changed. The wizards all look up at her, like a herd of spooked deer, and out of habit, she looks away, down at the waters. Mehen would be disappointed—there are times a warrior shouldn’t back down.
She summons a memory of her father. The vision of Mehen plaiting her hair, before she heads out on patrol duty for the first time, back in the village of Arush Vayem, washes up as sharp-edged as it is in her mind. She is so young and gangly at fourteen— she knew it then, and the image only makes her want to hug her younger self close.
“Is it . . . ,” the younger Farideh starts. She tries again. “It’s just it’s supposed to be so dangerous.”
“It’s not dangerous,” Mehen says. “Stop listening to Criella.”
“If it’s not dangerous, then why is there a wall? Why do we need patrols?”
Mehen ties her hair off, tucks the end of the braid into the band at the nape of her neck, and steps around her to check her armor, her sword belt. “There is dangerous,” he says, “and there is dangerous. You’re watching for signs of bandits and monsters migrating through. Getting a little hunting in. That’s it. The day patrol is nothing, or they wouldn’t let a fourteen-year-old do it.”
“ ‘Make,’ ” the younger Farideh corrects.
“You will be fine,” Mehen says. “You’ll have your sister with you. A blade at your side.” He pauses and his great nostrils flare. “Hmmph. But keep her from running off. She needs you to be her . . . voice of reason.”
Farideh looks away. “She doesn’t listen to me.”
“She does,” Mehen says. “She doesn’t listen to everyone, but she listens to you, Fari. Even when it doesn’t look like it.”
He looks her over once, then hugs her tight. “Remember: keep your wrist firm and your grip gentle. And don’t worry about the day patrol.”
Two fat tears send a series of ripples over the scene. Farideh wants to ask if Havilar would have listened this time, if it would have been wiser to tell her the truth about Bryseis Kakistos, the collector devils, and the Toril Thirteen. But the waters don’t know the answer any more than she does, and Farideh is running short of time.
Though not as short as the people she’s doomed, she reminds herself. She steels herself and looks up at the apprentices, who watch her back, appraising. Whatever it is she’s done, their opinion of her is shifting, and it doesn’t soothe her at all.
Chapter Twelve
23 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) The High Forest
Mehen crouched behind a moss-covered hump of stone, peering past at the moonlit clearing. The Thayan party had stopped, lowering the palanquin carried between two hulking zombies so that the two necromancers inside could exchange places with two more of their fellows. The remaining two clutched the leads of eight ghouls between them, as the creatures pulled like errant hounds, scenting the air wildly. The Harpers had moved carefully, staying downwind of the pack. The smell was thick, and every time Mehen nervously tasted the air, he fought not to gag.
Eight ghouls, six necromancers of unknown skill, two zombies, one towering creature with fingers like sharpened stakes that one of the scouts had identified as a boneclaw. And a Red Wizard.
“She’s sleeping in the palanquin,” Ebros had reported back. “The other wizards swapped in about half an—” He caught himself at Daranna’s furrowed brow. “Eight songs ago.”
“Now’s the time, then,” Vescaras said. “Let’s move.”
“Send your scouts around,” Mehen said. “Fire arrows from behind.”
“I know how to stage an ambush, goodman,” Daranna said. She had nodded at the scouts, gestured quickly in a rough circle, and they’d sped off into the forest.
Now, crouched and ready to attack, Mehen could just mark Ebros in the rustle of a tall oak tree. Daranna peered into the dark, checking for a sign of each.
“Ready?” Khochen murmured.
By way of answer, Daranna gave a nightjar’s looping trill, summoning the scout’s arrows as surely as she might a trained hawk. Two hit ghouls—one straight through the eye, one with a thud and a screech in the meaty part of its back. Their keepers turned toward the source of the arrows, loosing the ghouls. The two wizards who’d just woken pulled globes of light into being. More arrows struck more ghouls in the dark. Then a wizard dropped, clutching an arrow in the gut. The ghouls found the scent of the hidden Harper scouts, scrabbling at the bark of the trees.
The curtains of the palanquin twitched.
“Go,” Daranna said.
The arrows kept coming, but now the wizards aimed their spells at the scouts’ hiding places, splashing the trees with dark magic. Branches withered, leaves dropped. One scout yelped and fell to the brush as Mehen swung his falchion and took the wizard who’d brought her down across the chest. The wizard fell, a look of shock on his features, and Khochen’s dagger froze them that way with one sharp motion. A ghoul leaped on her, but Khochen turned it aside, and toward its former master’s body as she rolled under. The ghoul took the offering, and Khochen took the opportunity to run it through.
The Red Wizard burst from her palanquin, all fury and fiery light, and turned against the scouts and the Harpers that harried her undead and her apprentices. No taller than Khochen, but thicker, her skin was ghostly in the moonlight. Her inky hair stood out in a plume down the center of her shaven head and ran down her back in a thick queue.
Mehen shoved aside another ghoul and slammed against the zombie that had broken free of its harness and come at him, claws raised.
The Red Wizard cast a sp
latter of flames at the battle beyond, catching Vescaras’s sleeve and sending Daranna scuttling back from the boneclaw she’d been harrying. The scouts aimed their arrows at the boneclaw, and as they hit, they burst with a vibrant green light that made the boneclaw scream. It threw a hand up and the tapered blades of its middle fingers stretched impossibly far, up into the trees. Mehen heard Ebros cry out, and Daranna threw herself at the boneclaw again.
The Red Wizard started shouting orders to her remaining apprentices— only three now—to fall back, to pull in toward the palanquin.
But before she could finish, Mehen had reached her and her dangling braid.
He grabbed hold of it and yanked hard. With a yelp, the Red Wizard toppled backward, off the palanquin and to the ground.
Mehen set one clawed foot on her forehead and pressed the edge of his falchion against the woman’s throat. “Call them off,” he hissed. “Unless you can raise things when you’re the one beyond the grave?”
The woman’s dark eyes flicked down to the blade, shocked and fearful. Hesitantly, she raised a hand to the amulet she wore. Shadows twined around her hand.
The undead all froze and looked to the necromancer. Vescaras ran another ghoul through—the creature died with an inhuman screech—before he realized something had changed. The last three apprentices held their spells, dancing in their palms, and watched their leader.
The amulet still clutched in her hand, the Red Wizard looked up at Mehen. She was younger than he’d guessed—younger than his girls. “We surrender.”
“No need,” Daranna said, advancing with her blade out.
“Hold,” Vescaras said. He sheathed his rapier, eyeing the boneclaw, swaying in place, its skinless face impassive. “My friend doesn’t like trespassers in her forest, Lady Red. You might make her mood improve if you tell her what you’re doing here.”
The wizard’s eyes never left Mehen’s. “We have a mission. One you might be interested in for your own sakes. Parley?” Daranna snorted.
“You’ll forgive us,” Khochen said, “but parleying with zombies breathing down our necks is hardly appealing.”
“One zombie,” the wizard corrected. “One boneclaw. Four ghouls. Three necromancers. All held at bay. And myself. You have—I must admit—the advantage. In more than one fashion—I am Zahnya, of the Red Wizards of Thay. Who are you?”
“Your doom,” Daranna said. Vescaras sighed.
“Would you happen to be enemies of Netheril?” she asked. Her first fear at Mehen’s sudden presence had slipped behind a facade, but Mehen could see it, lurking behind her eyes. Not a lunatic, not a bluff—someone’s daughter, he thought. He kept the sword where it was, though.
“Because I might have information to trade,” Zahnya went on. “A partnership to offer, perhaps.”
“In trade for what?” Vescaras asked.
“Not killing me?” Zahnya squeezed the amulet more tightly, her eyes still on Mehen. “There’s a fortress, in the mountains. A wizard of Shade has a prison camp there. That is our mission: find it, destroy it, claim what weapons we can.”
The Harpers did not speak. Mehen felt as if every eye were on him in that moment—as if the Harpers and the undead knew that Mehen would be the one to decide the fate of this unlikely party. She can find Farideh, he thought. “What wizard?” he growled.
“A very evil man,” she said. “I can show you the way to his camp. I can help you destroy him.” She swallowed hard. “We’re on the same side, for the moment.”
Mehen’s pulse pounded. An evil man. Fari, he thought. Fari, Fari—what have you gotten caught in? He knew where he stood—if it meant they got where they needed to be faster, he would lead the slavering ghouls himself.
Vescaras and Daranna traded glances. Khochen’s eyes shifted off the boneclaw and to Mehen’s. “A caster would be handy,” she said.
“No,” Daranna said. “She’ll turn on us.”
“I can give you assurances,” Zahnya said. “The amulet—you can keep it. Control my creations, and the boneclaw.”
“Unwise.” The boneclaw’s hissed word made all of the Harpers jump. Its burning eyes pierced Mehen. “They will betray you.”
“Or they kill us now,” she said to the monster. Zahnya pulled the amulet from her neck and held the jewel up to Mehen. “It is, unfortunately, their choice.”
Tharra hadn’t been exaggerating. The next morning Dahl’s stomach had settled, his head had stopped spinning, and he felt far less fatigued. But his skull felt as if someone had filled it with nails that flexed and pierced his brain as he moved.
You don’t have time for a hangover, he thought. He shuffled out into the sunlight, nearly vomited from the sudden pain, and found Oota’s two guards waiting for him.
“Better, Harper?” the half-orc grunted. Dahl cursed to himself: Tharra clearly had different opinions about the need for secrecy.
“Oota has questions for you,” the human, Hamdir, said. “Come on.”
The little courtyard was empty this time, and Oota was sitting on a makeshift camp stool, making it look like a chieftain’s throne. She smiled when Dahl entered, and Dahl had to wonder what god’s hand had touched her, as a chill went down his spine.
“I assume Tharra has told you what we’re up against,” Oota said. “What we are.”
“More or less,” Dahl said. “Though that poison you dumped down my throat didn’t make things easier to make sense of. What do you want?”
Oota’s dark eye shifted off Dahl, to the entrance. “Tharra and I,” she said, “are on the same side. Let me make that absolutely clear. However, she and I have different ideas of how to be on the same side. How to run things. You understand?”
“Go on,” Dahl said.
“Tharra thinks it’s a death wish to take up arms against the wizard. She thinks we should bide our time until rescuers arrive. I say that is a death wish. There is no way into or out of this camp that the wizard doesn’t make. He picks us off, one by one. Some day—soon—we’ll have to take a stand, and the longer we wait for that day, the more people we lose.”
“You have no weapons.”
Oota smiled to herself. “We have some weapons. Some of us are weapons. Enough that if we had a clever strategist—someone who could even the odds from inside the fortress perhaps?—we could stand a chance. She says you stole a uniform.”
“I’m not about to stroll in there and start cracking skulls. I’d be dead in heartbeats.”
Oota’s attention shifted back to him. “Son, I know what you think of me—but whatever my kin have shown you, people don’t follow me because I’m a fool. I wouldn’t send you in alone. And I wouldn’t send you in without a plan. All I’m asking is if you have the means and the stones to do it.”
“Doesn’t Tharra know how to get in and out?”
“As a servant,” Oota said. “They offer extra rations for those of us desperate or foolhardy enough to take on tasks. But every breath there’s a guard on their back, and no one works down near the armory.” She sat back. “You can certainly use that, if you find a way. But you’re right, we need weapons. We need to deal with present threats first.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Word is,” Oota said, “the wizard has a new pet. A tiefling witch who’s making his life a lot easier.”
Dahl held in every curse he knew. “Does he now?”
“He’s picked up plenty of prisoners over the months, for the gods know what purpose. About thirty all told. But in two days she’s picked out that many of my people—all folks we suspected of having the gods’ good graces—and who knows how many of the rest. Tharra is out asking the longears for their count. Speck’s chatting up the remnants who don’t follow either of us.”
Dahl nodded, as if he were considering the numbers, but all he could think was that Khochen had been right. His younger self had been right. He thought of the distant way Farideh had acted, the way she’d snapped at him before she teleported them to the fortress. There was no
questioning it—Farideh was an enemy.
No questioning it, he thought, but some stubborn part of him still didn’t believe it.
“This keeps up,” Oota said, “the rest of us will be next.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I need someone to get into the parts of the fortress they won’t let servants go to. Recover some weapons and deal with the tiefling. Cripple the wizard somehow.”
“Just that?” Dahl said. “I’m guessing based on that wall and that castle that we aren’t talking about some dabbler.”
Oota shrugged. “Rumor is, he’s not as powerful as he lets on. Maybe there’s something in there that will make the difference. Tharra knows where the witch is—she can get to the tiefling, but as I said—”
“Oota.” Dahl turned and saw Tharra standing in the doorway.
“Ah, my good friend,” Oota said. “What do the longears say?”
“Sixteen. Speck’s found eight more missing.” Tharra nodded at Dahl. “Did you tell him what’s happening?”
Oota stood. “We were just discussing what comes next.”
Tharra gave Dahl a dark look. “Well, good to see you’re up. Can I talk to you a moment?”
Dahl followed Tharra out into the sunlight.
“She’s asking you to help her attack the fortress, isn’t she?” she asked. “Gods be damned, her mind runs like a mine cart.”
“Infiltrate,” Dahl said. “She makes some good points.”
“Good points? Aye, well, here’s the one Oota will never make: attacking the wizard will kill more people than it will ever save. Starting with you.” She pointed up over the rooflines, at the fortress’s tower rising up to vanish in the low clouds. “Six points to that tower. He has a full view and at least four novices who can cast better than any of us. He doesn’t even have to come down to our level to destroy the entire camp. A few spells and we’re all ash.”
The Adversary Page 25