by Ed Greenwood
He held it up, smiled at it, and told Amarune and Arclath, “Fortunately, I always did enjoy playing these particular games.”
In a place as sprawling, tall, and deep as the royal palace of Suzail, there are forgotten places.
There are also “almost forgotten” spots. One of them was a neglected corner deep in the palace cellars where ancient and mighty interwoven ward spells foil detection magics and hide magical auras, very much as a thick fog conceals small scuttling things.
Targrael thought she just might be the last rememberer of that spot, judging by the condition of a particular ill-mended wall that had been getting worse for centuries. It had two dark recesses, cavities where stones had collapsed out to leave behind holes like missing teeth in an old warrior’s jawbone.
One of them was large enough to hold a death knight, one who had managed to unbar the door, escape Druth’s room, and make her slow and painful way to the doors of the royal crypt after several long and agonizing hours of crawling. Only her incredible force of will kept her going.
There, as she’d expected, the Fang of Baerovus glowed, as it protruded from the heart of a warding-rune that had kept it from entering the crypt.
She had it with her now.
Oh, this was going to hurt.
Stepping into the little cavern behind the wall, she bent over, choosing where she would fall, making certain she had space enough to lie. The slow, cold drops of water seeping through the stone above her chilled her back as she brushed against them. Yes, this place would do. It would have to.
She undid her leathers above her belt, laying bare her midriff, chose the spot with one careful finger—and slowly thrust the Fang of Baerovus into herself, driving the blade up under her ribs.
Every inch tore a fresh gasp of pain out of her, and she shuddered helplessly.
“I,” she hissed at the unhearing stone around, “am a Highknight of Cormyr. The Highknight of Cormyr!”
Then the agony overwhelmed her, and she sank down with a moan, trembling …
This was her doom, or her last slender hope.
Would her undeath slowly drink the magic of the dagger, healing and strengthening her, despite the agony she now felt?
She dared not move around the palace—where Alusair might find and finish her, or foolish war wizards destroy her. Not as weak as she’d become, even before tasting the Fang.
She would be a long time healing, if this worked at all … a very long time.
But then—she smiled coldly—that was the one thing she did have left. Time.
“What was that?” a Dragon snapped, his sword hissing out.
“A stone tumbling out of a water-soaked wall,” Glathra replied briskly, not slowing in the slightest. “It’s why we no longer use this part of the cellars much. Too many springs seeping out of the stones. Walls were built to seal off the worst parts, but that was centuries back, and they fall, stone by tumbling stone, with no one here to care or rebuild. Don’t worry, there’s quite enough solid rock left to hold the palace in place up above our heads. All four cellar levels and six floors of it, just here.”
“I thought I heard someone moan,” the soldier muttered, looking behind them. Glathra sighed.
“Lord Warder,” she commanded, “you have the right wand handy; are there undead behind us?”
Vainrence smiled, used the wand, and reported, “No.”
Glathra turned to the Dragon, the Highknight with her, and the other three Dragons carefully avoiding her eyes. “Happier?” she asked the soldier briskly.
“Yes, lady,” he replied, managing to convey not even a hint of a sigh. Or a curse.
“Good.” She swept on. “We have much larger worries.”
“Loyal blades,” Vainrence spoke up, “I presume you’ve heard the names Garendor, Argrant, Orkrash, Wyshbryn, and Loagranboydar?”
“The sages who’ve spent years digging through ancient court records, down here somewhere?” the Highknight asked.
Glathra gave him a sharp look, but he added stoutly, “The entire palace knows as much. What we don’t know, any of us, is what they’re looking for. Tidying up and organizing doesn’t take years.”
“Well,” Glathra said tartly, “it can, but yes, those five have spent most of their waking hours in certain deep palace cellars doing rather more than putting records in order. They’ve been tracing royal and noble lineages.”
The Highknight snorted, which earned him another sharp look.
“Yes, clever Sir Hawkmantle, they’re, as you so subtly hint, not merely reading records any commoner can consult in the right royal court offices, any day they choose to. We’re hoping these sages can, by referencing recorded incidents from the past, identify nobles who have, or are likely to have, any inherited personal talent for the Art.”
“You’re hunting the noble who commands a blueflame ghost,” one of the Dragons said quietly.
Glathra stopped dead, so swiftly that they almost ran into her, and gave the man a flat, expressionless look. “I see there’s nothing at all wrong with your wits, Sir Jephford.”
“For years,” the lord warder told the ceiling, “our wizards of war have scorned using such methods to learn more about our nobles’ mastery of magic, trusting instead to scrying and to subversion of—even placing our own mages among—the House wizards hired by all nobles who can afford to do so. Yet this long-practiced vigilance has thus far failed to identify who controls the ghost who slew nobles at the Council, so …”
“You’re willing to try other methods,” Sir Hawkmantle finished the sentence. He did not add “at last,” but his tone of voice made doing so unnecessary.
If the Lady Glathra’s glare could have melted manhoods, he would have suffered such a fate on the spot.
The lord warder flung out an arm to bar Glathra’s way. “I will go first.”
“Lord Vainrence,” Glathra began, “there’s no need—”
“Oh, but there is,” he said firmly. “The little tellsong I cast across the passage here is gone. Meaning powerful magic has been cast, very close by.”
“A tellsong? You never—”
“No, I did not. A secret is something one person knows. Once two know it, that ‘secret’ is better termed ‘realm-wide gossip.’ Wait here.”
Glathra stayed where she was, a little shocked. Vainrence had never been so curt with her before.
A moment later he returned and pointed to two of the Dragons. “With me. You two, guard the Lady Glathra. Swords out.”
Everyone exchanged grim looks.
A few breaths later, Glathra was summoned to join the lord warder and learned why.
The passage they’d been following ended in a large room, which in turn opened into a huge storage cellar. The cellar held the records and the room where the sages worked, in a crowded den of chairs, floating glowstones for lamps, and tables.
No longer. Not only were there no men to be seen nor any hovering glowstones, the furniture and every last record had been reduced to ashes.
Including five neat little piles, standing in a line along a great rectangle of ash that marked where a table had been.
The conflagration had raged long enough ago that all smoke and smell had fled, and everything was cold. Yet a lingering, sickly yellow-green glow played and flickered feebly here and there among the ashes, from the magic that had done this.
“Treason,” Glathra whispered. “Right here, beneath our feet. Beneath the king.”
“Stand back,” Vainrence ordered, spreading his arms. “I must try to learn what befell here.”
Glathra turned and made shooing motions, frowning at the Highknight, who seemed reluctant to move.
He and one of the Dragons obeyed as the lord warder began a long and careful incantation.
Glathra turned back to face him, to intently watch the spell’s results. It was hard for any one person to notice all the details when such a revelation took shape, because so much was revealed so quickly ere it all faded. A second casting
would be only a poor echo of the first, a third a ghost of the second, and so on.
Vainrence cast the spell unhurriedly, careful and precise, finishing with a careful flourish.
And the world exploded.
Sir Eldur Hawkmantle was quick. As the blast erupted in front of him, he sprang back, trying to twist around in the air—which promptly gave him a hard shove in his ribs and in a whirling instant slammed him hard into a passage wall that had been far behind him.
He lost consciousness for a moment amid the rolling, booming echoes and swirling dust, but when he was aware again and could move, he discovered he and one wincing and groaning Purple Dragon were the only folk coming to their feet.
Vainrence had unwittingly triggered a waiting trap. A blast of some sort that had—he stared at ashen corpses, crumbling as he watched—fried the other three Dragons, because they happened to be closest.
He dimly remembered seeing Glathra and Vainrence scream, brief tongues of flame spurting from their eyes and mouths ere they’d toppled. Wincing at that memory, he went to them.
They were sprawled atop the older ashes, looking lifeless.
Not scorched, outwardly, and nothing about them seemed broken or missing. Unconscious, and quite possibly brain-burned.
“Search,” he ordered the dazed surviving Dragon, and set an example by stirring the ashes very gently with his sword.
They found nothing, but the glowstones Glathra and Vainrence were wearing began to flicker and fade, so they grimly hoisted the two stricken mages onto their shoulders and began the long, grim trudge back up to where they could find help.
Someone wanted family secrets kept. Someone who had magic to spare.
Storm came in first, with Elminster right behind her.
Mirt was standing with daggers up beside both ears, held ready to throw.
She crooked an eyebrow at him. “You hate being Heljack Thornadarr that much?”
Mirt grinned, resheathed his fangs, and turned to the table behind him, waving them toward a platter piled high with cold roast fowl and a large, lazily steaming bowl of fragrant fieldgreens soup. “Want some?”
“Do Waterdhavians love coins?”
Mirt ladled soup into tankards for them. “So, who’d ye kill tonight? Shall I expect a host of Purple Dragons to soon break down the door, even as the massed wizards of war blast the roof off?”
“No one, and I hope not,” Storm replied wearily, sipping soup and discovering she was ravenous. She waved at the food. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Arclath sent a servant with it. Suitably disguised, so no fear. Said he’ll send a man around on the morrow to teach me to cook.”
El and Storm regarded him with identical frowns of concern, then headed for their bedchamber, snatching up food and taking it with them.
Mirt roared with laughter at their reaction and headed for his own bed, decanter in hand.
After all, only six decanters already lay beside the bed, and his throat was as dry as all Anauroch.
“You should have come to me earlier, you two.” The Lady Marantine Delcastle spoke softly, even sadly. “I had no idea.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Arclath said gravely. “This is my fault, entirely. Rune didn’t even know my name a month back.”
He spread his hands. “I suppose every young noble thinks his—or her—concerns about what’s ahead for Cormyr, and its noble Houses in particular, are something older nobles don’t want to hear, or will challenge or dismiss out of hand. After all, you are inevitably part of whatever we want to see changed, or that we fear won’t change, or …”
Lady Delcastle nodded, the ghost of a smile rising to her lips. “I recall feeling very much as you do now, when I disagreed with my father. He hurled me into the duck pond. Which is why we no longer have a duck pond.”
Amarune and Arclath had been sitting with her in the best parlor in Delcastle Manor for hours, explaining what had been going on with the blueflame ghosts—but not their work with El and Storm, or their deepening friendship with Mirt. Lady Delcastle, in a rare friendly, talkative mood, had proven to be a free-flowing geyser of information about noble feuds and alliances and personal friendships and hatreds, from the time of Arclath’s grandsire up until last night, or so it seemed.
She was frowning, now, trying to recall something. Suddenly she flung up an imperious hand for silence and brightened. “I remember!”
Arclath thrust his head forward eagerly, squeezing Amarune’s hand in an unnecessary signal for silence. His mother noticed and grinned.
“And does that work on her, dear?”
Her son flushed to the roots of his hair, and the Lady Marantine patted his other hand affectionately and said, “Never you mind. Yet listen. The Imprisoners, they were called.”
“They?”
“No, I’ll not be rushed, dear. Let me tell this my way. I had it in hints and careless sentences here and there, mind you, from your uncles and Baelarra and Thornleia, anyhail, so it’s not much.”
She paused, tapping her chin, then said slowly, “The Imprisoners were a handful of wizards, here and along the Sword Coast—in Silverymoon in particular, I understand, and no, I know no names—who crafted the spells for blueflame items and started imprisoning particular persons within them, long ago. Before the Blue Fire came and magic went wild.”
She spread her hands. “I heard more about all the astonishment—consternation would not be too strong a word—among our local clergy of Mystra.”
Arclath nodded. “Because of Aunt Thornleia.”
Lady Marantine nodded. “They were surprised, you see, that the goddess did nothing to stop the Imprisoners, either by altar speech or through her Chosen. As if it was meant to be, or necessary for time yet to come, they said.”
She leaned forward just as her son had done, to stare hard at Amarune and Arclath. “So, has the time now come?”
The royal magician looked up when she strode into the room, and smiled in genuine pleasure. “Ah, something splendid to embrace at last! You’re well!”
Glathra blushed. “Thanks to too many healing prayers from more priests than I care to count. I was fortunate—I was merely caught in the backlash of what felled Vainrence.”
“The lord warder?” Ganrahast asked quietly.
“Remains in care. Senseless, his mind still roiling inwardly, despite all the spells they’ve used.”
Ganrahast sighed. “And the five sages and all those old records are gone.” He waved at the scrying image he’d been intent upon when Glathra had arrived; in its glow, she could see a distant corner of the palace cellars.
“We’re scouring out the cellars now. Larandur has found a spell-locked room—supposedly an armory, sealed since Salember’s time—that has somehow acquired very recent spells on its door seals.”
“So, it’s been opened and resealed recently,” Glathra murmured, gazing into the scrying image with him. There she saw Wizard of War Naloth Larandur, as tall and expressionless as ever, calmly finishing the casting of a “long-arm” spell to open the sealed armory door from a distance.
The seals obliged and melted away, and the door swung open.
Floating just inside the chamber was a spherical creature with one large eye, a wide and crooked many-fanged maw, and ten eyestalks that glared at the six court mages outside the room as the beholder unleashed its eye-magics.
Rays flashed out, a mage staggered, and then another fell. And Larandur and the other wizards of war hurled magic at the monster, in a great roar of unleashed Art.
The result, in the instant before the scrying sphere burst, was a titanic explosion.
Ganrahast was seated, but Glathra was flung off her feet as the entire palace shook around them, the walls swaying. They could hear minor crashes from all around as various portraits, shelves, and the like fell or toppled.
A great wave of force rolled away out into Suzail, and in its wake they heard the stones groan, in a deep and terrible sound that told them, even before shou
ting, running mages came with the news.
Part of the palace had slumped down into ruin topped by unstable, yawing passages and chambers, as the cellars underlying them collapsed.
Killing Larandur and the others with him.
The beholder had been another trap.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
WHEN THE BLUE FLAME DANCES
Buildings shuddered near the palace. Folk were flung off their feet on the Promenade. A wagon sideswiped an inn amid screaming horses and splintering wood; slates and tiles whirled down from roofs in a deadly rain; stones and windows and whole balconies fell from up high to crash to the cobbles in a ragged, ongoing thunder … and one wing of the palace sagged with a deep and terrible groan, settling lower into the earth amid blinding plumes of rising dust.
Manshoon sat back in his chair and allowed himself a gloating smile. He couldn’t look away from the scrying eye that was showing him the aftermath of the explosion.
“They’ll think twice before hurling spells at the next beholder they see,” he purred. “A hesitation that will doom them as surely as if they blasted it with all they have. Ah, this is good sport.”
Chuckling, the Uncrowned Incipient Emperor of Cormyr and Beyond sprang up and strode to another scrying eye to peer at certain nobles who were arguing in a gathering that they believed was private.
“No hint of the blueflame ghost reappearing yet,” Manshoon murmured to himself, “but then its minder knows full well that the wizards of war—not to mention far more formidable mages—are hunting him.”
“Storm, it’s us,” Amarune hissed, snatching off the raffish old sailor’s hat. “See?”
“Ah, but which ‘us’? Surely that fashion disaster in old petticoats with you isn’t the lord and heir of a high noble House?”