by Ed Greenwood
The Royal Magician gave the sage a withering glance and waved his hand at the chamber around. “Look you: The stones are solid, with nothing to raise or lower them, floor or ceiling—and there’s no room in the walls for secret doors or passages. The curve you see is because the walls here are the same walls that form the outside of the tower.” One of his hands went to a belt-pouch, hesitated with visible reluctance, and then dipped within.
There was a small glass sphere in the wizard’s fingers when he raised his hand again. He murmured a word over it. Sudden light winked and moved within its depths.
“Stored magic?” Alaphondar asked, leaning forward for a better look.
Vangerdahast nodded. “These hold but one spell—and it’s a spell that works only once in a particular place. Once I’ve called this forth, another spell of the same sort will never manifest successfully in this room.”
“And it’s a …?”
The Royal Magician left the sage’s question hanging unanswered in the air as he went to the windows, closed and latched the shutters, and put his back to them. “In a moment,” he announced, “we should see an image, a person. Identify it if you can—and fix its features in your mind if you can’t.” He felt Sardyl’s question without bothering to meet her gaze, and added, “My magic will be seeking the likeness of the last person to use translocational magic into or out of this room.”
As he spoke, the glass sphere flashed with a vivid golden flame and shattered, tiny shards tumbling musically through his fingers.
A moment later, the air in the middle of the room shimmered, seemed to flow for a moment, and suddenly grew misty. Gray wisps coiled, lengthened, and became—very suddenly—sharp and distinct. They were looking at a woman, or rather at the faint, flickering image of a woman’s upper torso, the rest of her lost in the mists. She looked determined, even eager, as she raised slender bare arms and moved her fingers in the most graceful casting Sardyl had ever seen. Suddenly, she was gone, leaving two fading motes of starry light.
It was a long moment before she realized the woman hadn’t been wearing anything but rings and a necklace. It was another before she heard Vangerdahast swallow in a way he rarely did.
Sardyl knew what that sound meant and turned in time to see grief in Vangerdahast’s softened face. The Royal Magician looked like just what he was: an old man struggling not to cry. That was all she saw before his face hardened.
He looked up at her with what could only be called a defiant glare.
Wordlessly she put a comforting hand on his arm—something Alaphondar would never have dared to do—and asked her question with her eyes.
“Amedahast,” he replied gruffly. “High Magess of Cormyr, into the reign of Draxius. This was her ‘by-herself’ chamber, long ago. No one’s used translocational magic here since her time—not really a surprise, that, given the wards.”
The wizard strode a few paces to the wall, peered at the map, and touched a tiny monogram in one corner of it. “Aye, here’s her mark. She drew this … more than seven hundred summers ago.”
Alaphondar looked around the room once more, and shook his head. No, it really was too small to hide anything from them. “If your missing Bolifar were in this room,” he said carefully, “and didn’t just go back down the stairs after you left him, perhaps he left by way of the window, in wraithform.”
Vangerdahast shook his head. “No holes in those shutters, and no gaps for air to slide through. Saw you the dust when I opened them? No. Something darker happened here. I can feel it.”
His scribe was nodding. She could feel it, too, as strong as when she’d been here before. There was something about this room. A watched feeling …
Alaphondar shrugged irritably, and said, “I’m for my bed. I’ve seen your nothing and have far too much to do tomorrow to stand here yawning any longer. The gods give you good slumber—though for the life of me, you don’t deserve it.”
As the sage turned and left, the wizard and his scribe looked at each other. In unspoken accord, they frowned and turned to prowl the room again, searching for what must be there.
With a sudden growl of impatience at his own failing wits, Vangerdahast cast a magic-seeking, advanced on the map and the lamp, and sighed sourly. He leaned back against the wall. The map held its complex weave of old spells, and the lamp, flame and all, was bereft of enchantment. The rug also bore only the magics of long ago.
Bolifar Geldert, it seemed, had simply vanished from this room. Simply and impossibly. “Impossible,” in Vangerdahast’s experience, always meant magic.
“The sage’s desire for bed seems wiser than before,” he said quietly. “Come, lass. Let’s spell-lock this room and go. There’ll be plenty of time to search fruitlessly on the morrow.”
Sardyl nodded and said nothing, but then she usually did.
YOU DON’T SEEM TO FEATURE IN THIS YET, MAGE. YOU WILL BE TEACHING VANGERDAHAST ABOUT MAGIC BEFORE THIS IS DONE, WON’T YOU? OR IS A LITTLE OF THIS NECESSARY?
[mind slap, red pain flaring like flames in the vaulted darkness]
If ye refrain from that, Nergal, ’twill unfold faster!
[diabolic growl of warning]
[fresh images flaring]
Between great paintings and tapestries, sheets of polished copper striped the palace walls. Lamplight reflected from the metal, throwing a warm glow onto its face and flashing back onto carefully motionless, watching guards. Standing in pairs along the walls, the guards kept their faces expressionless as the Royal Magician escorted his scribe past them to the door of her chambers.
“Get some sleep,” he told her grimly, his voice low enough to reach her ears alone. “There’ll be plenty of time to worry about Bolifar’s fate in the morning. Set your spell shield.”
Sardyl nodded and bowed to him. She looked pale and on the verge of tears, her eyes large and dark.
After another wordless moment, Vangerdahast put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
Lady Crownsilver slid gently out from under it and went into her room.
The Royal Magician stood like a statue, listening as his scribe closed and bolted her door. It was barely a breath later before he heard the tiny singing sound that meant she’d set her spell shield within.
Vangerdahast nodded grimly at the closed door and cast a spell of his own. As he turned away for the long trudge to his own chambers, the guards were startled to see a fist-sized eye hovering behind the wizard’s back, keeping a lookout for him.
The conjured eye saw nothing suspicious on the journey, nor was there anything amiss as the Royal Magician entered his familiar rooms, set his own wards, passed into an inner spell chamber, and turned to his workbench. Without even pausing to light a lamp, he worked a mighty magic to trace Bolifar Geldert.
The mighty magic collapsed into darkness, failing utterly.
Vangerdahast frowned down at the fading ashes and wisps of smoke that had been his spell. He sighed for perhaps the hundredth time that night and headed for a closet he rarely opened. A hooded thing waited there.
The spell on the closet door gave him enough dim red radiance to drag the hood off and toss it aside. The revealed speaking-stone atop its pedestal was a chipped, sloping mass of rock, not the polished crystal sphere favored by the fashionable mages of Sembia and Calimshan. Just now, Vangerdahast couldn’t have cared less what it looked like. Six guards whose minds were free of magic had agreed that Bolifar had gone up those stairs—and not come down.
Wherefore the answer to his whereabouts lay somewhere in that little turret-top room, almost certainly hidden by a magic older and greater than his own. To find out what that might be, the Royal Magician of Cormyr needed to talk to someone who’d remember Amedahast alive—how she talked, how she’d thought, how she’d lived.
The wizard sighed again and ran his fingers through his beard. Like it or not, he could think of only one person yet alive who, if the gods smiled, might have known her well enough.…
A rug in the corner flickered, rip
pled, and reared up from the floor like some sort of menacing monster. Vangerdahast blinked wearily at it for a moment, whirled away from the speaking-stone, snatched up a wand from his workbench, and aimed it grimly at the rippling pillar of cloth.
The rug blinked back at him reproachfully, and then fell away to reveal a tall, gaunt, white-bearded man in worn robes. With one hand on his hip and an eyebrow raised, he regarded Vangerdahast. Even a slate-cutter in the westernmost reaches of Cormyr could have identified the visitor: the Old Mage of Shadowdale, Elminster.
“Thy wards need a little work,” Vangerdahast’s onetime tutor observed in a dry voice. “I could reach through them without difficulty, having so used this rug before.”
Vangerdahast’s eyes narrowed. “You did? Why?”
Elminster raised his other eyebrow. “To visit Amedahast, if ye must know,” he said, with what was almost a grin. “Yon rug lay beside her bed.”
The Master of the War Wizards rolled his eyes. “I might have known,” he snapped, starting to pace. He brought himself to a halt, drew in a deep breath, wrestled down the anger that always gripped him when he faced Elminster’s easy smile, and said abruptly, “We—I—need your aid. There’s been a disappearance.”
“Heir? Crown jewels? Azoun’s second-best codpiece? Or is it serving maids again?”
Vangerdahast gave Elminster a dark look. “A War Wizard,” he said quietly. “A good man. Come.” Without a backward glance at the rug or the speaking-stone, he set off toward the doors, striding hard. Elminster shrugged and followed.
A LONG TIME TO THE MAGIC, LITTLE WIZARD. WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?
Trying to call up memories for ye, devil. There are many, buried deep. But there’s magic enough in this one. Watch and see.
On his second circuit of the little room, El bent over, sniffing. He dropped to his hands and knees and prowled, like a boy playing at being a stalking wolf. His snuffling became constant, his beard trailed along the floor, and his eyes narrowed. “D’ye have much trouble with rats?” he asked the stones.
“Running about? No. Or do you mean dead rats in the walls?” Vangerdahast frowned down at the crawling wizard. “There’s naught but air outside these walls … why? What can you smell?”
“Rotten meat. Decay. Very faint.” El sprang to his feet, his prowling done, and asked sharply, “The lass said the rug was different?”
Vangerdahast nodded.
El nodded back at him, the barest grim beginnings of a smile playing about his lips. “No doubt, no doubt.”
The Cormyrean wizard’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know, or suspect?”
“A trapper on the floor, who ate the rug atop it along with your War Wizard and his papers. His bones, ink bottles, and such will pass through it soon. Lurker-beasts give off such stinks at will.”
“A trapper? I’d have found it,” the Royal Magician of Cormyr said sourly, waving at the floor, “and it’s not there now. I took care to make sure that rug was just a rug. Spin another dream, Old Mage.”
“The murderer put it in here before your Bolifar arrived, and took it out again after the lass ran out of here to come looking for ye.”
“Someone who can carry lurker-beasts around like carpets or bid them follow like pets? You strain credul—”
Vangerdahast stopped speaking in midsnap, and left his mouth hanging open. The color drained slowly out of his face.
“Kaulgetharr Drell,” he said, very slowly. “Master of the King’s Beasts. He has a trapper; I’ve seen it devour butcher scraps and the like. When he casts the right spells, it follows him about like a hunting hound.”
El smiled and spread his hands. “Well then,” he said briskly, “I’ve work of my own waiting, back in Sh—”
Even as he raised one long-fingered hand, Vangerdahast barked, “Wait!”
The Old Mage raised an eyebrow again, and the Cormyrean wizard said hastily, “My scribe Sardyl spell-locked this door! Drell couldn’t have just—”
The rest of the color left his face. Vangerdahast looked suddenly very old, as yellow and as brittle as crumbling parchment.
“Sardyl,” he murmured. “Is she in it too?”
Elminster shrugged. “Mayhap … but she needn’t be. That’s not the way the trapper and its handler came in.”
He waved at the map on the wall. “That’s one of Amedahast’s portals. All of her maps are. Have ye never known?”
Vangerdahast gaped at him.
“Ye can also see and hear through them,” Elminster added with a tight smile. Turning to look at the map, he drew his fingers inward like a crone’s grasping claw. He seemed to beckon or to pull something unseen toward him.
The map shimmered. Out of it stumbled a man in a rich, open-front shirt and tasseled leather boots and breeches. The newcomer’s face was twisted in a snarl, and he lunged atop Elminster. One arm—the one that held a gleaming dagger—rose and fell in a blur. Blows thudded as hard as galloping hooves as he stabbed the Old Mage repeatedly.
Elminster raised his other eyebrow. “Are ye done?” he asked calmly, watching the blade pass into and out of his chest, as harmless as smoke.
The dagger-wielding man stiffened. His blade fell from trembling fingers, struck the toe of his boot, and clinked its way to a tumbling halt along one wall.
“Baerune Cordallar,” Vangerdahast said in a voice of doom from just behind the man’s ear, “surrender your person and the truth your tongue can speak to me, now, or face everlasting torment in beast-shape!”
The motionless noble could move only his eyes.
Elminster stepped forward almost lazily, touched Cordallar’s forehead with one long finger, and murmured, “Three others with features like these—one a woman. His kin. And a cruel man with fine features and a goatee. Two others—one of Arabel, one of Marsember—with ambitions but only slight involvement, to be used as dupes later. The woman’s thoughts have shaped the plot, but this one was to be the chief instrument. He is to have wed the Princess Alusair … then brought about the death of her elder sister, Tanalasta.”
Vangerdahast growled, a low rumbling that rose in growing fury. Baerune’s eyes became desperate. He struggled to speak, face quivering, but managed only whimpers, like a muzzled dog.
“How many plots against the crown has it been, this tenday?” Elminster asked almost merrily. “Now I really must go.”
Vangerdahast drew in a deep breath and said simply, “Thanks. This is one more I owe you.” He raised an eyebrow of his own. “How did you know about the maps?”
Elminster smiled. “If I were a gentlesir,” he told his onetime student mildly, “I’d not tell. Amedahast was … very beautiful. I’ll take care of your beast-master, ere I depart; this map leads to the one in his chambers, in the back robing room.”
“You can see that, through the map?” the Royal Magician of Cormyr asked curiously. He strode forward to peer at Amedahast’s drawing of the kingdom.
In the wizard’s wake, Baerune Cordallar was jerked along helplessly, stiffly upright and unable to do anything but move his eyes about, which he did wildly.
“No,” El replied sweetly. He stepped forward and melted into the map. “I recall where the matching map hangs. That robing room used to be mine.”
It seemed to Vangerdahast that the last he saw of the Old Mage of Shadowdale wasn’t the airily waved hand but that old sardonic smile. As always.
I LOOK AND SEE NO MYSTRA, NOR SILVER FIRE. ONLY MORE CLEVERNESS OF ELMINSTER.
[red anger, ebbing]
YET YOU ARE A CHOSEN OF MYSTRA AND MUST HOLD SOME OF HER SECRETS IN YOUR MURK OF A MIND.
SO REVEAL WHAT I SEEK, OR DIE.
Well, we must all perish sometime. Slay me, then, if ye care so much for my present comfort.
I’LL GIVE YOU THE COMFORT OF DEATH, CHOSEN OF MYSTRA, WHEN THE SILVER FIRE IS MINE. IF YOU CEASE DISPLEASING ME, IT MAY EVEN BE A SWIFT ONE.
Have my thanks.
GET ON WITH IT, MORTAL! [mental slap]
[pain, reeling,
the maggot gnawing, gnawing … aaghh]
[healing, purging fire, frying maggot]
THERE. NOTHING VITAL. PROCEED.
* * * * *
“Vangy,” the princess in gleaming armor growled as she drew on her gauntlets, “this had better be good. I’ve a little treason to ride and attend to, and—”
The Royal Magician raised one bushy eyebrow. “You think this is news to me? Alusair, where do you keep your wits? In your codpiece, like all the blades riding with you do?”
The princess stared at him and chuckled. “Well said, wizard. Just don’t start a series of jokes about ‘What does the wayward princess carry in her codpiece,’ hey? Mother’s been through enough lately.”
Vangerdahast gave her a severe look as he came close to her. “I know that well. Unlike some oh-so-important young lasses, I’ve been comforting her.”
Alusair rolled her eyes. “Vanj,” she said, employing a nickname she knew he hated, “the queen is stronger than any of us. She needs comfort like a dragon needs more scales. Now, what do you need me for—oh. What’re you doing?”
The Royal Magician of Cormyr had unlaced her gorget and flipped it aside, and his thick fingers were now busy with the laces of the leather jack beneath it.
Alusair arched one eyebrow. “Really, mage! Have you not heard of courting? A glance, a few honeyed words, perhaps a glass of wine for a girl—”
“Alusair Nacacia,” Vangerdahast growled, “behave. Blast—look you, lay bare your throat and fish out that pendant I gave you.” He distastefully eyed the pointed double-prow of her breastplate and rubbed at his forearm where he’d bumped the sharp-sculpted Purple Dragon adorning it. “Your breastplate leaves me very little room to work.”
The Steel Princess gave him a wry grin. “It’s not supposed to. Some men who come close to me use swords and daggers, remember?”
“Huh,” the wizard growled. “They’re the wise ones.”
Alusair let out a roar of laughter.
Vangerdahast had to shoot a severe look over her shoulder at the Purple Dragons who’d leaned in to see why their warrior princess held her armor aside and her throat out to the Royal Magician.