Tsantress activated a second ring. If she was going to enter her chambers alone with an unidentified man, she was going to furnish no possibility of his successfully attacking her or snatching any of the unfinished—albeit cryptic—work she had spread out on her bed and tables.
“Very well,” she said, and she unlocked her door with the deftness of long practice, keeping herself facing him all the while. “Pray enter, Unknown Lord.”
The man in black winced. “I would not have you think poorly of me! I mean you no harm nor dishonor. Believe me! I desire but to aid Cormyr on a matter of utmost delicacy! Please believe me!”
“In here.” Tsantress beckoned.
Her guest cast two last exaggerated looks up and down the hallway and then ducked inside, swirling his cloak away from his face with a flourish as she swung the door shut behind him.
Tsantress regarded him calmly. His face was quite handsome, and she recalled seeing it at Court a time or two. As noble as he claimed to be, but of no important family … and about the same age she was.
“Is it locked?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the war wizard told him. “Its locking awaits the revelation of your name.”
The man in black broke his dramatic pose long enough to spin to face her. “Lady Wizard,” he said, striking another pose, “I am Lord Rhallogant Caladanter!”
“Well met,” Tsantress replied. She made her own little show of locking—and bolting—the door, then leaned back against it, folded her arms across her chest, and asked, “So you wish to speak to me regarding a matter of utmost delicacy?”
The handsome young lord looked both ways again, even in her small, dim antechamber, then sank his head low between his shoulders and murmured in a deep voice, eyes darting this way and that as if he could see watching eyes appearing in every corner, “I have overheard some disturbing things about a few Wizards of War—Vangerdahast and Laspeera, in particular—who have been meeting in secret with some Sembians and Zhentarim. I fear for the realm, but I know not where to turn.”
Tsantress stiffened, her face going pale. She was an ambitious, capable young war wizard and had been very careful to watch and learn much, for fear of putting a foot wrong as she sought to ascend ever higher in the Royal Magician’s regard. A few of the folk she had seen Vangerdahast meeting with had troubled her deeply. So this, now …
“Come,” she whispered as she crossed the antechamber into her study, taking him by the sleeve. She was pleased to see that although he trembled with excitement, he showed no triumphant grin of lechery or brightening opportunism. “Sit with me, and tell me all you have seen and heard. All.”
As she’d suspected, it wasn’t much. Yet it was more than enough to make her shiver. She regarded the Royal Palace in a new way: as a brooding fortress of suspicions, every shadow something that peered and listened. “Den of traitors, den of thieves,” she murmured, remembering the old Suzailan song deriding the Court.
“Lord Caladanter, I thank you,” she said then, putting a firm hand on his knee and staring deep into his eyes. Under her palm, he seemed as excited as a puppy, his eyes glowing as he stared into hers—but again, there was no hint of the seducer.
“Your very life is in danger,” she said, telling him what she knew he wanted to hear—and knowing it was all too true. “If you breathe one word to anyone about speaking to me and anything that even hints at what you’ve just told me, someone—possibly several someones—will kill you.”
She paused a moment to let that sink in and watched his excitement slide slowly into fear. Not as swift-witted as he’d first seemed, this one. Madwits, yes, but a slow madwits, to boot.
“You must not be seen leaving my rooms,” she said. “Will you submit to a spell, if I cast a translocation upon you?”
He started to nod eagerly then frowned. “A—oh. To whisk me in an instant from here to … somewhere else?”
Tsantress nodded. “To one of the gates where the Royal Gardens lets out onto the Promenade. Whence you can easily stroll home.”
“P-please!” he stammered.
She rose, gesturing that he should, too—and the moment he did, touched him with a ring she had already awakened. In its silent flash, he vanished without another word.
“No touching farewells, young lord,” she murmured, more to hear her own voice than for any other reason. She didn’t want to wallow in how deeply this news had troubled her, didn’t want to—
Hold! No one had seen him depart, yes. But had anyone seen him arrive?
Tsantress marched across the room and flung the door wide to do her own sharp look up and down the passage.
She found herself meeting the startled gaze of a doorjack in the usual livery, standing formally outside the door across the passage and a few strides down.
It was a man she’d never seen before, and it was an odd door to stand upon ceremony—because it led onto a landing of an internal staircase, not into a state room or anyone’s chambers.
At her scrutiny, the doorjack’s expression turned cold. He was almost glaring at her as he slowly turned, opened the door, and stepped through it.
Tsantress saw a slice of landing and stair through its frame, just as she’d expected—but she also saw something more.
The doorjack had turned his head to stare at her as he strode out of sight, and just before he passed from view, his unfamiliar face slid into the features of someone else.
Vangerdahast.
Chapter 9
THE LOST PALACE
Yet though I live so long, I pray you lords
thrust your blades deep into me,
to make sure I breathe no more
if ever I begin to become
the sort of king who forgets his own name,
knows not lifelong friends nor foes,
and loses even palaces in the fogs of his failing mind.
The character King Brighthawk Godsummer
In the play The Fall of Three Kings
by Ornrabbar Helikan, merchant of Athkatla
First performed in the Year of the Weeping Moon
The door closed behind Vangerdahast. Tsantress stared at it, her mind racing. Her entire world whirled away in an instant … what to do? What should she do?
She looked up and down the passage out of sheer habit, seeing no one, then heard the faintest of sounds in the room behind her—or thought she did—and whirled around.
Nothing. Her antechamber was dark and still, with no grimly smiling Royal Magician or anyone else standing there. Tsantress closed the door again, strode swiftly across the room to snatch up a wedge of cheese for later consumption and took down her dagger in its thigh-sheath from its usual place on the wall. Drawing in a deep breath, she used her teleport ring again.
It was the only way out, given the wards in place over the vast Royal Court and the Royal Palace beyond that would foil any translocation cast by someone not wearing such a ring—and she had to get out.
To find time to think, if nothing else.
Wherefore she found herself standing on a ledge high on the Thunder Peaks, lashed by rain. She stared bleakly out over fog-shrouded eastern Cormyr for a few moments, called on the ring again, and teleported to where she was really bound for. An extra “jump” should foil any tracing magic Old Thunderspells used to follow her. She hoped.
The ledge went away in the usual instant of falling endlessly through bright blue mists, and then there was solid stone under her boots again, and familiar dank gloom surrounded her amid smells of earth and old bear dung.
She was home. Or rather, she was back in a side-fissure of a wilderland cave that she’d long ago cast a spell upon to keep a bear or anything else from settling into it and lairing. The cave was nigh the Moonsea Ride near Tilverton, clear out of Cormyr, where she’d spent days and nights practicing her spell-casting when she’d been younger.
“Tluin,” she whispered, taking a step to where she could perch one foot on an upthrusting rock and more easily buckle her dagger about
her thigh.
She was gone from Cormyr, gone from the life she had known that had made her feel so happy, so important, so … needed.
Now what?
A lantern was unhooded, and the Knights of Myth Drannor found themselves staring down a littered stone cellar at four men. The foremost of whom was Lord Maniol Crownsilver.
Behind the noble lord were three unfamiliar men in robes, arranged in a stony-faced line. All were glaring at the Knights.
One robed man held the lantern high; the other two had their hands outstretched toward each other, and the air was flickering and pulsing between those reaching fingers—little flowerings of blue radiance that grew, winked out, then flashed into existence again, more strongly.
Three wizards. By the style of their sashes and rune-adorned jerkins, Sembian wizards-for-hire.
“Jhess,” Florin muttered. “What magic’s that?”
“A portal, I think,” Jhessail murmured back as they saw the lantern set down carefully on the floor—and the flickerings form a pulsing blue-white upright oval of glowing air as tall as a man.
Belatedly, Florin bowed his head and said respectfully, “Well met, Lord Crownsilver.”
The noble took a slow step closer to the Knights and swept them with a withering glare. There was no trace about him of the quavering, broken shell of a man they remembered seeing last. Crownsilver seemed alert, purposeful, and even—when one saw the fire in his eyes—frenzied.
“Slayers of my wife and daughter,” he said, “taste my revenge! For Narantha! For Jalassa, damn you!”
The three Sembian mages snatched wands out of their rune-adorned jerkins and grinned in cruel triumph as they aimed—and unleashed.
The Knights shouted, sprinting desperately this way or that, but ravening wandfire roared down the cellar in a blinding white flood that drove a million tiny lances into bare skin even as it hurled and tumbled the Knights hard into the unyielding stone wall behind them.
Very hard. Faerûn started to go watery and whirl away from more than one Knight, with the searing magic still roaring on and on.
Amid a splintering groan of riven support posts, the ceiling above started to collapse—and Florin, Pennae, and Islif, still struggling to move and to see, beheld the little tracer-gem Pennae had stolen bursting forth from its concealment beneath her tattered leathers. It spun and spat strange purple flames and sparks as the roaring white wandfire tore at it, then it surged down the cellar toward Lord Crownsilver.
Only to explode in its own burst of blinding white light, a blast that—laced with Pennae’s shriek and startled shouts from the Sembians—drove its own burning rays into everyone.…
Aumrune Trantor stopped midstep, teetering awkwardly with one foot raised—and then brought it down, lurched against a passage wall, and stayed there, leaning like a drunkard.
Old Ghost had found something.
Something in Aumrune’s mind made him seethe with excitement and glee—so bright and fierce that Horaundoon, sharing that mind with him, cowered.
Aumrune’s pet project, kept secret from all except Manshoon and Hesperdan, who seemed to approve of it, was adding magics to an ancient, flying magic sword: Armaukran, the Sword That Never Sleeps. Aumrune had already infused the blade with new powers to make it obey him.
Surging in bright exultation, Old Ghost uncovered the way into the sword from Aumrune’s mind.
The body of Aumrune Trantor thrust itself away from the wall so briskly it almost fell. It hurried off down that gloomy, deserted passage in Zhentil Keep, headed for where a certain hidden sword awaited.
This was going to be good. Very good.
Two flights down a deserted staircase in the Royal Court, while passing his forty-third faded tapestry, Vangerdahast stopped and murmured, “Far enough. Best alter things before we run into the real Vangerdahast.”
The features more than a thousand courtiers and servants knew and feared rippled and flowed, melting down off a quite different face as the hargaunt sought the chin of Telgarth Boarblade, and points below.
As he held open the front of his doorjack’s jerkin to let the hargaunt flow down out of sight, Telgarth Boarblade smiled. Lord Rhallogant Caladanter was a buffoon of the most childish sort, aye, but he must have done well enough in telling War Wizard Ironchylde the tale Boarblade had so carefully concocted. She’d been white with fright and seeing foes in every shadow. Well delivered, indeed.
Still wearing his satisfied smile, the doorjack who was not a doorjack went down the stairs at a more dignified pace, and out through a door three floors down.
Only after he had heard the familiar slight scrape of that door closing did the old doorjack—who’d been watching Boarblade’s transformation from behind one of the faded tapestries that lined the staircase walls—dare to breathe again.
Myarlin Handaerback was trembling and purple from lack of air and indignation. As he thrust aside the tapestry and started his own ascent in the gloom, he muttered, “There’s more confounded creeping as goes on in this place! Not like in the old days, when it was all pretty lasses seeking their suitors or the suitors chasing after them. First adventurers and now men with oozing things that disguise their faces! Now we’re getting the riff raff, to be sure!”
The little tower room was thick with dust from the many yellowing, rolled maps, deeds, and contracts that choked its storage shelves—but not a single speck of it marred the sword that lay gleaming on the trestle table that filled the center of the room.
Aumrune carefully locked, latched, bolted, and then barred the lone door behind him. Old Ghost made him edge past the table and do something he never did: Undog and swing aside the inner shutter that covered the window and its bars, unlatch and take down those bars, and undog the window itself.
Horaundoon paid little attention. Horaundoon, crouched in one corner of Aumrune’s mind, had all his attention bent on the magnificent sword that lay on the table.
It was a long blade, nigh as long as some men stood tall, about two thirds of it a slender blade of bright silver and the last third a large hilt neatly wrapped in black silver, with sleekly curved double quillons and a cabochon-cut blue gem for a pommel, smooth and rounded and glowing with a faint light of magic.
Gods, it was beautiful. The Sword That Never Sleeps, crafted by that rarest of creatures, if the tales could be believed: a smith of the elves!
Not that Old Ghost could tell, after all the enchantments that had been cast, recast, broken, and overlaid upon the sharp steel. Certainly its curves suggested elven stylings, and the oldest surviving enchantments felt like elf work.
Armaukran was the name of someone it had slain, whose lifeforce had been infused into the sword through dark spells. It had been forged for a purpose—but that purpose was lost, at least to Old Ghost and Horaundoon.
What remained clear and delighted Old Ghost very much was that seven enchantments remained rooted in the blade that shared a purpose: binding souls, spirits, or sentiences into the blade.
Horaundoon wallowed in the intricacies and elegances of all the castings upon the blade. Their sweepingly shaped, subtly reinforced incantations, the balanced flows of Weave-work … even the lesser, simpler magics added by Aumrune Trantor, grafted on recently, were but plainer outer garments draped over great beauty beneath. He ached to do such work, to so ride the Weave that he could craft such beauty.…
Lost in lust, he never saw his peril.
Old Ghost found the words of magic he needed in those seven binding enchantments, gathered himself—then spoke them, clearly and crisply, plucking the forces they unleashed as deftly as any master harpist and using them to thrust a helpless Horaundoon into the Sword That Never Sleeps. Down into the brightness the younger, lesser spirit so hungered for, down into the cold, thrilling embrace of bindings that tightened and anchored themselves upon him in a dozen ways, then a score of ways—bindings that burned when Old Ghost bent his will upon them.
The splendid sword rose into the air to float silent
ly above the table.
“Yes,” Old Ghost murmured through Aumrune Trantor’s lips, his thoughts blazing loudly into Horaundoon through the sword’s bindings, “you are mine now. Mine to bid, to command as surely as if my hands were firm around this hilt. Yet chafe not, Horaundoon. This is a task you’ll thoroughly enjoy.”
Aumrune Trantor opened the window and the outer shutters beyond, letting in the sun and a cool breeze that was scudding past all the towers of Zhentil Keep.
“Go,” Old Ghost commanded. “Go and kill Zhentarim. I shall be with you, watching. Try to take them alone, where others will not see you. Go and seek Zhents to slay. Not Manshoon, mind. Not yet. And not Hesperdan, for both of them can probably destroy Armaukran with ease. Which leaves you, O Hungry Slayer of Zhentarim, just about every other member of the Brotherhood you care to fell.”
The Sword That Never Sleeps rose from the table and slid forward through the air, point first, as sleek as any arrow.
Out the window it went, banking and plunging hastily down out of sight, seeking concealing shadows.
A part of his awareness plunging down with it, Old Ghost smiled inside Aumrune Trantor and made the Zhent mage reach out and close the shutters and then the window.
It was time and past time to begin remaking the Zhentarim into something worthy in fair Faerûn.
Florin blinked.
Aye. He was Florin.
Florin Falconhand … and he lay on his back on cool, hard stone.
It was too smooth to be anything but a floor, and there was nothing but darkness above him.
Or so it seemed. Things were coming back gradually. They’d been in that cellar, facing Lord Crownsilver. Then the blast …
Wherever he now was, it wasn’t the cellar. This place was larger and a lot less dank. Dusty, even—
Florin sneezed. Hard and uncontrollably and several times, bouncing his shoulders off the unyielding stone beneath him.
Someone groaned from floor level nearby. Off to his left.
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