Watching it sizzle wetly amid the flames, Pennae’s smile returned.
“Want to see who you’re killing?” Semoor called from what sounded like the safety of the ledge.
Stlarning holynoses.
“Yes!” Dauntless bellowed back, seeing Florin staggering grimly back to join him. The Harper was struggling to stand somewhere farther off—which left a lone ornrion of the Purple Dragons, just now, to battle these mysterious men whose faces seemed to shift and even melt as they swung their blades.
One of them was down, sliced open by the Harper earlier, and another was fighting an unsteady battle to stand up. He’d been caught in the same spell-blast that had flung Florin and the Harper over yonder.
Which still left two—two who were clearly visible as Semoor’s spell banished night, creating a sphere of bright sunlight.
Unfortunately, the two melt-faces were moving well apart so as to come at Dauntless from sharply opposing sides at the same time. Their swords, daggers, and teeth all gleamed. They wore identical merciless smiles.
“Gah,” the Harper groaned from somewhere behind Dauntless. “This light! It’s like fighting on a stage in some Sword Coast city theater!”
“We’ll be … right with you,” Florin gasped, reeling, from even closer at hand.
“Worry not,” Dauntless called back over his shoulder. “There are only two, after all.”
Florin lurched past him, swinging his sword for balance. One of the melting-faced men mistook the ranger’s groggy state for clumsiness and went for an easy lunge to the vitals.
The man blinked as Florin was somehow—and quite suddenly—nowhere near the sword reaching for him. Rather, he was past the lunging man and aiming a cut at the back of an undefended knee on his way on to cross swords with the other melt-face.
That cut landed, and the knee’s owner crashed to the ground, shoulders first. Winded, he was still struggling for breath when the sharpest knife Dauntless owned sliced through the shapeless thing on his face, which was rearing up like a snake—and slashed it right off his face.
Shorn of his nose, the man screamed. So did the shapeless thing on the ground beside him. Spurting gore and squalling, it had been severed into two pieces. Both of them reared up in energetic undulations, seeking to get away as swiftly as possible.
The Harper bent and deftly diced both into many small, wriggling fragments. “These should be burned,” he said. “I’ve never seen them before, but I think I know what they are. Hrasted if I can remember the name, though. They shapechange.”
“Ah,” Dauntless said as he cut the fallen man’s throat. In the same movement he turned to menace the last of the melting-faced men. “Useful to know. Can they change themselves into hard metal armor, or do swords still work on them?”
Florin was striking a series of ringing blows against the desperate parries of that last man, who was backing away as he saw that he now stood alone. His dazed and reeling fellow blade had just been slain by the Harper—who was now carefully butchering the hargaunt that he’d just sliced away from the dead face it was clinging to.
“Mercy!” the last melting-faced man cried suddenly. “I am Glays Tarnmantle and can offer twenty thousand golden lions of the realm in return for my life! I—”
The masklike, drooping thing on the man’s face flowed with sudden urgency, streaming into his nose and mouth.
Glays struggled to shout something through its surging, but his nose was swelling up, stuffed full. His mouth was already distended into a grotesque, froglike shape, and as he shuddered and clawed at the shapeless thing, his face went slowly reddish-purple.
It was almost black by the time he staggered, then reeled, eyes bulging.
He fell headlong, crashing down to trampled forest turf. The sword clattered from his hand, and he lay still. The thing that had choked him flowed out onto the ground, dark and shapeless and menacing.
“Hooh,” Dalonder Ree said, eyeing the corpse. “It seems something was in a real hurry to collect that gold. We should burn that something.”
“When we’re done here,” Florin said, pointing.
A large-boned skeleton was striding out of the night at them. It plucked up a fallen sword, hefted it, and then swung it with a flourish, still walking their way.
Dauntless sighed. “Some nights, you wonder what else the forest can spit up to entertain you.”
Hefting his own sword, he strode to meet the skeleton.
In the chamber of scrying, everyone looked like a ghost.
Or so the saying went, established years ago by war wizards after their first experience of seeing the glow of over two dozen scrying spheres lighting all faces eerily from beneath.
As eerily ghostlike as any of them, Laspeera raised her eyes from some of those spheres to give her superior a rather grim look.
“So passes Lorbryn Deltalon,” she said. “We have few enough left who are skilled at both Art and diplomacy and truly havens for our trust.”
“Tell me what I don’t know, lass,” Vangerdahast said. “Reduced to sending Dauntless with a few enspelled trinkets in his pouches. That’s us.” He crooked an eyebrow at Laspeera’s busy hands. “What’re you doing?”
“Avenging Deltalon, if I can. It’s worth a few scrying spheres to try to harm Onsler Ruldroun. I taught him so much. All wasted …”
“He’s probably fled beyond our reach,” the Royal Magician said. “Yet it’s worth doing anyhail. At the very least, it’ll stop him using the glade. Let him try to sleep up a tree.”
Watching and listening to Laspeera’s casting, Vangerdahast carefully began one of his own, deftly reaching his hands over and among hers with the familiarity of long practice at spell-weaving together.
When it was done, they both stepped back and thrust their wills at the other floating scrying spheres, seeking to force them away from the quartet that were flaring brightly and about to burst. They weren’t fast enough to save them all.
In the tinkling, ear-ringing aftermath, both mages rolled over from where they ended up—on the floor and driven against a wall. They looked at each other. Their upflung arms had saved their faces and throats from deadly shards of crystal, but they were bleeding from the usual countless tiny nicks and slices, and their garments now looked as if a dozen assassins had hacked at them with razor-sharp blades.
“Before you try to think of something clever to say about my new fashion look,” Laspeera said, as she struggled to her feet and held out a hand to haul him up, “consider that you look worse. Much worse.”
“ ’Tis the paunch and the body hair,” Vangerdahast said. “So now for the rest of our evening’s entertainment: the intrepid Dauntless faring into the forest.”
“As all the Nine Hells break loose,” Laspeera said. She murmured the cantrip that would rid her hair of a thousand tiny shards of crystal.
Vangerdahast murmured something more substantial, and his hands were suddenly full of stark black robes. With a flourish he held the uppermost garment out to Laspeera.
She took it with a smile and asked, “Aren’t you going to turn your back as I slip into this?”
“No,” Vangerdahast told her, shrugging off his own tatters. “Why?”
He had always loved Laspeera’s laugh.
The glade exploded.
Ruldroun didn’t even have time to leap down out of the tree before its great trunks shattered above him, its boughs torn off and swept away in a crashing rain—and he was hurled along after them, his shielding buffeted, struck hard, slammed against other trees, and shattered.
He hit the ground in a tumbling chaos of snapping twigs, sliding wet leaves, mud, and bruised wizard.
“And so I taste the Royal Magician’s little slap,” he grunted. Pain flared in his left side. Broken ribs, probably. His shielding had done its work, but it was clear that it would be the act of an utter fool to tarry anywhere near the glade.
He’d best get to the Knights and skulk along after them. He could still conjure his best shi
elding and weave a lesser one as well, then combine the two—but he’d best do it only after he’d passed the clearing and gotten well clear of its other side.
Not that there was anything forcing the Knights to stay where they were. Ruldroun sighed, winced again at the pain that brought, turned to face the pattering of falling twigs that marked where the clearing had just enlarged itself, and started to run.
“I believe that particular tactic would be one I’d deem, in the words of Lord Piergeiron, ‘less than wise,’ “a warm, lyrical, woman’s voice said. That would be Sharanralee.
“I’m not talking wise, look ye,” Mirt the Moneylender rumbled. “I’m laying all the tactics I can think of before us, rather than sorting out just those I deem best or preferable beforehand. I’ve heard too many lords’ deliberations—or Harper moots, come to that—to want to do otherwise.”
“So,” an amused, mature, man’s voice asked in quiet amusement, “are we then as bad as Harpers, Mirt—or as good as Harpers?”
That would be the wizard Tarthus, straying from Piergeiron’s shadow for once. The Open Lord of Waterdeep must be very well guarded by someone else just now.
The night was dark, the turret that held those three folk was widely deemed inaccessible to creatures who couldn’t fly, and the wards around it would raise instant alarm upon the approach of any flying creatures.
It seemed those wards deemed hovering magical swords to be something other than creatures. Whereupon no alarm had been raised, and it was extremely unlikely that anyone would be out and peering up at the turret just to check up on the efficacy of those wards.
Besides, Old Ghost was making Armaukran float absolutely motionless, vertical, and quite close to the shutters of the window. The little conference was quite interesting.
It was folk such as these three whom he wanted to collect in the Sword That Never Sleeps. To know the workings of the Harpers, or the Lords of Waterdeep, or—
It was at that moment that a spell Old Ghost had cast a long time ago suddenly stirred, sending its brief and faint warning across half of Faerûn.
Battle spells had erupted in a certain clearing used by Cormyr’s Wizards of War, a clearing he’d cast his watch spell upon—and now, scant breaths later, someone had cast a complex, manyspells shielding.
That caster had to be someone powerful, on important business bent.
Business—and a person—he was very much interested in knowing more about.
The long, slender sword silently drew away from the window, turned in the air until its point was aimed east, and raced silently away from the turret, as swiftly as if it had been loosed from the bow of a mighty archer.
Old Ghost had decided to get to that nameless forest clearing just as fast as the Sword That Never Sleeps could fly.
Tsantress was barefoot and in her nightgown, sitting upright on the edge of her bed—the bed she’d been tossing and turning in, mere moments ago.
No wonder, that, given the time, but her restless inability to sleep and the energetic propensity of certain unscrupulous merchants of Suzail to get up to things illicit the moment her back was turned had her renouncing all attempts to get back to sleep.
She ran her hands absently through her sleep-tangled hair and stared into her scrying sphere.
It glowed softly as it hung in the air in front of her nose, awakening into a view of Albaertus Tranth’s private office, quite a few streets closer to the harbor than where she was sitting.
It seemed the good merchant—if that wasn’t using the term too loosely—was also afflicted with sleeplessness just now. He was using his wakefulness to meet with someone cowled, masked, and gloved, who appeared to have fallen into the habit of knocking on back doors in Suzail in the dark wee hours with heavy sacks of gold coins in his hand.
The war wizard bent forward and peered closely. Tranth was unlocking a heavy metal coffer with a key that had been hanging around his neck, and—
Abruptly the scrying sphere flashed bright white, blinding her into a sharp gasp, and flung itself across the room.
Thankfully, it struck her row of cloaks and gowns, tearing them all off their pegs as it raced past to strike a heavy tapestry.
Tsantress rolled on her bed and then off its edge to land hard on her spread knees on the carpeted floor. She clawed at her flooding eyes and tried to crawl toward her door on her elbows. An inescapable conclusion reared up like a dark and inexorable foe in her mind: Vangerdahast was up to his tricks again.
No one else—save Laspeera, and she had more sense—would dare to cast a slaying spell through one of Vangey’s precious scrying spheres, causing it to explode and shattering any other scryings going on at the same time. Certainly not anywhere near the Royal Court. Or the Palace, come to that.
Either the halls were going to be crowded with angry, wand-waving Wizards of War in the next few breaths, or the Royal Magician was to blame, and everything would remain still and tensely silent until morning.
Well, not this time. She could find and pull on her boots by feel, if her eyes didn’t stop streaming, and probably find her way to the Palace, too.
She had to reach the Princess Alusair. That blinding flash had thrust a vision into her mind, fleeting and vivid and tluining alarming: Knights of Myth Drannor, fighting hard against some unknown foes in a deep, wild forest somewhere, with Dauntless—Alusair’s champion, that Dauntless—fighting alongside them.
Now, the Royal Magician was … the Royal Magician. Very much a law unto himself, who said and did as he pleased and somehow seemed to escape consequences that would kill—not merely discomfit or career-shatter—others. She, Tsantress, was not the Royal Magician and would be before-all-the-gods damned if she behaved anything like the Royal tluining Magician.
She kept her word, once given. And she’d sworn to the Princess Alusair—an Obarskyr who just might end up on the Dragon Throne if bad things befell her family—that she’d inform the princess immediately if Vangerdahast ordered Ornrion Taltar Dahauntul into danger again.
Which meant the moment she had her boots on and had found and buckled her wand belt on over her nightgown, she was going to hurry to the tunnel that linked the Royal Court with the Royal Palace just as fast as she could stride.
Then, blindness or no blindness, royal slumber or no royal slumber, she was getting to the Princess Alusair just as fast as she could, spitting out the pass phrase that meant doom was coming down on Cormyr, so the guards barring her way at door after guarded door would be frightened as they hurried to fling open their doors for her.
Because if Dauntless died because of Vangerdahast’s orders, and the Princess Alusair found out about it, doom would be coming down on Cormyr.
Chapter 24
ANGER A WIZARD, AND DIE
Aye, I have learned a thing or three
Thus far in a life well heaped in deceit
And treachery. There’s keeping pacts
And knowing when to run
And this: Anger a wizard, and die.
The character Ornbriar the Old Merchant
In the play Karnoth’s Homecoming
by Chanathra Jestryl, Lady Bard of Yhaunn
First performed in the Year of the Bloodbird
I’ve never seen a skeleton like that before!” the Harper said. “Keep back!”
“I’ve never seen a skeleton like that before, either,” Dauntless said. “But never mind that. Look you past it at the creeping things!”
“Hargaunts,” Dalonder Ree said, as he, Dauntless, and Florin backed away from Brorn and tried to peer past the sword-wielding skeleton. “They’re called hargaunts.”
“That’s nice,” Dauntless said. “It’s always the height of urbane courtesy to know the name of what’s trying to kill you.”
Beyond the advancing skeleton, the hacked-apart pieces of hargaunts were flowing together like worms mindlessly converging on something dead and beginning to rise up into a vaguely humanlike figure.
“Saers!” Florin called to Daun
tless and the Harper as he stepped to the left and waved at them to move to the right. He was motioning them to move so the three of them could strike at the skeleton from its front and from both of its sides, all at once. Ree and the ornrion nodded back and moved as the ranger had directed.
“Tluin,” the skeleton said.
He felt much better with the shielding around him.
Two wardings and a lesser ironguard woven into the result, to turn back most magics and make him untouchable by the swords and daggers of Knights of Myth Drannor—or anyone else, unless those blades bore strong magics.
Yet there was room for something more. A simple deception for simple adventurers. He’d not face the Knights as Onsler Ruldroun or as some crone in a dirty dress—but as the ornrion Dauntless, in the shreds of a failed disguise, out here stalking them under Crown orders.
That, they’d believe in a trice. Letting him walk among them, rather than spending his days skulking out in forests, straining to get close enough without being noticed.
The hargaunt was already stirring approvingly, even before he really concentrated on the remembered face of the ornrion.
A few moments of creeping and flowing, and he’d be hurrying on again to the battle.
The Lion Room was warm and richly paneled, and the firesparkle in their goblets was good. They were almost past the sneering and elbowing each other stage, carried along on their own rising excitement into being fellow conspirators. And that was saying something, considering how fervently these young noble rivals had hated each other before this night.
Royal Sage Alaphondar knew how to defer to nobility. He knew their strengths and had praised them, saying nothing of their pride and pratfalls and indiscretions. Wherefore Lharak Huntcrown, Doront Rowanmantle, Beliard Emmarask, Cadeln Hawklin, Faerandor Crownsilver, Garen Truesilver, and Talask Dauntinghorn were all secretly thrilled to be sitting in this private chamber of the Royal Palace.
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