Swords of Dragonfire

by Greenwood, Ed

  “Well, no,” Sarmeir replied. “We seem to receive far more encouragement to do as we’re told, and leave ‘wonderings’ to the likes of Vangerdahast, and Margaster—and you.”

  “Shrewdly struck, Sarm. I reel, but recover.” Laspeera’s dimples told the now tensely watching war wizards no eruption was about to occur. “Harken, then, to the new, emerging danger of portal travel: vanishings.”

  “You mean people going missing?”

  “No, that’s hardly a new danger. I speak rather of the matter of the portals themselves betimes melting away things taken through them—trade goods, the sword in a wayfarer’s hand or on her belt. Suchlike.”

  “Ah,” Orzil put in, “the old matter of ‘on dread deeds bent, I charge through the waiting way full-armored and sword in hand—and arrive at the other end grinning at my foes, naked and weaponless.’ ”

  “Indeed.”

  Yassandra, the darkly beautiful lady war wizard, frowned at that. “I thought sages of matters arcane always blamed such vanishings on snatchings done by creatures watching over or guarding the portals. The same creatures who sometimes do or intend far greater ill to portal-users.”

  “They do. I thought alarphons were better schooled than to believe them.”

  Yassandra flushed and said sharply, “None of us, so far as I know, have been told anything of portal vanishings. If I understand you correctly, they are why portals will never replace caravans for overland trade, yes?”

  Laspeera nodded. “And why we still use mass teleport spells, yes.”

  Sarmeir frowned. “But we’ve been told that a teleportation done purely by a spell can’t be traced later, whereas a portal jump—particularly by a keyed individual—can. So was that a lie, and these vanishings the real reason?”

  “No. War wizards use portals whenever possible because they are both more reliable and for tracing reasons. If you run into trouble, the rest of us can more easily trace you, and if you are pursued and hide a document or item to keep foes from seizing it when they take you, colleagues investigating later can follow your portal uses and know where to search. Yet everyone not already sworn to the Crown of Cormyr and standing high in both service and trust who learns the location and nature of a portal opens a gap in the shared armor of the realm. Wherefore we avoid portals and cleave to spells instead when time and circumstances allow, when shuttling common citizens and outlanders around Cormyr. Keying can’t be done on the sly; even if a person we do it to is unaware of what we’re doing, he soon discovers what we did, and what powers he’s now gained. That’s why we don’t tend to key just-risen adventurers, whose loyalties may stray far from us—” She waved her hand at the row of sprawled and sleeping Knights of Myth Drannor, just as Doust started to slide off his chair. Laspeera launched herself across the room in time to catch him and thrust him back onto the seat, turning back to the younger wizards with a shushing finger to her lips, and concluded, “—but do key Crown messengers and envoys.”

  “And why,” the Wizard of War Ghoruld Applethorn purred, smiling at the unwitting face of Laspeera in his glowing scrying crystal, “I can trace everyone who uses any portal in the Palace.”

  He beamed at her unseeing beauty and told her unhearing ears, “Vangey has trusted me too much, for too long. And trust, as better men than our dear Royal Magician discovered to their costs long ago, is a blade with two sharp edges.”

  Florin came awake very suddenly, and found himself looking into a pair of alert dark brown eyes. They belonged to a slender, dark-haired, handsome man in robes, now bending over him, that he’d seen somewhere before, recently, but … oh, yes: this was a war wizard, one of the five Laspeera had introduced to them, in—

  Quick glances told him his fellow Knights were still sitting on chairs beside him, Islif as awake as he was, the others seemingly asleep. But they were in no room Florin knew or had ever been in before. And of Vangerdahast, Laspeera, and the other war wizards, there was no sign.

  “Where are we?” he asked. “And why?”

  “This is Arabel, and you are here in obedience to the queen.”

  “Departing the realm forthwith,” Islif said. “And you are … Melandar ah, Raentree.”

  The handsome war wizard nodded, his smile tight, his face revealing nothing. “At your service. You were magically transported here while you slept. I have been assigned to oversee your departure.”

  “Well,” Semoor grunted, “I suppose it is too much to expect the queen to trust us—we being her sworn Knights, and all.”

  “We being adventurers,” Jhessail told him, her smile rueful. It seemed everyone was awakening.

  “Well met again, fellow weaver of the Art, and Holy of Lathander,” Melandar greeted them both. “Not much time has passed since you spoke with Her Majesty, but by means of magic you are now in Arabel. This is a—well, a nondescript backstreet house owned by the Crown, that stands hard by a busy stable. Wherein await mounts for all of you, saddled and ready. Purple Dragon mounts when this day began, but yours to keep now.”

  “Oh?” Semoor’s eyes narrowed. “How many Purple Dragons know this? And how many are going to be riding hard after us, eager to chain and dungeon us as horse-thieves?”

  Florin frowned. “This is … very swift. The Lady Narantha Crownsilver lies not even in her family crypt yet, and no one has paid the price for her death. Something I mean to attend to, before I depart Cormyr!”

  The war wizard nodded gravely. “I understand your feelings, believe me—but betimes our oaths of loyalty must govern us sternly, and we must set aside revenge until a better time.”

  The look Florin gave him then was stony. “And did Narantha’s murderer choose a ‘better time’ to bring doom down upon her?”

  Jhessail turned and laid a gentle hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Florin,” she murmured, “nothing we do—or don’t do—will bring her back. Please find some calm inside you, and listen. Vangerdahast promised me that her death would be fully investigated, and the queen said so too. I trust her to see that he does what he promised—and he can do far more, with his spells and working among nobles he knows and has some authority over, than we could ever hope to do. We can’t threaten nobles into confessing or aiding us; we have nothing to threaten them with.”

  “Not now we’ve been ordered out of the realm,” Florin said bitterly, “but do any of them know that yet?” He glared at Melandar. “How long will it be before they all know?”

  “Sir Falconhand,” the war wizard replied carefully, “please listen to the wise words of Lady Knight Silvertree, and depart the kingdom—for now—without delay or dispute. If you knew exactly who was guilty and how to reach them, and they happened to be here in Arabel, I myself would aid you with my spells to get into their presence, and keep what you did as secret as possible. Yet such is not the case, and it could take you years of blundering around asking questions and waving your sword before you learned anything useful about whom you should be seeking. If, that is, this or that noble didn’t have you killed out of sheer irritation, first.”

  Florin turned his head to look down the line of chairs. “Well?” he growled. “What do the rest of you think?”

  Doust held up a hand to quell what others might have been going to say, and replied quietly, “I hate to leave Cormyr. This is not what I intended, when I dreamed of adventure. Yet I like even less the thought of disobeying a royal command as almost our first act as Knights.”

  “Pennae?”

  The thief shrugged. “When a queen lets on that she knows all you’ve been up to, and in the same breath tells you to get out of town … let’s just say that as I’m not a disguised dragon or arch-lich able to overthrow thrones whenever I please, minstrels’ fantasies notwithstanding, disobeying Queen Fee is not my first instinct. Nor yet my sixth or seventh.”

  Melandar winced visibly at that “Queen Fee,” but said nothing. His look in Islif’s direction, however, was as clear as if he’d snapped an order.

  Islif gave him a thin
smile and then turned to Florin and said, “I, too, am reluctant to leave our beloved Cormyr—but I am not interested in being hunted by nobles or rushing around looking for culprits, just now. It will end in our having to fight some of our countrymen, and that will end with us imprisoned, exiled for good, or dead. Florin, if you stay now to avenge Narantha, I’m afraid you’ll do so alone. And this is a war wizard standing in front of us; you won’t be free to flit around Cormyr by night and put your sword through suspected culprits—unless you do so as Vangey’s puppet. Not quite the adventurers’ glory I’d be seeking.”

  Florin stared at her grimly, then looked at Jhessail, and in the end glared at Melandar again. The war wizard said nothing.

  From somewhere nearby, there came a muffled crash, some shouts of men disagreeing enthusiastically over something, and a series of thuds, as if heavy things were being stacked up and shifted around.

  Pennae looked questioningly at Melandar, who murmured, “This house stands hard by a warehouse too—just the far side of the stable. There’s always bustle, night and day.”

  The war wizard’s gaze never left Florin’s face, and a silence fell—broken only by the creaking and clottering of a cart passing, outside—that ended only when the ranger looked up and said through clenched teeth, “Very well. We go. For now.”

  “Good,” Melandar said. “This is an ideal time to depart Arabel. Night has fallen, and it’s raining lightly. Few folk will be out on the streets to get a good look at your faces as you ride by.”

  Doust frowned. “But if ’tis after nightfall, the gates—”

  “Strangely enough,” Melandar said with a wry smile, “we’ve taken care of that.”

  The rain dripped from Norandur’s cloak in loud and swift abundance. “S’come on to rain,” he said, unnecessarily.

  “Um-hmm, so it has,” Ornrion Dauntless growled, looking up from his desk. “So, who are these war wizard highnoses, who need all our best horses so suddenly?”

  Norandur snorted. “The adventurers we chased all over that warehouse,” he rasped, as a raindrop descended from his nose, “that the queen knighted. Seems she has some private little mission in mind for them.”

  Dauntless stared at the Purple Dragon with his mouth open, his face slowly going white with anger.

  Norandur stared back, impassively. This ought to be entertaining.

  The dripping First Sword wasn’t disappointed. Dauntless slammed the quill in his hand down on the table so hard that it seemed he was trying to drive it through the thick, scarred wood. It snapped, and the blow caused his inkpot to skip off the table and shatter noisily on the flagstone floor. “Tyr and Torm blast me if they deserve any such thing! Private little mission where?”

  The soldier shrugged. “I know not. There’s just one war wizard left with them now, and he gave me the cold eye when I tried to talk to them.”

  “Well, we’ll just let our eyes serve where our tongues can’t!” Dauntless snarled. “They won’t ride a horselength without us seeing it, from now until—”

  “Until I order you to do otherwise, Ornrion Dahauntul,” the wizard Laspeera said coldly, materializing out of empty air at his elbow. “As I’m doing right now. Clean up that ink and see to your work here, and the Knights of Myth Drannor will just ride out of all our lives. If Tymora smiles on us.”

  The blue mists were suddenly gone, and Princess Alusair found herself in a city, standing outside in the night, in gently falling rain. She was on a slick but almost level slate rooftop. She blinked at a huge and impressive wall of stone spires soaring up beside her—nay, towering over her. A temple rooftop.

  Alusair peered around through the wet night, until she was sure. Yes, familiar towers and gables, a streetmoot she knew; she was in Arabel, though she couldn’t remember just which god this holy place belonged to.

  No matter; she was here, and she was alone at last. Adventure!

  The roof under her feet was nothing but a rain-cover, to give shelter to a coach or wagon loading area, where a temple door opened out into a cartway running back to a stable. At its outward end (she walked cautiously away from the towering temple), it ended at a stone wall enclosing the temple grounds, a wall crowned with a rusty row of iron spikes. A man’s boot wouldn’t fit between those spikes, but her slippered feet could.

  Beyond, she could just see a narrow alleyway in the night-gloom, running along the shabby, shuttered-windowed backs of shops and homes that were nothing compared to the temple behind her.

  The temple that must be full of priests and their magic, and possibly guardian beasts and enchanted stone sentinels too!

  Alusair shivered in sheer thrill, getting wet but not caring, and went to the row of spikes in an excited crouch, planting the sword in her hand like a staff to balance with. Adventure at last!

  She’d been to Arabel twice or thrice that she could remember; the Rebel City, some courtiers called it. “Almost outside the kingdom,” as some in Suzail never missed a chance to describe it, or even “the fortress that keeps the Stonelands at bay.”

  Not that she believed half the wild tales of dragons and worse that the Stonelands were supposed to be a-crawl with. Why—

  Enough. She was getting wet through. She needed her adventure to feature a warm fireside or at least a cloak soon.

  Alusair drew in a deep breath of wet Arabellan air, smiled at the uncaring night, and set one foot carefully between two spikes. She shifted her weight back to make sure she could lift that foot easily back out of its wedged position, found that she could—and stood up tall, swinging sword and dagger wide with a flourish, to step boldly forward, into a feet-first jump down into the dark alley below.

  Her landing jarred, and she crushed something wet and squishy that she was glad she couldn’t see—her slippers slid in something that felt like hair or fur—underfoot. Springing away to her right, Alusair trotted down the alleyway, finding it evil-smelling and strewn with rotten fragments of wood and what looked like slimy remnants of leaves that were beyond rotten.

  Her heart leaped as something moved in the gloom ahead. A man! A lurching, bleary-eyed man in worn leathers and a tunic that looked more like a rag than clothing, who peered at her and mumbled, “S’truth! The l’il lasses’re a-waving swords and daggers, now? Are the orcs come again, then?”

  He reached out for her with shaking fingers, but she swiveled her hips, quickened her pace, and was past, giving him a smile but no reply—and trailing her sword behind her to discourage him following. She looked back, a few breaths later, to see no sign of him in the night shadows.

  The alley stank, of dung and rotting food and worse, everchanging smells overlaid by woodsmoke and the occasional lovely aroma of a cooked meal, but Alusair breathed it all in deeply and happily, running along in the rain with a smile on her face. She was having an adventure!

  And not a war wizard in sight! Nay, she was—

  The hand thrusting out of the darkness this time was swift and strong, taking her by the shoulder and spinning her around before she could do more than utter a startled eeep.

  Adventure.…

  Chapter 4

  SWORDS IN THE RAIN

  Of that night, I remember mercifully little

  Beyond too many friends falling dead

  And striking aside swords in the rain.

  Onstable Halvurr

  Twenty Summers A Purple Dragon:

  One Soldier’s Life

  published in the Year of the Crown

  Ho, now! Hold hard there, my lad! Where d’ye be going, so hasty-like, on a night like—”

  This voice was deeper than the first drunkard’s had been, and came with a reek of stale drink that was almost stupefying. Alusair reared back, bringing her sword and dagger up between her and that half-seen face. The hand abruptly let go.

  It returned, coming in a little lower, thrusting past her bared steel to press hard into her chest and send her staggering back. “Away with that war-steel!”

  Then the drunkard made a s
urprised sound at what his fingers had found, and growled, “A lass? A lass, out in the night like this? Running from a murder, are ye?”

  “Nay,” Alusair said, trying to make her voice snap in command as she’d heard her father do many a time, “but there will be a murder in this alley if you lay hands on me again!”

  “Whoa, now! Easy!” The reply seemed a step or two farther away, as if the man had retreated. “A lass, light-dressed, out in the rain and the night with no lantern, carrying war-steel unsheathed … a slip of a lass, too, with a sword too heavy for her by half … ye’re an acolyte of Tempus, ye are!”

  He sounded almost proud, as if he’d won some sort of prize. “The Lord of Battles keep ye and honor ye, Swordmaiden! Fair even to ye, and pray accept the apologies of ol’ Dag Runsarr—not the least of the King’s Dragons, in my day! Saw the king himself I did, once!”

  Alusair resisted the urge to tell old Dag that she’d seen the King of Cormyr a thousand thousand times, and sometimes felt she saw far too much of him, yet at the same time not enough. “Fair even, Dag Runsarr,” she said, instead. “Tempus defend thee and watch over thee.”

  That grand speech was rather spoiled by a sudden loud grumble from her stomach. Old Dag chuckled and shuffled off down the alley, in the direction she’d come. Leaving the youngest princess of Cormyr suddenly aware of just how hungry she was. She’d last eaten at morningfeast, and last sipped some spiced clarry just after high-sun … and the night was well begun, now.

  A tavern. A tavern would still be serving food. So would a feasting hall, but she had no idea if Arabel even had any fine feasting halls. So a tavern it would be.

  Alusair hurried along the alley and came out into a narrow cobbled street lit by two lonely, distant hanging lamps. She could see nothing but houses in either direction—and the alley continuing on, across the road. She crossed, returning to the darkness almost thankfully. A distant dog barked, but she knew she had little to fear: dogs in Arabel were working beasts, and only fools let their workers stand out in rainstorms to get chilled and fall sick. It would be a rare alley that would have wild dogs waiting for her. Rats, now …