“Always keep antidotes handy,” Yellander said brightly, reaching down a hand to help Crownsilver to his feet. “Sound policy for every poisoner.”
Settling thankfully back into his seat, Maniol Crownsilver shook his head in disgust. “That demonstration was not necessary.”
He waved his hand as if to banish all memory of what had just occurred, and said, “What I don’t understand is why you two don’t own all Cormyr—Obarskyrs, war wizards, Purple Dragons, stinking Marsember and all—already! You could have been sending long caravans of loaded trade-wagons, or mounted, weapon-gleaming armies, through that portal!”
Eldroon shook his head. “Listen not to minstrels’ tales. Portals will never replace caravans for overland trade. Even if the way you’re using is free of some fell and ancient evil watching over it in the belief that all who use it are their rightful meals, the ways themselves occasionally ‘drink’ or melt away things taken through them.”
“ ‘Things’?”
“Coins, swords, trade goods. Anything you’re wearing or carrying.”
“Which is why,” Yellander put in smoothly, “you can step through a portal in your best armor, waving your sword—and arrive at the other end naked, with your sword hand empty.” He sipped from his goblet. “Something of a crestfallen disaster for your mounted, weapon-gleaming armies.”
“So our trade has been well and truly disrupted,” Lord Eldroon concluded. “Wherefore we want the Knights of Myth Drannor and particular war wizards and Zhentarim dead, and their corpses missing or reduced to scattered dust—so not even beyond death will they be able to tell anyone about certain things they may have seen in our warehouse.”
“Which, by the way,” Yellander added, “also contains many legitimate wares, stored for other traders.”
Eldroon nodded. “We only need six-and-twenty or so slain, but they must be the right six-and-twenty.”
Crownsilver frowned. “Adventurers, war wizards, Zhents—so you’re going to start a war in the streets of Arabel? How, exactly, without dragging every war wizard in all the realm—and half the Purple Dragons too—down on our heads like so many hungry war-dogs?”
“No,” Yellander snapped, “not Arabel. We’re not dolts, man.”
“Halfhap,” said Eldroon.
“Halfhap?”
“Walled town, well on the way to Tilver’s Gap, going eas—”
“Yes, yes, I know it. Why Halfhap?”
“It has a lure we can use. With your help.”
“All right,” Lord Crownsilver said warily, “suppose you tell me first how my help is a key to this cunning scheme. Then you can tell me the cunning part, and all about this lure.”
Yellander smiled thinly. “Well said, Maniol. Here ‘tis then, bluntly: you’re being watched.”
“By?”
“The war wizards, who else? They’re very interested in you right now, expecting you to either take your own life or more likely work treason in a rage against your recent losses. So, upon our signal, you will bait our hook by hiring a few bullyblades and gathering your most able servants for a little run to Halfhap—telling said servants why of course, so they can tonguewag it all over Suzail—to find and seize Emmaera Dragonfire’s magic for your own.”
“Ah. That’s your lure.”
“Indeed. The persistent local legend of the hidden, never-yet-found magic of Emmaera Dragonfire. More properly Emmaera Skulthand, but minstrels prefer her nickname, of course. Long dead, cloaked in many wild bards’ tales—just the sort of thing adventurers, Zhents, and our ever-meddling war wizards all find irresistible.”
“So given that very irresistibility, why hasn’t someone plundered Emmaera’s magic long since?”
Yellander shrugged. “Perhaps they have. It certainly isn’t in Halfhap, so far as we can tell.”
“And given that the war wizards undoubtedly know that too, how exactly do you expect the lure to work?”
Lord Eldroon smiled. “You cover ground the two of us have argued over a time or two before. Let us share our conclusions with you.”
“Please do.”
“Well, if we make sure the Knights of Myth Drannor and particular Zhents—and, once our favorite adventurers have reached the Oldcoats Inn in Halfhap, certain war wizards too—overhear news that the dead woman’s long-lost spellbooks, wands, and all have been discovered behind a false wall in the deepest cellar of the inn, but that no one dares approach them because a ring of floating, magically animated swords guards them—”
“Swords that blaze with all-consuming dragonfire,” Yellander murmured.
“Guardian swords that blaze with all-consuming dragonfire,” Eldroon agreed. “The Knights and the war wizards are sure to race to claim such a prize. As the rumors we spread and the hook-baiting your hurried preparations and travel serve to make that ‘sure’ even more certain.”
Crownsilver nodded. His face seemed to be getting used to wearing a slight frown. “And how will that help you? Once they discover there’s nothing there, won’t they all just leave again?”
“Ah, but there isn’t nothing there. There’s a spell Dragonfire cast, an illusion of her spellbooks, wands, and baubles. The war wizards have searched that old decaying barn of an inn dozens of times, and banished her spell, too, but it keeps returning. It was her lure—and one of the reasons we bought the inn some years back.”
“Her lure, you say? So where is her magic, really?”
“No one knows, and we’ve never wanted to waste coin, time, and lives finding out. The inn cellars serve us as way-storage, and the new keeper serves us, sending us coin that the rooms above bring—the rooms that aren’t full of our bullyblades.”
“So the Knights go down into the cellar …”
“And we pounce.” Lord Eldroon smiled. “Or rather, our bullyblades do, using all the back passages and curtained-off corners in the cellars; crossbows that fire bolts tipped with our poisons, and that sort of thing. They can bring war wizards down dead just as easily as they can foolhead adventurers.”
“And when it’s all done,” Lord Yellander added, sliding aside the top of the table between them to reveal a velvet-lined storage niche that held a string of cheap-looking beads and a note that read Caution: necklace of fireballs, “this will provide a blast-the-bodies pyre to thwart war wizards spell-prying into dead brains.”
“And how will you get there in time to use it?”
Yellander smiled softly. “By means of the other reason we bought the inn. The portal into its back pantry. Yes, another portal; the realm’s riddled with them.”
Old Ghost drew the last three runes of the spell in his mind, silently and emphatically thinking of the words that ended the incantation as he did so, in deft and exacting sequence.
And the swirling, building spell-glow rose into a bright fist, trailing sparks, that opened to him and flooded over him with a rapture sweeter than he’d ever felt in his long existence before.
He’d now mastered every one of the ancient Netherese spells! At last!
Gleefully he soared up out of the roofless “haunted” ruin in the hills of upcountry Amn he’d been using as a spell chamber and raced through the dark tangled wood like a howling storm, darting through the gaps of a badly boarded-over back window into a tavern storeroom, and thence out into its smoky bustle like a half-seen, streaking arrow—that plunged right into a human host. He had every exultant intention of riding the man mercilessly.
The hitherto fat and lazy master of the Bright Mare Fine Tavern, best (and only) drinking-house in the rural Amnian village of Darthing, suddenly flung himself across a littered card table, viciously punched a warrior twice his size in the throat, snatched out the gargling, strangling man’s short sword and slashed that same throat open, and then bounded up, howling.
The taproom of the Bright Mare was as crowded as usual—and every jack and lass in it stared in open-mouthed, dumbfounded astonishment as Tavernmaster Undigho Belarran waved the short sword around and around his hea
d, laughing and hooting in wild, loud incoherence as the blood flew from it to spatter faces and tables all around—and then lurched forward and butchered a staring cobbler, right in front of the man’s shrieking wife.
Then Belarran became a fat, panting whirlwind, racing here and there across the taproom and back, wildly and recklessly slashing and stabbing. Men swore, fumbled for daggers and belt-knives—and died, hacked and pinioned by a man no one believed could move so fast, even as they gaped at him doing so.
Belarran’s wife and his favorite ale-maid toppled over in their blood. The old miller’s dog was laid open from jaws to haunches. Then the wild-eyed tavernmaster slashed open the throats of two cowering guests in one huge swing of the blood-drenched sword in his fist and made it to the door.
He tarried not to trap and stalk the two wounded but feebly crawling guests still left alive, but burst out onto the main street of Darthing.
Villagers turned to give him greeting, frowned at what they saw, and then died as the tavernmaster rushed at them, hacking and slashing, hurling himself forward recklessly to chop at knees and wrists and ankles.
Folk screamed and shouted in fear, and some men came running with shovels and picks and the rusty swords of old wars, to try to ring the madman and slow his wild butchery. They failed.
Thrice the tavernmaster hewed down armed men who faced him, rushing this way and that at rolling-eyed random, so that none dared strike at him from behind for fear they’d suddenly be kissing his blade as he whirled to face them. Another Darthingar fell, and another, until the village blacksmith shouted at them to all strike at once, rushing in from all sides.
Two more died in that fray of clanging blades as the grunting, flailing-armed tavernmaster lashed out faster than ever—but it ended with Tavernmaster Undigho Belarran spitting blood and sagging to the ground with seven swords thrust through his body, like a large crimson pincushion.
“Well,” the smith said to Darthing’s chandler at his right shoulder and harness-maker to his left, “that’s tha—”
Something like gray-white smoke raced up out of the dying man at their feet and plunged right through them—chandler, smith, and harnessmaker—and the three Darthingar clutched their chests, reeled, and fell on their faces, dead.
The smoke-thing raced on down the village street—and it was laughing.
As villagers shrieked and stared, the mirth of what they could now see was a human-shaped wraith, its arms and legs trailing off into ragged wisps, became a howling guffaw.
The folk of Darthing turned and fled, pelting down stairs into their cellars to cower, panting, as Old Ghost veered through a few more of them, stopping their hearts as he plunged through the sobbing, running humans.
He soared on, gloating aloud in triumph, his voice a raw and terrible hissing. “The spells are all mine at last! I can snatch power enough to destroy Hesperdan! To destroy Manshoon!”
He chortled as he raced on, sweeping east out of Amn faster than any racing hawk.
The old Netherese spells were poorly written. The incantations awakened stresses in the flowing and rebounding energies of the Weave they called on. A wizard could handle two active spells at once, but trying a third one tore that wizard apart every time. So had perished many wizards and sorcerers of Netheril. Yet only corporeal casters stood in peril. Old Ghost could survive having six working at once, perhaps more!
And what spells they were! Slow but titanic, they literally melted away land—rock and soil, energy flows, everything—into energies that Old Ghost—and only he!—could control, by directing their flows into the Shadow Weave rather than the Weave. He was getting good at doing so, now, and the beauty of it was that Mystra attributed the slight weakening of the Weave to Shar, but Shar couldn’t even sense his work.
Or so it seemed. If he was wrong, he might soon face the wrath of two angry goddesses … if he was wrong.
He’d noticed the castings also stole energy from portals, causing a marked increase in what sages of the Art termed “portal drink”—non-living items that vanished from creatures traversing portals. But what of that? Only creatures who lived and breathed and grasped after food and drink and each other had need of coins or clothes and such!
Casting another spell whenever he needed more strength, he would become one of the mighty. Ever-stronger, even able to rise up again like mist if “destroyed,” as long as creatures used portals anywhere in Faerûn.
Old Ghost raced toward Cormyr, bellowing triumphant laughter.
As she trotted through the wet Arabellan night, Pennae was breathing hard and starting to limp as her leg stiffened.
Someone’s dagger had sliced her arm, and a Zhentish sword had more than nicked her leg. She’d slain both Zhents who’d wounded her, but that didn’t make their little gifts to her throb any the less, and if she lost her agility, her career—gods, her life—went with it.
Wherefore she’d left that happy little fray of Zhents and Knights of Myth Drannor butchering each other in the stables, and hurried a few streets across sleeping Arabel to here.
Dark, empty, and dripping Crownserpent Towers. The boarded-up mansion of a minor noble family that to her certain knowledge was extinct, unless undead could sire or bear living offspring. It was old and massive, with air-vents large enough for a skilled sneak-thief to crawl through, and doorposts a child could scale. Decaying moldings and crevices everywhere, and the sort of genteel decay that seeping water, rats, and birds caused.
All of which made it the perfect place to hide healing potions until they were needed.
Such as now, for example.
The rain was slackening, and the mansion was boarded up as tightly as ever. Good; she wasn’t in the mood to fight a street gang—or the servants of a new owner, for that matter.
She climbed up a doorpost, along the ornate stone cornice to a corner, then onto a wide stone windowsill adorned with a fresh duskfeathers nest. The bird sitting on it cheeped once in its sleep as Pennae’s foot came down softly beside it. From there, a long, aching stretch led to the lip of the roof-carving. She dug in fingers like claws, because everything was wet and it could be a killing fall from here.
Up and over, and there was the vent cover.
It slid off as readily as ever, and Pennae lowered herself cautiously down and in. Along the attic air-vent to the moot of six vents, down—
Hand on a precious vial, she froze. Murmurings. Voices. Mens’ voices. Crownserpent Towers, it seemed, was empty no longer.
Chapter 8
MORE CONFOUNDED SCHEMING
No fight nor foe of Cormyr ever angered me.
I had no wrath to spare, for it was twice or thrice
daily provoked by all the confounded scheming.
Horvarr Hardcastle
Never A Highknight:
The Life of a Dragon Guard
published in the Year of the Bow
Thrusting the precious vial she’d come for into her seldom-used throat pouch, Pennae crept along the vent-passage as stealthily as she knew how, until she was peering down through a grating at a sudden glow in a bedchamber that should have held only darkness, cobwebs, and mold.
It was a cold radiance, bright blue and glimmering. Magic.
A glow that came from an orb on a neck-chain, held on high by the robed and hooded figure that was wearing it.
A second, similarly garbed man held up a second orb, clearly in response to the first. “With both of these at work,” he said, his voice sounding male, Cormyrean, and old, “not even Vangey’s magic can see or hear us. Well met.”
A man who also sounded like a native of Cormyr, but slightly younger, echoed that dry greeting even more sarcastically, and then asked, “Is the time to strike come at last?”
“Not yet. Soon.”
“When?”
“When all the alarphons are dead—that is, they believe you to be dead—and Laspeera’s dust, and Vangerdahast is weakened or preoccupied, or both. I’ll write ‘Leak here’ on the wall at the bend i
n the Long Passage, to let you know when the time is right. If anyone sees it, they’ll dismiss it as a steward’s message to the Palace masons.”
Pennae frowned. The alarphons were the internal investigators among the war wizards, the watchers who kept all war wizards honest. Or supposedly upheld honesty, by the sounds of this.
In the bedchamber below, the first man lowered his orb. “And then?”
“Set the traps on the crystals. When ready, you write the same phrase on the opposite wall of the passage, facing mine, and I’ll know to send word to Vangey that the princesses are imperiled.”
“And he’ll come running, and—blam! What then?”
“The same lure should work just as well on Azoun. Mind you rig something physical—stone, falling from above, perhaps—to disable him in case his shields are strong enough to defeat your spells.”
“Yes. I’d not want to end up facing him blade to blade.”
“Indeed. Kill him, but keep the head. We may need it.”
“We must all get a head in this world.”
“Ha. Ha. We’ll arrest Filfaeril for treason, accusing her of Azoun’s murder—we can say we found the head wedged down the shaft of her private garderobe. Tana we marry off to our puppet, Alusair we keep in hiding as our backblade, in spell-thrall—and then, regrettably, the traitor Filfaeril is killed by our spells while trying to escape.”
“Not smooth, but—”
“It doesn’t have to be. Many grumble about us, day in and day out, but how many dare to denounce or even challenge their war wizards? Remember: ‘Leak here.’ ”
“ ‘Leak here.’ And if someone tries to check on the princesses before we’re ready?”
“Leave that to me.”
The two men exchanged deep, dry chuckles, and then parted. As one—the one who sounded a little younger—turned away, Pennae caught sight of his face in the light of his orb.
It was not one she’d seen before, but she’d know it again. White hair at the temples, framing a handsome, commanding face. Imperious nose, hard eyes.
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