by Ed Greenwood
He found both almost immediately by literally stumbling into a small dining chamber dominated by an oval table heaped with slumped, mindless drow. The food under them was almost all crushed or spilled, but archways at the back of the room led into similar feasting rooms clustered around a central kitchen—a kitchen connected to larder after larder.
Dodging collapsed or wandering drow who had no minds left to notice a boldly wayward priestess in warriors’ armor clambering among them, El ransacked the citadel’s food stores at will. The good wine was all in fluted, fragile, utterly impractical bottles and decanters, but the soldiers’ swill was in double-thickness skin belt pouches, and there was cheese, thin hard-smoked pack lizard steaks, and plentiful vallart, the dark, chewy crescentiform wayfarers’ bread favored by many near-surface drow.
He took all he could stow, along with a battered metal mug a cook had been using as a measuring cup and a wickedly sharp little carving knife as long as one of his newly gained little fingers, thrust everything into two shoulder sacks that rode one atop the other like ungainly bulging bladders, one of them half-full of someone’s huge, rock-dust-soiled, dark old cloak, and departed the ruined citadel, heading the way the glaragh had: with his face into that faint breeze that blew along the passage.
That Underdark wind just might be coming from the Realms Above, the lands he knew, and provided the only firm direction point in this endless subterranean labyrinth. Symrustar was right—
Of course.
Aye, and thank ye. Symrustar was right: he did not want to tarry overlong, and be caught there when more drow arrived and saw what had happened to their mighty fortress.
No, he wanted to be back in the surface lands, as swiftly as he could get there without blundering into death for his new body, or great delays. Not that he could call to mind any ways up that should be nearby.
He recalled the places he wanted to avoid, all right. Haunted Ooltul, with its phaerimm and beholders, and the patrols of giants that ranged out from Maerimydra. Yet if he stayed too distant from those perils, he risked walking right into the drow hunting bands that would become ever more numerous and frequent, the closer he got to Cormyr—and the drow city of Sschindylryn.
There were ways that rose—if they’d survived the initial tumult of the Spellplague, and the century or so since—up into caverns in the Stonelands, and some in the Storm Horns, too …
The Thunder Peaks routes might be best, if the dragons and dracoliches that laired in their uppermost caverns were gone, asleep, or preoccupied. Hah; if. Those ways would bring him to the surface on the easternmost border of Cormyr, where the Purple Dragon outposts were few and scattered. He had spells enough that he should be able to evade the notice of Cormyr’s soldiery and easily reach the heart of the realm, where he could begin to follow Mystra’s commands. Which he recalled precisely: “By any means you deem best—becoming their head or turning their leaders to my service—recruit Cormyr’s wizards of war. They must become the ready allies, helping hands, and spies for all my Chosen.”
If he conducted himself properly, El could do that without instantly coming to Manshoon’s attention. Oh, that malevolently twisted one would notice him soon enough, and would need dealing with sooner or later … but for now, if El could manage matters thus, let it be later. He’d seen too many men and women—and Fair Folk, too—fall into the folly of fighting a favorite rival, spending their lives seeking to thwart and eradicate a foe; ere long, that striving became all their lives held and accomplished.
And you haven’t taken that very same fall? Symrustar’s voice rang through his mind in challenge. Don’t tell me you’re such a fool that you can’t see that!
El sighed. “I see it all too clearly, lady. I’ve spent century after century being slapped across the face by such an obvious conclusion, after all.”
And so?
“And so, Elminster of Shadowdale has more important work to do than to hold hard to any one foe or task. Since I began to avenge my family by bringing down the magelords, and in doing so learned my gift for the Art, I learned I could be more than a skulking slayer, and that Divine Mystra desired my service. Since then, I have always had more important work to do.”
When we first met, I was drifting, seeing no fitting cause or reward, only corruption and decadence and a slow decline for my family and my city. That was part of my fascination with you: you had many things ahead of you; I could feel it.
El grinned. “All too often,” he told that inner voice, “I felt it, too. Usually the lash of a spell, but sometimes the kiss of a blade.”
All right, clevermouth. So, the Thunder Peaks?
“The Thunder Peaks,” he confirmed. Those routes appealed for another reason, too. They crossed and crisscrossed, and ultimately came to the surface in a dozen different caverns or more. There was always a good chance not all of those caves would be blocked, occupied, or guarded.
Aye, he’d seek them, to arrive in the borderlands of Cormyr and there, far from Suzail and the watchful eyes of Manshoon, or for that matter Vangerdahast or Glathra, seek to join the war wizards under another name. Either in this new body, explaining it away as the result of a magical mishap—a lost spell duel, perhaps—or in another one, if a human body somehow became available. Then he’d take the slower but better road, making friends among them so as to rise in respect and usefulness, and spread his influence that way.
You make it all sound so easy. I hope it proves to be.
“So do I,” El murmured, as he went cautiously on down the passage, well aware of the perils facing any lone creature on the move in the Underdark.
Surprisingly, he felt not the slightest foreboding, and his earlier rage had vanished. Now, he was almost merry; happier and more carefree than he’d felt in a long time.
Why so?
My, Symrustar was swift.
He grinned, and found himself saying, “Well, I’m back at work, serving Mystra—and that striving is what my life holds to, and accomplishes.”
He walked along humming silently to himself, utterly contented.
Though he’d been lonely and longing for someone—anyone—to visit, to speak with him, to just to say his name, Rorskryn Mreldrake was less than happy now that it had happened. He was scared.
Just one cowled man had entered Mreldrake’s prison, though he’d glimpsed—been shown—a man-high roiling darkness through the briefly half-open door that warned him his visitor was not alone.
It was one of the hooded wizards. He’d brought a sack heavy with cloth bags and small, fragile clay jars—no glass, nothing metal that could be used to cut or pierce—and set it down with the words: “The magical needs you so calmly requested.”
Mreldrake had flushed at that, remembering his own angry shouts through the locked and bolted door. He’d lacked this and that—and any measure of patience, too.
Yet any mage as excited as he was over his work would be impatient to get on with it. For the first time in his life, he was creating something useful and important. Something more than a mere clever variant of a spell crafted by someone else, centuries ago. Something … new. Something his captors were interested in, which confirmed his suspicion that they were magically spying on him.
His visitor leaned back against the wall, folded his arms across his chest—his hands were male, and human, and looked strong but not young—and announced, “Time for a little demonstration, Mreldrake. Show us what you’ve accomplished thus far.”
Mreldrake found himself sweating. “It … it’s not much.”
His visitor sighed. “I do, as it happens, possess some nodding familiarity with magical experimentation and creation. I understand matters can proceed slowly, and achievements may be small. Nevertheless, I am interested in what little you may have accomplished. Impress me.”
“I … yes, of course.” Mreldrake went to his notes, wiped his forehead on one sleeve, drew in a deep breath, and blurted out, “Well, you know I’m seeking to make air hard, like the well-known wall o
f force, but to have a keen cutting edge. Eventually giving me an invisible blade that can strike from afar, but I do mean eventually, and—”
“Words I can hear anywhere,” the cowled man said softly. “Show me.”
Mreldrake nodded wildly, gabbled assent, and peered at his notes again. Then he pointed across the room to where he’d set up his threads, pulled from the hem of his robes and secured to the top and bottom of an open-frame chair back with drops of wax from the candle lanterns.
“Observe,” he gasped. “I—” He threw up his hands and abandoned all explanations, to stammer out an incantation as he carefully touched the things his captor had brought, one after another: down feathers from a she-duck, the shard of glass, the flake of metal from a sword blade that had drawn blood in battle, a human hair, and a drop of elf blood. He folded his touching finger into his palm as he sliced the air with the edge of his other hand, as if swinging a sword at the distant threads.
One of them obligingly parted, the severed ends dancing in the wake of the unseen force that had sundered them.
Mreldrake watched them, breathing hard. He was determined to make himself—a living, whole Rorskryn Mreldrake—part of this magic, somehow, so his captors couldn’t simply dispose of him once he perfected the spell. Yet now, before he’d achieved that, he had to keep his intent to do so secret from them. Or they’d destroy him instantly, and find some other hapless mage to do this work for them.
That thought brought him right back to what had so puzzled him in the first place. He wasn’t much of a wizard. They must see that. So why did they want Rorskryn Mreldrake?
“I—I can’t … the magic fades swiftly with distance from the components, and I haven’t yet begun to try to extend its reach.” He panted, aware that he was drenched in sweat. He had provided the hair, and so was personally linked to the magic; would the man leaning against the wall suspect that he was deliberately trying to bind himself to the spell?
Whatever his captor knew or suspected, the man seemed pleased. “You’ve certainly been busy, Mreldrake. Keep at it, and try not to dissolve in fear at our every visit. We know more about your thinking than you’d no doubt like—and any fool can guess more of your schemes than what we can be certain of.”
As Mreldrake froze, chilled by those drawled words, the cowled man strolled to the door, adding over his shoulder, “Let us know if you feel the need for a break in this work. We’ll fill it by discussing with you details of the wizards of war, and daily life in the royal palace of Suzail.”
“W-w-why?” Mreldrake dared to ask.
The cowled man stopped, turned unhurriedly to face his captive before tendering an elaborate shrug, and replied softly, “As wizards mightier than either of us have said before, it’s always nice to learn new things.”
CHAPTER
SIX
DANGER FOR HIRE
Lurth’s Trading was not a shop in which Suzail’s haughtier highnoses cared to be seen. “Squalid” was a fair description of its dingy, dusty interior, a dark labyrinth heaped with stolen, broken, and well-worn wares of all sorts, from rusty saws and cleavers to rags that had been fine gowns thirty summers ago. Trade was brisk, because “used sundry” needs always outstrip ready coin, but few patrons ventured beyond the front of the shop, where the lantern-wielding proprietor and his two scarred and leering young fetchhands met anyone who stepped through the front door.
Very few visitors ventured through the door adjacent to the front entrance of Lurth’s mercantile palace, let alone mounted the steep flight of dark and narrow stairs to reach the upper rooms of the building: the offices of Thurbrand and Arley, Wendra of the Willing Whips, and Splendors of the Shining Sea Importations.
Perhaps this was because the building was located in the poorer, rougher western part of Suzail. Or perhaps this was because Thurbrand had been dead for more than the decade that Arley had been a guest of the Crown dungeons, or because Wendra was older than many grandmothers and looked it, besides being less willing to taste her own lashes than she’d once been. Yet again, it might have had something to do with the fact that the Splendors had flourished importing illicit physics and powders that were now easily obtained at scores of Suzailan shops, and had since been reduced to selling daring scanty garments to men too embarrassed to purchase them in shops women might enter.
Wherefore business wasn’t, to be blunt, too good, and a new sign was tacked to the Splendors door at the back of the upstairs passage, informing interested Suzail that a sideroom of the Splendors now housed a new establishment. That new sign told the world crisply: “Danger For Hire.”
Judging by the looks of the two down-at-heel men lounging with their boots up on their desks, in lopsided chairs that threatened to collapse utterly and deposit them on their worn, sagging rented floor, the sign told the truth.
The more handsome of the two surviving partners in this crisp new business firm rejoiced in the name of Drounan “Doombringer” Harbrand. He was a tall man who always wore black from head to toe, and sported an eye patch that might have seemed more menacing if he hadn’t long ago fallen into the habit of switching it from one eye to the other. Harband had just returned from an interview with a new client that had—at her insistence, discretion be damned—been conducted in more savory surroundings. Upon his return, in some triumph, he had tossed her payment for the deal they’d struck onto the vacant table between the desks, where it landed with a satisfyingly weighty crash.
That feeling of exultation had ebbed as he’d begun to tell his business partner the particulars of the arrangement, and they now stared rather grimly at the heavy sack of gold coins.
That partner was shorter and uglier than Harbrand, and far less elegant in appearance. Even if his nose hadn’t been broken many times into a wreck of vaguely vertical shapelessness, the many crisscrossing scars that adorned his arms, head, torso, and knuckles told the world all too clearly that he was a brawler. A less than successful one, at that. But Andarphisk “Fists” Hawkspike did not appreciate such judgments, and most folk didn’t dare to dispense them in his presence, given the more than a dozen daggers sheathed all over his rotting, greasy, much-patched leathers.
“Hrast it!” he snarled, spitting at the floor with enough accuracy to hit it, “I knew there’d be a tail-sting in this! There always is, with nobles!”
Harbrand sighed gloomily. “At least it’s work. I’ve grown more than a bit tired of eating rats and table scraps thrown out kitchen doors.”
Their client was Lady Dawningdown, the vicious matriarch of a minor, disgraced noble family of Suzail. She had offered them far too much gold to refuse, to do a “certain task” for her—plus the tail-sting Hawkspike had been expecting: the threat that they’d be hunted down and slain if they turned down her offer, now that she’d confided in them.
“Remember that,” Harbrand added grimly. “Old Skullgrin sat there, flanked by four men who had loaded and ready crossbows trained on me. That fired poisoned bolts, she just happened to mention. If she’s so determined no one learn of our hiring—well, if we succeed in our task, her bullyblades’ll hunt us down and slay us, for that very same reason.”
“Huh. Why don’t she just send them to do it, and save her gold and our necks?”
“Because she has foes she fears, too, and doesn’t want to risk being left unguarded while they make the trip,” Harbrand explained patiently. “S’what I’d do.”
His partner gave him a dark look, and spat on the floor again.
Their task seemed simple enough. They were to journey to the remote prison stronghold of Castle Irlingstar in the Thunder Peaks on the eastern border of Cormyr. Not the prison every Cormyrean knew about, the walled Sharren-cauldron of Wheloon, but a small castle few had heard of, where King Foril Obarskyr sent his special prisoners—such as traitor nobles too dangerous to put with murderers and thugs they could buy the loyalties of, and agents of Sembia and Westgate and other hostile near neighbors who’d use more public imprisonings as a pretext for w
ar or royal assassinations or the like.
They were to free Lady Dawningdown’s son and heir from Irlingstar, and get him safely over the border into Sembia. Officially, fire-tempered young Jeresson Dawningdown had been cast into Irlingstar for murdering a man, and ordering a hiresword to slay two more he’d quarreled with over cards, slayings that had been swiftly accomplished. However, all Cormyr knew Jeresson “the Rager” had really been confined in Irlingstar because he’d joined a cabal of young nobles plotting with Sembian sponsors to murder the entire royal family and put a Sembian on the throne of the Forest Kingdom.
Jeresson was to be delivered safely to Bowshotgard, a hunting lodge in forested northern Sembia, where Danger For Hire would receive the rest of their gold.
“And a handy waiting grave, I’ll warrant,” Hawkspike grunted gloomily.
He watched Harbrand get up and thrust the sack of coins into their usual hidey-hole in the side of the privy chute, and he spat on the floor again.
“Nobles,” he growled. “I hate working for nobles. Trouble, always trouble.”
Harbrand flashed a mirthless smile. “Goes with the gold. Coin, always coin. That’s what makes them noble.”
“Oh? Not birth? Not good breeding?”
Harbrand snorted. “Have you ever noticed any hint or shred of good breeding on the part of the nobles of this land?”
He let silence fall, then snorted again. “Thought not.”
“What puzzles us most,” Ganrahast said slowly, “is this ‘Lady of Ghosts’ who pursued all of you through the Dalestride Portal. Just who—hrast it, what—was she?”
Storm grimaced. “A mistake shared by Elminster and Manshoon. Her name is, or was, Cymmarra. Long ago, she was Manshoon’s lover and apprentice—as were her mother and two older sisters. Eventually, tiring of those three and wanting to be rid of them, the Lord of the Zhentarim sent them to kill Elminster. They failed, of course. Cymmarra alone he held back from that mission, but forced her to watch the deaths of her kin. Wild with grief and rage, she attacked Manshoon. He bested her easily with his spells, manacling her with magic, and forced himself upon her one last time—as he sought to slay her with a dagger thrust. You saw that blade, thrusting out of her, as she strode through the palace.”