by Ed Greenwood
At the moment, Alassra was laughing with delight amid water aglow as the last of the cloak’s magic passed into her and it crumbled to nothingness. “Did you bring some soap? Or one of those new Sembian scents?”
Storm made a face. “Do I look as if I want to stink like a cartload of jungle flowers crushed into the blended lees of an extensive wine cellar?”
“You,” her sister said happily, “look like you can and do shrug off everything and serenely take from life what you seek, letting all else drift away without getting bothered over it.”
She spread her limbs and floated, submerged except for her face. “Thank you, Storm. Thank you for myself back … for a little while. So, what’s afoot in the wider world outside this hidehold? What are you up to? And El—where’s he right now, and what foolishness is driving his deeds?”
“Meddling in Cormyr, as usual,” Storm replied. “He sent me because he wants all the fun for himself.”
“Hah, as usual,” her sister told the cavern ceiling. “He always tries to keep me away from the best moments, too. I’d have slain thrice the Red Wizards, down the years, if he wasn’t always—”
“Alassra,” Storm told her with mock severity, hauling herself out of the water and hissing at the chill she felt as streams of it ran from her to rejoin the pool, “you haven’t left two-thirds of the Red Wizards alive, so far as any of us can tell, at any time since you started defending Aglarond. You couldn’t have claimed three times the Thayan lives you did. Trust me.”
“Oh?” Alassra grinned archly. “Why start now, after all these years? Tell me more news. Not about El—you’re helping him, of course—but of the wider Realms. Any kings toppled? Dragons tearing cities apart? Realms obliberated by angry dueling archwizards?”
“Oh, all of those,” Storm chuckled, running both hands through her hair to shed fresh streams of water as she cast a swift glance back at the manacles and the rest of the magic she’d brought. “Where to begin?”
“Thay, of course,” her sister said promptly. “I always want to hear what calamities have befallen the Thayans lately. Why, alathant so partresper I … what’s kaladash, ah—”
Their eyes met, and the wildness was back in the Simbul’s. And a moment of desperation, too, almost of pleading, before they rolled up in her head. Then they sank half-closed, making her look sleepy.
“S-sister—,” she managed, in one last struggling entreaty.
Storm plunged grimly back into the pool and reached for her sister as Alassra started to slip under, babbling in earnest.
That hadn’t lasted long.
Mystra damn it all.
Storm tugged her feebly thrashing sister—who was starting to bark like a dog—up out of the water, rolling her far enough away from it that only a determined crawl—and Alassra was beyond doing anything in a manner that might be termed “determined”—could get her back to a swift drowning before Storm returned.
Then she crawled back to her cloak and the manacles, water running from her soaked breeches and boots in floods that thoroughly drenched the sloping stone beneath her knees.
Storm shackled her sister to the wall ring, wrists crossed and hands behind head. That put most of her back in the water again—but unless something tore Alassra’s arms from their sockets, the short length of the manacles would keep her face clear of the surface.
Giving Storm time enough to gather plenty of wood for a large fire and rocks to warm around it, to get herself and her sister dry.
Drenched and dripping, jerkin in hand to bundle twigs in, she lowered her head and trudged grimly back out through the ward again.
She hadn’t expected the cloak to win Alassra’s sanity back for long—its enchantments were relatively feeble, after all—but it had lasted a much shorter time than she’d expected.
Which was, as they said, bad. Storm hadn’t brought all that many enchanted gewgaws with her.
Huh. El had better liberate a lot of magic from the royal palace or the nobles of Cormyr coming to council, if he ever wanted to see his beloved sane again.
Once Lass was over the initial frenzy, the rage that always accompanied her slide back into idiocy—and who wouldn’t scream and fight, knowing they were sinking back into that?—she’d be fine. A survivor who’d fight like a tiger to cling to life. The ankle-chain didn’t keep her from the water; it kept her from walking out of the cave, absorbing the ward as she went.
Even chained a long way from it, she was unwittingly reaching out and leeching its power, draining it ever-so-slowly to keep herself alive. Water, she had, and food she needed not, as long as she had magic to drink from afar …
Yet if ever Lass got out to wander the vast forest that surrounded the Dales and cloaked most of the land between Sembia and the Moonsea, she’d be just one more clever prowling beast awaiting fearful foresters’ arrows. And the jaws and claws of larger, stronger prowling beasts.
Those were watchmens’ manacles, recent Cormyrean forgework stolen from down in the Dale. They neither had nor needed keys, and locked or opened by sliding complex catches on both shackles at once, something that could be done easily except by anyone wearing them, the cuffs being rigid. Unless they were put on a shapeshifter, or someone who had tentacles, that is …
Well, Lass had always hated malaugrym and doppelgangers and anything with tentacles; she was hardly likely to work any magic that could give her such features, even if she did somehow regain sanity enough to work any magic at all.
Those thoughts took Storm back out through the torments of the field—she really noticed, then, how much feebler they had become—into the forest where full night had fallen, bringing a darkness that would be deep indeed until the clouds thinned and let the moon shine down.
Which made the tiny, leaping orange glows over to her right all the more noticeable. She couldn’t see the fire, only the light it was throwing up onto the leaves of overhanging trees; a campfire in one of the hollows on the edge of Shadowdale, where travelers who lacked coin for inns or wanted not to be seen down in the dale often spent nights.
They might be merely passing through, or they could be trouble. Which meant she could not ignore them.
As silently as she knew how—which was very slowly, in this poor light—Storm crept closer to the flames.
There were eight well-armed, fierce-looking adventurers in the hollow. Three were huddled asleep in their cloaks; two stood watch with their backs to trees, facing out into the night; and a trio were muttering together as they banked their fire with clods of earth. Their talk told Storm they were trouble, all right.
“Harper’s Hill,” one was saying. “Three different men down in the dale said he’ll be thereabouts, if he’s to be found at all.”
“I heard he lurks around Storm Silverhand’s farm—with her and a lot o’ ghosts and the like,” another put in.
“Nay,” said the last of the three. “Ulth and I searched there a day back. No crops sown this year, and a garden run wild. The house stands open and empty. They say in the dale the Lady Storm walks out of the woods when she pleases—mayhap twice a year, now, no more—and no one knows when she’ll appear or why. Never stays more than a night, seems to avoid her farm, then is gone into the trees again.”
“Crazed, all of them,” the first man offered, spitting thoughtfully into the fire. “Been thus a long time, now.”
“So what do we do if we can’t find Elminster?” the second man asked, sounding younger and less assured than the other two. “Search the backside of every tree between here and Sembia? That’s a lot of forest!”
“Yes,” the first man told him firmly. “Search we will—not trees, idiot, but every last cave in all the forest. Yet I doubt it’ll come to that. Once we find a hint of magic, we’ll have found Elminster.”
Storm sighed soundlessly and backed away. Right past the sentinel she’d passed on her way in—just as unnoticed as during her arrival.
She would have to deal with them before she headed back to Suzail … or
Alassra would be dead with half-a-dozen arrows in her before this lot were done looking for El.
Who would just have to deal with the council on his own, Cormyr fall or Cormyr stand.
Oh, Mother Mystra, come back to us.
That fierce prayer was answered by the utter silence she’d been expecting.
The empty silence she’d heard for a hundred years.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
WELL EARNED
Marlin poured himself another glass from his favorite decanter and nodded approvingly.
This Jharakphred was the best artist for hire in Suzail, it seemed.
A nervous, simpering little runt of a man, to be sure, as he stood there holding the protective cloth covers he’d just stripped from the two portraits he’d painted—but the best.
There was no arguing with the two boards lying flat on Marlin’s table. They weren’t just good likenesses of Lord Draskos Crownsilver and Lord Gariskar Dauntinghorn—they were old Draskos and Daunter.
“You like them?” the artist asked nervously, misinterpreting Marlin’s silence. “I followed both lords for days, until they told their bodyguards to run me off. With cudgels.” He rubbed at some bruises, reflectively, then left off to add proudly, “I think I got them right, though. Very true to life.”
“Very,” Marlin agreed with a smile, stepping forward to hand the man the promised fee. “Well earned.”
Jharakphred beamed, bowed deeply to his noble patron with the heavy pouch of gold clutched in both hands, turned away—and never saw Marlin’s smile widen into a beam to match his own as two men blazing with silent blue flames from head to toe stepped out from behind tapestries both before and behind the artist and ran him through.
“Take him to the furnace,” Marlin ordered, plucking the gold back out of convulsing claws that would never hold a brush again, as the impaled man gurgled and shuddered on two swords at once. “You know the way. Mop up every last spot of blood ‘twixt here and there, then return to me.”
His will more than his words compelled the two silent slayers, but Marlin enjoyed giving orders. Besides, he needed the practice. It wouldn’t do to sound less than regal when the time came.
Soon.
What seemed a very short while later, silent blue flames erupted out of the nearest wall. Marlin smiled and, as both Langral and Halonter emerged, beckoned them over to the pair of portraits.
“These men … would you know them, across a room or down a dark street? Look well, until you will.”
He pointed at the painting on the left, so vivid and lifelike that it might have been the living man it depicted, somehow rolled out flat on Marlin’s table.
A burly, fierce-looking lord, going white at the temples but possessed of a warrior’s confidence and rugged good looks, staring hard out of the painted board at anyone viewing it, with a frowning challenge in his ice blue eyes. “Lord Draskos Crownsilver, patriarch of the Crownsilvers.”
Then Marlin waved at the other picture. A faintly smiling, smoothly handsome, dark-haired man with steel gray eyes, this one. A sleek, dangerous old sea lion. “Lord Gariskar Dauntinghorn. Like the other, head of his family.”
The two flaming men—or ghosts or whatever they were—stood in silence looking down at the two portraits for a long time, ere they both finally nodded.
Marlin smiled again. “When I compel you to,” he told them, “you’ll enter whatever club or inn or wing of the royal court I direct you to and kill them. Bearing their bodies away with you to a place I’ll tell you of, so they cannot be found and brought back to life.”
And as they nodded once more, eyes on his, he bent his will on them, forcing them back into the chalice and the Flying Blade again.
It was still a struggle but an easier one this time; when he was done, a single swipe of his fingers sufficed to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Then he reached for the handy decanter of his favorite wine, seeing with approval that his steward had freshly filled it since the morning, and pondered his plan.
If his coerced slayers slew these two key senior nobles during the council, he’d at one stroke remove the most capable and stubborn resistance to any change in rulership, plunge the realm into uncertainty and turmoil, and lure any investigating highknights and war wizards within reach of the deadly blades of Langral and Halonter.
The flower of House Stormserpent sipped thoughtfully. And smiled again.
It was high time to take himself back to the Old King’s Favorite to survey the fresh crop of nobles arriving early for the council.
There might well be some other nobles fair Cormyr would profit from the removal of. To say nothing of the fortunes of one Marlin Stormserpent.
Once settled at his usual table, Marlin made haste to hide his face behind a full goblet of something refreshing, so as to not to be so obviously listening to the talk rising excitedly all around him.
Word spread as swiftly as ever in Suzail. The Purple Dragons on watch were all in an uproar; that young and sneering braggart Seszgar Huntcrown had been murdered in a club, along with all his blades—servants, bodyguards, and hangers-on, every jack of them—by two mysterious slayers who did their deadly and unlawful work wreathed in constant blue flames!
That would bring out the wizards of war after morningfeast on the morrow, to be sure. Or so ran the shared opinion of the nobles dining and drinking—mainly drinking, at such a late hour—in the Favorite.
There were far more lords in the place than usual, Marlin noticed; the city was starting to fill up with nobles who spent much of their time at their upcountry keeps and hunting lodges.
They knew they could find good food and properly fawning service at the Favorite at that hour, without all the din and roistering of more common clubs—and without most of the perils of such places, too. Most nobles mistrusted their fellow lords even more than they disdained commoners and hated Crown and court; even there, in the Favorite, they’d brought their wizards along for protection. Their House wizards, most of them, though a few had hired outlander mages as bodyguards. That was only to be expected; it was commonly accepted but officially unconfirmed truth that the war wizards trained, influenced, and even infiltrated the ranks of the House wizards, and spied on all noble-hired spellhurlers anyway. So there would always be some nobles whose mistrust of their House wizard overcame any miserly instincts.
Marlin smiled wryly to himself, recalling what courtiers called such lords. “Incipient traitors.” Well, for their part, nobles had far less polite terms for most courtiers.
Lord Haelwing, two tables away from Marlin, was one of those mistrustful nobles, it seemed, and had no doubt given his bodyguard wizard some blunt and specific orders before proceeding to the Old King’s Favorite and commencing to drink himself into insensibility.
So the mage, a Sembian of slim mustache and cold eyes hight Oskrul Meddanthyr, was seated at the table beside the drunkenly snoring heap of his employer. A table acquiring an interested audience of young nobles and wealthy pretenders to nobility, who had eagerly seized the opportunity to ply a talkative wizard with drinks and question him about the unfolding ways of the world.
Marlin listened as the Sembian became increasingly loquacious, as drink after drink took hold. Grand tale after grand tale was rolling out of Meddanthyr, and even the nobles’ bodyguards had started to listen.
“Oh,” he was saying to one would-be noble, leaning forward to favor the table with an unlovely smile, “the Harpers officially disbanded. That is, the head Harpers announced the dissolution and then set about very publicly butchering many Harpers whom they knew to really be agents of various evil groups who’d infiltrated Those Who Harp.”
Meddanthyr sipped from his jack, smiled again, and added, “Yet I very much doubt it will surprise any of you to learn that the Harpers did not, in fact, cease to exist. An extremely secretive, underground fellowship of some two dozen Harpers continued—as they do to this very day. In fact, my friends—”
T
he wizard thrust his head forward and lowered his voice dramatically, to add in a menacing whisper, “the Harpers are rebuilding …”
“WhooOOoohoo!” young Lord Anvilstone piped up, imitating a ghost’s frightening wail as he wiggled all his fingers in mock apprehension.
“They’re sitting among us right now,” his friend Lord Mrelburn put in sarcastically. “Under the tables, everybody!”
There were snorts and derisive chuckles, in the heart of which someone muttered, “Fear a lot of lasses and fancy-boys sitting half-naked over harps? Not farruking likely!”
“Here, now,” an older lord said quellingly, “I can hear wild nonsense about the Harpers any time! Leave off; we’ve got a wizard here, and for once it’s not one of Ganrahast’s watchful toadies. I want to hear about magic, old magic out of legend—and what out of all those tales has real spells and suchlike behind it that we should be seeking or being wary of or that might be here in Cormyr under our noses.”
A general rumble and roar of assent greeted these words, and Marlin decided to seize this chance to steer the Sembian’s tongue before he downed any more drinks and veered toward the fanciful or incoherent.
“Hey, now!” he called firmly, before Meddanthyr could decide what tale of magic to tell first. “If it’s to be magic spoken of, I want to hear about the Nine—the Crown of Horns, Laeral before the Blackstaff ‘saved’ her right into his bed, and the shattering of that fellowship. Two of whom had interests hereabouts, I’ve heard. We know what befell Laeral, but whatever happened to the rest of them?”
Meddanthyr turned to face Marlin for just long enough to dispense a shrug. “Dead, some of them. Fled away, others—I know not where, but they were veteran adventurers, mind; they may well have had other names and faces prepared to step behind, to live out their days in plain view but not known for who they really were. And they could have had all manner of spells and enchanted items, aye, though Laeral was their strongest spellhurler, by far. I’ve heard of nothing linking any of them or their doings to Cormyr after the Crown of Horns took her and she turned on them all. But as to powerful magic, three of them shared a fate that should be of interest to you.”
