Beyond the High Road c-2

by Troy Denning

  Rowen’s expression grew apprehensive. “And?”

  “I fought my way through the thicket to the shores of a small pond, where the young woman I had heard was watering her mount from the pool. The beast was as white and luminous as a diamond, but even then I did not realize what it was until I called out to ask the way to the monastery and the creature raised its head.”

  “It was a unicorn.” It was not a question.

  “The golden born, the cloven hooves, everything,” Tanalasta confirmed. “Instead of answering me, the woman leaped laughing onto the unicorn’s back and vanished into the forest. Flowers and shrubs rose to blossom in its hoof prints.”

  Rowen stood without speaking for a long time, then finally asked, “And when it was gone, you found you had been at the monastery all along?”

  “Almost,” Tanalasta said, surprised. “I was at my favorite lake. How did you know?”

  “Had you stiff been lost, it would not have been much of a vision.” Rowen’s expression changed from apprehensive to dazed. “And you think I am this unicorn?”

  Tanalasta shrugged. “You’re the best candidate so far-and I doubt it was a coincidence that I found your Faith Planting at Orc’s Pool.”

  Rowen shook his head. “But my family…”

  “Now who is being dishonest?” Tanalasta asked. In the sky behind Rowen, one of the ghazneths peeled off and started south after her mare. “You know as well as I do that the vision wasn’t about politics. It was about love.”

  Rowen paled visibly and seemed too stunned to speak.

  Tanalasta took his hand and turned to continue their flight. “Now can we go?”

  Filfaeril sat alone in the apse of a silent throne room, staring down a long ambulatory bounded by double-stacked arches and tall columns of fluted marble. Though the chamber smelled of mildew and rot, it had been immaculately adorned in broad, vertical bands of brown and gold. The pattern was a simple one favored by Cormyrean royalty more than a thousand years earlier, when the kingdom had barely extended past the Starwater, and Arabel had been little more than a cluster of crossroad inns. The queen could not imagine any family of Arabellan nobles building such an archaic reception hall-nor, having gone to the expense of building it, allowing the place to grow as dank and musty-smelling as this one. It just did not make sense.

  Then again, nothing made sense since Vangerdahast’s return. She did not understand why he had brought the phantom with him, or why the lurid creature had abducted her only to abandon her here and wander off. Was the thing that confident of its prison, or had it simply forgotten her-and what was it, anyway?

  As important as the answers to these questions were, they were not the ones to which Filfaeril’s mind kept returning. More than anything, she wanted to know what had happened to Azoun and Tanalasta-and to Vangerdahast. And those answers she would not find in this throne room.

  The queen forced herself to remain seated for a while longer, using the time to study her environs and look for any hint of her captor’s presence. In the event of an abduction, Vangerdahast’s instructions were quite clear. First, do as little as possible and wait for the war wizards to show up. Second, avoid giving a captor any excuse to harm her. Third, fight or flee only if death looked imminent. Vangerdahast had told her many times that once the war wizards were alerted to a royal’s danger, a rescue company would arrive within minutes. But Filfaeril had been sitting on the throne for hours, and she had seen even less of the rescue company than of her captor. Clearly, something had gone wrong with the royal magician’s plan.

  Filfaeril stood and descended the dais. She paused to see if the phantom would show itself. When it did not, she walked down the ambulatory to the bronze grillwork gates at the end. Her captor had not bothered to shut them, so she stepped through… and found herself looking up the ambulatory toward the dais, as though she had merely turned around.

  Filfaeril spun on her heel and found the gates hanging ajar between the same two pillars, looking out on the same gloomy foyer and huge oaken doors as before. She pushed the gate open and walked through. Again, she found herself looking up the ambulatory toward the two wooden thrones on the dais. Frowning, the queen pulled the gate closed, then opened it and stepped through-to the same result.

  The queen slammed the bronze gate behind her, then started up the ambulatory. She had suspected all along that the phantom had not simply flown off and forgotten about her, but leaving the gate open was a hint of the creature’s true cruelty. As every good torturer knew, the secret to breaking a victim’s will lay in controlling her mind. Leaving the gate ajar had been a deliberate attempt to rob Filfaeril of hope. It had worked better than she cared to admit.

  On her way back to the dais, she took the time to step through each of the arches along the ambulatory, but the result was always the same. She found herself standing on the opposite side of the room, facing the same arch through which she had come.

  Finally, the queen resigned herself to the fact that her prison was as secure as any dungeon cell and returned to her throne. She sat down as deliberately and calmly as she could. After taking a moment to compose herself, Filfaeril pictured the royal magician’s bushy-bearded face and rubbed her signet ring.

  Her mind remained as quiet as the throne room, and a dozen possible reasons for Vangerdahast’s silence leaped into her thoughts. She wished they had not. Had he been able to, the wizard would have answered. That he had not meant one of two things: either he was incapacitated, or the strange prison prevented him from hearing her.

  A fanfare of trumpets echoed through the throne room, and the phantom appeared inside the gate. He was as gruesome as before, with his folded wings, tarnished crown, and red-tinged eyes glaring in Filfaeril’s direction. In his hands he held a limp mass of gray rags that might have been a body or a wad of clothing, and from his talons dangled long strings of gore.

  “Milady.” He bowed deeply, then started up the ambulatory toward Filfaeril. “If I have let you grow lonely, you must forgive me. The traitors have kept me busy.”

  As the phantom neared the dais, Filfaeril saw that the rags he carried were black weathercloaks with bronze throat clasps. The war wizards had found her after all. The queen’s fingertips began to ache, and she realized she was digging her nails into the arms of her throne.

  The phantom dumped the clothes in a heap and ascended the dais. “There is no need to call for someone else.” As he drew closer, the stench of blood and battle offal grew overwhelming. “I am never far from you. Ever.”

  He stopped beside Filfaeril’s throne, then reached down and lifted her hand. She gave an involuntary shiver and shrank away.

  “Come now.” He clasped her signet ring and gently worked it off her finger, leaving her whole hand smeared with warm gore. “Do you really believe I would hurt you?”

  Filfaeril could only look at him and wonder if she had gone mad.

  The phantom closed the ring in his palm, then his eyes rolled back and his wings spread a quarter of the way open. He gave a low groan. Finding herself at eye level with his naked loins, Filfaeril turned away in disgust-but instantly thought better of it and reached for her hair. In a swift and practiced motion, she slipped her fingers between the tines of her silver comb and thumbed a tiny catch, then pulled a razor sharp fist-rake from its sheath. The queen twisted in her seat, driving the weapon’s needlelike tines into her captor’s abdomen and hissing the command word that activated the weapon’s death magic.

  The phantom snarled in pain, then opened his hand and let the signet ring clink to the floor. He did not fall.

  Filfaeril yelled her command word again, pushing against the thing with all her might. The throne beneath her gave an ominous creak and collapsed, and she found herself sitting on the floor atop the moldering green remains of a rotten bench. On the stone before her lay a drab band of tin bearing the royal dragon of Cormyr. The queen was too confused to tell what had happened to the throne, but she knew when the magic had been drained from h
er signet.

  The phantom plucked Filfaeril’s comb from his abdomen and stood staring at it in confusion. Behind him, the majestic throne room had grown as dark and murky as a cellar, and the queen could barely make out the blocky shapes of several tall cask racks silhouetted against a distant rectangle of filmy light.

  “Look what you’ve done to our thrones!” The phantom gestured at the splintered remains of the moldering bench, then fixed his red-rimmed eyes on Filfaeril. “When did you grow so fat? You’re as big as a sow!”

  And Filfaeril suddenly felt as large as a war-horse. Her breathing grew labored and slow, her body became ungainly and sluggish, and her stomach began to rumble and growl. A terrible feeling of despair and lethargy came over her, and she looked down to discover a mountainous lump of flesh in place of her once-svelte body. She cried out in shock, then tried to back away from the phantom and found she could not move her own weight.

  “Who are you?” The queen was surprised to hear her demand pour out in a barely-coherent wail. “What are you doing to me?”

  The creature kneeled beside her and ran his gore-caked fingers through her long tresses. She would have knocked the hand away, save that when she tried, her arm was too heavy to lift. Behind the phantom, the dank room once again became a majestic throne room.

  “Why do you make me do these things?” the phantom demanded. He wrapped his hand into her hair, then jerked her head back. “Do you think this is the way I want to treat my queen?”

  “Your queen?” Filfaeril took a deep breath and forced herself to look into the phantom’s mad eyes. “I am nothing to you but a hostage-a hostage that you would be wise to treat well. When the king finds us-“

  Something huge and hard slammed into the side of Filfaeril’s face and sent her corpulent body tumbling across the dais. She did not stop rolling until she slammed into the plinth of a marble pillar.

  “I am king!” The phantom sprang to her side, then grasped her chin and tilted her head back. “And you are my queen.”

  Filfaeril shook her head. “I am wife to Azoun.”

  As she spoke, the throne room grew murky again. The ghostly outlines of cask racks appeared along the ambulatory, and she began to see that her only hope of salvation lay in clinging to her true identity.

  “I am Filfaeril, queen to King Azoun IV.”

  The cask racks grew more substantial.

  “You are queen to no king but me!” The phantom slapped her again, and her vision went momentarily black. “You are wife to King Boldovar. To me.”

  Filfaeril began to tremble, and the murkiness vanished from the throne room at once. As adolescents, she and her sisters had delighted in keeping each other up nights by telling grisly tales of how King Boldovar had murdered his mistresses.

  “B-boldovar the Mad?”

  “Boldovar the King-husband to Queen Filfaeril!” The phantom pressed Filfaeril’s comb-dagger to her fleshy breast, then ordered, “Say it.”

  “K-king Boldovar, h-husband…” Filfaeril stopped, realizing that to indulge the phantom was to lose herself in his madness-perhaps forever. She shook her head, then raised her chin. “I’d rather die.”

  Almost instantly, her body became slender and beautiful again, and she found herself lying on the floor of a dank wine cellar Boldovar scowled and looked around in confusion, then shrugged and returned his attention to Filfaeril.

  “As you command, milady.”

  The phantom scraped the sharp tines along the queen’s flesh, opening four shallow cuts along the top curve of her breast. She closed her eyes, surprised that death’s black fog had not risen up to carry her off already. Once Vangerdahast’s enchantment was activated, even the weapon’s scratch was supposed to kill instantly and surely. She commended her soul to Lady Sune, then opened her eyelids to find Boldovar’s ghastly eyes still gazing into her own.

  “What is this? Did I drink up all your magic?” He tossed the comb aside, then flashed her a needle-fanged smile. “Perhaps you wish to recant?”

  12

  The royal wizard woke bound and naked, covered by a single blood-stained linen, surrounded by enemies of the realm. To the right stood Owden Foley, a clammy cold cloth in one hand and a brass basin in the other. Alaphondar Emmarask and Merula the Marvelous watched from the foot of the bed, eyes beady and observant, alert as always for any sign that the royal magician knew their thoughts. He did of course, but he could not let them see it. They would kill him on the spot.

  To the wizard’s left stood Azoun IV, his arm hanging in a sling and his shoulder wrapped in a bloody bandage. Good. Vangerdahast had done some damage after all, even if he did not recall when or how… or why.

  Vangerdahast’s head ached from the bridge of his nose to the nape of his neck. His thoughts came slowly and for only short periods. His scalp felt crusty and swollen and strangely taut, with long stripes of hot pain crossing it from right to left. His body ached with fever. He was hungry enough to eat a cat, though of course he knew better than to ask for one. He refused to give his captors the pleasure of seeing him beg.

  Owden, of course, was the torturer. The priest’s implements lay on the table beside the bed, arrayed in neat rows of knives and needles and coarse loops of thread. Knowing they had only left the instruments in the open to frighten him, Vangerdahast looked away. Had his hands not been bound to the bed frame, he would have grabbed one of those knives and shown the traitors the error of their ways. Then again, had his hands been untied, he would not have needed a knife. He was, after all, a wizard.

  If only he could remember his spells.

  While most spells required gestures and special components and the uttering of mystic syllables, some required only an incantation. They would be ready for that. The enemies of the realm were as cunning as they were pervasive. If Vangerdahast wanted to escape and save the crown, he needed to be as clever as they were. He raised his head and glared at Merula.

  “Help me, and I will forgive you this treason,” he said. “Use your magic against them, and I will pardon you when the crown is mine!”

  Merula’s face paled, and he looked to Owden.

  Owden looked to Azoun. “Forgive him, Majesty. It is the wound madness. You yourself raved on and on about how the Ladies Rowanmantle and Hawklin were jealous of the sons of your other-“

  “Yes, yes!” Azoun’s hand shot up to silence the priest. “I am quite familiar with the insane thoughts caused by the creature’s wounds.”

  “Insane thoughts? The insanity is this.” Vangerdahast strained to raise his left arm. “Unbind me, and I grant you safe passage to exile in a foreign land.”

  Azoun scowled at Owden. “I hope this madness can be cleared up soon.” He looked back to Vangerdahast and grasped his arm, then said, “Old friend, I know your thoughts are muddled, but you must try to answer me. What happened to my daughter? Is the princess safe?”

  Somewhere deep down beneath the madness, Vangerdahast felt a guilty pang. “Tanalasta?”

  Azoun nodded. “Yes. Princess Tanalasta. She didn’t return with you.”

  The battle in the canyon came flooding back to Vangerdahast-and with it a surge of anger.

  “She defied me!” Vangerdahast’s temples pounded with hot anguish. “The brazen harlot!”

  “Harlot?” Azoun repeated. “Then she’s with this Cormaeril fellow?”

  “Spoiled now!” Vangerdahast spat. “He’s spoiled her now.”

  “But is she safe?”

  Vangerdahast tried to sit up and managed only to lift his head off the pillow before the restraints jerked him back down. He began to toss his head back and forth, trying in vain to shake loose the memory of some spell that would set him free. Azoun laid a palm on Vangerdahast’s brow and pressed down to hold the wizard’s head still.

  “Don’t smother me!” Vangerdahast cried. “How can I tell if you smother me?”

  Azoun eased up. “I’m not going to smother anyone.”

  Vangerdahast laid very still and regarded the kin
g suspiciously. “How do I know?”

  “Vangerdahast, I would never hurt you.”

  “Tell me you don’t want me out of the way.”

  Azoun shook his head. “I don’t. You’re my most trusted advisor. My best friend. Please, try to remember. Tell me about Tanalasta.”

  “Undo this.” Vangerdahast jerked against the binding on his left hand. “Just this one-then I’ll tell you.”

  Azoun cast a querying glance at Owden.

  The priest shook his head. “He wouldn’t tell you anyway, and it’s too dangerous. He could wipe us all out with one spell.”

  “Don’t listen to the groundsplitter!” Vangerdahast’s head began to throb with the effort of finding some spell to help him escape. “He’s afraid of my power.”

  “And rightly so,” said Owden.

  Vangerdahast turned to glare at the priest. Owden’s hand came out of his pocket sprinkling yellow dust, but Vangerdahast was too quick for the priest and managed to shut his eyes.

  “Do you know where you are, Vangerdahast?” asked Owden. “Do you remember what happened to your head?”

  Vangerdahast did not open his eyes. “My head hurts. You did something to it.”

  “Not me,” said Owden. “It was the thing that came back with you.”

  “You!” Vangerdahast insisted.

  “It slapped you in the head, then went after Azoun-“

  “No!”

  At last, the incantation of a blinding spell popped into Vangerdahast’s head. It would not free him, and it would only affect one person-but if he chose the right person, perhaps he could cause enough confusion to get at one of Owden’s torture knives on the table beside him.

  Vangerdahast turned his head toward Azoun and began to repeat the incantation, then smelled something strident and saw Owden sprinkle some glittering droplets into his face. He squeaked out one more syllable, then the room went dark, and he was seized by a sudden sensation of falling.

  Sometime much later, Vangerdahast woke bound and naked, covered by a single fresh linen, surrounded by the haggard-looking enemies of the state. To the right stood Owden Foley, a clammy cold cloth in one hand and a brass basin in the other. Alaphondar Emmarask and Merula the Marvelous watched from the foot of the bed, eyes beady and observant, alert as always for any sign that the royal magician knew their thoughts. He did of course, but he could not let them see it, or they would kill him on the spot.