by Ed Greenwood
The room started to fill with the smell of Baert Ghalhunt’s scorching head, but it wasn’t long before the door opened again.
A lone person came in, hooded and cowled, and made straight for the dead noble.
Murmuring half-sung lines of ballads to himself, this new arrival bent to pick up the two severed hands and put them in a pouch.
“But she had eyes, those nightdark eyes, only for meee …”
The singing broke off with a brief grunt as the cowled one bent again—and in one swift, smooth heave, lifted the limp corpse up onto his shoulder.
Then he turned and went out into the forest, ignoring the drips that fell from what had been Marlin Stormserpent as he went.
“For I walk a lonely road, a hidden road, a bright road, yes I walk a …”
The soft singing faded, and birds began to whir and call again.
By the time they broke off and the lodge door swung open again, the head in the fire was a blackened thing, more skull than Baert Ghalhunt.
The two bullyblades were hot, sweaty, and very tired. Not to mention hungry. They’d been up all night, and if their mad lord of a master wasn’t asleep, they certainly wanted to be.
“Lord Stormserpent?” one of them called, finding the chair—nay, the room, there was nowhere here to hide—empty. He glanced up into the rafters but saw only pelts and trophies, no lurking slayers.
The other bodyguard touched his arm and pointed silently down at the blood on the floor.
There was a lot of it.
“Tluin,” the first one swore and hurried to the door that led into the kitchens, to make sure Stormserpent—or anyone else—wasn’t there.
He came out shaking his head. “Circle the place.”
“Of course,” the other bullyblade replied, drawing his sword. “Are you thinking what I am?”
“If you’re thinking Lord Mightybritches Stormserpent is dead, and we’re out of hire and are likely to be hunted as murderers, then yes.”
They gave each other grim nods and hastened back outside.
Never seeing or hearing the cowled one who watched their futile search from behind a distant tree, singing very softly, “Oh, there’s nothing so sad … as a bodyguard … with no body … left … to guard.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
A DIFFERENT NIGHT
Then out came the moon and what did I see?
His teeth turned to fangs and his eyes burning bright
My darling, my lover a-coming for me
I knew we’d be having a different night.
Zaroanra Deltree, Bard
from the ballad My Lady of Ghosts
first performed in the Year of Rogue Dragons
It had been a long night at the Dragonriders’ Club, and Amarune was so weary her dances would soon become snoring collapses into patrons’ laps if she tried to go on.
The nights all felt long since she’d gone back to dancing.
It wasn’t the work; it was the tension.
Everyone was watching each other warily; everyone looked over his shoulder; everyone carried an extra knife or pouch of sand or pepper … in the tenday since the Council, a mask of calm had settled over Suzail that no one at all trusted.
There was general brooding, a waiting to see just how and when the fighting would erupt.
No one doubted that it would. Most of the nobles who’d come for Council were still in the city, plotting and scheming behind closed doors, but oh-so-polite to each other on the streets and in the shops.
The good merchants of Suzail—and the shadier ones, too—were making coin hand over fist, feeding and thirst-slaking the fine lords and their maids and jacks and bullyblades, but wondering how soon this windfall would end. And how bloodily.
Right now, Rune was far too yawningly bone-weary to think any more about it. Not that she hadn’t thought and thought far too much already.
Her feet hurt the most, as usual.
She rubbed them thoughtfully, curled up on her chair, then rolled out of it to find her clothes. It was astonishing how quickly her own life had settled back into its usual routines. How she’d lived before a certain Lord Delcastle had started taking a very personal interest in her.
Not to mention a crazed old man named Elminster and a sinister thief by the name of Talane.
Wincing at that latter name and wondering if she should go home this night, after all, Amarune ran her fingers through her hair to banish the worst of the tangles, yawned farewell to her mirror, blew out the little lantern, and made her way to the door, surefooted in the total darkness.
It seemed a very long time since she’d been the Silent Shadow, peril of the night. Some time in the last few days—had they really only been that few?—she’d drifted into being the ornament of a dashing young noble. A spirited lass, but only a lass, coin-poor and bearing a family name that mattered to no one …
The guard that Tress had hired to watch over the back door of the club and the street outside, to make sure no one was lurking to endanger her dancers, gave Rune a smile and a nod.
“Safe as it gets,” that meant. Stifling another yawn, Rune smiled back, waved farewell, and slipped out through the door.
The street was not empty. A gleaming white coach stood where she would have blundered right into it if she’d come out with her head down, its horses pawing contentedly as they munched at their feedbags. A familiar face grinned at her out of its nearest window.
“Lord Arclath Delcastle,” she greeted him with a tired grin. “I hope you’re not expecting anything from me. Like staying awake, for instance.”
Arclath swung the door open and sprang out of the coach to assist her into it with a courtly flourish.
“Nothing of the sort, I assure you. Ravaging your snoring body will bring me all the delight I need at the moment—or to be more serious, Rune, why not spend a night under my roof in Delcastle Manor? Alone, in a guest bedchamber, with the servants knowing you need to sleep just as long as your snoring takes you, and a splendid repast waiting when you do rise? Mother won’t mind, being as she suggested it. What do you say?”
“I say, ‘Yes, please, and thank you very much, gallant lord, and wake me when we get there,’ ” Amarune replied happily, settling herself into the cushioned back seat of the coach.
A breath later, they were rumbling through the streets, and she was nestled against Arclath, talking uncontrollably. “Spilling all your secrets,” as Tress would put it.
“I feel utterly mind-mazed, to tell truth,” she gabbled. “Settling back into my old ways, as if none of it, the beholder and being in chains in the palace and—and everything—was real. Then when I’m alone, it rushes back to me, the bad things, I mean. I’m still afraid Talane will appear when I’m least ready for her, and really afraid whenever I return to my rooms that a deadly trap will be waiting for me—or a brutally welcoming thick-neck bullyblade. Then, when I’m out in the sunlit streets again, it’s all different, with El and Storm just gone, and all the exciting and important doings they brought with them, too!”
Arclath was nodding, so she rushed on.
“I—I don’t feel as if I’d ever dare approach the palace, now, by myself and on my own behalf … and I still don’t feel as if I belong to the grand, expensive world of you nobles—or ever will.”
Arclath smiled. “Nobles aren’t much different from commoners,” he told her quietly. “We’re just more spoiled and pompous and better fed—and have more coins to waste, and better clothes to waste them in, that’s all.”
“That’s all,” she echoed in amusement.
Yet, his words held truth, for she and Arclath’s mother were cautiously becoming friends, and few could match Marantine Delcastle for cold, lofty arrogance when she cared to play the noble matriarch to the hilt.
This strange calm that had settled over Suzail had come after a rather large handful of nobles had been wounded in duels and skirmishes, causing some of the highborn to bolt out of the city for the comparativ
e security of their various country seats.
Yet, intrigues were still going on, with nobles hiring sells-words as fast as they could—some of them in more numbers than any impartial observer could possibly deem necessary for bodyguard purposes, or for that matter were allowed under the laws of the land—but it was all happening out of sight, behind closed doors or high mansion or estate walls.
The war wizards were back in control, aggressively leading highly visible Dragon patrols to keep order in the city, clear out undesirables, and maintain an alert garrison against the oft-rumored imminent invasion. All independent mages in Suzail were under close watch, and it seemed as if most commoners—after an initial rush to secure transportation for swift flight, and ready coins for spending in exile—were holding their breaths and just waiting for whatever befell next.
“Which,” Arclath gloomily observed, as the coach turned a corner, “is usually some nastiness from Sembia, or something particularly cruel, stupid, and high-handed from one of the senior Houses. My mother would hotly dispute that, but it’s true. Everyone who bothers to think on such things can see it.” He sighed. “So, who will be the next stone-headed idiot to endanger the kingdom, I wonder?”
“Arclath Delcastle!” someone yelled, as if on cue—and men came rushing up to the slowing coach, out of the night.
Arclath snatched out his sword, and Rune, her heart suddenly pounding, raised one of her knives beside her ear, ready for throwing.
Yet, the man who stepped up onto the coach to rap on the closed window wore a bright smile, and Arclath knew him.
“Well met, lord!” were his first words, as Arclath thrust the sliding window down. “I—we—serve Lord Elbert Oldbridle, who bids us invite you to eveningfeast on the morrow, at the home of Lord Arkanon Nalander.”
“Is this an open invitation, Clarn?” Arlcath asked mildly.
“No,” was the reply.
“Don’t bother to bring your doxy,” Clarn added coldly, glancing at Amarune.
Arclath nodded, the Oldbridle bullyblade sprang down off the step, and the coach started to move again.
“What was that about?” Amarune asked.
“An invitation to join Lord Nalander’s scheme to put someone or other—possibly himself or his son Arkeld, or possibly someone chosen by his Sembian backers—on the Dragon Throne, after young fools like me risk our necks exterminating the House of Obarskyr,” Arclath replied grimly. “I’m beginning to think fleeing deep into the forest with Storm and Elminster, and staying there a good long time, is a very good idea.”
“What will happen if you don’t attend?” Amarune asked softly.
“They’ll consider me a foe and treat me accordingly,” Arclath replied calmly. “See? Not much different from commoners, after all.”
Amarune shook her head and murmured, “You’ve no idea what common folk are really like, do you?”
Arclath frowned. “Lady,” he said sternly, “I have tried hard to stride through life with my eyes open, seeing past the masks most adopt to greet the wider world, and marking the details of many lives and trades and customs, the better to—”
“Oh, I did not say you have not tried to look beyond the lives and affairs of nobles, my lord,” Amarune told him earnestly. “It is one of the reasons why … why I love you. I—I—”
She threw her arms around him, drew him down into an embrace, and hissed, “What’re you going to do? If not this cabal, which one?”
“None of them,” Arclath snapped. “We have our own cabal—you, me, the Lady Storm, Mirt, and your great-grandfather. Plus the ghost of the Princess Alusair, perhaps, when we venture into the palace.”
“So, do we turn this coach and head for the inn where Lord Helderstone has taken rooms?”
“In the morning,” Arclath told her, his smile surfacing. “Tonight, Lady Rune, you are mine.”
“There’s been no sign of young Lord Stormserpent or his two flaming slayers for days now,” Elminster murmured. “I wonder who got to him?”
“You think he’s dead?” Storm asked, by way of reply.
That fair evening, he and Storm were strolling along a sweeping, lamplit street lined with noble mansions, neither of them showing Suzail their true selves.
Eccentric old Lady Darlethra Greatgaunt was known as a collector of curios, and an independent-minded walker and huntress. She was also known to always demand the protection of the wizards of war when she was in “godless, perilous, almost-as-bad-as-Westgate” Suzail. In the form of a lone mage as her constant escort. A handsome, young male wizard, of course.
Wizard of War Reldyk Applecrown was far from the most handsome mage about the palace, and was far from the most powerful. However, he was happily eager to perform the duty, which was more than most of his fellows had been.
It wasn’t that Lady Greatgaunt expected her escorts to set foot in her bedchamber—indeed, she would have been loudly appalled and offended at the slightest hint of such “disgustingly forward” behavior. It was just that she liked to walk. And walk and walk and walk. No matter how foul, crowded, dusty, or stormswept the streets of Suzail were when she started down them, she wanted to walk them all. Setting a steady pace that permitted no dawdling or shopping moments, yet never approached what might be termed “brisk.”
Wizards seldom tended to be walkers for the sake of walking, and very often discovered that the hard, hard cobbles of Suzail’s lanes and byways made their feet hurt. Soon, and a lot.
Wherefore, there was little competition for Greatgaunt escort duty, and Applecrown had spent a long, footsore day—and most of the preceding eight or nine days, too—exhaustively scouring Suzail for a cobble that Lady Greatgaunt hadn’t set elegant slipper upon, yet.
For her part, Storm had worn out three pairs of slippers, had frankly grown tired of nodding politely to each watch patrol, most of them so often that she knew every last Dragon and Crown mage by the informal, daily short versions of their names, and was quite bored enough to tear off her expensive gown, snatch the nearest merchant by the hand, and dance with him the length of whatever street they were on.
Lady Greatgaunt, of course, would not have approved of such antics.
Not that she was soon likely to know someone had borrowed much of her wardrobe and been enspelled into her exact likeness, being as she was lying abed in Mirt’s lodgings, deathly ill after some unknown noble rival—or one of several much younger Greatgaunt heirs, succumbing to an attack of inheritance impatience—had tried to poison her and almost had succeeded.
Yes, her counterfeit had walked even more energetically than the real Lady Greatgaunt, but she and El had really been spending most of the last tenday exhaustively scouring Suzail for traces of a blueflame item, by walking the streets and covertly casting little pulses of magical fire that should send back an echo if such an item was nearby.
If they’d fashioned the spell correctly, that is. Though after centuries of twisting the Weave to myriad uses, very few folk in all the realms were better suited to probing for unusual magics.
“Dead or fled,” El replied now, stumbling in weariness. “I’m about done, lass. Let’s get home. Not a trace of anything strong enough to be a blueflame item, down all these streets.”
He glanced at her eyes. Lady Greatgaunt looked as leathery and indomitable as ever, but Storm’s eyes would tell him what Storm felt like, underneath. She, after all, was the one who’d been anchoring his spells, steadying him constantly; she had to be far more tired than he was. “How are ye, lass?”
“Ready to get home,” she sighed, letting her exhaustion show for a moment. “Rub my feet, when we get back to Mirt? I hope he won’t be roaring drunk this time. His snoring drunk is bad enough.”
“Heh. Don’t ye prefer finding seven or eight warmskirts snoring along with him?”
Storm rolled her eyes. “I do not. Seeing their charms—even when they’re worn out and snoring, too—makes me feel all the older. I’ll grant that Mirt has the stamina of a fresh young stallion. I
just wish he didn’t feel the need to prove it every second day or so! One of these nights he’s going to host the wrong lass, and she’ll slit his throat for him and take away everything he’s neglected to nail down.”
“Which is everything,” Elminster agreed. “Well, perhaps tonight will be different.”
It was.
Mirt was happily wrapped in the embraces of a willing playpretty when something that felt like his own weight in cold hard stone struck him on the back of his head and sent him down into darkness.
The coinlass beneath him was still drawing breath for a scream when she got a cloak tossed over her head, then received the same stone-to-head treatment.
Men in leather who were bristling with weapons suddenly flooded through Lord Helderstone’s rooms, two frowning and alertly peering hired wizards among them.
One of whom suddenly stiffened and snapped, “Someone—no, two people—climbing the stairs!”
“I’ll take care of it, Morl,” the other mage said. “Keep your scrying going. I want to make sure we get not just the two we can see, but anyone else, too.”
The blasting spell he hurled down the stairs then was far more powerful than it needed to be, but he had a fee to earn, and a surviving witness was a curse that could haunt you for the rest of your life in this city.
“You got them, Scarmar,” Morligul Downdagger announced with some satisfaction. “Smashed the man right down the stairs and back out of the building. The woman got tangled in the railings, but she’s down. Don’t see any lurkers yet.”
“Keep looking,” Scarmar snapped. Pulling out his paralyzing wand, he waved at six or seven armsmen to come with him.
From the head of the stairs he triggered the wand at the sprawled woman, then told the armsmen, “Get out there and find the man I blasted! I want him back in here fast!”
They raced past in a wild thunder of boots. Scarmar Heldeth followed more slowly with the rest of the armsmen, knowing Downdagger of Highmoon was guarding their rear; in Athkatla, where he came from, folks who rushed into unknown danger were usually soon known as “corpses.”
