by Ed Greenwood
Rogue magic! What could have caused it? Was Stormcloak an even greater danger than he’d thought?
Or was it the mysterious enemies? What Art did they wield?
What dark creatures were they?
Belkram looked around at rolling fields, trees clustered along little streams that babbled down from the ever-present watching gray walls of stone above, and drew a deep breath.
“Ready?” he asked, loosening his blade in its sheath.
Itharr nodded. “As ever,” he replied, adding a wry smile. “Harpers rush in”—he quoted an odd saying Elminster of Shadowdale had uttered just last summer, but which was already well known across the North—“where even fools fear to tread.”
“Aye,” Belkram agreed dryly. “So let it begin.” He pushed open the door and they went in. Above their heads, the worn signboard told all passersby that they were looking at “A Good Inn: The Shepherds’ Rest.” The sign creaked slightly in a gathering breeze, but there wasn’t anyone looking at it any longer, so it soon fell quiet again.
At about the same time, tumult wild and royal broke out with a roar inside the inn.
11
The Running of the Wolves
“ ‘A Good Inn,’ eh?” Itharr murmured as they shouldered their way through dark, heavy windcurtains—old hides, by the look of them—into smoky, lamplit dimness beyond. “Well, mayhap it was, once.”
“Long ago,” Belkram agreed and made for a small table against a wall. The sizzling of bacon and the smell of buttered frybread was strong in the crowded, low-beamed common room.
A few old men and withered goodwives were huddled in silence at the smaller tables. Most of the room held hard-eyed, arrogant fighting men in a variety of ragged leathers. All sported black armbands, some edged in purple. Off-duty Wolves, no doubt.
The serving man was old, grizzled, and weary. He shuffled over to the two Harpers with a simple, “Dawnfry? Drink? Right, what’ll it be?”
“Reddarn wine” Itharr replied with an eager smile. The hot spiced drink was brought quickly. It was saltier and thicker than in better houses but went well down their thirsty throats. Dawnfry was even better, and the two Harpers fell on platter after platter like starving men.
Or, one might say, like Wolves. One of the armsmen strode to their table. His armband had a purple border denoting rank; he was probably a Sword. Belkram looked unconcernedly up at him over a handful of hot, crumbling frybread.
The burly man’s thumbs were hooked under the guards of a dagger at his belt. He met Belkram’s eyes with a gaze as cold and as hard as a stone wall, and stood over them silently, waiting for Itharr to notice him.
Itharr finished his reddarn and said, “More, please,” without looking up. Belkram kept his face straight.
Itharr winked with the eye nearest the wall, so only Belkram could see, as he waved his flagon. “More reddarn,” he explained, “when you can. I’m enjoying this excellent bacon.”
“I’m not,” the man said flatly, “a servant.”
Itharr turned his head, raised his eyes lazily from the man’s belt to his face, and said, “Aye, I can see that. You a hiresword?”
The man frowned. “I’ll ask questions and you’ll answer, see?”
Belkram emptied his own flagon. “Get us more reddarn while you’re asking, will you?”
A few chuckles came from the nearest tables of Wolves as the man turned cold eyes on him. “I serve the Lord of the High Dale,” he said heavily, “and I don’t recall any armed adventurers being allowed into the dale this last seven days or so. How long’ve you two been here?”
“Not long,” Belkram told him. “We’re wandering minstrels, come to pay a call on friends.”
“You have friends in the dale?”
“Many—or at least, on our last visit there were many folk here we count our friends,” Itharr said smoothly. “We haven’t seen them this time around. Could something have happened in the High Dale these last two winters?”
Silence fell. The armsman scowled at Itharr, leaned a little closer, and asked loudly, “What brings you here this time?”
“We’re trying to find a friend who might have come here,” Belkram told him truthfully.
“Elminster of Shadowdale,” Itharr added helpfully. “Have you seen him?”
The Sword stiffened and swiftly drew back. The room fell so silent that faint sizzlings could be heard from the adjoining kitchen. The two Harpers looked calmly around to see hands on sword hilts all over the room. These men seemed to know Elminster’s name.
“And what are your names?” their interrogator asked from a safe distance away. He stood now beside his seat, and his sheathed sword lay on it near his hand.
“Gondegal. The Older,” Belkram replied merrily, using the name of the legendary Lost King of Cormyr, a vanished usurper. Itharr added brightly, “Gondegal the Younger.”
The man showed his teeth. “Smart tongues and ragged clothes usually mean Harpers,” he said, and turned to address the tables of armed men. “Take them!”
There was a general rush. Itharr snatched up the last of the frybread and Belkram snatched up the table. He flung it easily, as a child lobs a stone, and took down one Wolf. His chair took down another.
Amid the general tumult, Itharr swept up his own chair and held it as a shield. “Brawling in an inn? What knavery’s this?” he cried loudly. “Does justice rule no longer in the High Dale?”
Belkram nodded. “Aye! We demand to speak to Irreph Mulmar. A man should not have to fight to have a little dawnfry in this dale!”
One of the men chuckled, advancing. “Mulmar rules here no longer.”
“What have you done with Irreph?” Belkram asked, his voice slow and quiet. “I knew him, long ago.”
Itharr, who knew Belkram well, shivered a little despite himself when he heard his friend’s voice.
The Sword laughed, not pleasantly. “He works full days at the mill now,” he said, “docile as a well-whipped ox since Lord Angruin’s magic bent his will.”
“What?” said Itharr and Belkram together as their blades hissed out.
“Take them!” the order rang out again, and the room erupted into steely war.
The crack of the whip and the cold shock of the slop that was his morning meal being dumped on his sleeping body always awakened him. In the cold, misty grayness before full dawn, the dull-eyed thing that had once been a man always licked the slop from his flesh and the smooth stone he walked on.
They watched him. The moment he was done, the stinging crack of the whip came again, and his chains pulled him forward. It happened again about the middle of each day.
He was shackled to a massive wooden lever that ran to a central spindle. He walked on a great circle of stone in the darkness, around and around that spindle all day, pushing the lever. Above him, grinding stones rumbled and grain spilled endlessly down with a dry rushing sound. Thick dust rose and water always dripped somewhere, unseen in the echoing dark.
His hands had stopped bleeding an age ago. Shackles of stout metal encircled his throat and wrists. From each shackle, a chain as long as he was tall led to rings on the great lever.
When his body grew too foul for the overseers—he never saw them, just whips lashing down out of darkness—pipes were opened above and icy-cold water washed away the filth. The whips and water had taken his clothes long ago; he wore only a few tattered wisps of cloth around one ankle. His arms, shoulders, and thighs had grown huge and hard, covered with a latticework of white whip scars. His hair had grown long, jaw and chest covered with matted, furlike tangles. His eyes were always dull, no fire alight behind them.
Until this morn. The millstones rumbled overhead as usual, dust swirled, and the lever, as always, was smooth and very, very heavy. He pushed against it, driving forward a weight that seemed more than three or four dead horses. Endlessly forward. He had to shove and heave and snarl until he got it rolling, then he bent into a smooth, steady push that ate up the endless breaths of the da
y, around and around and around.
A thought came to him then, as he trudged, the first unbidden thought in a great while. His working day was really not so different from that of a lot of free men.
He chuckled at that as he pushed. It was a sound he had not made in a long, long time.
Belkram chuckled coldly as his steel found the throat of another Wolf. The Shepherds’ Rest was awash with blood and smashed furniture draped with bodies. The warriors who’d been so loudly arrogant when the fray began were now silent forever or backed into a corner, fear in their white faces.
A few deaths back, several of the Wolves had tried to break past the two Harpers and escape. Out of a side passage to bar their way came the grizzled old serving man, smiling grimly, an ancient and rusting battle-axe in his hands.
One Wolf contemptuously tried to run him through. The old man slid aside from his lunge, punched his assailant hard in the throat, and trampled the fallen Wolf as he swung his axe at the next. When the Wolves fell back from that old axe, it descended to meet the head of the man on the floor, rising again before they could advance.
Itharr had reached the rear of those Wolves. Steel leapt and bit, men grunted, swung, and screamed … and a little silence befell. Itharr and the old serving man used it to share a ferocious smile across the bloody fallen.
Belkram stalked forward to confront the last few Wolves. “We’ve important business at the castle,” he told them almost sadly, “so we haven’t time to take prisoners.”
Itharr sighed. “So sad,” he murmured, and lunged. A Wolf shrieked and struck the Harper’s blade aside at the last instant. His eyes were still on it when the dagger in Itharr’s other hand came up into them.
As the man fell, two Wolves charged in desperation, swinging their blades wildly. Itharr ducked under the falling body and rolled aside, lifting a boot to trip one Wolf. Belkram’s blade took the rearmost in the neck.
The serving man stood in the door, axe raised. “Who’s first?” he rumbled, eyes cold. “Who’ll die first?”
The Wolves hesitated for an instant, and that was long enough for Belkram to slay the one who’d fallen and for Itharr to rise again. The last two Wolves plunged forward desperately.
The old man’s axe bore the first to one side, and Itharr thrust him through from behind. The second leapt for the door and fell through the opening with Belkram on his back, stabbing with cold ruthlessness.
Silence fell again. Then the two Harpers rose, dusted themselves off, retrieved their weapons, and smiled at the old man. Belkram handed him six gold pieces. “For the furniture … and the floor show.”
“Aye,” Itharr agreed. “Our thanks. We must be off now.”
A light was dancing in the old man’s eyes. “Whither, lads? Come you to bring down this Longspear who lords it over us?”
The two Harpers nodded slowly.
“We came to find a friend of ours,” Belkram said quietly. “But it seems the High Dale needs more attention than he does just now. If he were here, he’d been doing what we aim to. We’re off to the castle, to rouse the dale against these Wolves and their wizards.” He frowned then as a thought struck him. “Does the high constable yet live?”
“Aye,” the old innkeeper said grimly. “After a fashion. As that carrion said, he’s in chains, working the mill as if he were an ox.”
Belkram looked at Itharr. “That ends first.” His fellow Harper nodded, the grim expression matching his own.
“I’m coming with you,” the old man said without another glance at the sprawled bodies in his taproom. The axe lifted a little. “I fought off outlaws aplenty, in my day.” He handed back the gold. “And I won’t take coins from men who do our work for us. No, take ’em! I haven’t felt so good in many a year.”
He stepped out to look up and down the street, then squinted thoughtfully at the frowning walls of the castle rising above the rooftops nearby. “Who’s this friend you came seeking?”
Belkram saw faces peering at them from nearby doors and windows. “One Elminster, a wizard. Have you heard of him?”
The old man’s eyes widened a little. “The Elminster?” he asked. “The Old Mage? That wasn’t just talk, what you told the Wolves?”
“No,” Itharr said. “We mean to find him. We promised a lady we would. Not to do him ill, either.”
The old man nodded. “I saw him beat six wizards once in a battle of spells. East of here, in Sembia it was. They were slavers, going about using spells to make folks follow ’em willingly by chaining their wits. He got proper hot, I tell you.”
He shook his head, a slow grin broadening his face at the memories. “It was something to see, that. He smashed ’em with lightning, hurled back the balls of fire they threw at him, opened a hole in the sky to swallow up a—a great tentacled thing they conjured up and sent after him, and crushed one of ’em under a huge rock. Snatched it off a mountain, in the midst of all, and sent it flying like a bird across most of Sembia to drop from above.” He shook his head again, smiling. “I don’t suppose he’s here now, is he?”
Itharr spread his hands. Belkram squinted up into the sky.
“No,” he said slowly. “No flying rocks.”
The old man sighed. “I guess not. Ah, well. I’d hoped to see just one more good spellfight, to tell folks about, before I die.” His eyes suddenly narrowed as he looked at one Harper and then at the other. “You don’t know any magic, do you?”
The two Harpers sighed, looked at each other, half grinned, and sighed again.
“If we did,” Belkram said ruefully, raising his still-bloody blade, “we wouldn’t have to get this close to those who would kill us.”
The old man looked at them both for a while, shaking his head slowly. “Well,” he said at last, “without magic, how in the name of all the gods do you expect to stay alive long enough to reach the castle, let alone muster the dale against Longspear? He’s got six wizards or more to back him up, Zhent Blackcloaks if I can still tell anything at all about folk I meet!”
“Well,” Belkram said slowly. “We usually try to set things going—like we did here—then just get our swords out and run with what befalls.”
“You wouldn’t be Harpers, would you?” the old man asked quietly. He watched them exchange glances and said, “I thought so. That explains it, then. Some like to roll dice for coins, or trade goods, or even horses. Harpers and adventurers are the only folk who like to do it with their own lives.”
Belkram chuckled as he wiped his steel on the sleeve of a fallen Wolf. The sound was meant to sound unconcerned and casual, but came out a trifle rueful.
Daera sighed and sucked her bleeding finger for perhaps the three hundredth time. Sewing flour sacks was something the gods just hadn’t meant her to do.
She looked out the gap between two old, silvery wooden boards at the frowning mountain wall not so far away. It was probably about the three hundredth time she’d done that, too. Bright sunlight dazzled her; it was always dark in the mill.
Somewhere far below, Father was pushing a lever endlessly around and around, driving the grindstones. It was sheer cruelty. There was water enough—and mules or oxen, too—to do the task. No, Father was there as a reminder to the folk of the dale, as she was, set to work here as a drudge, cooking, cleaning, and sewing these bloody sacks.
Literally bloody, she thought grimly, pinching her smarting hands between her knees as she knelt on the coarse sacking. The dark spots of her spilled blood had traveled out of the dale on many a sack already. They’d seen a lot more of the Realms than ever she had, or was likely to.
Every morning, the jailers in their magical mantles of darkness came for her. They tied her hands behind her and crammed dirty cloth into her mouth, binding it there to keep her silent. Then they led her, helpless in their cloaking darkness, down the creaking stairs and uneven floors of the mill, down to the wheel where her father howled or gibbered in his chains.
That was her reminder. They untied her hands and led her outsi
de in her soiled rags to load heavy flour sacks onto waiting carts, gasping and panting through her gag as hard-faced men in black armor stood guard around a group of silent folk of the dale—folk who had obviously been dragged from their doings and brought here to watch. If any tried to help or comfort her, they were clubbed senseless. It had been a long time since any of them had tried.
She was their reminder.
“Ylyndaera Mulmar,” she told herself formally, “stop feeling sorry for yourself and get to work.” On days when she didn’t do what the jailers or mill maids thought was enough, her meal—leftovers from the evenfeast platters of the others at the mill, always cold—was smaller. Once, when she’d been too weak from sickness to work, she’d been given nothing at all to eat.
Daera sighed and picked up the needle again. She was alone here in the drafty mill loft—and cold, and bleeding all over her work again—but her father had it much worse, chained like a bull in the cellar below.
Time and again she’d prayed to the unheeding gods to deliver him, if not from his chains and the backbreaking work then at least from whatever magic they’d laid on his mind. His eyes were always cloudy. Even when she’d been able to make some noise—she always paid for that with brief but savage blows and whippings—and he’d looked up, he never saw her … or anything else. His moods swung between stupid placidity and snarling rages. They’d turned him into a lame-witted, crazed beast.
Daera finished a line of running stitch and bit off the thread. She was too young and weak to fight the Wolves herself. A maid had called her “a young colt—all long, gangly limbs and knobbly wrists and ankles.” She must think of some way of getting aid, of calling on King Azoun or someone to rescue her father.
Most of all, Ylyndaera dreamed of the day when Irreph Mulmar would be himself again and rise to drive “Lord” Longspear and his Wolves from the dale, to reclaim his title of high constable. She was seeing that day now in her mind as she settled herself with another sack. Then the crashing and screaming began below.
