by Ed Greenwood
“And how brightly doth the spark of Tarandar shine across all the watching Realms this fair evening?”
El knew that voice. He put a finger on the pendant and felt the dark, hot flood of malice in the thoughts from the other side of the wall. So the sneering and sarcastic Master of Revels really was every bit as pompous and nasty as the wagging tongues of palace servants made him out to be.
Khaladan Mallowfaer, it was said, never did a lick of work and never stopped spying on his lessers, needling them, and decrying their work, either.
Just then, all gild braid and crisply uniformed magnificence, he had stepped out of nowhere into the path of …
El frowned and fought hard to steer the pendant away from Mallowfaer’s malice toward the other nearby mind …
… a weary Halance Tarandar, just as the senior chamberjack had started the long walk from his little cubbyhole of an office toward home and bed.
All these preparations for the council-plans, revisions, and new plans to sweep away the thrice-approved, thrice-modified revisions …
Halance was anxious to get some sleep before he had to present himself at the court-too soon, by the racing moon, too soon! — all over again for the next day’s work. However, the man who stood sneeringly under his nose, wearing his usual unpleasantly mocking smile, was eleven rungs above any senior chamberjack in the exacting ladder of palace rank, so Tarandar managed a smile.
“Tired, saer.”
“What?” Mallowfaer was playfully jovial. “How so? With all the-ahem-powers at your disposal?”
“Had to use those powers in my dealings with a certain noble lord, just now, to keep the arrangements right for the big day, and Cormyr safe, saer.”
“Oh? Which certain noble lord?”
“Not at liberty to say, saer. Sorry. Standing orders of Lord Ganrahast, saer; I’m sure you understand.”
The Master of Revels flushed a deep crimson that Elminster could feel through the pendant.
The whole palace knew Mallowfaer feared the Mage Royal and all war wizards, and deeply resented them and anyone else who had the authority to keep secrets from him, or to order others to do so. Every courtier who’d worked more than a few days at court knew the Master of Revels would never dare speak to Ganrahast. So Halance could be certain his words would never be checked for falsehood.
And Mallowfaer knew the darkly handsome young courtier standing so deferentially before him, eyes carefully downcast, understood full well the depths of his cowardice.
So he stepped aside with a wordless snarl and stalked away, whirling around three paces later to see if he could catch young Tarandar smirking.
The unseen Elminster rolled his eyes.
Rather than smirking, Mallowfaer had almost caught Halance yawning.
Gods, the senior chamberjack was thinking, but Mallowfaer is predictable …
It was a measure of Halance’s weariness that his feet had taken him down a side stair before he was quite finished with that thought. He passed the door guard at the foot of the stair with a trading of silent nods and went out into the night.
Elminster stayed with the chamberjack’s mind, hoping to learn something of the council preparations.
Halance Tarandar was stumbling-tired, but smiling.
Arclath Argustagus Delcastle was an exhausting friend.
His thoughts rushed through some of the airy nonsense Arclath had declaimed to the Realms around … then, for some odd reason, Tarandar found himself in another memory. He was staring into the dark eyes of that mask dancer at the club, posed as still as a statue in front of their table. Her arms had been flung wide to display all he was supposed to stare at … yet it was her eyes he remembered.
Because they’d been watching him intently.
Then Halance Tarandar realized what the subtle changes in her gaze had meant, and stopped in midstride, a little chill finding its way down his back.
She’d been listening to their every word.
Why?
“She’s my kin, all right,” Elminster muttered to Storm, letting go of the pendant. “Taking as much interest in doings at court as we do. Too much interest for her continued health, as it happens; yon courtier, a kindly and overworked young chamberjack, has just realized how much attention she was paying to them when young Lord Delcastle took him and a friend out to the club she dances at. Right now he’s wondering whom she’s working for, or what scheme she’s hatching herself. He’ll report as much to Delcastle, too, but thankfully for her-and us-he’s too falling-down tired to do it yet. We should be able to get to her first.”
“And bring Ganrahast and Vainrence and all their keen wizards down on her head?” Storm asked warningly.
El gave her a scowl. “She’s young and of my blood,” he growled. “She should welcome a little adventure.”
“A little, yes,” Storm replied. “I’m not so sure she’ll stay smilingly welcoming when half the realm comes after her. We’re used to it, remember?”
“Hmmph. Better for Cormyr if all its younglings happily take on anything the world hurls at them.”
“You’re sounding like a gruff old noble,” the silver-haired bard teased him.
“I’m feeling like a gruff old noble,” Elminster snapped back. “Distinctly underappreciated and beset by suspicious wizards of war at every stride I take. Not to mention experiencing a glut of foes that’s flourishing, not diminishing.”
Storm shrugged. “As I said, we’re used to that. Ride easy, El. Yes, you had to destroy more wizards and highknights than Cormyr should lose, but it hasn’t gotten really dark yet, for us or for young Amarune.”
“That,” the Sage of Shadowdale muttered, “is precisely what’s souring me. I’ve a feeling this is going to go very bad.”
“And I have a feeling you’re not going to be disappointed,” Storm sighed, putting a comforting arm around his shoulders.
He gave her another scowl, but it faded into something close to a wry grin.
Ere he shook his head and told her, “Just two of us, lass, until we secure Amarune’s loyalty and get her competent enough to do what we do and keep herself alive. Then we’ll be three. Not enough, not near enough.”
The air around them dimmed, then, as an enchantment on the cache abruptly took hold of them both.
Ganrahast had cast trap spells on the remaining caches that slowed every movement of someone who violated a cache without murmuring the correct password or wearing the right sort of enchanted ring.
Elminster and Storm had time to recognize what was happening and start to say so to each other, eyes meeting in dismay … but they lacked even a moment more to do anything about it.
“Such a simple trap! It seems the Chosen of Mystra are mighty no longer. So you are brought low at last, old foe. At last.”
The glow of the conjured spell-scene was by far the brightest light in the vast and gloomy cavern. In its heart, Elminster and Storm stood despondently facing each other in a secret passage deep in the royal palace, their faces grim as they started to speak words so slowly it would take them hours to finish.
“At last,” the beholder said again, smiling crookedly.
It was a very big smile, because the eye tyrant was as large across as the front door of any grand mansion. It had tentacles, some of them ending in hands of three opposed pincers, as well as eyestalks. The mind the tentacled hulk had begun life with was not the mind that still inhabited it.
It spent almost all of its time alone-and like many a loner who had not held that role lifelong, by choice, it spoke aloud to itself often.
“Yet the time to strike is not quite yet. Not with all the magics still tied to you. I’ve no wish to be destroyed alongside you in the fury of their unleashing. Your slaying must befall at just the right time. So I shall watch and wait still more. Yet now I know my wait will-finally-not be long.”
The eye tyrant smiled. “As your torment deepens, will you save the kingdom you so love, the rock you stand on when saving all the Realms o
ne more time-or will you let that rock crumble and shatter to save the madwoman you love?”
It drifted across the cavern to a floating cluster of small, glowing spheres, each one a scrying eye that was busily showing its own moving, silent scene of a different place in the Realms. Sounds would arise from those images only if the beholder willed matters so.
At that time, it seemed to prefer the sound of its own voice.
“I need not even muster an attack on Cormyr, so feeble have you become. The pieces already in play upon the board will serve well enough. Soon, soon will come my revenge-and at last, at long last, Elminster of Shadowdale will die a final death.”
The tentacled terror drifted back to the large, three-dimensional image of Elminster and Storm, frozen in the narrow passage.
“And you will die, Elminster, knowing it is I who have slain you,” the beholder whispered, almost fondly.
It gave the cavern around a dry little chuckle. “Soon, soon …”
Halance fought again to keep his jaws shut. He could not seem to stop yawning.
Gods, but he was tired-with a whole day of work ahead of him, a day that bid fair to be a very full one, too.
Behind the dark weight of weariness, the chamberjack never felt the cold, cruel presence that was watching him from afar, lurking deep in his own mind.
Around him, the royal court was abuzz. Not just with the ever-mounting confusion and endless rearrangements for the council-coming down on them all very soon-but at what had befallen in the palace the previous night.
The uproar was bringing war wizards in all haste from every corner of the realm, a worried-looking Understeward Corleth Fentable had murmured to Halance. More than a dozen Purple Dragons dead-and Belnar Buckmantle, too. Murdered at their posts by unknown intruders who’d beheaded most of them and had departed by some secret way that had the highknights as well as the war wizards mightily upset.
Fentable had looked more than worried, come to that. He’d looked sick … and he happened to be one superior that Halance liked, trusted, and respected. The man must know things he wasn’t allowed to tell underlings, to make him look that way.
Halance shook his head. Things always happened all at once, stlarn it. When everyone was already too busy to tend to them properly. “Beshaba’s kiss,” the older courtiers called it. Mischance, farruking, ever-irritating mischance …
Manshoon smiled darkly. Mischance or artful manipulation.
Halance yawned again. He had to find Arclath and warn him that the mask dancer had been listening to their talk the night before and might well be the paid informant of some noble client or other.
Yet he hadn’t time to be seeking nobles across the fair city, with all the daily moving of furniture and linens and replacement of oil lamps to be done.
Not with all the extra council preparations on his desk, the untidy heap of fresh scrawled notes from Fentable and Mallowfaer and the gods alone knew who else about this, that, and the other little details.
Now prepare the lure …
Note, make a note; Halance snatched up a fresh scrap of parchment from the pile given him to make his senior chamberjack notes, and a quill from his stand, and wrote hastily, “Tell Arclath Delcastle, Belnar murdered. Also, the dancer in the Dragonriders’ was listening to all we said.”
“Tarandar,” Mallowfaer bellowed from down the hall. “The new chairs and stools are being unloaded at Zorsin’s dock right now! I’ve sent Emmur and Darlakan for wagons, but get yourself down there to see they don’t break or mar every last piece in their loading!”
Right on cue. As anticipated and planned.
“Saer!” Halance shouted back. “I hear! And I’m on my way!”
Hurry, chamberjack. Hasten; mustn’t be late. Neither Mallowfaer nor my agent who waits for you should be kept waiting.
He dashed to the door, then spun around, strode back to his desk to snatch up the still-wet note, and ran.
For a wagon, it was a long way to Zorsin’s dock, but not such a long route for one hurrying man. Which meant …
He had a fair idea of where Arclath would be. The Eel or the Dragonriders’ Club or possibly Saklarra’s Wonderful Willing Wenches if our young Lord Delcastle was feeling particularly frisky.
If the Fragrant Flower of House Delcastle happened to be elsewhere … well, there were half-a-dozen inspections and negotiations regarding the upcoming council that a senior chamberjack could parlay into depart-the-court forays. Yet telling Arclath soonest would be best and would get it off his desk and out of the way, the better to devote all his attention to all the council details …
Into his head, then, came a brief, bewildering vision. It seemed as if a beholder was staring at him fixedly, through an eerie glow, with a dark cavern all around it. A beholder?
Gods, he was having waking nightmares! This farruking council!
Shaking his head, Halance Tarandar hastened down one last hall, ducked past the guards with a smile and nod, and hurried into the streets, crossing the promenade and turning immediately into his favorite alley.
He never even saw the hand that struck him down.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ENTER A LORD, LAUGHING
In the sumptuous heart of pink-walled Delcastle Manor, there were rooms most visitors never saw. Rooms whose pink-plastered walls were sculpted into semblances of thickly clustered roses climbing the paneling and entwining above doors.
Lord Arclath Argustagus Delcastle would have shuddered to see such decor in someone else’s home, but in his mother’s rooms, he was used to it.
Or so he repeatedly told himself.
It was a long-standing family rule that blood members of House Delcastle arriving home should present themselves to his mother-or to her personal maid on the rare occasions when Darantha had been ordered to intercept him-so, as he had done so many times before, Arclath took his dashing self up the soaring stairs from the entry hall and through several ornate chambers into the land of sickly roses. Sweeping past the usual impassive guards, he glided into his mother’s receiving room.
Where the Lady Marantine Delcastle gave him her best well-fed-cat smile. She was sprawled on a daybed whose blood red silks complemented the roses beautifully-but clashed horribly with the flame orange sleeping silks she wore, open to somewhere well below her waist. Not to mention shriekingly discordant with the emerald-dyed fur wrap she’d thrown oh-so-elegantly around her shoulders.
The hour had crept from very late to very early, but Lady Delcastle was wide awake and practically purring as she languidly ate scorched-orange-peel chocolates and sipped from a tallglass of amberglath “sweetwine” liqueur. Unless she’d found some unusual new diversion to leave her in such a mood, it meant she was very much enjoying the afterglow of being pleasured by three of her strapping “chamberjacks.”
“Well met, Mother,” Arclath gave her his cheerful, smoothly sardonic greeting. “Are your oiled ones gone?”
She gave him one of her best sneers. “Don’t belittle my playthings, Arkle dear. They’re more men than you’ll ever be.”
“How so?” he asked, strolling to her decanter-covered sideboard and regarding her in the mirror above it.
“Don’t you prefer boys?”
Arclath shrugged. “No, as it happens. Aren’t those your tastes, Mother?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “No, unobservant fool, I want men. Men who fight and kill and come to me reeking of sweat and blood and danger. Real men.”
“Lord Delcastle,” Arclath observed calmly, selecting a decanter and a clean tallglass, “is a real man.”
His mother’s shrug was far more dramatic than his. “He was, once. Now he’s too drowned in drink to be much of anything.”
It was an open secret in Suzail that Arclath’s father, Lord Parandur Delcastle, was a habitual drunkard who spent his days walled away in his favorite turret in Delcastle Manor, drinking.
“And so?”
“And so, nothing. Disposing of him would make you Lord Del
castle-and you are even less of a man.”
“And would I be a man if I came to you reeking of sweat and blood and danger?” Arclath asked calmly.
His mother laughed throatily. “Oh, yes. Not that such a celebratiory moment is all that likely to befall, is it?”
“Not all that likely,” Arclath agreed, setting the decanter down again and sipping the vintage he’d chosen. “Pleasant dreams, Mother.”
He strolled out, back into the dimly lit passage-where a hard-faced House guard stood watching him, a loaded and ready crossbow aimed at Arclath’s breast.
The younger Lord Delcastle raised an eyebrow. “Has heir-hunting season begun, Trezmur?”
“Orders,” came the curt reply. “Sons have murdered mothers before.”
“And will again, I fear,” Arclath replied, strolling away down the passage with his tallglass in hand. “Yet not this son. Such a deed would be entirely too … noble. I seek other delights in life.”
It was a good thing one of those delights wasn’t sleeping, he thought to himself, knowing just how soon he’d be up again and out of the bed that was waiting for him.
Two passages later, when he arrived at his own chambers, he handed the now-empty tallglass to the doorjack waiting there, went inside, and firmly closed the door.
Only after the inner door beyond that first one had closed behind him did he add aloud to what he’d told Trezmur, “And when at last I discover the delights I should be seeking, life can truly begin.”
Bright early morning was flooding through windows that thankfully weren’t framed in sculpted roses. Not that Arclath was lounging and enjoying the view.
He was at his usual desk, looking over documents, deeds, and an ever-rising pile of cross-strapped-between-boards parchments; the endless scrip of family investments and business dealings.
Around him, the front chambers of Delcastle Manor were bustling, as various family factors, clerks, scribes, and coin-stewards hastened up to him to receive their directions among his crisp stream of orders.
