“Rowen, what are you doing?” Thinking he might have been bitten by a lance snake or-even worse-a tiger centipede, she circled to his side and took his arm. “What is it?”
He did not move. “Those aren’t ghazneths.”
Tanalasta peered at the spiraling swarm, but it was still too distant for her to identify individual shapes. She tried again to pull him down. “You can’t be sure.”
“Can’t I?” He pointed toward the western edge of the spiral. “Watch their wingtips as they turn.”
Tanalasta did so, and she noticed a ragged, rounded fringe-almost like tiny fingers-silhouetted against the looming sand dunes. “Feathers?”
“So it would seem,” Rowen replied.
Tanalasta’s heart sank. “They’re vultures.”
“We don’t know what it means.” He squeezed her arm. “Perhaps one of Alusair’s horses died.”
“That’s too many vultures for one horse,” Tanalasta replied.
The princess started forward at a near run, struggling to hold her imagination in check. Tanalasta kept telling herself that Alusair had outwitted a dozen creatures as terrible as any ghazneth, that she was an experienced leader with a full company of warriors, a pair of clerics, and plenty of magic at her disposal. But those assurances rang hollow in the face of so many swarming vultures. There had to be a lot of carrion-and the most obvious source of that carrion was a patrol of Cormyrean knights.
As they drew nearer, Tanalasta saw that the keep was one of those strange, lopsided towers described in Artur Shurtmin’s tome, The Golden Age of Goblins. Constructed of slab sandstone and dark mortar, the spire had a conspicuous bulge near the top of one side and leaned noticeably in that direction, as though being dragged down by a great weight. Its girth was ringed by cockeyed bands of tiny windows, suggesting the presence of at least eight interior floors in a height of only forty feet.
The outer walls were streaked by long stains of scarlet and orange. Common myth held the stripes to be proof that the builders had used the blood of captives in their mortar, but Artur-whose love of the subject was perhaps too great for an impartial assessment of the evidence-maintained the streaks were merely evidence that ancient goblins often employed vertical stripes to make short things seem tall. Though Tanalasta had her doubts about both beliefs, the truth of the matter would never be known. The Goblin Kingdom had vanished long before history began, and it was known today only by the ruins it had left scattered across the wild lands between Anauroch and the Storm Horns.
Tanalasta tried to take some comfort from the presence of the goblin tower. Typically, such places were merely the entrance to decaying tunnel warrens now occupied by all manner of sinister creatures. Perhaps the vultures were feasting upon a tribe of kobolds or barbarian goblins that had been foolish enough to attack as Alusair’s company passed through.
Tanalasta and Rowen were still a hundred paces from the bailey when they began to smell hints of death-the fetor of rotting meat, acrid whiffs of charred flesh, the musty odor of newly-opened earth. Knowing from Artur’s tome that the goblins of the golden age always aligned their gates with the setting sun, Tanalasta guided them toward the west side of the bailey. The crowns of several large buckeye trees grew visible, protruding just far enough above the wall to reveal the starlike shape of their drought-yellowed leaves. The sickly odors grew heavier and more constant. As they drew closer, the princess heard the flapping and hissing of squabbling vultures, and also a sound she could not identify, an erratic rasping punctuated at odd intervals by muffled clattering and sharp snapping sounds.
Tanalasta stopped beside the gate and peered around the corner. She had been wrong about the number of buckeye trees. There was only one, with a twisted silver trunk as thick as a giant’s waist and a tangled umbrella of yellowed boughs that covered the entire bailey. In the shadows beneath the tree’s limbs, two dozen starving horses stood fastened to a tether line, so devitalized and weary they could hardly move to flick the vultures off. Several beasts already lay motionless beneath a cloud of droning flies and thrashing black feathers, while a tangle of scorched armor and charred bone lay piled against the base of the keep, directly beneath a tiny third-story window. Nearby, a dozen hissing birds played tug-of-war with the bones of a Cormyrean knight. Beside the corpse rested a primitive sword, its cold-forged blade covered with a layer of dusty red rust. Scattered across the bailey were dozens of huge dirt piles, each resting next to the dark cavity of a recently excavated hole.
A muffled clatter sounded from the far side of the bailey, and Tanalasta’s attention was caught by the motion of several small stones rolling down a dirt pile. She saw something black and vaguely arrow-shaped dancing atop the mound. In the shadowy light beneath the buckeye, she took the shape for a vulture-until a cloud of dirt came flying over the pile and momentarily obscured it.
Tanalasta felt Rowen’s hand close around her arm, then she finally recognized the dark shape as the top of a folded wing. She pulled back and turned to face the ranger.
“We’ll have to lure it away,” she whispered.
Rowen shook his head. “I’ll take it from behind. With a little luck, it’ll never hear me coming.”
“And I’ll be kept safely out of the way,” said Tanalasta, voicing the unspoken reason for his suggestion. She shook her head. “If I thought it would work, maybe, but those things are too quick and too tough. Even if you could take it by surprise-and that’s a big if-you’d never kill it with a single stroke. We have to do this together.”
Rowen peered around the corner again, then returned with a clenched jaw. “Forgive me for saying so, Princess, but we must consider the possibility that you are the only remaining heir. It would be treason to risk your life.”
“They’re alive,” said Tanalasta. “And so is Alusair.”
“You can’t know that,” he said. “They’ve been burning their own, which means they’ve had disease, and-“
“And they have two clerics, a war wizard, and a whole saddlebag full of magic potions.”
“No potions,” said Rowen. “The wizard died the first time we met the ghazneth, and even if the clerics are still alive, they have certainly run out of water by now. You saw the condition of the horses, a human would not last half as long.”
“There is water in the bottom of the warren-that’s what the keeps were built to protect.” Tanalasta hoped Artur Shurtmin had based this observation more solidly on fact than his fanciful explanation for the goblins’ love of crimson streaks. “Even if Alusair is dead, we may assume by the ghazneth’s digging that part of the company survives. Do you really think I would abandon them to the creature-whether or not they were alive?”
“I suppose not.” Rowen thrust the pike toward her. “Take this, and I’ll see if I can get Fogger’s sword.”
Tanalasta refused to accept the weapon. “I’m not strong enough to do much good with a pike, and I don’t want to take the chance that the ghazneth would notice the missing sword. It would ruin my plan.”
Rowen raised his brow. “Plan?”
“The Queen Feints.” Tanalasta smiled confidently. “Boreas Kaspes used it to win the King’s Challenge in 978 DR.”
Rowen looked doubtful until Tanalasta explained her plan, then gave a grudging nod and admitted that it could work. He offered a few refinements and showed her how to roll over her shoulder so she would not be hurt when she hurled herself to the ground, then the princess kept watch while he used his heel to kick a shallow trench across the near side of the gateway. Once that was done, he clasped her shoulder and pulled her back behind the wall.