“May the Great Mother bless you, Emperel Ruousk.”
The princess laid the slime-smeared satchel aside, then used the sword to roll Emperel’s body onto its side and pull the rope the rest of the way under his back. She tugged the line up under his arms, then tied a secure bowline knot and gave the rope three quick tugs. The line went taut, swinging Emperel around and dragging him toward the exit. When he came to the dirt wall below the passage, his head caught on the wall and tipped back, causing a muffled crack someplace in his neck.
Without thinking, Tanalasta reached behind his head and tipped it forward, sticking her hand into a fibrous mass of putrefying scalp and mold-coated hair. She fought back the urge to retch long enough to guide the body into the passage, then immediately grabbed a fistful of dirt and scoured the slime from her hand. Affront to the goddess or not, the princess simply felt too weak to abide having the stuff on her flesh.
Once her hand was relatively clean, Tanalasta returned to the pouch and opened the weather flap. Inside, she found a piece of charcoal, a pencil, a small leather-bound journal, some magic rings similar to her own-save for a striking-hawk signet, all standard issue for an officer of the Purple Dragons-and several small rolls of folded silk in relatively good condition. In the light of the flickering torch, Tanalasta unfurled the first of the silk rolls. It was about a foot wide, with two rough-cut edges that suggested it had been taken from a much larger bolt of cloth. The princess rolled it back up, then unfurled another.
This one had been rubbed with charcoal along the center, recording the smooth, erratically-fissured pattern of the bark of a white alder tree-and, in negative image, the familiar serpentine characters of ancient elven glyphs. The rubbing was rather fuzzy and difficult to read, but Tanalasta could make out the characters well enough to realize they were almost identical to the ones she had read in the moorlands several days ago. There was the peculiar epitaph enjoining a dead person’s body to nourish the tree, and the tree to yield that spirit back, “to them lette it return as it grewe.” Then there was the curse, condemning the “havoc bearers” to “kille the sons of their sons.” Only the last line, the summoning, was different:
Here come ye, Faithless Suzara, and lie among these rootes.
In her shock, Tanalasta cried out and let the silk slip from her fingers. Like King Boldovar, Suzara was an ancestor of hers-in fact, one of her very oldest ancestors. She had been married to Ondeth Obarskyr when be came to the wilderness and built his cabin in what would one day become the kingdom of Cormyr. In fact, the city of Suzail was named for her. It was always possible that the summons referred to some other Suzara, but Tanalasta found that unlikely. Suzara had never been a very popular name in Cormyr, carrying as it did a certain connotation of frailty and selfishness. After it had finally dawned on Suzara that she would never persuade her stubborn husband to return to the comforts of Impiltur, she had taken their youngest child and left without him.
Without bothering to reroll the silk, Tanalasta pulled another spool from the satchel and unfurled it. This one was the duplicate of the invocation she had readjust a few minutes before entering the tomb, on the buckeye tree above her head. It summoned a famous traitor, Melineth Turcasson, who had betrayed his King Duar-his trusting son-in-law-by selling the city of Suzail to a pirate band for five hundred sacks of gold.
The princess opened the rest of the silks in a flurry but found only the name of Lady Merendil, a naive fool who had thought to use an apprentice royal magician to lure the first Prince Azoun to an early grave. This name actually gave Tanalasta cause for relief, all the other traitors had been her ancestors.
Tanalasta pulled Emperel’s journal from the satchel. It was written right to left in High Halfling to foil uninvited readers, but the princess needed only a minute to recognize the trick and another minute to recall the basics of the ancient language. The first part of the journal was filled with unimportant entries detailing a two-day trip up the Moonsea Ride in preparation for investigating a series of reports claiming that the orcs were massing in the Stonelands. Matters grew more interesting once he entered the walled town of Halfhap, where a tenth of the local garrison had vanished while out searching for a murderer.
Apparently, a stranger had appeared in Halfhap one night raving drunk, boasting to anyone who would listen about how he was going to avenge his family’s unjust treatment at the king’s hands. When a tavern keeper had dared suggest that he take his business elsewhere, the stranger had used his bare hands to tear the man’s head from his shoulders, then went outside and vanished.
The local commander had sent a company of dragoneers after the murderer, but they had failed to return, and it was shortly afterward that Emperel had stopped at the garrison and learned of the strange events. After a few inquiries, Emperel had set out after the killer, tracking him to a giant, twisted fir tree where Halfhap’s missing company lay slain to a man. He had tracked the killer into a strange tomb beneath the tree and fought him there. During the battle, he had recognized the man as Gaspar Cormaeril, one of Aunadar Bleth’s collaborators who died during the Abraxus Affair, somehow returned to life. There was a note in the margin noting that later, after making a few inquiries when he returned to Halfhap for a new horse, he had decided the fellow was most likely Gaspar’s look-alike cousin, Xanthon.
Tanalasta stopped reading for a moment. Xanthon was familiar to her as one of Rowen’s more “adventurous” cousins, who-along with Thaerilon, Boront, Cheidrin, Flaram, and Horontar-journeyed the Heartlands in search of wealth and excitement. From what she recalled, they were generally less successful in their pursuit of the former than the latter, often finding it necessary to ask King Azoun to convince some foreign mayor or monarch that executing them was not worth the trouble it might cause between the two countries. Azoun had always been happy to oblige, at least until Gaspar had taken part in the Abraxus Affair, since the Cormaerils never failed to repay the crown’s expenses in quadruple. Now that the family was no longer in the royal graces, Tanalasta had heard that Boront and Cheldrin had met unhappy fates, while Horontar made his livelihood cleaning the cesspits of Darkhold.
She returned to the journal. To Emperel’s dismay, capturing his quarry had proven more difficult than expected. Xanthon had proven unbelievably quick and strong, and he seemed to drain the magic from any enchanted weapon that was used against him. By the time the battle ended, Emperel had lost most of his magic items, including his dagger, weathercloak, and the signet ring he used to contact Vangerdahast-Tanalasta could not help wondering how many others secretly carried the wizard’s special rings.
In the end, Emperel had wounded his quarry severely enough that Xanthon killed his pursuer’s horse and fled. Emperel returned to Halfhap for a new horse and a bolt of silk, then returned to take a rubbing from the fir tree and resume his hunt. Tanalasta examined the silk rolls again, ascertaining from the bark pattern that the fir had been Suzara’s tree.
It had taken Emperel a few days to find Xanthon’s trail again, but eventually he had crossed paths with an orc tribe that had seen a shadowy figure racing toward a “devil tree” near the Battle of Broken Bones. Emperel had quickly found the place and discovered a gnarled elm with the same glyphs as the giant fir.
Tanalasta studied the rubbings and quickly determined that this had been Lady Merendil’s tomb. She skimmed the rest of the entries and quickly connected Emperel’s next stops to the two tombs she had visited, Boldovar’s sycamore tree in the moorlands and Melineth’s buckeye in the goblin keep.
The journal’s last entry was a cryptic, almost illegible reference to finally capturing Xanthon, followed by the inexplicable exclamation: Helm save us! Their pride is our doom!