They were sprawled atop the older ashes, looking lifeless.
Not scorched, outwardly, and nothing about them seemed broken or missing. Unconscious, and quite possibly brain-burned.
“Search,” he ordered the dazed surviving Dragon, and set an example by stirring the ashes very gently with his sword.
They found nothing, but the glowstones Glathra and Vainrence were wearing began to flicker and fade, so they grimly hoisted the two stricken mages onto their shoulders and began the long, grim trudge back up to where they could find help.
Someone wanted family secrets kept. Someone who had magic to spare.
Storm came in first, with Elminster right behind her.
Mirt was standing with daggers up beside both ears, held ready to throw.
She crooked an eyebrow at him. “You hate being Heljack Thornadarr that much?”
Mirt grinned, resheathed his fangs, and turned to the table behind him, waving them toward a platter piled high with cold roast fowl and a large, lazily steaming bowl of fragrant fieldgreens soup. “Want some?”
“Do Waterdhavians love coins?”
Mirt ladled soup into tankards for them. “So, who’d ye kill tonight? Shall I expect a host of Purple Dragons to soon break down the door, even as the massed wizards of war blast the roof off?”
“No one, and I hope not,” Storm replied wearily, sipping soup and discovering she was ravenous. She waved at the food. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Arclath sent a servant with it. Suitably disguised, so no fear. Said he’ll send a man around on the morrow to teach me to cook.”
El and Storm regarded him with identical frowns of concern, then headed for their bedchamber, snatching up food and taking it with them.
Mirt roared with laughter at their reaction and headed for his own bed, decanter in hand.
After all, only six decanters already lay beside the bed, and his throat was as dry as all Anauroch.
“You should have come to me earlier, you two.” The Lady Marantine Delcastle spoke softly, even sadly. “I had no idea.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Arclath said gravely. “This is my fault, entirely. Rune didn’t even know my name a month back.”
He spread his hands. “I suppose every young noble thinks his-or her-concerns about what’s ahead for Cormyr, and its noble Houses in particular, are something older nobles don’t want to hear, or will challenge or dismiss out of hand. After all, you are inevitably part of whatever we want to see changed, or that we fear won’t change, or…”
Lady Delcastle nodded, the ghost of a smile rising to her lips. “I recall feeling very much as you do now, when I disagreed with my father. He hurled me into the duck pond. Which is why we no longer have a duck pond.”
Amarune and Arclath had been sitting with her in the best parlor in Delcastle Manor for hours, explaining what had been going on with the blueflame ghosts-but not their work with El and Storm, or their deepening friendship with Mirt. Lady Delcastle, in a rare friendly, talkative mood, had proven to be a free-flowing geyser of information about noble feuds and alliances and personal friendships and hatreds, from the time of Arclath’s grandsire up until last night, or so it seemed.
She was frowning, now, trying to recall something. Suddenly she flung up an imperious hand for silence and brightened. “I remember!”
Arclath thrust his head forward eagerly, squeezing Amarune’s hand in an unnecessary signal for silence. His mother noticed and grinned.
“And does that work on her, dear?”
Her son flushed to the roots of his hair, and the Lady Marantine patted his other hand affectionately and said, “Never you mind. Yet listen. The Imprisoners, they were called.”
“They?”
“No, I’ll not be rushed, dear. Let me tell this my way. I had it in hints and careless sentences here and there, mind you, from your uncles and Baelarra and Thornleia, anyhail, so it’s not much.”
She paused, tapping her chin, then said slowly, “The Imprisoners were a handful of wizards, here and along the Sword Coast-in Silverymoon in particular, I understand, and no, I know no names-who crafted the spells for blueflame items and started imprisoning particular persons within them, long ago. Before the Blue Fire came and magic went wild.”
She spread her hands. “I heard more about all the astonishment-consternation would not be too strong a word-among our local clergy of Mystra.”
Arclath nodded. “Because of Aunt Thornleia.”
Lady Marantine nodded. “They were surprised, you see, that the goddess did nothing to stop the Imprisoners, either by altar speech or through her Chosen. As if it was meant to be, or necessary for time yet to come, they said.”
She leaned forward just as her son had done, to stare hard at Amarune and Arclath. “So, has the time now come?”
The royal magician looked up when she strode into the room, and smiled in genuine pleasure. “Ah, something splendid to embrace at last! You’re well!”
Glathra blushed. “Thanks to too many healing prayers from more priests than I care to count. I was fortunate-I was merely caught in the backlash of what felled Vainrence.”
“The lord warder?” Ganrahast asked quietly.
“Remains in care. Senseless, his mind still roiling inwardly, despite all the spells they’ve used.”
Ganrahast sighed. “And the five sages and all those old records are gone.” He waved at the scrying image he’d been intent upon when Glathra had arrived; in its glow, she could see a distant corner of the palace cellars.
“We’re scouring out the cellars now. Larandur has found a spell-locked room-supposedly an armory, sealed since Salember’s time-that has somehow acquired very recent spells on its door seals.”
“So, it’s been opened and resealed recently,” Glathra murmured, gazing into the scrying image with him. There she saw Wizard of War Naloth Larandur, as tall and expressionless as ever, calmly finishing the casting of a “long-arm” spell to open the sealed armory door from a distance.
The seals obliged and melted away, and the door swung open.
Floating just inside the chamber was a spherical creature with one large eye, a wide and crooked many-fanged maw, and ten eyestalks that glared at the six court mages outside the room as the beholder unleashed its eye-magics.
Rays flashed out, a mage staggered, and then another fell. And Larandur and the other wizards of war hurled magic at the monster, in a great roar of unleashed Art.
The result, in the instant before the scrying sphere burst, was a titanic explosion.
Ganrahast was seated, but Glathra was flung off her feet as the entire palace shook around them, the walls swaying. They could hear minor crashes from all around as various portraits, shelves, and the like fell or toppled.
A great wave of force rolled away out into Suzail, and in its wake they heard the stones groan, in a deep and terrible sound that told them, even before shouting, running mages came with the news.
Part of the palace had slumped down into ruin topped by unstable, yawing passages and chambers, as the cellars underlying them collapsed.
Killing Larandur and the others with him.
The beholder had been another trap.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Buildings shuddered near the palace. Folk were flung off their feet on the Promenade. A wagon sideswiped an inn amid screaming horses and splintering wood; slates and tiles whirled down from roofs in a deadly rain; stones and windows and whole balconies fell from up high to crash to the cobbles in a ragged, ongoing thunder… and one wing of the palace sagged with a deep and terrible groan, settling lower into the earth amid blinding plumes of rising dust.
Manshoon sat back in his chair and allowed himself a gloating smile. He couldn’t look away from the scrying eye that was showing him the aftermath of the explosion.