A high-pitched blast of the whistle gained everyone’s immediate attention. The Royal Magician issued orders in cold tones that meant instant obedience for those who desired a few further moments of life. Unless, perhaps, they favored a long, damp career as a toadstool…
He spoke, and half a dozen minor priests and more than twice that number of peering courtiers were ushered out by hard-faced men-at-arms. From among the best guards in the room, Vangerdahast dispatched a runner to find Queen Filfaeril and ordered all but two of the others to clear the entire floor. The last thing they needed was gawkers and kitchen staff crammed in every doorway of Satharwood Hall trying to snare a look at the grievously injured royals. Vangerdahast bade the last guard stay by him in case something else was needed and sent the only other guard out to find Eskwuin and hose the terrified priest off before he fled into the city and started a full-fledged panic.
At about that time, the shoulders of the guards streaming out the door parted to disclose Alaphondar and Dimswart, the leading sages of Suzail. They were rivals of sorts, but at the moment, brushing shoulders as they peered across the chaos of moving people looking back over their shoulders at the king, they more closely resembled two weary prisoners caught in the same cell.
Alaphondar looked as if he’d been up the entire previous night researching some genealogical question in the library. He was followed by an argil, a page boy in palace livery. The young lad was frowning under the weight of a large box of tomes. Dimswart seemed to have been interrupted in midmeal and was servantless, bearing his own oversized black satchel with silver latches in one hand and a dripping leg of roast sarn fowl in the other. Both sages nodded to the Royal Magician and immediately asked the priests for a full report on “the stricken.”
Thaun Khelbor spoke first. “No change here. I’ve thrown every curative I know of to drive the toxin out, tried every preventive against disease, even used a charm against possession by tanar’ri. Nothing seems to catch hold.” He spread his hands in a gesture of frustrated futility. Khelbor was a balding man with patches of thick gray hair above his ears. He usually looked kindly and slightly comical, but right now his face was as white and tightly drawn as those of the two men who lay beside him on the trestle tables.
“Dispel magic?” asked Dimswart, gesturing with his leg of fowl.
“When I first arrived on the scene,” Vangerdahast replied, “and a spell to slow the spread of poison. Neither had any effect.”
“No improvement here, either,” said the young bishop of Tymora, “though I did calm him with a spell to remove fear.”
Vangerdahast stroked his beard. “That may just be a symptom, like night sweats or palsy.”
“If you can’t halt the disease,” quoted Alaphondar, “at least arrest the symptoms.”
Vangerdahast nodded. “We don’t know if it is a disease, or a poison, or a combination of curses, or what. But you are correct, at any rate.”
He turned to the priests and ordered, “Concentrate on lowering their temperatures, and perform a remove fear spell on His Majesty as well. That may ease the rictus in his frame. Make sure their breathing passages are unblocked and their hearts remain beating. Leech them if you have to-but only if you have to.” He looked around. “Where’s the one who was with them? Where’s Aunadar Bleth?”
The priests and sages ignored the question as they bent over their charges. Azoun’s breathing had become ragged and short, but as the calming spell took hold, Vangerdahast watched it lengthen and deepen, becoming more regular and measured. For the moment, at least, it seemed unlikely that the king and the baron would find their gods and leave Faerun behind this day.
Vangerdahast looked around the temporary sickroom. The two sages passed from one stricken man to the other, pausing only to confer and compare notes. Khelbor of Deneir and the young bishop tended to their individual charges. Lesser priests bustled back and forth, bringing clean cloths and ewers of fresh water. The page boy had sat down on his master’s box of tomes, excitement sharp on his young face.
Of Aunadar Bleth, there was no sign.
The Royal Magician looked to the guard beside him and the door butlers, including them all in his question. “Where did young Bleth go? Did you see him?” he asked both the guard and the belarjacks.
When mute, reluctant head shakings came as the only reply, Vangerdahast frowned again and sent one of the belarjacks to find out what had happened to the young noble, with instructions to contact the Royal Magician in his private library when the noble youth had been found. He then gave the lone guard orders to let no noble of the realm or stranger come near the two royals, then left the impromptu sickroom.
His private library-the one the folk of the court knew about, at least-was little more than a large anteroom whose three full walls were covered by bookcases. Vangerdahast skirted the pedestal with its guardian watchskull and pulled down three volumes from the shelves: one on toxins, one on diseases, and a treatise on mechanical creatures.
He sat in his favorite chair, the one upholstered in sahuagin flesh, and set the books on the small duskwood table next it, placing the topmost tome in a book holder fashioned to resemble a silvery human hand. The hand immediately shifted to open the book to the title page and held it there, propping the pages open with its smallest finger and thumb.
Vangerdahast thanked the magical contrivance gravely-the book bobbed a trifle in reply-and reached out to touch the helm of a staring knight carved into the decorative column of one bookcase. The helm slid inward with the faintest of clicks, and the spines of three massive, immovable tomes on a nearby shelf folded outward, revealing a small-and almost full-hiding place.
The wizard pulled a flat plate from a stack in the hiding place, a circular, mirrored disk with runes around its periphery, and tapped his finger on the door of the secret place, which rose smoothly to conceal the storage niche again. Vangerdahast paid it no attention, he was muttering a spell over the message plate, quickly committing words to it for later retrieval.
A chime only he could hear sounded. Vangerdahast laid one hand on the little sylph statuette that could spit lightning if need be and said sharply, an instant before a cautious knock fell upon the door, “Come!”
The door opened to reveal the anxious face and shoulders of the door guardian, with the news that Lord Bleth the Younger was in Princess Tanalasta’s quarters. Vangerdahast delivered a mild curse to the ceiling and gave the message plate to the page, with instructions as to whom to deliver it to among the war wizards and what he was to do about it. The young boy nodded and scampered off, his face stern and serious.
Vangerdahast’s features were equally stern and serious as he stalked through the halls of the royal wing of the palace. His grim face and stride, and the half-heard curses he was muttering under his breath as he trod the purple carpets, confirmed to the servants he passed that something terrible had happened to the king.
The Royal Magician put a hand to his lips for silence, swept past the belairjacks and the knights of the chamber, and walked into Princess Tanalasta’s sitting room unannounced. The room had been young Azoun’s when Rhigaerd was on the throne, but the princess had brought her own delicate hand to its furnishings since then. Gone were the heavy stained oak armchairs and tables, and the maps of the realm that had looked down on them. Vangerdahast threaded his way through filigreed chairs of white-painted bow wood and gilded lounges covered with floral print cushions. The maps were gone, too. The old wizard thought, as he always did, that there were too many mirrors in these chambers now. As a mage, he thought of mirrors as things from which unbidden horrors could emerge, not as something to admire oneself in.