“Kings still do,” Azoun told him dryly, and drew out the locking pins that held the sliding hatch lock shut. He threw back the heavy hatch with surprising strength for a lone man of his age, and hurled the wand into the cage.
The ghazneth snatched it out of the air, howled in glee, and boiled up into the air like a serpent striking at the sun.
His wings beat in a ragged blur as blue lightning raged around the wand, became a burst of light, and sank back into Luthax’s now empty hands as he spat. “I’ve not forgotten all my old spells,” Luthax said. “Lose a wand, and gain a meteor swarm!”
Balls of fire raced out from the ghazneth’s mouth, followed by bellows of wild laughter, straight at the king. Azoun stood his ground, shouting, “Everyone-get back and get down!”
On the heels of Azoun’s cry, the hilltop exploded in flames.
Hooting with laughter, the ghazneth tumbled backward through the air, flapping his wings exultantly. “A little warmer than you expected, Azoun? Ha! What an idiot! What a fool! This was the best the Obarskyrs could give the realm?”
The ghazneth circled the blazing hilltop once, roaring with laughter as the warriors below cowered away from him with their vainly upthrust swords bristling like blades of grass. Luthax flew away.
There were gasps of awe from the warriors as the King of Cormyr strode out of the raging flames, apparently unharmed, and snapped at the nearest swordlord, “Waste no time searching for fictitious wells or abandoned steads-a quarry I once lost a horse in lies seven hills southeast of yonder ridge.”
“Whither then, Majesty?”
Azoun Obarskyr pointed at the ghazneth in the distance. “Clever and arrogant war wizards gone bad may be-but they aren’t quite confident enough not to check on their captives, once the seed of doubt is planted.”
He smiled a tight smile and reached for the hilt of his ready sword.
7
Vangerdahast crested the last flight of crooked stairs in the great goblin palace and knew he had finally, certainly, lost his mind. The grand corridor was steeped in a savory, rich aroma-the same savory aroma that had drawn him into the murky warrens of the palace in the first place. A strange chorus of chittering voices echoed down the corridor from the left, where the expanse of dark wall was broken by a cockeyed square of yellow light. The voices were entirely alien to him, but the odor he recognized. Rabbit. Roast rabbit.
He plucked one of his eyelashes and encased it in a small wad of gum arabic from his pocket, then whispered the incantation of his invisibility spell. His hand vanished from sight, leaving only a halo of light emanating from his unseen commander’s ring. He slipped the ring off, then on again, suspending its magic radiance, and crept down the grand corridor. Though the hallway was the largest he had seen inside any goblin building, he still had to crouch to almost half his height. Grand goblin architecture expressed its majesty in the horizontal and more or less ignored the vertical.
As Vangerdahast neared the yellow light, it resolved itself into a lopsided doorway, with one side taller than the other and neither perpendicular to the floor. He began to pick out distinct speakers among the chittering voices, and the aroma grew deliciously, irresistibly overpowering. He had not been conscious of his hunger as such a palpable force for some time, but the smell of food-or the illusion of the smell-filled his mouth with saliva and made his stomach rumble. Knowing the despair that would come over him when he rounded the corner and found an empty room, he almost turned back. His belt was wrapped around him almost double now, and he suffered regular blackouts and periods of weakness so severe he could not stand. Discovering this wonderful aroma to be mere illusion might be enough to kill him.
But of course Vangerdahast did not turn back. The smell drew him on, and the sound, also, of voices other than his own-no matter how strange and alien. Soon he stood hunched over the little door, craning his neck around to peer under the sill at a candlelit table laden with the steaming carcasses of ten plump skunks and several dozen crows.
They certainly looked real enough. The skunks had been fully dressed and spit-roasted, then served on their own fur. The birds had been prepared just as elegantly, having been baked enfeather with shelled walnuts in their beaks and silver root grubs in their eye sockets. Vangerdahast wondered what kind of sick trick his mind was playing. At any other time, the mere sight of such a banquet would have disgusted him to the point of illness. Now, it made his hands tremble and his mouth water.
Squatting on their haunches around the table were more than thirty goblins, well dressed in brightly colored loincloths and pale tunics girded with leather sword belts. Rather husky and short for their race, they stood at most three feet tall. They were also the wrong color. The eyes and hides of most goblins ranged in hue from yellow to red, but these had pallid green skin and pale blue eyes the color of Queen Filfaeril’s.
To Vangerdahast’s amazement, the goblins’ manners were as eloquent as the creatures themselves were strange. A dozen white-cloaked waiters stood stationed around the table at equal intervals, using bronze carving utensils to cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. Whenever a diner chittered at one of the servers, the server would flip a tasty morsel in its direction, which the creature then endeavored to catch by moving its open mouth beneath the food. There seemed to be something of an art to process, with diners being careful to remain on their haunches and keep their hands tucked securely behind their knees until the food arrived. Whenever a guest caught a morsel that had been flipped a particularly long distance, behind the back, or through a flickering candle flame, the others would break into a burst of appreciative hissing. Only once did Vangerdahast see a diner miss, and the others quietly averted their eyes while the embarrassed goblin pressed its face down to snap the morsel off the dirty floor.
So polite were the goblins that Vangerdahast suspected he might win a dinner invitation simply by casting a comprehend languages spell and introducing himself. With a somewhat smaller mouth than the hosts, however, he suspected his manners would not measure up to their standards, and he really did not fancy eating his crow off the floor. In fact, he had never liked the idea of eating crow at all, and he was not about to start now-not when there was tasty, whole-roasted mephitis mephitis to be had instead. Vangerdahast raised an invisible hand toward the nearest skunk, then turned his palm up and made a lifting motion.
As he whispered his incantation, a soft rustle sounded from the head of the great staircase. He spun around and thought he glimpsed a pair of pearly dots at the mouth of the corridor. The goblins broke into a cacophony of astonished chitters and alarmed snarls. He looked back into the banquet hall and found his skunk hovering just above his invisible hand, filling his nostrils with an aroma that, if it was a hallucination, was at least the sweetest hallucination he had ever experienced.
The goblins were staring at the floating skunk less in fear than wide-eyed amazement, as though waiting for the fang-filled mouth of some unseen god to materialize out of the darkness and gulp the thing down whole. Happy to oblige them in the best way possible, Vangerdahast pulled his invisible dagger from its sheath and cut a morsel off the carcass, then popped it into his mouth. It certainly tasted real. In fact, he could not remember ever before enjoying a piece of meat so much, not even from the kitchens of Suzail Palace.
The banquet room erupted into a tumult of chattering and chiming as the goblins jumped up and began drawing little iron swords from their little bronze scabbards. Vangerdahast reached into his pocket and tossed a pinch of diamond dust into the doorway, booming out an incantation even as they turned to rush him. A shimmering curtain of force flickered into existence across the cockeyed portal. The first goblins slammed into it at a dead sprint and bounced back into their companions.