It was also something he didn’t want Purple Dragons to see and remember. The lone figure might be them, next time. What good is a king who stands heartless when a subject is in need?
“Foray force-down, and defend that knight! The rest of you charge when the hilltop is covered with orcs!” he roared, and set off down the hill.
“Majesty!” a lancelord protested, and another cried, “This is madness, good king!”
Azoun turned without slowing and cupped his hands around his mouth. “I can only hear officers who run with me,” he called. “If one man dies while I stand idle, what kind of king am I?”
He heard the approving murmur from the warriors in the ring, and the officers heard it too. No more protests came to the royal ears as the King of Cormyr, and his strike force raced down the hill, angling their charge so as to come between the foremost orcs and the lone fleeing figure.
Gods, but it was a horde. Hundreds of tall, hulking orcs, fresh and eager, loped along with their blades out and their tusks gleaming, howling as they saw the humans rushing to meet them.
The two running forces crashed together in a sudden mass of shouts, ringing blades, and thudding bodies. Azoun pointed at the lone, gasping knight they were trying to rescue to make sure no orc slipped through the fray. He saw that Tolon and Braerwinter were leading four dragoneers to form a ring, then he crashed into a knot of struggling men with the old, quickening eagerness for the fray. The king drove his sword half through an orc’s forearm. The beast screamed and tried to shake the steel free. Azoun barely heard an unexpected shout through its noise.
“Father! Azoun! Father!”
It could only be Alusair, but her voice was a raw sob. The king fell back from the fray, raising his ring. “Alessa? Lass?”
“Majesty!” Braerwinter’s voice arose like a trumpet, and Azoun realized that the exhausted, fleeing knight had been his daughter.
He sprinted across the field, hearing the mighty roar of his main army behind him as it charged down the hill to slay the orcs. He ran to where the small ring led by the lords stood around a lone, shuddering form.
The Princess Alusair was sitting, her mouth wet from the healing potion Braerwinter had already forced down her throat, her face streaked with dirt and rivulets of sweat. Her eyes were dull with weariness, and she was shuddering between gulps of air.
He might have stood on a hilltop and watched orcs butcher her-one of the best warriors in the realm.
“Lass,” he said fervently, dropping his sword and putting his arms around her in as gentle a cradling as he could manage. Her own embrace was fierce, and she put her face against his armored chest for only a few heaving breaths, never letting the men standing watchfully around them hear a single sob.
“I… found a grove of those twisted trees… It was full of orcs… Been running since… Spent all the magic I had fighting and running… Ring wouldn’t take me to you… How came you here to my backlands?”
The battle was rising around them in earnest now, men and orcs shrieking and shouting as they died, their cries almost lost in the incessant ringing of steel.
“Alessa,” Azoun said, rocking her slightly in his arms, reluctant to let go of what he’d come so close to losing, “I’m looking for the man who always knows what to do, no matter how much you two have crossed swords down the years. I need his counsel now, more than ever. Vangey’s warhorse came this way. We’ve been following the trail, hoping to find him alive.”
Alusair shook her head. “Cadimus was carrying someone else on this ride. Vangerdahast was-is-missing.”
“What? Vangey wasn’t in the saddle?”
Alusair shook her head again. “I fear he is truly lost,” she whispered.
The king threw back his head as if someone had slapped him, paying no heed to the battle raging close around them now. The endless orcs were slowly driving back the men of Cormyr.
The king closed his eyes and shook his head grimly. “No,” he muttered. “Gods, no.”
He let go of her and walked away, as if alone in a fog. Alusair and the lords exchanged startled glances, then sprang to their feet and followed. The Steel Princess scooped up her father’s forgotten sword.
“I’m no good at riddling my way out of prophecies!” Azoun told the air around him despairingly.
“Father?” Alusair slapped the blade back into her father’s hand and shook his shoulder, imploring, “King Azoun-speak to me!”
“Vangey’s wisdom lost to me, when I need it most?” Azoun murmured. “After all these years…”
He whirled around and snapped, “It cannot be. The old wizard’s off on some quick work of his own. Something he hasn’t told us about, as usual.”
“And if he’s not?” Alusair almost whispered.
Her father looked at her grimly, then said almost calmly, as if he were noticing the weather out a castle window, “Then the gods have truly turned their backs on me.”
A horn call rang out, bidding the army of Cormyr to try to return to their hilltop. The sound was almost lost in the derisive roar of a new wave of orcs.
3
Vangerdahast sat atop the highest step of the grandest goblin palace in the great goblin city, holding his ring of wishes in one hand and his borrowed mace in the other, staring out over the black expanse of the central goblin plaza into the great goblin basin where a pair of scaly golden membranes lay furled along opposite rims of the pool, giving it the slitlike appearance of a giant reptilian eye watching him watch it watch him watch it and so on so on to the end of all things, like a mirror mirroring a mirror, or an echo echoing an echo, or a man pondering the depths of his empty, empty soul. A wizard could lose his mind in a place like that.
Perhaps a wizard already had. The plaza around the pool seemed to be turning scaly and red, save for a long chain of giant white triangles that bore an uncanny semblance to teeth. Vangerdahast could also make out the shape of a sail-sized ear and the curve of a bridge-length eyebrow, and even the arcs of several lengthy horns sweeping back from the crown of the head. Taken together, the features gave him the uncomfortable feeling of looking at the largest mosaic of a dragon he had ever seen.
Probably, Vangerdahast should not have worried about failing to notice it earlier. At the time, he had been fighting for his life, trying to capture Xanthon Cormaeril and force him to reveal the exit to the goblin city. There had been flashing spells and gruesome melees and hordes of droning insects, and it would have been normal for even the most observant of combatants to miss the mosaic.
But Vangerdahast was no mere combatant. He was the High Castellan of the War Wizards, the Royal Magician of Cormyr, the First Councilor to the King, and he did not overlook such things. He could not afford to. Everyday the life of the king and the strength of Cormyr depended on his powers of observation, and he kept his senses honed keener than the blade of any dragon-slaying knight. He perceived all that passed before him, heard every whisper behind his back, smelled any kind of trouble the moment it formed, and still he had not noticed the mosaic until-well, until sometime earlier. Days had no meaning in this place. The only way to mark time was by the steady shrinkage of his ample belly, and he had already taken in his belt two notches before he began to notice the mosaic. Either he was hallucinating or the thing had begun to form before his eyes. He would not have liked to wager which.
A pair of yellow membranes slid across the pool, coating the surface with a fresh layer of black sheen, and slowly retracted again. Vangerdahast had seen the pool blink before, long before the dragon appeared, so perhaps the blinking had nothing to do with the mosaic. Everyone knew mosaics could not blink.