Ranthor is gone, Mistress. Cerulean nodded toward the room with his head. Ihope you are proud of me.
Shal patted the familiar again, then stepped past him into the spell-casting chamber.
Ranthor's body lay crumpled behind the casting stand. Crystal fragments littered the room, many glued to the floor in Ranthor's blood. As Shal knelt beside her former master, her shoulders and then her whole body began to shake as she felt the tears come. She had held on to the faintest, most minute hope that what she had seen in the globe was a vision only and not reality, that the chill she had experienced at her teacher's passing was only a reaction to a vivid nightmare. Now the truth lay before her. It was irreversible. And so she wept.
Tarl knelt behind Shal, encircling her in his arms, his head bowed. Silently he prayed, both for his friend and for the man he had not known. There were no words, he knew, to comfort Shal, any more than there were words that would make him feel better about Anton or Sontag or Donal or any of the others.
Ren didn't share Tarl's talent for offering comfort. His mind thought in terms of action. He walked silently past his two friends and leaned over the body, then turned the stiff corpse over and examined the wounds. What he found made him recoil. Ranthor had been stabbed in the back, over and over again, with a dagger that would have killed with the first scratch, for it was tipped with the same green acid poison that had killed Tempest. From the angle and the profusion of the wounds, Ren knew that Ranthor's murderer was taller and probably less skilled than the assassin who had killed Tempest, but unfortunately no less deadly.
Mistress… Cerulean's gentle call penetrated Shal's grief. Mistress, I will bring Ranthor with me into the darkness of the cloth. Once you have sealed this tower, I will take Ranthor on one last ride to put his soul to rest. It will be my final duty as his familiar.
But can he truly rest if his murderer remains unpunished? Shal communicated mentally.
In the back of her mind, Shal heard Ren relating his theories about what he had found in his examination of the body, but it was Cerulean's answer that Shal listened to. Ranthor will be at rest, Mistress. It is you who will not.
Shal stood and quietly explained the familiar's bidding to Ren and Tarl. They lifted the rigid mage's body onto the horse's back and watched as Cerulean reared up, then disappeared into a small pocket of the indigo cloth. After being witness to an entire day of magical wonders, they barely thought twice about the horse's unique method of departure.
Though near exhaustion, Shal moved through the tower hurriedly, sealing door after door, making sure all was as they found it. She spoke her assurances to the robe as they reached the second floor, but the ghostly garment continued to follow them as they removed the bodies of the cook and the servant. Finally it stood hovering inside the front door as Shal closed it and sealed it by reversing the same utterance she had used to open the great bronze door.
As they reached the park where Ren's mare was tethered, Tarl and Ren strapped the two bodies across the roan's broad back. Shal called Cerulean forth from the Cloth of Many Pockets. The horse leaped from the cloth and straight into the air with the grace of a unicorn and flew upward. Shal watched, misty-eyed, as it left a blue Stardust trail behind it. She could just barely make out Cerulean's message: See you soon, Mistress.
7
Porphyrys Cadorna held in his hands the official proclamation from the council making him Fourth Councilman. It praised him for "prudent judgment in the matter of assigning punitive tasks for the betterment of the community." It commended him for recognizing the caliber of the three barroom brawlers and for immediately acting on the information they provided by arranging to add new shipping lanes in and out of the harbor. Advisors to the council were suggesting that the resulting influx of newcomers to Phlan would double its present population and ensure further expansion into the uncivilized portions of the city.
Cadorna sat in his personal study, admiring the piece of parchment. It was written in the elegant script of the town's head scribe, a man known throughout the Moonsea area for the elegance of his calligraphy. Cadorna made a mental note to make the man his personal scribe when he became First Councilman.
"Finally, some credit for a Cadorna's talents." Porphyrys spoke aloud as he stared up at the portrait of his father that hung on the wall opposite his desk. "To think that simply because you had dealings with dragons they could assume that you were somehow responsible for the Dragon Run! That's like saying that because I send bits of useless information to the Lord of the Ruins, I must be in league with him. The fools just don't recognize the importance of maintaining connections… of fending first and foremost for yourself!"
Cadorna shook the parchment at the portrait. "But here, finally, is some credit. It's still not what we deserve… what I deserve. It was Second Councilman Silton whose incompetence was exposed by my proficiency. It is his seat I should have assumed, but the council in its "wisdom" opted to advance the Third and Fourth Councilmen ahead of me." Cadorna rattled the parchment once more, then set it on his desk. "However, I won't spend forever waiting for-"
A stiff rap on the door interrupted Cadorna in midsentence. "State your business," Cadorna called.
"Gensor reporting, Honorable Fourth Councilman."
Cadorna strolled to the door and lifted the bolt that secured it. "Enter, mage. What news do you have?"
"I followed them from the inn to-"
"I instructed you to follow them; of course you followed them! I asked you what news you've gathered."
"They-"
"Remove that hood in my presence. I like to look a man in the eyes when he speaks."
The mage's face was hidden deep within his black hood. "You think you control me because you are Fourth Councilman? You wish to look me in the eyes? So be it." Gensor reached up and pulled back his hood.
Cadorna blenched at the sight of the man's face. Gensor's skin was shriveled and ashen, an unnatural gray that gave him an almost corpselike appearance. His eyes were the color of a steel blade, and they seemed to bore straight into Cadorna as he spoke, his voice like ice. "I have no need of your reimbursements, Councilman. I work for you because, like you, I desire to know certain things."
Cadorna said nothing. There were ways of taking care of ingrates, even magic-users, when they got out of line. He returned Gensor's stare with a cold look of his own.
"They went to the tower of the red wizard-Denlor, to those of us who know him."
"Yes, I knew Denlor," said Cadorna.
"Knew him? I've no doubt," said Gensor. "The woman's mentor died there, as I gather did Denlor. I listened in on the party's conversations until they reached the tower itself, but I did not follow them in. My cloak of invisibility would not have functioned within those magicked walls."
"Spare me the details of your ineptitude, mage! What else did you learn?"
Gensor glowered at Cadorna until the councilman took a step backward, and then he proceeded. "Her master was murdered-by a beast, she believes."
"Her master? Who-"
"A wizard named Ranthor. She knew something of Denlor's death and of the siege on his tower by creatures from the outside." Gensor paused for a moment, looking inquisitively at Cadorna. "And her steed is magical, a familiar inherited from her dead master."
Cadorna stepped closer at this news. "A familiar? What are its powers? Can anyone control it?"