“Here. Straight up to Eveningstar-rather angrily, I fear-to bring you home. Though even if he rides right through the night, he won’t be here until well after the sun rises again.”
Narantha stared at the Lady Lord of Eveningstar, aghast-then launched herself out of her chair with a snarl, storming across the room with her hands out like claws.
Tessaril sat unmoved, only the slightest trace of a smile twitching the corner of her lips. She went on smiling as her magic caught her seething captive steps away from her, spanked Narantha Crownsilver soundly with unseen hands, and hurled the sobbingly furious young noblewoman off to bed.
The Lady Lord of Eveningstar went on sitting in her chair, listening to the crashes of things being broken on the far side of that closed and spellbound door, and her smile turned sad.
“Gods above, child,” she murmured. “You are so much as I was, when your age, that I almost want to defy Azoun. Almost.”
As they squeezed through the rusty bars, there was a fair amount of crowding, and Semoor’s boot brushed one edge of the heaped weapons.
Whereupon a mouth appeared on the battered and bare metal shield atop the pile, and said in a flat, deep voice like a Purple Dragon giving stern orders: “Beware! These were carried in by those who will never carry them out again!”
Standing tense in the silence that followed those ringing words, the Swords watched the mouth fade away again. And waited.
And waited.
Nothing else happened, as their held breaths stretched. It was Semoor who first grinned, shrugged, and asked, “So, can I take yon shield now? And go through the weapons for whatever I like the look of?”
“No,” Pennae snapped. “You don’t really need them, and you could be spreading some fell curse or other. If Agannor or Bey-they’ve the best armor-wants to use the shield as we go out, to stand like a wall while the rest of us go past in a crouch, fine, but I’d throw it right back in here after, if ’twere me. I trust none of it.”
The Swords of Eveningstar were giving each other grim looks.
“I might have laughed at that warning, when we came in here,” Agannor said, “but not now.”
They moved on, Pennae tarrying to sprinkle a fingerwidth line of sand across the passage, from the third of four identical sacks tied to her belt.
“I saw you doing that earlier,” Doust said with a frown. “Why?”
The thief finished her pouring. “To show us, on our next visit, if anything has come slithering around these passages since we left. To check on our intrusions, say.”
Doust made a face. “Ah.”
Blowing out the lone lantern, the Swords went out into Starwater Gorge, low and fast and as quietly as possible.
Truly, the gods were smiling this night.
No crossbow bolts greeted them.
There was a time when Alura Durshavin had helped her mother sprinkle precise, slender lines of decorative powders atop cakes, and her hand had grown steadier and more confident since then.
As a result, her thin lines of sand were as straight as a sword blade, every one of them.
Until something large and serpentine, that moved with velvet silence for all its bulk, slithered across one after another of them, as it quested after the intruders who smelled so intriguing. And edible.
Chapter 16
This court is like a slaughterhouse when royal tax collectors are seen approaching town: all abrupt arrivals, sudden departures, and a lot of sweating haste and spilled blood.
Arl Thandaster, Sage of Aglarond
Aglarond: A Wiser View published in the Year of the Shrike
T he war wizard spying ended as abruptly as if sliced off by a sharp knife.
Hissing in satisfaction, Horaundoon moved faster than darkness is banished by bright light, teleporting away from his inn room to A cavern he’d used a time or two before, spell-sealed and long forgotten in the Storm Horns. Some dead wizard’s lair that now served Horaundoon of the Zhentarim as a hide-hold and cache of magic.
He stepped forward blindly but confidently in the silent, dank darkness.
Two measured paces. He reached out.
His fingers found the stone coffer just where he’d left it, on the ledge. The glowstones still waited inside it, and as their cold light kindled in his hands, Horaundoon strode along the stone wall to place them on either side of the mirror he’d hung there six-no, seven, now-seasons ago.
Gazing at himself in the mirror, cold-eyed and confident, he opened another box on the ledge and drew out one of the dream-stones, that held images spell-stored in them.
Calling forth a particular image from it, Horaundoon set about shaping the hargaunt covering his face into a likeness he’d never assumed before.
It was the likeness he’d called out of the dreamstone to float in the air, life-sized and frozen.
The head of a man Horaundoon had slain with his own hands-and much satisfaction-years ago.
The real head was now shattered, decaying bone somewhere in the woods of Daggerdale, but when his magic had captured its appearance, it had been very much alive, and belonged to a noble of Cormyr, one Lorneth Crownsilver.
Ah, yes, Lorneth: uncle to Narantha Crownsilver, and ne’er-do-well rake.
“A gambler and a fool, who made himself a fool all over again when he dared to try to swindle this wizard of the Zhentarim,” Horaundoon murmured aloud. The hargaunt wriggled around his mouth to make his own lips more closely resemble the noble’s wider, thinner, perpetually smiling ones.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said, turning his head this way and that. “Lorneth Crownsilver, as ever was.” He gave the mirror a fiendish grin, then said softly to the hargaunt: “Worm time.”
There was a single bell-like tone of acknowledgment-and that part of the hargaunt that was masquerading as the back of his neck started to ripple and darken. He watched in the mirror as it opened a mouth to let something dark and glistening slide out into his raised and waiting hand.
“Yes,” Horaundoon breathed, gazing at the first of his mindworms. It was time, indeed.
He strode across the cavern to its rubble-strewn end and lifted a certain stone among the heaps of rock to reveal a stone bowl holding a spellbook he’d not consulted for years. It pages held a few vital words to add to his teleport incant, to bring him tracelessly through Tessaril’s wards without alerting her or any war wizard-or being tugged astray by the nearby chaos of her Hidden House.
He smiled as he cast the spell that would take him thither.
There were times when war wizard traitors were very useful things.
It was pursuing her, dark, wet, and terrible, wriggling and slithering down the bright white marble passages.
Closer and closer, no matter how fast she fled or how recklessly she hurled herself down staircases and across the dark, bottomless chasms between balconies. It was going to catch her, going to…
She felt icy fear as she fell to her knees, midway down another marble hall. Must get up before it Warm and wet, welling up inside her, red-black and triumphant, choking her…
“No!” Narantha shrieked, falling into ruby-edged darkness, falling…
“Nooooo!”
She was gasping, panting wide-eyed into the moonlit night, hearing the echo of her own scream rebound again and again in her head, blinking at what she could see of the unfamiliar bedchamber in the reaching fingers of moonlight. Where was — oh. Oh yes: Tessaril’s Tower, in Eveningstar, as an unwilling “guest.”
Then something moved, in the darkness beyond the moonlight, and came forward. Smiling.
The mindworm going into her had driven her into nightmare, of course, and an abrupt awakening-but she hadn’t screamed, making his carefully cast cloak of silence unnecessary. Thus far.
Horaundoon smiled and started his walk to the bed, keeping his strides slow, soft, and confident.