Cool black fingers closed on hers, and drew her toward the wall, into the chill embrace pf the stones. Transtra swallowed, closed her eyes, and kept firm hold of the fingers that took her on, into silence, away from the alley…
The black flame along one side pf the alley was suddenly gone as if it had never been, revealing a dirty stone wall broken by one dark, open window. As the two struggling sorceresses flew past that spot, their splendid bodies wriggled, lengthened, and turned warty and green.
“Trolls?” Asper asked, frowning, and her two companions nodded. The forcibly transformed women plunged across the ruins into darkness, tumbling in the grip of the magic that propelled them. A moment later, on the far side of the great cavern whence they’d gone, two gigantic orbs blazed open and a thunderous voice rumbled, “Who dares—?”
There followed the rumblings and slight shakings of even so large a cavern as this that marked the stirring of a huge, long-quiescent body. Something larger than several buildings rose up on the far side of the ruins.
As the black dragon raised its scaly bulk higher than the roofs of Skullport to glare down the alley, Asper whispered something over the Netherese scepter. A nimbus of blue-and-gold fire surrounded her hand. “Touch me, both of you,” she said, “and bring the not-so-noble lady’s hand against mine.”
Durnan touched Nythyx’s limp hand to Asper’s, and she whispered something. The scepter began to whine and pulse, brighter at each flare.
“What have ye done, lass?” Mirt rumbled.
“Used this thing to power the little carry-stone you gave me, so as to whisk us all back to Mirt’s mansion,” she replied—and as she spoke, the familiar blue mists of teleportation began to rise and swirl around them. Asper smiled and turned her head to face Durnan. “I must agree with my lord,” she said sweetly to the tavernmaster. “A slow day, in truth.”
“May there be many more of them,” Durnan breathed his heartfelt wish as the dragon’s charge made the stony pave of the alley buckle and heave under their boots, and the mists rushed up to claim them, spinning them back to a place where there’d be a fire and a warm bathing pool, ready wine … and no dragons. What more could a retired adventurer ask for?
BLOODHOUND
It had taken the Master’s little flying eyes half the day to find her.
Tace tried not to smile into their reproving glares as she uncurled herself from the shaded corner she’d found, where the bases of two stone wind-spikes sprouted from one end of a tower balcony. The eyes hovered right in front of her face, angry and unblinking. She tucked the two curved pieces of glass she’d been peering through to magnify distant things—scraps purloined from the floor of the Master’s workchamber—into one of the many pockets of her dusty, clinging leathers, stretched, and murmured, “I come, Master.”
The breeze hissed past her ears as Tace ran lightly along the balcony and sprang into the air at its far end, leaping across emptiness some hundreds of feet above the dusty stone courtyard that ringed the tower to the round brass window she’d left open. She knew it was sturdy enough to take the weight of Maelarkh Throon’s youngest and most slender house slave. Catching its swing-bar with deft fingers, Tace pulled hard, swinging herself feet-first back into Ironwind Tower.
A last, wild glimpse of sun-drenched, rocky Thayan highlands flashed past her gaze, then she was landing on the smooth tiles hard enough to bruise her feet in her soft shoes, but bouncing forward to— feel fingers as cold and hard as iron dig into her shoulder.
“Tantaraze,” Old Sameera said in slow, scandalized outrage, “work is not to be hidden or run from. Slaves live to work. Slaves who do not work do not continue to live!” Old, iron-taloned fingers shook Tace like a dusty cloak.
“This,” Sameera snarled, “you know full well, wherefore my words are wasted, so I’ll let my goad speak for me and just say this: Run to the master, who awaits in his spellchamber! Run just as fast as you can!”
Tace sprang forward in a wild leap the moment Sameera’s grip loosened, but she knew the red fire of the goad’s barbed lashes would crack down her back and behind before she could get quite clear—and they did, sending her staggering. Sameera had been flogging slaves for a long, long time.
The slavemother’s satisfied hiss followed her around the first bend of the passage, the bend that hid the rude “dig my dung” gesture Tace made back at Sameera, and also hid her shoulder-wrigglings to loosen and soothe the goad-fire.
Not from the Master, of course. The flying eyes were darting along by her shoulders as Tace raced. Like a quiet little wind she ran, ducking low at every turn and leaning so close to the crimson and goldglimmer wall hangings that they rippled with the haste of her passage.
She feared the Master, of course, and in a curious way, although she knew full well that she could die at his whim and that he was by far the most dangerous and powerful person in his tower, she also liked him.
More than that: He liked her… or at least was amused by her, and let her tease him, just a little, or betimes steal a sweet tart from the hearthside platters without informing Sameera.
And Tace knew his hot-eyed guards did not touch her, for all her youth, because—and only because—the Master had ordered it so.
Fire flared from some of the rippling goldglimmer as she raced closer to the spellchamber, and the razor-jawed heads of tiny dragons curled forth from the hangings to snap and dart barb-tipped, poisoned tongues at her. Tace avoided them almost scornfully, hurling herself into a roll at one point so as not to slow her storm wind pace. Maelarkh Throon was, after all, a Red Wizard of Thay, and as the saying went, “Death comes for all who cross a Red Wizard, or dare to keep one waiting.”
The doors rolled back into mists at her approach, so Tantaraze bounded, somersaulted, and sprang forward high and wild into a lasting, racing roll that brought her to the very feet of her Master. There she threw herself to the gilded mosaic tiles, lips to his slipper and branded bottom thrust high for chastisement, as she’d seen his pleasure-lasses do when they’d done something to set them weeping with fear and left his face dark with anger.
Maelarkh Throon chuckled above her, then asked almost gently, “And do you truly think there is any place in my tower you can hide from me. Little Dancing Spider?”
“No, Master. Your magic sees all and commands all. Moreover, I am bound to you by something almost as powerful.”
“Oh?” The wizard’s voice went soft, and Tace knew that what she said next was very important.
“By my love for you, Master. Wherefore I would never try to hide from you.”
“Prettily said, my Swiftfalcon. Very prettily. Almost you sound like a rarautha.” A courtesan. Well, Tace had no interest in mixing dusted-gold scents to go beneath her breasts and wherever her limbs bent, nor in wearing elaborately-filigreed, pierced, and upwired gowns with chime-bells or without. Nor did balancing full goblets on her breasts and undulating across a room to piping music seem more alluring than ridiculous, but she could dance for her Master, if that’s what he wanted.
“Though your nether end is pleasant enough, I grow tired of addressing it. Rise, Little Imp, and look at me.”
Tace obeyed as gracefully as she knew how, surging up to her feet to stand with hands clasped behind her, as Sameera had taught her.
Tall and handsome as ever, the Master was smiling at her. She dared to smile back.
Though he was said to be a powerful Red Wizard, Maelarkh Throon never wore red. Whenever Taze had seen him, he’d always been clad in black boots or slippers and sweeping black robes with tight sleeves and cutaways that left his bronzen chest, with its tattoos and many talismans on fine gold chains, bare. That’s what he was wearing now as he towered over her, whatever magic he’d been doing with the Vaedren just finished or momentarily left incomplete. Its gems winking and gleaming, the wristlet floated behind the Master, spinning slowly in midair as it floated above a slender pedestal Tace had never seen before, with spell-smokes curling around it.