So who in Aglirta was working sorceries that shook all Darsar… when the priests were dabbling in poisons and bribery, and the forces of the king were rounding up every wizard they could find?
Such puzzles were why he'd always watched Aglirta, and always would… even if it hadn't been a place that had made his heart dark and heavy with grief.
Accursed Aglirta-the realm that had swallowed most of the younger Bowdragons. Cut down in eager youth, their bright magic lost before they could quite achieve mastery… just a handful among the ranks of all the dead and forgotten wizards who'd fallen in the ongoing strife that had been the true ruler of the Kingless Land for as long as Dolmur could remember.
As long as his parents could have remembered, too, and probably their parents before that. Senseless, so senseless.
"They fled," he murmured to the unheeding window, "because they were fools who went looking for trouble. Fools near and dear to me, but no less foolish for that."
The window was taller than a man, its frame set with gems inside and out-massive cabochon-cut stones there to hold enchantments that warded birds from the glass and kept the single huge pane from breaking under the sharpest weapon-blows Dolmur Bowdragon had been able to test it with. He smiled at the memory of the largest, strongest armaragor he could find running full-tilt down the long cellar passage in full armor, before leaping into the air to put his entire weight behind a great swing of his two-handed battleaxe. In the crash that had followed, the weapon had been chipped and its wielder numbed and winded, but the glass had held firm, unmarked. It was a good, strong spell, one of the last powered by the slowly ebbing life of the spellbound wizard entombed alive deep under this house. Someone called Eiyraskul, who'd been a foe of Dolmur's father.
Dolmur would have preferred to source his lasting spells from an enchanted ring, wand, or stone he could control rather than a slumbrous mage who might someday be freed of the binding enchantments and come looking to slay Bowdragons-but wizards weren't obligingly sacrificing their own lives to craft such treasures, these days.
Dolmur sighed aloud and told the window, "We must work with what we have. Yearning after desired dreams of what can never be is how the weak-minded waste their lives."
"Is it now?" came a quiet voice from behind him. A voice that should not have been there.
Dolmur Bowdragon whirled around. To a wizard, such surprises are armor-chinks of carelessness or misfortune that usually mean death. But no man can help but want to see his slayer or fate.
The ward-spells on the study and the house around it should have hurled away non-mages and warned Dolmur of the entry of any wizard powerful enough to break them… yet this robed man facing him, with the raven-dark hair and the soft, knowing smile, could be nothing else but a wizard.
An intruder standing in his own study, boots only a stride from a flagstone that bore one of Dolmur's hurl-hard spells-that would snatch the man straight up to impalement on the spikes of the huge iron dragon-head candle cluster thrusting down from the ceiling above.
His visitor smiled more broadly, and carefully stepped around that flagstone as he paced forward. "Forgive the abruptness of my intrusion-and for that matter the intrusion itself, Lord Bowdragon. I come with peaceful intent, to make an offer, not to try spells with you."
"Then be welcome, Lord Nameless," Dolmur said calmly, gesturing to the lounges by the fireplace as he turned and walked toward them. "Offers always interest me. Will you take wine? Or hot serbret, perhaps?"
"Neither, thank you," his guest replied, following. The stranger's route took him across a certain cluster of flagstones-as Dolmur had intended it to-but no alarm flourish of horn music swelled to fife. This was no intruder, then, but a "sending." Solid-seeming but illusory, and so of course unable to drink. Able to spy on him for months, though… and wanting Dolmur to know it, by the avoidance of the hurl-hard flagstone.
"Then take your ease, and unfold your offer." The Bowdragon patriarch waved his hand toward the fireplace, offering his unexpected guest any of four lounges-or the more likely choice of standing against the mantel. Again his guest surprised him, taking a seat. There came a slight rustling of robes and a creak of furniture as he sat down, but Dolmur smiled inwardly. He knew of no natural way to make that lounge creak in that manner, given what it was made of-so his visitor must be using magic to "supply" sounds, to fool Dolmur into thinking this sending was solid. My, to have magic to waste so lavishly…
Dolmur took a seat of his own, briefly entertaining the notion of using the lingering spell that amplified his voice to summon servants to echo perfectly the rustling and creaking, to signal to his guest his recognition of their falsity, but-no. Mages whose greatest need was to impress did such things, and Dolmur Bowdragon was years beyond the need to impress.
Or so he hoped. Assuming a relaxed pose, he waited.
"I'm Ingryl Ambelter, a wizard once in the service of Baron Silvertree of Aglirta. I supported him in his ambitions to rule the Kingless Land, and confess myself less than enamored of the new King, the boy Raulin Castlecloaks-and of the overdukes and former regent who crowned him. They've done me much injury, though my sorcery has been powerful enough to keep me alive and allow me to flourish since. These foes of mine have also done much injury to you, slaying more than one Bowdragon without cause, warning, or so much as fair salutation. Now they're hunting wizards, slaying or imprisoning without cause-and when they've scoured Silverflow Vale clean of mages, they'll look in this direction and others, and reach for you. Not for nothing do your countrymen have the saying, 'Beware wizards of Aglirta.' The overdukes watch you even now, and remain a menace to you so long as they live."
"And so?" Dolmur asked calmly, wishing he'd fetched a decanter, but not wanting to interrupt this Ambelter now.
"I offer you a chance to avenge the deaths of your kin-and more. I'm here to entreat you to join with me to overthrow and slay Aglirta's new King and his overdukes."
Silence hung between them after that. It lasted a goodly time, both robed men staring expressionlessly into each other's eyes, before Dolmur slowly shook his head.
"As it happens," he told his unexpected visitor calmly, "I've no interest in slaying any royalty or nobles, and even less interest in overthrowing any ruler. Mastering sorcery is enough for me, and takes most of my time-and achieving as much power as possible in these arts would seem to be my only defense when these Aglirtans, as you warn, come looking for me. If they ever do."
"Oh, they will, believe me. I know they spy upon you with magic, even now. I say again: 'Beware wizards of Aglirta.' "
"Ingryl Ambelter, you are a wizard of Aglirta."
"Forgive my correction, Lord Bowdragon: I was once a wizard of Aglirta, neither born nor reared there, but merely hired by a baron of that realm-and cast aside when he deemed me no longer useful. I'm now an exiled foe of Aglirta."
"Correction noted; yet I remain a man who desires neither to slay nor to overthrow. Such actions create lawless strife, and the banishing of such must needs be by the imposition of new rulers… and in being such a ruler, or thinking myself responsible for placing anyone in such a position, whether they know of me or take counsel of me or not, are things in which I have no interest."
"Not even if it delivers into your hands one or more of the fabled Dwaerindim?" Ambelter held out his empty hand, palm up-and suddenly a molded, round stone hovered or rather spun above it, acrawl with strange glows and fleeting lightnings.