If any one of them had a connection with the mirror-if they knew anyone with a connection-the water would become steam and the salt would burst into brilliant yellow flame. Alassra watched as familiar patterns swirled in the glass. She marked a mutation in the Bezantur pattern: Aznar Thrul and Mythrell'aa were probing each other. When rivals squabbled, enemies paid attention. Otherwise Thay was unchanged until the end. Where she expected to see Lauzoril's rogue-handsome face, there was only a spiral as green as his eyes.
Alassra glanced anxiously at the salt and rainwater patterns. Short of the mirror itself, smiling Lauzoril was her prime suspect. She wasn't at all relieved to discover that a day after the Sulalk ambush, his reflection had gone abstract. But there was neither steam nor flame.
"Show me everyone who wishes me harm." The mirror went black and began vibrating. "Sorry-bad question. Set it aside." The vibrations ceased. Alassra restored the patterns. "Show me Aglarond. Show me those who would work knowingly for the Red Wizards."
The mirror revealed a handful of faces. Red Wizardry had been Aglarond's dread enemy for generations. There were few households that didn't memorialize someone slain by Thayan magic, fewer still with members who would openly consort with the enemy, and the Simbul's mirror knew them all. Alassra used Aglarond's traitors as bloodhounds, letting them flush out the Thayan plots and minions that penetrated her realm.
They did very little that wasn't discreetly observed, by her or by her living accomplices, but it was possible that mistakes had been made. A traitor might have made a Thayan connection without her becoming aware of it, but that wouldn't account for Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk.
Waiting.
Alassra considered the implications. She'd known her attackers for what they were by the reek of Thayan wizardry surrounding them, but none of the villagers had her skills. To them, the Red Wizards had been strangers. What might an ordinary Aglarondan say to a curious stranger? The mirror couldn't tell her what the Sulalkers might have said yesterday or the day before, but the question still seemed worth asking:
"Show me Aglarond. Show me those who speak ill of me or wish me the same."
The Simbul anticipated more faces than before: She was Aglarond's queen, not the bosom friend of each Aglarondan. Being fair meant everyone's fur got rubbed the wrong way once in a while.
"Gods! I'll be here all night!"
Alassra laughed without appreciating her own humor. It was one thing to know she wasn't loved as her sisters were loved and cherished by those who knew them-even Qilue was beloved by those who worshiped the drow goddess, Eilistraee-but the sheer number of faces flickering within the dome depressed her. And these were only the folk displeased with her at the moment. The mirror couldn't show the folk who'd cursed her name over breakfast or would do so at supper.
There were Fangers swearing in their squalid boats, revanchist Cha'Tel'Quessir muttering her name in the Yuirwood. Their numbers dismayed her, not their attitudes. No, the surprise and sadness came from the truly ordinary folk who blamed her for whatever misfortune had befallen them: a fishmonger whose eels had escaped from a broken basket, a wet nurse with a teething infant, a cook whose sauce had clotted, a baker with bad yeast.
Their queen was the mightiest wizard in all Faerun. She could destroy armies with a single spell. Why then-they demanded in words easily read from their lips-were her taxes so high? What did she do with their hard-earned coins? Why was it raining when a farmer wanted dry weather for cutting his hay? Why was it so hot-couldn't the Simbul do something about the weather? Why was she always somewhere else, but never in Glarondar… Emmech… or wherever the mirror captured their reflections.
The mirror clouded; Alassra sighed and covered her eyes. Aglarond was a predominantly human realm, and humans were old when they'd lived as long as she'd been queen. They were ready to turn their affairs over to children, perhaps grandchildren, and, deep in their hearts, they expected their queen to do the same.
When she'd accepted the crown and throne, the Simbul had assembled her court from the best men and women she could find. They served competently, loyally, and the Simbul replaced them with equally capable folk only when they died or retired. It was fair to say that Aglarond was a better ruled realm than it had been during any other reign; but it was also fair to say that it was ruled by gray-beards and crones.
"Elminster," Alassra said ruefully and the mirror obliged by displaying the Old Mage's Shadowdale tower. "I need someone to inherit all this from me. I'm human, you're human-but we're immortal, too. We're old. All the Chosen are old. Think of it, Eclass="underline" we're older than some of the gods! I'm not my sister; I'm not Laeral. I can't go away and come back pretending to be my namesake. And even if I could, someone has to be king or queen of Aglarond while I'm off being nobody."
The tower door opened and the Old Mage emerged for a stroll. Alassra could have called him, could have transported herself to Shadowdale in an instant. He might have agreed, and today she didn't care where her child was conceived. Then Lhaeo came through the door and young Azalar, the nephew whose unexpected birth had gotten Alassra thinking about heirs in the first place.
She certainly wasn't going to plead her case in front of Azalar. This meant that since the mirror hadn't solved her problems, she was going to have to deal with that heap of dusty spellbooks. Squaring her shoulders, Alassra cleaned the topmost book with her sleeve. The script was all dots and sharp angles; she'd have to cast a spell if she wanted to read it, which she didn't, so it was a good place to start, except…
"I've had this book for three hundred years. No one this side of the Outer Planes even knows it exists."
Alassra riffled the pages once. Nothing, literal or magical, leapt out at her. She shoved it on a shelf to gather dust again.
A wizard would need more than luck and a few potent spells to slip a spy-eye past her defenses. He or she would need patience, and while Alassra had patient enemies-enemies who'd been lurking decades, hoping for her to make an exploitable mistake-she didn't think she had any patient enemies in Thay. The Red Wizards weren't a subtle lot, a by-product, the Simbul assumed, of their reliance on slaves, goblin-folk, and undead minions to carry out their commands: their armies were fearsome, but as spies or slaves, orcs and zombies were absurd, and the Red Wizards knew it.
Red Wizards were predictable, not foolish, and-little as she liked to admit it-they knew their magic. Their academies churned out competent, albeit unethical, wizards year after year. The handful she'd dispatched yesterday would never be missed. They were, in all likelihood, already replaced.
Already replaced…
The Simbul cursed her own foolishness, her own subtlety. She'd assumed that because there were journeymen Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk, one of their zulkirs had been spying on her, had learned of her interest in the village and the colt. But it was much more likely that a zulkir had simply sent a team of expendable journeymen across the border in the faint hope that they'd trip over something useful. They'd been disguised as grain merchants, after all, not horse traders.
She'd spent the best part of the day covered in dust, while the solution to her mystery-if there was a mystery to be solved-was attracting flies in the ruined village.
Alassra cursed again before digging out the spellbook where she kept the spells she used to interrogate the dead. A glance or two refreshed her memory; it took little longer to assemble the reagents. It might take forever to get the chamber put back together. She made the mess worse looking for a little book of cantrips. She'd devised them centuries ago, the last time she'd been tempted to add a child to her life.