"You don't like it!" Alassra let out a bitter laugh. "You don't know the meaning of your words. I'll keep these." She closed her fist over the tokens.
"Of course, I'm sorry-they're a poor birthday present."
"No, a valued one. You'll understand if I leave you to your own devices now? I've lost my taste for fruit and company." She reached for the staff.
The Simbul's mirror shone with its own light when she returned to her privy chamber.
Show me Nethra! she demanded before the echo of her entrance faded. What's loose in Nethra?
Nothing untoward, according to the mirror with a mix of Aglarondan clarity and foreign fuzziness.
Nothing other than what she'd expected, based on Boesild's tale and the tokens clutched in her hand.
Alassra took the noisier of the disks, the one that had belonged to the dead man, and balanced it carefully on the cap of the crystal dome. The quicksilver flowed up to cover it. The image of Nethra blurred, then reconstructed itself exactly as before. It was the same with the dead woman's token.
"Cold tea and crumpets!" the queen grumbled, resorting to the harmless curse the Rashemaar Witches had taught her a long time ago and a measure of the foreboding she felt.
Red Wizards rarely traveled alone; as Boesild pointed out, they didn't trust one another and the zulkirs trusted least of all. At best, Boesild had stumbled across a pair that had lost the little trust that held it together. At worst, he'd interrupted a skirmish between rival groups, which remained invisible if they remained in Nethra.
And if they'd left Nethra?
The quicksilver trembled in rhythm with Alassra's frustration: If they'd left Nethra, they could be anywhere. She didn't worry too much about Red Wizards infiltrating the Yuirwood. Little as the wilder Cha'Tel'Quessir might love Aglarond's queen, they preferred her to anyone from Thay. A Red Wizard falling afoul of them might well wish he'd crossed the Simbul's path instead. The Fangers were a different problem; they should know better-their parents and grandparents had formed the core of Halacar's defeated army. But their discontent was rooted in nostalgia for a time that had never been, and their ears were fertile ground for sedition.
Alassra could, and would, keep a closer watch on the Fang. She had the resources: trusted men and women, and magic, too. Keeping watch wouldn't solve the greater problem. Taking the dead woman's token from the quicksilver, Alassra polished it between her fingers and studied it by the light of a spell-dissolving lamp. Foul smells poisoned the air: blood pearl and dragon's wing foremost among them; not the Simbul's favorite reagents, but common enough in Thay. Probing deeper, she heated the token in the lamp's flame. It melted into a mottled lump while she learned nothing about the Red Wizard who'd cast the spell.
She had better luck, in a sense, with the dead man's token, which had been protected by a familiar spell cast by a familiar mage: Lauzoril. His green-eyed grinning face was harder and colder in her mind's eye than it had been earlier on the quicksilver. The world would be a better place when he was gone-at least until the new zulkir learned his predecessor's tricks.
"Somebody's stalking your spies, Lauzoril," she said to the man who wasn't there. "Someone's turned on you. You'd best look carefully among your allies." She thought of the zulkirs together and shook the thought from her head. "Let me look upon something peaceful instead: Zandilar's Dancer. Show me Zandilar's Dancer and the boy. Take me to Sulalk."
The mirror obliged, showing them both bedded down for the night, the colt in a pasture, Ember stripped down to his breeches and smiling as he dreamt in his narrow bed. Alassra envied them a moment-Mystra's Chosen didn't need to sleep; their dreams were mostly daydreams, pale imitations of the real thing-then, without prompting, the quicksilver roiled. The Simbul, expecting the unimaginable, readied a potent barrage of spells.
The mirror's image resolved into four men hunched around a plank table in a dirt-floor room. Alassra recognized the room. Sulalk was too small to have an inn or tavern. When folk gathered or strangers visited, they gathered and visited in the sacking room behind the mill. The four men were strangers, travel-stained traders with gamblers' eyes. Town merchants sent such men into the countryside each summer to measure the coming harvest. The traders drove hard bargains and weren't beloved by the farmers, but they'd been part of Aglarondan life longer than the Simbul.
Alassra saw no reason for alarm. Though she'd constructed the mirror, she didn't always understand its workings: It had shown her scenes both unexpected and trivial before. She was releasing her uncast spells when she read a word as it formed on one man's lips.
Horse, he'd said-in what tone Alassra couldn't say because the mirror didn't reflect sound. She thought she saw him add the word tomorrow. She was no lip-reader; she couldn't be sure, but a grain trader could easily become a horse trader for a day. He'd have no trouble finding a buyer for Ember's colt. She'd have to buy it from him herself, if she didn't get to the boy first.
The Simbul had advantages-powers of persuasion-no trader could match. Alassra needed a bit of time to assemble her traveling gear and to remind herself of the spells no traveling wizard should be without, but after that she'd would be off to Sulalk to purchase a birthday present Elminster would have to visit Aglarond to claim.
She planned to reach the village in the late morning hours. Judging by the amount of ale the four men had already drunk, she'd arrive with time to spare.
3
Thazalhar, in eastern Thay Midnight, between the thirteenth and fourteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)
In a silent crypt beneath an isolated estate of Thazalhar, two men, both of them necromancers, neither of them alive, awaited the arrival of a third. They waited patiently because patience was all they had, bound as they were in bandages and seated in ebony chairs that flickered with the turquoise light of unbreakable warding. The pair was also bound by ties of blood and ambition that went deeper than the misunderstandings that had led Gweltaz to slay Chazsinal who sat on his right.
The blood was between fathers and sons. It reached beyond the crypt to a third living man whose footfalls echoed outside. The ambition, cherished by all three, was nothing less than the destruction of Szass Tam, Zulkir of Necromancy.
A century ago, when Gweltaz had been an aspiring necromancer, he'd caught the zulkir's undead eye. For a while, he'd been Szass Tam's favorite. In the time-honored tradition of Thayan treachery, Gweltaz had coveted Tam's place atop the necromancers' hierarchy. He plotted against his mentor. His plots failed, spectacularly. Gweltaz paid for that failure with his mortal life and a final lesson: Tam, who understood tradition without respecting it, did not teach any pupil, however favored, enough to threaten his own position.
Chazsinal, by then a novice necromancer himself, had rescued Gweltaz's charred bones from a demon-guarded midden on the heights of Thaymount. For the next ten years Chazsinal abandoned his own studies to collect the rare unguents necessary to restore his father to a semblance of life. He cast the spells successfully, at no small risk to himself. Then, heeding Gweltaz's demands for filial loyalty, he surrendered what little remained of his own ambitions to his father's need for revenge.
Seven times, they'd risked everything in schemes to bring Tam down, and seven times they'd failed so miserably, so early, and so completely that the zulkir never became aware of their plots. Gweltaz came to believe that his son was a half-wit, a fool incapable of executing the simplest plan. Badgered by his father, Chazsinal came to believe the same thing. Succumbing to vice and debauchery, he sired a son on a green-eyed Eltabbaran slave and, watching the infant take its first wobbly steps, suffered a chilling revelation: