Part 26 (1/2)
”Indeed, Gaskur. It went well,” Marlin replied, making the gesture that told Gaskur he was dismissed for the night.
Smiling, the younger Lord Stormserpent watched his servant vanish down the back stair, then strode into his own rooms and started locking and securing doors.
He was just about done when blue flames erupted from a nearby wall, as the two ghosts of the Nine stepped into the room with dripping bundles in their hands. The thief, Langral, plunged one hand into his bundle-someone's cloak, darkened with blood-and drew forth a head that stared blindly past Marlin's shoulder, features frozen in terror.
The face of Seszgar Huntcrown; its look of fear was certainly preferable to its usual sneer.
Satisfaction became triumph. Deed done, that swiftly and easily.
”Take all that to the furnace,” Marlin commanded, staring hard into their cold smiles and repeatedly visualizing the room, the way there, and tossing their bundles down into the flames. If the writings spoke truth, they should be able to see what he was thinking in his eyes. ”Then return here to me without delay.”
After what seemed like a long time, the two flaming men nodded, turned, and walked through his wall...at just the right spot for the shortest journey to the furnace.
Marlin surveyed the trails of blood they'd left behind, then went to his board-his private one, far better stocked than the one most guests ever saw-selected a flask of Rhaenian dark he'd noticed going cloudy, and used it to sluice away the blood. Gaskur could scrub away the faint results in the morning.
”Farewell, Lord Huntcrown,” he murmured. ”My, my, the dismembered bodies are piling up. I must remember to have Gaskur rake the bones out of the furnace ashes before a servant who might report them to Mother sees to that little ch.o.r.e.”
He selected a clean flagon and the decanter that held his latest preferred throatslake: Dragonfire Dew, a fiery amber vintage from somewhere barbarous in upland Turmish. Cleansed throat and nose, kindled a fire below, and left a taste like cherries and blackroot on the tongue between. Ahhh...
He was well into his second flagon when his blueflame ghosts returned. He set it down, took up the Flying Blade and the chalice, and told them, ”Well done.”
Did those wide, steady, cold smiles waver a little when he began to will them back into their prisons?
It was hard, that much was certain, thrusting back an imponderable darkness in his mind that might have been their silent resistance or might just have been the weight of the magic. He was sweating when he was done-but he managed it, setting blade and cup, flickering an angry blue, on the table in a room suddenly empty of grinning, blazing men.
Right. I I am the master of Langral and Halonter...and soon, of many thousands more. am the master of Langral and Halonter...and soon, of many thousands more.
Taking up his flagon, Marlin made for his bedchamber. High time to snore a little and dream of being a mighty and ruthless king of Cormyr.
As he unbuckled and shrugged off garments and kicked them away across the floor, Marlin sipped more Dragonfire Dew and pondered the part of his scheme he'd neglected to tell his fellow n.o.bles.
He controlled no long-lost Obarskyr, but he was going to make make one. one.
His two blueflame ghosts-they were hardly ghosts, really, but he liked the phrase-would one by one, at his direction, slay all the highknights and war wizards. He'd replace those dear departed with his hirelings, one by one as they fell, until the Obarskyrs had no one attending them who was truly loyal.
Then, of course, it would be their turn. He'd slay them all, every last living Obarskyr, and then present one of the Nine he commanded-Halonter looked the more Azoun-kingly of the two-to Cormyr as a ”true Obarskyr” from the past.
Throughout all of that, he'd keep his fellow conspirators handy, up to their blood-besmirched elbows in the killings and ready to be framed as scapegoat ”traitors”-and slain before they could implicate him him-at any point in the proceedings where other Cormyreans became suspicious or any of his deeds got inconveniently witnessed.
Even if Lothrae produced more of the Nine and wanted to call a halt to his use of his two...well, Lothrae would hardly be eager to pa.s.s up the chance to rule Cormyr from behind the scenes.
It was, after all, one of the richest kingdoms in all the Realms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.
A STORM IN S SHADOWDALE.
It had been a glorious day in Shadowdale, but the sun was lowering in the deep forest of the hills around the dale. Long shafts of light stabbed in under the trees to gild ferns and set aglow the broad leaves of the asthen-thorn and halabramble bushes that cloaked the toppled trunks of fallen forest giants.
Storm Silverhand crossed a glade like a slow and patient shadow, making as little noise as possible. She'd meant to be there much earlier, but the need for stealth and leaving no clear trail conquered all else. She'd draped the wizard's cloak over her distinctive hair to make herself a cowled, anonymous figure.
Twice she'd sunk to her fingertips to crouch in motionless silence as foresters with ready bows came stalking through the trees, following the trapline trails aseeking dinner. Their bows were more to keep off bears and worse than to bring down game, but it seemed there was always one who'd loose a shaft first and worry about what it had hit later.
It had been years since Storm had been the Bard of Shadowdale in anything more than legend; she farmed her land and mothered Harpers under her roof no more. The folk of the dale would think her a ghost or a shapes.h.i.+fter or perhaps an accursed reminder of the Spellplague-and try to put an arrow through her or set their dogs on her, as likely as not.
And it had been years since such violence would have been a pa.s.sing annoyance to her and no more. Increasingly she was more forlorn grim wisdom than mighty power. Alone, most of the time, too, though that bothered her less and less.
From the glade, it was a short way up through close-standing trunks and rising rocks to where a shoulder of rock reared out of the trees, moss-girt and dark with seeping moisture. Cracks and crevices aplenty gaped in its flank, some impressively large. Two were big enough to be termed ”caves” to a pa.s.sing man's eye.
One, she knew, was a niche that went in no deeper than the length of a short man lying down. The other was her destination.
Or would be, after she'd turned at the last tree to look back and bide silent, listening long enough to make sure no one was following her.
Storm held still as gentle breezes stirred leaves above and around, until the birds started to call and flit about unconcernedly again, and she decided no one was on her trail. Whereupon she set the cloak down on the toes of her nondescript old boots, shrugged off her robe, undid the jerkin beneath it and doffed it, wrapped the cloak around herself, donned her clothing again over it-and strode straight to that deeper cavemouth.
Where she stopped, put her left foot carefully on a little ledge about s.h.i.+n-high up one side of the jagged opening, and kicked off, to leap forward into the darkness, taking care not to put her other foot down anywhere on the rocks by the lip.
As a result, the spring-spear mechanism remained still as she ducked past it, rather than slamming its long metal boar spear right through her body.
Several human skulls-that she'd helped gather, a lifetime ago-adorned the narrow and uneven floor of the natural cleft she was suddenly standing in, that ran deeper into the solid rock. Mere warnings.
She strode past them and into the real real guardian of the cave, hoping its magics hadn't decayed enough to kill her. guardian of the cave, hoping its magics hadn't decayed enough to kill her.
Harper mages had woven it long before, Elminster among them; a magical field to keep intruders out of this waystop hidehold in the forest. The Blue Fire had turned the ward into a roiling chaos that made living bodies shudder and terrified most who felt its touch, but the menaces it offered were meant to scare, not slay. If, that is, they still worked as intended and hadn't become something worse.
First came the blistering heat that robbed her of breath and drenched her in sweat in two steps. Storm closed her eyes to keep her eyeb.a.l.l.s from cooking, gasped for air through clenched teeth, and forced her way on.
On, as the inferno grew and all her garments hissed, the moisture baked and blasted out of them, into-in midstride-icy cold, a chill that froze the sweat on her skin and plunged her into helpless s.h.i.+vering. A cold that seared nostrils and lungs, stabbing at her like countless spikes-Storm had nearly died, too many years earlier, on hundreds of sharp-pointed metal needles, and knew what that felt like-then faded into the next part of the ward, the curtain she disliked the most.
Mouths formed in the air all around her, maws she didn't bother to open her eyes to see, blind eel-like tentacles that saw her without eyes. Worms ending in jaws with great long fangs that struck at her like snakes, then bit and tore, savaging her as she hastened on, trying to get through them without losing overmuch blood. The maws hissed and roared or gloated wetly nigh her ears as they drooled her her gore...as Storm stumbled across what she'd been expecting to find, heavy chain that clanked and skirled on stone beneath her. gore...as Storm stumbled across what she'd been expecting to find, heavy chain that clanked and skirled on stone beneath her.
The manacles, lying discarded on the pa.s.sage floor. She kicked them and plucked them up, through all the vicious biting, and clung to them as she fought her way on.
Then the biting mouths and their roaring were behind her, and she was walking in air that crackled and snapped as many small lightnings stabbed at her, raking their snarling forks across her skin, her muscles trembling in their grip, spasming and cramping painfully as she lurched on.
Out of that torment into another, a nightmare of half-formed, shadowy coils that tugged at Storm, tightening like so many ghostly yet solid snakes of t.i.tanic size, coils that always always, despite her upflung and clawing hands, managed to encircle her throat and start to strangle her, until she was walking arched over almost backward, caught beyond sobbing or gasping for breath, fighting through gathering dimness to-win free and snap back upright into a last torture of sharp, unseen points that jabbed at her eyes, solid shards of air that struck only at eyes and throat and mouth...to let go of her at last, leaving Storm staggering forward spitting blood from her many-times-stung tongue to regain breath and balance in the widening mouth of a cavern.
Alone and almost blind in near darkness, the only light coming from faint, fitful pulsings of the roiling ward behind her, Storm gasped and stretched and panted, seeking an end to her trembling as she tore off robe and jerkin again, to take off the war wizard cloak so she could wrap it firmly around the manacles and keep them from clinking.
After what seemed a very long time, she felt her body would obey her again. Not bothering to dress again, Storm caught up her clothes, the magics she'd brought, and the m.u.f.fled manacles, and strode through the deepening darkness for a long way, across the level stone floor of a great cavern, until a faint glow became visible ahead.
She headed for it, and it became several glows, close together and down low and flickering feebly, at about the same time as the smooth stone under her boots started to slope down and the faint echoes of her progress changed, making it clear that the unseen ceiling of the cavern was descending as she went on, to hang close above her, the cave narrowing, descending, and getting damper.
And starting to stink, too. Not the smell of decay or earth or stone, but the musky stench of an unwashed and filthy human.