gate. Only one thing that could cause Rowen to betray his duty to Cormyr: the fear of betraying Tanalasta.
The muffled drumming of boots began to rumble up the stairway, and the princess heard Boldovar’s claws clacking across the floor toward the window. She summoned to mind the incantation of her magic bolt spell and pointed her finger toward the seam of the door. She was not going to let the ghazneth escape, not after what he had done to Rowen.
“Clagi, give me a crack to fire through.” Knowing the priest would argue, she quickly added, “Now!”
Clagi gulped down a deep breath but pulled the locking bar back and pushed the door up. Boldovar stood across the room gathering himself up to spring out the window, his drink-bloated face pivoting around at the sound of the iron door being unbarred.
“Where you going, lady killer?” Tanalasta’s voice was as snide as she could make it. She uttered her spell and sent a single bolt of golden magic streaking high between his legs. It struck the window sill in front of his groin, and the casing erupted into a spray of stone shards. “Afraid the little pregnant princess will make a eunuch of you?”
Boldovar glanced at the fading magic in the shattered window sill, then raised his lip in a yellow-fanged sneer and spun toward the box. Clagi let the door drop and had it barred before Tanalasta could give the order, but even so he was very nearly not fast enough. A loud squeal rang through the box as the ghazneth’s claws raked at the seam, then the princess’s stomach sank as the iron box rose into the air.
Tanalasta began to feel helpless and panicked again. This was not something she had expected. The box clanged and spun as it banged out the window casement, then the princess lost contact with the padding behind her shoulders as they plummeted groundward. Boldovar’s wings pounded the air like a bellows, and still they sank. Tanalasta grabbed Clagi’s arm and reached for her escape pocket, then pitched sideways and cracked heads with the priest as they splashed into Lake Azoun.
She blacked out, but awoke a few moments later coughing and choking. Lake Azoun’s muddy water was already filling her mouth and lapping at her nostrils. Clagi lay completely submerged beneath her, facing the side of the box and not moving.
Thanking the goddess she had returned to consciousness before drowning, Tanalasta gulped down a last breath. She pushed her hand down into her weathercloak, fighting through a floating morass of heavy wool. By the time her fingers located the escape pocket’s leather-lined mouth, the box was completely filled with water. Clagi had begun to convulse and did not respond to any of Tanalasta’s prodding and poking. Even if the princess managed to turn herself so the dimension door did not appear between them, he would be incapable of following her through on his own. She would have to pull him, which meant she would have to squeeze her swollen, aching stomach back around toward the front of the box. There was no time for that. She slipped her free arm around Clagi’s neck, then removed her other hand from her escape pocket, reached past him, and pulled the locking bar back.
The door flew open. The light and the air came flooding in, and Tanalasta found herself staring up into Boldovar’s mad red eyes, gasping for breath and struggling to understand how the ghazneth could be standing upright in the depths of Lake Azoun, shaking his fat belly at her and cackling in laughter.
Before the answer came to her, he stepped into the iron box, grinding his heel down on Clagi’s neck and crushing it with an audible crunch.
“For me? How kind.” As Boldovar spoke, his dark hand flashed down and grabbed the collar of Tanalasta’s weathercloak. “Thank you very much.”
The ghazneth ripped the heavy cloak off over her head, taking with it the simple smock underneath and leaving the princess in nothing but her breast bindings and loins girdle. He hardly seemed to notice. Boldovar simply buried his face in the black cloth and let out a long, satisfied groan as he began to absorb its magic.
The watery depths changed to Vangerdahast’s study, and grotesque and lascivious carvings began to appear on the walls. Finally coming to understand how she had been tricked, Tanalasta screamed in anger.
“No!”
Boldovar looked up and smiled, the remains of her shredded smock draped over his head. “Oh, yes.”
Battlelord Steelhand’s voice boomed up the stairs. “We’re coming, Princess! A few moments more…”
But they did not have a few moments more. The depth of color was already fading from Tanalasta’s weathercloak, and the chamber now looked more like a ghastly festhall devoted to unnatural cravings and monstrous delights than Vangerdahast’s study. If she allowed the ghazneth to absorb any more of her magic, Steelhand and his men would have no chance at all of destroying the thing.
Gritting her teeth against the crushing pain in her abdomen, Tanalasta propped herself up and drew the iron sword secreted in the door of her hiding box. Every day, her self-defense instructors drilled one simple lesson into her: strike to cripple, then strike to kill. But how to cripple a ghazneth?
To stop Boldovar, she knew she had to do more than crush a knee or slash a hamstring. She had to assault him in the very heart of his sick existence. The answer came to the princess easily. She pushed herself to her knees and brought the short blade across Boldovar’s loins in a vicious backhand slash.
“Coward!” she cried.
Boldovar’s crimson eyes grew as wide as coins, then he let out a surprised little whimper and allowed the weathercloak to slip from his grasp. Tanalasta brought the sword back in the opposite direction, opening another dark gash in the underside of his belly. Her own pain seemed to vanish-or rather, her fear seemed to vanish. She was still aware of her labor, of the crushing feeling around her waist and the baby moving steadily closer to the world, but now she was in control. She brought the blade around for an overhand hack at the center of his big belly.
“Enough!”
Boldovar’s arm flashed out to block. The blow caught him across the wrist and nearly lopped it off, but the ghazneth hardly seemed to notice. He circled his forearm around as though it were a blade, forcing Tanalasta’s sword back against her thumb and stripping it from her grasp. The weapon fell free and clanged off the rim of the box.
Tanalasta turned toward the stairwell door, where the sound of pounding boots had grown so loud the princess swore the warpriests had to be in the room with her. They very nearly were. The battlelord and his first three men stood at the top of the stairwell, panting for breath and running in place, apparently convinced they were still ascending the spiraling staircase into Vangerdahast’s study.
“Steelhand!” Tanalasta called. “Run forward!”
“What are you calling him for?” Boldovar demanded. “You asked me to play.”
The ghazneth’s hand slammed into Tanalasta’s head so hard that she heard half a dozen teeth clatter off the wall. Her vision narrowed and her hearing grew distant, then she felt herself being jerked out of the iron box and hurled against the stone wall. The impact moved the baby lower, and she felt its head beginning to crown.
When her eyesight returned, Boldovar was standing in front of her, holding her against the wall with his mutilated forearm and glaring at her with an insane, maniacal grin. “Good. You’re back.”
Something sharp and hot pierced Tanalasta’s abdomen just below the navel, then her belly exploded into agonizing pain. She looked down and saw the ghazneth’s arm pressed against her stomach. At first, she could not quite fathom what she was seeing-then she noticed the collar of red blood around his forearm, and felt a huge hand feeling around inside her.
“Let me see… where is that baby?” He grabbed something up near her rib cage and pulled.
Tanalasta’s world became a red fiery scream. She brought her knee up more by instinct than intention and felt it connect hard. Boldovar did not groan, but the impact was enough to send him two steps back. He was holding something brownish and bloody in his hand. It wasn’t a baby, and that was enough for Tanalasta.
Boldovar smiled and raised the bloody mass to his mouth-then pitched over forward as Battlelord Steelhand and his men barreled into him from behind. Their swords rose and fell in a tempest, hacking the ghazneth into a mangled black mass. It hardly mattered. The wounds closed almost as fast as they could inflict them. The Mad King pushed the bloody mass he was holding into his mouth and broke into a maniacal laugh, then began to chew and swallow.
Tanalasta felt the strength leave her legs and slumped to the floor. The pain was all gone now. There was a cold numbness up under her ribs, where Boldovar had ripped her life out, and a warmer, happier emptiness down in her womb, where she felt her baby sliding out into the world even as she faded. She reached down and felt its head, waxy and warm and tiny. It was all she would ever know of the child. The ghazneth had sealed her doom when he ate whatever it was he had eaten, for even the finest healers in the kingdom could not save her without all
