you’re making all this noise. Every owlbear and wood-wolf for miles has heard-”
Narantha shut her mouth abruptly, pinching her lips into a thin, furious line.
“-all the crashings of your every footfall… and they’ll be stalking us right now, following patiently, waiting until you weary and stop to rest.”
“Oh, gods bugg-buh- violate you!” the Lady Crownsilver snarled, stumbling in her fury and almost falling on her face in a slimy hole of mud and long-rotten leaves.
Florin raised expressively reproving eyebrows, looking so much like her father when he did so that Narantha shrank back. The ranger turned his head away from her, jaw set, and her cheeks flamed with mortification.
They would have flamed with something else if she’d been able to see his face, and the crooked grin that now kept springing onto it despite Florin’s best efforts to wrestle it down.
Chapter 5
In my days thus far, I’ve observed three things that beset all kings: laws that trip them up or are used against them; the plottings of traitors, scheming to weaken and shame them and bring them into the dark regard of their subjects ere the plots turn to their bloody removal from the scene; and those very same murderous fates that befall them. Yet do they not deserve it? After all, the dooms of kings are always a lot more bother for all than the killings of mere bakers, foresters, and cobblers.
Havandus Haeratchur
Musings of an Ale-Seller published in the Year of the Lion
T he floating scrying orb darkened and sank a little as Horaundoon passed his hand over it, banishing a scene of one more elf mage lying dead with doomed astonishment stark on his face.
Humming a jaunty tune, Horaundoon strolled past a table on which rested a neat row of three human skulls, to another table where several old and massive metal-bound tomes lay waiting. At his approach, the air in front of his nose roiled briefly, presenting an intricate glowing sign in warning.
He slowed not a step, and the sigil promptly vanished again-without the thunderclap of unleashed Art that would have slain any other man.
The archmage reached out with a hand that shimmered with enspelled rings for the darkest, most battered book. Galaundar’s Grimoire should hold what he was seeking, somewhere in the pages just after the section on preparing dismembered limbs to be spell foci…
A sound as of tinkling bells occurred in the room behind him.
He drew back his hand, and turned. “Yes?”
The sounds came again, more liquid this time, ascending in different notes. In time with them, a glow flickered in midair like a passing flame leaping out of nowhere, a little glowing scene dancing above the central skull of the three.
Horaundoon peered at it closely. The hargaunt was showing him his last slaying: the elf mage crumpling down his own garden steps, to sprawl limp and lifeless, forever staring.
Its bubbling, bell-like speech came again.
“Yes,” Horaundoon agreed gravely, “the spell is dangerous-but only if I’m actually caught in the act of using it. It leaves no trace behind, no link to me or to this place.”
Bells cascaded like water, and another scene sprang into brief existence where the first had danced only moments ago. The hargaunt, it seemed, was unimpressed.
One of the earliest slayings, this time, the elder elf who’d raced in vain to reach his ward-spells, and died clawing the air well outside their crackling reach.
The archmage nodded patiently. “No magic is foolproof-with the Art, we steer and shape energies that betimes have intent of their own, in a world full of old, hidden spells that can flare into life without warning. Yet consider how safe, in something as rife with uncertainty as sorcery must needs be, this crafting of mine is. Mages are given to grandiose claims and boasts that far outstrip their true talents, yes, but this is not only my masterwork, but a masterwork by any solemn measure of spellcrafting.”
He strode back through the protective ward, waving a hand to call up a vision of his own, much larger than those the hargaunt emitted.
The air between them was suddenly full of yet another elf mage, this one life-sized and battling something that swirled half-seen around him, dread on his face as he came to know that there was nothing he could do against this attack, and that his doom was come upon him at last.
Horaundoon stepped right through the image even before it began to fade, as he strode to stand over the skull. “My master-spell can detect any mantle and move toward it, drifting across half Faerun if need be. When it impinges upon the mantle, I am made aware of this-and at my command, the spell conquers the mantle and turns it against its user! From the mantle’s focus gem it lashes into the mind of he who wears the mantle, emptying his spells into the gem and feebleminding him as it does so. This, too, I am made aware of, whereupon it sends those spells to me. The weight of that mind-burst can be staggering, yes, but-behold-I’m still standing. I then command my spell, intermingled with the mantle, to immolate itself, gem, mantle, and mantle-wearer-or merely his mind, turning his brain to ash, and ’tis done.”
The hargaunt belled anew.
“Ah, but it has worked every time. I’ve slain elf after elf, though I’m going to have to work very swiftly indeed, now. Word is spreading, and Fair Folk are abandoning use of their mantles from Evereska to the Dragonreach shores. I’ve been stealing the spells of the most powerful mages I can catch alone, avoiding only masters of the High Magic-and with each mind I empty, the spells at my command grow richer.”
The hargaunt made its querying whistle, accompanied by that wisp of pink that meant, as clearly as if it had shouted out the word in Common: “Why?”
Horaundoon shrugged. “The ranks of the Zhentarim grow steadily unfriendlier, the schemes and betrayals and false blamings crowding in hard and fast, one upon the other. If I remain, with the wits and standing all know I have, I continue to be a target. Sooner or later, most probably sooner, some rival or cabal of rivals will inevitably slay me.”
The archmage raised a hand, and the air around him sang, briefly and faintly, reassuring him that his shielding spells-that blocked all scrying, and warned of attempts to intrude, or to shatter or alter them-remained intact.
“So I must grow powerful enough to make myself a way out of the Zhentarim. That’s why I tolerate apprentices. Already my magics have made them my slaves, though they know it not. When the time is right, I’ll force one of them to take my shape and seeming. The others, just as spellbound, will slay this false Horaundoon. Leaving me, in a new guise fashioned by you, to vanish from the notice of the Brotherhood. Free once more.”
The hargaunt trilled, throwing up a scene that flashed briefly blue.
“Already? Haularake, where does the day go?” Horaundoon hurriedly loosened the sash of his robes and shrugged them back off his shoulders, letting them fall to where his arms held them up at his waist. “I know, I know,” he added, before the hargaunt could interrupt him. “Spellcrafting always takes longer than I think it will. Naed, we’ll have to really hurry now.”
He extended his other hand to the skull. It promptly bulged, coiled, and became an ivory-hued, sightless snake, oozing up his arm with purposeful speed, and leaving no sign of the skull it had been.
“Naed, naed, naed, ” the archmage murmured impatiently, the last word muffled by the hargaunt flowing over his lips as it molded itself to his face, giving him quite a different visage. A woman’s face, strikingly beautiful.
Below Horaundoon’s newly pointed chin, the bulk of the hargaunt had molded itself into a pair of decidedly feminine-and decidedly attractive-breasts.
He was breathing hard in his haste by the time he reached the wardrobe mirror, and cast the spell that turned him from a rather gaunt and hairy man with an incongruously smooth and beautiful woman’s face and front, into a shapely and curvaceous woman. Blowing himself a mocking kiss, he whirled into the wardrobe, snatched out a suitable gown, thanked the watching gods (and not for the first time) that the current fashions in footwear were
