Truly, the gods were smiling this night.
No crossbow bolts greeted them.
There was a time when Alura Durshavin had helped her mother sprinkle precise, slender lines of decorative powders atop cakes, and her hand had grown steadier and more confident since then.
As a result, her thin lines of sand were as straight as a sword blade, every one of them.
Until something large and serpentine, that moved with velvet silence for all its bulk, slithered across one after another of them, as it quested after the intruders who smelled so intriguing. And edible.
Chapter 16
This court is like a slaughterhouse when royal tax collectors are seen approaching town: all abrupt arrivals, sudden departures, and a lot of sweating haste and spilled blood.
Arl Thandaster, Sage of Aglarond
Aglarond: A Wiser View published in the Year of the Shrike
T he war wizard spying ended as abruptly as if sliced off by a sharp knife.
Hissing in satisfaction, Horaundoon moved faster than darkness is banished by bright light, teleporting away from his inn room to A cavern he’d used a time or two before, spell-sealed and long forgotten in the Storm Horns. Some dead wizard’s lair that now served Horaundoon of the Zhentarim as a hide-hold and cache of magic.
He stepped forward blindly but confidently in the silent, dank darkness.
Two measured paces. He reached out.
His fingers found the stone coffer just where he’d left it, on the ledge. The glowstones still waited inside it, and as their cold light kindled in his hands, Horaundoon strode along the stone wall to place them on either side of the mirror he’d hung there six-no, seven, now-seasons ago.
Gazing at himself in the mirror, cold-eyed and confident, he opened another box on the ledge and drew out one of the dream-stones, that held images spell-stored in them.
Calling forth a particular image from it, Horaundoon set about shaping the hargaunt covering his face into a likeness he’d never assumed before.
It was the likeness he’d called out of the dreamstone to float in the air, life-sized and frozen.
The head of a man Horaundoon had slain with his own hands-and much satisfaction-years ago.
The real head was now shattered, decaying bone somewhere in the woods of Daggerdale, but when his magic had captured its appearance, it had been very much alive, and belonged to a noble of Cormyr, one Lorneth Crownsilver.
Ah, yes, Lorneth: uncle to Narantha Crownsilver, and ne’er-do-well rake.
“A gambler and a fool, who made himself a fool all over again when he dared to try to swindle this wizard of the Zhentarim,” Horaundoon murmured aloud. The hargaunt wriggled around his mouth to make his own lips more closely resemble the noble’s wider, thinner, perpetually smiling ones.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said, turning his head this way and that. “Lorneth Crownsilver, as ever was.” He gave the mirror a fiendish grin, then said softly to the hargaunt: “Worm time.”
There was a single bell-like tone of acknowledgment-and that part of the hargaunt that was masquerading as the back of his neck started to ripple and darken. He watched in the mirror as it opened a mouth to let something dark and glistening slide out into his raised and waiting hand.
“Yes,” Horaundoon breathed, gazing at the first of his mindworms. It was time, indeed.
He strode across the cavern to its rubble-strewn end and lifted a certain stone among the heaps of rock to reveal a stone bowl holding a spellbook he’d not consulted for years. It pages held a few vital words to add to his teleport incant, to bring him tracelessly through Tessaril’s wards without alerting her or any war wizard-or being tugged astray by the nearby chaos of her Hidden House.
He smiled as he cast the spell that would take him thither.
There were times when war wizard traitors were very useful things.
It was pursuing her, dark, wet, and terrible, wriggling and slithering down the bright white marble passages.
Closer and closer, no matter how fast she fled or how recklessly she hurled herself down staircases and across the dark, bottomless chasms between balconies. It was going to catch her, going to…
She felt icy fear as she fell to her knees, midway down another marble hall. Must get up before it Warm and wet, welling up inside her, red-black and triumphant, choking her…
“No!” Narantha shrieked, falling into ruby-edged darkness, falling…
“Nooooo!”
She was gasping, panting wide-eyed into the moonlit night, hearing the echo of her own scream rebound again and again in her head, blinking at what she could see of the unfamiliar bedchamber in the reaching fingers of moonlight. Where was — oh. Oh yes: Tessaril’s Tower, in Eveningstar, as an unwilling “guest.”
Then something moved, in the darkness beyond the moonlight, and came forward. Smiling.
The mindworm going into her had driven her into nightmare, of course, and an abrupt awakening-but she hadn’t screamed, making his carefully cast cloak of silence unnecessary. Thus far.
Horaundoon smiled and started his walk to the bed, keeping his strides slow, soft, and confident.
And now, we shall see.
Well-regarded mages of the Zhentarim necessarily spent more time working magic than acting.
Yet it was dark, the lass was young and used to paying attention only to herself, and a wayward Crownsilver could be expected to change a bit, over the years.
Putting on his best wry noble’s smile, Horaundoon stopped at the foot of the bed.
It was a smile she knew.
Narantha felt her jaw drop. Could it be? Truly? After all these years?
“Uncle Lorneth?”
His eyebrows rose. “You’re expecting someone? I can depart.”
“No! I-Uncle, where have you been? We’ve not heard from you in years! ”
“I’ve been rather busy. ’Twas a distinct pleasure for me to discover my business turning at last to kin, and someone I was fond of, at that. Someone young, beautiful, and brimming with promise. Well met, Lady Narantha Crownsilver.”
“Uncle! Call me Nantha, as you always did!”
“Not grown too proud for the names of your youth? Good! Nantha, how would you like to be free of these confinements-and at the same time taste your own adventures and serve the Crown of Cormyr?”
Narantha stared at him. “Yes! Yes! ”
“Then get out of that bed, put on good boots-and useful garb above them, trews or better leather breeches and a tunic, none of these silken gowns-and come with me. Quietly. ”
Her uncle turned his back and strolled away from the bed, making a deft, intricate gesture as he did so.
Narantha froze, her bare feet just about to touch the floor. “You work magic? Uncle, you never said…”
“You never asked. Certain family members are so deathly concerned about the respectability of the Crownsilvers that I kept my increasing mastery hidden. Which is the very thing that made me useful to the king. Don’t sit there all night, lass! Get some proper clothes on!”
Narantha moved hastily. “I-ah-sorry, Uncle. I-you serve the king?”
“Uncle Lorneth can still surprise, hey?”
Narantha was dressing in feverish haste, hopping awkwardly in the moonlight as she shrugged her most rugged tunic over her head and sought to put on breeches at the same time. “Tessaril will be furious! Won’t she come after us?”
“Tessaril is the king’s plaything no more. Even to squawk about your disappearance would harm her standing. I think you’ll find she tries to pretend you were never here at all, and concocts some story about the Swords murdering you on the road to get your jewels, and dressing up some lowcoin lass in your gowns before they got
