To echo Horaundoon, this was shaping up into a superb show.
Radiance blossomed silently in the air behind the knights’ heads, hidden from view in the lee of tree-boughs the knights had just ridden under. Out of that swift-fading light glided a flying snake. A single wingbeat took it over the boughs and into a long glide, its mouth opening, toward the back of Florin’s neck.
Mindworms wriggled down the snake’s pointed head to cluster between its fangs, dark and glistening…
Dove sat bolt upright in sudden alarm, eyes widening. “No!” she cried, silver fire kindling in her eyes as she clenched trembling fists. “Not Florin!”
The Weave howled with the frantic fury of her reaching.
Though he was too far.
And she was too late.
The snake struck, Florin grunting and stiffening-but no fangs sank into his neck, for at their touch the serpent vanished in a sudden burst of spell-light.
Horaundoon hadn’t even time to blink as serpent jaws gaped, right in front of his face.
He did find time to scream as it struck, fangs biting deep-and the mindworms surged forward, to burrow in.
He went on screaming, reeling blindly around the room, clawing at the snake as the mindworms gnawed and devoured, sinking deeper.
He could feel the hargaunt fleeing from him, but was too lost in agony to care, raking at the snake until scales flew-and he finally tore it free, much of his cheeks and brow going with it, to dash it again and again against a wall, clubbing it into soft ruin.
Dropping it dazedly, he felt for the potions he knew were there. Six healing quaffs, and the others that were useless to him now…
Horaundoon gulped them frantically, feeling the hot wetness deeper and deeper in his brain as the mindworms gnawed on. Mystra have mercy, eight of them…
He was still blind, could in fact feel one of them gnawing behind his eyes, and vainly tried-with hands that trembled treacherously-to work spells on himself.
No. No.
“Not the doom I’m… looking for,” he gasped aloud, clawing his clattering way across the table again, sending useless potions flying. Ha! He had it!
Snatching up the scepter he’d been seeking, Horaundoon turned it on himself and gasped out the word that awakened it.
A glow he could no longer see warmed his face. He writhed, shuddering helplessly, but locked his fingers in his lap, cradling the scepter, and nursed the beam that ravaged him, even as he curled up around it in pain.
He was, he knew, glowing and pulsing…
Between each pulse of his scepter, Horaundoon of the Zhentarim looked increasingly wraithlike. He was translucent now… Looking down into the crystal ball that held the Zhent’s image, Amanthan cursed softly, fists clenched. “ Die, hrast you,” he whispered. “As I did.”
The husk of a body fell in on itself. With a ragged cry of despair and revulsion, a roiling glow burst up out of it.
Weeping and wailing, Horaundoon swirled around his rooms-then out of them, howling.
A fat, unshaven carter was tying up horses in the street below. Horaundoon plunged down through the man, savagely trying to slay.
The carter staggered, wheezed, stared at the street with wild, bewildered eyes-and fell on his face and lay still, his horses snorting and trying to back away.
It was that easy. That hideously easy.
And what comfort was that to him?
Howling anew, Horaundoon raced down the street, a pale and shapeless arrow, to slay again. And again. Purple Dragons, shopkeepers, alley drunks…
A lush-bodied woman in an upper window, preening before a mirror. He soared into the room and spiraled around her, not wanting to slay so much as touch… touch what he could no longer touch!
She screamed once then trembled, too fearful to breathe, tottering… He tried to hold her as she fell, but managed only to sink into her, passing not through her body but into her mind.
Which was both darker and more shallow than he’d expected, and faintly disgusted him, but which he found he could coerce… thus… and shape the thoughts of… thus. So he had no body, but could-yes! — live in the bodies of others.
Her mind was a small and cringing thing, flinching from him. Horaundoon lashed it scornfully even as he forced it to do this, then that.
She clawed her way stiffly back up from the floor, the gown she’d been trying on hanging half-off her, and went to the stairs, lurching and stumbling.
By the time she reached the street, she was walking more or less upright-stiffly, foaming at the mouth as her eyes rolled wildly. Horaundoon was still learning control.
“Ever the unsubtle, bumbling idiot,” Old Ghost sneered through Amanthan’s lips, as he scried the clumsy progress of the woman Horaundoon was mind-riding. “And as you stumble about, your schemes do the same-as clumsily as you do.”
Yet they were now two of a kind, he and the Zhent. Possessing, mind-riding spirits.
Horaundoon just didn’t realize, yet, what a great victory he’d achieved.
“Bitter laughter and applause,” Old Ghost murmured. “For us both, I suppose.”
The hargaunt was wriggling as fast as it could, flowing along the cold stone floor of a dark passage.
The flying gauntlets that pounced upon it, lifted it into the air, and expanded around it into a spherical prison were quite a surprise-but ignored its most belligerent chimings.
“You, little flowing menace, are going to come in quite useful to this war wizard traitor,” the wielder of the gauntlets purred gloatingly, toying with a ring that bore a handsome, oversized carved unicorn head. “Yes, quite useful. When my time comes.”
The war wizards had been gentle, even respectful in their questionings, and had left her some privacy to recover herself while they fetched her a meal.
That was why Narantha Crownsilver was sitting alone in a pleasantly furnished chamber somewhere in the palace in Suzail when horror burst open in her mind, unfolding with such awfulness that she could only whimper.
There was something called a mindworm in her head, linking her to this wizard-a Zhentarim! — the murderer of her Uncle Lorneth!
Who’d cold-bloodedly taken her uncle’s face and voice to deceive her, using her to spread mindworms to Florin and others… so many others… nobles all across the realm!
“Gods deliver me,” she gasped, when she could find words. “What have I done? ”
This revelation was due to this Horaundoon’s own misfortune. She watched the monster suffer under his own snake and mindworms, and she felt his sick pain-a dull echo of it, at least, as her own mind staggered…
And even as he shuddered and shrieked and wallowed in agony, her dazed mind stumbled through his dark plans, laid bare to her at last.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh no.”
He would survive this.
He would control her again, through the mindworm in her head-and through her, all she’d subverted.
“Gods!” she whispered, “so many! ”
She must do something. Right now…
So this is what real fear tastes like. Fear for all Cormyr.
Weeping and trembling, she left the room and hurried through the palace.
“Failure, Lady Lord,” Dauntless said bitterly. “Complete failure. The fugitives got clean away. I stand deserving of any punishment you see fit.”
Myrmeen Lhal’s eyes bored into his as if she were reading something written small on the inside back of his skull, but she said nothing.
And went on saying nothing as a curtain parted behind her, and the Warden of the Eastern Marches came
