The portal flared again, and Pennae groaned, “Oh, no! ”
Laspeera lifted her hands to cast a spell-and then let them fall again as more men came crowding through the portal. More bullyblades-foes beyond counting!
Laspeera hastily started snatching up potions, and Florin sprang to join her.
“To the cellars!” he gasped, waving at the common room. “Stairs down-behind desk!”
Laspeera nodded and sprang up, moving as if completely healed and re-invigorated. She proved able to run almost as swiftly as Pennae, and so was in the lead as the three burst back out into the Oldcoats common room, with bullyblades hard on their heels, shouting for their blood and waving swords and daggers galore.
Wisps of smoke sped to meet those bullyblades, and two in the lead suddenly spun around and stabbed those just behind them. Amid screams and startled shouts, the running men stumbled over the falling bodies and crashed to the floor.
The few black-armored Zhentilar still alive in the common room turned to gape at these new foes and then moved grimly to engage them-as Laspeera and the Knights plunged down the cellar stairs.
Bullyblades roared defiance and sprang to meet the Zhentilar, who sneered and hacked at them, in a great crashing and clanging of war-steel.
A clangor that was echoed by a larger, louder crash that made the combatants blink and turn in suddenly bright, flooding daylight.
The front doors of the inn had just been blasted off their hinges and were tumbling across the room, shattering tables and then running bullyblades alike.
Outside, the astonished Zhentilar could see a wrecked coach on its side, with wheels still spinning and struggling horses shrieking.
Striding past it and up the inn steps into the room, through the huge hole where the doors had been, were nine Zhentarim mages. They were smiling cruelly, their hands already shaping spells.
Chapter 15
No mage should hesitate to use the right spell
No matter if it slay or diminisheth him.
Neither did Sarhthor, on that day
When wizards converged on Halfhap,
And a realm needed saving.
The glow of the scrying crystal cast pale shadows around the dark room, and across Ghoruld Applethorn’s watching face.
A face that was slowly acquiring a look of profound disgust.
“Just kill Laspeera,” he murmured. “Is it really all that difficult?”
“These thicknecks serve a few scheming Cormyrean nobles,” the oldest Zhentarim wizard sneered, his left hand raised so as to keep all nine mages safe from hurled weapons behind his greatshield. He waved contemptuously at the bullyblades with his other hand. “Eliminate them.”
He watched castings unfold around him, and at the right moment dropped his shielding. Spells lashed out from all eight of his fellow mages, howling across the common room in a bright, fell flood to rend men limb from limb, melt their flesh away from their spasming bones, hurl them into tables and pillars with shattering force, and cause their brains to explode bloodily out of their heads.
A few rushed desperately back toward the portal, only to stiffen and fall as they were struck by more than a dozen pursuing bright bolts each. A handful ran the other way and made it down the cellar stairs before they could be slain.
Up out of the foremost of those, arcing back up into the common room as two large, bright streamers of eerily glowing smoke, came Old Ghost and Horaundoon.
“What by the Nine Hells-?” one Zhentarim cursed, the rings on his fingers winking into life as he called up hasty wardings.
“Stop those-” the oldest wizard snapped, but that was as far as he got ere Old Ghost plunged into his chest and Horaundoon slid into the ear of the Zhent mage beside him.
Both men stiffened, rearing back-and then spun around and hurled the swiftest slaying spells they had at their fellow wizards.
Ghoruld leaned forward to peer intently into the crystal, anger and alarm flaring into warfare with each other across his face. “There it is again! What’s happening? Someone’s controlling those fools, yes, but who? And how? ”
Hanging lanterns danced and swung wildly in their chains, and chairs and tables tumbled in slow circles in midair as spells lanced and sizzled, stabbing and flickering across the common room of the Oldcoats Inn.
Zhentarim wizards hurled spells not in power-duels or wary attempts to cow foes with a minimum of destructive Art. Rather, they struck to slay. Two of them did so uncaring of their own safety.
Wherefore Harlammus of Zhentil Keep, heart-high with the excitement of his first real Brotherhood foray, found himself lying dazed and blinking against a wall, with the splintered ruins of the table he’d just been hurled through on top of him, and a welter of broken legs and riven wood that had been its chairs tangled on top of that.
Trapped, barely able to breathe, and just beginning to be aware, through crawling numbness, of agonizing pains in his legs and gut, Harlammus frantically cast the new spell Eirhaun had taught him, the one that would alert his teacher that something had gone badly wrong in Halfhap, and the Zhentarim he’d sent there needed aid. Urgently.
“Master,” he mumbled, when the spell was done, eyes refusing to focus on the splintered table leg standing up out of the bloody ruin of his gut, that rose and fell with his every gasp amid bloody bubblings, “Come swiftly, or…”
Then numbness claimed him. He never finished that thought, as he sank slowly into a nightmare world of racing wraiths and Zhentarim wizards turning on their fellows, of sinister cowled figures turning suddenly to grin at him with cold, ruthlessly gleeful faces out of nightmare, of beholders floating in the distance watching over everything and laughing… always laughing…
The chamber was dark. It was always dark, save for temporary radiances of awakened magic. Magic was awake there now, a robed wizard lounging back in his chair studying spells in a tome.
Glowing runes floated in the air above the open pages of that book, runes that turned slowly and changed hue as he stared at them and murmured, seeking to understand them and shift them to his will. Their power aroused little crackling radiances, that danced and played along the edges of other tomes stacked nearby.
Sarhthor of the Zhentarim slowly rose from his lounging, leaning forward more and more intently as he started to understand this magic at last. Three seasons he’d struggled to master it, understanding four constructions of the Weave at once so they could be shifted and fitted together in combination- thus — and There came a chiming behind him that broke his unfolding glee and collapsed the spell in bright chaos above its pages. Sarhthor murmured a curse-just which one, he never knew-and leaned forward again, fighting to regain that fourfold understanding, that visualization that was just so, with every The chiming came again, shattering all and leaving Sarhthor blinking at the stack of tomes as the one he’d been perusing started to sink down, its floating runes fading. He cursed again, loudly and fervently, and spun his chair around to see what neglected duty of the absent Eirhaun had disturbed him now.
The teacher-wizard’s desk bore a row of crystal balls, each resting on its own black cushion.
