Yhaunn,” Baron Thomdor whispered, gasping with effort. Eyes bright with sudden resolve, the stout noble was lying on his curtained, guarded bed trying to grip Vangerdahast’s arm firmly, but lacking the strength. “There’s a lady in a cottage by the well there-over forty winters old, she’d be now, and a beauty…
Vangerdahast looked across the sickbed at Gwennath. The Tymoran priestess had remained by the baron’s bedside since the first day. She had gotten some badly needed sleep, but she still looked haggard and red-eyed. The old wizard did not quite manage to suppress a sigh.
The baron ignored the wizard’s glance and added fiercely, “Hear me! I wronged her years ago, said I’d come back to wed her when I had made something of myself and I… never have. Will you take her coin enough to see her through her shadowed years? And send my apology? It’s… one of my few regrets…”
“Of course I will, Thom,” the Royal Magician said, “if ever I have to. But you need not worry yourself about things undone before death yet-you’ve years left. You can ride over and marry the wench yourself!”
The tired gray-blue eyes of the Warden of the Eastern Marches blazed up into his. “Don’t toss courtiers’ lies at me, wizard! I know what happened to Bhereu. This gaudy tent here is my deathbed. Azoun’s lying near death somewhere that way-“
He waved one large and hairy hand eastward, toward the next chamber. The hand trembled and quickly fell back to the bed furs. He growled, “And so here I am, with none of my men clanking in to tell me jokes. No pretty lasses coming to bring me flowers and wish me better-“
“Huh!” Gwennath, the Bishop of the Black Blades, said indignantly from across the bed. “What am I if not a pretty lass?”
Thomdor turned his head to face her with visible effort and said, “Oh, gods, don’t start! Ye’re an honest sword maid, not a perfumed court wench!”
Gwennath winked at Vangerdahast, and the wizard hid a smile, watching the baron rouse himself in embarrassment. “I meant no slight!” the old warrior protested, and then the color went out of his face and he fell back onto the pillows and gasped. “So here I am… waiting in the king’s shadow to die… just as I’ve been waiting, come to think of it, all my life.”
He managed a wry smile as he turned to look at the Royal Magician, and he was still smiling when the light in his eyes went out, a grayness came over his cheeks, and his head lolled sideways. His eyelids slammed down like shudders, and the chamber was filled with his ragged breathing.
Vangerdahast bent forward with a swiftness born of fear and almost bumped noses with the priestess, who was making the same lunge from her side of the bed. Thomdor still lived, his breathing slow but even. He’d fallen into the deepest of slumbers. “This could go on for years,” the old wizard murmured.
“Both he and the king roused this morning for the first time. Yet after knowing the world and their wits this morn, both he and His Majesty have failed fast,” Gwennath said softly, looking down at the deepening lines on the baron’s face. “I wanted him to pass, if he pass he must, in peace… but to rouse him to fight on if he could be roused.”
The High Wizard of Cormyr looked into her eyes from only inches away and said gently, “You did well to summon me, Bishop of the Black Blades. You have my thanks. You continue to do Cormyr great service. Know that I, at least, take notice and am grateful.”
Gwennath of Tymora gave him a wan smile, then reached out to squeeze his arm. Vangerdahast was careful to still his automatic reactions of stiffening warily and reaching for a belt wand, allowing himself-for once-the trust to merely reach out and return the gesture.
“I’ll stay with him, whatever befalls,” the priestess said, indicating a cot on the far side of the canopied bed.
Vangerdahast smiled, glanced at the four motionless, full-armored Purple Dragons standing with grounded swords at the four corners of the bed, and replied, “And I’ll be sure that some of the men he commands come up to slip him wine and sweets and a little rough cheer.”
“Do so,” the priestess agreed, sitting down on the edge of her cot, where she could watch the baron’s face. She lifted a hand in farewell.
Vangerdahast waved to her, feeling the weariness of too little sleep as a bone-deep ache in his shoulders and at the back of his head, and strode to the guarded door. He waited for the guards to open it and reveal the wary faces of still more guards, parted them with a gesture, and passed on into Gryphonsblade Hall, where the king lay.
Watchful Purple Dragons with naked swords in their hands were everywhere, peering grimly at the priests and war wizards flanking the high bed and warily escorting the excitedly murmuring nobles one by one up to the pale figure that lay on it. Like Thomdor, His Majesty had awakened that morning as well but remained stricken by the affliction that was slowly killing them both.
An eagerness gnawed at the air in the sapphire-domed room… a tension of waiting. The nobles of half the realm, and as many rich merchants of Suzail as cared to bribe a minor noble to serve as escort through the court bureaucracy, had gathered to see Azoun’s passing. They were there to see the king close up-closer than most had ever gotten in their lives-and to whisper prayers and wishes of encouragement to His Majesty, in hopes of being remembered in the royal will and so they could say to neighbors and descendants, “Azoun conferred with me on his deathbed, you know, and I told him
” But mostly they were here to see the king die.
If you gave not a thought to civil war or invaders rushing down to ravage the realm, it was thrilling to be right on the spot when something that would shake all Faerun was happening right before your eyes!
Those who knew what it would really take to shake all Faerun, Vangerdahast thought, were busily arming and patrolling their holds or hiding what they valued, not standing gossiping in the long lines that wound up from the palace gates, waiting to get in here. The catch-phrase “The king is dying!” had spread from one end of Suzail to the other in a matter of hours after the return of the hunting party, of course, and the court had been jammed-was still jammed-with folk demanding, pleading, insisting, and bribing their way in to see their king… while he still was their king. There was always a chance that someone with a knife or a suicide spell would try to make sure of what the abraxus hadn’t-yet-and so layer after layer of spells had been laid and the king put under heavy guard.
Huh, thought the court wizard sourly, we should all be under heavy guard, with this many nobles flitting in and out. Or should that more properly be crawling in and out?
That thought carried him almost into the long, pointed nose of the noble who was badgering the king right now, some popinjay who wasn’t going to let a comatose ruler get in the way of seeking personal favors. Blundebel Eldroon, from the minor socalled nobility of Marsember, if memory served right…
“Your Majesty,” Eldroon was saying earnestly, “if you could just see your way clear to signing-“
“The king won’t be signing anything today,” Vangerdahast said firmly. “Today is cloudy.”
The noble straightened up with a frown. “Go away, old man! This is the king I’m talking with, and I’m a very important-“
“And widely praised buffoon known to one and all as Blundebel Eldroon, among ruder things,” the Royal Magician interrupted. “Go away. Come back when the weather is clear.”
“‘Weather is clear’? Guards-take away this madman!”
A Purple Dragon as tall and muscular as the front end of a horse grinned, sheathed his sword, and obediently took Blundebel Eldroon by the elbow and forearm, lifted him off the ground, and trotted to a side door.
“What-Hey! Ho! What’re you doing?” the Marsembian noble shouted.
“Taking the madman away, as you requested,” was the gruff reply. An instant before a door banged open, Blundebel had a dizzying glimpse of several more grinning guards swinging wide another door onto a vista of descending marble steps, and the painful grip on his arm was released. He barely had time to grasp the fact that he was sailing through the air, down a flight of stairs that looked very solid and hard indeed, when he wasn’t anymore. His roar of pain was lost in the laughter from above.
Back in Gryphonsblade Hall, the next noble in line, smiling uneasily at the greatest mage in the realm, wisely decided to keep silent and await a later moment to speak with the king.
“Old friend! Your match hat is a werebeast, I see!” Azoun smiled weakly, then frowned as he himself heard what he had said. “Your match-hat…” he began again, “is a werebeast,” then shook his head. Whatever fever raged in his brain prevented him from communicating his ideas fully. The King tried to wave an arm, but the limb wouldn’t do more than twitch on the silken sheets and then fall still again.
“Yes,” the Royal Magician agreed gravely, “My match hat is indeed a werebeast. I’ve thought that for some
