crows.
They certainly looked real enough. The skunks had been fully dressed and spit-roasted, then served on their own fur. The birds had been prepared just as elegantly, having been baked enfeather with shelled walnuts in their beaks and silver root grubs in their eye sockets. Vangerdahast wondered what kind of sick trick his mind was playing. At any other time, the mere sight of such a banquet would have disgusted him to the point of illness. Now, it made his hands tremble and his mouth water.
Squatting on their haunches around the table were more than thirty goblins, well dressed in brightly colored loincloths and pale tunics girded with leather sword belts. Rather husky and short for their race, they stood at most three feet tall. They were also the wrong color. The eyes and hides of most goblins ranged in hue from yellow to red, but these had pallid green skin and pale blue eyes the color of Queen Filfaeril’s.
To Vangerdahast’s amazement, the goblins’ manners were as eloquent as the creatures themselves were strange. A dozen white-cloaked waiters stood stationed around the table at equal intervals, using bronze carving utensils to cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. Whenever a diner chittered at one of the servers, the server would flip a tasty morsel in its direction, which the creature then endeavored to catch by moving its open mouth beneath the food. There seemed to be something of an art to process, with diners being careful to remain on their haunches and keep their hands tucked securely behind their knees until the food arrived. Whenever a guest caught a morsel that had been flipped a particularly long distance, behind the back, or through a flickering candle flame, the others would break into a burst of appreciative hissing. Only once did Vangerdahast see a diner miss, and the others quietly averted their eyes while the embarrassed goblin pressed its face down to snap the morsel off the dirty floor.
So polite were the goblins that Vangerdahast suspected he might win a dinner invitation simply by casting a comprehend languages spell and introducing himself. With a somewhat smaller mouth than the hosts, however, he suspected his manners would not measure up to their standards, and he really did not fancy eating his crow off the floor. In fact, he had never liked the idea of eating crow at all, and he was not about to start now-not when there was tasty, whole-roasted mephitis mephitis to be had instead. Vangerdahast raised an invisible hand toward the nearest skunk, then turned his palm up and made a lifting motion.
As he whispered his incantation, a soft rustle sounded from the head of the great staircase. He spun around and thought he glimpsed a pair of pearly dots at the mouth of the corridor. The goblins broke into a cacophony of astonished chitters and alarmed snarls. He looked back into the banquet hall and found his skunk hovering just above his invisible hand, filling his nostrils with an aroma that, if it was a hallucination, was at least the sweetest hallucination he had ever experienced.
The goblins were staring at the floating skunk less in fear than wide-eyed amazement, as though waiting for the fang-filled mouth of some unseen god to materialize out of the darkness and gulp the thing down whole. Happy to oblige them in the best way possible, Vangerdahast pulled his invisible dagger from its sheath and cut a morsel off the carcass, then popped it into his mouth. It certainly tasted real. In fact, he could not remember ever before enjoying a piece of meat so much, not even from the kitchens of Suzail Palace.
The banquet room erupted into a tumult of chattering and chiming as the goblins jumped up and began drawing little iron swords from their little bronze scabbards. Vangerdahast reached into his pocket and tossed a pinch of diamond dust into the doorway, booming out an incantation even as they turned to rush him. A shimmering curtain of force flickered into existence across the cockeyed portal. The first goblins slammed into it at a dead sprint and bounced back into their companions.
Vangerdahast broke a length of rib bone off the skunk carcass, then illuminated it with a quick spell of light and tossed it down the corridor. A tall, manlike silhouette ducked quietly down the great staircase, and a chill ran down the wizard’s spine. The thing looked far too robust and human to be Xanthon, but there had been no hint of a tunic or cloak covering the smooth outline of its shoulders-and the wizard was all too certain of what that meant. Ghazneths could not wear clothes, for their bodies caused fabric to rot almost instantly.
The skunk suddenly lost its taste, but Vangerdahast forced himself to cut another piece and eat it. He was going to need his strength.
The goblins hurled themselves at the wall of force for only a few moments before concluding they could not get at their invisible thief through the doorway. They posted four guards in front of the portal and retreated to their table, then fell into a heated discussion. Keeping a watchful eye in both directions, Vangerdahast remained where he was and cast a spell to eavesdrop on their conversation. With a ghazneth lurking somewhere in the palace, he did not want to move until he had eaten his fill and recovered some of his energy.
“This thief we must find,” rasped one goblin, a particularly broad fellow in a crimson loincloth. “The Grodd Palace he must not have the run of.”
To Vangerdahast’s great dismay, it sounded to him as though the goblins were speaking some corrupted dialect of the same ancient Elvish in which Nalavara had spoken her name.
“One jill it is only,” said another. “Let the sneak have it and choke. Later we will smell him out.”
“Nay, later there will be more.” This speaker seemed to be female, and the others remained respectfully silent when she spoke. “Has the Iron One not spoken of these human things? If one is abided, a thousand come. We must smell him out before others follow, or the way of Cormanthor will we Grodd go.”
“As Otka commands.” The male who had spoken pointed toward a door in the back of the room. “Ghislan and Hardy, through the kitchen with your companies, and the alarm sound. Pepin and Rord, at the wall with yours.”
With chilling efficiency, Pepin and Rord gathered twenty of the diners and began to chink at the powdery mortar in the walls. Ghislan and Hardy took the rest and rushed off through the kitchen, leaving only Otka and the white-cloaked servers standing alone in the center of the banquet hall. Vangerdahast had no idea whether Ghislan and Hardy or Pepin and Rord or their subordinates were male or female. The only hint of their sexes he had been able to identify was their voices, and now they were too busy working to talk.
Vangerdahast managed to wolf down only half of the skunk before he heard the companies of Ghislan and Hardy charging up the great staircase. Deciding this particular tribe of goblins was too efficient to toy with, he wrapped the remaining carcass in its fur and stuffed it inside his cloak, then cast a spell to help him see in the dark and scuttled away down the corridor.
At the first intersection, Vangerdahast turned down a small side passage, circling toward a secondary staircase he had seen at the rear of the palace’s great foyer. The skunk meat sat in his belly like lead, though he suspected this had more to do with the condition of his neglected stomach than the Grodds’ skills as chefs. This particular tribe was unlike any he had ever seen before, being much more organized and-it made him shudder to think such a thing-civilized. His thoughts leaped to the forlorn keeps scattered throughout the Goblin Marches, but he could not see how the Grodd were related to those ancient structures, which had stood abandoned long before there was a Cormyr. Of course, he did not see how he had failed to notice Otka and her band earlier, and yet here they were in the grand goblin palace. Both mysteries, he suspected, had more to do with Nalavarauthatoryl the Red than he would have liked.
When Vangerdahast finally started down the final passage toward the stairs, he was dismayed to find a reddish, manlike silhouette crouching atop the landing. The head and body remained distinctly human, but the thing’s pearly gaze shone with the same faint light the wizard had seen in the eyes of Xanthon Cormaeril and the other ghazneths. Moreover, the figure was definitely naked, and he was peering across the foyer toward the skunk bone Vangerdahast had illuminated earlier. Though only a few minutes had passed since the spell was cast, all that remained of the magic was a faint yellow aura.
Vangerdahast cursed silently, then burped under his breath and retreated back up the corridor. He was already feeling stronger-but not yet strong enough to battle a ghazneth. It would be better to take his chances with the goblins.
He had scuttled nearly to the front of the palace when the soft hiss of sniffing goblins sounded around the next corner. Quietly, he retreated to the previous corner and started up another passage. This corridor was the smallest yet, so cramped he had to crawl on hands and knees. Had his life depended on it, he could not have turned around. The first goblins, silent save for the snuffle of their noses, passed the corner behind him. When none of them sounded the alarm, Vangerdahast breathed a silent sigh of relief and kneeled on his haunches, peering back beneath an arm to watch the rest of the group pass.
The sigh came too soon. The line had almost passed when a goblin stopped and squinted into the cramped passage, then chittered in excitement. With a sinking feeling, Vangerdahast dropped a shoulder and craned his neck to look down along his back. Where he should have seen nothing but darkness, he glimpsed a faint patch of blue.
