and easy as the king’s leaping thoughts might have it.
“And I’ve been doing so for far more summers with a sword in my hand than you’ve been alive,” Azoun reminded her with a grin, swatting her armored shoulders playfully with the flat of his sword.
Alusair rolled her eyes and barked in a mockery of aged gruffness, “Aye, but have ye learned which end of it to keep hold of, yet?”
The royal response was a mock thrust with the blade in question. Their eyes met over it, they chuckled in unison, and the king turned to his frowning, looming bannerguard and said, “We march on Arabel as swiftly as we can. Pass the order.”
The war captains had evidently been watching. Before the hulking armored man could more than turn, trumpets blared. Men rose, lifting packs and weapons-save for those who’d served with the Steel Princess before. They looked to her, seeing just what they’d expected. Her hand was raised in the “to me” rallying signal, as she strode to where the marchers’ rear guard should be.
Quietly, without any fuss, those men started to move to her. Alusair drew in a deep breath and wondered how much longer they would.
25
Vangerdahast was the proverbial fly on the wall in the goblin war room, save that he was actually a mouse- eared bat and, in deference to the diverse menu of his subjects, an invisible one at that.
With Nalavara gone, he felt free to use all the magic he wished, so he had made use of a live spider from the kitchen’s garnish box and a pinch of coal dust from the cooking ovens to cast a spider climb spell on himself as well. He was hanging quite comfortably in a high quiet corner, looking down on a sand-covered situation table surrounded by bronze-armored goblin generals. At the near end sat the high general’s chair, with a back so tall Vangerdahast could not see the occupant. At the far end rested an even larger chair with a skunk fur seat, vacant save for the iron crown Nalavara had tried to press on him. Rowen was not in the room. He was outside, hiding in a small hollow near the top of the Grodd Palace, drizzling rain on twenty legions of puzzled goblins assembled in the great plaza below.
A smallish goblin in an iron breastplate rose from the high general’s chair and clambered onto the situation table. The goblin-Vangerdahast still could not tell the males from the females-crawled to the middle of the table, where a thin leather strap enclosed a pebble gridwork that bore an uncanny resemblance to Arabel’s street plan. Intersecting the model at right angles were four strings, each representing one of the highways that met at the Caravan City. In the quadrant between the High Road and Calantar’s Way, there was even a small stand of crow feathers to represent the King’s Forest southwest of the city.
A second goblin followed the leader to the middle of the table, then fished two handfuls of dead beetles from its belt pouch and tossed these onto the sand, one in the quadrant northwest of the city and one coming out of the forest to the southwest. With the others looking on, the leader carefully arranged both groups of creatures into the triple-wide ranks of a Cormyrean Heavy Company with a war wizard complement. The lead beetles of both groups converged on the High Road just west of Arabel and seemed to be heading into the city.
The goblin pointed to the company coming from the north. “The Legion of the Steel Princess is this.” Having made good use of the ingredients in the palace kitchens, Vangerdahast had also cast a comprehend languages spell and recognized the leader’s voice as that of Otka, the High Consul of the Grodd. “She has given our tusked allies much trouble.”
Otka pointed to the company from the south. “The Legion of the Purple King is this.” She held her hand out behind her. Her adjutant passed her a handful of dead ants, which she carefully arranged in two squares flanking the rear of Azoun’s army. “The legions of Pepin and Rord have turned him back, and still the Naked Ones control the south.”
An angry rush filled Vangerdahast’s round ears. That he should be trapped here helpless while a bunch of goblins passed freely back and forth into his home plane outraged him to no end.
Again, Otka passed her hand back. The adjutant gave her a handful of cave roaches, which she arranged in an amorphous mass behind Alusair’s army. When one of the creatures turned out to be not quite dead, she angrily snatched it up with a handful of sand and swallowed both down, then carefully rearranged the other roaches and smoothed the resulting divot.
As soon as she was finished, her adjutant turned to another adjutant, who produced a beautiful red dragonfly mounted on a long thin wire. Almost reverently, the assistant presented the thing to Otka, who took it in both hands and carefully sank the wire into the sand next to the High Road, so that the dragonfly hovered over the convergence of the two Cormyrean armies.
“The Giver has joined the tusked ones, and now must the Steel Princess flee into the great fortress at Four Roads.” Otka jammed a finger into the great palace complex in Arabel, then said, “Here we stop the human things before they do to Grodd what was done to Cormanthor. Here we repay the Giver for all she has taught us.”
Vangerdahast expected Otka to continue on, but instead she simply accepted a pouch full of dried ants from her adjutant and began to arrange them in Arabel’s streets. “This way the Legion of Makr goes, to fill the east streets with fire and death. This way the Legions of Himil and Yoso and Pake go, to take the western gate and to the tusked ones throw it open. This way the Legion of Jaaf goes…”
Vangerdahast listened in growing horror as Otka outlined a plan to eradicate not only the Cormyrean army but the entire city of Arabel as well. The goblin did not need to describe what would come next. Her legions would sweep over Cormyr, driving all humans from the land and reducing their grand cities to smoking midden heaps. Shadowdale and Sembia and the other neighboring realms would send troops either to aid Cormyr or to bite off what they could, but the efforts would come too late and be too small. By the time they mobilized, the Grodd would control all the crucial points-Gnoll Pass, Thunder Gap, High Horn, the port cities, Wheloon and its crucial bridge. Their numbers and organization would astonish all corners, and with Nalavara to back them up, the kingdom would be theirs.
Vangerdahast listened intently as Otka rattled off assignments, trying to discern some hint from the goblin’s instructions of how she communicated with the legions she had already sent to Cormyr. Thinking that perhaps Nalavara’s disappearance had lifted whatever magic kept him captive in the caverns, the wizard had already tried to teleport and plane walk home, but the only result had been that he and Rowen spent the next several hours searching each other out. His luck with communication spells had been no better. Save when he tried to contact Rowen, all he ever heard back was the mad rushing of empty space.
And yet Nalavara had gone to Cormyr when he wished her out of existence, and the goblins were as free to pass back and forth as Xanthon had been. Even now, they were standing along the rim of the black void where the dragon had raised herself from the plaza, arrayed in neat ranks and ready to step through the darkness into the very heart of Arabel. Vangerdahast cursed himself for not understanding how Nalavara had imprisoned him and for being foolish enough to free her on Cormyr. The truth of the matter was he had expected everything that had happened. Had he held his tongue, Nalavara would have destroyed Rowen and perhaps him and the Scepter of Lords as well, then departed in her own time. All the wish had done was preserve his hope, and that was really all he had expected to gain.
As Vangerdahast watched Otka lay out her legions of ants-he had deduced her scale now, one ant per cohort-he thought about using the wish again. If Nalavara had been moved to Cormyr by being wished out of existence, perhaps Vangerdahast could do the same thing by wishing himself out of existence. He could tell by the way Rowen’s pearly eyes were constantly drawn to the ring that it still had plenty of magic in it, and it seemed reasonable to hope that if a thing worked once, it would work again.
The trouble was that wishes were reasonable things. They were entirely reasonable, and it was that which made them entirely unpredictable. For the multiverse to stay in balance, there had to be a certain equilibrium to wishes, so that even as the thing the wisher asked was granted, something he did not wish also came to be. If people could simply go around wishing things without consequences, the multiverse would quickly grow unstable and spin out of control. By wishing Nalavara out of existence, he had merely taken her out of his immediate existence and placed her in another where he wanted her even less, and the multiverse had stayed in balance.
To wish himself back to Cormyr, he would have to wish for what he did not desire and hope that what he
