A thin smile crossed the king’s face, and he added almost playfully, “Someday, that is, when we all have time for such things.”
“Now!” a bristle-mustached lancelord shouted, his eyes on the dark form of the dragon gliding through the smoke.
The catapults let go with deep thumps, their rocking making the rampart shudder underfoot as they let go their stony loads. Most sailed short to plummet down into the ruined western city, but a few thudded home. Nalavara the Red wheeled away in anger and vanished behind the smoke.
“Work those wheels!” the lancelord bawled. “She’ll be back, and we’ll look pretty silly if she can just glide down here and tear us to dog meat. Leap to it, lads!”
The sweating crews swarmed over the catapults, sweat-drenched muscles rippling in their bared arms and backs, but Alusair turned away. “Those won’t touch the ghazneths,” she snarled. “Too slow-and probably no harm to them if they do take a load right in the face.”
“We’re ready for them, Highness,” a stern-faced war wizard assured her. “All of us are ready.”
“Oh?” the Steel Princess said, whirling around to face him with one gauntleted hand on her hip and the other holding a warsword it appeared she was itching to use. “And just how do you intend to deal with them, sir wizard? They’ll eat your spells like a wolf biting down a rabbit.”
“If Your Highness pleases to see,” an older wizard said calmly, “the gate is opening right about now. The ghazneths’ll be here soon enough.”
Alusair looked at him, lifting an eyebrow at his confident tone… then her eyes fell to the end of his graying beard. His fingers were locked in it, twisting nervously, already so badly tangled in the locks that most of them would have to be cut out of it.
“I’ll stay,” she said softly, “and be of what use I can.”
An unearthly shriek rose up the nearest vent shaft, from somewhere in the citadel below, and the Steel Princess whirled around to face it. “What by all the waiting hells was that?”
“That,” said the older war wizard, with something that might almost have been satisfaction in his voice, “would be the lady mage’s pain as she opens the spell gate.”
“They’re starting,” the swordcaptain muttered unnecessarily, licking his lips.
“Just stay back against the wall,” the old swordlord growled, “where she told us to stand-no matter what you see. Watch, and be still. Pass the word.”
That was a clear order, so the word was passed, redundant though it was. If the wizards could be believed, a magical door was to open here in Suzail-in the open space right in front of them-and the folk of Arabel would flee from that beleaguered city, flooding into this hall. The warriors waiting here would then step through the gate to Arabel and ply their blades as needed to get every last citizen out.
Every man’s eyes were fixed on the two women standing alone in the center of the cavernous main hall, as they had been since the Lady Laspeera and the sorceress Valantha Shimmerstar had first calmly begun removing their clothing.
Bare and slender, now, they stood on either side of a glowing, pulsing oval of spell light, a blue-white radiance that seemed to throb around their calves as they each raised an open hand. With the small silver daggers they held, they calmly slit open their own palms.
Both sorceresses threw the knives away as violently as a man in fury hurls a goblet, and turned to face each other. From the falling blood, white fire roared into life.
The fire burst forth from their mouths as they moaned, sobbed, then began wailing. A slowly rising ululation became shrieks of pain as the fire leaped across the space between them, becoming blue-white lightning.
“Gods,” the swordcaptain gasped roughly, as snarling bolts of lightning played from fingertips to thighs and breasts, and the two curvaceous sorceresses trembled, their flesh seeming suddenly to waver and flap, as if torn out of shape by gales no one else could feel. As warriors of Cormyr watched with narrowing eyes, the spell light between the two struggling sorceresses became almost blinding.
Lightning suddenly stabbed out from the forming star at the center of the chamber, reaching to the ring of naked war wizards sitting on the floor close enough to the walls for the cowering soldiers to reach out and touch- had any of them dared. The wizards whose nakedness, born of the need to preserve enchanted clothing and adornments from the ravening fire of the mighty magic being attempted here, had attracted rather fewer gazes than the two women standing in the center of the hall. Around the ring, fat, hairy men and sunken-chested bearded younglings alike gasped and wavered as the magic plucked at their vitality, calling forth the fire of their lives to build what was needed.
Their cries of pain joined the rising shriek and were echoed by the gasps of the warriors around the chamber walls, as the light suddenly became a ring. The ring raced somewhere else to become the end of a tunnel, and Laspeera Inthre suddenly threw back her head and sobbed, “Durndurve-anchor me! I can’t take the pain!”
They saw her image rise up over the glowing ring, a large and ghostly projection of the magic. Rings of lightning raced up and down her shuddering arms. Her once bound and coiled hair was wild and free, licking around her shoulders like dark flames, as she threw her head back and wept. Flames spurted from her very eyeballs as Valantha’s ghostly face, also set in pain, snarled through set teeth, “Hold on, Lady! Hold!”
Suddenly Laspeera’s body shuddered and seemed to topple-only to rise slowly and smoothly upright again like a falling sapling righted by a forester’s hand.
“Lady,” a man’s voice spoke, seemingly out of her forehead, “I am here. You have reached me in Arabel. You do us all great honor.”
A slow and crooked smile spread across Laspeera’s face as the pain fell away. She sighed, and the lightning suddenly fell from its wild whirling to coil around her breasts.
“We’re through,” she gasped. “Now the true test begins.”
The warriors grasped their weapons firmly and peered through the still eddying starry splendor of magic at the ring, in case what came through it was a foe.
They saw a grim-faced man-at-arms, the Purple Dragon blazing on his breastplate, looking back at them over his own drawn sword. Behind him was the wide-eyed face of a woman with a babe held against her breast and behind them other helmed heads and staring women. They stood in a room some of the warriors recognized as a chamber in Arabel.
“By the gods,” the swordcaptain said, his voice quavering on the edge of tears, “they’ve done it!”
“For Cormyr!” the first man-at-arms called, raising his sword heedless of the lightning that sprang from the gate to snarl up and down it.
“For Cormyr!” a hundred throats roared from all around the walls. Men surged forward as if a revel had begun.
For in a way, one had…
“Now!” the war wizard commanded, and mages all along the wall clutched their foreheads and shouted in pain. There was suddenly a boulder just above the streaking ghazneth-and a moment later, another below.
As a dark head twisted upward in puzzlement at the sudden lack of sunlight, a war wizard roared in pain, falling heavily to his knees. The two rocks seemed to leap to meet each other.
There was a wet sound from between them, and war wizards all along the battlements reeled and fell. The boulders promptly tumbled from view, to strike the orc-flooded square below with a mighty crash.
“Impressive,” Alusair murmured, picking herself up from where the impact had hurled her, “but look! Another comes.”
The old war wizard didn’t bother to rise from his hands and knees beside her. He merely bent his head, growled something, and the air suddenly held what had to be most of a toppled city house. It smashed into the second ghazneth and hurled it helplessly sideways in the air, crumpled and broken, into the nearest building that was still standing.
As the crash shook the very citadel, the battering stone broke apart into its smaller blocks and rubble and fell away, leaving a bloody smear of ghazneth down the cracked and teetering walls. The building groaned as if it was an old man, then slowly sighed into ruin, spilling down into dust.
“We can’t kill the ghazneths like this,” the war wizard gasped, “but we can certainly slow them.”
Alusair looked down at the dust rising from the square, and half-crushed orcs screaming under scattered stones, and could see no hint of dark wings. “You’re restoring my regard for wizards, I’m afraid,” she said slowly.
