It seemed only a short time before the trees thinned, and Alusair spun around and held up her hands for a halt. As panting noblemen gathered around her, she said, “The hills beyond are alive with goblins and their scouts, and the dragon has been landing on the hilltops beyond. We can’t avoid being seen, but magic will only bring our foes and darkness confuses our eyes, but not theirs. Moreover, the lives of many Cormyreans may be lost if we delay. So it’s time to be fools, I’m afraid, and just rush out to be slain. Let’s see if we can’t draw the dragon down to us in the process.”
She turned, blade flashing, ducked between two trees, and was gone.
After a startled moment, the noble sons of Cormyr-the expectation of looming death now clear upon their faces-charged after her.
Where the woods ended, farm fields began. It was rolling pastureland for the most part, with rubble-and- stump boundary fences, and goblins. The humanoids were camped in little clumps here and there, gathering on distant hills and sure to see the rushing human band, unless
A curious wall or hump of mist filled a low spot not far off on their right. It was a bank of fog that by rights should not have been there, unless the little creek that meandered along beneath it had suddenly spouted hot springs.
Alusair peered at it, as suspicious as any warrior who knows the countryside well and sees something strange in it, then shrugged, pointed at the mist with her drawn sword, and veered toward it. The men trotting behind her followed her into the whirlwind of mist, peering and keeping their blades ready in case this fog should prove to hold the dragon or another deadly beast.
They found no such hidden peril before Kortyl gasped to the princess, “How far do you think this extends, then, Highness?”
Alusair turned to answer, her face making it clear that “I don’t know” was going to feature in her utterance to come-then the world changed.
Everything was suddenly a deep, bubbling blue, and the ground was gone from beneath their feet. They were upright, and yet falling endlessly, or perhaps Faerun was falling away from them… then there was suddenly bare rock under their boots, without any sense of landing or jarring, and the deep blue radiance was fading, into deeper darkness.
“Torches!” Alusair commanded, stripping off one of her boots and plucking up the inner sole to shake a tiny glowpebble out of a hollow heel. “Use this to light them by.”
Those without torches or lanterns waited tensely in the darkness, listening with blades drawn until the torches flared up. Nothing rushed at them.
The flickering flames showed them a large, dank cavern on all sides-a very large cavern, with tunnel mouths opening like dark eyes in every wall.
“Where,” Kortyl Rowanmantle cursed, looking around in astonished dismay, “by all the dark pits of the Underdark and the fiends that dance in them, are we?”
His commander came up behind him and put a reassuring arm around his shoulders, bringing with her a smell of scorched hair and leather and smooth, muscled curves that awakened a sudden stirring in the noble knight as they pressed against him.
“Wherever we are,” Alusair told him calmly, “our work is clear. We slay the foes of Cormyr wherever we find them, until we see that dragon dead and the realm saved.”
“And where in all this murk are the hills of goblins and the dragon?”
Princess Alusair Obarskyr gave him a wolfish smile and replied sweetly, “And how by all the dark pits of the Underdark and the fiends that dance in them should I know?”
Azoun groaned, and his body spasmed, seeming to bound off the bed as it arched, and dragging astonished underpriests with it. They clung to the royal limbs and turned pale, frightened faces up to their superiors.
Aldeth Ironsar, Faithful Hammer of Tyr, rose from his knees with a face as grim as it was puzzled. “So it is with my healing, too. What do you make of it, my holy lords? I cannot believe this valiant king is cursed of all our gods!”
“Perhaps,” the Loremaster of Deneir said slowly, “the wounds given him by the dragon are no ordinary hurts but something different than what the healing prayers we’ve employed are intended to treat.”
“We’ve done this before, all of us,” snapped the high huntmaster of Vaunted Malar, gesturing down at the unconscious king. “Azoun Obarskyr has hazarded much, and received much healing, down the long years. Perhaps a body-any body-can only receive so much healing ere it has tasted enough, and the magic must fail.”
Several faces turned sharply to regard the Malarite, wearing fresh frowns of their own. If there was any truth to that thought, many more folk than the king of Cormyr stood in imminent peril… not a few high priests among them.
“I have heard,” the Lord High Priest of Tymora said heavily, “of persons who desired death-husbands who’d held their slain wives in their arms, and wives who’d beheld their dead husbands-taking no benefit from even the strongest healing spells. As if they willed the magic to pass away from them, and do them no good.”
He strode a few slow paces away, then told the nearest tent pole, “The lantern of the king’s mirth, so far as I could see, went out in his face when he heard of the death of the Steel Princess.”
“Whatever the reason,” Battlemaster Ilnbright said from the entrance to the tent, “we dare not try more healing now. A ghazneth is come upon us.”
The priests looked up at him, only too ready to sneer at a mere warrior-even if he was a nobleman, and regardless of the sense of his words-but their denunciations died in their throats at the sounds that came from behind Haliver Ilnbright then.
Outside the tent-just outside the tent-they heard a startled shout, thudding footfalls, the clang of a sword ringing off a shield, and the heavy fall of a body. Then they heard a wet, grisly sound. It was a sound of rending flesh, accompanied by a rising, choked-off, disbelieving shriek.
It was the sound of a man being torn apart, and it was followed, after a sudden soft rain that could only be the spraying of much blood, with cold laughter. It was mad laughter, high and shrill, that faded into the distance as the throat it was issuing from ascended into the air, and flew away.
The laugh was followed by the groan of a disbelieving veteran Purple Dragon starting to be sick.
After a moment, several of the priests in the tent echoed that last sound with an enthusiasm none of them wanted to feel.
37
Keeping the ghazneth centered in Alaphondar’s new spyglass was not easy, especially not when it was circling directly overhead and kept vanishing behind the palace roof for two seconds at a time.
Vangerdahast had developed a painful crick in his neck, and his arms ached from holding the heavy brass tube over his eye. His vision had grown spotty and painful from continually swinging the lens across the midday sun. Still, the device worked well enough for him to glimpse a pair of leathery black wings, two thin arms, and two crooked legs. The thing was definitely a ghazneth.
Vangerdahast lowered the spyglass and returned it to Alaphondar. “It works better than the last one. I saw what I was looking at.”
The sage beamed at the compliment. “Not as clear as one of your spells, but it has its uses.”
“Could you tell which one it was?” asked Tanalasta.
Vangerdahast shook his head. “Alaphondar hasn’t improved it that much.”
“The priests have stopped trying to heal Azoun,” said Filfaeril, speaking from the balcony door. It was the first time in decades Vangerdahast had seen her looking less than radiant. Her eyes were swollen and rimmed in red, her face puffy and pale, her expression haggard and mad with worry. “They say the spells don’t work. They say the magic only gives them away to the dragon and draws ghazneths.”
Vangerdahast went to the door and clasped Filfaeril’s arm. “I’ll get there,” he promised.
He saw Tanalasta exchange a nervous glance with Owden.
“I have no doubt,” said the princess, “but we must decide how. When you leave the palace, that scepter will draw the ghazneth to you like a vulture to a dead man.” She nodded into the drawing room, where the Scepter of
