He stopped in the center of the room and took the Scepter of Lords from the nervous guard, then pointed the man to the balcony. “Young man, in a handful of moments I’m going to come streaking through that window like a flaming star. You and two men of your choosing are to slam and bar the doors behind me-and do it quickly, for all our lives will depend on it.”
Tanalasta looked nervous. “Vangerdahast, if there is any risk to this plan…”
“Risk? There’s no risk if this boy does as he’s told-and is quick about it.” Vangerdahast motioned the guard off, then started to the balcony doors. “The royal magician has returned.”
With Tanalasta following along behind, Vangerdahast went to the balcony entrance. He pulled a pinch of powdered iron from the pouch he was using to carry spell ingredients and rubbed it over the doors, at the same time uttering one of the spells he had fashioned to make the best use of his burdensome crown. His head erupted into white pain as it always did when he made iron, but he was prepared for the shock and managed to endure it with no more than a long grunt. A gray-black darkness spread over the doors, then a long series of creaks and pops echoed through the room as the wood and glass changed to thick, heavy iron.
The ghazneth bell clanged to life, filling the bailey with a deep, insistent knelling.
“Your magic seems to have caught our visitor’s interest,” said Tanalasta.
“It’s not Boldovar come to join us?”
“That would be a different bell,” answered the princess, “and I would be much paler.”
“Well then, let’s have at her and be done with it.”
Vangerdahast stepped out onto the balcony and saw that Suzara had circled down to within a hundred yards of the palace roof. She was close enough to see what was happening, yet high enough to make her a difficult target for the archers’ iron-tipped arrows. He could just make out the red flush of her oblong eyes glaring down at him, and for the first time he wondered if his boasts about how easily he would subdue her had been somewhat overstated. From such a low height, she would be on him almost the moment he was in the air.
“Is something wrong?” Tanalasta asked.
Vangerdahast glanced back and saw not only the princess studying him, but Owden and the guards as well. If he changed plans now, their confidence would go the way of Korvarr and his company.
“Just planning my route.” He shooed Tanalasta back into the room. “To your hiding place.”
“Be careful, Old Snoop.”
“I will be quick.” Vangerdahast drew a crow’s feather from his spell pouch. “That is better.”
As he started his flying spell, the ghazneth dipped a wing and began to circle lower. Vangerdahast brushed the feather over his arms and finished the incantation in a flurry, then took the Scepter of Lords in both hands and sprang into the air. Even as he banked toward Lake Azoun, he felt the iron crown drawing his spell’s magic into itself, robbing him of precious speed and flight time. It might have been wise to warn the princess about this particular handicap, but then again maybe not. She would probably have insisted on doing things her own way.
The ghazneth bell began to clang madly, and Vangerdahast knew Suzara was coming after him. He dropped down below the crest of the outer curtain and banked hard toward Etharr Hall. A sharp thump sounded behind him as his pursuer hit the wall and dropped to the ground. The erratic clatter of firing crossbows echoed across the bailey, and Vangerdahast glanced back to see a cloud of iron quarrels descending on the ghazneth from the ramparts above.
Though more than a few bolts found their mark, Suzara spread her wings and launched herself, dodging and weaving, after Vangerdahast. Even as she flew, her wounds began to close. The quarrels dropped from her body and clanged to the cobblestones below, and only a handful of new ones took their place. Vangerdahast soared over the roof of Etharr Hall, then dropped low and skimmed the ground, circling around the building back toward Palace Hall.
The ghazneth shot over the roof of Etharr Hall in the opposite direction but saw Vangerdahast and dipped a wing to wheel around. Praying he had the speed to outrun her for just fifty more paces, he soared back toward Tanalasta’s balcony. A flurry of bowstrings throbbed from the windows along both sides of the bailey. Dark streams of arrows zipped through the air behind, tracing the ghazneth’s progress as she closed the distance to him.
Finally, the balustrade loomed before Vangerdahast. He scraped over it screaming in terror-it was only an act to distract the ghazneth, of course-then shot through the open doors and across the entire drawing room before a deafening clang sounded behind him.
His flying spell expired an instant later, a dozen steps into the long hallway outside the drawing room. Though only traveling at a quarter speed, he hit hard and tumbled headlong down the floor. A pair of dragoneers managed to grab hold and prevented him from plunging down a sweeping staircase.
“Lord wizard, are you all right?”
“What do you think?” Vangerdahast allowed the guards to pull him to his feet, then shook them off and stumbled back into the drawing room.
By the time he arrived, the battered balcony doors were already open. The ghazneth was surrounded by a handful of dragoneers, all hacking and chopping at her while Tanalasta kneeled at her side, struggling to pull a glittering necklace of diamonds over her broken skull.
“Suzara Obarskyr, wife to Ondeth the Founder and mother to Faerlthann the First King, as a true Obarskyr and heir to the Dragon Throne, I grant you the thing you most desire, the thing for which you abandoned your husband and son-I grant you the luxury and wealth of the Suzail Palace.”
Vangerdahast arrived to see the darkness drain from Suzara’s face, leaving behind the careworn visage of a brown-haired woman who did not look so different from Tanalasta herself. The woman’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, and she began to groan and froth at the mouth and jerk about spasmodically, as the victims of head wounds were sometimes prone to do.
Tanalasta touched her hand to Suzara’s trembling brow. “And as a direct descendent of your line and heir to the crown, I forgive your betrayal and absolve you, Suzara Obarskyr, of all crimes against Cormyr.”
When the princess removed her hand, Suzara simply continued to thrash about and foam at the mouth.
Tanalasta frowned and looked to Owden, who could only scowl and shake his head in bewilderment. Vangerdahast kneeled beside Tanalasta and pressed her hand back to Suzara’s shattered skull.
“And in the name of Cormyr and its royal line through thirteen centuries, and its strong and loyal people, we thank you,” the royal magician said. “We thank you for the sacrifices you did make, and we pledge to honor your memory even as we honor Ondeth’s.”
Tanalasta nodded. “So it will be,” she said. “As Crown Princess Tanalasta Obarskyr and a daughter of your line, I pledge it so.”
Suzara’s eyes opened again, then she fell still and silent and sank, at last, into a peaceful rest.
38
A fellowship of gloom crowded together in the dim depths of the royal tent, close around the silent king.
At the head of the bed where Azoun lay wounded, two bodyguards stood in stolid, watchful silence, their large and callused hands never far from the hilts of their swords.
The men they faced, down at the foot of the bed-half a dozen priests and a war wizard-brooded in a more restless silence, born of futility and mounting fear. Their most modest healing spells had failed, and they dared not try more powerful magics. Not with the ghazneth circling the hilltop like a vengeful hawk, casually diving down from time to time to rake and rend Purple Dragons at will.
At each shout and skin of blades outside the tent, the men sitting around the bed tensed and threw up their heads, peering vainly at the tapestry-hung tent walls as if some helpful, lurking enchantment might pluck the canvas aside to reveal the fray without, but the unhelpful canvas never moved.
Always, after a few moments, a scream of pain would rise close outside-sometimes brief, more often a long howl of agony that sank into the wet gurgling of a bloody death-and cold laughter would begin, fading as the eerie slayer took wing again into the sky.
The king never dozed through these brief battles. His eyes would snap open, anger sharpening his features, and his fingers would close like claws on the linen. Twice he made as if to rise, but each time pain too fierce to conceal flashed across his face, and he fell back to lie listening with fury in his eyes. Azoun was a king as impotent
