Tanalasta swung her feet off the stool, then leaned forward and pressed Rowen’s holy symbol into the harvestmaster’s hand. “Please, Owden. I must know.”
Owden closed his eyes and sighed, then reluctantly nodded. “You deserve at least that much.” The harvestmaster took the symbol and lifted her legs onto the stool again, then motioned his subordinates over. “Clagi, keep watch for Boldovar. You others, stand by me. It may be that this dark man is Rowen, or it may be he is some other thing we would rather not bring into Cormyr.”
The priests quickly arranged themselves as ordered. There were no dragoneers or war wizards within five hundred yards of the room, for Tanalasta’s troops had learned through hard experience the power of Boldovar’s delusional tricks. Only clerics seemed able to withstand the madness he induced, and even they had to gird themselves with prayers and holy symbols.
Once all was ready, Owden began to swing the symbol before Tanalasta’s eyes. “Concentrate…”
Tanalasta followed the silver amulet with her eyes, picturing the same dark face she had glimpsed twice before-a heavy brow and pearly eyes, brutish hooked nose, the familiar cleft chin. The image melded with the symbol and began to swing back and forth, and she had the sensation of peering down a long black tunnel, then the inky face was there before her, gaunt and sinister-looking, half hidden by a gray curtain of rain.
“Rowen?” Tanalasta called.
The brow furrowed, and the eyes grew white and angry. The dark figure shook its head, then started to turn away as before.
“Rowen, no!” When the head did not stop, Tanalasta yelled, “Now, Owden! I have him.”
The harvestmaster rattled off a long string of mystic syllables, and the distance seemed to vanish between Tanalasta and the dark figure. He pivoted back toward her, and the air behind his head began to flash with silver lightning.
“No!” he cried.
The voice was deeper and raspier than Tanalasta recalled, but its dry northern accent left no doubt in her mind that it belonged to her husband. The portal through which she was viewing him seemed to grow larger, and she saw that his body was as dark as his face and as naked as the night they had conceived their child-though she no longer found it irresistible. Far from it. Everything seemed strangely out of proportion and brutish, with hulking shoulders and bulging arms and an impossibly narrow waist. His thighs were as large and round as wine casks, his groin covered by a mosslike tangle of hair that hung nearly to his knees.
Rain and thunder began to spill through the portal, soaking Tanalasta and shaking the room. Owden cried out in alarm, and his priests pressed close, moving to interpose themselves in the narrow gap between the princess and whatever was coming out of the gate. The dark figure spun away, turning a small pair of leathery ghazneth wings toward the portal.
“No!” Tanalasta screamed.
Her eyes had to be deceiving her, or perhaps it been her ears, when she thought the creature sounded like Rowen then she hit on the only possible explanation. Boldovar was there. Somehow, he had snuck into the chamber and begun to deceive them, and it was one of his mad illusions she was seeing.
“Rowen, don’t go!” she yelled. “I know you’re not-“
It was too late. The ghazneth’s wings had already begun to absorb Owden’s magic, and the portal was shrinking before her eyes. One of the priests screamed in terror and slipped over the edge, then two more went. Tanalasta felt it sucking at her feet.
“Close it!” she yelled.
Owden’s only response was a pained yell. Tanalasta swung her feet off the stool and drew them up into the chair with her, curling into the seat as well as her swollen bulk would allow. The portal shrank to the size of a window, pulling the rest of the priests in after it and leaving the princess staring over the top at Owden’s straining face.
“Owden, close it!”
“Ca
“
That was as much as the harvestmaster could say before he tumbled forward and pitched headlong into the portal. The hole closed with a sharp hiss, leaving Tanalasta alone on her side of the room and only Clagi standing on the other.
The palace’s ghazneth bell started to ring through the window.
40
“Gods above watch over us,” Lareth Gulur murmured, watching the huge red dragon settle on a hilltop four miles or so away. The farm fields between it and a wandering brook not far below where they stood were covered in a cloak of moving goblins. “Earfangs, the scourge of men’s knees. I never thought they’d get this far.”
“If we don’t stop them,” his superior grunted, “they’ll be at the gates of Suzail tomorrow-and yon Devil Dragon’ll be coiled around the towers of the palace.”
Gulur shuddered. He had a new and better-fitting breastplate because a valiant Purple Dragon had died fighting the dragon the night before, but his helm was the same old dented one that had cradled his brains for a decade. It’s hard to salvage a helm when a dragon’s swallowed the head wearing it whole, but gore can readily be washed off a breastplate if it’s fresh enough. The thought made him glance down, involuntarily. When he looked up, Hathian Talar was regarding him with a grim smile.
“Just try and stay out of its jaws until Vangerdahast does his work,” Talar said. “Then you’ll see what a red dragon looks like falling ready-cooked out of the sky.”
Gulur looked up at the gathering gray clouds, and shuddered. “Like something to stay out from under?” he joked weakly.
Talar gave him a hollow laugh, clapped him on the shoulder, and strode off down the tense line of waiting men, all on foot. Goblins meant no horses. Their hooves might claim half a dozen or more, but the animals always fell, and fell hard, losing the lives of their riders to swarming goblin blades. Goblins ate horses and, for that matter, men. Fingers and toes, he’d heard, were delicacies. Along with other things.
Goblins he could handle, given swords enough, though he’d never seen this many goblins before, and knew from the tales of the older soldiers that so many had never before swarmed into Cormyr to take the field against any army. It was the dragon, though, that none could stand against. With flame, claw, and spell it-no, she, they said-smote the most valiant knights and the shrewdest battlemasters, sniffing out war wizards whatever their disguise and rending them to pieces.
She seemed to know Cormyr better than the oldest veteran Purple Dragon scouts and know magic better than any war wizard. She was a very “devil among dragons,” as one mage had choked, viewing the dismembered bodies of his three apprentices. The Devil Dragon it had been to the realm from that moment on, the name spreading across farms and barracks like sunlight in the morning. And there she was, only a few lazy wing beats away.
As Gulur squinted across the fields at her, the red dragon suddenly raised her head and looked, he thought, right back at him. He could see the glitter of one of her eyes.
“Gods defend me!” Gulur gasped, turning his head away with an effort. Even as he drew a sword that didn’t need to be drawn and looked along its length in an entirely unneeded examination-a length that trembled more than he cared to admit-he could feel the fell, cold weight of the dragon’s gaze upon him.
A trumpet blared, calling each man to arms. Gulur lowered his visor and saw to his lacing. Hathian came down the line again offering murmured courage and warnings. A small gap in the lowering clouds fell across the field, and the sun shone warm and bright upon the hill where they stood. Gulur looked around at this small corner of fair Cormyr for what might be his last time, and drew in a deep breath. The goblins were across the brook and toiling up the hill. It wouldn’t be long before the call to charge came.
“Is this wise, my liege? We’re so few!” Durmeth Eldroon called, spurring his black stallion over to the king. Even from the height of his saddle, he found himself staring up into the stolid face of a mountain of a man in plate armor. This was Kolmin Stagblade, Bannerguard to the King. Stagblade held a fearsome battle-axe in his hands, its
