Elminster Must Die

CHAPTER SEVEN

NOBLES, SHADOWS, AND DEADLY DOINGS

But what of Baron Boldtree?”

Marlin Stormserpent made haste to drift away from that question and the excited young nobles listening to it, thankful he’d kept to his feet and had no need to rise from a chair, and so be noticed moving away.

He wanted nothing at all to do with Lord Royal Erzoured Obarskyr and his little schemes, whether the man called himself’Baron Boldtree’ or not. That one was a smilingly cold-blooded, untrustworthy danger to all nobles. Those who rode too close beside him would lose their heads alongside him, when the time came.

And it would, he had no doubt of that.

No, this incipient traitor prided himself on being rather more subtle than softly smiling Boldtree. Let others admire the Lord Royal or the power he was gathering unto himself, all nobles and shadows and deadly doings; the pride of House Stormserpent had other, quieter steeds to ride.

At that moment, just when he was beginning to think he’d be forever toying with the almost-empty tallglass he’d been nursing, Marlin saw what he’d been waiting for and smiled. At last.

Ganrahast’s departure from the Open Feast had been gratifyingly abrupt. So would his be.

Setting his tallglass down on the feasting table, Marlin turned toward the garderobes, as if his haste was due to a need to relieve himself.

The hour was growing late, after all.

On his brisk way down Dragontriumph Hall, he saw something else that made him smile. Six war wizards at the feast whom old Jamaldro had unwittingly served with drugged wine-such a creature of careless habit, our senior cellarer, always setting out his decanters just so, long before they’d be needed, and trust the highnosed mages to want their own, oh-so-special vintage-were all slumping in their seats, as if overcome by drink.

Once he was inside the archway that led into the garderobes, where he could see out into the hall but its shadowed gloom would conceal him from those still by the table, under the lamps, Marlin turned, surveyed the Open Feast, and let his smile broaden.

Certain other guests had observed his departure and in turn had risen to depart. They were all heading his way, as they’d been paid to do. Like him, they would drift first to the garderobes and then sidle onward. Not home, but deeper into the palace.

The carelessness of whose guards was becoming simply shocking, these nights.

The noise of the feast was far behind them. They walked warily on into deepening, almost velvet silence. The passage was dark, and the room they were stepping into even darker.

“I’ve never been in this part of the palace before,” someone muttered. “No guards, no war wizards …”

“They’ve few enough left of either, these days,” Marlin Stormserpent told them calmly from the darkness at the back of the room. “You’re late.”

“We were followed,” came the curt reply from a man still wiping blood from his hands. He’d killed before, but butchering a war wizard had to be done in haste, before the mage could get out a spell or send some magical cry for aid. “We’ve taken care of our little shadow.”

“Darrake Harnwood?”

“Yes. We put his head down a garderobe shaft.”

“Good.” Stormserpent was pleased and let them hear it. “However, every killing is someone who will be discovered, probably sooner rather than later. So let’s be about matters.”

“We’re all here,” someone else said simply. “I counted.”

“I trust all of you counted the coins I paid you, too?” Marlin asked coolly, and without waiting for a reply told the men standing close around him, “The undead of the haunted wing are real, but very few. If you come with me and do what I’ve paid you to do, destroying the handful or so of skeletons and wraiths you’ll meet, you’ll have done Cormyr a great service.”

“Why are there undead in the royal palace at all?” someone muttered. “Have the war wizards grown so feeble as all that?”

Marlin smiled. “The war wizards command the undead, using them as guardians to keep everyone out of the haunted wing-where the Obarskyrs keep most of the wealth they seize from citizens, the dark magic they’ve collected over the centuries, and … certain prisoners. Nobles and commoners who have become too great a challenge to the Crown.”

“Belnar? Thol Morand?”

“Among others. And unless you want to join them, you must all keep as silent as the tomb-ha ha-about what you’ve done, until I can make sure all the undead are gone, or you’ll be seen in the city not as heroes but as the war wizards will portray you: traitors plotting against the Dragon Throne.”

“Ganrahast is so stlarning suspicious,” someone snapped. “He sees traitors behind every door and around every corner.”

“The war wizards,” someone else said gloomily. “The doom of the realm and its real rulers. Always, when there’s trouble, it’s the war wizards.”

“A threat to every Cormyrean-even the royal family,” another agreed.

“The sooner they’re all killed off,” Marlin told his hirelings smoothly, “in a series of accidental demises too deft and veiled to raise any general alarm, the better.”

That brought nods, and he added quietly, “Now come. Into the haunted wing. Swords out, all.”

Great arched doors had been locked across the main passage, but there was an easy way around them, through a room whose connecting doors were neither locked nor barred.

When they got three steps beyond that room, two skeletons strode to meet them-one a dust-shrouded, floating assembly of bones too decrepit to fit together anymore, the other newer and more intact.

Stormserpent strode straight on, raising his sword and pointing at the undead. “Hack them apart. Then shatter all the bones. No shouting, no clangings. Do this quietly.”

Fear rose in him as empty eyesockets turned his way. They were dead or should be dead, not moving forward in silent menace, swords lashing out-

One of his hirelings snapped, “Quickly-before something else shows up!”

There followed a general rush and a frenzied hewing and hacking.

Stormserpent peered ahead into the gloom. The faint glows of old lighting spells, long unrenewed, kept the empty wing from pitch darkness, but he’d have been much happier if he’d dared bring lots of lanterns and walk along in proper brightness. In the shadows, anything could be …

Anything was. Another less-than-whole skeleton with a zombie-no, two zombies-lurching in its wake. Behind them, something dark, almost batlike, glided. One of the wraiths. Real trouble.

Marlin turned to his hirelings. “Get them!” he hissed. “There’ll be more! You and you-watch behind us and our flanks!”

He was scared, all right. He could taste it, and the excitement was making him tremble. Not that he’d have dared such a thing at all if he hadn’t had his amulet. An old family treasure that the gods alone remembered which errant ancestral Stormserpent had got and from where, that was said to render the one who wore it “immune to what undead can do, beyond purely physical woundings.”

Not that there was a Stormserpent alive who’d tested those claims. A visiting Sembian had confirmed there was “strong magic” on the nondescript, tarnished little pendant and had ventured the opinion that it should protect Marlin-but not anyone with him-against life drain, soul reaping, and other such necrotic dooms. But the Sembian had admitted that was just his guess. And it would be an idiot’s death to trust overmuch in a greedy outlander’s guess.

The skeleton was down; one shattered bone skittered past Marlin’s boots. The zombies, too, had been hewn apart by men with their teeth clenched in distaste.

The sword wraith hung back; Marlin took a step toward it and ordered, “Stand together, now. Some of these horrors can leap around.”

His hirelings were only too happy to obey; they were still drawing together into a shuffling ring, holding their