and rocks and trees.
Gaerond’s sharp gesture brought them all to a silent, hard-listening halt, but there were no rustlings to tell where Thal had gone. The forest was suddenly empty of cheerful little lads.
“Well?” Malkym asked at last, as the Bloodshields stared at each other … and dusk came down.
“Light the lamps,” Gaerond ordered shortly. “We go on.”
They did that and were well down the path among the trees, Rornagar having turned to stare suspiciously- but vainly-into the forest twice.
Gaerond’s fingers were busy at his peace-strings without his eyes ever leaving the path ahead and the forest around. He could see where the way went, right into a low cavemouth ahead. A twinkle of light was escaping from the chamber, through holes in a door made of a patched and tattered hanging deer hide that had seen better days.
He stopped well outside it and waved to his fellows to join him as quietly as possible. As they gathered nigh-silently around him, each gave him the ramming-hilts-home gesture that told him they were ready for battle.
Gaerond nodded approvingly and looked to Rorn, who shook his head to silently say there’d been no sign of their young guide. Hmm, gone without coin, too; what but wager he’d been the wizard himself, in shift-shape?
With a shrug and smile, Gaerond called pleasantly, “Elminster? Elminster the wizard? Peaceful hired fellows here to confer with you!”
“Come ahead,” an old man’s voice quavered in reply. “Peaceful fellows are always welcome.” Then it turned stern or rather pettish. “See that ye stay that way.”
The Bloodshields traded smirks and came ahead.
The cave was a long, narrow hovel of damp dirt, stones, and sagging old rough-tree furniture, more a hermit’s cellar than a druid den. Two small, flickering lamps hung from a crossbranch over a rude table, and somewhere behind their glows sat a stout, broad-shouldered old man, blinking at them past a fearsome beak of a nose. He had a long, shaggy white beard.
The floor was an uneven, greasy, hard-trodden litter of old bones and empty nutshells, and around the dirt walls roots thrust out here, there, and everywhere; on many of them had been hung a pathetic collection of rotting old scraps of tapestry and paintings.
“So ye’ve found Elminster, ye adventurers, and to earn thy hire would speak with me? Well, speak, then; I’ve naught to share, I fear, and if ye were expecting great magics or heaped gems, I’m afraid ye’ve come a century or so too late.”
“Huh,” Gaerond replied.
The old man snorted sourly and fumbled for a clay pipe with age-gnarled, shaking fingers. “If I could, d’ye think I’d be sitting here in this mud-hole, slowly starving? That’ll be my price for answers, mind ye: a finger of cheese or a bite of meat, if thy pouches run to such luxuries!”
Gaerond smiled, not kindly, and shook his head. “Our shame steadily deepens, doesn’t it, lads?”
The Bloodshields chuckled unpleasantly by way of reply. They had already spread themselves out and had drawn various favorite weapons-that they waved menacingly.
“You may have noticed,” Gaerond told the burly old man, “that Lylar here has brought a spear. We think it’d look better adorned with your head, as a sort of wave-about trophy, when we return to Sembia. Sembians pay well for their bodyguards-and it’s not every band of blades that can claim to have bested the legendary archwizard Elminster in battle!”
The burly oldbeard seemed to shrink a little in his seat. “Ye … ye’re joking, surely …,” he quavered.
Gaerond smiled his best, soft wolf smile. “No. I’m afraid not.”
The air promptly erupted in a briefly deafening storm of hissing and twanging, while the old man sat as still as a stone.
As abruptly as it had come, the storm was done, all the tapestries and paintings fluttering in the wake of too many snarling quarrels to count.
Most of the Bloodshields had been driven back against the walls, so studded with those quarrels as to resemble pincushions. Gaerond hadn’t been near a wall, so he was the last to fall, toppling in slow silence, disbelief plain on his dead face.
As if the thump and clatter of his landing were a cue, figures all clambered out from behind the tapestries in brisk haste, their pearl-white limbs reaching to reload crossbows or to snatch away weapons in case any of the Bloodshields might have had magical protection enough to somehow still live.
It appeared that none of them had.
The doppelganger sitting behind the table dwindled down into something long and lean that easily slid out of the wizard’s robes and the suit of padded armor beneath them that had lent “Elminster” such broad shoulders, and stretched across the table to join in the work of taking up the adventurers’ bodies and gear-the latter for salvage and sale, and the former to eat.
“Any trouble?” hissed a new arrival, coming into the cave still wearing Thal’s face, but with a body pearl white and featureless as the others.
“None,” replied one of the doppelgangers, who was busily breaking the necks of the Bloodshields, just to be sure, sounding almost bored.
“Where
Doppelgangers rarely shrug, but most of those crowded into the cave tried various versions of it, in wriggling unison.
The one who’d played Elminster answered, “He is, but he’s long gone from here. No shortage of talking meat coming looking for him, though. Still some Harpers, even.”
One old doppelganger grew a large mouth so he could leer, exclaiming, “I
CHAPTER ONE
The wardrobe was a cursedly tight fit.
Even for one of the handsomest, suavest, most lithely athletic, and most debonair nobles currently inhaling the sweet air of the Forest Kingdom of Cormyr.
Even a sneering rival would have had to grant that Lord Arclath Argustagus Delcastle was all of those things in the judgment of many a lass, not just his own.
Yet, despite all of those splendid qualities, the heir of House Delcastle could
Left knee above his left ear and fingers braced like claws to keep his cramped body from slipping and making the slightest sound, Arclath stared into the darkness wrought by the closed door right in front of his nose and prayed fervently that Ganrahast and Vainrence would be in a hurry and keep their secret meeting brief.
So it would end, for instance, before he happened to need to sneeze.
No one ever came to this dusty, long-disused bedchamber high in the north turret-or so Arclath had once thought. He’d found the place after a feast some years ago, while wandering the palace to walk off the effects of far too much firewine before he braved the dark night streets homeward, and had employed it thereafter to enjoy the charms of a certain palace maid in private-a sleek delight since sadly gone off to Neverwinter in the employ of a wealthy merchant-and then as a retreat to sit alone and think, when that need came upon him.
It had come as a less-than-pleasant surprise, moments before, to learn that the Royal Magician of Cormyr, the widely feared Ganrahast, and his calmly ruthless second-in-command, “Foedoom” Vainrence, favored this same north turret bedchamber for private parleys.
