Elminster Must Die

They were rushing the palace soldiers already, wasting no breath on shouts or war cries.

What his dead father had liked to call “a brief and bloody affray” was about to erupt.

Marlin smiled and pulled open the breast of his jerkin to let Thirsty fly free.

One distant Dragon wasn’t running to meet the sellswords, but was instead trotting off down a side passage. Marlin pointed at the man the moment the poison-painted stinger of his pet stirge was safely out past his arm.

“That one!” he snapped-and Thirsty flapped off in untidy, streaking haste.

Marlin waited, ignoring the first grunts and clangs of hard-swung swords as the rushing men met. Swords flashed and thrust, a Dragon fell with a groan, and a hiresword and another Dragon guard slumped with nigh identical wet gurgles.

Marlin still stood motionless, head cocked and listening hard. Gods, this was taking forever …

Then Thirsty flapped back into view, almost nonchalantly, and fell on the neck of one of the Dragon officers, stinger lancing down hard. Marlin allowed himself another smile.

That Dragon had gone down before the alarm could be raised. No doubt the man was lying paralyzed on the floor, not far from the gong he’d been running to reach.

So sad-but then, life was a series of such sadnesses. The trick was making sure every one of them was suffered by someone else.

Thirsty was no ordinary stirge, the well-known vermin that sucked blood from cattle until sated. Rather, it liked the tastes of many victims-and was even now winging to another one.

One of Marlin’s hirelings died on a Purple Dragon blade thanks to being startled at the sight of Thirsty flapping past, and the guards had already hacked down two more sellswords-but those hirelings hadn’t been idle, either. The smartly uniformed patrol had been reduced to a trio of frightened, surrounded men, beset by too many swords to stop.

The Dragons fought desperately, sending one of Marlin’s sellswords staggering away cursing weakly, then slashing out the throat of another. Yet with the numbers they faced and the veteran skills of those seeking to slaughter them, their fates were never in doubt.

The last Dragon died spewing blood with two swords through his body.

Leaving two of Marlin’s hireswords still standing and a third on his knees gasping out blood, his face twisted in pain.

As Thirsty flapped back to its master almost lazily, the two able-bodied sellswords looked to their patron for orders.

Marlin pointed at their wounded fellow. “Kill him,” he said curtly.

They gave him expressionless looks for a moment, realizing their own fates if they got hurt, then did his bidding, turning again from the corpse to learn his will.

“The sacks we brought along,” Marlin told them promptly as he caught up the chalice from the floor where its death-struck recoverer had carefully placed it. “Retrieve them. Behead all of the dead, and collect the heads in the sacks; they’re coming with us.”

That earned him another pair of expressionless looks.

Marlin sighed. “So there’s nothing left that can possibly have seen us or wag tongues about that, when the war wizards come prying with their spells and asking their foolish questions.”

Chalice safely in the crook of his elbow, Marlin then applied himself to close scrutiny of his maps. By the time his two hirelings joined him with their dripping sacks, he was ready to lead them confidently away from the Chamber of the Wyrms Ascending, through a secret passage in its walls behind the rearing dragon statue.

Gods above, but the Obarskyrs had loved secret passages.

“This is heading deeper into the palace,” one of the sellswords muttered, as Marlin waved them to move ahead of him. It was a safe bet that the chalice would earn them more, sold illicitly, than any sack of heads. Unless that sack had, say, the king’s head in it.

“So it is,” he snapped. “Rest assured that I know exactly what I’m doing-and what you’re thinking, too, come to that.”

After climbing a precipitous flight of steps right after departing the Wyrms Ascending, the passage ran straight and narrow for what seemed a very long way, obviously inside the thickness of a wall. It climbed and then descended once, presumably to hop over a connecting door, and then, for no apparent reason, took an angled bend to the left.

“Stop,” Marlin murmured. Just as his most expensive map showed, part of the angled section of wall could be slid aside to reveal an older, damper stone passage. He took care to put that panel carefully back into place after they’d stepped through it, then cautioned his two men to keep as silent as possible.

Keeping quiet was, after all, only prudent when trying to sneak out of a palace.

This new hidden way had a lower ceiling than the previous ones they’d used, arches built of crude, massive stone blocks. Its walls were rougher, too, and it smelled old.

According to his map and the tales that had come with it, the passage linked the royal palace with the deepest winecellar of the Old Dwarf, a long-established Suzailan tavern, passing right under or between various cellars of the royal court. It had probably been dug by the Old Dwarf himself-whoever he’d been-and no doubt used often by the legendary womanizer Azoun IV to move unseen between the palace and willing wenches all across Suzail. Or Azoun’s father before him, or any of the half-dozen randy Obarskyrs before that.

A plague on them all. Their day was almost done.

“Long live King Marlin, first of the Stormserpent line,” Marlin murmured to himself. Then shook his head and grinned wryly.

Perhaps that would be his fate, but he doubted it. Wasn’t there something about a sky full of hungry dragons returning to devour and ravage and seize Cormyr back from all humans, if no Obarskyr backside warmed the Dragon Throne?

He shrugged, glanced behind him-nothing but darkness-and devoted himself to following his cautiously striding hirelings. There’d be time enough later to ponder old legends …

“Later” as in after he was dead, most likely. A demise Marlin Stormserpent fervently hoped would occur in his sleep in some gigantic bed with gold-glister sheets and dozens of beautiful, willing, bare bedmaids in a suitably opulent chamber atop whatever palace he was then ruling most of the Realms from. About a century or so from now.

CHAPTER TEN

HARDER THAN HARBOR RAIN

Arclath smiled his customary easy smile.

Both of his two unlikely friends were nervous and tired. It must be the upcoming council and their superiors shouting at them about this particular exacting preparation and that specific niggling detail. As the days dwindled down to that grand gathering, the tension behind the palace doors would rise to shrieking heights that would need far more than a mere knife to cut. These days, it always did.

Wherefore Lord Arclath Argustagus Delcastle, who prided himself on being a benevolent, enlightened noble who was considerate of his lessers-as well as being the airily outrageous, flamboyant flame of Suzailan fashion, though he knew some folk described him far more bluntly, “an utter fop” being one of the politer descriptions-had conducted them that evening to the Dragonriders’ Club, an establishment they’d otherwise never have spent coins enough to enter, for it was both exclusive and very expensive.

These were factors he dismissed in less than an instant. His coins would be spent, not theirs, and his purse could easily cover the patronage of two hundred nervous and tired young men. Besides, those who hoarded their coins only lost them in the end to such perils as the Silent Shadow, without ever enjoying them.

“Come, Belnar! Ho, Halance!” he said merrily, turning in a whirl of his rich and splendid half cloak. “Come and stare at the best mask dancers in all Suzail!”

He reached to fling wide the doors and usher them in, but the club door guards, who knew him well,