Hurrying along a passage in the darker, damper depths of the royal palace, Ganrahast and Vainrence stiffened in unison and exchanged anxious frowns. An age-old alarm spell had interrupted them, unfolding in their minds like a forgotten door. An unwelcome surprise telling them one of the caskets in the royal crypt had been broken open!
Now fresh tumult was unfolding in their minds. A second Obarskyr coffin had just been breached.
“Should we warn Mallowfaer?” Vainrence snapped.
Ganrahast emitted a very un-Royal Magician-like snort. “Lot of good
His second-in-command smiled. “Heh. Point made. Well, then, shall we warn Fentable?”
“Time enough for that later-when we know what we’re warning him about.”
They turned the last corner, wands raised and ready and shielding spells spun into being in front of them. A thief’s poisoned dart could be a very nasty greeting.
The passage stood empty, and the doors of the crypt were closed.
They exchanged silent glances. Undead, within?
Ganrahast drew a rod he’d hoped never to have to use from its sheath down his leg, and Vainrence activated one of his rings.
At a nod from his superior, the Lord Warder unsealed the doors.
Then he opened them, wand up again, to reveal … darkness. Still and silent darkness.
The two mages looked up and down the passage, then at the ceiling, then peered at the ceiling inside the crypt. Nothing.
Ganrahast held up one hand with a ring pulsing on it as seeking magic stole forth, and waited tensely as it found … nothing.
The two men exchanged doubtful looks again. Then, hesitantly, they stepped into the crypt, wands held ready.
The silence held. Nothing moved, nothing seemed out of place-
The royal crypt was not visited often, but to both men it seemed the coffins and the few relics on the shelves along the back wall were undisturbed, everything very much as it had been the last time they’d been there.
With one exception that was making them both peer again into every corner of the crypt and check the ceiling once more.
One casket-an old and rather plain, massive one, probably one of the kings not long after Duar-stood open, its unbroken lid laid neatly on the floor beside it.
The two senior war wizards peered suspiciously around at all the silent, undisturbed coffins. Nothing moved, and there was no sound but that of their own breathing.
Cautiously-very cautiously-they moved forward, Vainrence at the fore and Ganrahast shooting glances here, there, and everywhere around the crypt and back out the open doors at the empty passage they’d come from.
There was nothing in the stone casket but unmoving, shrouded bones, under a thick cloak of dust.
Vainrence put one hand slowly into the burial cavity, the ring on his smallest finger blazing a steady, unchanged white. No undeath there. Nothing stirred at his intrusion, and he felt no tingling of awakening magic.
Withdrawing his hand, he stepped back and looked at the Royal Magician who had taken a pendant out from under his robes and was holding it up, turning toward this wall of the crypt and then that. It, too, glowed a faint, steady white.
They traded suspicious frowns, then without a word strode to stand back-to-back and started to search all over the crypt, Ganrahast moving cautiously to look here and there, and Vainrence guarding his back.
Still nothing.
There was certainly no intruder-not an invisible one, and not a ghost. The wards that prevented all translocations were still pulsing strongly around them; the magic alive in the crypt was so strong and swirling that they had no hope of telling what spells, if any, had been used there recently … still less, longer ago.
The alarm spells had told of two disturbed burials, yet there was only one open coffin. With nothing missing or disturbed, if that dust could be trusted. Still, there were simple, everyday spells to settle shrouds of dust on things …
“Your guess?” Ganrahast asked calmly.
Vainrence shrugged. “Some long-ago spell to lift a casket lid? Either it started to fade and was written so as to function before its energy ebbed too much for it to do so, or something among all the wards and shieldings in here triggered it?”
“That,” Ganrahast murmured, “seems entirely too convenient. Not to mention overly benign.”
“So I feel, too,” Vainrence agreed. “I await your better explanation, Mage Royal.”
In the silence that followed, they traded wry grins.
Then Ganrahast shrugged. “Let’s shift this lid back where it should be and see what that does to the alarms; reset, gone off and gone, or still awake and insisting an intrusion has occurred.”
The coffin was old; there were certainly no spells to levitate the lid. They staggered under the weight of the carved stone slab momentarily, grunting and huffing to heave it high enough to restore it to the top of its casket- and only then saw a fresh piece of parchment on the floor under where the lid had lain. There was writing on it.
Vainrence stooped. “You are doomed,” he read aloud.
As he spoke, the lid of the closed casket beside them lifted just enough for magic to be triggered from within it.
There was a singing sound, as if an idle hand had slashed across the highest strings of a harp-and the two war wizards stiffened in unison.
To stand frozen, unseeing and unbreathing in the midst of their own new and pale auras.
“Well, well,” Targrael murmured, lifting with casual ease the lid she’d lain concealed under and climbing gracefully out from atop the bones she’d been relaxing on during the blunderings of these two. “These old Obarskyr trinkets still serve quite effectively. Unlike the realm’s wizards of war, these days.”
Ganrahast and Vainrence stood mute and immobile, caught in stasis. Targrael smiled at them almost fondly.
“Pair of prize idiots.”
She examined Ganrahast’s nearest hand then plucked the ring she wanted from its finger-it took a strong tug, but she’d known the stasis would hold and really cared not if she broke the man’s finger; he had plenty more-and donned it.
No doubt he could trace its whereabouts when he was capable of doing anything again. That might well be a very long time later, however.
The faint beginnings of a smile twisting her lips, Targrael put each of the stasis-frozen men into his own opened coffin and restored the two lids to their proper places.
“Ineffectual dolts. That’ll keep you. Once I use this
With a chuckle, the undead highknight departed that silent chamber, her dark cloak swirling.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Storm slowed a little, to try to catch her breath. It wouldn’t do to try to talk pleasantly to hostile guards if she was panting so hard she couldn’t even gasp out words.
Inevitably, Elminster ran into her from behind, head-butting her rump and propelling her helplessly around the last corner.
