entrance, up to and including the king himself.
Manshoon caught himself smiling. Such a she-viper! A trifle shallow and old for his tastes, but if she’d come into his life a good century ago…
But what of her son?
Manshoon looked into his oldest sphere and saw just what he’d expected to see.
Up in his tower, Marlin Stormserpent was pacing in rising fear, faster than before, almost dashing from room to deserted room. Feeling the jaws of the trap around him, no doubt, and seeing no way out.
Manshoon didn’t have to go into the lordling’s mind to know what the young fool was thinking.
No escape but a desperate fight through the house, using the ghosts and their ability to drift through solid walls to make them stealthy slayers-from-behind. Yet, they did not obey him absolutely, and he didn’t-couldn’t- trust them to keep him safe. They’d let him be captured or enspelled or even “I–I’m ready, Lord Manshoon,” Sraunter stammered, from behind the vampire.
The future emperor of Cormyr turned, his soft smile broadening. At last.
The alchemist was pale with fear. He stood uncertainly holding a trio of emerald-liquid-filled glass flasks in each hand.
“One from each hand broken together produces killing smoke?” Manshoon asked. “Is there a defense or cure?”
“N-no, lord. None short of powerful temple magic.”
“Good. Worry not; I’ll send you and bring you back alive. Just try to stay out of your smoke as you cause it, hmm?”
Sraunter nodded fervently. He was still bobbing his head like an idiot when Manshoon’s teleporting spell deposited him a few paces behind the frightened servants in the forehall behind the closed and barred front doors of Stormserpent Towers.
In the scrying sphere, Manshoon saw Sraunter grimace at the sight of the servants, bend down, and carefully set his flasks on the floor. Smashing one, he dashed another into its wreckage, snatched up the remaining flasks, and fled.
Smoke billowed up, and Manshoon’s second spell-the one he’d cast on the sprinting alchemist before the teleport, not that his dupe had noticed he was doing three castings rather than one-took effect, birthing a strong wind from Sraunter’s back that slowed the servants pursuing him, swept the smoke against the doors that the war wizards outside were casting spells at, then swirled around the forehall. All over the room, coughing and staggering servants fell.
The wind blew on, spreading smoke with astonishing speed. Sraunter was dashing deeper into the mansion, the flasks tucked close to his body, heading for the central feasting hall. Good man; he was too frightened to think for himself or dare to betray his mind-master.
Sraunter reached that lofty hall and broke two more flasks. A fresh cloud of smoke arose.
The alchemist stumbled on, through deserted passages. Winded now, he was moving more slowly, but he was following Manshoon’s orders, seeking the small back hall at the rear of the mansion. Where the disused towers had their roots, it was the hub of the rooms where most of the servants dwelt and worked. Every mouth silenced was one less source of talk about Stormserpent’s little conspiracy that the Crown might find useful.
Which reminded Manshoon to look back at his newest sphere. Farewell, Lady Stormserpent…
The front doors of Stormserpent Towers gave way, blasted and melted by war wizard spells, and Purple Dragons plunged headlong into the waiting smoke.
Manshoon’s smile grew. Served them right, overzealous hands of tyranny, for bursting unbidden into the private home of a respected noble family of the realm.
Sraunter shattered his last pair of flasks, and Manshoon awakened the last of the three castings on the man. The gasping alchemist was snatched away from the doom he’d been spreading, across some of the richest streets in Suzail in a trice-to arrive on the other side of yon door, in the locked cellar room where Crownrood was brooding.
He hoped the two of them would have sense enough not to kill each other while he was busy in Stormserpent Towers.
Soldiers of Cormyr were coughing and falling in the mansion forehall, and war wizards were lurching back outside, choking and cursing.
Manshoon chuckled and cast the spell that would put him into what was left of the decaying mind of the nearest death tyrant.
It took hold, and the cellar around him seemed to lurch and sway. Then he gazed out of darker, multiple eyes and watched his handsome human body stagger under the mental weight of seeing out of two bodies at once, of controlling a living host and an undead one.
Then he drew his human body upright, smiled, and cast the spell again.
Plunging himself into the mind of the second death tyrant, too.
The cellar swam around him-Bane forfend, but he was tired! — then slowly steadied.
Very slowly.
Manshoon’s human host sighed.
When things had stopped swimming and swaying, he made his human self go to a wall and slide down it to a sitting position, where he could see the scrying spheres and hope to come to no harm.
From there he cast the greater translocation that would take both undead beholders to a tower room two floors below the frantic Marlin Stormserpent.
Then he cast it again, this second incantation a delayed working that would snatch the tyrants-and their burdens-back to the cellar again when he willed it to take effect.
The cellar went away, and all of his many eyes saw swirling smoke.
Manshoon shuddered as everything swam again. He was tired.
Drifting back to clarity, he saw that all around his two floating selves, the ground floor of Stormserpent Towers was a dim and silent labyrinth of slumped servants and darkly roiling drifts of smoke.
Death tyrants couldn’t smile any more than the frozen curves of their wide and crooked maws, but Manshoon tried to smile.
Before the idiot war wizards managed to deal with this smoke, the future Emperor of Cormyr and Beyond should have more than enough time to snatch away young Lord Stormserpent and his two precious ghost- commanding items.
Lady Shout-at-Everything Glathra would be so displeased.
“Lady Glathra!” Storm shouted, seeing at a glance that there was no time at all left for politeness. Only for a swift and desperate lie. “The king wants you!”
“Not now,” Glathra started to snarl, flames of orange and purple already whirling around her raised hands as she stalked toward the fat man in the window.
Then she sighed and lowered her burning hands. “Who calls?”
Most of the war wizards and Dragons had already spun to face the door had that banged open and dashed the luckless soldier leaning against it to the floor. They all stared at a young noble, the dancer he seemed to go everywhere with, a tall and strikingly beautiful silver-haired woman… and the ghost of the Princess Alusair.
“We do,” Storm replied quietly.
Glathra glared at her. “The king wants me why? What message?”
“The king wants you to treat his guest, a visiting Lord of Waterdeep, with rather more respect and less deadly magic,” Alusair snapped, sweeping through the assembled Cormyreans like a cold breeze to float facing the war wizard.
Who let the flames fade around her hands and asked coldly, “Your Highness, is there no end to your meddling?”
Alusair’s ghostly nose was suddenly almost touching Glathra’s living one.
“When an Obarskyr engages in ruling Cormyr, dear,” she said softly, “it is anything but ‘meddling.’ Courtiers who fail to grasp this may well find themselves swiftly replaced.”
Chilled and shivering, the wizard of war drew back a step. “But you’re dead, Princess! Dead! And-”
“Glathra,” Storm interrupted sternly, “hear us! Lord Marlin Stormserpent is the master of the two blueflame ghosts who murdered young Lord Huntcrown at The Bold Archer! He holds the Wyverntongue Chalice that
