you to a place in this house of mine where no one will trace or follow you!”
“Don’t bet on that,” Glathra hissed furiously, struggling to her knees. “This particular thick-skulled idiot doesn’t embrace defeat so willingly.”
Something swirled in the dark passage beyond the door-and Alusair blazed back into the room like an arrow, straight at the war wizard’s head.
Only to stop right in Glathra’s face.
“Glathra Barcantle,” the ghost hissed, “Cormyr stands in peril! The realm needs you to grow up, right now. Think on that.”
Then the princess was gone, leaving nothing but empty air in front of Glathra’s nose.
And beyond it, a lot of sheepish men in robes or armor, awkwardly avoiding meeting her gaze as they wincingly found their feet.
Unexpectedly, Glathra found herself on the trembling verge of tears.
“No!” Marlin Stormserpent shrieked, slashing at the death tyrant in wide-eyed terror. The Flying Blade flashed and bit, sinking into rotten plates that in life would have been as hard as Purple Dragon armor.
Each blow shook the beholder, jostling Manshoon’s many overlapping visions as its eyes danced and writhed.
Momentarily everything blurred, and a pounding pain arose in his mind. Blackfire, but he was tired!
His vision steadied, sliding back into focus again. The second death tyrant had hold of the Chalice, and had just slammed into the struggling noble from behind. The room was too small for the beholders to battle effectively Yet the clumsy strike worked; the sword tumbled from Stormserpent’s hand. Manshoon used the tyrant that had hold of him to shove him back, pinning the lordling when he went limp and tried to slip to the floor and crawl to his blade. The other tyrant snatched the sword up.
Back now, out of Stormserpent Towers, to me.
To Sraunter’s cellar… so tired…
Had the smoke somehow come with the tyrants? No… What, then, was this purple-gray, heaving mist that swirled in his mind? The rising pain…
Manshoon was vaguely aware he’d lost control over one tyrant. It was drifting limply near the cellar wall. He was seeing it from the floor, a floor that lurched beneath him, slowly, like the deck of a ship he’d been on, long years ago, fighting slow, rolling waves in the Moonsea…
Too much. He’d tried controlling too many minds at once. Sraunter’s roiling fear, the dark, cold dead weights of the two undead beholders, all while keeping his scrying spheres going as he cast multiple teleports, holding some in hanging abeyance… too much. Stormserpent’s flood of terror had defeated him, had put the noble’s mind beyond his mastery this time, exhausting him…
Bile of Bane, but he had limitations after all.
“Sark and lurruk,” he cursed in a weary whisper, watching the ceiling spin above him. Stormserpent was on the move.
The lordling had torn free of the tyrant holding him, but Manshoon still had a tenuous hold over it. If Stormserpent tried to harm Manshoon’s human body, he could slam the beholder into the man, or interpose it between angry young lord and exhausted vampire lord…
Or, he could take mist form to escape destruction if he had to-but the last time he’d done that, as Orbakh of Westgate, so many of his bindings and mental holds over others had faded away that he’d spent the better part of seven seasons restoring a little more than half of them; the others were gone for good.
So that was very much a last resort.
Ohhh, his head…
The sword and the chalice lay on the cellar floor beneath the other, limply floating tyrant. Through swimming eyes Manshoon saw the young noble snatch them up.
Blade in hand, Marlin Stormserpent turned a pale, frightened face in Manshoon’s direction for a moment, then turned and bolted for the cellar stairs.
Manshoon lay on cold stone, listening to the thunder of the noble’s boots die away. He was too drained and near senseless to prevent Stormserpent’s flight.
Silence descended in the shop overhead. No smashings, no smoke… just stillness.
So his pawn had escaped-for now-and the two blueflame items with him.
Manshoon sighed. Undeniably, the future emperor of Cormyr had overreached himself.
He let slip his control over the last tyrant and watched it drift, eyestalks drooping. If the pain would only fade, sark it…
From overhead came the faint slam of a door and the tinkling of the shop’s bell.
Then an imperious female voice, a little breathless but with shrill volume to make up for that, coming nearer.
“Shopkeeper? Alchemist! Master Surontur, or whatever your name is! Yoohoo! Is anyone here? Service! Ser- vice! ”
From behind the door of the corner cellar room where an alchemist and a noble lord of Cormyr were confined arose the muffled thunder of Immaero Sraunter trying to get the locked door open.
Manshoon’s lips twisted in wry amusement. Of course. The alchemist knew all too well that Nechelseiya Sammartael didn’t like to be kept waiting.
“Th-they’re saying it everywhere, saer! Rumors always run wild, aye, but they’re all crying it! Noble lords butchered, and King Foril dead, and the realm now at war!”
Lord Irlin Stonestable shook his head. “Surely not all of this can be true! Broryn, is this steward of yours a drinker?”
From the far side of the decanter-crowded table in the front parlor of Staghaven House, his grim-faced host shook his head.
“Aereld here is one of the oldest and most trusted Windstag servants,” he announced almost fiercely. “Shrewd, prudent, and utterly trustworthy. If he tells us all the city’s saying so, then you may trust that all the city’s saying so!”
“Well, haularake! If this doesn’t naed all!” Stonestable swore, draining his flagon and sitting back to stare at the steward as if the man were a shapechanging monster growing jaws and claws before his eyes.
Windstag suddenly rounded on the old steward, in one of his abrupt changes of mood.
“At war?” he bellowed into the man’s frightened face. “Are you sure?”
“Yon trusty may or may not be,” a familiar voice gasped, before the stammering Aereld could say a clear word in reply, “but I sure as the Purple Dragon am!”
Lord Mellast Ormblade, red faced and puffing for breath, staggered past the steward to crash down into a vacant seat at the table and gasp, “Truth, all of it! Many nobles butchered-by a barepelt club dancer, seemingly possessed by the ghost of the legendary Vangerdahast! The king clings to life despite three or four swords through him, I think-and Handragon’s alive, for sure-but many of the oldbloods are frightened or enraged enough that we may already be at war!”
A clatter of hooves and the loud neighing of a protesting horse came from outside. Before anyone could go to see the cause, Lord Sacrast Handragon came striding in.
“Butchery at the palace, a score of oldblood lords dead, and the rest all crying rebellion, and worse news!” he said grimly.
“Worse?” Windstag growled in disbelief. “How so?’
Handragon snatched up a decanter and drank deeply, not bothering with a flagon.
“Just now I almost rode down some Stormserpent family servants,” he replied, slamming what was left of the wine down on the table. “They’re running through the streets saying Lord Marlin Stormserpent and most of his household have been slaughtered in Stormserpent Towers, by unknown hands!”
“Where are we, exactly?” Mirt growled.
“Deep in the haunted wing,” Alusair replied. “Where the old enchantments are so thick that none of the wizards of war who serve the realm now can scry us or even find us with certainty.”
“They’ll guess we’re here,” Storm said dryly, and they were all treated to the sight of a ghost shrugging.
“Let them,” the princess replied. “What boots it? I trust we can agree on some things before Glathra can
