“Very well,” the wraith-spider replied and murmured something too softly for either the king or the wizard of war to hear.
Foril’s scepter suddenly vanished from his hand, two suits of armor in the corners of the anteroom stepped down off their plinths and knelt to the king, and a dusty stone statue at the end of the room shifted its pose to hold forth and open the stone book it was carrying, revealing it to be a pipe coffer holding three pipes and four small and rather moldering lines of pipeweed.
“Do you believe me now?” the spiderlike intruder asked rather testily. “I come on a matter of some urgency, as it happens, and would rather not deprive the crowned head of Cormyr of any more royal slumber because I’m being challenged to do tricks.”
“I believe you,” King Foril Obarskyr said firmly, “and that should be sufficient. What do you want, Royal Magician Vangerdahast?”
“To tell Your Majesty that I’ve found Ganrahast and Vainrence in magical stasis, down in the royal crypt.”
“What?!” The king and wizard of war shouted that word together.
“Reduced to what I’ve become,” Vangey continued calmly, “I can’t cast the necessary spells if they awaken crazed or hostile or enthralled by a foe of the realm. So, I need Glathra here to gather four or five war wizards of experience and accomplishment, and go down and release them.”
“Is this another ploy, old madwits? Another deception?” Glathra spat. “What sort of trap awaits us down there, hey? You just want us all gone, so you can rule again!”
“I want nothing of the sort,” Vangerdahast snapped. “Other than to know just why you didn’t search the palace well enough to find them yourself, days ago. I would hate to think you were either that incompetent or that much of a traitor.”
Glathra went white. “You dare accuse me of treason?”
“Yes. Twice now. I’ll do it again, if you’re hard of hearing. Foril, will you please order this witch to go down to the stlarning crypt and free the royal magician and the lord warder? I don’t need to sleep anymore, and even I’m getting weary of endless snappish debating.”
A sudden commotion erupted outside the doors, the gruff challenges of veteran Dragons overruled by stern orders-and then the doors were flung wide.
Three Crown mages stood there. Seeing the king in his nightrobe, they hastily went to their knees. “Forgive us, Your Majesty, but there’s grave peril! Statues and suits of armor-solid stone ones, and empty suits, that is! — are on the move, all over the palace! They’re tramping places and rearranging things, and we can’t-”
The wraith-spider chuckled, muttered something, then said, “Sorry. That should all stop now. I hope.”
The war wizards all stared at the spider-thing, and some of the Dragons behind them raised spears as if to try to stab at it over the heads of the gaping mages.
“Behold,” Vangerdahast said gleefully. “Here are the wizards you’ll need, Glathra. You might actually reach the crypt before highsun, if you stop arguing and start obeying!”
Glathra glared at him. “I-”
“Can provide us with no good reason not to go down to the royal crypt to investigate Lord Vangerdahast’s claims,” the king said firmly. “Wherefore, I now give you, Lady Glathra, these explicit orders-you are to free the royal magician and lord warder if you find them, and bring them unharmed here to this chamber without delay, that I may converse with them. You are to take these wizards and all of the loyal Dragons outside my doors except Launcel and Tarimmon, there, who will remain as my guardians. Go. Go now. See that this is done.”
With alacrity Glathra bowed low and replied, “It shall be, Majesty.”
After she’d swept out, she looked back to see if the wraith-spider was offering any menace to the king-but it had vanished.
She hesitated, but the king gave her a cold look. She hurried off toward the nearest stair.
The royal crypt was a long way down from there.
“Th-the Three Dolphins Door,” Neld quavered. “Now, will you stop hitting me?”
Mirt gave him a jovial grin and slap on the back that almost pitched the hostler off the coach and onto the rump of one of the hindmost horses.
“Of course,” the Waterdhavian agreed. “Down ye get, now, an’ run along, an’ I’ll say nothing at all bad about ye to the royal magician. A pleasure, Master Neld-a distinct pleasure!”
Neld said something in an incredulous voice as he launched himself in a heroic leap out from the drovers’ seat to the hard cobbles of the Promenade, quite a distance to one side of the coach.
Mirt gave him a cheery wave and brought the coach to a rattling stop outside the Three Dolphins Door.
Four impassive guards held their positions, spears slanted just so, as if he, his coach, and their dust weren’t there at all.
Behind the four Dragons, the double doors that made up the Three Dolphins “Door” started to swing inward.
Smoothly the door guards swung around to face inward, so that whoever was departing the palace would pass between them.
“These prisoners,” an officer’s voice inside began suspiciously.
“I have my orders,” came a flat reply, then the same voice snapped some orders of its own. “Forward. Into the coach. Remember, my wand is ready.”
Storm Silverhand strode out of the palace in shackles and dangling chains, her head bowed. The Lord Delcastle followed her, then Amarune, also in shackles. Behind them came the War Wizard Tracegar, his wand in hand.
Storm stopped in front of the coach and waited. After a long span of hesitation, one of the outer-door guards stepped forward, opened the coach door, and folded down its pair of steps. She ascended, and the other two prisoners followed, under the frowningly suspicious stares of all the guards.
As Tracegar got into the coach with them, one of the guards peered up at Mirt, then snapped, “I’ve not seen you before, and you wear no uniform! Who are you?”
Mirt gave the man a hard stare. “Ask the king. Keep in mind that your low rank will limit the answers you’ll get. And may well wind up lower, when you’re done asking.”
Tracegar rapped on the inside roof of the coach then, so Mirt flicked his whip, clucked to the horses, and set the coach in motion, his stare never leaving the guard’s eyes.
Unhindered, Glathra’s prisoners were conveyed in stately splendor up the Promenade-and out of her reach.
For a while.
The Lady Deleira Truesilver was not in a good mood. Wherefore, fools and those who merely happened to displease her did well to get themselves out of her sight and stay there. Though it was true she was eye-catchingly beautiful, lithe, and elegant, her exquisitely styled white hair contrasting with her flashing yellow eyes, it was the edge of her tongue and the weight of her formidable wits and character they were apt to remember instead, on nights like this.
To put it plainly, she ruled Truesilver House like a tyrant, and in the so-late-they-were-early hours since her reappearance from her chambers, she had verbally demolished two of her kin and a few servants for various stupidities. Having grown tired of having to find fresh words to find so much fault when it seemed to besiege her on all sides, she retired to her chambers again, dismissing her maids and locking them out.
Certain of her inner chambers had bars as well as bolts, and she used these with the deft vigor of a woman half her age, her movements both graceful and imperious.
When the last door was firmly fastened, leaving her only the windows, balconies, and certain secret passages as ways of departing her self-imposed retreat, the Lady Truesilver turned and began to disrobe as she walked toward her favorite bedchamber, kicking off her dainty boots and then doing off her gown and petticoats and hurling them aside for all the world as if she were a club dancer.
When she was down to the most scandalously brief of clouts-definitely the fashion of club dancers, and not aging noble matriarchs-she padded barefoot to a particular relief-carved wall panel, did something to the eye of the doe carved on it and then something else to a moon depicted in a panel across the room-and then returned to the first panel, put two fingertips around some gnarled tree roots in the carving, and drew the panel gently open.
