tireless, were flickering above and behind them, and he grabbed frantically for the Flying Blade. His fingers closed around the familiar, reassuring weighty curves of its hilt.
Then a man he’d never seen before strode into view around the chair, smiling down at him with sword drawn. A cruel smile on the face of a man wreathed in blue flames.
A blueflame ghost, but not one of his!
Then hard, cold hands took hold of him from the other side of the chair, holding his arms with iron strength. He strained to draw his sword, managed to get it halfway out with a sudden jerk-then felt the coldest, keenest pain that had ever blighted his life.
His hand had been hacked off.
His other arm was grabbed by the man who’d walked around the chair to smile at him, and forced down onto the chair arm. A blade wreathed in blue flames chopped down again, and Stormserpent screamed.
He was lost in pain, he was staring in disbelief at the two streaming stumps of his arms-and above them, standing side by side to smile down at him, three blueflame ghosts. Strangers, all of them.
The Flying Blade and the Wyverntongue Chalice were lost to him. He couldn’t call forth his own two blueflame slayers now, to save him.
If it wasn’t too late for any saving…
He could feel his own life flowing out of him, pumping out of him…
This couldn’t be happening! Couldn’t…
He was Lord Marlin Stormserpent! Didn’t they know that? How dare they?
Someone else was strolling unhurriedly around the three ghosts and reaching down long, shapely arms to pluck up the Blade and the Chalice. His Blade and Chalice.
Marlin stared up at her in dimming, dying disbelief. Blearily he beheld a tall, slender, beautiful human woman with a cruel face and dark, rage-filled eyes, clad all in black, with a silver weathercloak around her shoulders. He’d never seen her before, either.
As she set the sword and the cup down on a sidetable he hadn’t the means to reach, Stormserpent saw the bloody point of a dagger protruding from her black-garbed chest, thrusting out between her breasts.
He was fading fast, his lifeblood flowing out of his useless stumps with every heartbeat. He tried to raise them toward her, and his effort earned him a cold sneer.
“W-who are you?” he managed to gasp.
“The Lady of Ghosts,” came the mocking reply. “I gather blueflame ghosts. Yours are a most welcome addition to my collection.”
She strode closer. Marlin stared at the blood-drenched point standing out between her breasts in dull, dying fascination.
She smiled. “Like it? I seek the man who put it there. A well-known wizard named Manshoon. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure, but have you seen him hereabouts? Recently?”
Marlin shook his head.
“Is anyone else in Cormyr collecting blueflame ghosts?”
“One appeared… at the Council,” he replied weakly, tasting his own blood in his mouth. “No one knows who commands it.”
She bent suddenly and took hold of his throat, her grip cruelly tight.
“Do you tell me truth?” she hissed, blue flames suddenly dancing in her eyes.
Marlin shuddered and tried not to choke. “Y-yes.”
Eyes burning into his, she shook him.
Then, suddenly, she was telling him a tale, the words whispered low and fast.
“The one called Manshoon literally stabbed me in the back, years and years ago, and as you see, left his dagger in me, pommel-deep. I’m under a curse and cannot die until the spell is broken-so I live in constant agony. Worse than what you’re feeling now, worm of a noble.”
Marlin had just enough strength left to shake his head in disbelief.
“I am driven,” she hissed into his face. “Driven by my pain and hatred to seek Manshoon’s death. I dare not have his blade plucked out, because doing so will alter the enchantments on my body, and I’ll literally rot while staying alive. Undeath may be my fate, but it’s one I don’t want to choose yet.”
Straightening, she hauled the dying noble up out of the chair to stand with her, hanging from her grip on his throat and shoulders.
“I’m on Manshoon’s trail,” she whispered. “He is the collector of blueflame ghosts; he was busy gathering them all those years ago, when we first met. By assembling my own collection, I hope to lure him out of hiding. To me. Within my reach at last.”
Lord Marlin Stormserpent stared at her glassily, his eyes dark and empty.
“So,” she snarled, “is there anything you can tell me to help me find Manshoon, doomed noble? Anything at all?”
But she was shaking a dead man. While she’d hissed words at him, Stormserpent had died.
With a soft curse, she dashed his limp body to the floor.
The walls of the room, deep on the lowest level of the palace cellars, were furred with dark, sickly-looking green mold, and the air was damp and fetid.
Lord Arclath Delcastle guided the silent and empty-eyed wizard Tracegar to a stop in front of the massive stone table that was the room’s sole furnishing, looked around again at all the mold, and rolled his eyes. “Some six hundred rooms down here, and we have to meet in this one?”
His voice was Elminster’s.
Vangerdahast might be reduced to a spiderlike thing, but he could still shrug. “No one comes near it. Making it useful. You have no idea how many lovers come creeping down into the cellars for thrill-trysts by candlelight.”
“Oh, but I do,” El replied gravely. “Believe me, I do.”
He looked down at the man lying still and silent on the stone table, with Vangey poised like a protective spider by his head.
Youngish, pleasant-looking, but not overly handsome, Chondathan stock. Clad in the sort of robes favored by war wizards. Breathing very slowly, but senseless. No visible wounds, or for that matter, scars.
“Who’s this?”
“Wizard of War Reldyk Applecrown. Young, loyal, a minor wielder of the Art. He’s been healed of the wounds he took last night in the beholder fray, but he got caught in a spell backlash and hasn’t much of a mind left.”
“Brain-burned,” El murmured, looking up at Vangerdahast with a silent question in his eyes.
“Your new body, if you want him,” the former royal magician of Cormyr said gruffly. “The realm owes you that much. Hells, a lot more. As do I.”
Elminster looked at him gravely for a moment. “Thank you.”
He inclined Arclath’s head toward Tracegar and asked, “You need him up on the table?”
“No,” Vangey replied. “Just walk him around it-slowly, mind-as we work on him.”
So Elminster did that, as the two of them, riding Vangerdahast’s spell, drifted into Welwyn Tracegar’s mind together, fogging his memories with spell after overlapping spell so he’d forget all about how he’d helped his prisoners escape. Then they lowered him to the floor and cast simple sleep on him.
“I’ll steady you, once you’re in,” Vangey offered, nodding at the man on the table. “Can’t have you getting up and stumbling over Tracegar, and him waking up thinking he’s facing two traitor mages and a spider-monster that all need blasting.”
El shrugged. “It’s what Glathra would do.”
Vangerdahast was still chuckling ruefully at that when the young wizard on the table stirred, then started to convulse and thrash.
“Don’t try to get off the table yet,” he advised. “I have to reassure Lord Delcastle here about what we’re up to, first, or he might just decide not to catch you when you start to topple.”
Spiderlike fingers rose to point down over the edge.
“Arclath, try not to step on Tracegar, there. He’ll look a bit odd with boot-prints all over his face, when they find him sleeping in a bed he shouldn’t be in, somewhere in the palace.”
