four cellar levels and six floors of it, just here.”
“I thought I heard someone moan,” the soldier muttered, looking behind them. Glathra sighed.
“Lord Warder,” she commanded, “you have the right wand handy; are there undead behind us?”
Vainrence smiled, used the wand, and reported, “No.”
Glathra turned to the Dragon, the Highknight with her, and the other three Dragons carefully avoiding her eyes. “Happier?” she asked the soldier briskly.
“Yes, lady,” he replied, managing to convey not even a hint of a sigh. Or a curse.
“Good.” She swept on. “We have much larger worries.”
“Loyal blades,” Vainrence spoke up, “I presume you’ve heard the names Garendor, Argrant, Orkrash, Wyshbryn, and Loagranboydar?”
“The sages who’ve spent years digging through ancient court records, down here somewhere?” the Highknight asked.
Glathra gave him a sharp look, but he added stoutly, “The entire palace knows as much. What we don’t know, any of us, is what they’re looking for. Tidying up and organizing doesn’t take years.”
“Well,” Glathra said tartly, “it can, but yes, those five have spent most of their waking hours in certain deep palace cellars doing rather more than putting records in order. They’ve been tracing royal and noble lineages.”
The Highknight snorted, which earned him another sharp look.
“Yes, clever Sir Hawkmantle, they’re, as you so subtly hint, not merely reading records any commoner can consult in the right royal court offices, any day they choose to. We’re hoping these sages can, by referencing recorded incidents from the past, identify nobles who have, or are likely to have, any inherited personal talent for the Art.”
“You’re hunting the noble who commands a blueflame ghost,” one of the Dragons said quietly.
Glathra stopped dead, so swiftly that they almost ran into her, and gave the man a flat, expressionless look. “I see there’s nothing at all wrong with your wits, Sir Jephford.”
“For years,” the lord warder told the ceiling, “our wizards of war have scorned using such methods to learn more about our nobles’ mastery of magic, trusting instead to scrying and to subversion of-even placing our own mages among-the House wizards hired by all nobles who can afford to do so. Yet this long-practiced vigilance has thus far failed to identify who controls the ghost who slew nobles at the Council, so…”
“You’re willing to try other methods,” Sir Hawkmantle finished the sentence. He did not add “at last,” but his tone of voice made doing so unnecessary.
If the Lady Glathra’s glare could have melted manhoods, he would have suffered such a fate on the spot.
The lord warder flung out an arm to bar Glathra’s way. “I will go first.”
“Lord Vainrence,” Glathra began, “there’s no need-”
“Oh, but there is,” he said firmly. “The little tellsong I cast across the passage here is gone. Meaning powerful magic has been cast, very close by.”
“A tellsong? You never-”
“No, I did not. A secret is something one person knows. Once two know it, that ‘secret’ is better termed ‘realm-wide gossip.’ Wait here.”
Glathra stayed where she was, a little shocked. Vainrence had never been so curt with her before.
A moment later he returned and pointed to two of the Dragons. “With me. You two, guard the Lady Glathra. Swords out.”
Everyone exchanged grim looks.
A few breaths later, Glathra was summoned to join the lord warder and learned why.
The passage they’d been following ended in a large room, which in turn opened into a huge storage cellar. The cellar held the records and the room where the sages worked, in a crowded den of chairs, floating glowstones for lamps, and tables.
No longer. Not only were there no men to be seen nor any hovering glowstones, the furniture and every last record had been reduced to ashes.
Including five neat little piles, standing in a line along a great rectangle of ash that marked where a table had been.
The conflagration had raged long enough ago that all smoke and smell had fled, and everything was cold. Yet a lingering, sickly yellow-green glow played and flickered feebly here and there among the ashes, from the magic that had done this.
“Treason,” Glathra whispered. “Right here, beneath our feet. Beneath the king.”
“Stand back,” Vainrence ordered, spreading his arms. “I must try to learn what befell here.”
Glathra turned and made shooing motions, frowning at the Highknight, who seemed reluctant to move.
He and one of the Dragons obeyed as the lord warder began a long and careful incantation.
Glathra turned back to face him, to intently watch the spell’s results. It was hard for any one person to notice all the details when such a revelation took shape, because so much was revealed so quickly ere it all faded. A second casting would be only a poor echo of the first, a third a ghost of the second, and so on.
Vainrence cast the spell unhurriedly, careful and precise, finishing with a careful flourish.
And the world exploded.
Sir Eldur Hawkmantle was quick. As the blast erupted in front of him, he sprang back, trying to twist around in the air-which promptly gave him a hard shove in his ribs and in a whirling instant slammed him hard into a passage wall that had been far behind him.
He lost consciousness for a moment amid the rolling, booming echoes and swirling dust, but when he was aware again and could move, he discovered he and one wincing and groaning Purple Dragon were the only folk coming to their feet.
Vainrence had unwittingly triggered a waiting trap. A blast of some sort that had-he stared at ashen corpses, crumbling as he watched-fried the other three Dragons, because they happened to be closest.
He dimly remembered seeing Glathra and Vainrence scream, brief tongues of flame spurting from their eyes and mouths ere they’d toppled. Wincing at that memory, he went to them.
They were sprawled atop the older ashes, looking lifeless.
Not scorched, outwardly, and nothing about them seemed broken or missing. Unconscious, and quite possibly brain-burned.
“Search,” he ordered the dazed surviving Dragon, and set an example by stirring the ashes very gently with his sword.
They found nothing, but the glowstones Glathra and Vainrence were wearing began to flicker and fade, so they grimly hoisted the two stricken mages onto their shoulders and began the long, grim trudge back up to where they could find help.
Someone wanted family secrets kept. Someone who had magic to spare.
Storm came in first, with Elminster right behind her.
Mirt was standing with daggers up beside both ears, held ready to throw.
She crooked an eyebrow at him. “You hate being Heljack Thornadarr that much?”
Mirt grinned, resheathed his fangs, and turned to the table behind him, waving them toward a platter piled high with cold roast fowl and a large, lazily steaming bowl of fragrant fieldgreens soup. “Want some?”
“Do Waterdhavians love coins?”
Mirt ladled soup into tankards for them. “So, who’d ye kill tonight? Shall I expect a host of Purple Dragons to soon break down the door, even as the massed wizards of war blast the roof off?”
“No one, and I hope not,” Storm replied wearily, sipping soup and discovering she was ravenous. She waved at the food. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Arclath sent a servant with it. Suitably disguised, so no fear. Said he’ll send a man around on the morrow to teach me to cook.”
El and Storm regarded him with identical frowns of concern, then headed for their bedchamber, snatching up food and taking it with them.
Mirt roared with laughter at their reaction and headed for his own bed, decanter in hand.
After all, only six decanters already lay beside the bed, and his throat was as dry as all Anauroch.
