language. They came a damn long way to steal that girl and her dowry.'
Druhallen pitied the misbegotten girl, but cut was cut and his pity was worthless. He hoped she was dead. The dead didn't remember… usually.
Leaning on each other, the friends surveyed the killing ground. It was just as well that Galimer's eyes weren't working too well. He was spared what Dru saw all too clearly once the sun was up. Whatever had killed Ansoain had torn her apart like so much stale bread. He recognized her by pieces: bits of cloth and scalp, a bloody chunk of her hand with fingers and rings still attached.
Fighting nausea, Druhallen retrieved her rings. They were magically potent, not to mention intrinsically valuable. It was difficult, for many reasons, to understand why they'd been left behind.
'She'd want you to have them,' he told Galimer as he pressed the metal bits into his friend's hand. 'Now, let's get out of here. I can see a few of the horses. You be the hands, I'll be the eyes…'
Galimer balked. 'Guide me to the hilltop. Maybe those bastards left something traceable behind.'
'Cut is cut,' Druhallen muttered, but he led Galimer through the grass.
The scents of spellcraft and malice lingered on the hilltop, and something else: a palm-sized glass disk. The disk was dark, but neither black nor completely opaque. So smooth and slick that it slipped through Druhallen's fingers when he tried to retrieve it. The disk was colder than the claw of winter when he finally had it in his grasp.
Ignoring numbed fingers, Dru held it up to the risen sun. Gold flecks sparkled within the icy glass.
'There's something written on the edge,' Galimer interrupted.
'I thought your eyes were bad.'
'My body's eyes. My mind's eye sees clearly enough. That thing reeks of sorcery and there's writing on the edge.'
Dru rearranged his fingers and saw the truth of Galimer's statement. 'I don't recognize the script.'
'Doesn't it tell you something through your fingertips?' Galimer asked.
'Only that it's colder than winter.'
Dru balanced the lens in his left hand. It was an agonizing error. He gasped and the disk thumped to the grass. While Druhallen swore at himself and his pain, Galimer swept the grass with his hands.
'Sweet Mystra!' the gold-haired mage swore as he clutched, then dropped, the glass. 'Cold's not the half of it!'
'Aye, but what is that other half?'
Galimer pinched his fingertips to the scripted edge and lifted the disk carefully. 'How about a way to control their undead minions?'
Dru considered the possibility. 'Did you see the robes they were wearing when they first appeared?'
'That was the last thing I did see. Their robes were red.'
'Red robes. Red-robed wizards. The Red Wizards of Thay. They pool their magic and one wizard casts the spells for all of them. Nobody-nobody-knows how they do it. Until now.'
Druhallen fumbled with his folded magic box. It would have been easier to manipulate with both hands, but he'd designed it for single-handed work. As the hidden locks opened, the box unfolded, increasing in size and complexity. Reagents filled the revealed compartments. Dru's traveling spells were etched into the compartment dividers. With the third unfolding, he found an empty compartment large enough to hold the disk.
Galimer squirted the disk into the empty compartment. 'Being cold and dark, it's more likely a device for controlling the undead.'
'It's the circles.' Dru clung to his opinion as if it were one he'd held for a lifetime though, before today, he hadn't given more than ten thoughts to Thay in the last year. 'Anyone can control the undead. You or I could, if we chose to learn the art. But only the Red Wizards rely on the undead, because their circles make it feasible to control whole bone-yards. The arrogance! They descend from nowhere, take what they want, leave everyone for dead, and don't even bother to collect their trash.'
'Is it trash? How can you be sure? It didn't feel spent to me.'
'It's cold and dark,' he snapped. 'If it's not spent, it's useless.'
'Not useless,' Galimer countered thoughtfully. 'We can use it to prove that we were ambushed by the Red Wizards. That ought to put the wind in the Zhentarim.'
'Mind what you say,' Dru said, sobering quickly though he had had similar thoughts a few moments ago. 'Or we'll get caught between the Black Network and the Red Wizards.' He folded the box and let it hang against his hip. 'When we get to Elversult, we tell the Network that we were ambushed, but that we never saw what hit us. And we don't tell them about finding the disk.'
'Mother…' Galimer protested. 'The girl, the captain and his men, the damn carters… We've got to tell the truth, Dru. There won't be justice without the truth.'
'What justice is there between Thay and the Zhentarim? We'll need a lifetime of luck just to clear our names of this disaster. Talk about red-robed wizards won't help us do that, and neither will a lump of rotten glass-'
'I can't accept that, Dru. Not for her.'
'You don't have to. We'll avenge her ourselves. I swear to you right now and forever: We'll hunt those wizards down. We'll go to Thay, if we have to. We'll find out how they beat us, and well use their secrets against them.'
2
28 Eleasias, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR) West of the Dawn Pass
Druhallen leaned against a rough-plank wall. Fifteen years after Ansoain's death and the thought of her could still set his wrist aching. Especially in a Zhentarim village like Parnast, on the rump of the Dawn Pass Trail, when the natural heat of a northern summer met the unnatural heat creeping off the nearby Anauroch desert.
The breeze coming through the open window was moving heat. The shade where Dru sat was dark heat. The air burned with the yellow dust of Anauroch. A storm was coming-possibly from the desert, certainly in the rented room he shared with his partners.
'I'll lodge a protest. There's law in this town,' Galimer fumed as he paced the room's not-considerable width. 'They've forfeited their earnest money, that's given.'
'Wonderful! I'm sure they cared about their earnest money!' Rozt'a shot back.
Florozt'a had come into Dru and Galimer's lives a few years after Ansoain's death. They were all younger then and she'd been new to the journeying life. She'd sold her sword to a Zhentilar captain who'd only pretended to value her fighting skills. When he'd tried, one too many times, to demonstrate what he did value from women, she'd left him writhing on the ground.
It had been a short-lived victory. Rozt'a had quickly found herself without a contract and stranded on the empty road east of Triel with no more than her sword, the clothes on her back, and a leaking waterskin. The gods knew what might have happened next if Druhallen and Galimer hadn't been riding magic with the next eastbound caravan. They'd both remembered the striking woman and her boorish captain, and judged that he'd deserved whatever damage she'd done to him, maybe more.
Riding double behind Galimer, she'd said that wizards who journeyed the Western Heartlands should hire their own bodyguards and not rely on someone else's muscle to protect them when the going got rough. Dru and Galimer, who scarcely needed words to exchange ideas, then or now, had hired her on the spot, more from pity than need. But Rozt'a fit comfortably between them, and by the end of that season they were a threesome.
Rozt'a's hair was a few shades yellower than Galimer's and cropped ragged just below her ears. She was tall for a woman. In the sun, with her hair standing wild, she was nearly as tall as Druhallen and broader across through shoulders, in any weather, than Galimer. She and Galimer could pass themselves off as siblings. From behind, with her weapons and leathers about her, Rozt'a passed for the brother.
When her temper was blazing as it did in the rented room, a wise man kept his head tucked low.
'What's a bit of earnest to the likes of them?' she ranted. 'If they cared about their precious earnest, they'd have waited for us. They were in one damn hurry and we're three full, forsaken days early ourselves! Helm's eyes! One nose-full of trouble and they ran with the first Zhentarim spend-spell who admired the shine in their purses. I
