“You toy with me,” the dragon growled, and the fingers of his right hand snapped out like whips, transforming instantly into talons to match his left. “Don’t toy with me. Tell me to kill her. Tell me to kill them all.”
Marek spoke an incantation and gathered a feeling of calm. He took a deep breath, held it for a few heartbeats while Insithryllax continued to slowly transform, bit by bit, in front of him. When the Red Wizard exhaled he sent a wave of calm washing over the dragon. It was a simple spell, but one Marek was^onfident would at least slow the black dragon’s mounting rage.
“Save your breath,” the dragon said. “You know you want her dead. She’ll start on the dock workers next. She’ll destroy everything you’ve built.”
“Not just her, though,” Marek said. The dragon turned away, wings beginning to sprout from his slowly- widening back. “That’s the thing, my friend. Kill her, attack her at the temple, and we make an enemy of her whole faith. They are hardly to be concerned with one at a time, but should their goddess take notice of”
“Goddess?” the dragon shot back, his voice so loud and so low-pitched it set Marek’s ears ringing.
The girl who’d been watching them from the door slapped her hands to her ears.
“Leave us…” Marek called to her, but he couldn’t remember her name,”… you. Leave us!”
The girl had her hands over her ears and couldn’t hear.
“Girl!” Marek screamed.
Insithryllax turned in her direction and she screamed, her hands still over her ears. Marek shouted for her to run, but she couldn’t hear him. A cloud of black mist washed over her, expelled from Insithryllax’s head, which had fully transformed into the head of a dragon. When the mist hit her, her skin blistered. She opened her mouth to scream again and inhaled a deep breath of acid. Instead of another scream, what came out was a white and pink froth. Her eyes melted into her skull and were gone entirely in less than a single heartbeat. The girl lived too long, dissolving away while trying to breathe and scream, but succeeding only in sizzling.
When she finally collapsed, Insithryllax tipped his head up into the sky and roared as his neck stretched. His tail lashed out behind him, his wings burst into full form, and he dropped onto all fours.
Marek ran through a spell more potent than the last, one that would temporarily rid the dragon of any intellect at all, leaving him open to whatever calming suggestion the Red Wizard chose to imbed in his consciousness.
“Insithryllax, please,” he said.
The dragon stretched his wings and with a groan his transformation was complete. “My friend, I-“
“No!” the black wyrm shouted. Marek stepped back, feeling as though the dragon’s voice had physically pushed him. “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill them all. I’ll reduce their temple to mud. I’ll melt them from the face of Toril.”
Marek tried to make eye contact with the wyrm, but Insithryllax wouldn’tor couldn’t look him in the eye.
The Red Wizard brought a spell to mind as the dragon leaped into the air. It wasn’t easy casting it in the wash of dust and leaves under Insithryllax’s titanic wings, but he did his best to hold firm.
Marek’s spell opened a gray-black doorway in the air an arm’s length in front of the dragon, who flew blindly into the slowly-rotating zone of darkness. Without pause, the dragon, blind with rage, flew into the middle of it. When the last fraction of an inch of the black dragon’s tail passed through the horizon of the effect, Marek slammed it shut with an exertion of his will.
The door in the sky disappeared and took the dragon with it.
“Master,” a voice sounded from behind and above the Red Wizard. “Is everything well?”
“No,” Marek answered, then stopped himself and cleared his throat. “Everything is fine, but someone will have to clean up the… the…” Marek pointed at the still-sizzling remains of the acid-melted apprentice alchemist, “… the mess, over there.”
“The dragon is gone, Master?” another of the apprentices called from a window.
“He’s gone, yes,” Marek said with a sigh. He folded his arms across his chest and sighed again. He closed his eyes, thinking, wondering what could have come over Insithryllax. “He’s gone back to the Land of One Hundred and Thirteen.”
“Will he be back?” asked yet another wizard, one visiting from Thazrumaros to help the growing staff of the Innarlith enclave master the art of creating magic wands.
“No,” Marek said even as he considered whether he should bother answering at all. “He won’t be back until I bring him back.”
“Please don’t, Master,” the wandmaker said in a voice loaded with fear and on the edge of panic.
35
5 Eleasias, the Yearof Rogue Dragons (1373 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith
All of his best Shou ceramics and it was fine indeed was set out. Not a single detail had been overlooked. The silver shone so brightly in the candlelight it was difficult for him to look at the table. The crystal stemware glimmered with tiny rainbows, and the table linens were as white as fresh-fallen snow. A line of wine bottles had been opened and decanted, left to breathe a little too long already. The foodprepared by a small army of cooks who had long since gonesat cooling on silver trays on a huge mahogany sideboard he’d purchased specially for the event.
Willem sat in a stiff, uncomfortable chair he’d had for years and didn’t remember ever having sat in. He let the breath out through his nose.
“I’ll be going to bed now,” his mother said, her voice barely more than a whisper, from behind him. “Unless you…?”
She didn’t finish, but Willem shook his head anyway. Of course he didn’t expect his mother, only two months back in Innarlith from Cormyr, to help him clean up. As the only witness to what had become the most humiliating day of his life, he really just wanted her to go upstairs, go to bed, and perhaps forget what she had seen that evening.
“Willem, my dear?”
He turned to look at her and winced at the look of disappointment that was written so plainly on her face. She looked away as though he were diseased or in some way deformed. She looked away as though he were a beggar in the street. Without another word she shuffled off, her long silk gown rustling, the jewelry he’d bathed her in tinkling with each step.
He sat there for some time longer, watching the candles shrink, dripping wax on the clean linen. Willem knew the last thing he’d be able to do was sleep. He needed someone to tell him whytell him how, tell him when he had been abandoned by everyone. How could all two hundred invitations be ignored?
He didn’t understand, his mother wouldn’t know, and Willem Korvan had no one else to talk tono one except Marek Rymiit.
Willem stood and smoothed his fine wool waistcoat with trembling hands. He didn’t bother calling for a coach, though it was a walk of four long blocks from his home to the Thayan Enclave. He breathed deeply of the summer air, and as he walked he tried not to make eye contact with any of the people who strolled the lanternlit streets. He knew that too many of themespecially the ones who made a point to cross the street when they caught sight of himhad been on his guest list.
When he presented himself at the gates to the enclave, he was admitted without question, as though the guards had been told to expect him. As he passed through the tall wrought-iron gate, Willem tried to remember when Marek Rymiit had hired guards. He looked up at the building as he approached the door, and though parts of it were familiar, much of it had changedtoo much of it, he thought, since the last time he’d been there. But then, try as he might, he didn’t quite remember exactly when he’d last been thereanyway, not long enough for the grand house to be converted into what more closely resembled a castle bailey: a cluster of buildings inside a walled enclosure.
“Senator?” the guard said, even that one word thick with the peculiar, gruff accent of Thay. When Willem stopped to look at him, the guard continued, “The master will see you in his private study.”
Willem nodded, not sure what that meant or where he should go. Obviously sensing that confusion, the guard motioned for him to follow and led him to a low stone housefor all appearances a pleasant country cottage
