backed onto the dining room from a different corridor. He snarled and rushed around through the foyer linking the taphouse to the inn, turned right, and found a hallway that paralleled the one in the taphouse. A gangly, teenaged servant lad stood in front of an open storeroom, a small keg in his arms. Rhovann pushed past him to look in the storeroom. Amid the clutter of casks and barrels, he saw the gleam of light shining through from the dining room on the other side, with a small space cleared by the spyhole. There was even a blanket on the floor.
He turned on the serving lad standing there. “Who was in here? Where did he go? Speak, boy!”
The youth gaped at him before he found his voice. “It-it was a woman, m’lord, with black hair and a blue cloak. I opened the door to fetch this keg and found her on the floor there, looking through the hole. She-she leaped up and ran out.”
“Which way?” Rhovann demanded.
The boy nodded down the hallway behind him. “There’s a door to the alleyway back there. I heard her go through.”
Rhovann ran to the end of the hall and burst out into the dark alleyway behind the inn. He looked left, then right, but he saw no sign of his quarry. A moment later Valdarsel appeared behind him. “No sign of our mouse?” he asked.
Rhovann shook his head. “No. She’s gone. The boy said she was a black-haired woman in a blue cloak.”
Valdarsel scowled. “That could be anybody. Damn it all to the depths of Nessus!”
“No one followed me here or knew that I was coming,” Rhovann said. He looked at the Cyricist. “Our mouse was spying on you, not me. Perhaps the folk of the Three Crowns have come to know you better than you would like.”
“Oh, trust me, I intend to question them rigorously.” The cleric kicked at the ground and walked in a small circle, composing himself. “How much did she hear, I wonder?”
“Assume that she heard everything until we have reason to believe otherwise.”
“We need to find her, then. Tonight.” Valdarsel took a deep breath and looked at Rhovann. “Do you have any divinations that might help?”
“Divinations, no. But I might be able to do something else.” Rhovann headed back inside with the priest trailing him and returned to the storeroom. The serving boy was gone; he’d fled back to the taphouse with his keg as quickly as possible, it seemed. He kneeled by the place where the spy had crouched, and spoke the words of a light spell to illuminate the scene. There was the blanket-an old saddle blanket, he saw-a small candle in a tin holder, and a few crumbs of bread and cheese. Whoever it was, she had waited for some time for Valdarsel to arrive. Then something glinted in the light. He reached down and retrieved a long, fine strand of black hair from the blanket.
“Have you found something?” Valdarsel asked.
Rhovann showed him the hair. “It may be enough. I must return to my chambers and make some preparations.”
“Go swiftly, then. We must catch this mouse before she squeaks.” The priest smiled cruelly. “While you essay your magic, I will find out what I can from the servants of the house. Someone besides that boy knew she was here.”
“Very well,” said Rhovann. He hurried outside to the alleyway and spoke the words of his flying spell. In the space of a moment he soared up over the rooftops, leaving the dark alleyway behind the Three Crowns behind him. This time he did not have to search out his destination with care; he could see the lights of the Marstel manor from the moment he rose above the rooftops of the Tailings. With all the speed the spell allowed him, he raced back toward Lord Marstel’s home, high above the town in the richest part of the Easthead.
He easily avoided the guards at the front gate by alighting in a little-used garden behind the grand house. Rhovann had appropriated the northerly wing of the Marstel manor as his own months ago, evicting the other residents. It gave him space to set up a library, a laboratory, and a conjury for his arcane studies, and also made it easy for him to leave or return to the estate without being observed. He knew he would have been wiser to keep his quarters right next to Maroth Marstel’s own chambers, but he detested the old man and wanted an excuse to keep him at some small distance when he could. Instead he made sure that Marstel’s servants and guards never left the old man’s side and knew to summon him the instant Marstel did anything he wasn’t supposed to.
The elf made his way into his rooms and went at once to his conjury. This room he kept sealed with a spell of locking, which he undid with a word and a gesture. In the center of the room a large, magical diagram of beaten silver was inlaid into the polished stone floor; shelves and worktables along the walls held a variety of arcane reagents and materials. When he entered the room, a hulking figure in a vast black cloak stepped into the light-a pale creature almost the size of an ogre, with doughy flesh and lusterless black eyes. It reached one great hand toward him.
“It is I, Bastion,” Rhovann said absently. The golem halted at once, its arm falling to its side. “Has anyone tried to enter since last I left?”
The creature shook its head in a slow, deliberate gesture.
“Good,” Rhovann muttered. He looked around the room and found the item he was searching for-a large, thick glass jar filled with dark liquid. Inside floated a small, malformed creature about the size of a cat. He carried the jar over to the center of one of his worktables then used a small chisel to break apart the old, brittle wax seal that fastened the lid to the neck of the jar. Bastion stood by and watched him at his work, its eyes dead and dark. A rank, briny smell greeted Rhovann’s nostrils when he pried off the lid.
Rhovann held his left hand over the jar then used a small, sharp knife to cut the tip of a finger. He squeezed a single drop of blood into the dark fluid where the creature floated. Nothing happened at first, but then the thing inside began to move slowly. Its limbs twitched weakly, and its beady eyes opened. “Come, little one,” he said to the thing in the jar. “I have need of you tonight.”
The creature-a homunculus, it was called-climbed awkwardly out of the jar and slid to the tabletop in a splatter of dark brine. It unfurled a pair of batlike wings and flapped them slowly, drying itself. Its motions were growing stronger, more confident, with every moment. Rhovann allowed himself a smile of satisfaction. Creating a homunculus was a tedious and unpleasant task, but now he was going to reap the reward of his own foresight from many months ago. He took the strand of hair he’d found in the spy’s nest at the Three Crowns and gave it to the creature.
“Find the woman whose hair this is,” he said. “Do not allow yourself to be seen. Then return, and tell me who she is, and where she may be found. If you do not find her by sunrise, return and tell me so.”
“Yes-s, mas-ter,” the homunculus said in a small, wheezing voice.
Rhovann went to the room’s window, opened it, and threw open the heavy shutter outside. “Now go,” he said to the homunculus. The creature hopped from the tabletop to the windowsill, tested its wings, and threw itself out into the night. It flew clumsily at first, but quickly grew stronger and steadier. When it flapped out of sight, it was flying as well as any big, heavy-bodied bird. The mage tended to the cut on his finger and then settled down to wait. Since there was little more he could do until the homunculus returned, he motioned for Bastion to withdraw and seated himself cross-legged on a low divan against one wall. The elf allowed himself to doze off into the half- memory, half-dreaming state that served as sleep for elfkin. His mind wandered and time passed.
A little more than an hour later, he heard a sudden fluttering and scratching at his window. He rose and went to let in the homunculus. The little creature scrabbled across the windowsill to the table nearby. “Well, let us see what you have learned,” Rhovann said to the creature. It could not truly understand him, of course, but it knew what it was supposed to do. It crouched down and held still. The elf mage reached out to rest his living hand atop its head and intoned the words of the spell that would reveal to him what his spy had discovered.
He closed his eyes, the better to focus on the images of the creature’s memories. He saw its wild, fluttering flight across the rooftops of Hulburg. It stopped frequently, clinging to the eaves of houses or prowling over the rough wooden shakes of roofs, snuffling and tasting the air as it sought the woman. At first it seemed to move more or less at random, a few hundred yards this way, then a few hundred yards back, but soon its movements became more urgent, more focused. It moved to the east side of the Winterspear River and headed to the north side of town, not far from the foot of the castle Griffonwatch, flapping past a handful of passersby and drunks staggering through the streets despite the late hour. The homunculus steered wide around any people it encountered. Once Rhovann saw a Shieldsworn guard by the castle’s battlements look up with a startled expression on his face, but no one else seemed to notice the winged monster. It soon alighted on an old split-rail fence by a small farmhouse in the middle of an apple orchard and crawled closer on its wings and feet. In his mind’s eye Rhovann saw the thing
