Bury Elminster Deep

CHAPTER FIVE

A Purple Dragon horn call rose into the air.

“Gods, again?” The veteran Dragon lionar was running out of profanities. He spun away from the table of drunkards he’d been about to glower down at, and strode hastily back out of the tavern. His men, some of them groaning, followed him in a weary thunder of hurrying boots.

Manshoon drifted out of the shadows to watch them, not quite smiling. Tension had been rising in the city all day; skirmishes had erupted between various nobles’ bodyguards in clubs, taverns, and then the streets, and not long past highsun the “to arms” had been sounded, calling all Dragons out of barracks to establish order.

The Council of the Dragon had been proclaimed to begin not this day but on the morrow-and Suzail was not taking the news well.

Rumors were racing from table to table and along the alleys. Of course. Some had King Foril dead, and others swore a dozen nobles had been hunted down and butchered by royal command, though no two tales seemed to agree on just which lords had met their bloody ends. Still others said tombs in the royal crypt had burst open and the dead kings of Cormyr were stalking the palace, furious at Foril for even thinking of curtailing royal powers-and rending servants, courtiers, and wizards of war alike limb from limb in their displeasure.

Vangerdahast had returned from the grave, transformed into a horrid skull-headed monster, one particularly gruesome tale insisted, and was demanding noblewomen be brought to him “to breed a new line to warm the Dragon Throne.”

Manshoon had chuckled aloud at that one. It sounded so unlike that old fool Vangerdahast-and so much like something Elminster might have tried.

Yes, he was going to enjoy blaming things on Elminster. Why, he might be able to keep that useful line of besmirchment going for decades, and use it to cloak all manner of wayward butchery…

Not that he had overmuch time to spare for such pleasant musings just now. Not with half a dozen new blackhearted traitors to recruit from among the ambitious lesser nobility. The young Houses, those lowly highborn so hungry for more power that they’d do almost anything. They were here to gain anything they could and would listen to a certain sort of whispering.

A handful of them might be capable enough to prove useful, and Manshoon would seek out these few.

He smoothly thrust aside a curtain and stepped to the elbow of one of the useful few. “Lord Andolphyn?”

A sharp-featured man looked up with a doubtful frown from the splendid decanter he’d been about to unstopper, the twin daggers of his forked chin-beard glistening with the scented wax that kept them teased into two points. “Do I know you, sirrah? How did you get in here?”

“Your guards are… mere swordswingers, Naeryk. No match for a wizard of war.”

A gasp came from the men clustered around Andolphyn in this back tavern alcove, but Manshoon gave them all a soft smile and added, “And still less of a match for me.”

After a moment of uncertain silence, many of the men cast swift glances at their master, seeking guidance with hands hovering near blade hilts.

Lord Naeryk Andolphyn seemed to be having some sort of silent seizure; he’d gone stiffly upright in his chair and trembled violently, his eyes rolled up in his head. Then, quite suddenly, he’d relaxed. His face went smooth, his eyes reappeared, and a smile swam onto his face.

“At ease, all,” he said huskily. “I… remember this man. An old friend. A very old friend.”

Manshoon clapped the lord’s shoulder gently. “Until next time, then,” he murmured and slipped back through the curtain.

One mind invaded and conquered; one man now his. If all of them had such paltry magical protections, all six were going to be that easy. Yes, six should be enough-though it would be far too much to hope that six lordlings, even minor ones, would lack enough magic to prevent such unsubtle assaults.

Andolphyn down, Blacksilver not far ahead…

Smiling his gentle smile, Manshoon strolled on.

“You are here,” Wizard of War Glathra Barcantle said earnestly, leaning forward to stare into the faces of the handful of courtiers in the room, “because the Crown trusts you most deeply, and seeks your counsel.”

“Thank you, Glathra,” King Foril said quietly. “Very well put.”

The four courtiers facing the monarch and the lady wizard refrained from pointing out that the “most deep” trust just mentioned couldn’t be all that deep, given the two mountainous knights in full plate armor kneeling in front of the king, and the three stone-faced wizards of war standing behind him with powerful-looking magical scepters in their hands… but then, they were senior courtiers.

The palace steward was notably absent. In his place sat the palace understeward, Corleth Fentable. The head Highknight Eskrel Starbridge was also missing, gone from the city on a secret mission, but his immediate underling, the well-spoken clerk of vigilance, Sir Talonar Winter, was present in his stead. Next to Winter sat the old, gruff, and very capable Steward of the Regalia Langreth Ironhorn, his towering height and ample girth settled in the stoutest seat, the two sticks he tottered around on gathered into the crook of one of his massive arms. In the last seat, which she’d hitched a hand’s breadth or two away from the others, was Lady of Graces Jalessa Windstone, every bone of her a prim, disapproving perfectionist. Palace protocol was “her charge and her only child,” it was said about Windstone.

“You are here,” Glathra added, “because we are frantically trying to learn the identity of the traitor who introduced the deadly smoke into the Hall of Justice-or at least hit upon some way of finding out who that traitor is.” She watched Fentable’s gaze move to the three mages behind the king, and added quietly, “We are using all the spells we can think of, never fear. We are hoping one of you can think of some other means we might employ, to make sure that-”

Sir Winter gasped, shivered, and reeled in his seat.

Even before anyone could react, they all saw the cause. A ghostly, translucent figure had stepped through the wall behind Winter’s seat and then through the courtier himself to stand facing King Foril Obarskyr.

“Majesty,” she greeted him gravely, ignoring the swords the knights snatched out to thrust at her, “your traitor is Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake. He’s working with others, I believe, but the spells that brought the hay into the palace were his. He couldn’t resist bringing himself into the room to check, just for an instant, after sending in the third burning bale. I saw him.”

“Who are you?” Fentable snapped furiously-as the Lady of Graces fainted dead away and old Ironhorn leaned forward with a delighted chuckle.

The Princess Alusair favored the palace understeward with a look of scorn. “You know very well who I am, Fentable. We’ve seen each other often enough-and I’ve seen rather more of your doings than you’d like me to have witnessed, I’m sure.”

Three scepters were now leveled at the ghostly figure, but Glathra held up a warning hand to keep the mages from unleashing magic just yet. Drawing a wand from her belt to menace the princess, she told Alusair curtly, “I’m not sure we should even listen to a ghost, let alone believe anything you have to say.”

The longtime Steel Regent kept her eyes on those of the king as she shook her head sadly, sparing Glathra not even the briefest of glances.

“Foril,” she sighed, “it seems you’re surrounded by fools. If you’d like a larger one, I can fetch Vangerdahast-or what’s left of him.”

Lord Danthalus Blacksilver proved to be a tall, mellifluous dunderhead. He and the effete, oh-so-sophisticated Lord Lyrannus Tantorn were as easily subverted as Andolphyn had been.

Rather more easily, as both were straining for any chance to win greater influence and respect in a Suzail teeming with wealthier, more arrogant, and far more powerful nobles.

However, Manshoon felt his smile fading when he found Lord Melder Crownrood hunched over a gleaming platter of skewered roast quail at the best table in the Merdragon. Two steely-eyed hired wizards were seated on either side of the nobleman, wands ready in their hands as they stared watchfully at the diners all around. One shifted his scrutiny to Manshoon and sharpened it into a baleful challenge.

Servers hovered nervously in distant doorways, and no wonder. This was the most exclusive and expensive room of one of the haughtiest and most overpriced clubs in the city, the Rearing Merdragon, and those wands were menacing some of the wealthiest citizens of Suzail. Any misunderstanding could mean disaster.

“Come no closer,” one of the wizards told Manshoon in tones of soft menace.

The advancing future emperor took no notice of the man; his slow, deliberate stride continued without hesitation, and his urbane, slightly bored expression never changed.

“Crownrood,” he asked in the gentle purr an indulgent lover might use, as he bent over the quail-chewing lord, “are these lackspells yours? I was unaware they allowed pets in the Merdragon.”

“As they seem to tolerate walking bones in here,” Crownrood replied without looking up, “I suppose they’ll put up with hired mages.”

His tone was dismissive, even bored, but Manshoon noticed the man was clutching his just-emptied skewer like a dagger. A ring on the lord’s dagger hand had begun to glow fitfully.

Ah, Crownrood’s means of knowing his undeath.

Manshoon sighed, sat down in the vacant chair across from Crownrood, and murmured, “I’d like to discuss a little treason with you. Profitable treason, mind.”

A sharp singing, tinkling sound marked a wizard’s point-blank use of his wand-and the twisting of whatever magic it had unleashed into otherwhere, along a silvery astral conduit. Manshoon felt one of his rings crumble to dust in the wake of that defending, its fading taking the wizard’s deadly magic with it, and he quelled a flare of irritation. Such defenses were expensive these days, not swiftly or easily replaced.

“You are refreshingly direct, undead stranger,” Crownrood muttered, turning to meet Manshoon’s gaze for the first time. “Suppose you convince me why I shouldn’t be just as direct with this skewer. Quickly.”

The wizard on Crownrood’s far side glared at Manshoon and then looked away again, surveying the room for other perils. Such as accomplices.

Manshoon bit down on the dried pea he’d been carrying in one cheek, let its cargo of acrid dust fill his mouth, then turned and blew it in the face of the wizard right beside him, who’d just used his wand and was hauling out another one.

The wizard started to cough helplessly, unable to breathe. Not a surprising result, given what the dust was, and that he wasn’t a vampire.

Manshoon went back to ignoring him. Crownrood chose to do so, too, but lifted the skewer meaningfully.

“I have plans for the future rulership of Cormyr that include you, Melder Crownrood. As chancellor of the realm, you will oversee the Purple Dragons and directly command the wizards of war,” Manshoon told him.

“A splendid dream,” Crownrood drawled, though not before a flash of his eyes betrayed his excitement. “And you are, O granter of dreams-?”

“Your master,” Manshoon purred. He leaned forward until they were almost nose-to-nose, and launched the spell that wrapped around his mind, and hurled it into Crownrood’s.

The skewer started to thrust… then fell back. The nobleman shuddered and spun around in his seat to slap aside the wand the alarmed wizard behind him was trying to aim. “Dolt! D’you want to ruin everything?”

“You’re doing something to the Lord Crownrood!” that mage snarled at Manshoon, springing up from his chair to back hastily away and aiming his wand again. “You’re doing it, undead thing!”

The man’s voice rose, and heads turned at nearby tables. Manshoon smiled crookedly, shook his head, and made Crownrood turn to him and do the same, and cast a swift and simple spell.

The wizard’s head burst in a welter of spattering gore. Even before the screams started, Manshoon rose from his chair, drew a knife from his sleeve, and sliced delicately across the throat of the still-coughing wizard, and strode away.

If he’d been wearing his own face, being seen by so many of Cormyr’s high and mighty would have been a grave mistake.

As it was, Crownrood’s mind was his, now. And it was the mind of an accomplished schemer and lawbreaker, who had already been thinking much treason without any help from visiting Manshoon at all.

As he smiled at a server and made the man flinch back out of his way in stammering fear, Manshoon started to hurry. Not out of any fear of lawkeepers; he’d be long gone before any Dragons arrived.

No, there were still two nobles he wanted to recruit-and with Suzail crowded with ambitious feuding nobility and their already-roused bodyguards, finding and reaching his quarries was going to take time.

Lord Jassur Dragonwood and Lord Relgadrar Loroun. Bane and blasphemy, but they even sounded like arrogant idiots…

“Your Majesty,” Glathra said quickly and a trifle sharper than she intended to, “should we place any trust in the words of a ghost, or even listen to them? My experience has been that undead understand little of the changing world around them, clinging instead to what they knew in life, and that they can appear as anyone they please! This might well be an image sent by a hostile mage sitting in Sembia, or the ghost of an exiled traitor noble just pretending to be the Steel Regent, and-”

“Your ‘experience’ has been?” Alusair’s eyes flashed. “Glathra Barcantle, just what experience have you had, treating with ghosts? You always seek to ignore me when you see me around the palace, and frankly, it shouldn’t matter if I’m the lowliest chambermaid or passing street urchin! The moment you hear the slightest hint of possible treachery on the part of any wizard of war, you must investigate-or the House of Obarskyr, and Cormyr as anything other than a wizard-ruled land, is doomed!”

Glathra gave the ghostly princess an angry glare. “A ghost telling me my business? Why, next you’ll be-”

“Holding your peace,” King Foril Obarskyr said firmly, giving Glathra a glare that outshone her own in ferocity. He glowered at her for a long breath before turning to favor Fentable with the same quelling look, slowing the understeward to fumbling uncertainty as he clawed some sort of talisman or magical token out of a belt pouch.

“Ironhorn,” the king of Cormyr added gently, “I believe the Lady of Graces needs reviving. Please?”

Then he turned to face Alusair directly, nodded to her as an equal, and said gravely, “Your Majesty, we thank you for your counsel.”

The ghostly face drifted closer to his and acquired a smile. “Majesty, you do me honor. I’m a ‘Highness,’ and no more. I never ruled as queen, only as regent.”

Foril waved a grey-haired hand. “To me, anyone who defended the Dragon Throne and the realm, when she could have taken both, is a true monarch of Cormyr. Your Majesty.”

Fentable sputtered.

The king rounded on him and said sternly, “My decision, faithful understeward, and my judgment. This royal princess knew the burden and took it on, without enjoying the reward. She served the realm long and well, and made many of our nobles more loyal to the Crown than they had ever been. So slight her not, in my presence or behind my back. Oh, and it is high time that you and many of your fellow courtiers-to say nothing of others in the realm-ceased to mistake my customary reserve and politeness for weakness and vacillation of mind and purpose.”

“Well said,” Ironhorn and Alusair murmured in unintentional unison-and the king astonished everyone in the room by flashing, just for a moment, a boyish grin by way of reply.

Then he turned to Glathra and said politely, “Lady Glathra, I command that Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake be taken into custody and questioned with spells, priestly assistance, and everything else short of mind-reaming. Search his rooms here in the palace. And set tax-scribes to turn up any properties he may own in or near Suzail, that they may be searched without delay. If we wrong him, I’ll tender my apologies.”

Foril looked back at Alusair grimly and added, “Yet, I very much doubt that we will.”

Fentable, face flushed and downcast in the wake of his rebuke, was behind Foril Obarskyr, hidden from the others in the room by the king’s body. That was a good thing for Foril, because it kept the other members of the court from seeing him stiffen, his face change, and his eyes flash with momentary fire-highly unusual behavior for Fentable or, for that matter, any prudent understeward of any high House.

A moment later, Fentable was his usual urbane, almost expressionless self again, but the mind behind those thoughtful eyes was once more crowded, as Fentable’s own sentience quailed and cringed beneath the cold weight of Manshoon’s mind. He had returned to the understeward’s mind in haste and in none-too-good a temper, after conquering the mind of Lord Jassur Dragonwood just in time to hear Mreldrake denounced as a traitor.

Manshoon made Fentable turn away and pass his hand over his eyes to conceal any grimace or eye-flash his swift departure might cause. He had to get to Mreldrake without delay.

“Traitors, traitors everywhere,” he said sardonically, so those were the words the understeward mumbled, in his wake.

The words that made everyone else in the room-save for Lady of Graces Jalessa Windstone, who was still blearily drifting her way back to full awareness-nod grimly.

It was a sentiment every one of them had heard before.

Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake had just risen from the seat of his favorite garderobe in the palace, adjusted his garments, inspected the inside of his nose with a practiced finger, and reached for the door when Manshoon burst into his mind like a dark thunderbolt.

Mreldrake stiffened, swayed in midair with his fingers not quite close enough to the door bellpull to close on it, then lunged for the door in pounding haste.

He had to get across the upper floor of the palace, down the far stair to the easternmost of the tunnels that linked the palace with the sprawling pile of the royal court, traverse that underway, ascend from the court’s uppermost cellar to a certain nondescript linen-cupboard in the southeasternmost corner of the court’s ground floor, and pass through the portal that was hidden there. Without being seen, if possible-as himself, at least-and without raising any sort of cry.

The portal would take him to the fortress of the king’s tower in Marsember, and hopefully buy him time enough to get aboard a ship bound for somewhere more distant than Westgate, before he was traced.

Mind-reaming is not a pleasant death.

He was sprinting along a passage when Manshoon again gripped his mind, flooding him with his master’s growing disgust at his frightened flight, and Mreldrake was forced to slow to a normal walk, open the next door he came to, calmly step into the vacant guestroom beyond that door, and work a magic that would alter his appearance.

A few long, calming breaths later, a rather stocky, plain, middle-aged female wizard of war stepped out of the guestroom, carefully closed its door, and trudged along the passage as if bored and tired, rather than in a hurry to go anywhere at all.

She felt a bit dazed but remembered she had to get to Marsember and take a ship for Turmish or some other distant place, without anyone in the palace knowing. She was on a mission so secret that it would be revealed to her only when she was safely on the waves. Her name was… was Mythandra, but she had to fight to remember that-and it was a fight that brought to her a confused, whirling half-memory of a very powerful and coldly malicious mind departing hers in haste, searing many memories as it went.

Mythandra’s head hurt. She growled wordless displeasure and plodded toward the door that opened into the far stair.

“Traitors, traitors everywhere,” she mumbled-then paused, lifting her head with a frown. Now where had that come from?