The Simbul's Gift (16 page)

“Yesterday, the bitch-queen came to that village where Mythrell'aa's minions waited. They had neither the wit to recognize her before she recognized them, nor the strength to stop her after that.”

“Mythrell'aa's a fool.”

The spy master nodded. All the zulkirs were fools,
squandering Thay's wealth and energy in endless rivalries while the real enemy got away. “A fool who
knew
the silver-eyed queen was coming to that village, looking for a horse—that horse—and the mongrel who bred and raised him.”

Too late, Aznar Thrul heard what she was saying. He looked at the plate without laughter or mockery. “Final sight?” he asked, naming one of the spells that forged the image. “Did anyone survive?”

“No, my lord.” The spy master gave her employer the customary form of respect, but not the content. Never again the content. They were enemies now, though he didn't know it. She would bring him down. “The silver-eyed bitch slew everyone, hers and ours alike. She wanted no witnesses to her thievery.”

Thrul offered her the plate as if nothing had happened between them. “Show me.”

Once the spy master would have been pleased to cast the variation of Deaizul's final sight that would animate the tarnish. It wouldn't have bothered her that Thrul needed to invade her mind to see what she saw. Once it had seemed reasonable that a zulkir should have the means to possess another wizard's mind; reasonable that he never committed the final sight spells—of which he had a complete set, written on parchment, embellished with gold leaf and the tattoos of the Invoker whose duplicity had inspired Deaizul to create them—to his memory.

Now, with hatred souring her judgment, the request and its consequential invasion of her consciousness flooded the spy master with another passion: contempt. She bowed her head anyway, invoking the spell with precise gestures and a single word, submerging her passions into the needs of the moment. No one knew better than a spy master that vengeance required time.

Thrul's thoughts mingled with the spy master's as the spell played out the last moment of four lives. Three had died suddenly, blindly, in a skirmish of lightning and fire, but the fourth had survived the initial carnage. Laying low, he'd watched the witch-queen search each ramshackle barn until she found one that held her attention. He was creeping closer when his attention swung to one side: two more survivors, a village youth—a mongrel from the
forest—and one of Mythrell'aa's minions, fought each other. The wizard was exhausted; the mongrel, lucky. Another Thayan died and the mongrel, carrying a small human girl, headed into the barn the witch-queen hadn't left. Using the youth as his stalking-horse, the spy followed.

The last image the spy's mind had held was a frozen scene: the queen and the gray horse, the mongrel and the little girl. The queen and the mongrel argued—the tone was unmistakable, though the words were garbled—until the silver-eyed queen noticed the spy. His life ended in flame and terror.

“Is there more?” the zulkir asked.

The spy master nodded, triggering the darkest spell of Deaizul's devising. After-death vision was deeply shadowed and without color. It saw the living world through a narrow slit in a floating sphere: a mangled corpse, an empty stall, footprints in the dirt, all pointing in the same direction. The trail led outside, to a large blackened circle. There was no trace of the witch-queen, the horse, the mongrel, or the human girl.

Thrul sucked his teeth pensively as the necromantic vision ended.

The spy master spoke first, to break the silence. “Something went wrong. Wherever she was headed, it's likely she didn't arrive.”

“Rest assured that she did, woman. The silver-eyed bitch has Beshaba's luck: her misfortune never falls on her head. Those others paid the price.”

The spy master shrugged. “Our spies along the coast will send word when she reappears, or if she doesn't.”

“Good, woman. Why a horse, though? If she saved anything, she saved that horse: it's what she went after in the first place. Find out what was special about it … or that boy. He wasn't human—one of those forest mongrels.”

“Yes, my lord.”

She needed no instructions in her craft from Aznar Thrul. The zulkir's arrogance propelled her to a decision not to reveal the true reason for her visit: There had to be a connection between that gray horse and the gods-brewing mystery that had lured Deaizul into the Yuirwood, a connection that now involved the witch-queen
herself. Deaizul wasn't a particularly potent wizard, no match for the witch-queen. The spy master feared that he might need help and had hoped that the Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir of the Priador would agree to provide that help.

Now she wouldn't bother to ask, but she needed some explanation, some quick excuse to account for her unscheduled visit. One that had already crossed her mind and might even cross Aznar Thrul's mind. “I wonder, my lord, how Mythrell'aa knew where to place her minions, how she knew that one particular horse in that one particular village would draw the bitch-queen's attention.”

Thrul stroked his beardless chin. “Yes,” he said slowly. “How, indeed. Better spies, woman?”

“Unlikely, my lord. These were the first minions she's sent into Aglarond since you came to Bezantur, and half were castoffs from other schools. She had help, my lord, of one kind or another.”

“Help inside Aglarond or inside Thay?”

The spy master nodded. “One kind or the other,” she repeated. “To find out which, there must be pressure here in Bezantur.”

“That can be arranged, woman. Easily arranged. I've waited for this day! I warned her when I took the Priador tharchionate that her time was up. Two zulkirs cannot live in the same city. She swore no interest in politics and broke her oath last winter. She thought Szass Tam had me on the rocks, but he's the one who foundered in the spring. He's not the lich he was! I'll tighten the noose; you watch who runs where, and then we'll call everyone in to account.” Thrul straightened in his chair. “Well done, woman. I expect nothing less of you.” He returned her carnelian token. “No hard feelings?”

She fastened the token to her gauze gown, pointedly ignoring the stains where she'd bled after the fall. “None at all, my lord.”

Alassra's chambers were in chaos. Artifacts were strewn everywhere, as if a restless child had played with each for a moment, then discarded it. Spellbooks, some of them older than she and written in languages unknown in the realms, were heaped haphazardly in the middle of her work chamber. Every table top was clear for the first time since she created this bolt-hole. The walls were bare, the shelves emptied of all but her most fragile mementoes, none of them magically useful—gifts from her sisters, a lock of her mother's hair, the thorn branch she'd taken from Lailomun's pillow.

She'd learned the domestic cantrips for cleaning centuries ago, but simple magic never intrigued her. The storm queen had always been better at whipping up the weather than containing the dust that burst from an ancient tome. She sneezed—which didn't help her or the spellbook she held—and got to her feet, a feral growl rumbling in her throat.

“Where did all this come from? Who brought it here?”

The most rhetorical of rhetorical questions: No one else was in the room. No one else had ever been in the room. Even her sisters and Elminster, back when the Old Mage accepted her invitations, went no further than the antechamber where the little Sulalk girl was now sleeping on a gilded daybed that had once belonged to a queen of Chondath. (Alassra hadn't wanted to disturb the palace with her return when she expected—or had expected—to be leaving quickly. When she had everything back under control, when she could spare a thought for the little girl's care, then would be soon enough to throw the royal household into an uproar.)

Alassra had accumulated, abandoned, and forgotten the entire mess herself. She'd never had a permanent home before Velprintalar. She'd cached her few possessions throughout Faerûn in warded boxes, none of them larger than a seaman's chest. Her life had been the pursuit of knowledge and adventure, not things, not until she became a queen.

Royalty acquired and accumulated. From her deathbed, Queen Ilione had warned her apprentice and heir:
Clean out the past. Don't let it pull you under
. Alassra had taken the words metaphorically, ignoring many of Aglarond's dearly held traditions as she established her reign, but Ilione had intended a more literal interpretation.

If dust had market value, the queen of Aglarond was the richest woman in Faerûn.

She muttered another cantrip at the opened tome. Parchment sheets broke loose from the brittle binding. Two fluttered out the window, the spells written upon them lost for eternity, if Alassra didn't catch them before they vanished in the ether.

She didn't.

“Cold tea and crumpets! Where does the dust come from?”

Tucking those sheets she had rescued beneath the back cover, Alassra began a page-by-page examination of the spellbook. A spell for the transmutation of sand into glass caught her attention. The other variants she knew produced crystal-clear glass, no matter the color or coarseness of the sand. This one, cruder in concept, yielded glass as mottled as its component sand. A little tinkering and it might yield stained glass panels.

Alassra growled again. After the dust, distraction was the worst part of cleaning. She hadn't meant to
read
her spellbooks, merely
look
at them, examine the pages for some vagrant mote of magecraft placed there or exploited by an enemy. There could be no other explanation for the ambush she'd triggered in Sulalk. Outside this chamber, only her sisters knew of her interest in the twilight-colored colt, because no one else could be trusted not to tell the Old Mage. She'd spied on the village in utmost secrecy from this chamber and someone, somehow, had spied on her.

On her! On Alassra Shentrantra, the Simbul, the witch-queen who'd mastered every kind of magic but was—perhaps—a bit behind in her housekeeping and careless with all these
things
she scarcely remembered acquiring.

Not totally careless, she assured herself. Alassra routinely examined everything she touched for magic and malice. The way she attracted enemies, vigilance was an absolute essential, but the Simbul rarely resorted to artifice. When she needed to eavesdrop, she'd transform herself into a spoon and ride the soup tureen up from the kitchen. Not many mages, though, shared her sense of humor; fewer still had the skill and imagination to bind themselves into a nonliving shape.

The mirror had been the most likely suspect, since the ambushers had been Red Wizards and the mirror was the artifact she used to keep an eye on both Thay and the colt. As soon as she'd gotten the little girl bedded down, Alassra had subjected it to a thorough examination. It had come up innocent of any tampering. She'd thrown a quilt—also examined—over it to keep the dust off while she probed the rest of her artifacts. Confronted with the prospect of scrutinizing every page in her considerable library, Alassra decided to give the mirror a second going-over. She dribbled patterns of salt and rainwater across the dome.

“All right.” She cracked her knuckles. “East, to Thay! Show me the tharchions and zulkirs. Show me Thrul and Szass Tam. Show me that damned Mythrell'aa. Show me Lauzoril last.”

If any one of them had a connection with the mirror—if they
knew
anyone with a connection—the water would become steam and the salt would burst into brilliant yellow flame. Alassra watched as familiar patterns swirled in the glass. She marked a mutation in the Bezantur pattern: Aznar Thrul and Mythrell'aa were probing each other. When rivals squabbled, enemies paid attention. Otherwise Thay was unchanged until the end. Where she expected to see Lauzoril's rogue-handsome face, there was only a spiral as green as his eyes.

Alassra glanced anxiously at the salt and rainwater patterns. Short of the mirror itself, smiling Lauzoril was her prime suspect. She wasn't at all relieved to discover that a day after the Sulalk ambush, his reflection had gone
abstract. But there was neither steam nor flame.

“Show me everyone who wishes me harm.” The mirror went black and began vibrating. “Sorry—bad question. Set it aside.” The vibrations ceased. Alassra restored the patterns. “Show me Aglarond. Show me those who would work knowingly for the Red Wizards.”

The mirror revealed a handful of faces. Red Wizardry had been Aglarond's dread enemy for generations. There were few households that didn't memorialize someone slain by Thayan magic, fewer still with members who would openly consort with the enemy, and the Simbul's mirror knew them all. Alassra used Aglarond's traitors as bloodhounds, letting them flush out the Thayan plots and minions that penetrated her realm.

They did very little that wasn't discreetly observed, by her or by her living accomplices, but it was possible that mistakes had been made. A traitor might have made a Thayan connection without her becoming aware of it, but that wouldn't account for Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk.

Waiting.

Alassra considered the implications.
She'd
known her attackers for what they were by the reek of Thayan wizardry surrounding them, but none of the villagers had her skills. To them, the Red Wizards had been strangers. What might an ordinary Aglarondan say to a curious stranger? The mirror couldn't tell her what the Sulalkers might have said yesterday or the day before, but the question still seemed worth asking:

“Show me Aglarond. Show me those who speak ill of me or wish me the same.”

The Simbul anticipated more faces than before: She was Aglarond's queen, not the bosom friend of each Aglarondan. Being fair meant everyone's fur got rubbed the wrong way once in a while.