The Simbul's Gift (18 page)

“We were betrayed. O Mighty Simbul. After you arrived. There were other Red Wizards here. Watching us. Waiting for you. Them.” She pointed a trembling hand at the two corpses Alassra planned to drag back to Velprintalar. “I saw their faces. I could find out. Who they were. Who sent them.”

“Who?”

Vazurmu shook her head. “Don't know. Saw their faces. That's all. Never forget a face. Someone knows. I'll find out. Go back to Thay. To Bezantur. Find out.”

“If you live that long.”

“If I live. O Mighty Simbul.”

Vazurmu might live a bit longer. It wasn't unthinkable. Alassra had come prepared with a greater store of minor healing potions and poultices. She could spare one for Mythrell'aa's traitor. Maybe more than one. Aglarond's queen had a few other Red Wizards stowed in pockets throughout Thay. One never knew when such creatures might be useful.

Nethreene!

Alassra's name—the private name only her sisters, Elminster, and a very few others knew—broke like a storm wave in her mind.

Nethreene, come home—NOW!

She couldn't be certain which sister had summoned her or why, only that it had to be important, had to be heeded. The afternoon had become a time for quick decisions, quick actions. Four unfinished tasks surrounded her: Vazurmu's interrogation, the memorial to the slain Sulalk villagers, the unbranded corpses, and Ebroin, somewhere in the Yuirwood with a strand of her hair tied around his wrist.

In her present state, Vazurmu wouldn't survive a sudden translation to Velprintalar. Alassra couldn't stay in Sulalk long enough to heal her. The two unbranded Red Wizards were nothing more than weight. Hauling them back to the palace wouldn't damage them any more than they already were. But the thought of resurrecting them after leaving Vazurmu behind and the memorial uncreated stuck in the Simbul's craw. Besides, if there were two unbranded wizards in Aglarond, there'd be more—and she'd find them.

One decision, then, would resolve three of Alassra's unfinished tasks. She slew Vazurmu with a word of power—more mercy than execution—placed her corpse with the villagers, and the two unbranded corpses as well. Then she cast shapeshifting magic to mold them all into a statue of Chauntea, the golden goddess of grain and summer. A second spell made the transformation permanent, and a third—she was squandering her spells at a prodigious rate—sent her back to Velprintalar.

She'd done nothing about Ebroin, except decide that she'd have to find him. She'd considered letting him stay in the Yuirwood as he so clearly wished to do, but if Mythrell'aa had known about the colt, then she knew about Bro. With Lailomun's fate a reopened wound in Alassra's conscience, she'd not leave the young man wandering beyond her protection.

Thazalhar, the wild and empty easternmost province of Thay, was a place to be endured by the wizards, soldiers, and slaves compelled to serve there. It was a place ignored by the rest of Thay, and loved only by the very few who chose to live among its rolling hills. That small number included the Zulkir of Enchantment, twenty leagues away from home and riding hard along the old Mulhorand trunk road out of Pyarados on the west bank of the River Thazarim.

The zulkir leaned into the gallop of his favorite mount, a stallion carved from green and black marble and brought to life by the twelfth Zulkir of Enchantment a hundred years ago. The stallion was inexhaustible and unfazed by whatever magic a zulkir or his enemies cast across its path. Whether the road curved or straightened, turned glassy black or shimmering silver, the stone horse took everything in stride.

While his rider suffered.

Lauzoril had begun his journey before dawn in Tyraturos, deep in the Thayan plateau, crossed the Thazarim at noon and expected to be sore, but home in time for supper. A roomy saddle with a flying carpet folded carefully around it cushioned the zulkir from the worst of the stallion's hammer-legged gait. An assortment of magics kept him awake, alert, and free from the inconveniences of hunger and thirst, but nothing could spare him the headache born of continually enchanting the road in front of him so that wherever in Thay his journey began, it would end a half-day later.

Lauzoril could have used a spell to speed his travel and eliminate any discomfort. Indeed, he had used magic to
leave the Tyraturos garret where he'd spent the previous evening trading rumors and favors over dinner with a disgruntled diviner.

The dinner was at the diviner's request. His zulkir, Yaphyll, a woman who'd been allied with Lauzoril and Aznar Thrul until last year, was apparently ready to change sides again. The diviner offered a gift: a token of Yaphyll's restored good faith: a true copy—or so the diviner claimed—of a spell that would reveal not only the properties of an enchanted object, but the precise spells that had enchanted it. A useful thing, if it were a true copy, and, even if it was, insufficient proof that Yaphyll could be trusted.

If she couldn't and the diviner had been looking for advantage with Tam's enemies, then trailing Lauzoril's after-dinner spell would have gained him nothing. Lauzoril had destroyed the shed where he'd concealed the stone horse and it left no trail for either hounds or magic to follow. No one knew precisely where enchantment's zulkir made his home, and that was not about to change today.

To the best of his considerable ability, Lauzoril had erected an impenetrable wall between his life as zulkir and the Thazalhar estate where an undistinguished Lord Tavai dwelt in obscurity. With the arsenal of enchantment to draw upon in addition to his own personality, he kept his children, slaves, and domestic retainers ignorant of his public life. His Red Wizard peers assumed that he spent his private hours in pursuits best left unimagined.

Lauzoril's peers weren't entirely wrong. Their lives were rooted in Thay's stifling cities with their dark pleasures and illicit markets. When deceit and intrigue were called for, Lauzoril rose to the challenge, but between acts in the zulkirs' endless drama, he escaped to the countryside, proving—he supposed as he reined the stallion to a halt—that enchanters were romantics at heart and that their zulkir was the greatest romantic of all.

Once, long before Lauzoril was born, all that would become Thay had been farmland where every valley was under plow and every ridge supported a flock of sheep. The farmers had been as poor as their land was rich. Everything they produced went to Mulhorand to please the god-emperor. In those days the Red Wizards were persecuted revolutionaries, firebrands for liberty in all its seductive
guises. Driven from the Mulhorandi heartland, they fled north, past Thazalhar, to Delhumide, where they found themselves surrounded by unlikely, but stalwart, allies. Together, the wizards and farmers declared their independence from imperial laws and taxes … with predictable results.

Mulhorand sent its armies north to destroy the rebels and replant their feet on the farmers' necks. Facing certain death or slavery if they lost, the wizards and farmers waged a desperate war for freedom that culminated on the rolling hills of Thazalhar.

They won the battle of Thazalhar, but at tremendous cost. The Red Wizards fought with magic and minions from the elemental plains; the farmers fought with steel. Fighting was fierce—a score of Mulhorandi soldiers went down for every wizard or farmer who died. Mulhorand lost half of all its armies in that one battle; two-thirds of Thazalhar, women and children in addition to fighters, lay dead as well. Yet the land had suffered most. Scorched by spellcraft and soured with blood, Thazalhar's bountiful farms became blackened ruins where nothing grew or could be grown for generations.

Even now, four centuries later, though Thazalhar was fertile again, it remained largely uninhabited. Each spring thaw raised a crop of grisly relics from their ancient graves. The boundary walls of Lord Tavai's estate were built from moldered bones and rusted armaments; they discouraged intruders. Visitors thought Thazalhar was haunted; residents knew.

Lauzoril dismounted. He exchanged his Red Wizard robes for a gentleman farmer's comfortable leather and linen. Then the Zulkir of Enchantment and Charm dug a small hole beside the road and filled it with scraps from his Tyraturos dinner: crumbs of bread, a slice of roast pheasant, two green grapes, and a bit of cloth stained with wine.

“For the dead,” he said, tamping the loosened soil back into the hole. “For Thazalhar and the dreams we've all forgotten.”

It was customary for Red Wizards to pay lip service to some god in Faerûn's pantheon. In his youth, Lauzoril had divided his infrequent prayers equally between Beshaba,
Maid of Misfortune, and her sister, Lady Luck. The strategy served him well until he became Zulkir of Enchantment—more importantly, until he took possession of his predecessor's Thazalhar estate. Then Lauzoril's view of life and death began to change. Though he'd publicly continued his dual devotions, the private man sought a worship more appropriate to the scarred land he'd come to love.

In those days, The Reaper had been the deity most often seen, most often invoked in Thazalhar, but Lauzoril never warmed to him, perhaps because Myrkul was his father and grandfather's god-of-choice. Bhaal and Moander had appealed even less to his romantic temperament. Recently Kelemvor had appeared as the new Lord of the Dead. Lord Tavai approved of the new god's notion that death was the natural end of life. He began performing his private rituals in Kelemvor's honor.

Whether Kelemvor appreciated or approved of the offerings meant nothing. Like any Red Wizard who'd survived his education and gone on to acquire power in the Thayan hierarchy, Lauzoril believed in himself above all else—zulkirs couldn't afford the slightest doubt in that regard.

Lord Tavai remounted. He guided the stone horse off the road. They were on his land now, where a score of enchantments hung in the air, guaranteeing that even if he were seen riding across the ridges, neither he nor his unusual stallion would be remembered.

A small woods, framed with graveyard walls, abutted the fields where the lord's men and women tended his grain. Lauzoril's shadow, long and dark in the sunset light, preceded him into the trees where a marble statue awaited his return. The statue was identical in all ways to the stallion the zulkir rode—except that it was pure glamor and dissipated as the real stone horse planted its hooves on the dais.

The woods were quiet, without the tang of menace Lauzoril's warding spells would have conveyed had danger lain waiting. He had, however, the sense that he was being watched. The watching eyes might belong to a bird or animal, and thus have failed to trigger his spells or they could belong to a magic user with the skills and spells to pass unharmed through a zulkir's wards. Lauzoril took no chances. He placed his hand firmly on the gold-wrapped hilt of his dagger.

The knife awakened at his touch and challenged his right to dominate it. Lauzoril met the challenge and quenched its rebellion. The knife's spirit, Shazzelurt, spoke directly to his mind.

Nothing, Master. Nothing magical. Nothing lost
.

As old as the ore from which it had been forged, Shazzelurt was not easily deceived. Lauzoril heeded its warnings, but sometimes disregarded its assurances. He concentrated on a potent enchantment that could stun a serious foe and annihilate a lesser one. The fingers of his left hand formed the requisite gesture, the triggering word was fresh in his mind: he'd cast the spell with his dying breath, if worse came to worst.

Until then …

“Show yourself.”

He heard rustling. Without magic's aid, no human eyes could see deeply into the twilight shadows, but the sound had been too large for a bird or squirrel. Large enough for a man? Even now his wards were quiescent and Shazzelurt remained silent.

“I'm of a mind to be merciful, but be warned: My mind is quicksilver.”

More rustling, then movement through the shadows. Too small to be a man, Lauzoril considered the gnomes and goblin-kin he kept as slaves. The moment of mercy faded. He'd raised his hand before he heard a very familiar voice.

“Poppa? Poppa, I'm sorry. Please, Poppa … I didn't know what would happen. I didn't know I'd find you here.”

“Mimuay,” Lauzoril sputtered before words failed him.

He'd come within a breath of killing his daughter and needed a moment to slow his racing heart. In lieu of words, he spun a light sphere from one of his rings and let it float above the stone horse's head. His eldest daughter stared at the sphere, at the horse: She'd never seen her father do what he did best.

Never.

She trembled, trying not to cry. Her hair was mussed with leafy bits. Her shift and face were both creased from lying on the ground. Lauzoril guessed she'd fallen asleep waiting for his return.

“Your mother will be crying by now, thinking that you're
lost forever,” he said with unfeigned sternness. “Everyone will be looking for you, but no one will look
here
. No one else would disobey my orders.”

The girl nodded; a tear escaped and made a shiny track down her cheek. She was a plain child under the best of circumstances; tears did not become her. Lauzoril quenched the light and threw the saddle and its packs over his shoulder. The flying carpet, ever buoyant, eased the load.

“Shall we walk together to the house?”

“Poppa?”

She sought his hand through the shadows. Her fingers were cold and clammy. Lauzoril warmed them naturally with his own.

“Why were you in the grove?” he asked as they emerged from it.

Mimuay shivered and withdrew her hand. “I have a friend, Poppa.”

The zulkir contained a sigh. It was bound to happen. He kept his daughters isolated and innocent, but childhood couldn't last forever. Mimuay was thirteen. When he was thirteen he'd already mastered the fourth level of enchantment and forgotten his childhood.