Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [101]
“Your patrol’s needed at the Bold Archer. There’ve been murders there, lots of them! Nobles, too!”
All over the club, Dragons started to move.
“Swordcaptain Dralkin sent me. Wants you there faster than possible, he said,” the telsword added with the last of his air, weaving to a chair to lean on it and gasp for breath.
Arclath and Amarune stared at each other across the table.
“You stay here,” the noble muttered, thrusting the decanter in Amarune’s direction.
By the orders Tannath was bellowing, he’d decided to leave none of his men at the Dragonriders’ and wanted “every last jack” of them out the door with him immediately.
“And I became your servant when, Lord Delcastle?” Amarune very quietly asked Arclath’s unhearing back as he rushed across the room to join the soldiers.
With a shrug of farewell to Tress and a swift swig that drained the last liquid fire out of the decanter, Amarune ran to the bar. Snatching up a cloak from the litter of unclaimed clothing from the fled and fallen that had been gathered there, she whirled it about her shoulders to cover her skimpy robe and ran out into the night, right on the heels of the noble and the slowest of the Dragons.
Tress watched her best dancer go, shaking her head. Then she turned back to survey the damage to her club. Again.
Sigh. Mustn’t let yon blood dry and the stain really set in …
Elminster sighed. Either this was a very slow night for Dragons walking patrol in Suzail, or the butchery inside yon club was truly impressive.
War wizards were still arriving—pairs and trios, each with a sword-jangling Purple Dragon escort—and hurrying into the Bold Archer.
From which the Dragons would soon emerge to stand talking with their bored, pebble-kicking soldiers who’d arrived earlier, and wait.
Presumably for the growing assembly of wizards inside to decide something or finish casting something—or fall asleep.
Gods, what did the callow young idiots who called themselves wizards of war do, these days? What could possibly be taking them so long?
Or were they all spewing their guts out in shock and disgust at the sight of so much carnage? By all the gods that still walked, weren’t jacks or lasses who joined the war wizards expecting much blood in their lives ahead?
If not, why not? Were they all utterly ignorant of the world they strode around in?
Elminster sourly abandoned asking silent questions that the alley around him couldn’t answer.
After all, who was he to demand answers about anything, an archmage who couldn’t control his own trembling fingers?
He’d have to go and see and hear for himself. Using yon alleyway refuse hatch, for instance.
He glided over to it, found it ajar, shook his head anew at the carelessness of Cormyr’s guardians, and listened hard.
About the length of his arm away from him, two swordcaptains had just begun to confer.
Swordcaptain Tannath was out of breath and none too happy. “Well, Dralkin? I got here as fast as I could; where’s the fire?”
“Out,” Dralkin said grimly, standing just inside the innermost door of the Bold Archer. All the lanterns had been lit and allowed to blaze up full; the room was bright, and every man could see the pool of blood that began at his boots and stretched away into a wrack of furniture and torn, draped bodies like a sticky crimson lake. “This would be what bards like to call ‘the bloody aftermath.’ Just before they start spewing up their suppers.”
Tannath was dispassionately scanning the severed limbs and hacked and staring faces. “I’d say more than a few noble families are going to be howling for vengeance come morning.”
“Aye, and our heads for not preventing it before it befell, when they can’t find anyone else handy to blame,” Dralkin agreed. “The spellhurlers have just cleared out to concoct something to head them all off. Not to mention to try to decide—though how a man decides such a thing, I wouldn’t know—if some plague of marauding madness has befallen Suzail this night.”
“Right, I’ll ask