Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [106]
The face of Seszgar Huntcrown; its look of fear was certainly preferable to its usual sneer.
Satisfaction became triumph. Deed done, that swiftly and easily.
“Take all that to the furnace,” Marlin commanded, staring hard into their cold smiles and repeatedly visualizing the room, the way there, and tossing their bundles down into the flames. If the writings spoke truth, they should be able to see what he was thinking in his eyes. “Then return here to me without delay.”
After what seemed like a long time, the two flaming men nodded, turned, and walked through his wall … at just the right spot for the shortest journey to the furnace.
Marlin surveyed the trails of blood they’d left behind, then went to his board—his private one, far better stocked than the one most guests ever saw—selected a flask of Rhaenian dark he’d noticed going cloudy, and used it to sluice away the blood. Gaskur could scrub away the faint results in the morning.
“Farewell, Lord Huntcrown,” he murmured. “My, my, the dismembered bodies are piling up. I must remember to have Gaskur rake the bones out of the furnace ashes before a servant who might report them to Mother sees to that little chore.”
He selected a clean flagon and the decanter that held his latest preferred throatslake: Dragonfire Dew, a fiery amber vintage from somewhere barbarous in upland Turmish. Cleansed throat and nose, kindled a fire below, and left a taste like cherries and blackroot on the tongue between. Ahhh …
He was well into his second flagon when his blueflame ghosts returned. He set it down, took up the Flying Blade and the chalice, and told them, “Well done.”
Did those wide, steady, cold smiles waver a little when he began to will them back into their prisons?
It was hard, that much was certain, thrusting back an imponderable darkness in his mind that might have been their silent resistance or might just have been the weight of the magic. He was sweating when he was done—but he managed it, setting blade and cup, flickering an angry blue, on the table in a room suddenly empty of grinning, blazing men.
Right. I am the master of Langral and Halonter … and soon, of many thousands more.
Taking up his flagon, Marlin made for his bedchamber. High time to snore a little and dream of being a mighty and ruthless king of Cormyr.
As he unbuckled and shrugged off garments and kicked them away across the floor, Marlin sipped more Dragonfire Dew and pondered the part of his scheme he’d neglected to tell his fellow nobles.
He controlled no long-lost Obarskyr, but he was going to make one.
His two blueflame ghosts—they were hardly ghosts, really, but he liked the phrase—would one by one, at his direction, slay all the highknights and war wizards. He’d replace those dear departed with his hirelings, one by one as they fell, until the Obarskyrs had no one attending them who was truly loyal.
Then, of course, it would be their turn. He’d slay them all, every last living Obarskyr, and then present one of the Nine he commanded—Halonter looked the more Azoun-kingly of the two—to Cormyr as a “true Obarskyr” from the past.
Throughout all of that, he’d keep his fellow conspirators handy, up to their blood-besmirched elbows in the killings and ready to be framed as scapegoat “traitors”—and slain before they could implicate him—at any point in the proceedings where other Cormyreans became suspicious or any of his deeds got inconveniently witnessed.
Even if Lothrae produced more of the Nine and wanted to call a halt to his use of his two … well, Lothrae would hardly be eager to pass up the chance to rule Cormyr from behind the scenes.
It was, after all, one of the richest kingdoms in all the Realms.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
A STORM IN SHADOWDALE
It had been a glorious day in Shadowdale, but the sun was lowering in the deep forest of the hills around the dale. Long shafts of light stabbed in under the trees to gild ferns and set aglow