Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [157]
“Just as I said!” Lady Delcastle snapped. “The young rakes, the reckless, care-nothing idiots who’ll have all Cormyr at swords drawn—”
“Exactly!” Arclath roared, whirling right beside Amarune—who flinched away from him involuntarily—to stride back across the room, waving his arms angrily.
“What are they doing?” he snarled. “The war wizard’s’ll have their guts for soup, if the king doesn’t, first! Setting the city into uproar on the very eve of the council!”
“Exactly,” Amarune agreed, daring to interrupt because the moment seemed right. “What are they thinking?”
Arclath whirled to face her, his eyes afire. “Well, we’ll have to find out, before things get any worse.”
“How?” Amarune asked.
“We’ll go and ask them!” he replied fiercely.
His mother laughed merrily. “And you think they’ll just tell you? Because you’re a fellow noble?”
Arclath whirled to face her. “No,” he snarled, “because I’ll be holding the point of my sword at the throat of whomever I’m asking. I’ve found a man generally prefers to talk and live, rather than keep silent and die!”
He rushed out a door, reappeared almost immediately with sword and cloak in hand, and dashed across the receiving room and out the door Amarune had been brought in through.
Leaving Amarune and the Lady Marantine Delcastle to exchange startled glances and follow him.
Where they found the front doors of Delcastle Manor already open, and Arclath gone.
“Aye, the Lord has departed,” one of the door guards offered in answer to Amarune’s wild look around. Without a word Amarune hurried to the door, remembering only at the last moment to turn and bow in farewell to Lady Delcastle.
Where she saw a doorjack scurrying off, obviously to retrieve her cloak—and Arclath’s mother looking after him, then back at Amarune. After a bare moment of hesitation, Lady Delcastle snatched her own cloak from the other doorjack and tossed it to Amarune—who caught it out of long habit of being on the stage and stared back at the noblewoman in astonishment.
There was a strange look on Lady Delcastle’s face. “Keep it,” she blurted. “And—and look after him!”
“Lady,” Amarune replied gravely in thanks and salute, bowing low again. Then she sprang up and sprinted out into the night, the cloak swirling around her as she went.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
A GREAT MAGIC UNLEASHED
Mirt followed his second coinlass of the evening up a none-too-clean flight of stairs, a bottle and two metal flagons in one hand and a somewhat-gnawed leg of steaming mutton clutched in his other.
“Been a long time, lass,” he told her shapely backside happily. “A long time …”
Manshoon frowned in his scrying as he watched Mirt eagerly ascending the stairs, still pondering what use to make of the infamous lord of Waterdeep.
“Well,” he murmured, “he’ll keep for now, at least. I have more important targets to savage.”
Marlin Stormserpent was in a foul temper. He and a similarly terse Broryn Windstag were nursing headaches and huddling in bandages; they both snarlingly turned aside queries about how they’d acquired their wounds.
Marlin leaned forward to glare down his meeting table and tell his conspirators, “This is all that’s left of us. Delasko and Kathkote are abed, healing, and will be for days. We must be very careful during the council; someone is on to us.”
Before the excited talk could get going, he added sourly, “And not the war wizards, either. Someone able to hire wizards as powerful as Larak Dardulkyn.”
“Windstag lives,” Sacrast Handragon pointed out. “So the hunt for the hand axe succeeded?”
“It was found,” Marlin replied flatly, “but proved an utter failure. We gained no slayer who’ll obey us, but let loose some fat old thief of a lord of Waterdeep who obeys only himself and fled from us!”
He lurched up out of his seat and told the table grimly, “So the scheme of harming the king or the crown prince in an ‘accident’ when plenty of nobles are gathered for the council to