Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [33]
“They’ve few enough left of either, these days,” Marlin Stormserpent told them calmly from the darkness at the back of the room. “You’re late.”
“We were followed,” came the curt reply from a man still wiping blood from his hands. He’d killed before, but butchering a war wizard had to be done in haste, before the mage could get out a spell or send some magical cry for aid. “We’ve taken care of our little shadow.”
“Darrake Harnwood?”
“Yes. We put his head down a garderobe shaft.”
“Good.” Stormserpent was pleased and let them hear it. “However, every killing is someone who will be discovered, probably sooner rather than later. So let’s be about matters.”
“We’re all here,” someone else said simply. “I counted.”
“I trust all of you counted the coins I paid you, too?” Marlin asked coolly, and without waiting for a reply told the men standing close around him, “The undead of the haunted wing are real, but very few. If you come with me and do what I’ve paid you to do, destroying the handful or so of skeletons and wraiths you’ll meet, you’ll have done Cormyr a great service.”
“Why are there undead in the royal palace at all?” someone muttered. “Have the war wizards grown so feeble as all that?”
Marlin smiled. “The war wizards command the undead, using them as guardians to keep everyone out of the haunted wing—where the Obarskyrs keep most of the wealth they seize from citizens, the dark magic they’ve collected over the centuries, and … certain prisoners. Nobles and commoners who have become too great a challenge to the Crown.”
“Belnar? Thol Morand?”
“Among others. And unless you want to join them, you must all keep as silent as the tomb—ha ha—about what you’ve done, until I can make sure all the undead are gone, or you’ll be seen in the city not as heroes but as the war wizards will portray you: traitors plotting against the Dragon Throne.”
“Ganrahast is so stlarning suspicious,” someone snapped. “He sees traitors behind every door and around every corner.”
“The war wizards,” someone else said gloomily. “The doom of the realm and its real rulers. Always, when there’s trouble, it’s the war wizards.”
“A threat to every Cormyrean—even the royal family,” another agreed.
“The sooner they’re all killed off,” Marlin told his hirelings smoothly, “in a series of accidental demises too deft and veiled to raise any general alarm, the better.”
That brought nods, and he added quietly, “Now come. Into the haunted wing. Swords out, all.”
Great arched doors had been locked across the main passage, but there was an easy way around them, through a room whose connecting doors were neither locked nor barred.
When they got three steps beyond that room, two skeletons strode to meet them—one a dust-shrouded, floating assembly of bones too decrepit to fit together anymore, the other newer and more intact.
Stormserpent strode straight on, raising his sword and pointing at the undead. “Hack them apart. Then shatter all the bones. No shouting, no clangings. Do this quietly.”
Fear rose in him as empty eyesockets turned his way. They were dead or should be dead, not moving forward in silent menace, swords lashing out—
One of his hirelings snapped, “Quickly—before something else shows up!”
There followed a general rush and a frenzied hewing and hacking.
Stormserpent peered ahead into the gloom. The faint glows of old lighting spells, long unrenewed, kept the empty wing from pitch darkness, but he’d have been much happier if he’d dared bring lots of lanterns and walk along in proper brightness. In the shadows, anything could be …
Anything was. Another less-than-whole skeleton with a zombie—no, two zombies—lurching in its wake. Behind them, something dark, almost batlike, glided. One of the wraiths. Real trouble.
Marlin turned to his hirelings. “Get them!” he hissed. “There’ll be more! You and you—watch behind us and our flanks!”
He was scared, all right. He could taste it, and the excitement was making him tremble. Not that he’d have dared such a thing at all if he hadn’t had his