Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [38]
Alusair nodded and put out her hand to him.
Her touch was no more solid than a whisper, but her chill was deep, plunging him into uncontrollable shiverings in an instant.
Yet his word was his word, and she’d led him to a hidden Obarskyr dagger and offered him its magic without hesitation, so …
There was an instant of whirling nausea as El unleashed the spell and found it caught up in strong new wards that tore and twisted …
Until he could ride them, become one with them, and melt through them.
Typically unsubtle, brute force magework.
Wizards, these days …
Ganrahast started to pace. The windowless room near the top of the north turret held only an empty wardrobe, plain wooden bench, and a table along the wall beside it where a row of storm lanterns were kept ready, so he had plenty of room to stride.
That, the cloaking spells they’d cast on the chamber long before, and the room’s deserted remoteness were why the two men liked to use it.
Vainrence was right, of course. They couldn’t ignore the tip, even if it had come from someone quite likely paid to pass it on by a disguised someone else who likely intended it as misdirection. There was very little they could do about that; since the Spellplague, the mind-reaming that had once made Cormyr’s wizards of war so feared—and effective—was useless.
The Crown’s decreed death penalty for trying a mind-reaming was quite beside the point. Attempts by any wizard to use the reaming spells always resulted in that mage being driven to idiocy or instantly and severely spell-scarred. So regardless of Foril’s laws and the longtime refuge of no war wizard facing trial for what no king or courtier learned about, not a single war wizard dared mind-ream anyone—unless the mage was already dying and did it as a “last loyalty.”
If things had been otherwise, a lot of sneering noble heads would probably long since have left their shoulders … but things weren’t otherwise, and all Cormyr knew it.
“My turn,” Ganrahast said quietly. “I overheard something interesting at the feast. Rumors about some nobles trying, sometime in the near future, a little foray into the haunted wing. What I could not learn—because the gossipers didn’t know—was whether this was to be a lark, some sort of dare or rite of passage, or yet another attempt to get at all the treasure and prisoners and chained pleasure maidens we’re supposed to keep hidden away there.”
“You mean there aren’t any pleasure maidens?” Vainrence joked. “Years I’ve been serving the Crown, years, man, in hopes of …”
“Har har har, Rence. Think about it. We’ll double the guards on all ways in, of course. Who’s behind it, that’s what I’d like to know.”
As everyone in the palace and most who worked in the royal court knew very well, the haunted wing of the palace really was haunted. Even war wizards avoided it as much as they could. The Blue Fire had twisted layers upon layers of wards cast down the centuries into dangerous magics no war wizard dared tamper with.
The Spellplague had wrought one good thing in the royal quarter of Suzail, and one thing only. No portal or any other sort of translocation magic worked properly anywhere within, into, or out of the palace, court, or royal gardens anymore, so the Crown was spared one worry. No one could magically whisk marauding monsters, would-be assassins, or small armies into the haunted wing or anywhere else near where the council would be held.
Ganrahast, Vainrence, and the most senior courtiers had already talked about raising spells to seal off the haunted wing during the council. The war wizards would have done so without wasting breath on a single word of discussion if they’d quite dared to cast wards that powerful inside the palace or had known the best web of spells to try to construct.
“The Shadovar, perhaps?”
With that quiet murmur, Vainrence voiced the longtime fear of both men: that Shadovar wizards had killed and were now impersonating the heads of many powerful noble families of Cormyr, and doing the same