Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [69]
When he turned back to face the wizard of war, she was standing right in front of him. And contriving somehow, though she was a head shorter than he was, to seem to loom over him.
He sketched the briefest of bows. “Well met, Lady—?”
She snorted. “Glathra by name. No lady. Spare me your honey-tongued flatteries.”
She turned her head and gave the messenger beside her a stern look—and he silently stretched out his hand and proffered a parchment note, holding it up and open for Arclath to read but drawing it back and away when, out of sheer habit, he reached to take it.
Arclath demonstrated that not just lady war wizards could dispense dirty looks, and the messenger blanched, swallowed, and advanced the note again. Arclath didn’t reach for it this time, but merely applied himself to silently reading it.
“Tell Arclath Delcastle, Belnar murdered. Also, the dancer in the Dragonriders’ was listening to all we said.” Halance’s handwriting. Freshly written, and smudged in one corner, as if handled before dry.
Belnar murdered?
He raised his eyes questioningly to Glathra, who snapped, “Just what was ‘all we said,’ and why were you to be so swiftly and urgently told of this killing, Lord Delcastle?”
“If ‘Belnar’ is Belnar Buckmantle, Lady,” Arclath said stiffly, “he was my friend. Halance can tell you that.”
“Halance Tarandar’s headless body has just been found in an alley.” Her voice was grim. “He was carrying this note. The Crown desires to know just who ‘we’ are or were and what was said. I’m not accustomed to repeating myself, Lord Delcastle.”
Arclath stared at her, too shocked to give her the sort of stinging rebuke that most nobles would have greeted such words with. Belnar and Halance—? But only last night, we were …
The war wizard was watching him like a hawk.
Arclath bent to take up another sausage. As its greasy magnificence flooded his mouth, he thought back over what had been said across his table at the club.
His eyes narrowed, and he nodded slowly. Glathra took a step forward but said not a word. She knew control as well as bluster.
“The ‘we’ were Halance, Belnar, and me,” he told her. “We’re friends. Not conspirators, Lady Glathra, not schemers after profit. Just friends.”
The sausage, somehow, was gone. He plucked up another and bit into it. Gods, they were good.
“They were both,” he added, chewing, “consumed with the tumult of preparing for the coming council, and I was being sympathetic … merely that, not rat-hunting details of security. So, yes, there was much talk of the unfolding arrangements, and more about the probable troubles there’d be with this noble and that, various opportunistic visitors likely to come to town because of the gathering … spies of Sembia, of course …”
“And did Tarandar or Buckmantle seem particularly interested in anything? Some matter they shared an interest in, perhaps?”
Arclath grinned weakly. “The charms of the mask dancer who was performing practically in our laps. I don’t think either of them have had much time recently for, ah, dalliance.”
Glathra nodded. “You,” she told the messenger beside her, as she almost snatched Halance’s note from his hands, “will accompany Lord Delcastle in finding this dancer, identifying her, and bringing her to me. I shall be back at the palace, watching you both from afar.”
Without pause she turned back to Delcastle and added crisply, “And you shall find her before you do anything else in your life, and bring her safely to me. Not dallying with lasses or over drinks, and not taking time to exchange witticisms with your idle friends. Nothing is more important than this, in your life from now on. Nothing.”
Delcastle sketched a florid bow. “Though I must observe that I’ve been given commands more politely in my time, I cannot find it in myself to disagree with so charming and fiercely Crown-loyal a lady. I shall obey and strive to—”
“Save it. You don’t want my old and unlovely bones in your bed anyhail,” the war wizard