Elminster's Daughter - Ed Greenwood [98]
Two men were promptly standing before him, blinking in startlement and alarm. They went pale when they saw who was standing facing them.
Starangh gave the merchants Bezrar and Surth a sharklike smile. "I hope you've eaten well. You're going on a journey."
"Eh? What j-" Bezrar began, but fell silent as Surth kicked his ankle savagely.
Starangh let them both see his smile turn soft and menacing and commanded, "Stand still and silent. Please."
They did so, and he cast an intricate spell that laid a fog of for-getfulness on them. Until it expired, they'd be compelled to seek the retired Mage Royal, being drawn always in his direction-but stripped from them was all remembrance of why they were seeking Vangerdahast or who'd enspelled and sent them. Anyone trying to break the spell before it ran out would reduce the two Marsembans to quivering mindlessness.
They stood like two gaping statues, no longer seeing the man who worked a second, minor spell to place images of the animated suits of armor known as helmed horrors in their minds. "When you see such a one," Harnrim Starangh told his two minions gently, "one of you will throw one of these at it, so as to strike it."
The black-clad wizard took the limp hands of the two oblivious men, and posed them so those of each man were cupped together. From a basket beneath his reclining chair, Starangh scooped many small, shiny, identical objects into those waiting palms: rune-graven ovals of metal that bulged plumply at their centers but thinned to the breadth of armor plate nigh all their edges.
He smiled at his two enchanted idiots, stepped around them to lay a hand on the backs of both of their necks at once, and pronounced another word that made them both vanish.
Humming a jaunty song, Harnrim Starangh made a last adjustment of his crystals and rode a plume of mist down the passage to join Rauthur. It was time to go hunting-for Vangerdahasts were suddenly very much in season.
* * * * *
Aumun Tholant Bezrar blinked, wiped his sweating face, and looked wildly in all directions with every evidence of utter bewilderment. Trees, aye, definitely trees.
As always, standing behind him like one more tree trunk, was his companion in so many crimes, Master Malakar Surth.
Surth was clutching a handful of something that looked like oversized silver coins, and frowning in puzzlement.
Bezrar looked down and discovered that his own fat, sweaty palm was cradling another handful of the same things: ovals of gleaming metal graven with intricate runes-nothing he could read or had ever seen before, but the same things on each one. These long-as-his-fmgers gewgaws bulged in their middles like snail-cakes but were flattened out all around the edges like, well, again like snail-cakes.
So where by all the cozy Nine Hells had these come from-and where was here, anyhow? And how… how had he and Surth gotten here?
"Uh, Surth?" he asked, seeking some answers. "Surth?"
"Bite your tongue til it bleeds," Marsember's richest dealer in scents, wines, cordials, and drugs snapped, employing the standard polite port expression for what slightly more highborn Cormyreans usually rendered as "Belt up" or (if they were priests or elders) "Be silent."
Surth was glaring around at trees and vines and the deep damp green vista of more trees, that stretched away in all directions from the narrow trail they were standing on. His manner made it clear that he was blaming the trees themselves for being here-at least for the few moments it would take him to find someone nearby to blame.
"I don't know either," he muttered, as his face turned slowly to regard his longtime partner. And darkened.
"What did you do to get us here, Bez? You must have done something! You're an idiot, you know that? An idiot! You must have fiddled with something enchanted or lit the fuse of that… that…" His face went clouded, almost frightened, and he waved a dismissive hand. "You know: that… man."
Bezrar drew himself up like an indignant walrus, puffing and sweating, and jabbed Surth's chest with one fat, hairy finger. "Now, you listen