Stormlight - Ed Greenwood [37]
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The lady in the long gown looked back over her shoulder, opened her mouth in a soundless scream, snatched up her trailing skirts, and ran on, fading away in midfrantic stride.
"Haunted Tower, indeed," a voice said disgustedly "That's not going to keep anyone away." Two hands lifted to work magic.
The spell was newly gained, and so the casting, as always, was just a trifle awkward-but there were no charging adventurers or other foes to make haste necessary.
Soon enough, the blue mists were swirling. Out at them, with a cold rattle of laughter, came the first of the skulls. With eyes of flame, it winked at its creator, and swooped off to the right as it was bid. The watcher smiled grimly as it plunged back into the mists, and made the fog drift into a ring around him.
When the watcher was surrounded with a roiling barrier, he began to pace. No curious armsman or mage was likely to pass screaming skulls and mists that flickered with lightning. And this haunting, however harmless, would last until all the magic was drained from the enspelled daggers that the Summerstar fools had seen fit to inter with their fallen. To leave such things to rust away in a crypt-nobles were mad!
Well, there’d be fewer of them soon enough. It was time to plot and plan in earnest…no matter how hard was becoming.
Hard indeed. A tremulous sigh echoed within the roiling ring of mist.
The fire brought spells, and the skills to cast them. It could bring also important knowledge, and useful powers akin to spells-whatever mental properties the victims had possessed. But with such treasures came annoying memories.
Foods of memories, bright and sharp and roaring and… oh, so heavy. Crowding and clamoring for attention, always, jostling along in an alluring flow that could spin one way, breathless, into being a man shivering on his first battlefield, side torn open, as the wolves came trotting nearer, then a woman shrieking under the brutish cruelty of her lord, in a room where the rippling blaze of candles brought no warmth nor comfort; and then a man again, watching from the battlements on a day of chill fog, as a falcon came streaking down to tear a dove from the air in a flurry of bloody feathers, and…
On and on, for one heart-wrenching moment after another, until strength came to rise up out of the endless flood and know what was truly befalling here and now. The seneschal had known damned near every chamber and passage of this old keep, and the ways of the vale beyond. What he hadn’t know was familiar to the Harper. Even those with paltry lives were best subsumed when met with-for a body emptied by the fire was forever mindless. Even if some meddler transformed an errant finger into a whole body, that body would be a brainless husk… and brainless husks could be trusted to keep secrets.
Secrets that must stand for a time longer, until no alarm among the Harpers or the Zhentarim or the Red Wizards or those who defended the crown of Cormyr could spell doom for the rising power in these two hands-the power that must triumph.
Dimly, through the ever-increasing, racing chaos of stolen memories, the watcher could recall the taste of divinity. It had a tang like the iron of blood in a mortal mouth… and yet, so much more. He ached to know that taste again, ached to be revered, and worshiped- and feared. It would come again. It would come again!
Usurpers commanded the priests who should still be his. Usurpers wielded the power that was rightfully his. Usurpers made decrees and blundered through divine dealings, speaking where he should have spoken. All of this would end. Hands clenched in the dimness of this chamber at the heart of the Haunted Tower. Aye, all of this would end.
It would take much more power, though.