The Dragon's Doom - Ed Greenwood [28]
Dolmur would have preferred to source his lasting spells from an enchanted ring, wand, or stone he could control rather than a slumbrous mage who might someday be freed of the binding enchantments and come looking to slay Bowdragons-but wizards weren't obligingly sacrificing their own lives to craft such treasures, these days.
Dolmur sighed aloud and told the window, "We must work with what we have. Yearning after desired dreams of what can never be is how the weak-minded waste their lives."
"Is it now?" came a quiet voice from behind him. A voice that should not have been there.
Dolmur Bowdragon whirled around. To a wizard, such surprises are armor-chinks of carelessness or misfortune that usually mean death. But no man can help but want to see his slayer or fate.
The ward-spells on the study and the house around it should have hurled away non-mages and warned Dolmur of the entry of any wizard powerful enough to break them… yet this robed man facing him, with the raven-dark hair and the soft, knowing smile, could be nothing else but a wizard.
An intruder standing in his own study, boots only a stride from a flagstone that bore one of Dolmur's hurl-hard spells-that would snatch the man straight up to impalement on the spikes of the huge iron dragon-head candle cluster thrusting down from the ceiling above.
His visitor smiled more broadly, and carefully stepped around that flagstone as he paced forward. "Forgive the abruptness of my intrusion-and for that matter the intrusion itself, Lord Bowdragon. I come with peaceful intent, to make an offer, not to try spells with you."
"Then be welcome, Lord Nameless," Dolmur said calmly, gesturing to the lounges by the fireplace as he turned and walked toward them. "Offers always interest me. Will you take wine? Or hot serbret, perhaps?"
"Neither, thank you," his guest replied, following. The stranger's route took him across a certain cluster of flagstones-as Dolmur had intended it to-but no alarm flourish of horn music swelled to fife. This was no intruder, then, but a "sending." Solid-seeming but illusory, and so of course unable to drink. Able to spy on him for months, though… and wanting Dolmur to know it, by the avoidance of the hurl-hard flagstone.
"Then take your ease, and unfold your offer." The Bowdragon patriarch waved his hand toward the fireplace, offering his unexpected guest any of four lounges-or the more likely choice of standing against the mantel. Again his guest surprised him, taking a seat. There came a slight rustling of robes and a creak of furniture as he sat down, but Dolmur smiled inwardly. He knew of no natural way to make that lounge creak in that manner, given what it was made of-so his visitor must be using magic to "supply" sounds, to fool Dolmur into thinking this sending was solid. My, to have magic to waste so lavishly…
Dolmur took a seat of his own, briefly entertaining the notion of using the lingering spell that amplified his voice to summon servants to echo perfectly the rustling and creaking, to signal to his guest his recognition of their falsity, but-no. Mages whose greatest need was to impress did such things, and Dolmur Bowdragon was years beyond the need to impress.
Or so he hoped. Assuming a relaxed pose, he waited.
"I'm Ingryl Ambelter, a wizard once in the service of Baron Silvertree of Aglirta. I supported him in his ambitions to rule the Kingless Land, and confess myself less than enamored of the new King, the boy Raulin Castlecloaks-and of the overdukes and former regent who crowned him. They've done me much injury, though my sorcery has been powerful enough to keep me alive and allow me to flourish since. These foes of mine have also done much injury to you, slaying more than one Bowdragon without cause, warning, or so much as fair salutation. Now they're hunting wizards, slaying or imprisoning without cause-and when they've scoured Silverflow Vale clean of mages, they'll look in this direction and others, and reach for you. Not for nothing do your countrymen have the saying, 'Beware wizards of