The Simbul's gift - Lynn Abbey [53]
Red Wizards were predictable, not foolish, and-little as she liked to admit it-they knew their magic. Their academies churned out competent, albeit unethical, wizards year after year. The handful she'd dispatched yesterday would never be missed. They were, in all likelihood, already replaced.
Already replaced…
The Simbul cursed her own foolishness, her own subtlety. She'd assumed that because there were journeymen Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk, one of their zulkirs had been spying on her, had learned of her interest in the village and the colt. But it was much more likely that a zulkir had simply sent a team of expendable journeymen across the border in the faint hope that they'd trip over something useful. They'd been disguised as grain merchants, after all, not horse traders.
She'd spent the best part of the day covered in dust, while the solution to her mystery-if there was a mystery to be solved-was attracting flies in the ruined village.
Alassra cursed again before digging out the spellbook where she kept the spells she used to interrogate the dead. A glance or two refreshed her memory; it took little longer to assemble the reagents. It might take forever to get the chamber put back together. She made the mess worse looking for a little book of cantrips. She'd devised them centuries ago, the last time she'd been tempted to add a child to her life.
Three bone-rattling sneezes and a torn sleeve later, Alassra was standing in the antechamber with the open book in her hands. Tay-Fay was sleeping peacefully, almost exactly as they'd been when Alassra tucked her beneath a cobweb shawl hours ago. The child had every right to be as exhausted as she appeared to be. Sleep was the best healing for children: That's what Alustriel said, and where children were concerned, Alustriel, the mother of twelve, was the authority. Alassra sang two of her cantrips, enough to keep the child asleep until she returned; then she transported herself to Sulalk.
The village was a reeking, smoldering ruin. If any inhabitants had survived, they'd wisely departed for somewhere else, but it seemed likely, as the Simbul walked past charred cottages and swollen corpses, that Bro and his sister were the only Sulalkers left. She came upon a child's body, so badly mangled that she couldn't guess whether it had been a boy or girl.
"Vengeance," the Simbul vowed as an oval disk appeared, hovering on level with her knees.
She laid the corpse gently on the disk, which followed her to a grassy knoll, unharmed by yesterday's events. Time would wash away the ashes, restore the greenery, and, if no one came to resettle the village, revert its cultivated land to wild meadows and woodland. Sulalk wouldn't be forgotten, though. The dead would become their own memorial as, one by one, Alassra brought the victims to the knoll.
Not all were innocent villagers, to be treated with a queen's reverence. There were Red Wizard corpses scattered through the ruins. They weren't carrying the metal disks such as Boesild had found in Nethra. No surprise but, unlike her tall nephew, the Simbul didn't need tokens to separate the wheat from the chaff. A spell she'd devised and stored in a finger-sized wand had never failed to unmask a Red Wizard.
The first corpse she examined proved to have illusionist tattoos pricked into her skin. With the thought that Mythrell'aa was responsible, the Simbul's simmering rage boiled over. The corpse became stone, and the stone collapsed into dust before she was calm again.
The second