The Simbul's gift - Lynn Abbey [56]
11
Thazalhar, in eastern Thay
Early evening, the fifteenth day of
Eleasias, The Year of the Banner
(1368DR)
Thazalhar, the wild and empty easternmost province of Thay, was a place to be endured by the wizards, soldiers, and slaves compelled to serve there. It was a place ignored by the rest of Thay, and loved only by the very few who chose to live among its rolling hills. That small number included the Zulkir of Enchantment, twenty leagues away from home and riding hard along the old Mulhorand trunk road out of Pyarados on the west bank of the River Thazarim.
The zulkir leaned into the gallop of his favorite mount, a stallion carved from green and black marble and brought to life by the twelfth Zulkir of Enchantment a hundred years ago. The stallion was inexhaustible and unfazed by whatever magic a zulkir or his enemies cast across its path. Whether the road curved or straightened, turned glassy black or shimmering silver, the stone horse took everything in stride.
While his rider suffered.
Lauzoril had begun his journey before dawn in Tyraturos, deep in the Thayan plateau, crossed the Thazarim at noon and expected to be sore, but home in time for supper. A roomy saddle with a flying carpet folded carefully around it cushioned the zulkir from the worst of the stallion's hammer-legged gait. An assortment of magics kept him awake, alert, and free from the inconveniences of hunger and thirst, but nothing could spare him the headache born of continually enchanting the road in front of him so that wherever in Thay his journey began, it would end a half-day later.
Lauzoril could have used a spell to speed his travel and eliminate any discomfort. Indeed, he had used magic to leave the Tyraturos garret where he'd spent the previous evening trading rumors and favors over dinner with a disgruntled diviner.
The dinner was at the diviner's request. His zulkir, Yaphyll, a woman who'd been allied with Lauzoril and Aznar Thrul until last year, was apparently ready to change sides again. The diviner offered a gift: a token of Yaphyll's restored good faith: a true copy-or so the diviner claimed-of a spell that would reveal not only the properties of an enchanted object, but the precise spells that had enchanted it. A useful thing, if it were a true copy, and, even if it was, insufficient proof that Yaphyll could be trusted.
If she couldn't and the diviner had been looking for advantage with Tam's enemies, then trailing Lauzoril's after-dinner spell would have gained him nothing. Lauzoril had destroyed the shed where he'd concealed the stone horse and it left no trail for either hounds or magic to follow. No one knew precisely where enchantment's zulkir made his home, and that was not about to change today.
To the best of his considerable ability, Lauzoril had erected an impenetrable wall between his life as zulkir and the Thazalhar estate where an undistinguished Lord Tavai dwelt in obscurity. With the arsenal of enchantment to draw upon in addition to his own personality, he kept his children, slaves, and domestic retainers ignorant of his public life. His Red Wizard peers assumed that he spent his private hours in pursuits best left unimagined.
Lauzoril's peers weren't entirely wrong. Their lives were rooted in Thay's stifling cities with their dark pleasures and illicit markets. When deceit and intrigue were called for, Lauzoril rose to the challenge, but between acts in the zulkirs' endless drama, he escaped to the countryside, proving-he supposed as he reined the stallion to a halt-that enchanters were romantics at heart and that their zulkir was the greatest romantic of all.
Once, long before Lauzoril was born, all that would become Thay had been farmland where every valley was under plow and every ridge supported a flock of sheep. The farmers had been as poor as their land was rich. Everything they produced went to Mulhorand to please the god-emperor. In those days the Red Wizards were persecuted revolutionaries, firebrands for