The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [91]
Silver fire danced on dark water, throwing feeble reflections onto purple-bordered tapestries of deepest black. High on those tapestries, in purple thread, were worked their sole adornments: cruel, somehow feminine smiles.
The inky waters of the scrying font rippled, and the scene of silver fire soaring up out of a castle was gone.
Someone close above the water said excitedly, "You saw? I know how we can use this."
"Tell me!" a cold voice snapped, sharp with excitement, then in lower tones, in another direction, said more calmly, "Cancel the Evenflame service. We'll be busy…and undisturbed, mark you, Sister Night…until further notice."
And so it was that Galadorna lost its queen and its court mage in the same night, less than a tenday before the armies of Laothkund rolled down from the tree-girt hills to set Nethrar ablaze, and shatter the Unicorn Kingdom forever.
Book Two: Sunrise On A Dark Road
Eleven: Moonrise, Frostfire, And
Doom
Adventurers are best used to slay monsters. Sooner or later, they become your worst monsters, and you have to hire new ones to do the obvious thing.
Ralderick Hallowshaw, Jester
from To Rule A Realm, From Turret To Midden
published circa The Year of the Bloodbird
"Seems peaceful enough, don't it?" the warrior rumbled, looking around from the height of his saddle at the forest of hiexel, blueleaf, and gnarled old phandar trees that flanked both sides of the road. Birds called in the distant depths of its shade gloom, and small furry things scuttled here and there among the dead leaves that carpeted its mossy stumps and mushroom-studded dead falls. Golden shafts of sunlight stabbed down into the forest here and there, lighting little clearings where shrubs fought each other for the light, and the moss-draped creepers were fewer.
"Don't say such foolhead things, Arvas," one of his companions growled. "They sound all too much like the sort of cues ambushing brigands like to follow. That sentence of yours sounds like something that should end with an arrow taking you in the throat…or the chunk of road your charger's standing on rising up to be revealed as the head of some awakened titan or other."
"I'll take the 'or other,' you merry-faced killjoy," Arvas grunted. "I just meant I don't see claw-sharpening marks on trees, bloodstains… that sort of thing… which should make you even more cheerful."
"You can be sure the High Duke didn't hire us to block the Starmantle road while we argue about things I'd rather other ears didn't hear about," a deeper voice said sharply. "Arvas, Faldast…stow it!"
"Paeregur," Arvas said in weary tones, "have you looked up and down this road recently? Do you see anyone…anyone…but us? Block the road from what, may I ask? Since the deaths began, travel seems to have just about stopped along here. Possibly about the same time you got this funny idea into your head that you're somehow entitled to give the rest of us orders! Was it that new armor, the heavy helm pressing hard on your brains? Or was it the new thrusting codpiece with the…"
"Arvas, enough.!" said someone else, in exasperation. "Gods, it's like having a babbling drunk riding with us.'
"Rolian," his halfling comrade said, from somewhere below the level of the humans' belts, "it is having a babbling drunk riding with us!"
There was a general roar of laughter…even echoed, albeit sarcastically, by Arvas himself…and the Frostfire Banner urged their mounts into a trot. They all wanted to find a good defensible place to camp before dark, or have time to get back to Starmantle if no such site offered itself, and it wouldn't be all that many hours, now, before the shadows grew long and the sun bright and low.
High Duke Horostos styled himself lord over the rich farmlands west of Starmantle, along a forested cliff