The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [37]
Ingryl kissed a stone door in a certain place, murmured a word that mattered and a slightly louder one that was nonsense, and laid his hand on the door in another certain place. The door melted away, and in the brief moments before it became solid again, the Spellmaster ducked through its frame into the curtains.
He hated their wet and waiting slime, but they were necessary: nets hung thickly with a curtain of little slithering slime-worms, pale and bulbous and with eternally twitching, questing ends, like giant maggots. His little slithering guardians, their slime harmless to him, but deadly to all others. Still alive after all this time, as patient and as deadly as their master.
Beyond was a small, dark stone chamber, its walls lined with shelves of battered old caskets. One held potions and spellbooks, all the rest skeletal things that would clutch and grab at anyone foolish enough to open them. In their midst stood a low table with a coffin on it-whose touch would dash lightnings through any hand but that of Ingryl. The Spellmaster wondered briefly if the baron had ever known who truly ruled Castle Silvertree, behind his back.
Not Ingryl Ambelter ever again, if he didn't hurry. The burning agony was rising into his chest now, his breath acquiring a rattle. Ingryl lifted the coffin lid, looked down at the skeleton in its wooden frame, and laid his hands on the three stout cross braces that would take his weight.
The flaws of the magic he'd worked-or the ravages of time, on Ladazzur's scepters-were greater than he'd thought; the effort to clamber up onto the table and then into the coffin left him trembling. Draped on the cross braces that kept him from crushing the bones so close beneath, Ingryl embraced the grinning bones and hoarsely gasped out a spell.
An eerie light grew and pulsed along the bones, washing over the Spellmaster ere it faded away again. Ingryl lay still, listening to the tiny sounds that accompanied a finger crumbling and dropping off the skeleton into the bottom of the casket, and smiled.
He was whole and vigorous once more. Beware, folk of the Vale, for Ingryl Ambelter strides forth again! Or would do, once he raised himself out of the coffin.
Ingryl took time and care over it, and when he was done stood silently looking down at the bones of Gadaster Mulkyn, most famous and-thus far-most feared of Silvertree mages. None but Ingryl knew they lay here… or Gadaster's true fate.
After a moment, the Spellmaster stiffened. "A gathering of magic around my… Sirl portal?" he said slowly, and raised one eyebrow. "My thanks, Gadaster."
He turned to go, recalling the sequence of spells he'd crafted to steal Gadaster's power (and ultimately the old mage's life), with no one-including Gadaster-being any the wiser. Satisfying, and still secret. Brilliant spell-craft that he'd never dare to tell anyone about.
Ah, well. By the sound of things, 'twas high time to work brilliant spell-craft again…
8
A Swordsman's Home Is His Castle
The wolf-spider towered over her. Embra spread empty hands, knowing she couldn't weave any useful spell in time, and dodged away, hair swirling wildly around her shoulders as she cast glances here and there, seeking ways out and the whereabouts of her companions. She knew this room; they were back in the Silent House, dragged there by Sarasper's desperate spell…
Hawkril lay sprawled and bloody in his gnawed armor, Craer was darting around furred limbs, slashing and stabbing with a long knife, and Sarasper was sagging wearily against a wall, face ashen. Embra's precious Dwaer-Stone was somewhere in the wolf-spider's innards, swallowed whole when the thing had bitten down on her upflung arm, back on the hill.
The Band of Four was in no state to win this battle.
"Flee!" Embra cried, more to learn Sarasper's condition than anything else. His eyes