Emerald Sceptre (7 page)

“Please,” the girl pleaded, her voice resounding in her skull but nowhere else. “I want to get out.” She waited, listening, but there was nothing. No sounds, not even the roaring in her ears. “Please!” she screamed.

Nothing.

Emriana curled up into a ball and lay on her side. She would have liked to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. She was simply left with her thoughts.

Later—an hour? a year?—Emriana became aware of something. It was not clear what she had noticed, but just the fact that she was noticing anything at all snapped her out of a sort of stupor. She rose up onto her knees, turned her head, tried to determine which sense had detected something.

It was light.

Very faint, above her, a pinprick of light had appeared. The light grew, became a window, grew still more, dazzlingly bright, making the girl cringe. It became one whole side of her prison. It burned her eyes with its brightness, but she was oh, so thankful just to feel pain in her eyes.

Emriana blinked repeatedly and managed to, focus on the scene beyond her prison, through that window.

She spied a room, one that she vaguely remembered from another time. A large bed stood against a distant wall, with a couch to one side and a dressing table beside that. It was a woman’s room, draped with bright, colorful tapestries and illuminated by numerous pierced lanterns hanging from the walls and ceiling. Textures, temperature, length, and form all seemed wonderfully welcome right then, even if a recollection nudging at the edge of her memory was vaguely unsettling. Emriana knew that if she could

just think hard enough, it would come to her.

At that moment, a woman dressed in a formal gown stepped into view in front of her precious window, blocking out the rest of the world. The owner of the room, triggering all of those memories.

Lobra Pharaboldi.

Denrick’s sister.

Emriana gasped and shrank back. The look on the woman’s face told Emriana that she was not being rescued.

“Hello, Emriana Matrell.”

, “Please let me out,” the girl began, crawling right up against the window, pressing her face as close as she could, hoping she looked sufficiently anxious that Lobra would take pity on her and not blame her for what had happened to Denrick. “I don’t know how I got in here, but if you could ask someone, or have a wizard perform a divination, I’m sure you could let me out, and—”

“Hush,” Lobra said, her voice soft and yet commanding. “Not just yet.”

Emriana felt tears on her cheeks. “Please?” she begged, and she thought she sounded rather pitiful, like a child. “Please?” she repeated.

“Oh, I will let you out in a moment,” Lobra said, smiling just a bit. “To serve your penance for the crimes you and your family have inflicted upon me.”

“I didn’t mean to do anything,” Emriana began, feeling frantic to convey remorse, anything to win Lobra over. “It was an accident, a big misunderstanding, and I’m sorry for that. It would never, ever happen again,” and she went on, babbling anything she could think of to convince Lobra that she should be allowed to get out of the mirror.

“Hush,” Lobra repeated. “There is someone here who would like to see you,” she said, looking up, past Emriana, to some place out of the girl’s field of view.

Denrick Pharaboldi strolled around the side of the window, stepped right up and knelt down, that familiar, terrible, wolfish grin spreading wide. “Hello, Emriana,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Lavant knows we’re watching him,” Falagh said, sounding impatient. “He must. He hasn’t said anything of consequence to Lord Wianar since we began.”

“Perhaps,” Grozier replied, leaning over Bartimus’s shoulder and watching the scene displayed on the wizard’s mirror.

The glass was smaller than the one in Bartimus’s chambers at House Talricci, handy for travel, but it made viewing the images more difficult. Since they were performing the viewing in the sitting room of House Pharaboldi, it was a necessary inconvenience. He would have liked to use the larger one, the exquisite glass he had been ordered to fetch from the dungeons of the Generon, for it was much more suitable

for scrying. But the woman Lobra had it in another room, along with one of the shapeshifters, who had taken the form of her dead brother.

Bartimus wondered if she had some ability at magical scrying, too.

“Stop shaking it!” Grozier ordered. “It’s hard enough to see what’s going on.”

The wizard sighed and held the small mirror still, wishing his employer would stop putting so much weight on him. Grozier’s breath stank of salted fish roe, a delicacy served at the celebration and something Bartimus knew the man enjoyed.

“He doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to our spy, though,” Grozier continued. “I think Lavant would have taken action if he suspected something.”

“Well, if the two of them try to wander off alone and put some distance between themselves and our planted guard again, that might be a good clue that they sense trouble,” Falagh replied. “Maybe he and the Shining Lord just aren’t willing to discuss their private matters with guards standing about, and if your doppelganger insinuates himself into their, midst one more time, they are bound to realize he’s‘ shadowing them.”

“Perhaps,” Grozier said again, sounding doubtful, still peering into the mirror. “Give it a little more time.”

Bartimus thought Falagh’s initial plan had seemed promising. After Junce had shown the lot of them where the magic mirror was stored and then vanished to deal with other issues, the scion of House Mestel had suggested that their duplicate Pilos wait a bit before carrying out his ruse with the Darowdryn family. Instead, Falagh had suggested,

they should have him transform into the likeness of a Generon guard and get near Lavant. He reasoned that attempting to use Bartimus’s magic to scry directly on either Lavant or Lord Wianar might trigger some magical defenses one of the men had in place, but focusing the magic on another figure who could get close to them might let them overhear a conversation with little chance of getting noticed.

Thus far, the high priest and the ruler of Chondath had done nothing but make small talk, and frankly, the wizard was growing bored. He didn’t much care to return to the party, not so much because he would rather be somewhere else, but because he so often got lost in the middle of conversations. He always found himself mulling problems in his head, letting his mind wander over spells he was developing. Being drawn back into a discussion in which someone was waiting for him to reply to a missed question made him uncomfortable, so he tended to keep to himself at public events, standing off in the corner and avoiding groups. That wasn’t much fun, either.

“Bartimus!” Grozier snapped, drawing the wizard out of his thoughts.

“Um, yes?” he stammered, realizing that he had actually managed to daydream about daydreaming and thus missed his employer’s question.

“I said, let’s forget this for a moment and try something else. Can we peek in on someone else’s situation?”

“Why, yes,” Bartimus answered, mentally ticking off the number of applications of the scrying spell in his head. “I planned ahead and scribed the requisite spell several times, just in case you would desire me to perform several viewings at once.”

“Excellent,” Grozier said. “Let’s take a look at what

our good friend Vambran Matrell is up to. I wonder if he’s dead yet?”

Bartimus nodded and withdrew a small rolled parchment from a hidden pocket in his robes. Unfurling the thing, he began to call on the magic embedded in the script he had placed there, drawing on the arcane energies locked away in the phrases. He felt the swirl of magic surround him and pour from his hands into the mirror. As the spell took effect, a new image formed in the glass. At first, Bartimus could make out little more than a shifting, swarming light from some flame, with black figures silhouetted against the blaze. With a mental command, the wizard adjusted the point of view, drawing back from the image to get a more panoramic orientation.

Behind Bartimus, Grozier gasped. “What is that?” he asked, leaning down to better scrutinize the mirror. “Are you sure you found Vambran? Where is he?”

The diminutive wizard pushed his spectacles farther up his nose and stared for a moment at the scene before answering. “Yes, I’m sure I’ve focused in on him. That looks like a city street. I don’t know what’s burning, though.”

“Look,” Falagh said, pointing. “There he is, fighting.” Then the man leaned in closer, right next to Grozier, crowding Bartimus out. “What is that thing next to him? And what in the Nine Hells are they battling?”

“By Waukeen, that’s a zombie!” Grozier said, jerking back. “Bartimus, pull the image back some more. Get the whole street, if you can.”

When the wizard complied, the three men could see that a multitude of hunched and limping forms

shambled around the periphery of three figures fighting back to back. One of the three was a man, clearly Vambran Matrell, another was a woman, and the third was inhuman.

For a long moment, the three of them sat and stared at the grim battle taking place within the mirror. Finally, Falagh asked in a quiet tone, “Bartimus, can you draw back even more? I’d like to see as much of the city as we can. That has to be Reth.”

Bartimus sent a mental command to the mirror and the image panned back, encompassing several blocks of stone buildings. A multitude of fires burned in the scene. Everywhere the three men stared, houses and shops were engulfed in fire.

“Our logging,” Grozier rasped, his eyes wide. “It’s all going to burn! We’ll lose everything!”

• •

Horial Rhoden attempted to stifle numerous yawns as he trudged along a poorly lit path, following one of the druids leading him through the damp and misty Nunwood. On the third such mouth-splitting gape, he stumbled over a tree root and nearly fell on his face. Disgusted, the sergeant rubbed his eyes and smacked his cheeks a few times to force himself fully awake again.

Pay attention! he ordered himself.

“Contemplating a nap?” Adyan Mercatio asked in his distinctive drawl, hiking along beside Horial in the near-darkness, his breathing somewhat labored in the muggy night. Selune’s light barely penetrated the canopy overhead, making it difficult to spot the many branches, roots, and bushes that slapped and clawed at the five mercenaries along their journey.

The half-dozen or so druids accompanying them did not have the same problem navigating the woods.

“I’ve forgotten what sleep feels like,” Horial replied, yawning again. “Other than a brief nap when we were imprisoned in that cave, I don’t think I’ve slept since we were on board Lady’s Favor.”

“That sounds about right,” Adyan agreed. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he added with a chuckle, “I’ve had about enough of traipsing through dripping forests in the dark of night. I’m soaked.”

Edilus, the druid leading the expedition, appeared out of the darkness beside the two sergeants. “Shhh!” he hissed, motioning with his hand for the two mercenaries to be silent. “Stop speaking, or you will bring the enemy down on us!” he snapped in a whisper. “And can’t you walk more quietly?” he asked before turning back. “You move like a herd of rothé,” he called over his shoulder.

Horial opened his mouth to retort, then thought better of the idea and instead covered his mouth with his hand, fighting yet another yawn. Edilus disappeared once more, drifting off under the cover of night without a sound, presumably to scout ahead.

“I thought we were the enemy,” Adyan remarked with just enough volume that Horial was certain the druid had heard.

Horial grunted at his companion’s humor. Behind the pair, the other three members of the Order of the Sapphire Crescent followed along, making considerably more noise as they crashed and stumbled through the undergrowth. The racket made the druid’s scathing remarks seem more apt than the sergeant wanted to admit. The dwarf Grolo, in particular, stomped along, cursing every so often as vines and saplings slapped at him.

I guess he’s got a point, Horial thought in grudging appreciation. We sound just like a herd of rothé.

It was not easy to acknowledge the druid’s skills. Edilus had taken every opportunity to express his dislike, both in word and manner, since the Crescents’ capture and subsequent release by the Emerald Enclave nearly a full day earlier. Whether he used a sour look or a cross word, the man was determined to make clear just how much he disliked having to cooperate with soldiers from beyond the borders of his forest. Horial had no doubts that Edilus would just as soon run them through as help them.

The feeling is mutual, Horial thought. Thank Waukeen that Shinthala is the one making decisions.

“It’s sure a good thing Vambran has a way with the ladies,” Adyan drawled in a near-whisper. “Otherwise, Shinthala probably would have already let that fellow work off his frustrations on us.”

Horial chuckled at how Adyan was echoing his own thoughts. “He might still do it,” he replied with a grin, though he knew his friend could not see the expression in the dimness. “Shinthala isn’t here to rein him in.”

Adyan grunted but did not reply otherwise, for at that moment, the signal came from up ahead for the procession to halt.

Horial slowed to a stop and gave a soft “hold,” over his shoulder to the other soldiers coming up behind him. He crouched down and peered ahead, trying to see the reason for their pause. Adyan dropped low beside him. In the darkness, it was difficult to tell what was beyond, but it appeared that a clearing lay not much farther along the path. Moments later, Edilus appeared next to the two sergeants

once again.

“We are almost there,” the druid said as he dropped down beside them. “But we must be cautious now, for we leave the safety of the forest and will be out in the open and more easily seen. Ahead of us, the road from the city passes. On the far side, among some ruins, is the magical way.”

“What’s your plan, then?” Horial asked.

“I have scouts ahead,” Edilus replied, “making sure the road is clear. Once we are certain we are alone, I will take you to the portal. It won’t be long, and I can be rid of you once and for all,” he finished.