Murder in Halruaa (12 page)

From his position on shore, Covington could see three turrets. The windows looked like huge gemstones of different colors. They bulged out as if someone had catapulted red, green, and blue jewels the size of boulders into the walls, and they had stuck halfway through. From the outside, he could see the glimmer of light and movement within.

There was no classic gate. This castle’s “gate” was a simple, unadorned wooden door with a plain copper doorknob. Pryce

leaned forward, having a hard time believing his eyes, because the entire Mystran Inquisitrix Castle rested on top of a single, simple door, which in turn seemed to float a paper’s thickness above the water.

He turned back to look wonderingly at Dearlyn, who shrugged. “It’s always been like that,” she told him. “A huge stone edifice resting atop a plain wooden door. Don’t ask me to explain it.”

Pryce got as close to the water’s edge as possible. He walked down the quay until the water lapped at his boots. He moved to the left and to the right, craning his neck, but he never could see whether there was anything beside or behind the door. No matter what angle he looked from, the huge castle continued to appear as if it were balancing on a single door beneath it.

Covington blinked, shook his head, and looked down. The wonders didn’t cease. The castle, now some fifty yards away, rested on the door, which in turn hovered over a solid concrete shelf, covered by only a single inch of placid, crystal-clear bay water.

‘The Lalloreef Strait.” He turned at the sound of Dearlyn’s voice in his ear. She smiled understandingly, then nodded toward the shelf with its thin layer of clear water. “I’ve never seen anyone but an inquisitrix or an inquisitrix’s guest move across it. No one has. Even children consider it off limits.”

If it could be said that Pryce was in over his head in only one inch of water, the visual conundrums the Mystran Inquisitrix Castle presented him with had done the trick. But just like the rest of the dangers this mystery posed, Covington couldn’t afford to dwell on it. If he had, he would have run screaming into the predawn murk, as opposed to staying and fighting for what he was rapidly beginning to believe in—little, unimportant things like love and justice.

“All right,” he gulped, finding his voice. “Use what skills you have been able to surreptitiously acquire to divine what fortification you can.”

Dearlyn looked worriedly at the castle, then back at him, unsure of herself.

It was his turn to lay a hand on her arm. “Please,” he said. “I’d rather die than let anything happen to you.”

She looked at him with confusion, but then a strange look of hope infused her features. “Let me get this straight,” she said with equal portions of incredulity and disbelief. “Are you saying … would you… ? Are you asking me to be your apprentice? My father can’t teach me directly, but through you… ?”

Pryce’s heart sank. Now he knew that in order to secure her cooperation and collaboration, he would have to resort to another eminently practical, but truthless, deception. “Please don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just attempt what I requested … please? Sometime tonight?”

“Of course,” she said with new willingness, either unaware of, or more likely ignoring, his sarcasm. “I’ll do my best, Blade.” She lowered her head and started to mumble something. At first he thought it was a spell, but then he began to make out words and realized that she was trying to remember specific magical necessities, like a child laboriously doing her math on her fingers and toes.

Oh, great, he thought. The magicless leading the deceived.

Finally she seemed to be satisfied. Pryce couldn’t help standing back as her hair seemed to float of its own accord. Her cloak billowed, then swirled into the moonlight. She raised one strong, shapely hand… and nothing happened.

Her hair, cape, and hand dropped, and she turned to him. “I can detect nothing,” she said simply.

“Nothing’s there?” he said hopefully.

She treated his question as a test of her reasoning. “I didn’t say that. Whatever is or is not there, I can’t substantiate it.”

Pryce looked askance at the castle door. “I have always,” he said steadily, “trusted in the ability of an Ambersong.” Then, with the suicidal faith of a child blindly jumping into an inviting

pond, he started walking through the inch of water, across the Lalloreef Strait, directly toward the castle door.

If anyone in the city had been watching, it would have been an impressive sight. Thankfully for the woman on shore and the marching man, even the most curious wizard had retired, thinking that anything of interest was done for the night. This was, after all, the exclusive city of Lallor, where wealthy vacationing conjurers felt safe enough not to be examining every alley every hour of the day.

So the wizards missed the splendid sight of Covington purposefully striding toward the door, his cloak fluttering, as if his conviction and fervent faith in his own luck were enough to stave off disaster. Pryce was forty yards away… then thirty-five … then thirty… then twenty-five. He maintained his steady speed, feeling in his heart that if anything was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

Twenty yards to go. Covington had made it past the halfway point. It was all downhill—figuratively speaking—from here.

Pryce wasn’t sure whether Dearlyn’s cry or the sensation of movement through the bottom of his boots reached his brain first. In any case, the woman’s scream was the most tangible.

“Blade! Look out! Dragon turtle!”

Pryce’s brain instantly laid the options out on the table of his mind. Run or think. Pryce considered running for a fraction of a second, but he pictured himself being bitten in two, so he chose “think.”

Pryce looked to his left. Incredibly, coming straight at him, across one inch of water, was one of the most terrifying creatures known to any seafarer. Pryce had heard a rare survivor of an encounter with a dragon turtle call it “beautiful” and “awesome.” It was indeed both.

The forty-foot-long dragon turtle was only fifty feet away from him. Pryce stared straight into the creature’s one dark, copper-colored eye as its long webbed, spiked, craning neck bore down on him, its fins skimming the water like a pond bug. But a pond bug could be crushed with one swat of a human hand. The only swatting to be done here was by the thing’s scaly, armored tail— that is, if it didn’t swallow Pryce whole first.

“Run!” he heard Dearlyn cry over the roar of the approaching beast. “I’ll try to do something!”

Pryce Covington spun around to face the shore and anchored his legs firmly, his right arm shooting up and out in a commanding position. “No!” he boomed. “I, Darlington Blade, forbid it!”

Dearlyn was stunned into silence by his decree, and then it was too late. She watched as the beast covered the remaining distance. Then the creature’s snout opened, and from between its shardlike teeth emerged a sizzling cloud of scalding steam that shot forward, completely covering the Lalloreef Strait.

With one chomp of its deadly jaws and one sweep of a murderous claw, it sank into the bay on the other side of the Inquisitrix Castle.

Dearlyn Ambersong stared out at the bay in shock. The water was placid. There was no sign of the monster or the slightest hint that it had been there. It was as if nothing had happened.

Except the man she knew as Darlington Blade was nowhere to be seen.

Pryce Covington was gone.

Pryce opened his eyes slowly. As he had hoped and prayed, he was not inside the belly of the beast. Instead, he was in the lair of Berridge Lymwich, which held the promise of being just as painful.

“Dragon turtle,” he said matter-of-factly. “Nice touch. Very convincing. The castle is devoted to illusion, I surmise?”

Berridge Lymwich turned from an oblong cavern of divining orbs to face her guest. “Guess,” she challenged him. “What was it you two shouted to each other just before you were swallowed?”

Pryce immediately made up something to protect Dearlyn Ambersong. ” ‘Lovely night for a swim,’ she said, to which I replied, ‘Come on in. The water’s fine.’”

He was seated on a not very comfortable lounge chair in the middle of a large black, otherwise empty floor. The floor was constantly being dappled by colors, however, from the reflected images of scenes from throughout the city on the dozens of orbs

placed high on three walls in the semicircular room. It was as if Pryce sat inside a huge bulb, with many halves of other, smaller bulbs jutting out from the inner wall, each showing a different view of the city.

“Which one does the Eye of the Inquisitrix see?” Pryce wondered aloud.

“That is not your concern,” Lymwich stated, walking toward him slowly. She was no longer in her inquisitrix uniform. Instead, she wore an impressive gown of dark gold with ruffled sleeves, cinched wrists, a long, puffy train, and a severe bodice threaded with silver laces. As she stepped closer, he could see that she wore matching gold-colored boots, also with silver laces.

She languidly pointed at a particular orb. Her voice sounded like a fingernail scratching on a chalkboard. “That view should be familiar to you.”

He looked to see Lalloreef Strait from the viewpoint of the castle. He saw a lone figure on the quay, her hands up to her mouth.

“Poor Dearlyn seems at a loss for words, let alone actions,” Lymwich murmured. “I wonder why.”

Pryce knew why. Just before he had been “swallowed up,” he had figured out how to defeat the fear the dragon turtle had instilled in him. Logically deciding that the fiend had to be an illusion, he then decided it was imperative that Dearlyn display no illegal magic for Lymwich to witness.

Halruaa had nine schools of magic, and the disciples of Mystra had erected a castle for the study and even worship of each one. The tenth castle was on Mount Talath and honored them all. Pryce already knew of the locations of several of them—Enchantment, Alteration, Summoning, and Necromancy—but not of Illusion. Even with the monster heading straight toward him in a very convincing way, logic dictated that it would look bad if the inquisitrixes had every unannounced visitor gobbled up.

Besides, the domestication and training of a dragon turtle into

a guard tortoise or “watch reptile” would be arduous in the extreme.

Knowing instinctively that it was all a gamble, and that the overwhelming odds were that Berridge or someone like her was watching, Pryce sought to protect Geerling’s daughter at all costs. Her earlier divining spell was so ineffective and of such a low level that Covington was certain he could explain it away if need be—perhaps as a parlor trick he had been teaching her.

But he would never have been able to explain away the kind of attack she had made on him earlier in the evening, especially if she had attempted to unleash it upon the dragon turtle. Thankfully, the inquisitrixes’ illusion was too good: Its roar had drowned out Dearlyn’s cry and Pryce’s warning.

Pryce said to Inquisitrix Lymwich casually, “I wonder why, with all the many inqusitrixes assigned to Lallor, I keep running into you.”

Berridge wasn’t taken aback. Instead, she smiled demurely. “I wonder, in turn, why an illusion as incongruous as a dragon turtle seems to have paralyzed the great Darlington Blade, then inspired him to take what looked like, for all intents and purposes, a last stand.”

Pryce was thankful for the probing riposte. It allowed him to be completely honest again. “My sole concern was for the daughter of Geerling Ambersong. She is not as well versed in the nature of prestidigitation as you or I.”

“Presti—” Lymwich’s expression remained demure, but the silk had hardened to stone and her voice had a harsh grate. “You like her, don’t you? She is… attractive to you, is she not?” She started to walk away from him.

“She has youth and beauty,” Covington acknowledged. “But she also has anger and doubt… like many people.”

Lymwich turned on him, her face half in shadow. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to guard this city? The dignitaries who maintain homes here should not, and will not, be interfered

with, but we are surrounded by possible danger.” She turned to the wall, and suddenly the half-orbs were filled with images of the mountainous countryside.

‘To our east, the Azhal Mountains, crawling with thieves. Farther east, Kethio, the Great Swamp, teeming with beasts of all kinds, both natural and supernatural. Beyond that, Dambrath. If the malicious Dambraii ever tried to invade us again, Lallor could well be the first city they attacked….” Lymwich let that sink in before continuing with her litany of jeopardy. ‘To the north, the Bandit Wastes. I don’t imagine I have to tell the likes of you the sort who populate that forsaken area.”

She turned, and suddenly the half-orbs were looking down at the Bay of Azuth, which lay just beyond Lallor Bay. “Go south and you won’t have to travel far to be within reach of the Shipgrave Isles and the Stormtails, where many a ship is beset by Dambrathian raiders, monster whirlpools, South Shining Sea pirates—”

“And dragon turtles,” he concluded for her.

“Yes … and dragon turtles,” she agreed with a slightly more sincere smile, but its duration was short. “We are virtually surrounded by threats,” she said grimly, “and if they ever chose to target our tiny city, the navy at Zalasuu would be of little help.” She stood before him, her legs wide, her feet anchored, and her hands clasped before her hips. “So is it any wonder that newcomers who are under suspicion are assigned a personal inquisitrix to watch over them?”

“Under suspicion?” Pryce echoed.

Lymwich shrugged with a malicious smile. “Geerling Ambersong is still missing, and you no longer have the excuse that he is out somewhere teaching you.”

“Does that concern you?” Covington asked the question for three reasons. One, to play for time. Two, to keep her from asking him any more questions. And three, because it certainly did concern him.

“Everything concerns me, Mr. Blade.” The images in the orbs returned to more nearby sites. “Halruaa is ruled by a Council of Elders,” Lymwich continued somberly, “of which Geerling Ambersong is but one. Of course, there are four hundred elders, but you know only thirty-nine are needed to achieve a quorum. But even if they needed thirty-nine-hundred, we would still respect Mage Ambersong as if he were King Zalathorm’s heir. That is how well regarded he is here.”