The Simbul's Gift (15 page)

Bro's ears popped twice. He guessed that spells, not javelins, were his assailants' favored weapons and that, inexplicably, they'd failed to affect him. He knew better than to expect his luck to continue. The Simbul's knife, his only weapon, was on his belt beneath him. Bro clawed right-handed at the sheath, while with his left hand he groped for any sort of weapon. The best he could grasp was a fist-sized lump of moss, which he hurled at the first thing he saw from the corner of his eye.

“Go away,” he warned.

“Go away!” “Go away!” “Go away!” they echoed amid raucous laughter.

One of the larger, unwinged seelie with the head and tail of weasel and a stone-tipped spear darted forward and launched his weapon at Bro's neck. The Cha'Tel'Quessir weren't as quick as their elven cousins, but Bro was quick enough to dodge.

“Leave me alone,” he warned again.

“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” they echoed, adding rude gestures to their chorus.

Bro's ears popped a third time. He couldn't guess which seelie had cast the spell, nor what it had been meant to do. He guessed they were more interested in tormenting him than harming him, but he had little interest in being their goat, either way. Bent-kneed and balanced on his toes, Bro tore another fistful of moss from the ground. He feinted at the weasel-seelie, but threw the clump at a smaller, man-shaped seelie who didn't sense danger coming his way.

The man-shape dropped straight to the ground with the moss landing on top of him and his shimmering wings broken beneath him. He wasn't moving. All the smaller seelie vanished. The larger ones hovered together, humming a low note among them.

“I'm sorry,” Bro apologized. It had happened so quickly, so easily. Yesterday, he'd been the victim; today, he was the murderer. “I warned you.”

“He warned us,” a seelie said and the others echoed: “Warned us.”

“He doesn't want to dance,” another seelie said, and the echo: “Doesn't want to dance.”

“He wants to fight!” A hawk-faced seelie raised a silver sword.

Bro swallowed fear and settled behind the Simbul's knife, striving to look more menacing than he felt or was.

The little seelie reappeared around Bro's head. Their tiny swords in their tiny hands couldn't break his skin, but they made him flinch while their larger brethren surged forward with weapons that drew blood. They concentrated their attacks on Bro's right hand and wrist. He kept his grip on the hilt until the weasel-seelie twirled himself around Bro's forearm and held on long enough to thrust his sword into the tendon at the base of Bro's thumb.

Pain paralyzed his arm from the shoulder down. Bro beat his forearm against the tree trunk. He knocked the weasel-seelie off, but he dropped the Simbul's knife, too.

“
Now
he'll dance for us!”

Bro lunged for the seelie who seemed about to cast the spell. His ears popped and a tingling spread down his legs. He thought for sure he was going to land on his face, but his feet began dancing wildly, and it appeared that he could not fall. He attacked instead, and knocked another seelie to the ground.

The seelie pulled back again, the little ones vanishing as before while the larger ones made their droning sound. One of them, the weasel-seelie, larger than before, pointed at Zandilar's Dancer, whom they'd ignored until that moment.

“Leave him alone!” Bro shouted.

His spell-driven dancing made it difficult to move closer to the colt without frightening him. But Bro judged that the lesser of two evils—Zandilar notwithstanding, horses weren't made for dancing. He'd sooner turn Dancer loose in the Yuirwood than see him go down with a broken leg. His greatest problem was keeping still long enough to untie the rope one-handed; he solved that by dropping to his knees and using his teeth.

His ears began popping before he got the knot undone. He began to sing loudly a song that made him blush, but he got the rope loose just in time for Zandilar's Dancer to rear up, trumpeting like a stallion, and beat the air with his front hooves. Bro threw himself backward, legs still dancing. The seelie laughed, but not loud enough to drown Bro's bawdy song.

Bro hoped laughter meant the seelie were satisfied. He hoped in vain. Misty light in rainbow colors spiraled up Dancer's hind quarters, transforming horse legs into bear legs. The colt reared again and fell over, hard and screaming.

Dancer's agony was more than Bro could endure. He stood on his hopping feet, shouted a challenge between the words of his song, and charged. Magic and weapons pelted him. He was blind and surrounded by rainbow light, floating and falling, on fire and freezing cold at the same time. At the end, he was shrinking and growing a bushy tail.

Bro emerged from the top of the Simbul's boot, chittering his song rather than singing it, hopping from one foot to the next, and next, and next. He saw the forest clearly and all around him, but without color. There was room in his shrunken head for his name, the broadest outlines of his history, and the natural instincts of a squirrel; nothing else fit or mattered. When he saw the laughing seelie, he fluffed his tail and flicked it once, then bounded over his abandoned trousers. He dug his claws into the tree bark and escaped into a lofty tangle of branches.

Thrul's spy master had discarded her disguise and, wearing a gown as sheer as any she wore in the zulkir's presence, worked her craft in a windowless bolt-hole. The gown was her own—that made all the difference in the world. The glass eggs in the chest in front of her had been devised by her mentor, Deaizul, when he was in his prime. They belonged to her now, and if that made them less reliable, then she was doomed and Aznar Thrul with her.

The two-score eggs, blown from the finest glass a zulkir's gold could buy and sealed with a dollop of lead, sat in padded compartments in a shallow, wooden chest. Each was about the size of the spy master's nose and empty except for strands of hair—eyelashes, mostly—fingernail parings, and a powder composed of blood pearls, dragon wing, and bits of human skin. When the spy master sprinkled alegar over an egg and held it in the light of a particular lamp, the powder rose like mist. When she added of yellow gossypol to the alegar, the mist became a face and the egg became a short-lived conduit between the spy master and her spy.

Or it did, while the spy lived.

The egg the spy master held was inert, as had been the previous three. The four represented those Deaizul had sent after Mythrell'aa's minions in the Aglarondan village. It wasn't hard to imagine what had happened to them; it wasn't pleasant either.

She blew out the lamp and carried the inert eggs to the table that dominated her bolt-hole. She returned to close and lock the chest: her mentor had been adamant: the key to effective spy mastering was unrelenting attention to details. Beneath the deliberate disorder of their lives lay
careful pattern and precision.

The spy master never stinted. She replaced the lamp, the alegar, and the gossypol, each in its preformed compartment. Her gaze lingered over the empty compartments, six of them: four for the men and women who would have to be replaced, one that had contained her egg when Deaizul owned the chest, and the last that had contained his. Minions from the lower ranks of her web would replace the four she'd lost, making donations of hide and hair as preconditions for promotion. The last two would remain empty while she owned the chest. The eggs that held her essence and her lover's were sealed in a different chest, in a different time and place, where no harm could come to them.

She filled a goblet from a decanter no different from others on the table. After emptying it in three gulps, the spy master took up a steel scriber and began the tedious process of opening the eggs without damaging their contents. Half a decanter later, the eggs had star-shaped holes in their narrow ends and a small mound of mortal remains sat on a silver plate. The spy master sipped another goblet while studying her spellbook and grinding powder in an iron mortar: moonstone, porphyry, a knuckle bone from an undead elf. After the reagents and remains had been thoroughly mixed, she added the dregs from her goblet and whispered words passed down through generations of Thayan spy masters.

The silver plate was crusted and streaked with tarnish when the scrying was complete; the spy master's skin was pale beneath its tattoos. She dressed quickly in her wig and rags, cleared the table into a sack, and headed for Thrul's citadel. The reagents disappeared into a midden hole where the next high tide would suck them out to sea, but the silver plate was still with her, hidden in a more ornate sack, when she left her second bolt-hole in the flame-patterned robes of a Kossuthan priest.

Thrul's chamberlain made his usual protests, demanded his usual bribes, when she entered the forecourt of the Black Citadel. Pocketing her coins, he accepted the carnelian token of her position as if he'd never seen it before. Lord Thrul's chamberlain was either an expert dissembler or not quite the man he once had been.

“The Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir has a full schedule today. Return tomorrow, or the next day.”

“I'll wait.”

“But—”

“Take my token to my lord, Aznar Thrul. I'll wait here.”

Though it countered her training to leave a memorable impression in any mind, however inadequate, the spy master got the chamberlain moving toward the audience chamber. There was a danger that he'd get distracted or deliberately confound her, but the danger was all his. The spy master had other ways of contacting her employer.

Deep in the possibilities, she was almost disappointed when he returned with the gauze gown draped over one arm.

“The Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir will spare a moment for you.”

He offered her the gown and with the same hand prepared to take the sack. The spy master shook her head.

“It goes with me.”

“Unthinkable! No one
carries
in
his
presence. I'll keep it safe until you're finished.”

“Unthinkable!” the spy master replied, though the man spoke the truth. She'd never before needed to bring an object to a meeting.

They argued without possibility of compromise. In the end she persuaded him with another handful of coins and entered the changing room with the sack still in her possession.

Thrul flattened her the instant he saw it. She lay helpless, convinced he'd broken every bone in her body, while the sack floated away. After an eternity, a familiar voice told her to rise. Slowly, she obeyed. Her pride had taken most of the damage; the rest of her was intact, though bruised and bleeding.

“A horse, woman!” Thrul snarled. “You come here, harassing my servants, disturbing my peace. I weary myself with spellcasting—and for what? A horse? Is this what I pay you for?”

“Permit me to explain, my lord. The horse is neither an end or a beginning; it's—”

“Explain away, woman. By all means, explain the horse. My curiosity knows no bounds.”

The spy master hated him. Perhaps she'd always hated him, Aznar Thrul, zulkir
and
tharchion, with his acid tongue. But, having avoided the brunt of his scorn before this, she had been unwilling to acknowledge that her employer was a small-minded man whose spite was greater than his ambition. She'd overlooked his failings because his power supported her web of intrigue. But that was past: once she saw a pattern—truly saw it—she saw its implications, too, and they became part of her.

Thrul toyed with the plate, flicking it toward her, then holding it close again, catching sunlight on the horse's untarnished outline and flashing it into her eyes. His every move proclaimed he wanted her to ask—to beg—for its return. She guessed he wouldn't surrender it without some additional humiliation.

“Mythrell'aa's minions found what they were looking for in Aglarond.”

“A horse?”

Thrul laughed at a private joke. Light from the plate flashed in the spy master's eyes again and lingered long enough that she had to blink. From its birth a moment earlier, the spy master's hatred had grown into a consuming passion.

A good spy lived without passion; it interfered with finding and analyzing patterns. Even with Deaizul, the spy master had felt only the pattern of love, not the passion. For one heartbeat, passion was interesting, by the second, it was inconvenient, and with the third she understood how Deaizul had lost his nerve. She pitied him: He'd chosen passion over pattern. Her mentor had made the wrong choice, a mistake she did not intend to make.

She'd take her hatred, seal it in a glass egg, and make it work for her. If Aznar Thrul wasn't worthy of her web, she'd use it for herself, for the glory of Thay, and bring him down slowly, piece by miserable piece.

“Say something, woman!”