The Simbul's Gift (45 page)

Alassra Shentrantra did not wait well. She had never mastered patience. She went into the forest to seal herself in silence and prepare the spells she thought she might need later in the evening. That didn't take much time; she was always prepared for trouble. Her eight Cha'Tel'Quessir companions, whatever their other virtues—and she was certain they must have some—were as interesting as the sky on a cloudless day. Halaern was out in the laurel. Bro was imprisoned, enduring torment only a zulkir would imagine. And Rizcarn was sitting in the middle of the inner stone circle, once again aglow with a silver-green aura. By Alassra's best guess, the moon was still several handspans below the eastern horizon. She'd begun to wonder how long it would take one of Mystra's immortal Chosen to die of sheer boredom.

She counted the stars as they appeared in the twilight sky. There were three hundred and twenty-two when Rizcarn hoisted himself to his feet.

“The 'Glade,” he announced, “is ready. We are ready to dance for Zandilar.”

Truth to tell, Alassra Shentrantra wasn't much of a dancer, either. Court dances with their pattern steps were worse than boring and the ecstatic dancing Rizcarn described asked too much of a wizard who enjoyed spontaneity only when she was in complete control of it. When Rizcarn proposed that she dance
alone
at the center of the circles while he led the Cha'Tel'Quessir in a vine dance among the inner stones she came within a heartbeat of heading straight back to Velprintalar.

“I thought Zandilar was going to do all the dancing,” she protested.

“Zandilar will! Zandilar will awaken from the ground. She will become one with you, Chayan. You and she will dance together.”

“Someone else should have the honor. I've been away from the Yuirwood for so long that I've forgotten how to dance.”

She looked toward the women among the Cha'Tel'Quessir: three of them, each young enough to seduce a man with their dancing. They all refused to meet Alassra's eyes.

“You
are
the one to dance Zandilar's part,” Rizcarn persisted. “You serve her; she's chosen you. It doesn't matter where you've been. The dance is part of you; your body remembers it from childhood. Come.” He beckoned her toward the circles. “Take your place.”

Grimly—she'd rather face a score of Red Wizards, ten-score of Red Wizards—Alassra unbuckled her sword belt. “Will there be music?” she asked as she walked past Rizcarn. “Or do I have to remember that, too?”

Rizcarn produced a set of silver pipes. “I will make the melody, the forest and the 'Glade will make the rest.”

There were ten stones in the inner circle; one for each of them. Alassra read Relkath's name on one, Magnar and Elikarashae on two more, Zandilar's on a fourth, above the old Espruar rune for dancing. If she had a place, then Zandilar's stone was it and she started for it.

The Simbul wasn't Zandilar. She wasn't a dancer. There
were six other stones in the circle whose inscriptions had been eroded. She picked one of those stones, the northernmost stone.

“That's the wrong stone!” Rizcarn shouted.

On impulse, Alassra knelt before the stone. She traced what remained of its inscription. There were no legible marks. It was as if its god's name had been chiseled out before time had begun its work.

“Zandilar's stone, in the west, where the moon's light will surround you.”

“This is
my
stone,” the Simbul informed him, using a tone that made gods think twice before arguing with her.

Rizcarn—or his god—got the message. “We will begin together. Chayan, you will move to the center when it is the right time.” He anticipated her next question. “You will know when it is the right time. There will be no doubt.”

It was plain awkward at first. Alassra was conscious of every knee, ankle, elbow, and wrist. Her back was rigid and her hips simply would not sway to the twisting, twirling music that came from Rizcarn's silver pipes. No Red Wizard or Zhentarim mage had devised a crueler torture. As moonlight peeked through the trees, awkwardness became anger—the childish, self-destructive anger that had worried her Rashemaar guardians centuries ago. Alassra struck the man behind her hard enough to knock him to the ground; she only wished it had been Rizcarn and that the whole farce would come to a halt.

But Rizcarn was out of reach on the other side of the Cha'Tel'Quessir vine. To reach him, she'd have to move across the circle. That would be dancing alone, and the time would never be right for that.

Never.

The moon rose above the ridge, huge and so bright it hurt, like the sun, to look at its face. Anger, frustration, and the knowledge that it was hours until dawn, pushed Alassra Shentrantra to distraction. She seized her hair—Chayan's brown hair—and pulled it out by the roots, letting her hair—the Simbul's silver hair—flow into its place. She became blue eyed again, and pale skinned. She threw back her head and screamed.

The power of the Yuirwood, so like the lightning essence she called upon when she fought her enemies and yet so
different, too, rose within her. It burst through the pores of her skin, her eyes and mouth, the tips of her fingers. And then, as suddenly as it had ebbed, the essence waned.

“Who will come away with me?”

Rizcarn's music had stopped. The question came from the center of the circle where a silver-form woman stood beside a twilight horse.

“Who will dance with me?”

Alassra waited with the others. Her scream, and the power that answered it, had brought a sense of peace, of oneness with the world around her, that she had rarely known before. She was ready for whatever Relkath—or the Zulkir of Illusion—provided. The subtle play of magic beyond the paired circles didn't disturb her. Two people, possibly three, stepped from the shadows of magic to the shadows of the Yuirwood: Mythrell'aa—tiny, hairless, and patterned like a deadly snake—and one, possibly two, man-shaped companions.

“Who will dance with me?” Zandilar asked.

One of Mythrell'aa's companions started walking forward. Alassra readied a spell that would release four others: three to punch through Mythrell'aa's defenses, one to whisk Bro to safety. It wouldn't take a gesture or even a word to loose them; a thought, an intention would be sufficient and not even a zulkir's reflexes would be fast enough to counteract them.

She waited for the optimum moment when Bro was closer to her than to Mythrell'aa, for the moment she could see his face.

Not his face.

Not the face of Ebroin of MightyTree, but the face of Lailomun Zerad, smiling, laughing, running toward her.

Lauzoril had ridden the marble stallion for two days and nights without rest, guiding it across the breadth of Thay and into the unknown realm of Aglarond and its forest. The knife was his target, a bright star in his mind that had kept him on an unerring course until, suddenly, it had vanished early in the previous afternoon. He'd pressed on, pointed to the place where he'd last felt its presence: a poor excuse for a path through the everywhere tangle of laurel and briar that bothered the stallion not at all but had made the zulkir's life a misery since they'd entered the Yuirwood.

Spent magic had lain heavy on the ground where the knife had vanished. Lauzoril had determined that his knife, and the youth who carried it, had been snatched by a wizard and had been either taken very far away or was being held nearby under impenetrable, undetectable warding. Warding was the greater possibility, and Lauzoril had run down his mental list of Faerûn wizards capable of hiding from a Thayan zulkir. He'd put the Zulkirs of Illusion and Invocation at the top and Aglarond's queen close by.

Then he'd backtracked the ground trails his spells had revealed. One had led him to two bands of Red Wizards, all dead, stripped of their magic artifacts, all Invokers or archers paid in Bezantur coin. The others had come together in a grove not far from the place where the knife had vanished. From there the trail had been easy enough to follow. Lauzoril had hoped it would lead him to the knife and the youth who'd captured his daughter's attention.

Instead it had led to sunset and a relic from another time: a generous score of rough-hewn stones rising from the ground like a dragon's teeth. The stallion, normally
the most obedient of magical creatures, balked and would not descend the ridge from which they'd first viewed the stones. Just as well: there was little cover between the ridge and the stones where the chattel-kessir had ended their journey.

Lauzoril hid the stallion in the laurel, marking the location carefully in his mind. The trees and bushes were all alike to his eyes, accustomed as they were to the open land of Thazalhar. He liked the place, though, despite the discomforts of whiplash bushes and the countless tree limbs that crossed the stallion's straight-line path at the precise height of a mounted rider's forehead. And as for the Yuirwood's vaunted inhibition of spellcraft: he'd experienced none of it. The usual spells by which he guided the stallion had performed flawlessly, and the enchantment he cast over the horse to hide it yielded a moss-covered boulder as rugged and ancient as the stones beyond the ridge.

Don't believe
, the dagger Shazzelurt had hissed in the zulkir's mind while he contemplated his spellcraft.
Nothing is what it seems, Master. Nothing is unwatched. Leave, Master. Leave now!

The blade told the truth. The Aglarondan forest was thoroughly haunted—almost as haunted as the rolling hills of Thazalhar. Shazzelurt didn't approve of Thazalhar, either. Hiding himself as he'd hidden the horse, Lauzoril had settled down on the ridge crest to watch the chattel-kessir and wait until the air was dark enough for him to risk getting closer.

In Thay, the art and craft stealth was the province of assassins and though a good many Red Wizards worked as assassins in the hard years after they left their academies, Lauzoril hadn't been among them. He hadn't learned to move quietly until he was living in Thazalhar and wished not to disturb the fragile prairies as he walked through them. The zulkir had always been a good student; he eased down the ridge toward the stone circle unobserved, in advance of the rising moon.

The sense of magic grew stronger with each step, and though it didn't oppose his passage, Lauzoril quickly believed that it could, and in ways a Thayan zulkir would be helpless to counter—a belief that Shazzelurt confirmed continually in his mind until, with an act of will, Lauzoril
had made himself deaf to the knife's complaints.

Lauzoril watched an argument brew between two of the chattel-kessir, a brown-haired woman and a brown-skinned man. He wasn't able to grasp its substance: They spoke their own language here, a language he didn't understand. It occurred to the zulkir, as he waited beyond the outer, taller circle, that he might successfully rescue the mongrel youth—even bring him back to the Thazalhar estate to serve his daughter—and be unable to speak with him. The Thayan dialect, though heavily influenced by Mulhorandi, was intelligible everywhere in Faerûn, and elven types invariably understood common human speech; the challenge was getting them to admit it before they died of stubbornness.

He hoped it wouldn't come to that. He hoped he'd still have the chance to be the hero for Mimuay; and for the mongrel youth as well, who ought to be grateful to whoever rescued him from the Zulkir of Illusion or the Simbul of Aglarond. With the discovery of the partially looted Red Wizard corpses Lauzoril judged it unlikely that Invocation was behind the snatch. Aznar Thrul would never have left the gold and jewelry behind.

The argument ended with the woman laying down her weapons and entering the inner circle. The other chattel-kessir—crouched behind the tall stones, in the subtle draft of their power, the zulkir had begun to wish he knew what these people called themselves. They had a greater dignity than he'd imagined for them, a greater grace and beauty—even the stubborn woman who didn't want to dance and had been cajoled into leading the others.

Slaves danced in Thay, when they thought they could get away with it, making music on logs, bits of pottery and cast-off furniture, unless they'd been purchased for entertainment. Red Wizards never danced, even romantically inclined enchanters. The zulkir watched, enraptured, as the simple pipe melody grew complicated and wild. The stubborn woman surrendered to the swirling rhythm. She tore her hair and was transformed.

Lauzoril sat back, cursing himself for ignoring Shazzelurt's warnings. He expanded his awareness—his suspicions. The youth had been snatched by Mythrell'aa of Illusion because the woman, the stubborn woman whose
brown hair now flowed silver in the moonlight was Aglarond's queen, the Simbul. He recognized her from descriptions Red Wizard spies funneled back to Thay and, more reliably, from the one time when he'd spied through his knife and felt her essence in his mind. He was a dead man if she felt his presence half as acutely. But, having abandoned herself to the music, she seemed oblivious to the world beyond the stones.

And then there was a column of light within the dancers' circle. It widened and coalesced into a horse—likely the twilight horse Aznar Thrul's spy master had mentioned—and a splendid woman formed from moonlight and mist. She said something in the forest language. The music stopped.

Lauzoril discovered that he was on his feet and had taken a step toward the light.

Shazzelurt manifested in the zulkir's thoughts, ever ready to dominate and exploit a weakened mind. Lauzoril's thoughts snapped into familiar patterns. He threw off the dagger's influence, and the silver-form woman's as well, just in time to sense magic hanging some ten or fifteen paces, withershins, away outside the circle.

A gate opened from another place, an illusory place, shrouded in shadow: Mythrell'aa's place. When the gate closed, three figures stood outside the circle: a woman and two men, a zulkir and her minions. One of them was the youth he and Mimuay had seen in the scrying bowl. The other, answering the silver-form woman's call, started walking toward the stone circles.