The Simbul's Gift (9 page)

“Hurry, Bro!”

Tay-Fay retreated a step and, with her hands braced adultlike on her hips, stamped her foot impatiently. A man's body sprawled behind her, made visible by her retreat. At least Bro thought the mangled corpse had once been a man; it didn't belong to the pale-haired woman who'd struck him down.

“Hurry,” Tay-Fay repeated. Her voice was faint, but clear. “She's getting away. She's taking your horse.”

She—the pale-haired woman,
the witch-queen of Aglarond
—Bro gasped as the morning's events formed a pattern in his thoughts. The Simbul had come to Sulalk because she knew everything that happened in Aglarond and because everything in Aglarond belonged to her, if she wanted it. The Red Wizards had followed the queen, because they were her sworn enemies and that's what enemies did: follow each other and fight whenever, wherever they could.

Wizards didn't care if a handful of Aglarondan farmers got in their way. Maybe the Simbul had cared. She hadn't killed him when she'd had the chance. He could almost wish she had.

“Bro-o-o!” Tay-Fay persisted, turning his name into a melody. “She's getting away!”

With Zandilar's Dancer. Bro had no real hope of separating the Simbul and her prize. As a loyal Aglarondan, he shouldn't even try, but broken pride and a broken heart would destroy him as surely as her magic if he didn't. The half-elf rose with his human sister's help. He wasn't quite himself; the barn spun dimly before he was ready to follow Tay-Fay toward the light.

The Simbul had cast a spell on Zandilar's Dancer. There was no other way the colt would have stayed inside the wide and glowing circle she'd made in the center of the fenced-in yard. But magic wasn't enough to keep Dancer calm or convince him that the Simbul was trustworthy. He reared when she tried to reclaim his dangling halter rope.

Bro watched the colt he'd raised from birth straighten his neck and sink onto his haunches. He knew as surely as he knew his own name that Dancer was going to bolt and that breaking a wizard's circle was certain death or worse. With waving arms and a banshee wail, Bro raced toward the colt.

He felt his hair rise like cat's fur as he leapt over the glowing line. It seemed as if countless hot thorns had pierced his skin, but Bro kept his balance when his feet touched down inside the circle. He lunged for the halter rope then hung on for dear life when the Simbul shouted his name and Zandilar's Dancer reared for the sun.

Alassra spread her arms in a desperate attempt to control the spell the boy's sudden appearance within her circle had disrupted. She almost had the magic in balance when his sister followed him across the line. The spell was ripe. Either it carried them away or it killed them. She seized the boy with her left hand and the girl with her right, then let it fly.

There were foggy cracks in time and space around them
long enough for Alassra to count to ten—twice as long as she considered prudent. There were dangers between here and there that couldn't be ignored—which meant she didn't know where they were headed, except it wasn't Velprintalar. That meant more spells unreeled from her memory to insure that they hovered a moment in breathable air when the fog dissipated.

The boy, naturally, chose that moment to wrest free, taking the colt with him. They hit the ground running … through faint moonlight … into dark, thick trees. Alassra put a quick stop to their escape with a bit of crystal and a word that froze both in midstride, then she lowered herself and the girl to the ground.

A tangle of branches hid the sky. “Trees and moonlight! Cold tea and crumpets! Where are we?
When
are we?”

A moment's concentration and, stars or no stars, the Simbul had one answer: The Yuirwood. The forest's ancient magic pressed against all her senses. The trees tolerated her presence among them; they did not welcome her. Respectfully, Alassra made herself small and inconspicuous, though not before she cast one last spell above the living canopy. The stars of summer were in the sky, each one subtly displaced.

The principles of movement through time were the same as those through space—every traveling spell required a bit of both. But to move herself, two children and a horse far enough through time that the stars were displaced should have been—after her skirmish with the Red Wizards—temporarily beyond her abilities.

“Damned odd,” she muttered, puzzled but not concerned.

In six centuries of wizardry, Alassra had survived far worse than a misdirected traveling spell, though usually it took more than children and domestic animals to confound her. The horse, she knew, was more than it appeared to be, hence her interest in it, but it remained a horse, neither help nor hinderance where magic was concerned. The little girl, whose hand Alassra still held, didn't know her own name, much less where they were; she hadn't played a role in bringing them here.

That left Bro, the half-elf—Ebroin of MightyTree, to give him the Cha'Tel'Quessir name she'd plucked from his
thoughts and the lineage she read from the beads strung around his neck. They'd come to rest in his native place. Bro was as overwhelmed as his sister, but far from empty-minded. In the two years Alassra had been watching him and his colt, he'd shown no magical bent, either for wizardry or the forest magic of his ancestors but this wouldn't be the first time shock had kindled latent talent. Poised on the verge of manhood, he was the right age for a sudden awakening.

Mindful of the forest's interest, Alassra gently touched his brow. The echoes were very faint; the talent not much greater. Bro hadn't cast a spell. That was some relief: Faerûn didn't need an untrained druid with the power to pull Mystra's Chosen through time. He'd intended to cause trouble, and he'd achieved his goal. She found she liked him better than when she'd known him only through the mirror.

“I'll have to leave you here,” she said as she lifted her spell from his limbs. “Even the witch-queen has her limits.”

Bro drew a free breath and clasped his hands around Alassra's throat.

“You killed them!” he cried. “You could have saved them, but you didn't. You let them die—my mother, Dent, the whole of Sulalk—and then you tried to steal Dancer!”

He was no threat, not to the likes of her. The challenge lay in not killing him when she flung him aside. He landed hard, ten paces away, and for a moment Alassra thought she'd failed. Then Bro hauled himself to his feet and attacked again.

“Be still!” she commanded, lofting another little crystal into the air. He froze and, like an unbalanced statue, toppled face-first to the ground. “You're determined to make this difficult for both of us, aren't you?”

The tide was out and a stiff wind, running ahead of a sea storm, swept over the harbor mud, absorbing scents of life and death. On land, smoke from countless ovens gave the wind texture, while sun-baked streets and fermenting middens added their offerings to the season known in Bezantur as Reeking Heat.

Those who could flee the city had left a month ago; those who could not—the poor and the powerful—endured. A perverse few claimed preference for air with a life of its own, but most suffered the stifling, pungent breezes with little grace. Perfumers did better trade than food sellers as everyone created a private aura, using one favored scent against a myriad of others. In the end, stale perfume became the worst stench of all.

The state room of the Black Citadel at Bezantur's heart smelt as bad as the meanest alley. Aznar Thrul, Zulkir of Invocation and Tharchion of the Priador—the newest Thayan province of which ancient Bezantur had become the capital—fought Reeking Heat with incense cauldrons and fans: strategies Bezantines had long abandoned. Heavy smoke attracted other aromas, which the fans plastered over every surface. A decade into his tharchionate and Thrul's laudatory murals were reduced to obscure blotches, and the ceiling was a greasy stain where swarms of insects made their homes.

Thrul's nature, infinitely adaptable in politics and deceit, did not allow him to admit an error in ordinary housekeeping. By his order, the cauldrons were kept full and cindering; the fans never stopped swaying. He surrounded himself with the most priceless perfume of all: crisp air invoked from a distant mountaintop. Clothed in heavy
velvet, the Zulkir sat on his throne while sweating petitioners paraded before him.

Sultry heat and foul air weren't all that made the Bezantine petitioners uncomfortable. Life was dangerous for a Thayan zulkir who accumulated enemies as the ceiling above him accumulated flies, doubly dangerous for a zulkir who was also a territorial tharchion. Death threats were routine; some were serious. Thrul took no unnecessary chances: when petitioners came to the state room, they entered it naked.

Conventional weapons were impossible to conceal, and it was a rare mage whose concentration was not addled by embarrassment. Shame was further compounded by the constant presence of the citadel's legion of slaves. Never mind that the slaves were equally unclothed or that most of them were undead: They had eyes, they stared, and there was always the chance that they might recognize or remember.

There were drawbacks: Unnerved petitioners were often incoherent. It took patience to understand their logic, and Aznar Thrul was not a patient man. He'd have foregone these bribe-heavy occasions entirely were it not useful, even in Thay, for a tharchion to hear the complaints of common folk at least once a season—or twice, in Reeking Heat.

Thrul saw a score of petitioners before the storm swept in; twenty-three, if he counted the three who fainted between the door and the front of his chair. Once the storm arrived, thunder made it too difficult to hear, and wind whipping through the unshuttered windows blew embers from the incense cauldrons to the ceiling where the greasy soot caught fire.

Lesser wizards levitated slaves with damp rags to beat out the blaze. Two slaves burned when the flames ignited their undead flesh. Another four were lost when the wizard who held them in the air was distracted by a particularly loud thunder blast. The confusion and cleanup delayed the zulkir's dinner well into the evening. He was in a foul mood when his chamberlain appeared in the doorway.

“Neema Gaz,” the blue-tattooed wizard announced. A ragged kilt hung around his waist, a mark of the favor he risked by interrupting Thrul as he ate. Warily, he placed a
carnelian brooch on the table. “I do not know her, O Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir, but she had this.” He pointed at the brooch, the token of a wizard whose rank was considerably higher than his own. “She says she will
not
leave without seeing you, O Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir. I would dispose of her, but …” He shrugged. “If I failed, and she burst in here unannounced, you would be even more displeased.”

The zulkir, still robed in velvet and surrounded by mountain air, set down his soup spoon with elegance and drama. He rolled his eyes in frustration or possibly the start of an invocation that would consign the chamberlain to the citadel's legions of undead soldiers. The chamberlain, assuming the latter, folded his arms in prayer.

Thrul chortled. He seized the brooch, breaking the wards around him. Candle flames flickered briefly in a cool breeze, then sultry calm was restored as the zulkir rubbed the dark red gemstone between his fingers.

“Give her what she wants, then send her in … alone.”

“O Mighty Tharchion, Mightier Zulkir, she
wants—”

“I know what she wants, lead-head. Assist her!”

The chamberlain wisely foreswore further argument. Shortly thereafter—when the soup tureen had been carried away and the main course laid in its place—a woman entered the room … alone, according to the zulkir's command.

She was a tall human, slender but at least a decade past her prime. Sinuous tattoos in shades of blue and green wound from her scalp to her toes; weathered wrinkles cut across the tattoos, especially where she'd singed away her hair years earlier. Her breasts, visible beneath a loose gown of bleached gauze, had begun to wither—hardly the sort of companion Thrul chose when companionship was on his mind, yet he poured a goblet of wine for her and pointed toward the wall where a three-legged stool waited for those privileged enough to sit in a zulkir and tharchion's presence.

Neema Gaz took the goblet, declined the stool.

“I was not expecting you.”

“I'd have failed you, my lord, if you were.”

Thrul slid the brooch across the table. When she picked it up, the pocket of mountain air expanded to surround her
as well. He watched her closely—he'd never honored her in this way before—but if she was surprised or flattered, he could not detect it. Then again, a spy-master whose thoughts could be read by an amateur wasn't worth his gold. Thrul's own thoughts were duly protected by his robe, which was constructed of spells and velvet. No one, not even the great Szass Tam himself, could probe his mind while he wore it.