The Simbul's Gift

10

The city of Velprintalar, in Aglarond Afternoon, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Alassra's chambers were in chaos. Artifacts were strewn everywhere, as if a restless child had played with each for a moment, then discarded it. Spellbooks, some of them older than she and written in languages unknown in the realms, were heaped haphazardly in the middle of her work chamber. Every table top was clear for the first time since she created this bolt-hole. The walls were bare, the shelves emptied of all but her most fragile mementoes, none of them magically useful-gifts from her sisters, a lock of her mother's hair, the thorn branch she'd taken from Lailomun's pillow.

She'd learned the domestic cantrips for cleaning centuries ago, but simple magic never intrigued her. The storm queen had always been better at whipping up the weather than containing the dust that burst from an ancient tome. She sneezed-which didn't help her or the spellbook she held-and got to her feet, a feral growl rumbling in her throat.

"Where did all this come from? Who brought it here?"

The most rhetorical of rhetorical questions: No one else was in the room. No one else had ever been in the room. Even her sisters and Elminster, back when the Old Mage accepted her invitations, went no further than the antechamber where the little Sulalk girl was now sleeping on a gilded daybed that had once belonged to a queen of Chondath. (Alassra hadn't wanted to disturb the palace with her return when she expected-or had expected-to be leaving quickly. When she had everything back under control, when she could spare a thought for the little girl's care, then would be soon enough to throw the royal household into an uproar.)

Alassra had accumulated, abandoned, and forgotten the entire mess herself. She'd never had a permanent home before Velprintalar. She'd cached her few possessions throughout Faerun in warded boxes, none of them larger than a seaman's chest. Her life had been the pursuit of knowledge and adventure, not things, not until she became a queen.

Royalty acquired and accumulated. From her deathbed, Queen Ilione had warned her apprentice and heir: Clean out the past. Don't let it pull you under. Alassra had taken the words metaphorically, ignoring many of Aglarond's dearly held traditions as she established her reign, but Ilione had intended a more literal interpretation.

If dust had market value, the queen of Aglarond was the richest woman in Faerun.

She muttered another cantrip at the opened tome. Parchment sheets broke loose from the brittle binding. Two fluttered out the window, the spells written upon them lost for eternity, if Alassra didn't catch them before they vanished in the ether.

She didn't.

"Cold tea and crumpets! Where does the dust come from?"

Tucking those sheets she had rescued beneath the back cover, Alassra began a page-by-page examination of the spellbook. A spell for the transmutation of sand into glass caught her attention. The other variants she knew produced crystal-clear glass, no matter the color or coarseness of the sand. This one, cruder in concept, yielded glass as mottled as its component sand. A little tinkering and it might yield stained glass panels.

Alassra growled again. After the dust, distraction was the worst part of cleaning. She hadn't meant to read her spellbooks, merely look at them, examine the pages for some vagrant mote of magecraft placed there or exploited by an enemy. There could be no other explanation for the ambush she'd triggered in Sulalk. Outside this chamber, only her sisters knew of her interest in the twilight-colored colt, because no one else could be trusted not to tell the Old Mage. She'd spied on the village in utmost secrecy from this chamber and someone, somehow, had spied on her.

On her! On Alassra Shentrantra, the Simbul, the witch-queen who'd mastered every kind of magic but was-perhaps-a bit behind in her housekeeping and careless with all these things she scarcely remembered acquiring.

Not totally careless, she assured herself. Alassra routinely examined everything she touched for magic and malice. The way she attracted enemies, vigilance was an absolute essential, but the Simbul rarely resorted to artifice. When she needed to eavesdrop, she'd transform herself into a spoon and ride the soup tureen up from the kitchen. Not many mages, though, shared her sense of humor; fewer still had the skill and imagination to bind themselves into a nonliving shape.

The mirror had been the most likely suspect, since the ambushers had been Red Wizards and the mirror was the artifact she used to keep an eye on both Thay and the colt. As soon as she'd gotten the little girl bedded down, Alassra had subjected it to a thorough examination. It had come up innocent of any tampering. She'd thrown a quilt-also examined-over it to keep the dust off while she probed the rest of her artifacts. Confronted with the prospect of scrutinizing every page in her considerable library, Alassra decided to give the mirror a second going-over. She dribbled patterns of salt and rainwater across the dome.

"All right." She cracked her knuckles. "East, to Thay! Show me the tharchions and zulkirs. Show me Thrul and Szass Tam. Show me that damned Mythrell'aa. Show me Lauzoril last."

If any one of them had a connection with the mirror-if they knew anyone with a connection-the water would become steam and the salt would burst into brilliant yellow flame. Alassra watched as familiar patterns swirled in the glass. She marked a mutation in the Bezantur pattern: Aznar Thrul and Mythrell'aa were probing each other. When rivals squabbled, enemies paid attention. Otherwise Thay was unchanged until the end. Where she expected to see Lauzoril's rogue-handsome face, there was only a spiral as green as his eyes.

Alassra glanced anxiously at the salt and rainwater patterns. Short of the mirror itself, smiling Lauzoril was her prime suspect. She wasn't at all relieved to discover that a day after the Sulalk ambush, his reflection had gone abstract. But there was neither steam nor flame.

"Show me everyone who wishes me harm." The mirror went black and began vibrating. "Sorry-bad question. Set it aside." The vibrations ceased. Alassra restored the patterns. "Show me Aglarond. Show me those who would work knowingly for the Red Wizards."

The mirror revealed a handful of faces. Red Wizardry had been Aglarond's dread enemy for generations. There were few households that didn't memorialize someone slain by Thayan magic, fewer still with members who would openly consort with the enemy, and the Simbul's mirror knew them all. Alassra used Aglarond's traitors as bloodhounds, letting them flush out the Thayan plots and minions that penetrated her realm.

They did very little that wasn't discreetly observed, by her or by her living accomplices, but it was possible that mistakes had been made. A traitor might have made a Thayan connection without her becoming aware of it, but that wouldn't account for Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk.

Waiting.

Alassra considered the implications. She'd known her attackers for what they were by the reek of Thayan wizardry surrounding them, but none of the villagers had her skills. To them, the Red Wizards had been strangers. What might an ordinary Aglarondan say to a curious stranger? The mirror couldn't tell her what the Sulalkers might have said yesterday or the day before, but the question still seemed worth asking:

"Show me Aglarond. Show me those who speak ill of me or wish me the same."

The Simbul anticipated more faces than before: She was Aglarond's queen, not the bosom friend of each Aglarondan. Being fair meant everyone's fur got rubbed the wrong way once in a while.

"Gods! I'll be here all night!"

Alassra laughed without appreciating her own humor. It was one thing to know she wasn't loved as her sisters were loved and cherished by those who knew them-even Qilue was beloved by those who worshiped the drow goddess, Eilistraee-but the sheer number of faces flickering within the dome depressed her. And these were only the folk displeased with her at the moment. The mirror couldn't show the folk who'd cursed her name over breakfast or would do so at supper.

There were Fangers swearing in their squalid boats, revanchist Cha'Tel'Quessir muttering her name in the Yuirwood. Their numbers dismayed her, not their attitudes. No, the surprise and sadness came from the truly ordinary folk who blamed her for whatever misfortune had befallen them: a fishmonger whose eels had escaped from a broken basket, a wet nurse with a teething infant, a cook whose sauce had clotted, a baker with bad yeast.

Their queen was the mightiest wizard in all Faerun. She could destroy armies with a single spell. Why then-they demanded in words easily read from their lips-were her taxes so high? What did she do with their hard-earned coins? Why was it raining when a farmer wanted dry weather for cutting his hay? Why was it so hot-couldn't the Simbul do something about the weather? Why was she always somewhere else, but never in Glarondar… Emmech… or wherever the mirror captured their reflections.

The mirror clouded; Alassra sighed and covered her eyes. Aglarond was a predominantly human realm, and humans were old when they'd lived as long as she'd been queen. They were ready to turn their affairs over to children, perhaps grandchildren, and, deep in their hearts, they expected their queen to do the same.

When she'd accepted the crown and throne, the Simbul had assembled her court from the best men and women she could find. They served competently, loyally, and the Simbul replaced them with equally capable folk only when they died or retired. It was fair to say that Aglarond was a better ruled realm than it had been during any other reign; but it was also fair to say that it was ruled by gray-beards and crones.

"Elminster," Alassra said ruefully and the mirror obliged by displaying the Old Mage's Shadowdale tower. "I need someone to inherit all this from me. I'm human, you're human-but we're immortal, too. We're old. All the Chosen are old. Think of it, El: we're older than some of the gods! I'm not my sister; I'm not Laeral. I can't go away and come back pretending to be my namesake. And even if I could, someone has to be king or queen of Aglarond while I'm off being nobody."

The tower door opened and the Old Mage emerged for a stroll. Alassra could have called him, could have transported herself to Shadowdale in an instant. He might have agreed, and today she didn't care where her child was conceived. Then Lhaeo came through the door and young Azalar, the nephew whose unexpected birth had gotten Alassra thinking about heirs in the first place.

She certainly wasn't going to plead her case in front of Azalar. This meant that since the mirror hadn't solved her problems, she was going to have to deal with that heap of dusty spellbooks. Squaring her shoulders, Alassra cleaned the topmost book with her sleeve. The script was all dots and sharp angles; she'd have to cast a spell if she wanted to read it, which she didn't, so it was a good place to start, except…

"I've had this book for three hundred years. No one this side of the Outer Planes even knows it exists."

Alassra riffled the pages once. Nothing, literal or magical, leapt out at her. She shoved it on a shelf to gather dust again.

A wizard would need more than luck and a few potent spells to slip a spy-eye past her defenses. He or she would need patience, and while Alassra had patient enemies-enemies who'd been lurking decades, hoping for her to make an exploitable mistake-she didn't think she had any patient enemies in Thay. The Red Wizards weren't a subtle lot, a by-product, the Simbul assumed, of their reliance on slaves, goblin-folk, and undead minions to carry out their commands: their armies were fearsome, but as spies or slaves, orcs and zombies were absurd, and the Red Wizards knew it.

Red Wizards were predictable, not foolish, and-little as she liked to admit it-they knew their magic. Their academies churned out competent, albeit unethical, wizards year after year. The handful she'd dispatched yesterday would never be missed. They were, in all likelihood, already replaced.

Already replaced…

The Simbul cursed her own foolishness, her own subtlety. She'd assumed that because there were journeymen Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk, one of their zulkirs had been spying on her, had learned of her interest in the village and the colt. But it was much more likely that a zulkir had simply sent a team of expendable journeymen across the border in the faint hope that they'd trip over something useful. They'd been disguised as grain merchants, after all, not horse traders.

She'd spent the best part of the day covered in dust, while the solution to her mystery-if there was a mystery to be solved-was attracting flies in the ruined village.

Alassra cursed again before digging out the spellbook where she kept the spells she used to interrogate the dead. A glance or two refreshed her memory; it took little longer to assemble the reagents. It might take forever to get the chamber put back together. She made the mess worse looking for a little book of cantrips. She'd devised them centuries ago, the last time she'd been tempted to add a child to her life.

Three bone-rattling sneezes and a torn sleeve later, Alassra was standing in the antechamber with the open book in her hands. Tay-Fay was sleeping peacefully, almost exactly as they'd been when Alassra tucked her beneath a cobweb shawl hours ago. The child had every right to be as exhausted as she appeared to be. Sleep was the best healing for children: That's what Alustriel said, and where children were concerned, Alustriel, the mother of twelve, was the authority. Alassra sang two of her cantrips, enough to keep the child asleep until she returned; then she transported herself to Sulalk.

The village was a reeking, smoldering ruin. If any inhabitants had survived, they'd wisely departed for somewhere else, but it seemed likely, as the Simbul walked past charred cottages and swollen corpses, that Bro and his sister were the only Sulalkers left. She came upon a child's body, so badly mangled that she couldn't guess whether it had been a boy or girl.

"Vengeance," the Simbul vowed as an oval disk appeared, hovering on level with her knees.

She laid the corpse gently on the disk, which followed her to a grassy knoll, unharmed by yesterday's events. Time would wash away the ashes, restore the greenery, and, if no one came to resettle the village, revert its cultivated land to wild meadows and woodland. Sulalk wouldn't be forgotten, though. The dead would become their own memorial as, one by one, Alassra brought the victims to the knoll.

Not all were innocent villagers, to be treated with a queen's reverence. There were Red Wizard corpses scattered through the ruins. They weren't carrying the metal disks such as Boesild had found in Nethra. No surprise but, unlike her tall nephew, the Simbul didn't need tokens to separate the wheat from the chaff. A spell she'd devised and stored in a finger-sized wand had never failed to unmask a Red Wizard.

The first corpse she examined proved to have illusionist tattoos pricked into her skin. With the thought that Mythrell'aa was responsible, the Simbul's simmering rage boiled over. The corpse became stone, and the stone collapsed into dust before she was calm again.

The second wizard corpse bore the marks of abjuration. The third appeared to be a conjuror. A mixed party, then? A sign that the Red Wizards had set aside their rivalries for true alliances and cooperation? All Faerun was at risk if the zulkirs ever spoke and acted with a single voice: Thayan anarchy was Aglarond's staunchest ally. The risk was small. Once they mastered middling spells, Red Wizards were on their own. Only the best-and some of the worst-remained directly bound to their zulkir. The rest worked for whomever would hire them.

Alassra's gut continued to hold Mythrell'aa responsible for the carnage. Her heart knew it could have just as easily been Szass Tam, Lauzoril, or one of the many troublesome Thayans who weren't zulkirs or Red Wizards but shared their conquering ambitions. Then she came upon a corpse that made her anxious.

The man's magic tattoos became clearly visible when she cast a simple revelation spell over his charred flesh: minor protections against fire and steel, major immunity to poison, none of which had saved him from her wrath. But the palm-sized area directly over his heart where each Red Wizard bore the mark of his or her specialty revealed nothing. She cast another more complicated and powerful spell with the same result.

It would be a chore to haul the corpse back to Velprintalar and a waste of reagents once she got him there, but resurrection-which the Simbul wasn't prepared to perform on the Sulalk knoll-followed by interrogation and execution might be the only way to find out how the man had obliterated his affiliation. Others had tried, with secondary tattoos, with their own magic, with acid and fire. Nothing had ever defeated her until now.

Until a few days ago in Nethra? Boesild didn't know the revelation spell; it was one of many the Simbul kept strictly to herself. Could she have raised that woman's affiliation, or would the corpse at her feet be the second un-branded Red Wizard she'd encountered?

And which zulkir had devised the spell-nothing but magic could erase the brand-that bested a spell of hers? Szass Tam sprang immediately to mind. The lich was as far removed from his so-called peers as she and Elminster were from theirs: Where magic was concerned, immortality was an unadulterated blessing for humanity. But Tam was laired up, purging the effects of a failed attempt to enslave a tanar'ri lord. That left… who? Mythrell'aa, again? Aznar Thrul, Tam's opportunistic rival? The suddenly faceless Zulkir of Enchantment?

A twig snapped. No accident. The two pieces were in the hands of a survivor wearing a face guaranteed to make Alassra Shentrantra's blood freeze in her veins.

"Lailomun?" she whispered as she raised the little wand.

Alassra would never forget the patterns of Lailomun's tattoos. They were very different from the light-drawn lines emerging from the survivor's scorched and tattered clothes-except for the interlaced circles over the man's heart. He was, as Lailomun had been, an illusionist. Logical conclusions cascaded through the Simbul's racing thoughts:

The survivor was Mythrell'aa's confidant, not some mere journeyman.

Mythrell'aa hadn't forgotten Lailomun.

Mythrell'aa knew who Alassra Shentrantra had become after Lailomun died…

After Lailomun disappeared.

After her beloved disappeared, not after he died, because Alassra's final conclusion-tenuous, yet almost inevitable, given what stood before her-was that Mythrell'aa had taken Lailomun back to Bezantur and held him captive for the rest of his life.

The urge to kill, to dissolve herself into the pure, violent stuff of lightning that would leave a crater where the false Lailomun stood and propel her own essence into the void where she would neither think nor feel, set Alassra's body trembling. She restrained the urge with no little difficulty. The false Lailomun, sensing his mortal danger, came no closer.

"Who are you?" the Simbul demanded.

"Vazurmu," the survivor answered, a woman's name in a woman's voice. She shed Lailomun's face. Her own was bruised and bleeding. Where unmarked flesh could be seen, it was a morbid shade of gray. "I served Mythrell'aa, Zulkir of Illusion, as you have, no doubt, guessed."

"Served?"

"We were sent here to watch a horse grow and wait for you to come to claim it."

Mythrell'aa had spied on her, Alassra thought numbly. Mythrell'aa had a spy-eye in her chambers. Alassra saw it in her mind's eye: the thorn branch. It was the first thing she had brought into the tower chamber after she became Aglarond's queen, setting it on a shelf where she could always see it. Where it could always see her… and the mirror.

Mythrell'aa must have been spying, if not from the beginning of her reign, then certainly not long after. Yet Mythrell'aa had waited until now to spring her trap. Why? Because the spy-eye had shown her not only the colt reflected in the mirror, but the reasons Alassra wanted it?

Vazurmu couldn't say. The woman didn't know about the mirror, didn't know the man whose face she'd borrowed-except that the zulkir had told her, in better days, that if she were ever face to face with the witch-queen, that man's countenance would buy her enough time to escape.

It didn't, of course. Vazurmu wasn't going to escape anything. Mythrell'aa had shredded Vazurmu's internal organs. She'd kept herself alive with a pair of healing potions and a burning need to avenge herself. That was done, or almost done; Vazurmu fell to her knees, her voice a whisper Alassra had to strain her ears to hear.

"We were betrayed. O Mighty Simbul. After you arrived. There were other Red Wizards here. Watching us. Waiting for you. Them." She pointed a trembling hand at the two corpses Alassra planned to drag back to Velprintalar. "I saw their faces. I could find out. Who they were. Who sent them."

"Who?"

Vazurmu shook her head. "Don't know. Saw their faces. That's all. Never forget a face. Someone knows. I'll find out. Go back to Thay. To Bezantur. Find out."

"If you live that long."

"If I live. O Mighty Simbul."

Vazurmu might live a bit longer. It wasn't unthinkable. Alassra had come prepared with a greater store of minor healing potions and poultices. She could spare one for Mythrell'aa's traitor. Maybe more than one. Aglarond's queen had a few other Red Wizards stowed in pockets throughout Thay. One never knew when such creatures might be useful.

Nethreene!

Alassra's name-the private name only her sisters, Elminster, and a very few others knew-broke like a storm wave in her mind.

Nethreene, come home-NOW!

She couldn't be certain which sister had summoned her or why, only that it had to be important, had to be heeded. The afternoon had become a time for quick decisions, quick actions. Four unfinished tasks surrounded her: Vazurmu's interrogation, the memorial to the slain Sulalk villagers, the unbranded corpses, and Ebroin, somewhere in the Yuirwood with a strand of her hair tied around his wrist.

In her present state, Vazurmu wouldn't survive a sudden translation to Velprintalar. Alassra couldn't stay in Sulalk long enough to heal her. The two unbranded Red Wizards were nothing more than weight. Hauling them back to the palace wouldn't damage them any more than they already were. But the thought of resurrecting them after leaving Vazurmu behind and the memorial uncreated stuck in the Simbul's craw. Besides, if there were two unbranded wizards in Aglarond, there'd be more-and she'd find them.

One decision, then, would resolve three of Alassra's unfinished tasks. She slew Vazurmu with a word of power-more mercy than execution-placed her corpse with the villagers, and the two unbranded corpses as well. Then she cast shapeshifting magic to mold them all into a statue of Chauntea, the golden goddess of grain and summer. A second spell made the transformation permanent, and a third-she was squandering her spells at a prodigious rate-sent her back to Velprintalar.

She'd done nothing about Ebroin, except decide that she'd have to find him. She'd considered letting him stay in the Yuirwood as he so clearly wished to do, but if Mythrell'aa had known about the colt, then she knew about Bro. With Lailomun's fate a reopened wound in Alassra's conscience, she'd not leave the young man wandering beyond her protection.