Edwin: 4-12 Flamerule

The city, at last; Edwin impatiently paid the toll, bid a merciful farewell to that foul bard, shook the slime from himself, and in a quiet corner passed a cantrip across his extraordinarily powerful new robe. (Would it be recognised as that of the master of the mines?—Perhaps, as much as it galled his pride to do so, he would be cautious with it until he fully understood its enchantments and modified them duly—) A resplendent wizard in dark grey. A resplendent wizard with little funding to draw upon, thanks to Kron's crude bargaining; but he was an Odesseiron, future heir to riches any barbarian would envy, and the present monetary condition strictly temporary.

Lodgings, first. He thought briefly of the possibility of concubines—of granting the foreigners the benefits of the erotic onslaught of Edwin Odesseiron—and regretfully decided on other tasks to take priority. The streets to the north-east might suit his purposes and budget, or so he had gathered from that crying little thief... Skie, if he had to give that ill-starred group their names. In the end they had served his purposes in the way he had desired of them, though at times they had seemed regrettably non-compliant to his wishes.

At last he found his way to a dark and low tavern, occupied by roughly dressed, thuggish men who spoke very quietly to one another. Eldoth Kron would have been quite at home. The scarred bartender regarded Edwin's coin as well as any other, in any case. He ordered a room, and dared a meal of slightly burned flounder, sitting alone and relying on an imposing and forbidding glare to turn away any stares from the brutish and hygienically challenged in his direction. What they called "sea ale" here burned his throat, so different to the clear refined grain vintages of home. He jotted notes and agenda in Mulhorandi, upon part of his low-running stock of spare parchment at his side. It would be necessary to gain confirmation first; Denak would demand that, as if the wretched conjurer enjoyed to pretend that the word of an Odesseiron Red Wizard was insufficient. His notes then turned to jotted musings on the fireball casting he had mastered of late, with lists of various people he wished to cast it upon, and a few small and entertaining illustrations in the margins of the paper... Yes; coherent and obvious plans that would have to succeed. He retired carefully to the narrow, dirty, and deeply inadequate room assigned him, and slept away exhaustion from all he had recently endured.

For a minor first step in his plots, Sorcerous Sundries was a gaudy building that reminded Edwin of some of Thay's magical structures, though there was too much blue and too little red to its stained-glass roof and windows, and it was smaller than most of Eltabbar's equivalent architecture. With the sun almost at its zenith, the glass glistened brightly, reflecting rainbow patterns into the stone-paved street. He'd continue to keep such reasonable hours for as long as he could, Edwin had resolved; would not need to be summoned from his rest at any unmercifully early hour any longer. A spare, inferior robe; parchment; candles; components; —he could not allow himself to be excessively tempted by the scrolls, though some intrigued him and the hedgewizard pretending to be in charge spoke some lowborn rudeness to him when he lingered too long by their racks, studying the rune for raining minute flaming meteors upon one's enemies.

The Iron Throne, he found easily enough in the centre of the city; marbled and windowless. He could not afford to linger long by it, only to begin his investigation by understanding the goal...

Later, he sat alone in the narrow room, by candlelight, at last ready to write in the code his supervisors used:

Denak,

I require one wizard to assist me if I am to succeed. He needs no qualifications beyond willingness to serve me and minor matters I shall explain; there is no need to waste any with powers almost equal to mine.

My location is...

No doubt he would wait several more days. Perhaps his postscript regarding the need for more coin ought to have been written in a larger hand. He practised his spells, frequented the public bathhouses for the limited purposes of cleanliness and warmth, and carefully walked in the parts of the city with more fresh air and better-kept streets; no need to spend any more time in that disgusting inn than necessary.

One night as usual he returned, dark-cloaked, from his—meaningless tramping about the city that might as well have been uncomfortably adventuring all over again, it was supreme and wondrous forbearance upon his part that he tolerated such fools that also allegedly completed work for Thay—back to the inn for tasteless food and bad wine. Talking to the bartender was a young man with a rabbity front chin and short, untidy light brown hair; Edwin would have paid no account if not for the dark red wizard's robes and the accent. The boy gestured expressively, asking his questions in an excessively loud and earnest tone of voice.

"Yes, have you a wizard staying here? I'm meant to meet him here; if you charge for the information I do understand. Lovely place you've got here. Pardon me, I'm sorry, sir. I can't quite hear..."

"Close your mouth and cease embarrassing yourself!" Edwin commanded. So Denak mocked him with this specimen? At least the boy had the sense to tone down his robes.

The boy smiled and waved. "Why, that's my brother in the Art now! Wonderful to meet you at last, dear fellow; if you've ever heard about me, my name's Philias..."

"Sit down and have a drink," Edwin commanded through gritted teeth. The bumbling fool's voice was far too loud. Grubby faces had started to turn in interest to them.

"Thanks very much; I've had such a journey, you know how teleport-lag takes it out of one." Edwin took the idiot searching for a village's arm as forcefully as he could, trying to stop the imbecile's babbling. "I'd really like some grape juice, if there's any of course, I don't want to be an inconvenience. Is this place supposed to be an example of the western atmosphere? It seems fascinating. I'm sure it's very thrilling, isn't it?" He looked around himself with wide, excited eyes.

"Sit down and shut up," Edwin hissed. "And let us talk where we can be uninterrupted by gibbering chimps," he added in Mulhorandi. "(Oh, wait, you are a gibbering chimp. Never mind.)"

The boy settled awkwardly into the nook Edwin had chosen at the far side of the room; under his breath Edwin muttered a quick spell to temporarily block their words from the hearing of others.

"Spell done? Marvellous." A light, cheery yellow colour flared briefly around Philias' right hand, and he seemed to poke at Edwin's spell for himself. "First off, I have a verbal message from Denak, which you can probably guess at, it's just to, ah, continue working," the young apprentice said (probably translating something much less courteous! Denak never appreciated his talents, Edwin mused to himself), "and also this..." Phillias drew a sealed letter from his robes and pushed it across the grubby table. Edwin passed his fingers across the magic in the red seal, examining it for breaches; it didn't seem that this imbecile had tampered with the scroll, but one never knew for sure.

The enclosing parchment felt Thayvian in origin to Edwin's hands, a certain texture he felt the absence of when he ran his hands over the scrolls of these western barbarians. Certainly unsurprising, that. The seal was standard to Thay, keyed to the magic of the the designate Red Wizard, in this case himself. His callsign rune was scripted to it, and his fingers travelled across all parts of seal and paper. Pristinely unbroken.

The apprentice was rabbiting on again, whilst Edwin finished his examination of the message with the due caution of a wide-respected Red Wizard.

"You see, I'm actually with Lauzoril's lot, not Nevron the Conjurer's like you—just graduated six months ago," the boy explained. (Fools were able to graduate! Edwin thought. And great wizards like he were forced on these ridiculous projects!) "And when I heard that you needed someone, I just metaphorically put my hand up and volunteered to help you, because you see your cousin Liss has always been so kind to me since I started, and I..."

Edwin unsealed the note; it was merely a few quick lines of Mulhorandi, written in a sharp and decisive black script he knew well enough after years of collaborative written magical exercises worked between them.

Edwin,

He is a fool, and what his family hopes for will never come to pass, but I find in him a dear friend. Don't you dare allow harm to come to him, or I shall be very upset with you.

And trim your silly beard!

Liss.

So the pup was Lissa's lackey, then? Edwin inwardly sighed; his cousin's choice of non-offensive specialist school had only been a greater impetus to her creativity in their schooldays. Her threat was a fate he was quite eager to avoid. He folded the note neatly and put it away with his components, intending to later disintegrate it; Thay's protocol was to destroy all correspondence, and certain small-minded simpletons not entitled to their higher rank could be so foolishly insistent on such trivial matters.

"My...cousin," Edwin said slowly, "and..."

"Yes, she's a wonderful person, isn't she?" the young man said; and at his ominous tone of voice, Edwin could almost swear to bright stars dancing in the boy's blue eyes. Any instant now, he reflected grimly, there would be red robins fluttering merrily about his head and assorted woodland animals bursting into the low tavern in order to break into song. "I am only a Challesme by family, with no connection to the Odesseirons or Leonovs. Liss was always so nice to me at work, always explaining things to help me—and now there's this mission. I hope—" His fair cheeks reddened. "I hope to prove myself to you, that I might someday approach Liss as an equal; that one day I could dare so far as to openly ask..."

A Leonov, related to the Odesseirons, would never be permitted to throw herself on a climbing weed like this, Edwin thought; and it was plain that Lissa herself was aware of it. "You wish to wed my cousin?" Bellissima Leonov had many fine qualities, as various people under her Charm spells regularly testified, but none of them were of a marriageable sort, surely. "Do you suffer from any kind of...blindness problem? Because although you will insult my cousin at the cost of a slow and painful death, I must admit she's..."

"She's the best woman in the world!" Phillias said. Edwin sighed, considered casting a temporary deafness spell upon himself, and resigned himself to the realisation that even his godlike reflexes were not swift enough for the task. "Ever since that first day at work, when I didn't know the slightest of things and everyone was laughing at me for coming from Stavalian—" he named one of the very lesser-known Thayvian academies, a far inferior school to Edwin and Lissa's own. "Liss explained the spell to me, so clearly that it stayed in my mind forever—she has the most beautiful voice, doesn't she? Like a violin played by a master—and she's the most intelligent person I know, and she has a wonderful laugh—I love it when her eyes crinkle up at the corners, you know, and the way her hair curls into those little fine hazel threads when the air's damp with transmutation energy and—"

"That's. Enough." Liss was civil to this fool? His unbelievably earnest adoration—now if an equally foolish woman gave it to Edwin as his due, but the difference was that he deserved it... "We will discuss my plan now, and nothing but. (A plan no doubt too cunning and intricate for the likes of your comprehension, but I shall do my best to duly simplify.) What personal transport spells do you have available, boy?"

"I know the dimension door incantation, my casting time's down to three seconds, and I should be able to cast it from what I've got—the old substitute-feather-for-powdered-pearl trick, of course you know, actually has a time advantage when you activate the casting as long as you time the breath right." Edwin had never done so, but recalled discussing the spell with the proper ingredients in the course of his studies. "And I've the spell components for two teleport castings," Philias went on—rogue stones, most likely, Edwin thought. It appeared even this Challesme had some idea of what constituted reasonable funding. "I've a scroll for Sefrakt's careful target variant as well as the standard version in my own spellbook; in truth I've memorised that even now, in case of emergency." The idiot gave a nervous laugh. "If you need the scroll, I'm quite willing to lend that to you..."

An adequate selection. That would work; and he would not have to spend his own precious time attempting to instruct the pathetic and undoubtedly block-headed novice. "I find that acceptable. You will memorise each of them as many times as your limited capacity may allow, to be cast as quickly and with as little direct access to components as possible," Edwin ordered. "I will take the scroll for safekeeping." Perhaps at last this time the paper would not betray him as he tried to force the teleportation spell to his will, conquer it at last and pen its wayward ways into his own book.

Philias nodded. "Oh, I can certainly precast the dimension door, use one of those Horus-style conjured suspensions, you know, release it by snapping my fingers; and if I speak the primary incantations in advance and carry a portion of the amber-dust circle with me, then the teleport spell should work in a hurry if need be," he said, and Edwin resolved that he would personally inspect that suspension spell described. "What exactly is your plan, Edwin, and how dangerous are you expecting it to be?"

"Ensure that you gather your spells exactly as I command it. We ought to carry out the plan with suitable alacrity." Edwin temporarily dispelled his ward to allow the barmaid—an older woman whose craggy visage he shuddered to look upon, rather than a maid of reasonable appeal who would surely have become one of his many feminine conquests—to set two clay tankards in front of them. He thought once more of the plan in his mind. Impatiently he renewed the spell once the female departed. "You may drink, Eddard of Thay—" Where had he thought of that name? Oh, the brother that crying little brat had whined about every so often. "Edmund of Thay," Edwin said, for Eddie the Red Wizard had been the arcane might to engineer and guide the defeat of the nest of bandits. "Once we retire to attain greater privacy, I will tell you of everything you have done, and everything you will tell about doing..."

It was a trifle unrealistic to expect to march unchallenged through the barbarian city streets dragging a man bound in silver mage-ropes, Edwin knew (though in Thay it was the eminently sensible custom that Red Wizard authority should go unquestioned); so in his formal visit to the Iron Throne he cast an invisibility spell on his fellow Red Wizard first. The point was to diplomatically make the gain for Thay; and a gift as a first step in the diplomatic process was standard, as he knew. On this his own ambitions rested (and they would see; and they would all see, so he promised himself).

He strode boldly toward the Iron Throne's chief edifice, in robes returned to his customary and magnificent red, a large ruby at his throat to show dignity. Phillias' family had given him a surprisingly large amount of gold for the interests of the mission, and Edwin's book bristled with the spell scrolls he had purchased. (Naturally for the sake of the greater glory of Thay. Simians could be most gullible.) He majestically ignored the gate guards and knocked, once; the mark of an important man was that he should only need to knock once.

"'Scuse me," the ape-faced left-handed guard said. "Got an appointment?"

His disrespectful tone Edwin temporarily let pass. "Announce to the junior Anchev that the Thayvian representative has arrived, my good man. And..." Upon the unlikely case that his first phrasing would go unlistened to. "You may also mention that I have an account of a bounty I know him to have set."

"Master Sarevok's up in the ducal palace all day," the second ape-face said. "Ye've no appointment. Leave, sir, or you might not like what we'd have to do."

Edwin would have empathised, perhaps, with Sarevok Anchev over such insolent lackeys as these, if their insolence had not been directed towards his own person. "You will show me to his nearest inferior, then," he demanded grandly. (It would be reasonable to begin to make his impressive figure known to Anchev's second-in-command; though of course he must win the trust of the man himself.)

"Do ye even known the name ye're looking for?" These simians had truly suspicious minds. How much longer would his invisibility spell last? Edwin heard snuffling begin to come from the air near him; perhaps he had arranged the ropes too tightly about Philias' nose and mouth. Sooner or later even these fools might begin to become suspicious.

Edwin's mind quickly tried to fix on names he had heard over the course of his investigation; Rieltar Anchev was the irrelevant adopted father, there was some wizard with a name beginning with W, western syllables that he did not wish to twist his tongue about on the spot. Why waste his mind on unimportant petty details? But at this moment it was hard to know externally who was truly in the Child's confidence and personal hierarchy; he had to think quickly...

"Temoka?" Edwin attempted. The man in question seemed to have the repute of some loyal henchperson, either the godbotherer or one of the principal bodyguards he'd heard mentioned. Edwin decided to take a decisive course of action, allowing sheer confidence and innate superiority to substitute for any possible pronunciation difficulties. A foreign name; perhaps Kara-Turan, fewer syllables than that other bootlicking lackey. "Yes, you will escort me to Tomake immediately. The truth is that I carry a captive, invisibly concealed; and your master would be most displeased were this particular prisoner to slip through his fingers."

The simians glanced at each other; the right-hand one nodded. "Right. I'll ask the lady if she's in a mood for visitors, and if you're not the type, Keron here'll throw ye off the steps."

"No sudden hand movements, please, sir, or it might be my duty to act," the second guard said. "Let's wait calm and civil-like. Mind if I check the truth of your story?"

"Oh, go ahead," Edwin said, sparing half a thought for Philias, invisibly groped by this other fool. He impatiently tapped his foot, waiting. Tomeka; here referred to as a woman, some sort of personal bodyguard to Sarevok Anchev, his information had run.

"She'll see you," announced the first simian; and through the Iron Throne's marked doors Edwin's spells dissipated. What greeted him and Philias were three swords, pressed rather too closely to Edwin's form for comfort; and a stocky woman in heavy armour, scowling. Temako's features were indeed of Kara-Tur and quite unattractive, Edwin thought, her nose apparently broken and badly set in several places. She stood at about Philias' moderate height, though her thick build made her appear far more substantial than he, and she bore a large and sharp flail at her belt.

She was moderately intimidating. "For what have you come, Red Wizard?" she said coldly, staring at Edwin as if he were some unpleasant cockroach upon the floor. He swept the female a magnanimous bow.

"I have brought one of the mercenaries for which there is a bounty," Edwin replied, pointing to the gagged Philias; "a countryman of mine, it is true, for which I have come to apologise in person to your master." Something in the composition of Temeka's thin lips seemed to change at the use of that last word, but Edwin tended to pay little attention to such things. "Edmund is his name; a fool whose title deserves to be lost. I come as an Odesseiron to make amends...once you escort me to the young lord Anchev."

"I see," the woman said slowly. She was armoured as a warrior; perhaps she was as educationally sub-normal as the typical brutish fighter, Edwin considered. Still, he had used relatively simple words to make his explanation, so she surely understood him. "You will follow, and wait. Diarmid, you should take them to the cellars; watch especially the mercenary. I think you may have your wish of seeing my lord," she said to Edwin; her accent was strong, he observed. A sign of linguistic unintelligence. "It may go more ill for you than you believe, mage."

It was no time to raise trivial objections; Edwin shrugged. "Then I shall look forward to more of your charming company," he said, trying not to let the sarcasm bleed too far into his voice; no doubt his personal magnetism would win over the woman at some point.

It was dark and cold, and though only Philias was bound, there was a guard who glared fiercely at Edwin's evey movement, knowing him to be a powerful caster. He loathed such waiting; and yet, when they were taken to the huge form of Sarevok Anchev himself, Edwin felt a slight flash of apprehension pass through him at last. Philias was meant to tell, finally, a few details of their band, and to make an exit for which Edwin was not to be blamed at all; but when the other Red Wizard was chained down, the bones in his right hand first to be shattered, Edwin's mind lost ability to concentrate with fear.

The boy screamed on and on, and Edwin waited for the confession to spill from him.

—