20 Eleint
The first wizard was tall; the second short; and the third was a halfling. All wore robes in the national colours of gold and green, blazoned by wizard's stars.
"Halruaa," the second said, "is gravely displeased. An ambassador murdered; formal congress with a treacherous exile and outlaw from our country; the theft of our property; the blatant, open usage of that property."
All Sarevok's fault except for the last, but that wasn't the point in their minds.
"The perpetrator of most of that is dead," I reminded of that even so. "We cannot resurrect him and execute him a second time for your satisfaction."
"He left no body behind," the halfling said, looking up with small, dark eyes.
"Because he was half-god," Imoen said. "Me too, but don't get any ideas about testing that out. I'm the good one, I healed people—and I'm not any more. ...Just a very powerful mage." She flung back her head with deliberate pride.
"Let us not dance around the facts. Halruaa has unequivocal demands," the short one said.
"Does Halruaa own the idea of a ship that flies?" Claudia said. "Agannazar never claimed to own the concept of...fire from hands."
The tall wizard bent over the lamp on the wide table, fidgeting with its wick. The golden light in the room grew. The Oak Room off the ducal palace's library; old, expensive books lined the walls, and rich tapestries hung from the eaves. It was suitable as a place to hear the Halruaans as strong priority while offering no insult in the choice of environs, but there was only one window and I felt the stuffiness of it. Evening approached outside.
"Do you know what happened in the fall of ancient Netheril, mage?" the halfling said. "Mortals grew fools and raised upturned mountains to build cities, floating in large numbers through the skies. Please prove that you are intelligent enough to be a mage by explaining the reason why I make this analogy."
Imoen scowled. "'Cause if the Weave gets tangled again the ships'll crash. But if you think of all the disasters that could possibly happen you end up by not doing anything at all; Claud's got some safety-measure ideas with the sideways design...that we'll protect as much as you want to keep your secrets. What if there's a fire in the palace? What if there's a storm on ordinary ships? What if I trip down the stairs and break my ankle? What if Skie slips deadly nightshade into the tea by mistake? And you think you'll be fine if the Weave goes belly-up?"
"Because Halruaa knows far more than you of how to protect against such disasters," the short mage said; his name was Kurtulnick. "Skyships are not permitted outside our territory for reasons besides keeping our protection. The very first time you lose one above hostile skies..."
"The Gondsmen are aware of the trenchant point that knowledge and rumour have an equal habit of spreading," Sauriram said.
"Not by outright theft," snapped the tall one, Halmzah. "Will you burn all your ships, return all plans to us, and sign an accord that you shall use no further magical devices without the consent of Halruaa that they have not been stolen? If not—Halruaa promises penalty."
"We do not yield to threats," Vai answered.
The halfling raised a hand. "Then we are at an impasse. Allow us to try the approach of incentive." I looked across at the burning lamp; the wick swung, red-hot and dancing. The window was glass-paned and closed, the air heavy but warm. Logs were laid in a fireplace below a chimney; the short wizard had warmed his hands by it when he had entered. "Kerltumi, ma'ah ramalan." My chair was comfortable, soft; I could afford to drowse. The dancing wick, wax-dipped, bent to and fro in the lamp and on the air I could almost see grey dust forming.
That was...unusual...
Sauriram gasped. "Cease this sorcery!" she pleaded weakly. "I cannot..."
"All be calm," the short one said. "Begin the unravelling."
—
The wind in my hair the fresh air and the sweep of birds spooling in flight by our sides instead of far above, so that almost we could have reached hands out to grasp them, as if we too had wings, and on the deck I shifted balance by instinct as it moved. Then in place of wind my hair was still; in place of the birds was blank grey; the ground perfectly still. There had been mast and high crow's nest, flapping sailbirds and prow cutting through air, wheel of turning and mages; but it had all been a dream; hadn't it?
Vai sat stock-still from her neck downward, shook her head, and moaned. Claudia clutched her head in her hands as if she had a migraine. Imoen's eyes were wide and glassily frozen. Sauriram's face turned slowly grey and she moved not at all, and slowly I began to worry for her heart. The grey particles rising from lamp and fire were like glass drops, where inside it time itself ran too slowly. Reflections tilted against water, mirrors, transparent panes.
"You will forget," Thurstwick the halfling said. "You will all forget your experience. Draw and spin the knowledge from your minds." He flicked his fingers as if he wove and spun thread; but instead of drawing it from a spindle he seemed to drag it from places rooted to each of our heads. "They never existed for you."
I went to the City of Coin and stood suspended in the air...
I went to the City of Coin and I don't have to remember the details of how.
Then the wizards all stood in a circle, holding hands above blue-glowing lines sketched in chalk. They chanted, in a susurrus so low it was impossible to tell where one voice ended and the other began. False winds blew slowly between the drops of grey glass in the air, in mouths and noses and throats. Lethe, was whispered, to untangle from city itself; if the blood of the ruler is the lifeblood of the loci then the memory too may be ended...
Inked scrolls reversed their writing, scrubbing blank with the bottom of the text first, erased pristine. Artefacts shimmered from shelves as if they had never been. I was in Claudia's personal study in the palace, book-lined, alchemic-embraced, and the statuette of a maiden with bird's feathered wings ready to fly on one of her shelves was struck and exploded to nothing. No, in that dust pile had never stood anything at all. The circles flared and spread. Baldur's Gate itself was laid out below, as if a bird saw it from the sky, something that had never happened. The half-moon of the docks, the worn central wall, the grassy estates to the north-west and the bustle of covered markets to the centre and the east, roofs and palaces and high red towers from above with the signs of magic that flew over them. Crossing, growing circles flew across it in blood-red light, changing where they touched, locking with each other and covering all in time.
"Open a vein in the old Duke's daughter," a man's voice said, "she is young and healthy enough, and the blood of the city would tell the strongest." There was soft pressure at the upper part of my right arm; a white bandage pulled tightly around it as if Viconia had relented on me for getting hurt in some battle. Then there was a short thin-bladed copper knife in the air. Below on the city the red circles danced.
That's awf'ly convenient, Imoen's voice whispered. She smiled. Maybe I've got a bit of the old charm going just under their web, point them right.
And you want them to take my blood? I thought slowly.
Nifty exceptions. They don't know how much we can work together. Can't you hear their circle casting?
She made me listen. I followed her;
Now don't let them touch you!
The knife passed through empty air.
"—What does she do, Thurstwick? I don't-"
"Imoen, Claudia, wake!"
To tangibility once more; take a statuette of Lathander and hit the back of the short one's skull with it— The first mage fell, smudging the lines of the red circle he had drawn. Then strange bolts crackled, someone screaming—
"Fool, you've ruined it—"
And a pair of spells to stun from Imoen and Claudia, awakened.
"Repair the circles!" Claudia screamed. A gust of wind blew in the open window; the table shook as if something broke apart from the inside; the air was thick as if just before a lightning storm hit the air. Claudia drew a dagger from the tall one's belt; across her own wrist red stuff spilled. She cried in pain, then bent to the floor and drew. Something flared a colour I did not know the name of and for a moment dazzling fire burst in the air as if it were an illusion. Then shields came into being, translucent as what Imoen had crafted from Ajantis' old shield in the Tower. Sauriram lay outside, grey-faced.
"Claud, can't we just end the spell?" Imoen said. "Kill the gullynappers! —No, don't necessarily kill them. But—"
"Yes, let's kill the ambassadors and start a war with Halruaa—no. Of course not. Sorry, Imoen. Think what would keep them from doing that, or wanting to do something like this again," I said.
"Soon, please," said Claudia, her arm dripping red. I winced.
"We—you—have a contingency plan for Thay," I said. "Can you make them believe that if anything the least untoward happens to us, the plans are set to appear in the zulkirs' palace in Eltabbar? Not that we'd really do it, because the Thayvians are slavers—but if that was true..." Thay was far closer to Halruaa. "That we've been negotiating with them for various reasons." They'd paid a generous sum in Edwin's ransom. "Charm them, quickly. Sign a trade accord. Implant it in their minds..."
Imoen nodded. "No time like the present." She raised her hands and chanted within the circle, Claudia echoing her. They must have meant to aim only at the Halruaans; but there we stood atop a tall tower in the shape of a woodcut I had seen of the summer palace of the Thayvian zulkirs...
"It worries me how easily you merge," Claudia whispered, half lost in the bustle of the foreign city.
Eltabbar, busy, bustling, where Edwin had studied magic, though he came from the poorest province of Surthay. And skyships rose from its high towers.
"This is the fate that will come to Halruaa as our contingency," I said, as if truly a duchess;
"—Tell that to the King, Thay a worse risk, then the barbarians must keep secure, a disaster—"
Cleared away the magical supplies as if nothing had happened; then on the table was something neat and ink-signed. Sauriram rose from her rest and sent a prayer for Helm as a healing spell for herself.
"The storm season is none too far," she said, "the weather unpredictable on the constitution."
"Ah, but you should see Halruaa's control of its climate," the tall one answered, his face slightly dazed. "We have the necessities completed, I see."
—
24 Eleint
"Evander Silvershield. I'm pleased to meet you at last, Duchess. I am sorry for your and the family's losses. I came as soon as I could, Lady Silvershield."
His name was not Silvershield; it was Brauming, it was only that he was supposed to adopt the name of an heir.
"Cousin, please. I'm Skie." Almost middle-aged; a streak of grey in his dark brown hair, light-eyed, and tanned as if he'd done his share of labour in his time. He walked like a fit man though not a fighter. "You've heard much of the substance of recent events?" That was too shallow a way of putting it. "Things won't be in full order, I'm afraid, but I've done the best I could. You must rest after your journey first. I hope you don't mind the others in the estate—my ward young Tevanie, and a few of those who helped save the city. We..."
"Hearing much of recent events tells of you as a hero, cousin. I'll be honoured to meet all of you." He spoke too formally, but at least his smile seemed to reach his eyes.
We'd hired maid and cook and houseboy; and pretended to have a meal as if we were all family indeed. Tiax told painful anecdotes on Cyric; Shar-Teel talked about the best way to make sure someone was dead in a single blow; Viconia explained about older male human slaves in the Underdark; Faldorn heard his goods included iron and lectured on the avoidance of metals. While eating with her fingers. Ajantis and Dynaheir said little.
"...Perhaps we could retire to my study, Evan. I'm sorry most of my friends aren't sociable at the best of times."
"Growing a spine at last." Shar-Teel leaned too far back in her chair and drank her wine.
"Fallen knight," Viconia taunted, "play a tune on the surfacer instrument?"
Faldorn looked up at him. "Catgut strings and wood," she said, "I think a druid could wield such an instrument if they had any interest in it. Mostly in the groves it is only pipes and drumming on animal skins."
"I am assuredly no mater of the lute," Ajantis said. It was an old instrument, one of few intact items of expense; rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl made by the master Tharis, somewhat inexpertly played by our squire.
"No, play, Ajantis, please, for a lady asks it," I said. "Let's go up, cousin."
"We should formally go through this if you have no objection," Evander said, showing the stack of papers, placing reading glasses on his nose. "Will it be—painful for you?"
"No, cousin, I've had my time to mourn. Please get on with it." I turned the lamp in the study to a brighter, paler flame; my father always liked it too dark and close for my tastes when it was he who sat in the heavy oak chair where he refused Brilla's taste in plush cushions.
Evander paused and adjusted his small, triangular spectacles before beginning. "Following the death of your brother, I was the residuary legatee in the last will of your father formally sealed and deposited at the notary of Gond. Leaving aside the minor bequests to servants and mementos to his old friends, both you and your stepmother were provided for by trusts. For you, the interest only and access to the principal upon your thirty-fifth birthday; for your stepmother, the interest only until the principal should revert to the estate. Are you familiar with this already, Skie?"
"Roughly. Please continue."
"From your stepmother's estate, you are her heir; for her personal properties, and to...such she was entitled to for as long as she lived. I would not quibble on this point in the least," he said; gossip must have informed him enough to be sensitive for that. "All her furnishings and jewels, they are rightfully yours. Nor any need to dispute on gold; the full amount of the interest until the moment it is returned to the Silvershield estate."
"And this house itself is yours," I said.
"I'd not throw my young cousin from her home," Evander said. "Without your friends here in—chaperone—"
The idea of Shar-Teel in that role brought a faint smile to my face.
"—it should appear improper; but thankfully that is not the case. We shall have to inspect the properties within the city to find an arrangement that you favour. You are a Grand Duchess; your choices are far from those a Waterdhavian merchant can think of."
"Yes, cousin. I am still...working on my plans."
He next took up a detailed ledger; I'd struggled to update it after the last entries about the date of my father's death.
"You're welcome to read that. I wasn't able to do it in full."
He studied it; "No, you have a fair instinct for it," he said. "Simply use the debit and credit columns like so; remember it by the red; transfer across and see how the figures come together."
Suddenly the corrections came clear across the page, a few simple penstrokes that transformed it into something my father would have approved of. He was genuinely good at this, better than me; useful.
"What has happened to the estate thanks to Sarevok? I know there is much less than there should have been, but you're the heir and I haven't been able to touch most of it." I could have committed burglary—but that would have been wrong.
"Your father's ships were commandeered by the city by the previous administration, and the current ratified it. That's the primary; he stored his asset moneys in a variety of stable investments. I have some experience directing ships. There are trade opportunities for the very rebuilding, and from Waterdeep I'd choose to send ships north for whale oil, to the soapmakers of Luskan; then south, where the Cimarines enjoy perfume. Or fine prices for fir in Sembia at present, where I know your father carried a certain amount of business... When the Grand Dukes rescind their order, of course." He watched me rather pointedly.
"Oh, I ratified that order," I said; Sauriram's advice to maintain the ships to the city. I suppose in the first place it was not my father but one of Sarevok's creatures to give them over— "But you can purchase them back from the Council of Four. We intend to release the merchant vessels to businessmen who covenant to keep their business here. At a reasonable price, of course."
"I can realise some of my Waterdhavian properties to add to the investment," he said, looking sharply through his spectacles, "if it is a worthy one. What of upkeep?"
"All ships are being repaired regularly. It's a source of employment in the docks," I said. "The price, of course, reflects that..."
Cousin Evan smiled. "Negotiations should prove interesting," he said amiably. He looked further down my pages of accounts. "These payments here," he said. "An odd pattern of debt?"
"A single payment," I said; the way I'd noted it so elliptically probably made it seem worse than it was. "I found recently from an agent I hired that a person who...adventured with us...left the city and various debts behind. I paid them."
Eldoth seemed to have abandoned Baldur's Gate for bills to three tailors, Sorcerous Sundries, a gnomish seller of hair oils, and the Undercellar, mostly for gambling. If he'd told me that sum when we'd been together, it would have seemed little. But he didn't tell the truth. He was helpful in the Cloakwood...
And, in the warm sun by the sea, Durlyle fixed a purple flower by my ear.
"Nobody important," I said. Evan turned over the last of the papers. "I think we've done a good night's work, haven't we, cousin?"
He sorted them carefully back to drawers and pigeonholes, his hands moving smoothly over them.
"Now you're here," I continued. "I am grateful to have a man to look after and instruct me in these things."
Shar-Teel, I thought, would slap me for that. Sauriram and Claudia and Vai were better than me at this sort of thing.
"I'm grateful for your welcome," Evan said, and in an oddly old-fashioned gesture bent over my hand.
—
30 Eleint
"—Have we lost them, Ajantis?"
"Yes, my lady. I may qualify as your escort." He tried to banter, but his face looked as blanched and pale as I felt. Without his armour and dressed in a simple shirt and jacket, he seemed almost soft and vulnerable; his symbol of Helm was below his clothing, and though the layered cambric was tailored over his muscles he moved awkwardly. He wore a plain iron sword at his side and occasionally clutched at its hilt.
"For eleven generations there has been no magic in the blood of the Ilvastarrs—anything that could be called sorcery in particular!" he had explained, after his restoration to human by Faldorn's casting. "It is uncontrolled, it is wrong, and it is not at all proper for one of us. On either the side of my father or of my mother! It does not...belong. Any signs of it would have been far from an Ilvastarr—"
"So you were a sorcerer as a kid, but then you prayed a lot and got to be a paladin instead and lost it, but Aquerna slipped through anyway when your holy steed plan didn't work out." Imoen stroked the jewelled head of the prettily scaled fairy dragon, who purred in a vaguely squirrelish way. "Then your wild magic broke through again to help us."
"It is—not right for an Ilvastarr!" he protested. "I would have been too different, from all the generations of my family..."
"So your mum was skipping out with the milk-seller or whatever," Imoen said idly.
Ajantis set his jaw firmly. "—If you were a man I should challenge you to a duel for that insult."
"Sorry, was that over the line?" Imoen said cheerily, now stroking one of Aquerna's ruby-coloured wingstruts between delicate, blue-green membranes of flight.
Faldorn folded her arms. "Pack is pack and it is not right to bind someone who does not wish to be bound."
"Line was seven-and-twenty leagues back, Imoen," I said. "It's not a nice thing to say about anyone's mother, especially not from a good family—"
"Oh, I beg the pardon of your Lord and Ladyship for Faldy and me not being born to nobs like you, I mean, what with us being philistinic peasants and all," Imoen said. "It's hard for the likes of our sort to understand that at least someone here had a mother—"
"My lady, I beg you to accept my apologies," Ajantis pleaded to her.
"Sorry, Im..."
"—Worth it," Imoen said. She patted the fairy dragon's head. "S'pose I couldn't convince you to come be my familiar? You're sparkly and pretty and magical, and it's not like we don't get on..."
"I have been a squirrel since I first knew my boy," Aquerna said in a dragonlike squeak. She flapped her wings thoughtfully; she blinked her eyes, and illusions of different colours swept along her exquisite scales, iridescent blue and rose pink and shining silver. "It is the body to which I am accustomed—my body—and I would prefer to return to it."
"I'll do the casting to make you a forest creature again," Faldorn said; and waved her hands to make the same chant to Silvanus that had transformed Ajantis back from a toad. Aquerna the squirrel returned to Ajantis' bare shoulders above his sheet of improvised clothing; he still carried the dark scars on his twisted left arm.
"I would return to Helm. I would complete my duty," he said, a hand on her fur.
He laid a fist to the Capetri knocker, alone with me.
The house itself was in the poorer end of the merchants' quarter, fairly small; ivy crawled up the walls and a garden held a straggling, uncared-for olive tree amidst tangled weeds and dirty paths. The steps were reddish clay, cracked in thin spidering lines between their high, slightly irregular rise. A maidservant in a stained dress let us in after a long wait.
Their rooms were bare and half-stripped as if they planned to leave their dwelling at any moment. Above a fireplace a blank shelf; a floor mapped with a threadbare, singed rug; an old, scratched table. A man and a woman standing before chairs; a younger woman; an old woman seated by the fire; and a young man Ajantis' age or so by the wall. He was brown-haired, fair-skinned, quite smooth-faced and weak-chinned; but I could not tell whether his face was the boy I had murdered. Stephan Capetri's tear-stained expression was almost blank in my mind. A dark damp wall, a cold steel sword, a boy's voice pleading for his life.
"Hello," I said, inadequately. Ajantis echoed a rough greeting.
"I am...a Waterdhavian adventurer," he said. "My name is Ilvastarr and I come to bear ill news..."
The man stopped the speech. "The Duchess!" he cried out, pointing at me; and the family stepped back, worried. "We didn't know nothing of what the Iron Throne was up to; weren't with that Sarevok; that Davaeorn just wanted our Stephan and we let... Please, my lady, let me know..."
"We came to offer you blood price," I said.
Afterward find the family of the child and ask of them what should be justice. I gathered courage, as Dynaheir or Imoen would do. "Your son Stephan is dead." It seemed they knew that already; the women wore mourning-black. "I murdered him in the Cloakwood; I've come to you. To place myself at..."
"You murdered my brother." A shimmer of silver swept through the air. The young man drew blade. Then it was a blur, a thick needle, thrust to my heart—
Then a clang of metal meeting metal Ajantis blocked it, gently, moving the blade of Stephan's brother aside. He stood in front of me.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I must—defend her— The order to kill him was mine. I was a paladin once, and Helm judged me for the sake of your son. The young deserve protection—"
"Guido, stand a moment," said the middle-aged woman, her voice like a harsh wind through far hills. "Son. My living son. You slew Davaeorn, and you slew his apprentice?"
"Yes," I said. Ajantis held Guido Capetri's blade entrapped; I was still. Both swords rested inches from my head.
"You've given us the present of certainty, my lady," said Stephan's father, in cold sarcasm. "Others didn't know so much. Is his grave that flooded mine place we've heard so much of?"
"It is," I said.
"Then the truth is we are more at your mercy." Stephan's father stared pointedly at Ajantis; he walked slowly to his other son and placed a hand on his shoulders. "What would happen to us were she—the two of them—to be found dead here?"
"Stephan was my brother," Guido said. "He loved magic."
"He was taken by Sarevok's mage," his mother said. "I gave him a new robe—all over with stars, a constellation he asked of me."
"Helm cared for him, my lady," Ajantis said. "The Watcher protects all children. The Watcher spoke that Stephan's death was wrong. If your son is within Helm's halls, then he is not uncomforted..."
"Never said a prayer to Helm in his life," his grandmother said sharply. "Will your vigilant one trouble to find him? I think not. The truth is that my grandson himself would have had no truck with it. We served the Iron Throne; and what price is his blood to you? Will you give his family freedom?" She raised a thin long-nailed hand as if it were a wolfwere's claw slashing down, or a mage's spell to do harm.
"The Capetris are not going to be taken in for support of the Pretender," I said.
"Our freedom on his blood." The old, veiled lady stood. "Promise us gold for Bestanza's son." The woman beside her wailed once, high and lost.
"—All the gold that is mine," I said.
"But no gold could be worth his blood. Promise yourselves," she continued in her old, ancient voice.
"If there is any service we could perform for you," Ajantis said desperately.
"But why would we want to look on the faces once more of those who murdered Guido's brother?" Her eyes behind a sunken sea of wrinkles burned; more than anything else I wanted to look away, but did not. We had no answer.
"Or promise justice, and it will never bring him back, murderers! Stand down, Guido. Pray their deed will gnaw on them for a long and painful life."
"I planned to—I will—return to the Order of the Radiant Heart," Ajantis said. "They are paladins; they will judge me on my sin. To my teacher Lord Firecam. I will accept their justice." It seemed all that he could offer the family, and they stared at him with cold eyes.
"I will not be a duchess forever," I said. Sauriram knew perfectly well that I was the same as Imoen, and I should have known all along that she would act for the good of the city. "And then..."
"Get out," Stephan Capetri's father said, tired.
—
Faldorn waited for us as if she'd been listening on purpose, standing by a straggling young ash tree in the city streets and paying no attention to the dirt and dust that stained her long leather tunic.
"I am leaving the city and returning to my master Corsone of the Shadow Druids," she said without preamble, stepping toward Ajantis and looking up at his face. "I have passed my rites by this quest. I will be a full-fledged Shadow Druid and a woman after I find him and he teaches me our ritual of adulthood. He was working on a venture to protect nature by breeding intelligent ettercaps to hurt those who hurt the forest, but I suppose it has failed to work. There will be other plans to protect nature against the likes of you."
Shar-Teel once set a lair of talking ettercaps on fire. "Go with the Oak Father, Faldorn," I said.
"Boy-squire?" she said, glaring at Ajantis. Aquerna slowly came down from the rooftop behind her, saying nothing to her boy as far as I could tell. He laid an absent hand on Faldorn's shoulder.
"Fare well, Faldorn. Aquerna will miss you very much, my lady. I return to Lord Keldorn..." We walked through the reconstruction of the streets damaged by the Ravager's storming; atop a distant platform Dynaheir stood straight and steady to cast spells as part of the rebuilding. Behind her the sun set in a western horizon transmuted red as blood, promising fair winds and weather for the ships in the morning.
The world turned and tomorrow the skies would be clear.
—