“Do you hear anything?” Suld asked suspiciously, peering into the night.
“Probably the master, coming back,” Arkuel said. “Just sit quiet, now, or we’ll both catch it.”
“Sit quiet, yourself, cleverjaws. It wasn’t me who bought a wagon whose front seat was so full of splinters it was like a carpenter’s beard.”
“Pierced your wits, did they? You shouldn’t carry them so low down,” Arkuel said smugly.
“You say a lot of clever things,” Suld responded darkly. “I hope the scant wits you have about you work half as well for more useful work.”
“Well met” said Malark dryly, stepping from the darkness in a spot neither of them was facing. “I’m glad to hear you both so happy and good-natured.” He pointed at the sleeping Rozsarran. “Take up our sleeper, and come. Cover the lantern and I’ll carry it.”
When the light was hidden, the mage dispelled his darkness and set off back toward the tower. There he raised darkness again and within it they dressed Rozsarran and left him with the bucket in his hands, for the other guards to find. “Back to the inn,” Malark commanded simply, banishing his darkness again.
The mage raised his arms and his fingers flowed and grew, then branched and branched anew. In the space of a breath or two, Malark’s upper body looked like a large bush. A mouth opened high on one of the branches and said, “Come! And stay behind me.” Together they crept through the night to the back of the stables.
“The dogs sleep,” Arkuel whispered.
“Yes, but the stablemaster does not,” Malark hissed back, and withdrew slightly, becoming himself again and muttering the phrases of a spell while Arkuel and Suld stood guard, swords drawn. Malark rejoined them and eyed the blades with contempt. “Put those away,” he muttered angrily. “We’re not carving roasts.”
“The stablemaster, then?” Arkuel asked, as his blade slid back into its sheath. Somewhere off in the hills to the north, a wolf howled.
“He has something to watch, over by the well,” Malark said. “Dancing lights. Come, now-quickly and quietly, to the wall.” He strode across the innyard, his underlings at his heels.
At the base of the wall, the archmage’s body shifted shape again, rising into a long pole with broad rungs; it gripped the windowsill of their rented room with human hands. The pole sprouted two eyes on stalks that peered back across the innyard. The stablemaster stood, axe in hand, watched the bobbing lights suspiciously.
“Hurry” commanded a mouth that appeared on the crossbrace Arkuel was reaching for. He flinched back and almost fell from the ladder.
“Don’t do that,” he pleaded, catching himself.
“Move!” the ladder responded coldly. “You too, Suld. Our luck can’t hold all night.” But they all reached the chamber and closed the shutters without incident.
Malark wondered, as he erected a wall of force between himself and his underlings, just what would go wrong when the time came. Everything had gone smoothly, yet he could feel in his bones that the secret of spellfire was not fated to come within the grasp of the followers.
Such hunches had given him sleepless nights before, but this time he fell asleep before he could fret. Soon he was falling endlessly through gray and purple shifting mists, falling toward something he could not quite see that glowed red and fiery below. “Horsecobbles,” he said to it severely, but the scene did not go away, and he. went on falling until he reached morning.
“I would speak with the cook,” the traveler said. “I eat only certain meats and must know how they are prepared. If you have no objection-?”
“None,” Gorstag rumbled. “Through there, on the left. Korvan’s the name.”
“My thanks,” the dusky-skinned merchant said, rising. “It is good, indeed, to find a house where food is deemed important.” He strode off, leaving Gorstag staring after him in bemusement. After a moment, the innkeeper caught Lureene’s eye and nodded at the kitchens, pointing with his eyes. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and straightened from a table where a fat Sembian merchant was staring at her low-laced bodice. Turning with her hand on her hip in a way that made Gorstag snort with amusement, and the eyes of every man at the Sembian’s table involuntarily follow her, she glided toward the kitchen.
The stranger was suddenly at Korvan’s elbow. “What news have you for the followers?” a silky voice said in Korvan’s ear. The cook froze. He then turned from a pan of mushrooms sizzling in bacon fat and reached for the bowl of chopped onions, his long cook’s knife still in one hand. He nodded briefly as his eyes met the merchant’s.
“Well met,” he muttered, as he turned back to the pan and dumped the onions in, tossing them lightly with his knife. “Little news, but important. A herder saw a girl who used to work for me here, a little nothing named Shandril who ran off a few tendays back, in the Thunder Peaks with the Knights of Myth Drannor and Elminster of Shadowdale. She had just wielded spellfire, and burned ‘a dragon or something;’ Rauglothgor the Undying, 1 fear. This man said he heard The Shadowsil’s name mentioned, and that there were gold pieces all around-”
“There will be, indeed. Sir Cook, if you do the boar just so,” the merchant replied smoothly. Korvan, looking up with knife in hand, saw Lureene gliding into the kitchen behind him. He glared at her.
“What keeps you, girl?” he growled. “Can’t you seduce patrons as fast as you used to? I’ll be needing butter and parsley for those carrots, and I need the fowl-spit turned now, not on the morrow!”
“Turn it, then,” Lureene said crisply, “with whatever part of you first comes to hand.” She swept warming rolls from the shelf above the stew cauldrons into a basket and was gone with an angry twitch of her behind.
The merchant chuckled. “Well, I’ll not keep you. Domestic bliss, indeed. My thanks, Korvan. Is there anything more?”
“They all went off northward, the herder said, from where he saw them, near the Sember. Nothing more.” The onions sizzled with sudden force, and Korvan stirred them energetically to keep them from sticking.
“Well done, and well met, until next time,” the silky voice replied, and when Korvan turned to reply, the merchant was gone. On the counter beside Korvan were three gleaming red gems, laid in a neat triangle. The cook’s eyes bulged. Spinels! A hundred pieces of gold each, easily, and there were three! Gods above! Korvan snatched them in one meaty fist and then stood, eyes narrowed in suspicion. What if this was some trick? He’d best not be caught with them about the kitchen.
The kitchen door banged. Outside, Korvan glared all around until he was satisfied that no one watched. With a grunt, he put his shoulder to the waterbarrel just outside the back door. Ignoring the water slopping down the far side, he tipped it so that he could lay the gems, and a dead leaf to cover them, in a hollow beneath the barrel’s base. Carefully he lowered the barrel again and straightened up with a grunt to look about again for spying eyes. Finding none, he rushed back into the kitchen again where the smell of burning onions greeted him.
“Gods blast us!” he spat angrily as he raced across the kitchen. Lureene stuck her head in at the door from the hall that led to the taproom and grinned at him.
“Something burning?” she inquired sweetly, and withdrew her face just before the knife he hurled flashed through the doorway where her smile had been, and clattered off the far wall.
Korvan was still snarling when Gorstag found the knife, minutes later. “How many times have I told you not to throw things?” the innkeeper demanded angrily. “And a knife, man! You could have killed someone! If you must carve something to work off your furies let it be the roast! The taproom is filling up right quickly, and they’ll all want to eat, I doubt not!” Gorstag tossed the knife into the stone sink with a clatter and went out.