She was home. Or rather, she was back in a side-fissure of a wilderland cave that she'd long ago cast a spell upon to keep a bear or anything else from settling into it and lairing. The cave was nigh the Moonsea Ride near Tilverton, clear out of Cormyr, where she'd spent days and nights practicing her spell-casting when she'd been younger.
"Tluin," she whispered, taking a step to where she could perch one foot on an upthrusting rock and more easily buckle her dagger about her thigh.
She was gone from Cormyr, gone from the life she had known that had made her feel so happy, so important, so… needed.
Now what?
A lantern was unhooded, and the Knights of Myth Drannor found themselves staring down a littered srone cellar at four men. The foremost of whom was Lord Maniol Crownsilver.
Behind the noble lord were three unfamiliar men in robes, arranged in a stony-faced line. All were glaring at the Knights.
One robed man held the lantern high; the other two had their hands outstretched toward each other, and the air was flickering and pulsing between those reaching fingers-little flowerings of blue radiance rhat grew, winked out, then flashed into existence again, more strongly.
Three wizards. By the style of their sashes and rune-adorned jerkins, Sembian wizards-for-hire.
"Jhess," Florin muttered. "What magic's that?"
"A porral, I think," Jhessail murmured back as they saw the lantern set down carefully on the floor-and the flickerings form a pulsing blue-white upright oval of glowing air as tall as a man.
Belatedly, Florin bowed his head and said respectfully, "Well met, Lord Crownsilver."
The noble took a slow step closer to the Knights and swept them with a withering glare. There was no trace about him of the quavering, broken shell of a man they remembered seeing last. Crownsilver seemed alert, purposeful, and even-when one saw the fire in his eyes-frenzied.
"Slayers of my wife and daughter," he said, "taste my revenge! For Narantha! For Jalassa, damn you!"
The three Sembian mages snatched wands out of their rune-adorned jerkins and grinned in cruel triumph as they aimed-and unleashed.
The Knights shouted, sprinting desperately this way or that, but ravening wandfire roared down the cellar in a blinding white flood that drove a million tiny lances into bare skin even as it hurled and tumbled the Knights hard into the unyielding stone wall behind them.
Very hard. Faerun started to go watery and whirl away from more than one Knight, with the searing magic still roaring on and on.
Amid a splintering groan of riven support posts, the ceiling above started to collapse-and Florin, Pennae, and Islif, still struggling to move and to see, beheld the little tracer-gem Pennae had stolen bursting forth from its concealment beneath her tattered leathers. It spun and spat strange purple flames and sparks as the roaring white wandfire tore at it, then it surged down the cellar toward Lord Crownsilver.
Only to explode in its own burst of blinding white light, a blast that-laced with Pennae's shriek and srartled shouts from the Sembians-drove its own burning rays into everyone…
Aumrune Trantor stopped midstep, teetering awkwardly with one foot raised-and then brought it down, lurched against a passage wall, and stayed there, leaning like a drunkard.
Old Ghost had found something.
Something in Aumrune's mind made him seethe with excitement and glee-so bright and fierce that Horaundoon, sharing that mind with him, cowered.
Aumrune's pet project, kept secret from all except Manshoon and Hesperdan, who seemed to approve of it, was adding magics to an ancient, flying magic sword: Armaukran, the Sword That Never Sleeps. Aumrune had already infused the blade with new powers to make it obey him.
Surging in bright exultation, Old Ghost uncovered the way into the sword from Aumrune's mind.
The body of Aumrune Trantor thrust itself away from the wall so briskly it almost fell. It hurried off down that gloomy, deserted passage in Zhentil Keep, headed for where a certain hidden sword awaited.
This was going to be good. Very good.
Two flights down a deserted staircase in the Royal Court, while passing his forry-third faded tapestry, Vangerdahast stopped and murmured, "Far enough. Best alter things before we run into the real Vangerdahast."
The features more than a thousand courtiers and servants knew and feared rippled and flowed, melting down off a quite different face as the hargaunt sought the chin of Telgarth Boarblade, and points below.
As he held open the front of his doorjack's jerkin to let the hargaunt flow down out of sight, Telgarth Boarblade smiled. Lord Rhallogant Caladanter was a buffoon of the most childish sort, aye, but he must have done well enough in telling War Wizard Ironchylde the tale Boarblade had so carefully concocted. She'd been white with fright and seeing foes in every shadow. Well delivered, indeed.
Still wearing his satisfied smile, the doorjack who was not a doorjack went down the stairs at a more dignified pace, and out through a door three floors down.
Only after he had heard the familiar slight scrape of that door closing did the old doorjack-who'd been watching Boarblade's transformation from behind one of the faded tapestries that lined the staircase walls-dare to breathe again.
Myarlin Handaerback was trembling and purple from lack of air and indignation. As he thrust aside the tapestry and started his own ascent in the gloom, he muttered, "There's more confounded creeping as goes on in this place! Not like in the old days, when it was all pretty lasses seeking their suitors or the suitors chasing after them. First adventurers and now men with oozing things that disguise their faces! Now we're getting the riff raff, to be sure!"
The little tower room was thick with dust from the many yellowing, rolled maps, deeds, and contracts that choked its storage shelves-but not a single speck of it marred the sword that lay gleaming on the trestle table that filled the center of the room.
Aumrune carefully locked, latched, bolted, and then barred the lone door behind him. Old Ghost made him edge past the table and do something he never did: Undog and swing aside the inner shutter that covered the window and its bars, unlatch and take down those bars, and undog the window itself.
Horaundoon paid little attention. Horaundoon, crouched in one corner of Aumrune's mind, had all his attention bent on the magnificent sword that lay on the table.
It was a long blade, nigh as long as some men stood tall, about two thirds of it a slender blade of bright silver and the last third a large hilt neatly wrapped in black silver, with sleekly curved double quillons and a cabochon-cut blue gem for a pommel, smooth and rounded and glowing with a faint light of magic.
Gods, it was beautiful. The Sword That Never Sleeps, crafted by that rarest of creatures, if the tales could be believed: a smith of the elves!
Not that Old Ghost could tell, after all the enchantments that had been cast, recast, broken, and overlaid upon the sharp steel. Certainly its curves suggested elven stylings, and the oldest surviving enchantments felt like elf work.
Armaukran was the name of someone it had slain, whose life-force had been infused into the sword through datk spells. It had been forged for a purpose-but that purpose was lost, at least to Old Ghost and Horaundoon.
What remained clear and delighred Old Ghost very much was that seven enchantments remained rooted in the blade that shared a purpose: binding souls, spirits, or sentiences into the blade.
Horaundoon wallowed in the intricacies and elegances of all the castings upon the blade. Their sweepingly shaped, subtly reinforced incantations, the balanced flows of Weave-work… even the lesser, simpler magics added by Aumrune Trantor, grafted on recently, were but plainer outer garments draped over great beauty beneath. He ached to do such work, to so ride the Weave that he could craft such beauty…