Beyond the High Road (22 page)

Something fluttered next to Vangerdahast, and he looked over to see the tip of a leathery black wing beating the air.

“No!” He clambered to his feet, at once raising a hand to wave off his friends and whirling around to face the ghazneth. “Defend your-“

A black hand swept down to catch Vangerdahast in the side of the head, launching him end-over-end across the stable. He crashed down a dozen paces in front of Cadimus and tumbled onto his stomach, ears ringing and blood pouring from his opened scalp. His vision narrowed. He shook his head clear and thrust his hand into his cloak.

A dozen dragoneers managed to spur their mounts out to intercept the ghazneth. The dark creature streaked through them like an eagle through a field of gophers, then slapped the sword from Azoun’s hand and settled into the saddle facing the horrified king.

“Usurper!”

The ghazneth snatched the crown from Azoun’s head, then sank its filthy claws through his armor and hurled him from the saddle like a child’s rag doll. Vangerdahast felt a sudden wave of nausea, and the darkness began to close around him. He gritted his teeth and grabbed his favorite wand, willing the darkness to stay away.

A flurry of Purple Dragons whirled on the ghazneth, hacking and slashing. It beat them off with a few strokes of its dark wings, then the war wizards cut loose with bolt and flame. The ghazneth furled its wings and roared with laughter as the spells languished against its defenses, then leaped over a wall of guards to land atop Filfaeril.

The barrage of war spells ceased as suddenly as it had started. The queen shrieked in terror, and the creature hid her behind its wings.

Vangerdahast’s vision continued to narrow. He pulled the wand from his cloak.

“No need to be frightened, my dear,” said the ghazneth. A mad cackle sounded from the other side of the leathery curtain. “I wouldn’t harm my queen-would I?”

The creature sprang into the air, Filfaeril clasped securely in its claws. Vangerdahast’s vision narrowed to a keyhole. He whipped his wand toward the queen’s flailing figure and shouted his command word as the keyhole closed.

The glyphs ringed the sycamore in an elegant spiral, as sinuous as a snake and as clearly defined as the day they were engraved. Though Tanalasta could not identify the era of the carving, she had studied enough elven literature to recognize the style as an archaic one. The letters flowed gracefully one to another, with long sweeping stems and cross arms that undulated so gently they appeared almost straight. While the language was definitely High Wealdan, the inscription itself seemed archaic and stilted, even by the standards of the Early Age of Orthorion.

This childe of men, lette his bodie nourishe this tree.

The tree of this bodie, lette it growe as it nourishe.

The spirit of this tree, to them lette it return as it grewe.

Tanalasta stopped reading after the first stanza and stepped back. Aside from its peculiar spellings and the reference to men, the inscription was the standard epitaph for a Tree of the Body, a sort of memorial created by the ancient elves of the Forest Kingdom. When an esteemed elf died, his fellows sometimes inscribed the epitaph in the trunk of a small sapling and buried the body beneath the tree’s roots. The princess did not understand all the details of the commemoration, but she had read a treatise suggesting only elves who had been a special blessing to their communities were honored in this way. In any event, she had visited several of these memorials during her short-lived travels with Vangerdahast and never failed to be impressed by the majesty of the trees bearing such inscriptions.

The sycamore before her was a marked contrast to those ancient monuments. The tree was a warped and gnarled thing with a split trunk and a lopsided crown of crooked branches straying off into the sky at peculiar angles. Its yellow leaves looked like withered little hands dangling down to grasp at anything unlucky enough to pass beneath its boughs, and the bark changed from smooth and white on the branches to a mottled, scaly gray at eye level. The greatest difference of all lay at the base of the trunk, where a recently dug hole wormed down into the musty depths beneath the roots.

Tanalasta returned to the inscription and read the next stanza.

Thus the havoc bearers sleepe, the sleepe of no rests.

Thus the sorrow bringers sow, the seeds of their ruins.

Thus the deathe makers kille, the sons of their sons.

Tanalasta’s stomach began to feel hollow and uneasy. Curses were rare things in elven literature, even in the relatively angry era of King Orthorion’s early reign. Of course, the Royal Library did not contain works predating Orthorion-apparently, early Cormyreans had lacked either the time or interest to learn High Wealdan-but the princess found it difficult to believe that such curses had been any more common to pre-Orthorion poetry. Aside from a single famous massacre and a few lesser incidents, elves in the Age of Iliphar had been standoffish but peaceful.

Tanalasta followed the inscription around the tree and read the last stanza, which consisted of only a single line of summoning:

Here come ye, Mad Kang Boldovar, and lie among these rootes.

Tanalasta thought instantly of the crowned ghazneth that had disappeared with Vangerdahast, then stumbled back from the tree, hand pressed to her mouth, heart hammering in her chest. Boldovar the Mad was one of her own ancestors, a king of Cormyr more than eleven centuries before. According to the histories, he had slain a long succession of palace courtesans before being dragged off the battlements of Faerlthann’s Keep with one of his victims. The unfortunate woman had died on the spot, less because of the fall than the horrible wounds inflicted by the insane Boldovar.

Less commonly known was that the king had lingered on for several days while Baerauble Etharr, the first Royal Magician of Cormyr, was summoned from abroad. Fortunately for the people of the realm, however, Boldovar “wandered off” alone before the royal wizard could return. When a badly bloated body dressed in the king’s purple was found floating in the Immerflow a tenday later, Baerauble announced his liege’s death and ordered the corpse burnt at once. Until now, there had never been reason to believe the wizard’s hasty order due to anything but the sensibilities of his nose, but Tanalasta could not help thinking Baerauble had used the incident to solve a terrible dilemma he must have been facing. As the Royal Magician sworn to protect the crown of Cormyr at all costs, he could hardly have condoned the overthrow even of a mad king-but neither could he have believed that Boldovar’s reign benefited the realm. Perhaps he substituted another body for Boldovar’s and spirited the mad king off to live out his days someplace where he could do no harm.

Rowen came around the tree behind Tanalasta. “Is something wrong, milady? You look… uneasy.”

“I’m frightened, actually-frightened and puzzled.” Tanalasta did not take her eyes from the tree as she spoke. “Were the glyphs on all the other trees the same as these?”

Rowen answered without studying the characters. “They looked the same.”

“Yes, but were they exactly the same?” Tanalasta pointed at the three characters that stood for Mad Kang Boldovar. “Especially here?”

“I think so, Princess,” Rowen said, sounding slightly embarrassed. “To be honest, I can’t even see the difference between the glyphs you’re pointing at and the ones next to them. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Tanalasta turned to him. “I should have realized how difficult it would be to learn High Wealdan without the Royal Library at your disposal.”

“Or even with it,” said Rowen. “I fear I’ve never been a student of the old tongues.”

Tanalasta smiled at the ranger’s candor. “High Wealdan isn’t really a tongue. It’s closer to music. Listen.”

The princess went around to the front of the tree and ran her finger along the initial glyph. A melodic rasp instantly filled the air, intoning the epitaph’s first line in a haunting female voice as anguished as it was menacing. Of course, Tanalasta understood the words no better than Rowen, for no human ear could comprehend the full timbre of an elven weald poem.

Rowen’s eyes grew wide. “I’ve never heard anything like it!”

“Nor have I.” Tanalasta shuddered at the pain of the music. ‘That was an elven spirit-voice, if you can believe it.”

She led the ranger around the tree, translating each glyph aloud both for his benefit and to assure herself that she was reading it correctly. By the time she finished, Rowen’s face had grown as pale as alabaster.

“An elf made them?” the ranger asked, clearly referring to the ghazneths. “Why?”

‘We won’t know that until we discover who that elf was,” said Tanalasta. “First, we need to be sure the ghazneths are related to these trees. That’s why I want to know if this glyph looked the same on the other trees.”

Rowen shrugged. “I just can’t say. If I’d known what to look for…”

“How could you have?” asked Tanalasta. “I’m sure I can figure it out from Alusair’s notes.”

“Notes?”

Tanalasta sighed. “I suppose Alusair isn’t really the note-taking kind, is she?”

“She was trying to catch Emperel.”

“I’m sure she was in a hurry.” Tanalasta started around the tree toward the musty hole. “Alusair always is. Did she at least look inside the tombs?”

“That’s where we found this.” Rowen pulled the iron dagger from his belt and handed it to Tanalasta. “In the second tomb.”

Tanalasta stopped beside the hole and examined the weapon, noting its stone-scraped cutting edge and the hammer marks on the face of its blade.

“Cold-forged iron,” she said. “I’m astonished this survived. It was made in Suzail over thirteen hundred years ago.”

“How can you tell?” Rowen frowned at the blade. “I didn’t see any markings.”

“That’s how I know. Suzail built its first steel works in the year seventy-five, the Year of the Clinging Death. Before that, people smelted their own iron in ground ovens and beat the weapon into shape on a communal anvil.” Tanalasta returned the knife to the ranger. “While this is a good piece of handiwork, no merchant bound for Cormyr would burden himself with iron when he knew the market wanted steel.”

“I see.” Rowen shook his head in amazement, then asked, “Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Of course,” Tanalasta said lightly. “To listen to Vangerdahast, he could fill volumes with the things I don’t know.”

Rowen chuckled lightly, then glanced back toward where the royal magician had disappeared. Tanalasta followed his gaze. The ghazneth could be seen circling over the labyrinth of canyons, its head still engulfed in a glowing gold orb. Though Vangerdahast had cast the spell less than thirty minutes earlier, the magical glow was already beginning to fade. Determined to finish her investigations quickly, the princess removed the Purple Dragon commander’s ring from her cloak pocket and slipped it onto her finger.

“Keep watch,” she ordered, stooping down at the rim of the hole.

Rowen caught her by the arm. “Where are you going?”

Though the gesture would have seemed condescending coming from anyone else, from Rowen it seemed merely an expression of concern. Tanalasta patted his hand.

“I need to look inside myself,” she said gently. “We both know I’ll see what others have missed.”

Rowen gritted his teeth, but nodded. “It would be best to make it fast, Princess.”

Tanalasta glanced in the direction of the ghazneth. “I won’t be slow.” The princess activated her ring’s light magic and started into the hole, then glanced back and smiled. “And didn’t I tell you to call me Tanalasta?”

Rowen stooped down to give her a stubborn smile. “As you command, Princess.”

Tanalasta kicked a clump of dirt at him, then turned and started forward. The musty smell grew stronger and more rancid as she crawled, and her skin began to prickle with the wispy breath of evil. When she reached the end of the passage ten paces later, she had goosebumps the size of rose thorns, and her jaws ached from the strain of holding back her gorge. Ahead of her lay a body-shaped hollow, surrounded on all sides by a fine-meshed net of broken black roots. The tree had no taproot, at least that she could see. The tiny chamber was empty, save for a simple floor of flat stones littered with scraps of rotten cloth and an odd assortment of tarnished buckles, buttons, and clasps.

Tanalasta pulled herself into the foul-smelling chamber and nearly cried out when something soft and diaphanous clung to her cheek. She quickly brushed it off and found a transparent web of gossamer filaments stuck to her fingers. It took her a moment to recognize the stuff as raw silk, and she began to notice it everywhere-tangled among the roots above her head, hanging down around her to form the walls of the tomb, and clinging to the debris scattered across the floor.

The princess’s first impulse was to leave, as the filmy stuff reminded her of nothing quite so much as the web of a black widow spider, but she clenched her jaw and forced herself to begin scraping the filament away from the walls. To her surprise, the silk came away in thick gobs, and she actually found herself digging a small tunnel that did not end for nearly ten paces-about the distance it would be to the sycamore’s dripline.

Tanalasta suppressed the urge to shudder, realizing that the tree-or the corpse beneath it-had so corrupted the ground that the normal process of soil replacement had been halted. She returned to the center of the tree and examined a handful of buttons. The gold plating was so tarnished that she could barely make out the shape of a dragon rampant, its wings spread and its tail curled over its back. Any doubts she had about the ghazneth’s identity vanished at once. It was the emblem of King Boldovar. Fearful of being tainted by the palpable evil she sensed in the place, the princess tossed the buttons aside and crawled out of the tomb.

Rowen was waiting at the mouth of the hole, holding the mare’s reins and staring back toward the canyon lands. He did not even let her leave the hole before he asked, “How long before Vangerdahast returns?”

Tanalasta looked up to find an uneasy expression on his face. “We may be on our own until tomorrow. I doubt Vangerdahast had two teleport spells ready, and even he might need time to prepare another.”