The Sword Never Sleeps Read online

  Rhallogant Caladanter responded with impressive alacrity. Unfortunately, the only action he took was to drop his mouth open and gulp several times, like a hungry bullfrog too clumsy to catch flies buzzing around his tongue.

  When it became obvious the now white-faced noble was unable to find anything intelligible to say, Boarblade continued.

  “For years, I have been spying on the war wizards for the royal family. I know they are the true traitors in Cormyr, who have oppressed all highborn in the realm, letting the Obarskyrs take the blame—and goading angry lords into treason that Vangerdahast then uses as pretexts for further hampering the rights of all highborn. You know this too, if you think about it. Have the war wizards not recently suffered scandal after scandal, all involving self-interested traitors in their ranks?”

  Boarblade paused to let Caladanter nod. The frightened young noble managed to do so. Eagerly and repeatedly he nodded, like some sort of string-pull toy, excited hope now joining the terror that had shone so starkly in his eyes.

  By Bane and the deft hand of Manshoon, this weakling couldn’t be trusted to aid the Brotherhood, even out of abject fear! So no hint of the Zhentarim must ever enter his head.

  Boarblade pressed on. “Saying or doing anything against the Obarskyrs will only get you dead—unpleasantly, painfully, and shamefully so. And consider: Why have you contemplated disloyalty to the Dragon Throne? Not out of personal hatred for a royal family you have barely met, surely. No, you schemed purely to avenge slights done to the highborn of our Forest Kingdom and to wrest what power has been taken from nobles back into noble hands. Yes?”

  Caladanter found his voice at last. “Y-yes!” he almost shouted, and then clapped a hand over his mouth in fresh fear, looking beseechingly at his bodyguard for acceptance.

  Boarblade gave it to him, smiling the warm smile of an admiring friend. Young Lord Caladanter actually sighed in relief—as the lying Zhentarim thrust the collar that would enthrall him around the foolish lordling’s neck and tightened it, hard and fast.

  “So instead of marching yourself straight to a needless execution that will end the Caladanter line in disgrace, why not win back power for nobles and the Dragon Throne for the Obarskyrs and us all by working with me in my little scheme? A plot that has King Azoun’s personal approval? I intend to eliminate a poisonous few Wizards of War, discredit the lot of them, and weaken their stranglehold on the throat of fair Cormyr. When King Azoun can truly rule from the Dragon Throne once more, he will need loyal officers and courtiers—and he knows he can find none better than the nobles of Cormyr. Not those with the longest, proudest lineages, nor yet those with the most coin to flash. Rather, he will look to those who aided him in the dangerous times when the shadow of Vangerdahast loomed over the land. To them he will grant power and high station and confirm the high regard all Cormyreans will hold for such brave men. You, Lord Rhallogant Caladanter, can be such a one.”

  His master blinked at him, downed most of his oversized goblet in one great gulp that left him reeling and blinking away tears, and gasped, “M-me?”

  Boarblade nodded. “I have seen it in you, these seasons we’ve spent together. I know you can be among the foremost lords of Cormyr.” He leaned closer to Caladanter and made his voice fierce with belief. “I know you deserve it!”

  “I-I do?”

  “You do,” Boarblade decreed firmly, “and the time has come to prove it. Not to me, Lord; I already know your true worth. To the king, whose hopes rest in you, and who so long ago sent me here in hopes you would take me into your service, and so set you on the path that has led you here, this day.”

  Was it Oghma he should pray to for forgiveness, for wallowing so grandly in every last cliché? Or Deneir? Both, Boarblade decided, and for that matter Milil and a few more gods; they must all be snorting at this tripe he was talking.

  But hold, the young lordling was finding his feet at last. Rather unsteadily. “C-command me,” he gasped, eyes shining. “How can I best serve Cormyr?”

  “Spare Feathergate and keep me close at hand henceforth. Take to bed and get some sleep; if you’re too excited for slumber to come easily, have a drink or two. You must be alert and rested three mornings hence, when King Azoun’s next orders will come to me.”

  “Done,” Caladanter agreed, waving his goblet with a wild flourish that almost overbalanced him into a stumbling run into the nearest study wall.

  Recovering, he gave Boarblade a wide smile, strode to the door that led into his bedchamber, and more or less fell through the opening, sketching a fanciful salute.

  Idiot noble.

  Boarblade watched the door slam and then listened to a faint series of crashes that marked the drunken lordling’s progress toward his distant and grandiose four-poster.

  “That went rather well,” he told the snarling panther and settled himself into his master’s favorite chair.

  He cast another of the mind-prying spells the Lord Manshoon had taught him, which he used so often to spy on Caladanter’s thoughts—shallow, boastful, and self-serving, most of them—to make sure his inspired young master wasn’t hurrying to arrange the slaying of his hired assassin or to contact a Wizard of War.

  Then he relaxed, allowing himself a sigh of his own. Young Rhallogant wasn’t—instead, as expected, he was hurrying to drink himself into a stupor.

  “Stout fellow,” Boarblade murmured aloud, glancing idly around the study as he wondered what mischief he could most profitably pursue once his master was blind drunk and snoring. The rushing thoughts he was spying on grew both wilder and more confused as all that wine took hold.

  Boarblade’s gaze settled on a magnificent gilded map of Cormyr that he’d admired before. Grant young Rhallogant one thing: he had an impeccable taste in maps.

  Boarblade clasped his hands together and stroked his chin with them. If he could just keep this now-leashed lordling from doing something so stone cold stupid as to draw Vangerdahast’s attention to him, he could do a lot of damage to the Wizards of War.

  And hasten the day when he could cast the spell that would bring him, in the depths of his own mind, face-to-face with the coldly approving smile of Lord Manshoon as he reported, “I have done it, Lord. The wizards of Cormyr are subverted, and their realm awaits your covert rule.”

  Not that he—unlike some nobles he could name, this one and others far older, who should know much, much better—was impatient fool enough to expect that day to come soon. No. Patience and slow, deft deeds and more patience. Step by careful step, until the destination becomes inevitable. Those who boldly leap tend to topple, hard and fast and fatally.

  Lost in such thoughts, with the blurred glories of Azoun ushering dozens of bared, beautiful, and adoringly eager noblewomen of the realm into the waiting and deserving arms of Lord Rhallogant Caladanter, Telgarth Boarblade of the Zhentarim failed to notice something silent and stealthy rippling its way across the room behind him.

  Something mottled and shifting in its shape. It looked like an old scrap of tanned boarhide that was somehow alive and able to grow its own tentacle-like arms that flowed continually into new shapes, yet tugged the shapeless thing along with menacing purposefulness.

  Ghoruld Applethorn, had he still been alive, would have known it for what it was and would have been eager to learn just why the hargaunt, after keeping company with him in such evident satisfaction, had so abruptly left him somewhere in the Royal Palace of Suzail.

  Yet a plot had failed, and Applethorn was dead, so there was no one to identify the hargaunt as it moved purposefully across Caladanter’s study, unnoticed by Telgarth Boarblade. Gloating does take some concentration.

  Silently the strange shapeshifting thing flowed up an ornately carved chairback, reared up to deftly shape a long, narrow tentacle—and thrust it, ever so delicately, into one of Boarblade’s ears.

  The Zhent stiffened and shivered, just once. Then, as the tentacle reached his brain, Boarblade’s face went from astonished horror at being invad
ed to a calmer expression of interest, an expression that drifted into sharper, stronger interest—and then into a pleased exclamation: “Ho! Well, now!”

  Then, slowly, Telgarth Boarblade smiled an evil smile.

  Dark and scowling Brorn had been one of Lord Yellander’s two best house swords, and tall, scarred Steldurth had been the other. A dozen armsmen each they’d commanded in Yellander colors.

  “My bullyblades,” Lord Yellander had called them all proudly, and he entrusted them with all his “dark work.” Slayings aplenty they had done for him and had fetched drugs and poisons by the caravan-load out of Sembia to enrich him. Thefts, too, and spyings. There were the Dragon Throne’s laws, and there were the handful of those laws that the Lord Yellander cared to respect.

  The gap between had been the business of his bullyblades.

  Until their lord’s disappearance. Purple Dragons had come to the Yellander lands then, six or seven for every bullyblade, and Wizards of War had ridden with them. They had taken firm possession of Yellander’s properties and wealth, notably barn after barn full of the unlawful drugs thaelur, laskran, blackmask, and behelshrabba—to say nothing of several coffers of poisons. Those barns, packed to the rafters, had been guarded by Yellander’s bullyblades.

  Not even an upland idiot farmer would believe their claims to have loyally served the Lord Yellander yet known nothing of what was in the barns.

  Wherefore Brorn, Steldurth, and the rest of the bullyblades had found themselves out of work, unpaid, and under suspicion. Still angrily proclaiming their innocence, they had been exiled from the realm for six summers each—and marched to the Sembian border under watchful eyes.

  It was Brorn who rallied them in a stable in Daerlun and slew the Cormyrean spy who tried to eavesdrop on their moot. It was Steldurth who emptied his own boots of coins to buy out the guards of a Suzail-bound caravan nighting over in Daerlun. It was Brorn, again, who found a few merchants in Suzail who wanted goods rushed north to Arabel and got a smaller caravan on the road again before any Wizard of War had time to grow suspicious. Whereupon it was Steldurth who sold the wagons and the plodding draft horses in Arabel, bought hardy remounts, and had the lordless bullyblades heading along the Moonsea Ride before a Dragon commander thought he recognized Brorn’s face.

  By the time that officer recalled a name to go with that face, the bullyblades were gone into the trees, and a higher-ranking Purple Dragon was shrugging and telling the officer who’d confided in him that the bullyblades had probably stolen back into the kingdom just long enough to snatch one of Yellander’s coin-hoards, ere heading for the Moonsea where they could be as lawless as their dark-booted little hearts desired.

  That option always awaited, but Brorn and Steldurth loved Cormyr a little more than that. And hated the Knights of Myth Drannor a little more, too.

  In their busy day in Suzail, they’d learned from a surviving Yellander spy at Court of the Knights’ coming ride and the wealth the Royal Magician was about to hand them.

  Brorn and Steldurth reacted to that news in the same manner, and together concluded it would be fitting revenge to slay the Knights, redeem themselves as loyal to the realm by claiming the Knights were butchering innocent upland farmers and merchants—murders they would do themselves, to gain coin, food, and goods—and relieve the Knights of all those coins, too.

  So here they were, with only a handful of their foes still standing.

  Brorn smiled. The revenge was going well. He threw up his hand to signal the ring of men should stop, closing no further.

  “Spellhurlers, all of these,” he said curtly to the best bowmen among the bullyblades, indicating the last three Knights. “Turn them into pincushions.”

  “You miss her, don’t you?” Torsard Spurbright murmured, refilling his father’s goblet.

  Two summers ago he would have uttered those words in a fury, enraged that his sire’s dalliance with the lady envoy of Silverymoon—and the old, old friendship they so obviously shared—amounted to an insulting spurning of his mother, the Lady Delandra Spurbright.

  But then, two summers ago everything Lord Elvarr Spurbright said and did had infuriated or at least embarrassed Torsard. Now, he understood his father—and the ways of the world, or at least Cormyr—rather better.

  Now, he would have given almost anything to have an old friend he could trust as much as Lord Spurbright and the Lady Aerilee Summerwood trusted each other. And if that old friend could also be a lover …

  And if he could have her—gods, if it was he, Torsard, the beyond-beautiful lady envoy wrapped her welcoming arms around and melted against! O, Sune and Tymora both, I would heap gold on your altars!—and still love and be loved by an unresenting wife …

  Well, either women were far greater fools than he’d ever thought in all his green years up until now, or Lord Elvarr Spurbright was someone … remarkable.

  He’d never thought past the resentment before, to try to really see his father as others might. Now that he was doing so, much as he hated to admit it, his father was, he supposed, rather remarkable.

  Which made his son, Torsard Spurbright, that much more important. And more obviously the green fool, too.

  “I do,” his father replied, meeting his eyes with a level gray gaze that startled Torsard with its honesty. His father, speaking to him as an equal? Well, now …

  Lord Elvarr Spurbright had always loomed large, dark, and a little terrible in his son’s mind. The Great Forbidder who decreed this or that limitation on Torsard’s behavior, yet was also the person whose approval the heir of the Spurbrights most craved. And found hardest to earn.

  To step around that great darkness and look at the older man across the table as a … a fellow Spurbright, perhaps even a friend …

  He found himself blinking at someone familiar, who at the same time looked utterly different.

  For one thing, he’d never seen his father this melancholy before. Grim, yes, and snappingly angry many a time … but not this weary sadness that rode atop remembered joy.

  He wanted the angry Lord Elvarr Spurbright back.

  With that sire, at least, he knew where he stood. Cowering and disapproved of, but that was, at least, a familiar cloak.

  Wherefore he tried again to lift his father’s melancholy mood. The cause lay like a great silence between them, obvious to the entire household in the wake of Lady Summerwood’s departure for Silverymoon.

  Gods, his mother must love this gray-eyed man across the table so much to smile and embrace him so earnestly and often, last night and this day!

  Yet she did, and he so obviously loved her, too, kissing her more fervently than Torsard could remember him doing for years. It was as if the lady envoy was a fire that warmed and then ignited those she touched, kindling them into little flames of their own in her wake.

  Torsard shuddered in remembered lust, seeing Aerilee Summerwood again, sleek and beautiful, all catlike swirling grace as she turned her head, laughing.

  He’d stood watching, shaking with longing but not daring to speak or step closer. His father had met his gaze and had seen the longing in his eyes, and he had done nothing but nod in silent understanding. Not condemning or mocking, imparting no hint of anger, just … understanding.

  They were two men smitten by the same laughing arrow.

  That smiling, dancing-eyed face, the lush, flawless body below it … Torsard swallowed hard and had to clear his throat twice before he managed to ask, “Will we … ever see her again?”

  Again the level, direct look. “King Azoun,” his father said carefully, “has promised to send me to Silverymoon as Cormyr’s envoy to the Gem of the North, but ’twould not be seemly to do so before next spring.”

  “Send you,” Torsard echoed, not knowing quite what he dared to ask.

  “I will go nowhere without your mother by my side,” Lord Spurbright said firmly. “Neither I nor she wishes to be sundered from each other, and the Lady Summerwood wants to see us both.”

  Torsa
rd blinked, trying to imagine his mother abed with the Silvaeren lady envoy—and then trying hard not to imagine it.

  “I’m sorry, Son,” his father murmured. “You must keep the family banners high while we are away from home. However, envoys are housed differently in Silverymoon than here; visitors choose where in the city they wish to dwell, and the High Lady’s purse pays for it.”

  Torsard frowned. “I—I don’t follow you.”

  “Aerilee promised to help her dear friends the arriving Spurbrights find suitable lodgings,” Lord Spurbright said gently. “If I were to send you to Silverymoon some months ahead of us … well, you are Lord Spurbright, too. You saw how approvingly she measured you.”

  “M-me?” Torsard knew he was blushing hotly and didn’t care. Had she really?

  His father nodded, ever so slightly, and smiled in a way that made Torsard suddenly grin and feel very warm indeed and want to be in Silverymoon right now. He settled for bringing his fist down on the table—gently, not with a crash—and asking, “You’ll do that, Father? You promise?”

  “On one condition. Having tasted of the lovely Aerilee, you return here at an agreed-upon time and start to become truly Lord Spurbright. My successor and head of our house. The gods, after all, might decide I’ll die in Silverymoon, yes?”

  “If you do,” Torsard dared to say or rather said before he could stop himself, “I can guess how!”

  Then he stopped, staring into his father’s eyes, suddenly afraid—until the sudden, boyish grin that appeared flashingly beneath them swept away all fear.

  “There are worse ways to die,” Lord Elvarr Spurbright observed, apparently addressing the rim of his goblet. He went on staring at it for a long, long breath as his grin faded, and then shook himself and fixed Torsard with that steady gray look.