A twig snapped. No accident. The two pieces were in the hands of a survivor wearing a face guaranteed to make Alassra Shentrantra's blood freeze in her veins.

"Lailomun?" she whispered as she raised the little wand.

Alassra would never forget the patterns of Lailomun's tattoos. They were very different from the light-drawn lines emerging from the survivor's scorched and tattered clothes-except for the interlaced circles over the man's heart. He was, as Lailomun had been, an illusionist. Logical conclusions cascaded through the Simbul's racing thoughts:

The survivor was Mythrell'aa's confidant, not some mere journeyman.

Mythrell'aa hadn't forgotten Lailomun.

Mythrell'aa knew who Alassra Shentrantra had become after Lailomun died…

After Lailomun disappeared.

After her beloved disappeared, not after he died, because Alassra's final conclusion-tenuous, yet almost inevitable, given what stood before her-was that Mythrell'aa had taken Lailomun back to Bezantur and held him captive for the rest of his life.

The urge to kill, to dissolve herself into the pure, violent stuff of lightning that would leave a crater where the false Lailomun stood and propel her own essence into the void where she would neither think nor feel, set Alassra's body trembling. She restrained the urge with no little difficulty. The false Lailomun, sensing his mortal danger, came no closer.

"Who are you?" the Simbul demanded.

"Vazurmu," the survivor answered, a woman's name in a woman's voice. She shed Lailomun's face. Her own was bruised and bleeding. Where unmarked flesh could be seen, it was a morbid shade of gray. "I served Mythrell'aa, Zulkir of Illusion, as you have, no doubt, guessed."

"Served?"

"We were sent here to watch a horse grow and wait for you to come to claim it."

Mythrell'aa had spied on her, Alassra thought numbly. Mythrell'aa had a spy-eye in her chambers. Alassra saw it in her mind's eye: the thorn branch. It was the first thing she had brought into the tower chamber after she became Aglarond's queen, setting it on a shelf where she could always see it. Where it could always see her… and the mirror.

Mythrell'aa must have been spying, if not from the beginning of her reign, then certainly not long after. Yet Mythrell'aa had waited until now to spring her trap. Why? Because the spy-eye had shown her not only the colt reflected in the mirror, but the reasons Alassra wanted it?

Vazurmu couldn't say. The woman didn't know about the mirror, didn't know the man whose face she'd borrowed-except that the zulkir had told her, in better days, that if she were ever face to face with the witch-queen, that man's countenance would buy her enough time to escape.

It didn't, of course. Vazurmu wasn't going to escape anything. Mythrell'aa had shredded Vazurmu's internal organs. She'd kept herself alive with a pair of healing potions and a burning need to avenge herself. That was done, or almost done; Vazurmu fell to her knees, her voice a whisper Alassra had to strain her ears to hear.

"We were betrayed. O Mighty Simbul. After you arrived. There were other Red Wizards here. Watching us. Waiting for you. Them." She pointed a trembling hand at the two corpses Alassra planned to drag back to Velprintalar. "I saw their faces. I could find out. Who they were. Who sent them."

"Who?"

Vazurmu shook her head. "Don't know. Saw their faces. That's all. Never forget a face. Someone knows. I'll find out. Go back to Thay. To Bezantur. Find out."

"If you live that long."

"If I live. O Mighty Simbul."

Vazurmu might live a bit longer. It wasn't unthinkable. Alassra had come prepared with a greater store of minor healing potions and poultices. She could spare one for Mythrell'aa's traitor. Maybe more than one. Aglarond's queen had a few other Red Wizards stowed in pockets throughout Thay. One never knew when such creatures might be useful.

Nethreene!

Alassra's name-the private name only her sisters, Elminster, and a very few others knew-broke like a storm wave in her mind.

Nethreene, come home-NOW!

She couldn't be certain which sister had summoned her or why, only that it had to be important, had to be heeded. The afternoon had become a time for quick decisions, quick actions. Four unfinished tasks surrounded her: Vazurmu's interrogation, the memorial to the slain Sulalk villagers, the unbranded corpses, and Ebroin, somewhere in the Yuirwood with a strand of her hair tied around his wrist.

In her present state, Vazurmu wouldn't survive a sudden translation to Velprintalar. Alassra couldn't stay in Sulalk long enough to heal her. The two unbranded Red Wizards were nothing more than weight. Hauling them back to the palace wouldn't damage them any more than they already were. But the thought of resurrecting them after leaving Vazurmu behind and the memorial uncreated stuck in the Simbul's craw. Besides, if there were two unbranded wizards in Aglarond, there'd be more-and she'd find them.

One decision, then, would resolve three of Alassra's unfinished tasks. She slew Vazurmu with a word of power-more mercy than execution-placed her corpse with the villagers, and the two unbranded corpses as well. Then she cast shapeshifting magic to mold them all into a statue of Chauntea, the golden goddess of grain and summer. A second spell made the transformation permanent, and a third-she was squandering her spells at a prodigious rate-sent her back to Velprintalar.

She'd done nothing about Ebroin, except decide that she'd have to find him. She'd considered letting him stay in the Yuirwood as he so clearly wished to do, but if Mythrell'aa had known about the colt, then she knew about Bro. With Lailomun's fate a reopened wound in Alassra's conscience, she'd not leave the young man wandering beyond her protection.

11

Thazalhar, in eastern Thay Early evening, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Thazalhar, the wild and empty easternmost province of Thay, was a place to be endured by the wizards, soldiers, and slaves compelled to serve there. It was a place ignored by the rest of Thay, and loved only by the very few who chose to live among its rolling hills. That small number included the Zulkir of Enchantment, twenty leagues away from home and riding hard along the old Mulhorand trunk road out of Pyarados on the west bank of the River Thazarim.

The zulkir leaned into the gallop of his favorite mount, a stallion carved from green and black marble and brought to life by the twelfth Zulkir of Enchantment a hundred years ago. The stallion was inexhaustible and unfazed by whatever magic a zulkir or his enemies cast across its path. Whether the road curved or straightened, turned glassy black or shimmering silver, the stone horse took everything in stride.

While his rider suffered.

Lauzoril had begun his journey before dawn in Tyraturos, deep in the Thayan plateau, crossed the Thazarim at noon and expected to be sore, but home in time for supper. A roomy saddle with a flying carpet folded carefully around it cushioned the zulkir from the worst of the stallion's hammer-legged gait. An assortment of magics kept him awake, alert, and free from the inconveniences of hunger and thirst, but nothing could spare him the headache born of continually enchanting the road in front of him so that wherever in Thay his journey began, it would end a half-day later.

Lauzoril could have used a spell to speed his travel and eliminate any discomfort. Indeed, he had used magic to leave the Tyraturos garret where he'd spent the previous evening trading rumors and favors over dinner with a disgruntled diviner.

The dinner was at the diviner's request. His zulkir, Yaphyll, a woman who'd been allied with Lauzoril and Aznar Thrul until last year, was apparently ready to change sides again. The diviner offered a gift: a token of Yaphyll's restored good faith: a true copy-or so the diviner claimed-of a spell that would reveal not only the properties of an enchanted object, but the precise spells that had enchanted it. A useful thing, if it were a true copy, and, even if it was, insufficient proof that Yaphyll could be trusted.