Not that there was anyone to see, no one but Mirror flowing along as an invisible sensation of hollowness and wrongness at his side. Once, no matter how cold the weather, the streets would have teemed with folk celebrating the Midwinter Festival. These days, ordinary people took care to conclude their revelry, or the open-air portion of it, anyway, before the sun went down. They feared to encounter their masters when the latter were in a playful mood.
Bareris and Mirror emerged from a twisting lane too narrow to accommodate a wagon onto a broader, straighter thoroughfare. On the far side of an arching bridge spanning a frozen canal, their destination glowed with silvery phosphorescence. Sleighs, coaches, and litters waited in line to deposit their passengers under the porte cochere of a stone house with turrets at the four corners of the peaked slate roof. A luminous, runic emblem inlaid above the door, its shape and color in constant flux, revealed that at one time, the mansion had belonged to the extinct Order of Transmutation.
"I don't much like this," Mirror murmured. It was the first time he'd spoken in three days. Evidently he was coming out of his latest bout of ghostly disorientation or whatever it was, just in time to fret.
"My disguise will hold up," Bareris said. "You just remain as near to imperceptible as you can get."
"Even if they don't recognize us, there are plenty of other things that can go wrong."
"I don't care. This Muthoth bastard is one of Sylora Salm's chief deputies. There's a fair chance she'll put in an appearance. And even if she doesn't, there'll be other people to kill." He strode toward the bridge and felt Mirror glide along in his wake.
As Bareris spoke to one of the slaves minding the entryway, he infused his voice with magic. The enchantment persuaded the lackey that he saw an invitation in the newcomer's empty hand, and he and a fellow servant swung open the tall, arched double doors.
On the other side was a high-ceilinged marble foyer with several doorways opening off it. Bareris assumed that newly arrived guests were supposed to pass through the one directly opposite the entrance, where an usher waited to thump his staff on the floor and announce them.
But, disguised though he was, Bareris didn't want all eyes drawn to him or to have his false name and fraudulent title shouted aloud to give every listener the opportunity to reflect that he'd never heard of such a person. He led Mirror into one of the other doorways. If this structure was like other Thayan mansions of his experience, a series of interconnecting rooms and passages should provide a less conspicuous means of access to Muthoth's great hall.
Some of the lesser chambers were occupied. In one, a withered husk of a creature robed in red, still the color reserved for the realm's most powerful wizards, sat talking with another malodorous corpse wearing the silver skull-and-crossed-swords badge of an order of undead knights. In another, the hulking, red-eyed undead called boneclaws, Muthoth's household guards of choice, gripped naked prisoners in their enormous, jointed talons. Several guests hovered around the captives, shouting in their ears, pinching them, or jabbing at their eyes with stiffened fingers. Bareris gathered that the object of the game was to make a victim flinch and gash himself against a boneclaws razor-sharp fingers, and that this was a sport on which the players had decided to gamble.
One captive had already severed an artery, and his lifeless body sprawled discarded on the floor. The remaining ones wept and pleaded, with blood trickling down their torsos and legs. A lithe female vampire knelt, licked gore off a taut, quivering stomach, and won a silver coin thereby.
Bareris could feel Mirror's wrath building as if the air at his side were growing colder and colder. "No," he whispered. "We didn't come here to rescue anyone."
"Perhaps we should have."
"But we didn't, and without a plan, we'd surely fail. Look, we've both been spared all these years for a reason; isn't that what you keep telling me? So we can't throw ourselves away. We have to pick our battles and fight intelligently."
"Move on, then. I don't promise to hold back if I watch any more of this."
Another two dozen paces brought them to a doorway opening on the great hall. An orchestra on a dais along the far wall played a pavane, and Bareris felt the old familiar urge, still alive in him when so much else had withered, to immerse himself in the music. He shook it off and surveyed the company instead.
He spotted a reasonable number of living revelers, mostly clad in red, proof that even after a century, Szass Tam hadn't completely transfigured the aristocracy. But the majority of celebrants were undead, shadowy specters, vampires with alabaster skin and chatoyant eyes, crumbling corpses, fleshless skeletons, and things so misshapen and grotesque they bewildered the eye, perhaps experiments created in the laboratories of the necromancers but granted positions of authority even so.
Good host that he evidently was, Muthoth had provided refreshments for all his guests. Some of the trestle tables proffered food and drink fit for mortals, but prisoners lay chained spread-eagled across others for the undead to devour.
A specter slid his fingers into a boy's face. The child screamed loud enough to drown out the orchestra as he grew old and died in a matter of moments. An undead ogre, its rotting body armored or perhaps simply held together by a framework of black iron rings and bands, ripped off a woman's head, then reached up inside her neck to claw out meat and stuff it in his mouth. More thralls waited caged in the corner to replenish the buffet.
Bareris procured a goblet of blood and pretended to sip from it as he sauntered around, eavesdropping, hoping to hear something tonight that would enable him to strike a blow against Szass Tam's government tomorrow. He might as well. It wasn't time to start murdering people yet. That would come later, when the revel grew wilder, and excitement and overindulgence left the attendees vulnerable. When more of them wandered from the great hall to other portions of the mansion to pursue intimate pleasures in private, purge themselves, or pass out.
The usher at the primary doorway knocked the butt of his staff on the floor. "Sylora Salm, tharchion of Eltabbar!" Bareris turned and bowed like all the other gentlemen, then lifted his eyes to inspect this foe he'd never seen before.
His first thought was that she was very like Dmitra Flass, who'd held the same office one hundred years before, a perfect example of a great Thayan lady. She was tall and slender, without a trace of hair on her head, and wore a shimmering scarlet gown that was a triumph of the dressmaker's art. Her ivory complexion was flawless, her smile deceptively warm, and a quick intelligence shined in her bright green eyes.
Perhaps she reflected Szass Tam's ideal of womanhood. Maybe the lich was genuinely fond of her, as supposedly had been the case with Dmitra. Bareris hoped so. He wanted to believe Szass Tam might actually feel at least a little bereft when she died.
And it should be possible to kill her, her sorcery and bodyguards notwithstanding. The gossips said she possessed a lickerish nature and enjoyed the attentions of vampires. He was disguised as such a creature and could exploit his bardic skills to seduce and beguile. When the opportunity presented itself, he'd lure her away to some private spot, then strike her down before she realized anything was amiss.
Or so he thought until Muthoth hurried out of the crowd to greet the new arrival.
His skinny frame robed in crimson. Sylora's lieutenant had clearly become a vampire at some point during the past century, but it didn't matter. Bareris still recognized the sharp, arrogant features, a face made to sneer and spit, and even if he hadn't, there was no mistaking the maimed right hand with its missing fingers.