From inside the carriage, the bear echoed the Shard's keening with a plaintive wail of its own.
17
The Spur
Cat leaned over Drone's journal with her elbows holding the binding open and her head propped up in her hands. Despite the shattered window and broken door, the tower room was a comfortable temperature, as long as she kept her fur-lined cape draped around her shoulders. Isolated from the rest of the family's living quarters, the room was also marvelously quiet, but the mage could not concentrate. The old wizard's crabbed handwriting blurred before her eyes, and her gaze wandered about the room, unable to focus on anything.
Idly she pulled out the amulet of protection from her skirt pocket. She could feel five lumps of varying sizes and shapes wrapped in the silk. Her curiosity prodded at her to peek at just one of the lumps, but with a sudden burst of will, she shoved the amulet back in her pocket. Ignoring Mistress Ruskettle's advice would be like asking Tymora to send me more bad luck, and I've had more than my share of that, Cat thought.
She stared into space and let her mind wander from the duty at hand to the events of the past year. Nothing had gone right for her since the previous summer. She'd awakened on Midsummer Day in a Zhentil Keep alley with no memory of how she'd gotten there, or indeed any memory at all beyond her name and place of birth. The rest of her history had vanished, leaving an irritating void in her head and an uneasy feeling in her heart.
With nowhere to go, she wandered the streets after dark and ran afoul of one of the Keeper press gangs. After the briefest of struggles, she became their prisoner. She foolishly bragged of her magical power, hoping to coerce or frighten the recruiting thugs into letting her go. Instead she'd found herself drafted into an army unit headed for Yulash.
An ugly little spider of a Zhentarim wizard tested her powers. He gave her a slender book, containing only such spells as slave mages could be trusted with. From the tiny size of the book, and the bloodstains on its cover, it was obvious that her masters did not expect her to survive, much less excel at combat.
After five days of forced marching, her unit engaged in its first battle, against a unit of Hillsfar's Red Plumes. The battle was a mutual slaughter—only officers on the sidelines survived. Cat's magic power was quickly spent as the enemy overran her position. Powerless and exhausted, she lay down in hopes of passing for one of the dead and escaping after dark. That was when Flattery had rescued her.
Maybe rescued wasn't the right word, Cat thought. Collected would be more accurate, she decided.
As soon as the army officers had quit for the evening, retiring to their tents and dinners, Flattery's zombies stumbled onto the battlefield and began collecting bodies for Flattery's experiments—and as food for some of his more disgusting undead minions. A particularly mindless zombie, unable to distinguish between the dead and the unconscious—for Cat had fallen asleep—collected her and brought her to its master in his fortress.
Cat remembered how impressed she'd been at her first sight of Flattery as he stood on a parapet overlooking the rolling fields far below. She thought his hawklike features and wolfish smile quite handsome. His capability and power were equally alluring.
But Flattery guarded his power and secrets jealously. He had no apprentices, no familiars, no companions, but surrounded himself with undead servants. He isolated himself from the outside world and everyday life, using his minions to gather everything he needed to work and live. The wizard had erratic fits of temper, which might explain why he chose to work with blindly obedient slaves. On the other hand, working with such slaves might have contributed to his quirkiness.
The wizard could have made Cat a zombie, or fed her to the ghouls, or resold her to the Zhentarim. But he didn't. Instead he took her under his wing—kept her in pleasant surroundings, taught her some new magic, and worked on a spell to help her regain her memory. Cat was not averse to being sheltered and trained, but most especially she wanted her memory back.
A gnawing desire to fill the void in her head grew in her daily. Regaining her forgotten history was worth everything to her— enduring Flattery's mad temper, living among the undead servants, reconciling herself to the confinement of Flattery's fortress. After all, she told herself, slavery to the Zhentarim could be much worse.
Finally, one evening many months later, Flattery finished the spell creating the dark jewel that held her missing past. He presented it to Cat with a proposal of marriage. Cat had looked at the gem, yearning to hold it. Afraid of Flattery's reaction should she refuse him, she agreed. She'd flattered herself into believing he'd come to prefer her company to the undead, that he found her beautiful, that he wanted to take care of her. After all, she told herself, he was handsome and clever and very powerful—she could do worse.
After the hasty wedding ceremony with the only attendant being a wobbly priest of Mystra, goddess of magic, Flattery had become irrationally angered by her request to have the gem. He demanded she prove her worth before he restored her memory to her. Then he assigned her the task of sneaking through the Immersea catacombs to fetch the wyvern's spur from the Wyvernspur family crypt.
Eager to get her hands on something the wizard truly desired, something she could barter for her memory, Cat didn't think twice about entering the secret door to the catacombs. It felt good to be away from the undead and free of Flattery's nerve-racking presence. She even enjoyed encountering some of the monsters that lived in the catacombs. They were awful, but at least they were alive; you could talk to them and bribe or trick your way around them.
Finding the spur missing came as a crushing blow to all her hopes. Finding her escape blocked hardly seemed to matter. Trapped inside those horrible tunnels, without even the comfort of having succeeded at stealing the spur, she wandered as aimlessly as any monster. As she wandered, Cat began to re-evaluate her last few months. She decided she could have done better.
Then she'd stumbled across Drone's nephew, Giogi. Giogi's offer of protection had been pretty amusing. Even if the nobleman found the spur, he didn't stand a chance against Flattery. She knew that Giogi's Uncle Drone could be a powerful ally, though. Flattery had taken the trouble to warn her how shrewd Drone was and how cleverly he'd warded the crypt against magical entry and scrying. After talking to Giogi, Cat fell upon a plan: In exchange for information on Flattery and his plot to steal the family's heirloom, Cat had hoped to get Drone's help stealing the crystal that held her lost memory.
To Cat, Drone's death had been nearly as big a blow as finding the spur missing from the crypt. Giogi's chances at finding the spur did not look very good to her, but he was her only hope. If Flattery found the spur first, she would have nothing to barter for the memory crystal—until the wizard found some other, possibly even more dangerous or distasteful, way for her to prove her "worth."
Then someone had tried to smother her in her sleep. In the moonlight it had looked like Flattery. Frefford and Steele Wyvernspur both resembled Flattery, but neither of them had any reason to kill her, and she doubted that either of them could walk through walls.
Flattery could have been playing some sick game or testing her loyalty. Or he might have decided to make himself a widower, in some mad fit of anger or jealousy, and then changed his mind.
On top of last night's shock had come Olive Ruskettle's accusations about Flattery killing that Jade person. Giogi seemed to trust Olive completely. At Thomas's mention of the halfling's name, the nobleman had raced down the stairs with positive excitement. No one challenged the halfling's claim to be a bard, even though Cat was pretty sure halflings were not accepted at barding college, but then Cat hadn't known that Harpers accepted halflings into their organization, either.
Then, when confronted with the accusation that he'd been responsible for Drone's death, Flattery not only did not deny it, but joked about it. That had been the final blow. Cat realized she was an absolute fool to trust him.
Finding the spur was no longer enough. She had to find the power to ensure herself against Flattery's power and deceptions. Olive Ruskettle's amulet of protection had been her first lucky break. The halfling convincing Giogi to bring her to Drone's lab had been her second.
Even if Drone's journal did not reveal information on the spur's whereabouts, Cat could loot from it enough magic to guarantee her survival.
And, if Giogi reaches Mother Lleddew in time to learn whatever she knows but which Flattery does not want Giogi to learn, then manages to bring that information back to me. Cat told herself hopefully, I may even have some power over Flattery.
The mage could not deceive herself about Giogi's chances, though. They were very, very small. He's so aimless and ridiculously romantic, she thought. One knock on the head, and he thinks he's been kissing a goddess, for heaven's sake. Even with a potion of superheroism in him, he's not likely to be much of a challenge against Flattery's hordes of undead. Still, I'm obeying Flattery's suggestion to use him to get what I want. Now, if I could only concentrate on the task I've set for myself.
She couldn't, though. The silly fop's face kept appearing in her mind's eye, wearing her earring and hair-beads and that priceless headband. She kept hearing his voice offering her his protection and telling her it was going to be all right and begging her not to die.
He cared about her. For all Cat knew, he was the only person in the Realms who ever had.
She also kept hearing him describe his dreams—the death cry of prey, the taste of warm blood, and the crunch of bone. For no good reason she could think of, the words excited her. In her own dreams, she was always fruitlessly searching dull desertscapes for something. She never knew what the something was. The dreams left her unhappy and anxious. Flattery denied having any dreams. He claimed they were for the guilty. How could such a weak fool as Giogi have such interesting dreams?
Cat looked down again at Drone's journal, but her elbows were in the way." Damn!" she muttered. The swig of invisibility potion she'd swallowed had worn off already, which meant she'd been staring into space far too long.
Outside the tower she heard the rattle of a carriage. She ran over to a window and looked down. Giogi and Ruskettle were driving away. They'd finished lunch already, servants had loaded the carriage with packages for Drone's memorial service, and the halfling and noble were leaving for Selune's temple.
I've been staring into space far, far too long, Cat thought with a frown.
She flipped through Drone's journal. It was merely a day-to-day diary. There were no spells written within, no formulas for magic potions scribbled in the margins, no treasure maps stuck between its pages. Page after page accounted family squabbles, purchases, meals, and rumors from court. The last entry was dated the twentieth of Ches, yesterday, just before Drone was killed. The full entry read:
Giogi arrived at last night's meeting twenty minutes early, astonished Dorath. Boy looks fit. Traveling must agree with him. Didn't get a chance to speak to him alone. Thomas went to meet his girl, but she never showed. Taught Spot a new trick. Gaylyn up all night with contractions. Frefford a wreck. Dorath in her glory. Healthy baby girl born after dawn—Amber Leona, named for both the parents' mothers
Breakfast burned.
Nothing, Cat thought with a sigh. An ordinary day in an ordinary castle. Arrivals, departures, births, deaths, the love affairs of servants, the muddling of a meal. A boring life.
A peaceful life, some other part of Cat's mind argued.
The mage slammed the journal closed. She surveyed the lab impatiently. Where are his spell books? she wondered. Were they destroyed with their master? Which of the undead that Flattery commands can cast a spell of disintegration?
Cat took up Gaylyn's catalog. What sort of wizard lets his possessions be cataloged in a pink book with pressed flowers on the cover? she thought disdainfully.
Yet, as she stared at the flowers beneath the crystal plate fastened to the catalog binding and thought of Gaylyn, she knew she was envious of the life the Wyvernspurs lived. They got to be happy—she would have to settle for surviving and, with Tymora's luck, regaining her memory.
Cat spent half an hour sorting through the stacks of paper, gathering the most powerful spell scrolls and potions she could find. Dust billowed as she moved piles of documents, but her stack of magic grew steadily.
Then she came upon a stack that was missing a scroll—a scroll that held a disintegrate spell. She double-checked the pink book, but everything else was in place. "How odd," she murmured.
"Don't move," a man whispered harshly in Cat's ear. The point of a dagger pressing lightly against her jugular vein compelled the mage to obey. The dagger's owner stood behind her. "One word, one move," he said, "and you'll be dragon bait, understand? Now hand over the spur."
Cat remained speechless and motionless.
Her attacker shook her by the shoulder. "Did you hear me, witch? I said hand it over."
"You also said don't move and don't speak," Cat pointed out with a mocking tone, "so I'm just a trifle confused."
"You'll be a trifle dead if you keep acting smart, you little ass," the man said. With his dagger still pressed into her flesh, he moved around her so that thev stood face to face.
Cat shuddered when first confronted with the man's face-Flattery's face. After a moment, she saw it wasn't Flattery, though. The man was too young, too nervous, and he had a birthmark by his lips. He was Steele, the kobold-torturer.
"Now, give me the spur and don't try anything. My uncle was a wizard, so I know all your foolish conjurer tricks."
"I don't have the spur," Cat objected.
"Don't lie to me. I was at the inner stair door. That halfling freak locked it, but her people aren't the only ones who can pick locks or listen at doors. I was listening. I heard Giogi call you a little ass, and he was right. Only an ass would risk her neck to save that idiot. The divination said the spur was in the little ass's pocket. Now, reach into your pocket very slowly and pull it out and hand it to me."
