Without any sound, without even a flash of magical light, Almor simply disappeared. And took Ren with her. One instant they were there, the next they were gone.
"Godsdamnit!"
In the next breath, Derg was gone.
Cale raised his dagger to throw. Halthor, his thick fingers slicked with blood, fumbled with the teleportation rod. Cale hurled the dagger and charged.
The sliver of steel took Halthor in the stomach and nearly doubled him over. Cale charged forward. Halthor pulled the dagger from his flesh and tried to parry with his sword. Cale would have none of it.
Using the force of his momentum, he swept Halthor's blade out wide, then suddenly reversed his motion and slammed the hilt of his sword into the man's face. Squarely. Bone crunched, and blood sprayed. The big man's head snapped back and he groaned in agony, a sound lost in the gurgle of blood pouring into his mouth. He dropped his teleportation rod and staggered back, reeling.
"Still seem tame, you bastard?"
Halthor muttered something, but a mouthful of blood, a split lip, and several dislodged teeth made it unintelligible. He still gripped Thamalon's sphere in his hand. Cale knew that if he could stop Halthor, the Almor lookalike would come back for it.
From behind, he could hear the guards charging into the reception hall. Behind Halthor, the grounds patrol closed in. They had him surrounded. They could take him alive if they wished.
No.
Cale decided that Halthor would be dead before the guards arrived. If they needed to speak with his corpse, the Uskevren could hire a priest. If he'd had time, Cale would have killed the man painfully for what he'd done.
He advanced, blade held low.
Though bleary-eyed and wounded, Halthor did not back away. Instead, he stood his ground and began to laugh. To Laugh. Not at Cale, it seemed, but as though he found being wounded and about to die exhilarating. His illusionary fat stomach bounced with his mirth. Blood frothed in the mess of his mouth.
Cale was disgusted, but lunged forward anyway and chopped downward, a blow that would split Halthor's fat, balding head right down the middle.
Stunningly quick for such a big man, Halthor raised his arms and interposed the sphere before Cale's slash, still smiling. Cale's enchanted sword rang off the quartz—
—and sound exploded in Cale's ears, as loud as the braying of a thousand Cormyrean bass shawms. A shower of sparks flew from the sphere, raced up Cale's blade, and danced around his arms. His hands went instantly numb. His sword fell from his grasp. A wave of concussive energy erupted outward from the sphere and blew him back toward the manse. He crashed into the doorjamb and sank to the floor with a groan.
The explosion knocked Halthor flat onto his back and drove him a full handbreadth into the ground. He recovered more quickly than Cale. As he sat up, he left the outline of his body imprinted in the soil.
Bleeding not only from his nose and mouth but also from his eyes and ears, Halthor still somehow wore a twisted smile. He got to all fours and crawled forward toward his teleportation rod.
The guards were coming, Cale knew, but would not get there in time. The explosion had knocked them to the ground as well. He struggled to get up. His legs would not respond. He fell to his side, helpless as a babe.
Halthor fumbled with the teleportation rod, still grinning like a jester.
"Halt!" shouted the house guards.
They had regained their feet. The concussive energy must not have affected them as severely. Crossbows twanged, and bolts stuck in the earth beside Halthor. He ignored them.
"Wondafa," he managed to say to Cale through his broken mouth. "Wondafa."
It took Cale a moment to understand: Wonderful, he had said. Dark! Who in the Hells were these people?
Seemingly satisfied with the setting on his teleportation rod, Halthor leered at Cale. He tried to raise the sphere as though it were a trophy but was too weak to lift it. To Cale, the sphere looked wrong, as though the explosion had left it misshapen, though Cale's muddled brain did not quite register how. So instead of lifting it, Halthor settled for cradling it to his side. One more twist of the rod and he was gone.
Guards rushed forward moments later. Voices filled Cale's ears but he could not distinguish words. He stared at the ground near where Halthor had fallen. He stared for a long while, trying to focus on what lay there. When it finally registered, when he finally understood what it was, he began to laugh.
The guards helping him to his feet shot him perplexed looks. Cale did not bother to explain.
Wonderful indeed, he thought and laughed still more.
The sphere had not been misshapen, and Halthor, the fat dolt, had not teleported out with it. He had teleported out with only half of it. Cale's blade had split it cleanly down the middle, exactly what he had intended to do to Halthor's skull. The other half lay in the grass, inert.
They'd be after it, Cale knew. And next time, he would be ready.
CHAPTER 6
AFTERMATH
The fire in the great hearth crackled angrily, mirroring Vraggen's mood. In his barely controlled rage, shadows clotted around his head and fingertips. His pulse thumped in his temples. He had expected to be on his way to the Dragon Coast.
He took a few moments before speaking, to get his anger under control.
On the other side of the reception room Azriim reclined on a velvet upholstered divan. For their base of operations, the half-drow had leased a luxurious villa on the north side of Selgaunt. The noble family who owned it had decided to remove to the country early that year. Either that or Azriim had murdered them. Vraggen didn't care which, though he would have been just as happy with an inconspicuous flat in the warehouse district. Azriim, of course, would have none of that. The half-drow required his luxuries.
Already Azriim had changed out of the clothing that had been ruined in the fighting outside the Black Stag. He wore a pale green silk overcoat, fitted breeches, and polished black boots. He seemed only passingly upset at the team's failure in Stormweather Towers. His calm drove Vraggen to still greater heights of anger.
Azriim caught Vraggen looking at him and gave his infuriating grin.
"I cannot tell enough from only half the globe, Vraggen. There are too many variables."
Vraggen didn't need the half-drow to tell him that. Half was useless!
"I know that," he snapped, and instantly regretted the outburst. Azriim had been goading him.
He paced about the far end of the great room, glaring at each of the team in turn—Dolgan, Elura, Serrin. None of them would look at him.
"I require an explanation," he said to no one in particular, with as much calm as he could manage.
No one spoke. Elura, seated in a chair near the hearth, stared into the fire. Serrin ran his thumb along the edge of his razor-sharp magical falchion and did not look up. Dolgan, who had fairly collapsed on the floor in the middle of the room, breathed noisily through his broken nose but otherwise said nothing.
"I said that I require an explanation!"
Vraggen strode across the room to where the big man sat. As Vraggen approached, Dolgan clambered to his feet, though he looked as though he would not stay upright for long. The front of his jerkin was soaked in blood—his own.
Vraggen had no sympathy for his injuries. Dolgan had failed. The whole team had failed. When they had returned with only half the globe—half!—Vraggen had almost killed all three of them.
He stared into Dolgan's broken face, which grew paler with every passing moment, daring the big man with his eyes to say something insolent. He did not; he just stood there and bled. Vraggen figured he would bleed out before much longer. He toyed with the idea of letting Dolgan die, as a lesson to the others. But no. Though Dolgan was the most easily replaced of his team, the big man had his uses.
He stared into Dolgan's swollen face and said, "You brought back only half of the globe. Explain."
The big man looked back at him with glassy eyes. Incongruously, the dolt smiled—he had lost a couple teeth—then he began to chuckle. When he did, his shattered nose made gurgling sounds. Vraggen thought the Cormyrean must have gone mad.