The Simbul’s Gift

Aznar Thrul settled back in his chair to get a good view of Szass Tam's face as he turned. Then, belatedly conscious that he'd assumed Enchantment's stance, he leaned forward. The undead Zulkir of Necromancy had turned around.

"Love of Loviatar..."

Lallara, naturally, broke the silence, though Thrul needed a strong jaw to keep his own gasping reaction deep down in his throat. A lich was nothing a sane man—a sane zulkir—ever wanted to see, even with Larloch's chair beneath him.

It wasn't death or undeath; those were commonplace in Thay. A lich was something worse, a nightmare from which you woke up screaming, but couldn't quite remember why. One look at Szass Tam and every living zulkir remembered that nightmare.

It was true, of course, that the zulkirs saw their undead peer as he was at each Convocation, but just as Rhym and Nevron were ragged, so, too, was Szass Tam. His face was chalk white and constantly in motion, rotting and reforming itself. The zulkir's eyes were empty sockets seething with a luminous green vapor, and his neck had become a serpent whose head had replaced the tongue in his gaping mouth.

At the head of an army marching against Aglarond or Rashemen, Szass Tam's lich form would have been an ideal battle standard, but in the Bezantur slave market, it only demonstrated how far Szass Tam had fallen and how far he still had to climb before he was his old self again.

"Lord Necromancy," the Chairmaster intoned from his safe place behind Larloch's chair. "It was you who sealed the writ of Convocation, you who must begin the proceedings."

"Zulkir Aznar Thrul, Lord Invocation—"

Thrul sat erect in his chair. In his wildest dreams he hadn't hoped for this: a whispering Szass Tam, a Szass Tam whose quavering voice truly came from beyond the grave. He tried to catch Mythrell'aa's eye: surely she was having second thoughts.

* * *

"Lord Invocation, you have trespassed against another zulkir. You have confined her and denied her the support and consultation of her school. By the Rule of Iphonos Cor, this is forbidden and must be undone. No zulkir can be denied the free access to her school—"

Mythrell'aa contained her shock and anger. All spring, after Tam's humiliation and her own awkward retreat into Serpent Tower, she had secretly funneled support to her overlord: rare and precious reagents for spells whose purposes she did not want to know; living minions to replace the undead servants he'd lost when his schemes to enslave the tanar'ri lord, Eltab, came crashing down around him; gold and gems in great quantities, no questions asked.

He was Szass Tam. He'd come back stronger than ever from other setbacks, worse setbacks. Mythrell'aa remembered; she was much older than she looked, but she couldn't remember a time when Szass Tam hadn't dominated Thay.

Earlier this summer, she'd asked to meet with him—to see him with her own eyes that were immune to all illusion, enchantment and disguise. They met at an inn near Eltab, unheralded, unnoticed. The lich had seemed himself and properly grateful for the sacrifices she'd made on his behalf. He'd given her a black jewel with the power to kill. Mythrell'aa wore it now, beneath her robes, between her breasts. It was useless against the already dead.

Szass Tam finished speaking. His chest heaved from the effort. Clots of rotten flesh flew into the air, carried by a dank, fetid draft. Mythrell'aa, seated on the lich's left, raised her hand and breathed across the wax perfume she wore on her wrist during Reeking Heat. It didn't help.

The Chairmaster cleared his throat. "Zulkir Aznar Thrul, Lord Invocation, what say you?"

"Ten years ago, I brought an end to the Salamander War and order to the Priador, which replaced Bezantur as the southwestern tharch of Thay. In the absence of others—"

Mythrell'aa seethed. He'd slain her longtime friend and companion, Mari Agneh, then stuffed the Black Citadel with orcs and gnolls before anyone could object!

—"I became tharchion of the Priador and ruled it from Bezantur, but I was already a zulkir, and there was, already, a zulkir living in Bezantur. Naturally, as I could not turn away from my obligations to Invocation—"

No zulkir would. Tharchions had only as much authority as the zulkirs allowed them. Mythrell'aa, herself, had ruled the Tharch of Bezantur through Mari Agneh before the Salamander War.

—"The Zulkir of Illusion should have left, also according to the Rule of Iphonos Cor that two zulkirs shall not establish permanent residence within the same city walls. Lady Illusion begged to remain in her Bezantur tower—"

Mythrell'aa had not begged. Bezantur had been Illusion's home since the first zulkirs were named. There were other cities in the Priador, if Aznar Thrul insisted on being both zulkir and tharchion.

—"We negotiated—"