Gauntlgrym (Neverwinter #1)(12)
Her dress was much like the one Dahlia had been wearing that same day, high collar, open neck and low cut, and none could deny that Sylora Salm wore it in an enticing manner. Like her rival, her head was cleanly shaven, with not a hair on her pretty head. She was older than Dahlia by several years, and though Sylora was human, her beauty had surely not dimmed.
She stood on the edge of a dead forest, where the diseased remnants of once proud trees reached to the very edge of the newest Dread Ring, a widening black circle of utter devastation. Nothing lived within that dark perversion, where ashes could be naught but ashes and dust could be naught but dust. Though she was dressed as if to attend a royal ball, Sylora did not seem out of place there, for there was a coldness about her that complemented death quite well.
“The vampire inquired,” explained her lone companion, Themerelis, a hulking young man barely into his twenties. He wore only a short kilt, mid-calf boots, and an open leather vest, showing off his extraordinary musculature, his wide shoulders exaggerated by the greatsword he wore strapped diagonally across his back.
“What is the witch’s fascination with the Hosttower of the Arcane?” Sylora asked, talking more to herself as she turned away from Themerelis. “It has been nearly a century since that monstrosity tumbled, and the remnants of the Arcane Brotherhood have shown no indication that they intend to rebuild it.”
“Nor could they,” Themerelis said. “The dweomers of its bindings were far beyond them even before the Spellplague. Alas for magic lost to the world.”
Sylora looked at him with open mockery. “Something you heard in the library while spying on Dahlia?” She held up her hand as her consort started to reply. The man was too dim to understand the insult. “Why else would you be in a library?” she asked, and she rolled her eyes in disgust when he looked at her with obvious puzzlement.
“Do not mock me, Lady,” the warrior warned.
Sylora turned on him sharply. “Pray tell me why?” she asked. “Will you take out your greatsword and cleave me in two?”
Themerelis glared at her, but that only evoked a burst of laughter from the Thayan sorceress.
“I prefer other weapons,” Sylora said, teasing him, and she let her hand come up to stroke Themerelis’s powerful arm. The man started toward her, but she moved her palm before him to halt his advance.
“If you earn the fight,” she explained.
“They are leaving this day,” Themerelis replied.
“Then be quick to your work.” She gave him a little push backward then waved at him to be gone.
Themerelis offered a frustrated snort and spun away, stomping back through the trees and up the distant hill toward the castle gate.
Sylora watched him go. She knew how he was so easily getting near to the wary and dangerous Dahlia, and she wanted to hate him for that, to murder him even, but she found she couldn’t blame the young man. She narrowed her eyes into hateful slits. How she wanted to be rid of Dahlia Sin’felle!
“Those thoughts do not serve you well, my pretty,” came a familiar voice from within the Dread Ring—and even if she hadn’t recognized the voice, only one creature would dare enter so new a ring.
“Why do you tolerate her?” Sylora said, turning back to stare into the fluttering wall of blowing ash that marked the circumference of the necromantic place of power. She couldn’t actually see Szass Tam through that opaque veil, but she could feel his presence, like a blast of a winter wind carrying sheets of stinging sleet.
“She is just a child,” Szass Tam replied. “She has not yet learned the etiquette of the Thayan court.”
“She has been here for six years,” the woman protested.
Szass Tam’s cackling laughter mocked her anger. “She controls Kozah’s Needle, and that is no minor thing.”
“The break-staff,” Sylora said with disgust. “A weapon. A mere weapon.”
“Not so ‘mere’ to those who feel its bite.”
“It is just a weapon, absent the beauty of pure spellcasting, absent the power of the mind.”
“More than that,” Szass Tam whispered, but Sylora ignored him and continued.
“Swashbuckling trickery,” she said. “All flash and dazzle, and strikes a child should dodge.”
“I count her victims at seven,” the lich reminded her, “including three of considerable renown and reputation. Could I not bring them back to my side in a preferable form,”—the manner in which he so casually referred to his reanimation of the dead sent a freezing shiver along Sylora’s already cold spine—“I would fear that the Lady Dahlia might be thinning my ranks too quickly.”
“Count it not as her skill,” Sylora warned. “She coaxed them, every one, into vulnerable positions. Her youth and beauty fooled them, but now I know, now we all know.”
“Even Lady Cahdamine?” said Szass Tam, and Sylora winced. Cahdamine had been her peer, if never really her friend, and they had shared many adventures, including clearing the peasants from the land for the very Dread Ring she stood before—clearing the peasants’ souls, at least, for their rotting flesh had fed the ring. During that pleasurable time, three years before, Cahdamine had spoken often of Lady Dahlia, and of how she had taken the young elf under her wing to properly instruct her in the arts carnal and martial.