Blackstaff Read Online Free PDF Page A

wool. She approached the bed and took up the bow and arrows, placing them carefully back in their places on hooks next to the wardrobe. Finally, she drew the scimitar from its sheath, and its silver sheen caught the morning light to dazzling effect. Mhaornathil—the only thing she’d inherited from her mother other than her elf blood—was a Rilifane-blessed scimitar that could cut ghosts as easily as flesh. Tsarra loved the blade almost as much as she hated undead, the bane of her existence since her father died by undead hands fifteen years before. Still, Tsarra knew she couldn’t use the scimitar for the test. Danthra already knew a lot about the blade,and it wouldn’t be a fair test of the spell. She snapped the weapon back into its sheath and hung it and the sword belt on their pegs above her headboard.
    Tsarra approached her window to stand in the sunlight a moment and breathe in the fresh morning air. Within five breaths, she sensed her familiar coming, even though he didn’t loop around the tower and land on the windowsill for a handful of moments. She loved the muffled rustle of his wings as he landed, as well as his purred greeting.
    In its language, she said,
“Good hunt to you too, mighty one.”
    Jet black in hue, the tressym stuck his head out, gesturing for a head scratch, his ravenlike wings ruffling slightly over his back. Tsarra obliged him, letting him rub his head solidly on her palm. She stopped a moment, staring into his mismatched eyes—one of deep blue, the other green—and smiled.
    “
Of course you’re a good companion and a very good hunter
,” she said.
    When the creature tensed to hop onto her shoulder, she held him back, smoothing his feathers and chucking him under the chin. In Common, rather than the purrs of tressymspeak, she said, “Not a chance until the smell of those chipmunks you ate fades from your breath. Now, go take a nap. I’ve got to work with Danthra for a while. Oh, and remember to leave Chaid’s familiar alone until he gets used to you.”
    Nameless let out a trilling purr, and she said, “I don’t care if he looks and smells like prey. He’s not food, any more than you are.” His trilling retort made Tsarra laugh as the tressym flapped his wings and headed out the nearest window, en route to the sunny top of the tower. Tsarra chuckled as she finished combing her hair with her fingers. Satisfied her auburn curls were under control with a white ribbon tying them back, she exited her room and descended the stairs. When leaving from the dormitories, the lack of a command word deposited the descender on stairs at the second level of the tower.
    Alcoves and tiny shelves lit by permanent fey lights lined the walls along both sides of the winding staircase, revealing random books and knickknacks. Tsarra remembered her first tendays in Blackstaff Tower, as she spent her free time staring at all the magical items and artifacts seemingly left out unprotected. By the end of the first tenday, she’d learned that none of the items could be removed from the alcoves without command words, and the things changed so often one might never see the same twice within the same tenday. After her first year, Tsarra knew she had seen more than two hundred magical tomes and at least as many unknown items and artifacts littering the walls of the tower. She stopped counting and just accepted that Khelben Arunsun had more magical items within the tower than all the rest of the City of Splendors held within its walls.
    In the short walk from her second-floor room down to the ground floor, she saw a pyramid of fifteen tiny silver frogs, the glistening black leather cover of
The Fanged Tome of Lykanthus Szar
with its four dragons’ teeth clasps, a gnoll’s skull carved from or transformed into green marble with eyes of scarlet flames, the golden crystal called Alaundo’s Loop—forever turning in on itself in a twisted curl and hiding eternity in its depths—on a pillow of white velvet, a