at least one wearing chain mail. He would have to be swift - a single outcry could spell the end of his single-handed assault on the castle. With calculating patience, Nimor edged out even more and found himself looking down on a curving gallery beneath the overhanging eave. To his left, the walkway became a walled stair leading down to the lower battlements, while to his right it simply ended at a black doorway. The door itself stood open. Directly beneath him stood a drow male in armor, gazing out over a lower courtyard.
Nimor studied the fellow for a full thirty heartbeats, planning his strike as he quietly slipped his dagger from its sheath. It was a blade of green-black enchanted steel that glistened wetly in the glimmering faerielight. Then, still invisible, he rolled himself off the roof and dropped down behind the Tlabbar guard.
The assassin's feet thudded softly to the flagstones. The guard started to turn and opened his mouth to cry out, but with one remorseless move-ment, Nimor clapped a hand over the fellow's face and punched his dagger deep into the base of the skull. The blade grated on bone, and the Tlab-bar guard simply sagged into Nimor's arms, dead on his feet.
Nimor let the nerveless body slump to the floor and looked up at the other sentry in the guard post, a fellow in the black robes of a wizard. The Tlabbar mage glanced over at the rustle of sound, just in time to see his watch mate fold up and collapse for no apparent cause - for Nimor was still invisible.
"Zilzmaer?" he said sharply. "What is it?"
Nimor bounded forward and rammed his bloody knife up under the wizard's chin, nailing his jaws closed and transfixing the Tlabbar's brain. The mage jerked two or three times, violently, then shuddered and died.
"Shh," the assassin hissed. "It's nothing. Go to sleep."
He laid the wizard alongside his companion, and turned to the dark archway leading into the castle proper.
Knife in hand, he stalked through - only to be halted by an invisible, intangible barrier that blocked the archway as surely as a wall of masonry. Nimor frowned, summoned up his willpower, and tried the archway again, only to find his passage barred in mid-step.
"Damnation," he muttered. "A forbidding."
The Tlabbar castle, or its interior anyway, was warded by a great fixed spell that utterly prevented an enemy from setting foot within. Nimor could elude or undo some magical traps, but the forbidding was simply beyond his ability to penetrate.
That explains the open door, he thought. The Tlabbars are confident in their magical defenses. Now what?
Nimor sheathed his knife and studied the archway. A spell of forbid-ding could be crafted to defend a building or area in one of several ways, but if the Tlabbars wanted to move about their own castle, they would have had to make a forbidding through which one could pass without too much difficulty - perhaps with a token ofsomekind, or maybe with a password. Nimor quickly searched the bodies of the two Tlabbarguards he'd slain, but found nothing that seemed like it might serve as a token to pass the forbidding.
It might be anything, he thought. A cloak clasp, an enchanted coin in a purse, an earring or a necklace . . .
He decided he didn't have time to experiment. With one hand he picked up the dead wizard and tucked the fellow under his arm, then he strode back to the archway and steeled himself to step through. This time, he passed through without resistance, as if the ward was simply gone.
Something the Tlabbar guards wear, then, Nimor decided.
He briefly considered shouldering the dead wizard and carrying the fellow along in case he needed to pass another warding inside the castle, but decided against it. Stealth and speed were his best defenses, and lug-ging a corpse through the castle was not particularly subtle. Besides, the Tlabbars were not likely to have two forbiddings in their palace, or to use the same key for both if they did. He unceremoniously dumped the wizard on the other side of the doorway, and headed inside.
The archway opened into a long, high-ceilinged corridor that ran above one of the Tlabbar halls. Doors made of pale zurkhwood lined the hall, opening into studies, parlors, trophy rooms, and other such cham-bers if Nimor's old maps were correct. He ignored them all and darted swiftly down the hall, reaching a small staircase at the end that descendedto the level below.