by Ed Greenwood
The long-dead Tresset had been a very successful brigand who’d tried his hand at ruling and built a slender-spired castle—the Ringyl—here to anchor his tiny realm. Tressardon had fallen within days of his death.
Elminster’s lips twisted wryly. ’Twould be an act of supremely arrogant self-importance to try to read lesson or message for himself out of such local history. Moreover, from here at least he could see no spiderweb gate like the one in his dream set into the walls of the ruined castle. It could take days to explore all of what was left of the town—assuming, of course, that nothing lived here that would want to eat him or drive him away sooner than that—and nothing he could see but the Ringyl itself stood tall or grand enough to possibly incorporate the gate in his dream. Or at least, he reminded himself with a sigh, so it looked from here.
He’d time for just one foray before true nightfall, by which time it’d probably be most prudent to be elsewhere … perhaps on one of those grassy hilltops in the distance, beyond the shattered and overgrown town. A wise man would be setting up camp thereon right now, not scrambling down a slope of loose stones—and more human bones—for a quick peer around before full night came down. But then Elminster Aumar had no intention of becoming a wise man for some centuries yet.…
The shadows were already long and purple by the time Elminster reached the valley floor. Thigh-high grass cloaked what had once been the main road through the town, and El waded calmly into it. Dark, gaping houses stood like graying giants’ skulls on either side as he walked quietly forward, sweeping the grass side to side with a staff he’d cut earlier to discourage snakes from striking and to uncover any obstacles before his feet or shins made their own, more painful discoveries.
Night was coming down fast as Elminster walked through the heart of deserted Ringyl. A tense, heavy silence seemed to live at its heart, a hanging, waiting stillness that swallowed echoes like heavy fog. El tapped on a stone experimentally but firmly with his staff. He could hear the grating thud of each strike, but no answering echo came from the walls now close around.
Twice he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he whirled he was facing nothing but trees and crumbling stone walls.
Something watchful dwelt or lurked here, he was sure. Twilight was stealing into the gaps between the roofless buildings now, and into the tangles where trees, vines, and thorn bushes all grew thickly entwined. El moved along more briskly, looking only for walls lofty enough to hold the spiderweb gates of his dream. He found nothing so tall … except the Ringyl itself.
Gnawed bones, most brown and brittle enough to crack and crumble underfoot, were strewn in plenty along the grass-choked street. Human bones, of course. They grew in abundance to form almost a carpet in front of the riven walls of the castle. Cautiously Elminster forged ahead, turning over bones with his staff and sending more than one rock viper into a swift, ribbonlike retreat. Darkness was closing down around him now, but he had to look through one of these gaps in the wall, to see if …
Whatever had torn entire sections of wall as thick as a cottage and as tall as twenty men was still inside, waiting.
Well, perhaps one need not be quite so dramatic. El smiled thinly. It’s a weakness of archmages to think the fate of Toril rests in their palm or on their every movement and pronouncement. A spiderweb-shaped gate would be sufficient unto his present needs.
He was looking into a chapel or at least a high-ceilinged hall, its vaulted ceiling intact and painted to look like many trees with gilded fruit on their branches though strips of that limning were hanging down in tongues of ruin. All this stood over a once polished floor in which wavy bands of malachite were interwoven between bands of quartz or marble—a floor now mantled in dust, fallen stone rubble, birds’ nests and the tiny bones of their perished makers, and less identifiable debris.
It was very dark in the hall. El thought it prudent not to conjure any light, but he could hardly miss seeing the huge oval of black stone facing him in the far wall. Sparkling white quartz had been set into that wall to form a circle of many stars—fourteen or a dozen irregularly shaped twinklings, none of them the longspindled star of Mystra—and in the center of that circle a carving as broad as Elminster’s outstretched arms stood out from the wall: a sculpted pair of feminine lips.
They were closed, slightly curved in a secret smile, and El had a gnawing feeling that he’d seen them, or something very like them, before. Perhaps this was a speaking mouth, an enchanted oracle that could tell him more—if he could unlock its words at all, or understand a message not meant for him. Perhaps it was something less friendly than that.
Well, such investigations could wait until the full light of morning. It was time, and past time, to leave Tresset’s Ringyl and its watchful shadows. El backed out of the gaping ruin, saw nothing lunging at him out of the darkness, and with more haste than dignity headed for the hills.
The heights on the far side of the Ringyl weren’t yet touched by moonlight, but the glittering stars cast enough light to make their grassy flanks seem to glow. El looked back several times on his determined march up out of the town, but nothing seemed to stir or follow him, and the many eyes that peered at him out of the darkness were no larger than those of rats.
Perhaps he would have time to win some sort of slumber, after all. The hilltop he chose was small and bare of all but the ever-present long grass. He walked it in a smallish ring, then opened his pack, took out a cloth scrip full of daggers that glowed a brief, vivid stormy blue when unwrapped—radiance that promptly seemed to leak out of them, dripping and dancing to the ground—and retraced his steps around the ring. He drove a dagger hilt-deep into the soil at intervals and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like an old and rather bawdy dance rhyme. When the ring was complete, the Athalantan turned back along it and drove a second ring of daggers in, angling each of these additional blades into the turf on the inside of the ring, so that its blade touched the vertical steel of an already-buried dagger. He held out his hand, palm downward and fingers spread, said a single, soft word over them, wrapped his cloak around himself, and went to bed.
“What, pray tell, are you reading?”
The balding, bearded mage set aside a goblet whose contents frothed and bubbled, looked up unhurriedly over his spectacles, elevated one eyebrow at a fashionably slow pace, and replied, “A play … of sorts.”
The younger wizard standing over him—more splendidly dressed and still possessing some of his own hair—blinked. “A ‘play,’ Baerast? And ‘of sorts’? Not an obscure spellbook or one of Nabraether’s meaty grimoires?”
Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses peered up over his spectacles again, more severely this time. “Let there be no impediment to your dawning understanding, dearest Droon,” he said. “I am currently immersed in a play, to whit ‘The Stormy Knight, Or, The Brazen Butcherer.’ A work of some energy.”
“And more spilled blood,” Beldrune of the Bent Finger replied, sweeping aside an untidy stack of books that had almost buried a high-backed chair and planting himself firmly in it before it even had time to wheeze at its sudden freedom. The crash of tomes that followed was impressive in both room-shaking solidity and in the amount of dust it raised. It almost drowned out the two smaller thunderings that followed, the first occasioned by the clearance of the footstool of its own tower of tomes by means of a hearty two-footed kick, and the second caused by the collapse of both back legs of the old chair.
As Beldrune abruptly settled lower amid scattered literature, Tabarast laid a dust-warding hand over the open top of his goblet and asked through the roiling cloud of dancing motes, “Are you quite finished? I begin to weary of this nuisance.”
Beldrune made a sound that some folk would have deemed rude and others might judge impressive and by way of elaborating on this reply uttered the words, “My dear fellow, is this—this burgeoning panoply of literary chaos my achievement? I think not. There’s not a chair or table left on this entire floor that isn’t guardi
ng its own ever-growing fortress of magical knowledge at your behest, and—”
Tabarast made a sound like a serpent’s skull being crushed under an eager boot heel. “My behest? Do you now deny the parcenary of this disarray around us? I can confute any claims to the contrary, if you’ve a day or two to spare.”
“Meaning my wits are that slow, or words so slow and laborious to come to your lips that—atch, never mind. I came not to bandy bright phrases all evening but to banish a little lonely befuddlement by talking a while.”
“A prolusion I’ve heard before,” Tabarast observed dryly. “Have a drink.”
He pulled on the lever that made the familiar cabinet rise from the floorboards to stand between them and listened to Beldrune pounce on its contents from the far side with an absence of continued speech that meant young Droon must be very thirsty.
“All right … have two,” he amended his offer.
The sounds of swallowing continued. Tabarast opened his mouth to say something, remembered that a certain topic was by mutual agreement forbidden, and shut it again. Then another thought came to him.
“Have you ever read ‘The Stormy Knight?’ ” he asked the cabinet, judging Beldrune’s head to be inside it.
The younger wizard raised his head from clinkings and uncorkings and gurglings, looking hurt. “Have I not?” he asked, then cleared his throat and recited,
“What knight is that
“who yonder comes riding
“bright-arrayed in armor of gold
“his sash the dripping blood of his foes?”
There was a pause, then, “I did it in Ambrara, once.”
“You were the Stormy Knight?” Tabarast asked in open disbelief, his small round spectacles sliding down his nose in search of unknown destinations.
“Second Undergardener,” Beldrune snapped, looking even more hurt. “We all have to start somewhere.”
Taking a large and dusty bottle firmly in one fist, he plucked its cork and hurled the stopper back over his shoulder where it hit the Snoring Shield of Antalassiter with a bright ping, glanced off the Lost Hunting Horn of the Mavran Maidens, and fell somewhere behind the man-high, dust-covered mound of scrolls and books that Tabarast considered his “Urgent Reading of the Moment.” He drained the contents of the bottle in one long and loud swallowing that left him gasping, with tears trailing down his face, and in urgent need of something that tasted better.
A knowing Tabarast silently handed him the bowl of roast halavan nuts. Beldrune dug in with both hands until the bowl was empty, then smiled apologetically, burped, and took his worry stone from its drawstring pouch. Thumbing its smooth, familiar curves seemed to calm him.
Settling back in his chair, he added, “I’ve always preferred ‘Broderick Betrayed, Or, The Wizard Woeful.’ ”
“This would be my turn,” the older mage replied with a dignified nod, and in the manner of an actor on center stage threw out his hand and grandly declaimed:
“That so fat and grasping a man
“Should have the very stars bright in his hands
“To blind us all with their shining
“Blotting out his faults in plenty.
“His huge and howling ghost
“Doth prowl the world entire
“but loves and lingers most
“upon this very same and lonesome spot
“Where gods loved, men killed, and careless elves forgot.”
“Well,” Beldrune said after a little silence, “not to deny your impressive performance—your usual paraph, and then some!—but it seems we’ve returned again to the subject we agreed was forbidden: the One Who Walks, and just what Mystra meant by creating a Chosen One as her most esteemed mortal servant.”
Tabarast shrugged, his long and slender fingers tracing the wisps of his own beard thoughtfully. “Men collect what is forbidden,” he said. “Always have, always will.”
“And mages more so,” Beldrune agreed. “What does that tell us about those who follow our profession, I wonder?”
The older mage snorted. “That no shortage of witty fools has yet fallen over Faerûn.”
“Hah!” Beldrune leaned forward, stroking one splendid silk lapel eagerly between forefinger and thumb, the worry stone momentarily forgotten. “Then you grant that Our Lady will take more than one Chosen? At last?”
“I grant no such thing,” Tabarast replied rather testily. “I can see a succession of Chosen, one raised after another falls, but I’ve yet been shown no evidence of the dozen or more you champion, still less of this Bright Company of star-harnessing, mountain-splitting archwizards some of the more romantic mages keep babbling about. They’ll be begging Holy Mystra to issue merit badges next.”
The younger mage ran one hand through his wavy brown hair, utterly ruining the styling the tower’s maid-of-chamber had struggled to achieve, and said, “I quite agree with you that such things are ridiculous—and yet could they not be used as a mark of accomplishment? Meet a mage and see seven stars and a scroll on his sash, and you know where he stands?”
“I know how much time he’s willing to waste on impressing folk and sewing little gewgaws onto his undergarments, more like,” Tabarast replied sourly. “Just how many upstart magelings would add a few unearned stars to grant themselves rank and hauteur accruing to power and accomplishments they do not in fact possess? Every third one who knows how to sew, that’s how many! If we must talk about this—this young elf-loving jackanapes, who seems to have been a prince and the slayer of the mighty Ilhundyl and the bed mate of half a hundred slim elf lasses besides, the object of our discourse shall not be his latest conquest or idle utterance, but his import to us all. I care not which boot he puts on first of mornings, what hue of cloak he favors, or whether he prefers to kiss elf lips or human ones—have we understanding and agreement?”
“Of course,” Beldrune replied, spreading his hands. “But why such heat? His achievements—as a Chosen One favored by the goddess Herself, mind—do nothing to belittle yours.”
Tabarast thumbed his spectacles back up to the bridge of his nose and muttered, “I grow no younger. I’ve not the years left to encompass what that youn—but enough; I’ll say no more. I beg leave to impart to you, my young friend, things about this One Who Walks of rather more importance to us both. The priests of the Mantle, for ins—”
“The priests of the which?”
“The Mantle … Mystra’s Mantle, the temple to Our Lady in Haramettur. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been therein.”
Beldrune shook his head. “I try to avoid temples to Holy Mystra,” he said. “The priests tend to be nose-in-the-air sorts who want to charge me coffers full of gold for casting—badly—what I can do myself with a few coppers of oddments.”
Tabarast flapped a dismissive hand and replied, “Indeed, indeed, all too often … and I’ve my own quarrel with their snobbery—pimply younglings sneering down their noses at such as myself because we wear real, everyday, food-stained robes, and not silks and sashes and golden cross-garters, like rakes gone to town of an ardent evening. If they truly served wizards and not just awestruck young lasses who ‘think they might have felt Mystra’s kiss, awakening at midnight this tenday last,’ they’d know all true mages look like rag heaps, not fashion-pretty popinjays!”
Beldrune looked hurt—again—and gestured down the front of his scarlet silk tunic. The gesture made it ripple glassily in the lamplight, its cloth-of-gold dragons gleaming, the glittering emeralds that served them as eyes a-winking, and the fine wire wrought into spirals that passed for their tongues bobbing. “And what am I? No true mage, I suppose?”
Tabarast passed a weary hand over his eyes. “Nay, nay, good Droon—present company excepted, of course. Your bright plumage doth so outshine mine aged eyes that I overlook it as a matter of course. Let us have no quarrel over your learning or able mastery of realm-shaking magics; you are, before all the gods, a ‘true mage,’ whatever by Mystra’s gentle whispers that is. Let us by more h
eroic efforts resist the temptation to drift away into other matters, and—if discuss the forbidden we must—speak plainly. To whit: the priests of the Mantle say that the One Who Walks is free to act on his own; that is, to make just as bad a hash of things as you and I are free to do … moreover, that it is holy Mystra’s will that he be left to blunder and choose and hurl recklessness on his own, to ‘become what it is needful he become.’ They want us all to pretend we don’t know who or what he is, if we should meet with him.”
Beldrune rested his chin on one hand, a fresh and smoking goblet raised in the other. “Just what is it that they say he must become?” he asked.
“That’s where their usefulness ends,” Tabarast snorted. “When one asks, they go to their knees and groan about ‘not being worthy to know,’ and ‘the aims of the divine are beyond the comprehension of all mortals’—which tells me right there that they haven’t figured it out yet—then they rush into an almost puppy-panting whirl of ‘oh, but he’s important! The signs! The signs!’ ”
Beldrune sipped deeply from his goblet, swallowed, and asked, “What signs?”
Tabarast resumed the ringing voice of doom that he’d used to delivered the lines from Broderick, and intoned: “In this Year of Laughter, the Blazing Hand of Sorcery ascends the starry night cloak, for the first time in centuries! Nine black tressym landed upon the sleeping princess Sharandra of the South and delivered themselves of four kittens each upon her very bosom! (Don’t ask me how she slept through that or what she thought of the mess when she did wake!) The Walking Tower of Warglend has moved for the first time in a thousand years, taking itself from Tower Tor to the midst of a nearby lake! A talking frog has been found in Candlekeep, wherein also six pages in as many books have gone blank, and two books appeared that have never been seen by any Faerûnian scholar before! The Well of the Bonedance in Maraeda’s run dry! The skeleton of the lich Buardrim has been seen dancing in—ah, bah! Enough! They can keep it up for hours!”