The Temptation of Elminster

by Ed Greenwood

  “Gullet Well’s gone dry?”

  Tabarast favored Beldrune with a look. “Yes,” he said mildly. “Gullet Well has gone dry—for whatever real reason. I saw the dead horses to prove it. So there you have it. Tell me, good Droon, you get out and about more than I do, and hear more of the gossip—however paltry or deliberately fabricated it may be—among our fellow workers-of-Art. How say the mages about this One Who Walks? What do the trendy wizards think?”

  It was Beldrune’s turn to snort. “Trendy wizards don’t think,” he retorted, “or they’d take care never to be caught up in any trend. But as to what’s being said … of him, less than nothing. What our colleagues seem to have heard out of whatever the priests have proclaimed can be boiled down to great secret excitement and preening over the chance to be named a Chosen of Mystra—and thereby get all sorts of special powers and inside knowledge. They seem to view it as the most exclusive club yet, and that someone is certain to privately contact them to join, any day now. If Mystra is selecting mortal mages to be Her personal servants, endowing them with spells mighty enough to shatter mountains and read minds, each and every mage wants to get into this oh-so-exclusive group without appearing in the slightest to be interested in such status.”

  Tabarast raised an eyebrow. “I see. How do you know I’m already not a Chosen and reading your mind even now?”

  Beldrune gave his friend a wry smile. “If you were reading my mind, Baerast,” he said, “you’d be trying to smite me down, right now—and blushing to boot!”

  Tabarast lifted the other eyebrow to join the first. “Oh? Should I bother to venture further queries?” he asked. “I suspect not, but I’d like to be prepared if your incipient anger bids fair to goad you into muscular and daring feats that I must needs resist … You do feel incipient anger, don’t you?”

  “No; not a moment of it,” Beldrune replied cheerfully. “Though I could probably work up to it, if you continue to guard that jar of halavan nuts so closely. Pass it over.”

  Tabarast did so, freely giving his colleague a sour look along with it and saying, “I value these nuts highly; one might even say they are precious to me. Conduct thy depredations accordingly.”

  The younger wizard smiled wryly. “All mages, I daresay, conduct their depredations while considering—if they take time to consider at all—what they’re about to seize or destroy to be precious. Don’t you?”

  Tabarast looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes, I do.” He lifted an eyebrow. “How many of us, I wonder, fall so into exultation at our own power that we try to seize or destroy everything we deem precious?”

  Beldrune scooped up a handful of nuts. “Most of us would consider a Chosen precious, would we not?” he asked.

  Tabarast nodded. “The One Who Walks is going to have an interesting career in time soon to come,” he predicted softly, his face very far from a smile. “Pour me something.”

  Beldrune did.

  Lightning rose and snapped out, splitting the night with a bright flash of fury. El blinked and sat up. Blue arcs of deadly magic were leaping and crackling from dagger to dagger around his ring, and in the night beyond something was thrashing wetly—something that was being avoided by a score or more slinking, prowling things that looked like ragged shadows, but moved like hunting cats. Elminster came fully awake fast, peering all around and counting. The thrashing hadn’t ended, and anything that could survive such a lash of lightning was something to be respected. Respected twenty-fold, it seemed.

  He folded his cloak, slung it through the straps of the saddlebag in case hasty flight should be necessary, and stood up. The prowling shadows were moving around his roused ring from right to left, quickening their pace for a charge to come. Something was urging or goading them; something El could feel as a tension in the air, a growing, heavy, and fell presence with the force and fury of a hailstorm about to break. Shaking his hands and wriggling his fingers to leave them loose and ready for frantic casting to come, he peered into the night, trying to see his foe.

  He could feel when he was facing it, its unseen gaze transfixing him like two hot sword tips, but he could see nothing but roiling darkness.

  Perhaps the thing was cloaked in a wall of these prowling shadows. It might be best to conjure a high, glowing sphere of the sort folk called a “witchlight,” just to see what he faced. Yet he had only one such spell. If his foe dashed it to darkness, El would be blinking and blinded for too long a time to keep his life against a concerted attack from many prowling things.

  Should he—then it came. The shadows swerved and moved in at him on all sides in a soundless charge of rippling darkness.

  His wards crackled and spat blue-white, leaping death into the night. Shadows stiffened, reared, and danced in agony amid racing, darting lightning. El spun around to make sure his ring had held in all places against this initial charge.

  It had, but the shadow beasts weren’t drawing back. Weeping as they perished, dwindling like smoke before the fury of the lightning crawling through them, they clawed and convulsed and tried to hurl themselves past the barrier. El watched and waited, as his lightning flickered and grew dim, dying with the creatures it was slaying. By the Lady, there were a lot of them.

  It would not be long now before the spell failed utterly and he’d stand alone against the onslaught. He had one teleport spell that could snatch him from this peril, aye, but only to a place back along his wanderings, leaving these Lands of the Lady in front of him once more; and who knew how much a foe who was expecting him could muster for his second visit?

  Here and there, as dying shadows roiled away into smoke, his spell was being brought to collapse: the daggers were rising from the ground, their cracklings and radiances fading, to leap at shadows. They would fly hungrily, points first, at anything outside the ring; he’d best stay where he was and hope they’d reap a good crop of shadow beasts before his unseen foe tried something else. Such as a spell of its own.

  Green, many-clawed lightning was born in the night—in the hand of something manlike, bare-bodied, and stag-headed that juggled its conjuration in wickedly long fingers for a moment beside its hip, then hurled it at Elminster.

  Snarling and expanding as it came, that ball of spell lightning burst through the last tatters of his ring shield without pause and rushed hungrily at the Athalantan, who was already muttering a swift phrase and angling his hand up, palm slanted out, in a curious gesture.

  Lightning struck and rebounded, springing away as if it’d been struck, to go howling back the way it’d come. El could see red eyes watching him intently now and felt the weight of a mirthless smile that he could not see, as the figure simply stood and let the lightning flow back into it to be swallowed up as if it’d never been.

  Elminster’s raised, warding hand flickered with a radiance of its own, then was itself again. His spell still lurked, though, awaiting another attack … or two, if this stag-headed foe struck swiftly.

  The last few slinking shadows rushed to the stag-headed being and seemed to flow up and into it. El used its moment of immobility to launch an attack of his own, tossing a dagger into the air that his Art made into thirty-three blades. He swept them all, whirling and darting, down upon his foe.

  Antlers dipped swiftly as the figure of shadows ducked away, emitting what might have been a low growl or might have been an incantation. The thing stiffened and sent out a high, shrill cry that might have been a human woman taking a blade in the back (for Elminster had heard such a sound before, in the city of Hastarl, several centuries ago), as blades bit deep. There was a flash of unleashed magic, motes of light raining to the ground like water dashing off a warrior’s shield in a heavy rain, and the whirling, stabbing blades were abruptly gone.

  El pressed his advantage; winning this spell duel was certainly needful if he wanted to keep his life—no mage bent on capture hurls lightning—and it would be the act of a fool to stand idly awaiting the next spell Silent Antlers here wanted to bury him with.


  He smiled thinly as his fingers traced an intricate pattern, their tips glowing as the casting concluded. Many, many of the things he’d done since that day when a mage-ridden dragon had pounced on Heldon and torn his life asunder could be viewed as acts of a fool.

  “I’m a fool goaded by fools, it seems,” he told his half-seen assailant pleasantly. “Do you attack all who pass this way, or is this a personal favor?”

  His only answer was a loud hiss. He thought it ended with the stag-headed being spitting at him, but he couldn’t be certain. His spell took effect then, with a roar that drowned out all other sounds for a time.

  Blue flames blossomed around those night-black, spiderlike fingers and on the antlers beyond. The screams came in earnest this time.

  El risked time enough to look all around, in case a lurking shadow was on the prowl—and so, glancing back over his own shoulder, he escaped being blinded when a counterspell set the night aflame.

  It consumed his wardings in an instant, sending him staggering back among the smoke of shattered spells. Heat blistered his left cheek, and he heard hair sizzle as tears washed the sight from his left eye.

  Softly and carefully through the pain, Elminster said the waiting word that awakened the final effect of the spell he’d already cast—and the blue flames cloaking the extremities of his foe blazed up in an exact echo of those that had just struck him.

  The shriek that split the night was raw and awkward, born of real agony. El caught a brief glimpse of antlers thrashing back and forth before the flames died and heard harsh gasping receding eastward, amid the swish and crackle of grasses being trampled.

  Something large fell in the grass, at least twice. When silence came at last El glided three quick steps to the west and crouched, listening intently to the night.

  Nothing. He could hear the long grass stirring in the breeze, and the faint cry of some small wild creature dying in the jaws of another, far off to the south.

  At length, El wearily drew the last enchanted dagger he owned—one that did nothing more than glow upon command—and threw it in the direction the sounds had gone, to strike and there illuminate the night.

  He took care not to approach its glow too closely and to keep bent low over the grass … but nothing moved, and no spell or prowling shadow came leaping out of the night. When he looked where the dagger’s light reached, all that could be seen was a broken trail leading a little way to a confused heap of crumbling and smoking bones, or antlers … or perhaps just branches. Something collapsed into ash as he drew nearer; something that had looked very much like a long, slim-fingered hand.

  Dangling strips of paint quivered, fell, and were followed enthusiastically by the vaulted ceiling itself, leaping to the floor below with a deafening, dust-hurling crash. In its wake, the entire Ringyl shook.

  Flung stones were still pattering down nearby buildings and crashing through bushes when the hall where an Athalantan had earlier seen stars rocked, groaned, and began to break apart. Gilded fruit shattered as the wall they were painted on burst asunder, splitting a dark oval and spitting sparkling stars into the night.

  Sculpted stone lips quivered as if hesitant to speak, seemed to smile even more for an instant, then broke into many fragments as the widening crack reached them and spat stony pieces out to roll and crash across the trembling hall. The lips toppled, sighed into oblivion, and left a gaping hole in the wall where they’d been.

  Echoes of the earth’s fury that had caused this cleaving rolled on … and out of the hole in the wall, framed by a few surviving stars, something long and black and massive slid into view.

  With a growing, grating roar, it canted over on the stony rubble and rattled out into the room: a black catafalque whose upthrust electrum arms held aloft a coffin and several scepters for a few impressive moments before toppling over on its side and crashing into and through the floor.

  Shards of floor tile leaped into the air, chased by crawling purple lightning that spat out of the riven coffin. Electrum arms, smashed and twisted in the fall, melted as shattered scepters in their grasp died amid their own small and roiling magical blazes. One arm spat a scepter intact out onto the dust-choked pave an instant before failing protective magics flickered the length of the coffin, hung silent and grappling in the air for a long, tense time of silence, then collapsed in a small but sharp explosion that transformed coffin, catafalque, and all into dark dust and hurled it in all directions.

  Amid the tumult, the scepter on the floor gave its own small sigh and collapsed into a neat outline of gently winking dust.

  Silence fell in earnest upon the riven hall, and all was still save for the dust drifting down.

  Not long afterward, the starlight grew stronger over Tresset’s Ringyl, until a mote of blue-white radiance could clearly be seen drifting down out of the starry sky—descending smoothly, like a very large, bright, and purposeful will-o’-wisp, into the heart of the riven hall.

  The light came to a smooth stop a handspan or so away from the floor and hung for a moment above the dust that had been the scepter—dust that winked and flickered like blown coals beneath its nearness.

  There was a flash, a faint sound like bells struck at random, very far off, and the dust was a scepter once more—smooth and new-lustrous, glimmering with stored power.

  A long-fingered, feminine hand suddenly appeared out of empty air, as if through a parted curtain, to grasp the scepter and take it up.

  It flashed once like a winking star as it rose. As if in answer the hand grew an ivory-hued arm, the arm a bare shoulder that turned, allowing a glossy flood of dark hair to cascade over it, and rose into a neck, ear, line of jaw—then a beautiful, fine-boned face. Cold was her visage, serene and proud, as she turned dark eyes to look around at the ruined hall.

  The scattered quartz stars glowed as if in greeting as the rest of the body grew or faded into view, turning with fearless, unconcerned grace to survey the shattered hall. A beautiful, dark-eyed sorceress held up her scepter like a warrior brandishing a blade in victory and smiled.

  The scepter flashed and was gone, the sorceress with it, leaving sudden darkness behind, and only three glows flickering in that gloom: the scattered quartz stars. As the lengthening moments passed, those faint fires faded and went out, one by one, until lifeless darkness reigned in Tresset’s Ringyl once more.

  “Holy Lady,” Elminster said to the stars, on his knees in what had once been his ring of daggers, with the sweat of spell battle still glistening on him, “I have come here, and fought—perhaps slain—at thy bidding. Guide me, I pray.”

  A gentle breeze rose and stirred the grasses. El watched it, wondering if it was a sign, or some evil thing his words had awakened, or simply uncaring wind, and continued, “I have dared to touch ye, and long to do so again. I have sworn to serve thee and will so, if ye will still have me—but show me, I pray, what I am to do in these haunted lands … for I would fain not blunder about, doing harm in ignorance. I have a horror of not knowing.”

  The response was immediate. Something blue-white seemed to snap and whirl behind his eyes, unfolding to reveal a scene in its smoky rifts: Elminster, here and now, rising from his knees to take up pack and cloak and walk away north and east, briskly and with some urgency … a scene that whirled away to become daylight, falling upon an old, squat, untidy stone tower that seemed more cone or mound than lofty cylinder. A large archway held an old, stout wooden door that offered entrance with no moat or defenses to be seen—and that arch displayed a sequence of relief-sculpted phases of the moon. Elminster had never seen it before, but the vision was clear enough. Even as it faded, he was leaning down to take up his belongings and begin his walk.

  No more visions came to him. He nodded, spoke his thanks to the night, and set off.

  Not three hills had the last prince of Athalantar put at his back when a chill, chiming wind whirled and danced through the Ringyl, like a flying snake of frost, and climbed the grassy slopes to where Elminster’s ring
had been.

  It recoiled from that place, a startled wisp of cold starlight arching and twisting in the night air, then slowly advanced to trace the outline of the wards that were now gone. Completing the circle, the wind leaped into its center rather hesitantly, danced and swirled for a time over the spot where Elminster had knelt to pray, then, very slowly, drifted off along the way El’s feet had taken him. It rose and flickered once as it went, almost as if looking around. Hungrily.

  Five

  ONE MORNING AT MOONSHORN

  A mage can visit worlds and times in plenty by opening the right books. Unfortunately, they usually open the tomes full of spells instead, to find ready weapons to beat their own world and time into submission.

  Claddart of Candlekeep

  from Things I Have Observed

  published circa The Year of the Wave

  Out of the dawn mists it rose, dark and old and misshapen, more like a gigantic, many-fissured tree stump than a tower. The sleepless and stumbling man silently cursed Mystra’s dictate to use no needless magic for perhaps the hundredth time and winced at the blisters his boots were giving him. It had been a long and weary way hence from the lands of the Lady of Shadows.

  Aye, this was it: Moonshorn Tower, just as Her vision had shown him: relief-carved phases of the moon proceeded around the worn stone arch that framed its massive black, many-strapped and bolted door.

  As he approached, that door opened and a yawning man stepped out, shuffled a short distance away from the tower, and emptied a chamber pot into a ditch or cesspit somewhere in the tall grass. As the pot-emptier straightened, El saw that the man was of middling years and possessed of raven-dark hair, good looks framed by razor-edged sideburns, one normal—and deep brown—eye, and one eye that blazed like a distant star, white and glowing.