by Ed Greenwood
He saw Elminster and stiffened in wary surprise for a moment before striding back to bar passage through the open door. “Well met,” he said, in carefully neutral tones. “Be it known that I am Mardasper, guardian of this shrine of Holy Mystra. Have you business here, traveler?”
Elminster was too tired to indulge in witty repartee, but he noted with some satisfaction that the state of the morning sunlight touching the tower matched the vision granted to him last night … or early this morn … or whenever. “I do,” he replied simply.
“You venerate Holy Mystra, Lady of All Mysteries?”
Elminster smiled at the thought of how shocked this Mardasper would be if he knew just how intimately a certain falling-down-exhausted mage had venerated Mystra. “I do,” he said again.
Mardasper gave him a hard look, that blazing eye stabbing out at the hawk-nosed Athalantan, and moved his hands in a tiny gesture that El knew to be a truth-sensing spell.
“All who enter here,” the guardian said, gesturing with the chamber pot as if it was a scepter of office, “must obey me utterly and work no magic unbidden. Anyone who takes or damages even the smallest thing from within these walls forfeits his life, or at the least his freedom. You may rest within and take water from the fount, but no food or anything else is provided—and you must surrender to me your name and all written magic and enchanted items you carry, no matter how small or benign. They will be returned upon your departure.”
“I agree to all this,” El told him. “My name is Elminster Aumar. Here’s my spellbook and the sole item of magic I yet carry: a dagger that can be made to glow as one desires, bright or dim. It can also purify water and edibles it touches and is guarded against rusting; I know of no other powers.”
“This is all?” the fire-eyed guardian demanded, staring intently into Elminster’s face as he accepted the book and the sheathed dagger. “And ‘Elminster’ is your true and usual name?”
“This is all, and aye, Elminster I am called,” the Athalantan replied.
Mardasper gestured that he should enter, and they passed into a small chamber, dark after the bright sunlight, that held a lectern and much dust. The guardian wrote down Elminster’s name and the date in a ledger as large as some doors El had seen, and waved at one of three closed doors behind the lectern.
“That stair leads to the upper levels, wherein are kept the writings you doubtless seek.”
El inclined his head and replied wearily, “Have my thanks.”
Writings I doubtless seek? he thought. Well, perhaps so.…
He turned, his hand upon the pull-ring of the door, and asked, “Why else would a mage come to Moonshorn Tower?”
Mardasper’s head snapped up from the ledger, and his good eye blinked in surprise. The other one, El noticed, never closed.
“I know not,” the guardian said, sounding almost embarrassed. “There’s nothing else here.”
“Why came ye here?” El asked gently.
The guardian locked eyes with him in silence for a time, then replied, “If my stewardship here is faithful and diligent for four years—two being already behind me—the priests of Mystra have promised to end the spell upon me that I cannot break.” He pointed at his staring eye and added pointedly, “How I came to have this is a private matter. Ask no more on this, lest your welcome run out.”
El nodded and opened the door. Probing magics sang and snarled around him for a moment. Then the darkness inside the door became a shrinking, receding web that melted away to reveal a smooth-worn, plain stone stair leading up. As the last prince of Athalantar set his hand upon its rail, an eye seemed to appear in the smooth stone just above his hand and wink at him … but perhaps it was just his over-weary imagination. He went on up the stair.
“To work!” The balding, bearded mage in the stained and patched robe threw up the shutter and set its support bar firmly in the socket, letting sunlight spill into the room.
“Aye, Baerast,” the younger wizard agreed, wrapping his hands in a cloth to keep dust from them before he caught up the next support bar, “to work it is. We’ve much to do, to be sure.”
Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses peered over his spectacles a trifle severely and said, “The last time you made such enthusiastic utterance, dearest Droon, you spent the entire day with some Netherese chiming-ball child’s toy, trying to make it roll by itself!”
“As it was meant to do,” Beldrune of the Bent Finger replied, looking hurt. “Is that not why we labor here thus, Baerast? Is restoring and making sense of the scraps of elder magic not an exalted calling? Doth not Holy Mystra Herself smile betimes upon us?”
“Yes, yes, and aye besides,” Tabarast said dismissively, waving away the argument like three-day-old feast table scraps. “Though I doubt overmuch if she was impressed by a failed effort to resurrect a toy.” He hefted the last support bar. “Yet, passing on from that trifle, let us recollect together.”
He thrust the last bar into its socket, settled it with a slap, and turned to the vast and uneven table that filled most of the room, in several places almost touching the massive and crammed bookshelves ranked along the walls.
Sixty or more untidy piles of tomes rose here and there from a carpet of scrolls, scraps of old parchment, and more recent notes that completely covered the table; in places the writings were three layers deep. The papers were held flat by a motley assortment of gems, ornate and aged rings, scraps of intricate wire or wrought metal that had once been parts of larger items, candle-topped skulls, and stranger things.
The two mages thrust out their hands above the pages and moved them in slow circles, as if a tingling in their fingertips would locate a passage they were seeking. Tabarast said slowly, “Cordorlar, writing in the failing days of Netheril … the dragonsblood experiments …” His hand shot out to grasp a particular parchment. “Here!”
Beldrune, frowning, said, “I was tracing a triple-delayed-blast fireball magic some loosejaw named Olbert claimed to have made by combining earlier magics from Lhabbartan, Iliymbrim Sharnult, and—and … agghh, the name’s gone now.” He looked up. “So tell me: what dragonsblood experiments? Stirring the stuff into potions? Drinking it? Setting it aflame?”
“Introducing it into one’s own blood in hopes that it would bring a human wizard longevity, increased vigor, the same immunity to certain perils that some dragons enjoy, or even full-blown draconic powers,” Tabarast replied. “Various mages of the time claimed to have enjoyed successes in all of those areas. Not that any of them survived or left later evidence we’ve found yet, to bear out any such claims.” He sighed. “We’ve got to get into Candlekeep.”
Beldrune smote his forehead and said, “That again? Baerast, I agree, wholeheartedly and with every waking scrap of my brain. We do indeed have to be able to look at the tomes in Candlekeep—but we need to do so freely, whenever thoughts take us hence, not in a single or skulking visit. I somehow doubt they’ll accept us as the new co-Keepers of Candlekeep if we march in there and demand such access.”
It was Tabarast’s turn to frown. “True, true,” he said with a sigh. “Wherefore we’ve got to make the most of these salvaged scraps and forgotten oddments.”
He sighed again. “No matter how untruthful and incomplete they may be.”
He poked at one yellowing parchment with an almost accusatory forefinger, adding, “This worthy claimant boasts of eating an entire dragon, platter by platter. It took him a season, he says, and he hired the greatest cooks of the time to make it palatable fare by trading them its bones and scales. I began to doubt him when he said it was his third such dragon, and that he preferred red dragon meat to the flesh of blue dragons.”
Beldrune smiled. “Ah, Baerast,” he said. “Still clinging to this romantic delusion that folk who go to the trouble of writing are superior sorts who always set down the truth? Some folk lie even to their own diaries.”
He waved at the ceiling and walls around them and added, “When all this was new, do you think the Netherese who dwelt or wo
rked here were the great paragons some sages claim them to be—wiser than we, more mighty in all ways than the folk of today, and able to work almost any magic with a snap of the fingers? Not a bit of it! They were like us—a few bright minds, a lot of lazy-wits, and a few dark and devious twisters of truth who worked on folk around them to make others do as they desired. Sound familiar?”
Tabarast plucked up a falcon’s head carved from a single palm-sized emerald an age ago and stroked its curved beak absently.
“I grant your point, Droon, yet I ask myself: what follows? Are we doomed to wallow in distortions and untruths as the years pass, with but seventeen spells to show for it—seventeen?”
Beldrune spread his hands. “That’s seventeen more magics than some mages craft in a lifetime of working the Art,” he reminded his colleague mildly. “And we share a task both of us love—and, moreover, are granted the occasional personal reward from Herself, remember?”
“How do we know She sends those dream-visions?” Tabarast said in a low voice. “How do we really know?”
Moonshorn Tower shook all around them for the briefest of instants, with a deep rumbling sound; somewhere a stack of books collapsed with a crash.
Beldrune smiled crookedly and said, “That’s good enough for me. What do you want Her to do, Baerast? Dole out a spell a night, written across our brains in letters of everlasting fire?”
Tabarast snorted. “There’s no need to be ridiculous, Droon.” Then he smiled almost wistfully, and added, “Letters of fire would be nice, though, just once.”
“Old cynic,” the younger mage responded with an air of offended pomposity, “I am never ridiculous. I merely afford a degree of jollity that has never failed to please even more discerning audiences than yourself, or should I say especially more discerning audiences than yourself.”
Tabarast mumbled something, then added more loudly, “This is why we accomplish so little, as the hours and days pass unheeded. Clever words, clever words we catch and hurl like small boys at skulltoss, and the work advances but little.”
Beldrune gestured at the table. “So take up some new scrap, and let’s begin,” he challenged. “Today we’ll work together rather than pursuing separate ends and see if the Lady smiles on us. Do start, old friend, and I shall keep us to the matter at hand. In this my vigilance shall be steadfast, but as nothing to my wroth.”
“Isn’t that ‘wrath,’ m’boy?” Tabarast asked, his hand hovering once more above the table.
“Lesser beings, dearest mage of my regard, may well indulge in wrath—I feel wroth,” Beldrune replied loftily, then added with a snarl, “Now take up a paper, and let’s be about it!”
Tabarast blinked in astonishment and took up a paper. “—‘That so surpasseth all mine previous … other mages decry such … Yet will I prevail, the truth being my guide and guardian,’ methinks, methinks, methinks, ho ho hum … Hmmm. Someone writing in the South, before Myth Drannor but probably not all that long before, about a spell to put a mage’s wits and all in the body of a beast, to make it prowl at his bidding for a night, or stay longer or forever within it should his own body be threatened or lost.”
“Good, good,” Beldrune responded. “Could it be Alavaernith, in the early days of working on his ‘Three-cats’ spell? Or is it too effusive for that?”
“I suspect someone other than Alavaernith,” Tabarast said slowly. “He was never so open with his secrets as this.…”
Neither of them noticed a red-eyed, hawk-nosed man step into the room and lean for a moment against the door sill with an air of utter weariness, looking around at everything as he listened to them.
“And does he say anything useful?” Beldrune pressed. “Or can we cast this aside on the heap in the barrel?”
Tabarast peered at the page, turned it over to make sure the back was blank, held it to the light seeking oddities in (or hidden under) the writing, and finally handed it to his colleague with a sound that was half sigh and half snort. “Nothing useful, beyond telling us what someone was working on or had thought of back then.…”
The hawk-nosed man stepped forward to peer at the gilt-lettered spines of tomes wedged tightly into the nearest bookshelf, then looked over at the table and carefully turned over a twisted, crumpled cage of wrought metal that had probably once held the shape of a globe. Examining it carefully, the stranger set it softly back down and peered at the writings beneath it.
“Now, this one,” Tabarast said slowly, bent over the other side of the table, “is rather more interesting. No, we shan’t be hurling this into the barrel quite so quickly.” He held it up under his nose as he straightened, then paused as Elminster’s boot made a slight sound and the dark-haired mage asked, “How goes it, Mardasper? Keeping an eye on things, as usual, hmmm?”
When there was no reply, he turned, and both mages stared across the room at the newcomer—who gave them a polite nod and smile, looked for a moment at an old and brittle scroll on the table, then stepped sideways, seeking more interesting writings.
Tabarast and Beldrune frowned at the stranger in unison, then turned their backs, drew in side by side, and continued their investigations in muttered tones.
El gave their eloquent backs and shoulders a wry, exhausted smile, then shrugged and peered at another parchment. It was something about crafting a spike-studded torture coffin so that folk latched into it were teleported elsewhere rather than suffering impalement, and it was written with that squaring of the letters that marked its origin as the south shore of the Sea of Fallen Stars. The glint of metallic inks shone back at him, and the page had reached that soft brown state just before crumbling begins … as old as he was, or older. El looked at the next page, sliding aside a Netherese ocular to do it.
He gave the beautiful item a second glance. The enchantments that would affix it over a wearer’s eye were gone, but the gem would still, by the looks of it, afford vision of heat, and even through wood or stone a handspan thick or less. With the curled filigree around it, it looked like a giant, elegant tear that would glisten endlessly on a lady’s cheek.
What a lot of work. Crafting far in excess of its usefulness, done for the sheer joy of mastering the Art and creating something that would last … and there must be a thousand times a thousand such items, scattered all over a world so rich in natural magic that all of them could be said to be frivolities.
And was Elminster Aumar, in truth, one more frivolity?
Perhaps, and perhaps he was destined to leave behind little more than these endless dusty scraps of parchment, the confused and unfinished ideas of centuries … yet that flow of mistakes and vain strivings and occasional triumphs or destructive disasters was the Art, with Mystra the gatekeeper of the Weave from which it all came and to which it all returned.
Enough. He was standing in a parchment-littered room in Moonshorn Tower, here and now, and the flow of magics or the very nature of Art were alike in their irrelevance. His world was a place of hunger, and thirst, feeling cold or hot—or feeling so gods-spitting tired that he could barely keep his eyes open an instant longer.
Wait! There—he’d seen that writing before. The fine, flowing hand of Elenshaer, who’d been so good at crafting new and unusual wardings in Myth Drannor—until he’d been torn apart by a Phaerimm he’d rashly caged in too-feeble spells to do a little experimentation … a victim, some would say, of that arrogant assumption of elven superiority and of the ethical right to transform, mutilate, or tamper with “lesser beings,” even if they’re not truly lesser beings, that afflicts so many of his race. An unfortunate moment of misjudgment and another of carelessness, others would term it. And who was to say which view was right or if any of it truly mattered? Seeing the slender elf laughing and gesturing, fluted wineglass in hand, in his memory of a terrace that no longer stood, amid folk who no longer lived, El slid aside other writings to expose all of Elenshaer’s missive.
It was a spell, of sorts. Or rather, the beginnings of a “hook” of Art that would allow a
n additional power to be added to an existing ward by the casting of another spell into the invisible hook—which would then draw the spell into the weaving of the ward and permit the caster to govern and adjust its effects. Elminster read the spell over silently until it approached its ending and stopped.
Elenshaer had followed a common elf mages’ practice. He’d set down the crowning part of the casting on another paper, kept elsewhere. His abode would have held thousands of such papers, with Elenshaer’s memory as the only link of what paper went with which. There’d even been a rogue mage in the City of Song, Twillist, who’d sought power by pilfering such “ends” of spells, trading them to young apprentices and others eager for more knowledge and power in exchange for lesser, but whole, magics.
The missing ending was almost obvious to a mage who’d had a hand in crafting mythals and studied with Cormanthan elves. A summation or linking bridge, probably “Tanaethaert shurruna rae,” a shaping gesture—thus—mirrored immediately and incorporated into the incantation with the utterance of “Rahrada,” then the declaration that would make the hook recede into the ward-weave and give its caster control of the spell effects it brought with it: “Dannaras ouuhilim rabreivra, tonneth ootaha la, tabras torren ouliirym torrin, dalarabban yultah.” A concluding gesture—thus—and it would be done.
He’d spoken those words aloud, though near-soundlessly, and was startled when something spun into being in the air before him, a little more than the length of his hand above Elenshaer’s incomplete spell. A little glowing construction hung in the air above the page: lines of fire looping into a tiny knot that began to rotate as he watched it, to spin endlessly and silently.
Sigh. If there was such a thing as a needless magic, this was it. Unthinkingly he’d broken Mystra’s decree, after enduring so much discomfort and danger to keep it. Gods blast!
As if that silent, savage thought had been a cue, the hook he’d created commenced to spit tiny sparks at the parchment beneath it. Oh, that was all he needed! In a room such as this, with dry and dusty paper inches deep on everything.…