by Ed Greenwood
El watched them start menacingly forward, only to halt at a gesture from the queen. Dasumia strode between them without stopping, towing her living warriors, and El stole along boldly in their wake, watching those raised sabers narrowly. Before he reached the helmed horrors, they wheeled around and floated along after the trio, sheathing their swords soundlessly. El brought up the rear, moving very cautiously now.
The chamber beyond was very large and very dark, its only light coming from a glowing ruby-hued tapestry at the far end, a tapestry that displayed a black device larger than many cottages El had seen: the Black Hand of Bane.
The aisle that ran down the center of the temple was lined with braziers. As Dasumia strode between each pair of them, they burst spontaneously into flame. Delver and Ingrath were obviously having second thoughts about their royal night of passion; El could clearly hear them gulping as they slowed and had to be dragged along by Dasumia.
There were pews on either side of the aisle, some of them occupied by slumped skeletons in robes, others by mummified or still-rotting corpses. El ducked into an empty row, crouching low to the floor; he knew what must be coming.
“No!” Ingrath cried suddenly, twisting free of the queen’s grasp and whirling around to flee. He moaned despairingly, an instant before Delver tore free of the chain of coins, began his own sprint—and screamed.
The two helmed horrors had been floating right behind them, gauntleted hands out and ready to close on their throats. Those steely fingers beckoned to them now, as the empty helms leaned horribly closer.
Moaning in despair, the two guardsmen turned back to face the queen. Dasumia was lying on the altar, propped up on one elbow and wearing rather less than she’d entered the temple with. Laughingly she beckoned them.
Reluctantly, the two warriors stumbled forward.
Ten
TO TASTE DARK FIRE
The best thing an archmage can do with his spells? Use them to destroy another archmage, of course—and himself in the doing. We’ll plant something useful in the ashes.
Radishes, perhaps.
Albryngundar of the Singing Sword
from Thoughts On A Better Faerûn
published circa The Year of the Lion
Unseen drums boomed and rolled, beginning an inexorable, unhurried beat that shook the temple. El watched narrowly as a large hand of Bane—a trifle taller than a man and seemingly carved of some black stone—rose into view behind the altar block. A halo of wispy red flames rose and fell around its fingers, and by their flickering light, as Dasumia leaped lightly back down from the altar, Elminster saw two long, metal-barbed black whips lying crossed upon the altar where she’d been lying.
The drumbeats quickened very slightly. Seeking a better view, El drew up the hood of his robes to hide his face in its cowl and slowly rose into a seated position on his pew, becoming just another slumped form among the many corpses. His decaying neighbors were no doubt onetime victims of rituals here. Delver and Ingrath—and one Elminster, too, for that matter—might well soon join them, if the Court Mage of Galadorna didn’t act with precise timing and do just the right things in the moments just ahead.
The two warriors stood facing Dasumia, and they were trembling with fear. She took their hands and spoke to them. The words were lost to El in the sound of the drums, but she was obviously reassuring them. From time to time she embraced or kissed them, ignoring—as they could not—the hulking helmed horrors floating just behind their shoulders.
The queen turned, took up the whips, and handed one to each man. Leaning back against the altar, she snapped a command to them and held up her hands toward the dark, unseen ceiling in a gesture of summoning.
With great reluctance they swung the whips in her direction—with no force, so the barbed lengths simply brushed against her and bounced off harmlessly. Elminster heard Dasumia’s angry order this time: “Strike! Strike or die!”
She held up her hands in a summoning once more, and the whips lashed out at her in earnest this time. Her body jerked under the blows, and a wisp of blue silk fell away. She hissed encouragement to Ingrath and Delver, who struck harder, their whips cracking. A lash wrapped around her, baring one of her breasts.
At their next blows, the first weals marked Dasumia, and she groaned at them to strike harder still. The guardsmen obeyed tentatively at first. Then with spirit as she shouted at them to strike ever harder, staring up at them as she had more than once overwhelmed Elminster with her will.
Delver and Ingrath reeled, then bent to their task, putting all their fear of dying here and resentment at her entrapping them behind each blow. Blood-drenched blue silk and smooth flesh beneath rapidly vanished under a rain of blows from whips that glistened dark with blood.
Abruptly Dasumia threw back her head and howled at them to stop. Delver, weeping hysterically, failed to do so—and the helmed horror behind him snaked out a gauntlet and caught his arm in a grip that halted his frantic flailing in mid-swing.
She looked more like a beast skinned for the roasting spit than a naked woman, now, but as Dasumia drew her arms down and put her hands on her hips to explain the next part of the ritual, she might have been imperiously gowned and giving orders to kneeling courtiers. She showed no trace of pain despite the blood coursing down her limbs, moving easily and with her usual wanton sway of the hips as she ordered Ingrath onto the altar, to lie on his back.
Anger was rising in Elminster. Anger and revulsion. He had to do something. He had to make this stop.
El tried to recall what he’d once heard a drunken worshiper of Bane say about this sort of ritual. Sacrifices being cut to death by priests flailing with sharp swords, was it? Or a floating Hand of Bane crushing sacrifices in its grip … aye, that was it.
Dasumia had mounted the guardsman on the altar and was crying out, “Strike! Strike!” to Delver, who was moving reluctantly forward with his whip to obey her, when El knew he could watch no longer.
The whip cracked down, trailing blood at each swing, and El found himself tingling with rage and with risen power—power throbbing at his very fingertips.
He was a Chosen of Mystra, however hazily he recalled what that had meant. “Mystra,” he murmured, “guide me.”
However evil his Lady Master had turned out to be, he could not watch her blood raining down any longer while he did nothing, and two good men drew closer and closer to their deaths. That black hand behind the altar would slowly rise, then reach out to crush them—as it was moving now!
Horrified, Elminster reached out with his will, using the one spell he could unleash without speaking or moving. Hopefully he could remain an anonymous corpse for a few moments more. He moved not against the hand—that would come next—but to disable the foes who were sure to come diving down on him the moment he was discovered. He could feel the webwork of linkages, now, coursing out from the altar. With infinite care he detached one linkage from a helmed horror, shifting it to a section of ceiling beyond the floating thing rather than severing it outright. If he could get one step further before being discovered.…
Dasumia stiffened and sat up, ignoring the continuing bite of the lash. She glared around the temple, seeking the intruder. El shrugged and broke the bindings of the second helmed horror with savage abruptness.
Dark and terrible eyes bored into him. Then, slowly, Dasumia’s lips twisted into a smile. She sat back on the altar, reclining again on one elbow with an air of amusement, and watched him.
Silently, their limbs jerking, Delver and Ingrath began to shuffle toward Elminster. Obviously in thrall, they thrust the bloody whips they carried back over their shoulders, ready for the first lashing strike. The barbs that had so mutilated Dasumia glistened red with her blood as the guardsmen lurched nearer … and nearer.…
El’s shearing spell was still active, and he was loathe to spend another magic when the duel of his life was waiting, sneering at him up on the altar. Yet what good would it do to break her thrall upon the warriors, when with an
other spell—no doubt to her a trifling magic—she could restore it?
Delver and Ingrath stumbled stiffly nearer, their faces locked and impassive, their eyes horrified and rolling, pleading with him for aid or mercy or release.…
El snapped the linkages that controlled them with brutal force. Ignoring their suddenly spasming bodies and uncontrolled spitting and ululating, he rode the shock of the magical backlash into their minds, feeling the same pain they did. It was he who cried out in agony—but they toppled bonelessly to the floor, senseless.
It had worked. El discovered he’d bitten his lip. He shot a glance at the altar, but Dasumia hadn’t moved. She was still reclining at her ease, soundlessly laughing—and the blood and whip cuts were fading from her skin, melting away as if they’d never been.
El drew in a deep breath and glanced behind him to be sure there were no other helmed horrors, arriving Bane worshipers, or any other menace that might strike from behind. He found nothing. He thought he saw a movement among the corpses along the darkest row of pews, right at the back, but he could not be sure and could see nothing moving when he stared hard at that place. He dared not turn his back on Dasumia any longer.
Wheeling around, he found her still lying at ease on the altar, whole and healed now, her body quite bare. She laughed aloud, and El gritted his teeth against the rage now boiling up in his throat and with iron control worked his next magic with precision. Lady Master or no, he was going to bring that huge, hovering black hand of stone crashing down on the altar. He was—
The Hand resisted him utterly. Dasumia’s laughter rose into real mirth as he snarled and strained to move it. He could feel the linkage, he could insinuate his will into its flows, to grasp at the magic—and it ignored him, remaining as rigid as an iron bar despite his best efforts to budge it. He was—he could … he could not.
As the Queen of Galadorna hooted at him, El abandoned the spell with a snarl and worked another magic, hiding his gestures from her, down below the back of the pew in front of him.
When he was ready, a seeming eternity later, he stood up and hurled his magic through her cruel laughter—not at the deadly, beautiful woman on the altar, or at the altar itself, a stone block that positively throbbed with ebbing and flowing magic he could not hope to overmaster. The floor beneath one end of it, however.…
Flagstones heaved, buckled, and shattered into shards, their cracks louder than those the whip had made. The floor rippled like a wave of stone, sending slivers of stone clattering against the back wall of the temple, and suddenly subsided, opening a huge pit. There must be cellars down there his magic could shove the earth and stone into, to clear a space so swiftly.
Dasumia sprang calmly off the altar to land on her feet, facing him. She smiled approvingly, saluted him, then turned to watch as the altar block shivered, teetered, and tipped over, sliding into the chasm with a thunderous crash.
“Shattered … how destructive of you,” Dasumia observed merrily. “Care to destroy anything else?”
In grim, wordless answer Elminster snatched a stall-plate from the end of his pew and broke it across his knee, cracking the hand of Bane. Dying enchantments spat black sparks. He cast its wooden shards onto the floor and reached for the next plate.
Dasumia laughed. “So, has it come to a duel between us two at last, brave Elminster? Are you ready to dare me at last?”
“No,” Elminster almost whispered. “Have ye forgotten what I told ye, when first we met at the Riven Stone? I serve Mystra first … and then Dasumia … then Galadorna. Tell me: who does Dasumia serve first?”
Dasumia laughed again. “Choices have prices,” she said almost merrily. “Prepare to pay yours.”
Her hands rose in a simple gesture, and almost immediately Elminster felt a tightness in his throat, a choking feeling that grew steadily worse. His legs and hips seemed to shift under him, his clothes began to feel tight … then more than tight.
El struggled to rise, and saw that his fingers were becoming stubby, bloated things, like mismatched, mottled sausages. So was the rest of him. Clothing began to split and disintegrate then, with tearing sounds like whip strikes.
The shredded remnants of the mantle of Court Mage of Galadorna fell away in tatters as El wallowed about, trying to rise on legs that kept changing in length and thickness. Dasumia was howling with laughter as he fell over to one side or another, growing steadily larger until he was pressed tight against the pew in front of his own in a grip that grew steadily more viselike. He was as fat as two cart barrels now, and still growing. He tried to spin the gestures of another spell with fingers that dangled and wobbled and were as long as his forearm—a forearm that was now as broad as his chest had been, before it, too, had started growing.…
Then his own spell took hold, and the tightness was suddenly gone as the pews in front of him, behind him, and under him all tore free of the floor, trailing dust as they rose—and tumbling him onto the floor, a grotesque mass of sliding, many-folded flesh that lay on its back, panting. El heaved and struggled, gasping for breath, and managed to get over onto one side, facing his foe.
The moment he could see her, three pews flashed through the air at her under his grim bidding, like gigantic lances. Dasumia ducked, rolled, then back flipped, turned as she landed, and in the same motion flexed her magnificent legs and sprang. All three pews missed, crashing into the floating black hand with a splintering fury that shook the room. One of the fingers broke off the hand, leaking magical radiances as it went.
Dasumia hissed something fast and harsh—and almost instantly El found himself rising into the air. Up and up he rose, uncontrollably, trying to see what was where around the temple as he went. Was she going to lift him and drop him, or—?
El caught sight of something lying in the aisle and got an idea. He worked the spell he needed in furious haste, knowing that a bruising impact with the cobwebbed stone ceiling was coming up fast.
He finished the spell just in time to throw one arm up in front of his face and turn his nose aside before slamming hard into the ceiling—sending startled bats screeching away in a wild flapping of wings—and finding that her magic was still pressing on him, pinning him against the dank stone.
He scrabbled with his arms and elbows, trying to roll over so he could see Dasumia—and not dark, dirty stone an inch from his eyelashes. He needed to be able to see, to work the spell he’d cast.
Grunting and gasping, he managed to roll his ponderous bulk over in time to see a tightly smiling Dasumia magically raise one of the shattered pews he’d hurled at her into the air—and send it right back at him.
Larger and larger it loomed as El scrambled along the ceiling trying to get out of its way, using his great bulk to catch and kick at vault ribs that would have been ten feet or more out of his reach if he’d been his proper size … El tried to concentrate on his own spell, down below, and ignore the oncoming pew.
He never saw the slim, dark-robed figure that stood up in the back pew to take calm, careful aim at him, fix his position in mind, then begin to cast its own deadly spell.
As El moved, the pew curved in the air to follow, Dasumia’s smile broadening with anticipatory glee at the coming impact. The end that would strike Elminster was a splayed mass of jagged wooden splinters, most of them as long as a man was tall.
Dasumia took three swift steps sideways to get a better look at the situation—and that was all El needed. He rolled over a roof vault, wheezing like some great aerial whale, and in its lee called on his spell. Two whips rose from the aisle like eager, awakened snakes, to pounce on the Queen of Galadorna.
As the pew struck the ceiling with a crash that sent him bouncing off the ceiling tiles amid showers of dust, El had a brief glimpse of Dasumia’s startled face as bloodied black leather whipped around one wrist and jerked down, throwing her onto her back. She struck her head on the floor and cried out in pain—and that was all the time the two whips needed. The wrist that had dragged her down was bound fast to
her ankle, the other whip did the same on her other side, and one whip slapped its handle across her eyes, blinding her with tears, while the other thrust its handle into her open mouth, effectively gagging her.
Most of the pew broke away and showered the temple below with shards of wood as the gigantic missile cartwheeled away from the roof vault. Ilbryn Starym didn’t even have time to flee as the rest of the pew plunged into the pew right in front of where he was sitting, sending riven wood in all directions and hurling him helplessly into the air, tumbling head over heels in the midst of his own conjured ball of magical flames to strike the back wall of the temple with a crash. He slid slowly and brokenly down that wall, his screams fading.
Abruptly El found himself plummeting to the ground. He grinned savagely; this must mean Dasumia was either falling unconscious or abandoning her spell in favor of something desperate. He sent the whips an urgent command to thrust their captive aloft, so he could give her the same sort of fall if she overcame him, or his own landing was too … hard.
Gods! El knew bones had shattered, even before he rolled over like some sort of agonized elephant and tried to scramble to his feet. Scrambling didn’t work, but he did get upright by throwing his great bulk to one side, then trying to climb it with his clumsy legs. He got himself turned around in time to see his whips suddenly swinging empty, their captive gone from their entangling midst.
A moment later, a cold, cold pain slid into his side and out again, and he knew where she’d gone. He didn’t bother to try to turn and face her, just to see a sword dripping with his own blood and to give her a better target to stab at, but concentrated on ignoring the pain and calling up another spell. The blade slid into him once more, but El knew his great bulk kept him safe from her slitting his throat—she couldn’t reach it without so much climbing that he’d be able to simply topple over onto her to win this fight forever. He threw himself backward and heard her startled curse and the clangor of a dropped sword bouncing on stone. Now he did start to turn, heaving himself around. If the blade was close enough, he could throw himself on it and bury it.