by Ed Greenwood
“Aye, I know this Elminster, right enough,” Caladaster was saying, “though a few days back I’d have answered you differently. He came walking up to this very tavern. Baerdagh—oh, hey! This is Baerdagh; come sit down with us, old dog—and I were warming yon bench, where you saw me just now, and he came striding up and bought us dinner—a huge feast it was, too!—in return for us telling him about Scorchstone Hall. Gods, but we ate like princes!”
“We can do no less,” the youngest, poorest-looking of the three horsemen said then, saying his first quiet words since handing a stable boy some coins. “Eat hearty, both of you, and we’ll trade information again.”
“Oh, a-heh. Well enough … that’s very kind of you, to be sure,” Caladaster said heartily as he watched platters of steaming turtles and buttered snails brought to the table. Alnyskavver even winked at him as the tankards were set down beside them. Caladaster blinked. Gods, he was becoming a local lion!
“So where and what is Scorchstone Hall?” Beldrune asked almost jovially, plucking up a tankard and taking a long pull at it. Baerdagh didn’t fail to notice the face the newcomer made at the taste of the brew or how quickly he set down the tankard again.
“A ruined mansion just back along the road a ways,” he said quickly, determined to earn his share of the meal. “You passed it on your way in—the road bends around it, just this side of the bridge.”
“It’s warded,” Caladaster said quietly. “You gentlesirs are mages, are you not?”
Three pairs of eyes lifted to him in brief silence until Tabarast sighed, took up a buttered snail that must have burned his fingers, and grunted, “It shows that badly, does it?”
Caladaster smiled. “I was a mage, years ago. Still am, I suppose. You have the look about you … eyes that see farther than the next hedge. Paunches and wrinkles, but yet fingers as nimble as a minstrel’s. Not to mention the wardings on your saddlebags.”
Beldrune chuckled, “All right, we’re mages—two of us, at any rate.”
“Not three?” Caladaster’s brows rose.
The man with the pale brown eyes and the tousled hair smiled faintly and said, “Here and now, I harp.”
“Ah,” Caladaster said, carefully not glancing at the regulars in the Maid, who were bent almost out of their chairs straining not to miss a word of what passed between these travelers and the two old tankard-tossers. Wizards, now! And haunted Scorchstone! Mustn’t miss this.…
A Harper and two wizards, hunting Elminster. Caladaster felt a little better, now, about telling them things. Hadn’t Elminster had summat to do with starting the Harpers?
“Scorchstone Hall,” Caladaster continued, in a voice so low that Baerdagh’s sudden humming completely cloaked it from the ears of folk at other tables, “is the home of a local sorceress—a lady by the name of Sharindala. A good mage, and dead these many years. Of course, there are the usual tales of her being seen walking around past her windows, as a skeleton and all … but you’d have to be a damned good tree-climber to get to where you could just see a window of the Hall—let alone look through its closed shutters!”
He got smiles at that, and continued, “Whatever—Elminster asked us all about her, and we warned him about the wards, but it’s my belief he went in there and did summat. We asked him to stop by our places—we live, Baerdagh an’ I, in the two cottages hard by Scorchstone, ’twixt there and here—when he was done, so’s we’d know he’d fared well—”
“And we wouldn’t have to go in there looking for his body,” Baerdagh growled and went back to his humming. Tabarast and the Harper exchanged amused glances.
Caladaster gave his old friend what some folks would call a dirty look and took up his tale again. “He did drop by to see us—looked right happy, too, though he had a little sadness about him, like folk get when they remember friends now gone, or see old ruins they remember as bright and bustling. He said he’d a ‘task’ to get on with, and had to head east. We warned him about the Slayer, o’ course, but—”
“The Slayer?” the Harper asked quietly. Something about his words made the whole Maid fall silent, from door to rafters.
Alnyskavver, the tavern master, moved quickly forward. “It’s not been seen here, lords,” he said, “whatever it be.…”
“Aye, you’re safe here,” someone else grunted.
“Oh? Then why’d old Thaerlune pack up and move back to—”
“He said he was going to see his sister, her bein’ sick an’ all—”
Caladaster’s open hand came down on the table with a crash. “If you don’t mind,” he said mildly into the little silence that followed and turned to the three travelers again.
“The Slayer is summat that has the High Duke, up in his castle Starmantle way, very worried. Summat is killing everything that lives in the forest, or travels the coast road past it, between Oggle’s Stream—just beyond us here—and Rairdrun Hill. Cows, foxes, entire bands of hired adventurers, and several of ’em, too—everything. They’ve taken to calling it the Dead Place, this stretch of woods, but no one knows what’s doing the killing. Some say the dead have been burned away to bones, others say other things, but no matter. We don’t know what killer we’re facing, so folk’ve been calling it the Slayer.” He looked around the taproom. “Well enough?
Said it all, didn’t I?”
There were various grunts and grudging agreements, one or two hastily shushed dissenting opinions, and Caladaster smiled tightly and lowered his voice again. “Elminster walked straight into the Dead Place, he did, an’ must be there now,” he said. “I don’t know right why he had to go there … but it’s summat important, isn’t it?”
There was a brief silence again. Then the Harper said, “I think so,” at the same moment as Tabarast snapped, “Everything Elminster does is important.”
“You’re going after him?” Caladaster asked, in a voice that was barely above a whisper.
After a moment, the Harper nodded again.
“I’m going with you,” Caladaster said, just as quietly. “That’s a lot of woods, an’ you’ll need a guide. Moreover, I just might know where he was headed.”
Beldrune stirred, “Well,” he said gravely, “I don’t know about that. You’re a bit old to be going adventuring, and I’d not want to be—”
“Old? Old?” Caladaster asked, his jaw jutting. “What’s he, then?” He pointed at Tabarast. “A blushing young lass?”
That old mage fixed Caladaster with a gaze that had made far mightier men quail, and snapped, “ ‘Just might know’ where Elminster was heading to? What did he tell you—or are you guessing? This blushing young lass wants to know.”
“There’s a ruin in that forest,” Caladaster said quietly, “in, off the road. You can tramp around in the trees all day waiting to get eaten by the Slayer while you search for it, or I can take you right to the ruin. If I’m wrong—well, at least you’ll have one more old, overweight mage and his spells along for the jaunt.”
“Overweight?” Tabarast snapped. “Who’s overweight?”
“Ah,” Beldrune said, clearing his throat and reaching for a dish of cheese stuffed mushrooms that Alnyskavver had just set down on the table, “that’d be me.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring one more man along,” Tabarast said sharply, “whom we may have to protect against the gods alone know what—”
“Ah,” the Harper said quietly, laying a hand on Tabarast’s arm, “but I think I’d very much like to have you along, Caladaster Daermree. If you can leave with us in the next few minutes, that is, and not need a night longer to prepare.”
Caladaster pushed back his chair and got up. “I’m ready,” he said simply. There was something like a smile deep in the Harper’s eyes as he rose, set a stack of coins as tall as a tankard on the table—many eyes in the room bulged—and said, “Tavern master! Our horses—here’s stabling for a tenday and for the feast. If we come not back to claim them by then, consider them yours. We’ll walk from here. You set
a good table.”
Baerdagh was staring up at his old friend, his face pale. “C-Caladaster?” he asked. “Are you going yon, in truth—into the Dead Place?”
The old wizard looked at him. “Aye, but we can’t take along an old warrior, so don’t fear. Stay—we need you to eat all the rest of this for us!”
“I—I—” Baerdagh said, and his eyes fell to his tankard. “I wish I wasn’t so old,” he growled.
The Harper laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s never easy—but you’ve earned a rest. You were the Lion of Elversult, were you not?”
Baerdagh gaped up at the Harper as if he’d just grown three heads, and a crown on each one. “How did you know about that? Caladaster doesn’t know about that!”
The Harper clapped his shoulder gently. “It’s our business to remember heroes—forever. We’re minstrels, remember?”
He strode to the door and said, “There’s a very good ballad about you.…”
And then he was gone. Baerdagh half rose to follow, but Caladaster pushed him firmly back down. “You sit, and eat. If we don’t come back, ask the next Harper through to sing it to you.” He went to the door, then turned with a frown. “All those years,” he said, scowling, “and you never told me you were the Lion! Just such a little thing it slipped your mind, huh?”
He went out the door. Tabarast and Beldrune followed. They just gave him shrugs and grins at the door, but Tabarast turned with his fingers on the handle and growled, “If it makes you feel better, you’re not the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on!”
The door scraped shut, and Baerdagh stared at it blankly for a long while—long enough that everyone else had come back from the windows and watching the four men walk out of town, and sat down again. Alnyskavver lowered himself into the seat beside Baerdagh and asked hesitantly, “You were the Lion of Elversult?”
“A long time ago,” Baerdagh said bitterly. “A long time ago.”
“If you could go back to some moment, then,” the tavern master asked a tankard in front of him softly, “what moment would it be?”
Baerdagh said slowly, “Well, there was a night in Suzail … We’d spent the early evening running through the castle, there, chasing young noble ladies who were trying to put their daggers into one another. Y’see, there was this dispute about—”
Turning to Alnyskavver to properly tell him the tale, Baerdagh suddenly realized how silent the room was. He lifted his eyes, and turned his head. All the folk of Ripplestones old enough to stand were crowded silently around him in a ring, waiting to hear.
Baerdagh turned very red and muttered, “Well, ’twas a long time ago.…”
“Is that when you got that medal?” Alnyskavver asked slyly, pointing at the chain that disappeared down Baerdagh’s none-too-clean shirtfront.
“Well, no,” the old warrior answered with a frown, “that was …”
He sat back, and blushed an even darker shade. “Oh, gods,” he said.
The tavern master grinned and slid Baerdagh’s tankard into the old warrior’s hand. “You were in the castle in Suzail, chasing noble ladies up and down the corridors, and no doubt the Purple Dragons were chasing you, and—”
“Hah!” Baerdagh barked. “They were indeed—have you ever seen a man in full plate armor fall down a circular stair? Sounded like two blacksmiths, fighting in a forge! Why, we …”
One of the villagers clapped Alnyskavver’s shoulder in silent thanks. The tavern master winked back as the old warrior’s tale gathered speed.
“Not all that much more sun today,” Caladaster grunted, “once we’re in under the trees.”
“Umm,” Beldrune agreed. “Deep forest. Lots of rustlings, and weird hootings and such?”
Caladaster shook his head. “Not since the Slayer,” he said. “Breezes through the leaves, is all—oh, and sometimes dead branches falling. Otherwise, ’tis silent as a tomb.”
“Then we’ll hear it coming all the easier,” the Harper said calmly. “Lead on, Caladaster.”
The old wizard nodded proudly as they strode on down the road together. They’d gone some miles and were almost at the place where the overgrown way to the ruins turned off the coast road, when a sudden thought struck him—as cold and as sudden as a bucket of lake water in the face.
He was very careful not to turn around, so that the Harper could see his face—this Harper who’d never given his own name. But from that moment on, he could feel the man’s gaze on him—a cold lance tip touching the top of his spine, where his neck started.
The Harper had called him by his full name. Caladaster Daermree.
Caladaster never used his last name … and he hadn’t told the Harper his last name; he never told anyone his last name. Baerdagh didn’t know it—in fact, there was probably no one still alive who’d heard it.
So how was it that this Harper knew it?
Eighteen
NO SHORTAGE OF VICTIMS
The one certainty in a coup, orc raid, or well-side gossip session is that there’ll be no shortage of victims.
Ralderick Hallowshaw, Jester
from To Rule A Realm, From Turret To Midden
published circa The Year of the Bloodbird
It was dark and silent, once the scrape of his boots had stilled. He was alone in the midst of cold, damp stone, the dust of ages sharp in his nostrils—and a feeling of tension as something watched him from the darkness, and waiting.
Elminster let himself grow as still as the stone handholds he still clung to, faced the aware and lurking darkness, and called up one of the powers Mystra had granted him. It was one he’d used far too little, because it required quiet concentration, and time … far more time than most of the beings he shared Faerûn with were ever willing to give him. Too often, these days, life seemed a headlong hurry.
His awareness ranged out through the waiting, listening darkness. Things both living and unliving he could not see, but magic, when El concentrated just … so, he could feel so keenly that he could make out surfaces on which dweomer clung, the tendrils of spell-bindings, and even the faint, fading traces of preservative magics that had failed.
All of those things lay before him. Faint magics swirled everywhere, none of them strong or precisely located, but outlining a large cavern or open space. A good way off, on the floor of this chamber or cavern—or down in a pit, he could not tell which—several closely clustered nodes of great, not-so-slumberous magical might throbbed and murmured ceaselessly. El blinked.
Trap or no trap, he had to see what waited here that could hold such magical might. He’d been led here; the swirling sentience that had done it was watching him or at least knew of his coming—so what was the point of stealth? El cast a stone-probing spell, seeking pits or seams ahead of him. Shrouded in its eerily faint blue glow, he stepped warily forward.
Great expanses of the floor were the natural rock of the cavern; as El proceeded, this gave way smoothly to a floor of huge stone slabs, smooth-polished and level; no mosses had stained them, but here and there, the fine white fur of salts leaching out of age-old rock trailed fingerlike across the stone.
A throne or seat of the same stone faced Elminster—empty of magic, surprisingly, though it was almost hidden from view behind the dazzle thrown off by the seven nodes of magic when he viewed it with his mage-sight. Thankfully, the seat was empty.
El sighed, threw back his head, and stepped forward. Seven nodes blinding in their magical might. Predictable or not, he could not ignore such power and remain Elminster. He smiled, shook his head ruefully—and took another step.
He might well die here, but he could not turn away.
The human was coming nearer. The Great Foe would soon be within reach—but also close to the runes that were too powerful to safely approach.
Too close.
He would probably get only one chance, so it would have to be a shattering blow that even a great god-touched mage could not hope to survive. After all these years, a few days or even mont
hs more would matter not at all. The slaying stroke did.
The strike that would reveal him and harm the Foe all at once had to be one that destroyed—or at least ruined his foe into something powerless but aware—aware of the pain he would then deal to it at leisure, and of who was harming it during that long, dark time … and why.
So wait a bit more, like a patient ghost in the shadows.
Two dark eyes that blazed like two inky flames of fury peered from the depths of one of the darkest clefts in the rear of the cavern and watched the wary wizard step forward to his doom.
Years consumed by the ache to avenge, the gnawing need that ruled him night and day … years that had all come down to this.
“Yes, Vaelam?” Dreadspell Elryn asked, his voice dangerously soft and silky. A long, tense creeping advance to a ruin where powerful foes were almost certainly waiting for them had not improved his temper—especially after one of his boots had found its first muddy, water-filled old burrow hole. That had occurred three paces before his other boot found the second. He’d lost count, since then, of how many creeper thorns had torn at him and raked across his hands and face … and all of it, of course, watched sneeringly from afar by the cruel upperpriestesses of the House, among them the Darklady herself.
Vaelam was practically dancing with excitement, his eyes large and round. The foreguard of the Sharran “wizards” was a thin, soft-spoken priest, both careful and thorough in his duties. He was more excited, now, than Elryn had ever seen him.
“Dark Brother,” he hissed excitedly, “I’ve found something.”
“No,” Elryn murmured, frowning, “Really? You do surprise me.”
“It’s a stone,” Vaelam continued, astonishingly not catching Elryn’s thick sarcasm at all—or displaying uncommonly swift skill at hiding his recognition of it. “A stone with writing on it.”
“Writing that says …?”
“Well, ah, just one letter actually—but one as long as a man is tall. It’s a ‘K’!”