by Ed Greenwood
The last prince of Athalantar smashed his nose and shoulder into a floor-slab that was heaving upward to meet him, and rolled over with a gasp of pain and despair. As he clawed at the edges of the stone with bloody, feeble fingers, trying to drag himself upright again, the stone melted away into smoke and rending magic burst into him.
Ah, well, this is it … forgive me, Mystra.
But no agony followed, and nothing plucked at his flesh, to melt and sear and reave.…
Instead, he was rolled over as if by the empty air, and glowing nothingness enclosed him in ropes of radiance. Dimly, through his tears and the roiling motes of light, Elminster saw magic rushing toward him from all sides, being drawn to him, veering in its dancing to race in.
Wild laughter rose around him, high and sharp and exultant. Saeraede! She was wrapped around him, clinging in a web of glowing mists that grew thicker and brighter as she gorged herself on magic, a ghost of bright sorcery.
Sunlight was stabbing down into the riven cavern, now, but the dancing dust cloaked everything in gloom—everything but the rising giant built around Elminster’s feebly writhing form. The rune-flames were twisting in midair to flow into Saeraede, and she was rising ever higher, a thing of crackling flame. El strained to look up at her—and two dark flecks among the magical fire became eyes that looked back at him in cold triumph … until a mouth swam out of the conflagration to join them and gave him a cruel smile.
“You’re mine now, fool,” she whispered, in a hoarse hiss of fire, “for the little while you’ll last.…”
“Lord Thessamel Arunder, the Lord of Spells,” the steward announced grandly, as the doors swung wide. A wizard strode slowly through them, a cold sneer upon his sharp features. He wore a high-collared robe of unadorned black that made his thin frame look like a tomb obelisk, and a shorter, more lushly built lady in a gown of forest green clung to his arm, her large brown eyes dancing with lively mischief.
“Goodsirs,” he began without courtesies, “why come you here to me once more this day? How many times must you hear my refusal before the words sink through your skulls?”
“Well met, Lord Arunder,” said the merchant Phelbellow, in dry tones. “The morning finds you well, I trust?”
Arunder gave him a withering glare. “Spare me your toadying, rag seller. I’ll not sell this house, raised by mighty magic, nor any wagon length of my lands, no matter how sweetly you grovel, or how much gold you offer. What need have I for coins? What need have I for gowns, for that matter?”
“Aye, I’ll grant that,” one of the other merchants grunted. “Can’t see him looking like much in a good gown. No knees for it.”
“No hips, neither,” someone else added.
There were several sputters of mirth from the merchants crowded at the doorway; the wizard regarded them all with cold scorn, and said softly, “I weary of these insults. If you are not gone from my halls by the time I finish the Ghost Chant, the talons of my guardian ghosts shall—”
“Lady Faeya,” Hulder Phelbellow asked, “has he not seen the documents?”
“Of course, Goodsir Phelbellow,” the lady in green said in musical tones. Favoring them all with a smile, she stepped from her lord and drew forth a strip of folded vellum, “and he’s signed them, too.”
She proffered them to Phelbellow, who unfolded them eagerly, the men behind him crowding around to see.
The Lord of Spells gaped at the paper and the merchants, then at Faeya. “W-what befalls here?” he gasped.
“A sensible necessity, my lord,” she replied sweetly. “I’m so glad you saw the good sense in signing it. A most handsome offer—enough to allow you to retire from your castings entirely, if you desire.”
“I signed nothing,” Arunder gasped, white-faced.
“Oh, but you did, lord—and so ardently, too,” she replied, eyes dancing. “Have you forgotten? You remarked at the time upon the hardness and flatness of my belly that made your penmanship such ease. You signed it with quite a flourish, as I recall.”
Arunder stiffened. “But … that was—”
“Base trickery?” one of the merchants chuckled. “Ah, well done, Faeya!”
Someone else barked with laughter, and a third someone contributed a murmur of, “That’s rich, that is.”
“Apprentice,” the Lord of Spells whispered savagely, “what have you done?”
The Lady Faeya drew three swift paces away from him, into the heart of the merchants, who melted aside to make way for her like mist before flame, and turned back to face him, placing her hands on her hips.
“Among other things, Thessamel,” she told him softly, “I’ve slain two men this last tenday, who came to settle old scores since your spells failed you—and word spread of it.”
“Faeya! Are you mad? Telling these—”
“They know, Thess, they know,” his lady told him with cold scorn. “The whole town knows. Every mage has his hands full of wild spells, not just you. If you paid one whit of attention to Faerûn outside your window, you’d know that already.”
The Lord of Spells had turned as pale as old bones and was gaping at her, mouth working like a fish gasping out of water. Everyone waited for him to find his voice again; it took quite a while.
“But … your spells still work, then?” he managed to ask, at last.
“Not a one,” she said flatly. “I killed them with this.” She drew forth the tiny dagger from its sheath at her hip, then threw back her left sleeve to lay bare a long, angry-looking line of pine gum and wrapped linens. “That’s how I got this.”
“Were these merchants also coming to—to—?” Arunder asked faintly, swaying back on his heels. His hands were trembling like those of a sick old man.
“I went to them,” Faeya told him in biting tones, “to beg them to make again the offer you so charmingly refused two months ago. They were good enough to oblige, when they could well have set their dogs on me: the apprentice of the man who turned three of them into pigs for a night.”
There were angry murmurs of remembrance and agreement from among the merchants around her; Arunder stepped back and raised a hand to cast a spell out of sheer habit—before dropping it with a look of sick despair.
His lady drew herself up and said more calmly, “So now the deal’s done. Your tower and all these lands, from high noon today henceforth, belong to this cabal of merchants, to use as they see fit.”
“And- and what happens to me? Gods, woma—”
Faeya held up a hand, and the wizard’s ineffectual gibbering ended as if cut off by a knife. Someone chuckled at that.
“We, my lord, are free to live unmolested in the South Spire, casting spells—so long as they harm or work ill upon no one upon this holding—as much as we desire … or are able to. You, Thess, receive two hundred thousand gold pieces—that’s why all of these good men are here—all the firewood we require, and a dozen deer a year, prepared for the table.”
Without a word, Hulder Phelbellow laid a sack upon the side table. It landed with the heavy clink of coins. Whaendel the butcher followed him, then, one by one, all of the others, the sacks building up until they were reaching up the wall, atop a table that creaked in protest.
Arunder’s eyes bulged. “But … you can’t have gold enough, none of you!”
His lady rejoined him in a graceful green shifting, and laid a comforting hand on his arm. “They have a backer, Thess. Now thank them politely. We’ve some packing to do—or you will be wearing my gowns.”
“I-I—”
Her hitherto gentle hand thrust hard into his ribs.
“My lords,” Arunder gulped, “I don’t know how to thank you—”
“Thessamel,” Phelbellow said genially, “you just did. Have our thanks, too—and fare thee well in the South Spire, eh?”
Arunder was still gulping as the merchants filed out, chuckling. The noises he was making turned to whimpers, however, when their withdrawal revealed the man who’d been sitting calmly behind them all the
while, the faint glow of deadly magics playing along the naked broadsword that was laid across his knees. That blade was in the capable grasp of the large and hairy hands of the famous warrior Barundryn Harbright, whose smile, as he rose and looked straight into the wizard’s eyes, was a wintry thing. “So we meet again, Arunder.”
“You—!” the wizard’s snarl was venomous.
“You’re my tenant now, mage, so spare me the usual hissed curses and spittle. If you anger me enough, I’ll take you under my arm down to the stream where the little ones play, and spank your behind until it’s as red as a radish. I’m told that won’t hamper your spellcasting one bit.” One large, blunt-fingered hand waved casually through the air past Arunder’s nose.
The wizard blinked in alarm. “What? Who—?”
“Told me so?” Harbright lifted his chin in a fond smile that was directed past Arunder’s shoulder.
The Lord of Spells whirled around in time to see Faeya’s catlike smile drifting out the door they’d come in by, together. The rest of her accompanied it, a vision in forest green.
Lord Thessamel Arunder moaned, swayed on his feet, and turned, on the verge of tears of rage, to run away from it all—only to come to an abrupt halt, with a squeak of real alarm, as he found himself about to run right into the edge of Harbright’s glowing blade.
His eyes rose, slowly and unwillingly, from the steel that barred his way to the huge and hulking warrior who held it. There was something like pity in Barundryn Harbright’s eyes as he rumbled, “Why are wizards, with all their wits, so slow to learn life’s lessons?”
The blade swept down and away, seeking its sheath, and a large and steadying hand came down on the wizard’s shaking shoulder. “Mages tend to live longer, Arunder,” Harbright said gently, “if they manage to resist their most attractive temptations.”
The Sharrans were beginning to sweat now, from the sheer strain of aiming and holding steady as the Art they wielded punched aside old stones and earth, to lay open a fortress and slay the beings below. Elryn watched Femter wince and shake the smoking fragments of a ring off one finger, as Hrelgrath tossed aside his third wand and Daluth slid one failing scepter back into his belt.
“Enough,” Elryn bellowed, waving his hands. “Enough, Dreadspells of Shar!” Something had to be saved in case they met with other foes this day—or, gods above, there was someone still alive down there.
The priests-turned-wizards turned their heads in the sudden peace to blink at him, almost as if they’d forgotten who and where they were.
“We have a holy task, Dark Brothers,” Elryn reminded them, letting them hear the regret in his voice, “and it is not melting away earth and stone in a forgotten ruin in the heart of a forest. Our quarry is the Chosen; how fares he?”
Three heads peered at roiling dust. All five looked down the shaft where they’d begun, where the dust was but a few flowing tongues. There was rubble down there, and—
One of the Sharrans cried out in disbelief.
The Harper who’d claimed to be Azuth was looking calmly back up at them, standing more or less where he’d been when their barrage began. The three old men, still blinking at him in awe, stood around him. He, they, and the floor around the bottom of the shaft seemed untouched.
“Finished?” he asked quietly, looking up at them with eyes of steady, storm-smoke gray.
Elryn felt cold fear catch at the back of his throat and slide slowly down into the pit of his stomach, but Femter snarled, “Shar take the man!” and snatched a wand from his belt.
Before Elryn or Daluth could stop him, Femter leaned over the well and snarled the word that sent a streak of flame down, down into the gloom below, straight at the upturned face of the gray-eyed man.
The Harper didn’t move, but his mouth somehow stretched wider than a man’s mouth should be able to—and the flames fell right into him. He shuddered for a moment as all of the fire plunged into his vitals. By the stumbling of the three old men around him, it seemed some sort of magic was keeping them at bay, moving them as he moved.
A moment later the fireball burst with a dull rumbling. The Harper stood with an unconcerned expression on his face as smoke whirled out of his ears.
He gave the watching Sharrans a reproving look and remarked, “Needs a little more pepper.”
The Dreadspells were screaming and fleeing wildly even before Azuth lowered his head and looked again across the riven cavern at Elminster. “I mean what I say,” he said gravely. “You must get free of her.”
“I—can’t,” Elminster gasped, staring into the dark eyes of Saeraede, as she reared up over him in triumph like some sort of giant snake, twining around him in large and tightening coils.
“And you never will,” she breathed triumphantly, her cold lips inches from his. He could feel the chilling frost of her breath on his face as she purred, “With the powers of a Chosen and all the might Karsus left here, I can defy even such as him.”
She lifted her head to give Azuth a challenging glare as she clamped one giant hand of solid mist around El’s throat. Other tentacles of mist rose around them both in a protective forest, undulating and lashing the tossed and shattered stone slabs.
The last prince of Athalantar struggled to breathe in her grasp, so throttled he couldn’t speak or shout, as the ghostly sorceress leisurely turned the uppermost spire of her mists to a lush and very solid human torso, curvaceous and deadly.
Slim fingers grew fingernails like long talons, and when they were as long as Saeraede’s hand, she reached almost lovingly for his mouth.
“We’ll just have the tongue out, I think,” she said aloud, “to forestall any nasty—ah, but wait a bit, Saeraede, you want him to tell you a few things before he’s mute.… Hmmmm …”
Razor-sharp talons drifted just inches past Elminster’s tightly constricted throat, to slice into the first flesh she found bared. Plowing deep gashes across the strangling mage’s neck, she flicked his blood away in droplets that were caught in her whirling mists and held her bloody talons exultantly up to the sunlight.
“Ah, but I’m alive again,” Saeraede hissed, “alive and whole! I breathe, I feel!” She brought that hand to her mouth, bit her own knuckles, and held the hand out toward the grimly watching avatar of Azuth to let him see the welling blood. “I bleed! I live!”
Then she screamed, swayed, and stared down, dark eyes widening in disbelief, at the gore-slick, smoking sword tip that had just burst through her breast from behind.
“Some people live far longer than they should,” said Ilbryn Starym silkily from behind the hilt, as he stared gloating into the eyes of the mage still frozen in Saeraede’s grasp. “Don’t you agree, Elminster?”
A door was flung wide, to boom its broken song against a heavily paneled wall. It had been years since the tall, broad-shouldered woman who now stood in the doorway, her eyes snapping in alarm and anger, had worn the armor she hated so much—but as she stood glaring into the room, the half-drawn long sword at her hip gleaming, she looked every inch a warrior.
Sometimes Rauntlavon wished he was more handsome, strong, and about ten years older. He’d have given a lot for so magnificent a woman to smile at him.
Right now, she was doing anything but smiling. She was looking down at him as if she’d found a viper in her chamber pot—and his only consolation was that he wasn’t the only mage rolling around on the floor under her dark displeasure; his master, the gruffly sardonic elf Iyriklaunavan, was gasping on the fine swanweave rug not a handspan away.
“Iyrik, by all the gods,” the Ladylord Nuressa growled, “what befell here?”
“My farscrying spell went awry,” the elf snarled back at her. “If it hadn’t been for the lad, here, all those books’d be aflame now, and we’d be hurling water and running with buckets for our lives’ worth!”
Rauntlavon’s face flamed as the ladylord took a step forward and looked down at him with a rather kinder expression. “I-it was nothing, Great Lady,” he stammered.
> “Master Rauntlavon,” she said gently, “an apprentice should never contradict his master-of-magecraft … nor belittle the judgment of any one of The Four Lords of the Castle.”
Rauntlavon blushed as maroon as his robes and emitted the immortal words, “Yujus-yujus-er-ah-uhmmm, I, ah—”
“Yes, yes, boy, brilliantly explained as usual,” Iyriklaunavan said dismissively, rolling to his elbows. “Now belt up and look around the room for me: is anything amiss? Anything broken? Smoldering? Aflame? Hop, now!”
Rauntlavon hopped, quite thankfully, but kept his attention more on what two of The Four Lords of the Castle were saying. They’d all been debonair and successful adventurers, less than a decade ago, and one never knew what wild and exciting things they might say.
Well, nothing about mating dragons this time.
“So tell me, Iyrik,” the Ladylord was saying in her I-really-shouldn’t-have-to-be-this-patient voice, “just why your farscrying spell blew up. Is it one of those magics you’d just be better off not trying? Or were you distracted by some nubile elf maid seen in your spying, perhaps?”
“Nessa,” the elf growled—Rauntlavon had always admired the way he could look so agile and elegant and youthful, and yet be more gruff than any dwarf—as he rose and fixed her with one glaring that’s-quite-enough eye, “this is serious. For us all, everywhere in Faerûn. Stop playing the swaggering warrior bitch for just a moment and listen. For once.”
Rauntlavon froze, his head sunk between his shoulders, wondering if folk really survived the full fury of Great Lady Nuressa a-storming—and just how swiftly and brutally she’d notice him and have him removed from the room.
Very and with iron calm, it seemed.
“Master Rauntlavon,” she said calmly, “you may leave us now. Close the door on your way out.”