by Ed Greenwood
“Apprentice Rauntlavon,” his master said, just as calmly, “it is my will that you abide with us. Send Master Rauntlavon out, and close the door behind him, remaining here with us.”
Rauntlavon swallowed, drew in a deep breath, and turned around to face them, hardly daring to raise his eyes. “I-I’ve found nothing amiss at this end of the chamber,” he announced, his voice higher and rather more unsteady than he wished it would be. “Shall I examine the other half of it now … or later?”
“Now will be fine, Rauntlavon,” the ladylord said in a voice of velvet menace. “Pray proceed.”
The apprentice actually shivered ere he bowed and mumbled, “As my Great Lady wishes.”
“It’s a wonderful thing to make men and boys fear you, Nessa, but does it really make up for your years under the lash? The escaped slave gets even by enslaving others?” His master’s voice was biting; Rauntlavon tried not to let his momentary hesitation show. The ladylord had been a slave? Kneeling naked under a slaver’s lash, in the dust and the heat? Gods, but he’d never have—
“Do you think we can leave my past careers in my own bedchamber closet, Iyrik?” the ladylord said almost gently. Her next sentence, however, was almost a battlefield shout. “Or is there some pressing need to tell all the world?”
“I won’t tell anyone, I won’t—I swear I won’t!” Rauntlavon babbled, going to his knees on the rug.
He heard the Great Lady sigh and felt ironlike fingers on his shoulder, hauling him back to his feet. Other fingers took hold of his chin and turned his head as sharply as a whip is flicked. The apprentice found himself staring into the Lady Nuressa’s smoky eyes from a distance of perhaps the length of his longest finger.
“Rauntlan,” she said, addressing him as he liked his handful of friends to—a short name he’d had no idea any of the lords even knew about, “you know that one of the most essential skills any wizard can have is to keep the right secrets, and keep them well. So I shall test you now, to see if you’re good enough to remain in the castle as a mage-in-training … or a wizard in your own right, in time to come. Keep my secret, and stay. Let it out—and be yourself shut out of our lands, chased to our borders with the flat of my blade finding your backside as often as I can land it.”
Rauntlavon heard his master start to say something, but the ladylord made some sort of gesture he couldn’t see behind her back, and Iyriklaunavan fell silent again.
“Do you understand, Rauntlan?”
Her voice was as calm and as gentle as if she’d been discussing haying a field; Rauntlavon swallowed, nodded, squirmed under the hard points of her gaze, and managed to say, “Great Lady, I swear to keep your secret. I shall abide by your testing … and if ever I let it slip, I shall come to you myself to admit the doing, so the chase can begin at your convenience.”
Her dark brows rose. “Well said, Master Apprentice. Agreed, then.”
She took a quick step back from him and lifted her gown unhurriedly to display a tanned, muscular leg so long and shapely that he swallowed twice, unable to tear his eyes from it. Somewhere far, far away, his master chuckled, but Rauntlavon was lost in the slow but continuing rise of fine fabric, up, up to her hip—he was swallowing hard, now, and knew his face must be as bright as a lamp—where his eyes locked on a purplish-white brand. The cruel design was burned deep into her flesh, just below the edge of the bone that made her hip jut out. She traced a circle around it with one long finger and asked in a dry voice, “Seen enough, Rauntlan?”
He almost choked, trying to swallow and nod fervently at the same time, and somewhere in the midst of his distress the gown went to her ankles again, her hand clapped his shoulders like a club crashing down, and her deep voice said in his ear, “So we have a secret to share now, you and I. Something to remember.” She shoved him away gently and added, “I believe this end of the room hasn’t been fully inspected yet, Master Apprentice.”
Her voice was a brisk goad once more, but somehow Rauntlavon found himself almost grinning as he strode away to the end of the room and announced, “Inspection resumes, Great Lady—and sharing begins!”
His master laughed aloud, and after a moment Rauntlavon heard a low, thrilling murmur that must have been the ladylord chuckling.
She used the lash of her voice on Iyriklaunavan next, breaking off in mid-chuckle to snap, “Enough time wasted, mage. You frighten me up from my table with a map half drawn and my soup growing cold, then go all coy about why. What’s so ‘serious’ that your apprentice must hear about it alongside me? Do you think you can get around to telling me about this oh-so-serious matter before, say, nightfall?”
“I meant it when I said this was serious, Nessa,” Rauntlavon’s master said quietly. “Put the edge of your tongue away for a moment and listen. Please.”
He paused then, and—wonders! Rauntlavon even turned around to see, earning him an almost amused glance from the Great Lady—the Ladylord Nuressa gave him silence, waiting to hear him speak.
Iyriklaunavan blinked, seeming himself surprised, then said swiftly, “You know that magic—all magic not bolstered by draining a few sorts of enchanted items—is going wrong. Spells twisting to all sorts of results, untrustworthy and dangerous. Some mages are hiding in their towers, unable to defend themselves against anyone who might try to settle grudges. Magic has gone wild. If fewer folk knew about it, I’d say that this should be our secret—Rauntlavon’s and mine own—for you to keep, or else. It will come as no surprise to you that many mages have been trying to find out why this darkness has befallen. I am one of them.”
“And that’s even less of a surprise,” the Lady Nuressa said quietly. Rauntlavon’s head snapped around to regard her somber face. He’d never heard her speak so gently before. She sounded almost … tender.
“I have no items to waste in bolstering my spells,” Iyriklaunavan continued, “so the boy—Rauntlavon—has been my bulwark, using his spells to steady mine. Word has even come to us that some wizards—and even priests of the faiths of the Weave—believe divine Mystra and Azuth themselves have been corrupting magic deliberately, for some purpose mortals cannot even hazard.”
“You worship our gods of magecraft?”
“Nessa,” Iyriklaunavan said calmly, “I don’t even have a bedchamber closet to keep my secrets in. I’m trying to hurry this, really I am; just listen.”
Nuressa leaned back against one of the lamp-girt pillars that held up the ceiling of the spell chamber, and gestured for the elf mage to continue. She didn’t even look irritated.
“Just now we were seeking but had not yet called up a place in our scrying, the enchantment being just complete,” Iyriklaunavan continued, “when I felt one thing, and saw another. I think everyone in Faerûn who was attempting a scrying at the time felt what I did: the willful, reckless release of many wizards’ staves at once, in one place, all directed at the same target.”
“You mean mages everywhere feel it, whenever one wizard blasts another?” Nuressa’s voice was incredulous. “No wonder you’re all so difficult.”
“No, we do not normally feel such things—nor have the violence of feeling anything strike us so hard that our own spells collapse into wildfire,” Rauntlavon’s master told her. “The reason we did this time was the target of this unleashing: the High One. I saw him, standing at the bottom of a shaft with three mortal mages, while magic seeking to destroy him rained down—and his attention was elsewhere.”
“Azuth? Who was crazed enough to use magic to try to blast down a god of magic?” The ladylord looked surprised.
“That I did not see,” Iyriklaunavan replied. “I did, however, see what Azuth was regarding. A ghostly sorceress, who was trying to slay a Chosen of Mystra.”
“What’s that?” the Great Lady asked. “Some sort of servant of the goddess?”
“Yes,” the elf mage said grimly, “and he was someone you might remember. Cast your thoughts back to a day when we fled from a tomb—a tomb furnished with pillars that erupted in
eyes. A mage was hanging above us there, asleep or trapped, and came out after we fled. He asked you what year it was.”
“Oh, yesss,” the ladylord murmured, her eyes far away, “and I told him.”
“And thereby we earned the favor of the goddess Mystra,” Iyriklaunavan told her, “who delivered this castle into our hands.”
The Lady Nuressa frowned. “I thought Amandarn won title to these lands while dicing with some merchant lords—hazarding all our coins in the process,” she said.
Rauntlavon stood very still, not wanting to be ejected again now. Surely this was an even more dangerous secret than—
“Amandarn lost all our coins, Nessa. Folossan nearly killed him for it—and they had to flee when he stole a few bits back to buy a meal that night and got caught at it. The two of them hid in a shrine to Mystra—rolled right in under the altar and hid under its fine cloth. There they slept, though both of them swear magic must have dragged them into slumber, for they’d had little to drink and were all excited from their flight and the danger. When they awoke, all of our coins were back in Amandarn’s pouch—along with the title to the castle.”
The Great Lady’s brow arched and she asked, “And you believe this tale?”
“Nessa, I used spells to glean every last detail of it out of both their heads, after they told me. It happened.”
“I see,” the Great Lady said calmly. “Rauntlavon, be aware that this is another secret shared between us here—and only us here, or you’ll have to flee four Lords of the Castle, not merely one.”
“Yes, Great Lady,” the apprentice said, then swallowed and faced them both. “There’s something I should say, now. If something happens to Great Azuth—or Most Holy Mystra—and magic keeps crumbling, we all share a grave problem.”
“And what is that, Rauntlavon?” The Lady Nuressa asked, in almost kindly tones, her fingers caressing the pommel of her long sword.
Rauntlavon’s eyes dropped to those fingers—whose fabled strength was one of the rocks upon which his world stood—then back up to meet her smoky eyes.
“I think we must pray for Azuth or find some way to aid him. The castle was built with much magic,” he told the two lords, the words coming out in a rush. “If its spells fail, it will fall—and us with it.”
The Great Lady’s expression did not change. Her eyes turned to meet those of the Lord Iyriklaunavan. “Is this true?”
The elf merely nodded. Nuressa stared at him for a moment, her face still calm, but Rauntlavon saw that her hand was now closed around the hilt of the long sword and gripping so tightly that the knuckles were white. Her eyes swung back to his.
“Well, Rauntlavon—have you any plan for preventing such doom?”
Rauntlavon spread empty hands, wishing wildly that he could be the hero, and see love for him awaken in her eyes … wishing he could give her more than his despair. “No, Nuressa,” he was astonished to hear himself calmly whispering. “I’m only an apprentice. But I will die for you, if you ask me.”
He drew his blade out of the swaying sorceress with savage glee, to thrust it into the Great Foe he’d pursued for so long, the grasping, stinking human who’d dared to stain bright Cormanthyr with his presence and doom the House of Starym; now helpless before him, able to move just his eyes—fittingly—to see whence his doom came.
“Know as you die, human worm,” Ilbryn hissed, “that the Starym aven—”
And those were the last words he ever spoke, as all the magic that the ancient sorceress had drawn into herself rushed out again, in a fiery flood of raw magical energy that consumed the blade that had spilled it and the elf whose hand held that blade, all in one raging wave that crashed against the far wall of the cavern and ate through solid rock as if it was soft cheese, thrusting onward until it found daylight on a slope beyond, and the groan of toppling trees and falling stones began in earnest.
Saeraede wailed, flames streaming from her mouth, and fell away from Elminster, her mists receding into a standing cloud whose dark and despairing eyes pleaded with his for a few fleeting moments before it collapsed and dwindled away to whirling dust.
El was still staggering and coughing, his hands at his ravaged throat, when Azuth strode forward and unleashed a magic whose eerie green glow flooded the runes and the dust that had been Saeraede alike.
Like a gentle wave rolling up a beach, the god’s spell spread out to the crevice Ilbryn had hidden in and every other last corner of the ravaged cavern. Then it flickered, turned a lustrous golden hue that made Beldrune gasp, and rose from the floor, leaving scoured emptiness behind.
Azuth strode through the rising magic without pause, caught hold of the reeling Elminster by the shoulders, and marched him one step farther. In mid-stride they vanished together—leaving three old mages gaping at a fallen throne in a shaft of sunlight in a pit in the forest that was suddenly silent and empty.
They took a few steps toward the place where so much death and sorcery had swirled—far enough to see that the runes were now an arc of seven pits of shivered stone—then stopped and looked at each other.
“They’re gone an’ all, eh?” Beldrune said suddenly. “That’s it—all that fury and struggle and in the space of a few breaths … that’s it. All done, and us left behind an’ forgotten.”
Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses raised elegantly white tufted eyebrows and asked, “You expected things to be different, this once?”
“We were worthy of a god’s personal protection,” Caladaster almost whispered. “He walked with us and shielded us when we were endangered—danger he did not share, or he’d never have been able to deal with that fireball as he did.”
“That was something, wasn’t it?” Beldrune chuckled. “Ah, I can see myself telling the younglings that … a little more pepper, indeed.”
“I believe that’s why he did it,” Tabarast told him. “Yes, we were honored—and we’re still alive, unlike that ghost sorceress and the elf … that’s an achievement, right there.”
They looked at each other again, and Beldrune scratched at his chin, cleared his throat and said, “Yes—ahem. Well. I think we can just walk out, there at the end where the fire burst out of the cavern, that way.”
“I don’t want to leave here just yet,” Caladaster replied, kicking at the cracked edge of one of the pits where a rune had been. “I’ve never stood with folk of real power before, at a spot where important things happen … and I guess I never will again. While I’m here, I feel … alive.”
“Huh,” Beldrune grunted, “she said that, an’ look what happened to her.”
Tabarast stumped forward and put his arms around Caladaster in a rough embrace, muttering, “I know just how you feel. We’ve got to go before dark, mind, and I’ll want a tankard by then.”
“A lot of tankards,” Beldrune agreed.
“But somewhere quiet to sit and think, just us three,” Tabarast added, almost fiercely. “I don’t want to be sitting telling all the drunken farmers how we walked with a god this night, and have them laugh at us.”
“Agreed,” Caladaster said calmly, and turned away.
Beldrune stared at his back. “Where are you going?”
The old wizard reached the rubble-strewn bottom of the shaft and peered down at the stones. “I stood just here,” he murmured, “and the god was … there.” Though his voice was steady, even gruff, his cheeks were suddenly wet with tears.
“He protected us,” he whispered. “He held back more magic than I’ve ever seen hurled before, in all my life, magic that turned the very rocks to empty air … for us, that we might live.”
“Gods have to do that, y’see,” Beldrune told him. “Someone has to see what they do and live to tell others. What’s the good of all that power, otherwise?”
Caladaster looked at him with scorn, anger rising in his eyes, and stepped back from Beldrune. “Do you dare to laugh at divine—”
“Yes,” Beldrune told him simply. “What’s the good of being human, elsewise?�
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Caladaster stared at him, mouth hanging open, for what seemed like a very long time. Then the old wizard swallowed deliberately, shook his head, and chuckled feebly. “I never saw things that way before,” he said, almost admiringly. “Do you laugh at gods often?”
“One or twice a tenday,” Beldrune said solemnly. “Thrice on high holy days, if someone reminds us when they are.”
“Stand back, holy mocker,” Tabarast said suddenly, waving at him. Beldrune raised his eyebrows in a silent question, but his old friend just waved a shooing hand at him and strode forward, adding, “Move those great booted hooves of yours, I said!”
“All right,” Beldrune said easily, doing so, “so long as you tell me why.”
Tabarast knelt in the rubble and tugged at something; a corner of bright cloth amid the stones. “Gems and scarlet fineweave?” he asked Faerûn at large. “What have we here?”
His wrinkled old hands were already plucking stones aside and uncovering cloth with dexterous speed, as Beldrune went to one knee with a grunt and joined him at the task. Caladaster stood over them anxiously, afraid that, somehow, a ghostly sorceress would rise from these rags to menace them anew.
Beldrune grunted in appreciation as the red gown, with gem-adorned dragons crawling over both hips, was laid out in full—but he promptly plucked it up and handed it to Caladaster, growling as he waved at more cloth, beneath, “There’s more!”
The daring black gown was greeted with an even louder grunt, but when the blue ruffles came into view and Tabarast stirred around in the stones beneath enough to be sure that these three garments were all they were likely to find, Beldrune’s grunts turned into low whispers of curiosity. “Being as Azuth wasn’t wearing them, that I saw, these must have come from her,” he said.
Tabarast and Caladaster exchanged glances. “Being older and wiser than you,” his old friend told him kindly, “we’d figured out that much already.”
Beldrune stuck out his tongue in response to that and held up the blue gown for closer scrutiny.