by Ed Greenwood
Elminster produced a grin of his own and went to the suit of armor. Plucking off its close-visored helm, he calmly emptied a dead mouse and its nest out of it, lowered it onto his head, and replied hollowly from inside it, “That’s why ye’re about to acquire a bodyguard. Help me on with all the rest of this clobber. Duar was about my size, I see, and he’s far too long dust to be wanting it all back now.”
“About your height, maybe, but he was twice your girth and even larger in the shoulders,” Arclath sighed, “but I doubt we dare tour the palace looking for a better fit.”
“I suppose not,” Elminster agreed cheerfully. “Besides, this is the suit with the enchanted codpiece—and I just might need it. Ye never know.”
His grotesquely broad wink left Arclath rolling his eyes again, but El was already sliding open the secret panel and waving Arclath through it. The noble stepped into the gloomy space beyond, and El followed.
The moment the panel closed behind them, the left-hand door at the end of the room swung open to reveal Glathra Barcantle and a man wearing a crown whom half Suzail knew at a glance: King Foril. They had been listening, and their faces were grim.
“So Elminster is after the Nine and believes them to be here,” Glathra said gloomily.
The king nodded. “He must not gain them. Any he does find, we must take back from him. Arclath can help us with that.”
“Can, yes,” Glathra muttered, “but will he?”
Foril sighed. “Distasteful as it seems, it’s high time to compel a few of our oh-so-loyal nobles to demonstrate their loyalty to Cormyr. Do whatever you must.”
Marlin was high-hearted with excitement, but Lothrae was coldly calm.
The words had all come out in rather a babbling rush, true, in his anxiousness to inform Lothrae that a third member of the Nine was bound to an item, somewhere which apparently half Suzail knew about!
“Contain yourself, Marlin,” Lothrae said curtly. “It will be the height of folly to rush off searching all Faerûn for magic that could be anywhere, when the council is almost upon us. We must be careful, avoid doing things that will draw both attention and suspicion, and keep our minds on seizing the right opportunity.”
“But we need all the magic we can get,” Marlin protested. “The Spellplague was unpredictable. Like a Dragon Sea windstorm, it left some things untouched here whilst utterly destroying castles’n’all over there. And it’s not done yet! Things’re still changing, stlarn it.”
“All of this is both true—and irrelevant. The ‘but the Spellplague’ argument can and has been used to justify anything and everything,” Lothrae replied coldly. “Were you to advance such an argument at court, expect to be openly sneered and laughed at; for far too many years, every single argument began thus. ‘But the Spellplague’ nothing.”
“But if someone else gets the axe—”
“Then you’ll know whom to kill to gain it, without turning all Suzail upside down and alerting much of it to your name and interests in the doing,” Lothrae snapped. “And with that said, leaving it clear to both of us that you have nothing more useful to add to our shared wisdom just now, this converse is at an end.”
The glowing air above the orb went dark, Lothrae’s image winking out, fading, and falling, all in less time than it took Marlin to draw breath to protest.
He was alone amid the dust-covered Stormserpent discards again.
Lothrae had been … irritated. From the outset. Not by news of the axe, so … what? The timing of the contact? Had he been busy or in danger of being discovered or overheard?
Marlin frowned as he restored things to the way he liked to leave them and left the room.
The orbs had come from Lothrae and were old magic. When either of the men entered the rooms where their orbs were kept, a spell cast by an outlander wizard Lothrae had hired and then murdered when his work was done made the other feel that a contact was about to come.
Early on, Marlin had usually felt Lothrae’s approach to his orb, wherever it was, and had hastened to the disused tower of the family mansion. These days, he usually went to his orb and initiated their converses.
Was Lothrae losing interest in their alliance? Or wanting him to keep silent for a time? Or was there some danger or difficulty at Lothrae’s end?
Well, the silent dust around him was hardly likely to offer him any answers. And somewhere out there, probably nearby, was a hand axe that held a secret …
Manshoon sighed.
Marlin Stormserpent. Young. Rash. And at that moment, nigh blind with excitement.
Idiot lordling. So utterly, utterly predictable.
The serving maid whose mind the soon-Emperor of Cormyr was riding shrugged off the stained old sheet to give her sneer the space she felt it needed.
Young Stormserpent had just rushed past her and was dwindling down the curving stair, all oblivious to his surroundings. She probably needn’t have bothered embracing the old broken statue and casting its dust sheet over them both. Just sitting still right under his nose would probably have been sufficient.
Blind idiot lordling.
“Things’re still changing,” she murmured, as Manshoon spoke through her. “But you grow no whit wiser, Marlin oh-so-ambitious Stormserpent. Nothing more useful to add to any shared wisdom just now, I’d say. Yet you’re one of the brighter-witted lordlings of the realm. All the gods help us.”
Lord Broryn Windstag was right out of breath, Sornstern was in a hardly better state, and even Kathkote Dawntard was panting and going purple. They were all wearing revel masks they’d very recently snatched down off the wall of a shrieking noblewoman’s boudoir—but hadn’t begun their foray with those masks, and in any case, whatever “protection” the slips of black, betrimmed silk afforded them would last only as long as they could keep out of the hands of the authorities.
Their search for the hand axe had grown increasingly frantic, and they’d had to bruise more than a few folk along the way. War wizards and Purple Dragons were after them, with the city roused; aye, it was death or exile if they didn’t manage to get clear away—and stay there for long enough for doubt and planted false rumors and a few convenient “accidents” to befall key witnesses …
Gasping for breath as they stumbled up the back stair of an expensive address just off the promenade, with the senseless body of its guard tumbling to a stop behind them, the three started to wonder aloud at how they came to be doing it so wildly, rashly, and precipitously. Or for that matter, at all.
“Was some spell at work on our minds?” Windstag snarled.
“Well, even if one wasn’t, that’s got to be our claim if we get caught!” Sornstern panted, reeling against the stairpost as they reached the upper floor.
“When we get caught,” Dawntard corrected grimly.
Still panting, they paused together to catch their breath in the passage outside the door of old Lord Murandrake’s expensive rented rooms—and hesitated, exchanging wild-eyed glances.
The wizard and the noble came to a spot where the dark, narrow passage ended in a meeting with a passage running left and right.
“This way, lad!” Elminster boomed cheerfully from inside his borrowed helm, turning left.
“Very well,” Arclath agreed, following, “but where are we going, if I may ask?”
“Ye may,” El replied brightly, “and if ye’re very good, I might even tell thee. Before we get there, that is. Life is, after all, a journey rather than a—”
“Destination.” Arclath sighed. “I know the hoary old sayings, too, saer. What I don’t know is why I’m following you at all, when I came here to find the lady war wizard named Glathra, and … ah …”
“Tell her all about me? That I’m after the Nine, is that it? Amarune told thee?”
“She told me a lot of things,” Lord Delcastle replied. “That she’s your kinswoman and that you want her to help you steal certain enchanted things from the palace—which frankly puzzles me. Are you lazy, or horribly busy, or just trying to
keep your hands clean? If you’re as mighty an archmage as the tales all say, why not steal them yourself? Or just seize them, brushing aside our wizards of war—fallen far since the days of the legendary Vangerdahast, who was a mere pupil to you, if I’ve remembered rightly—as if they were so many ineffectual children?”
“My, her tongue has been busy,” Elminster observed. “She must trust ye. Hmm; are ye lovers, perchance?”
“I’m her patron and friend, old man,” Arclath replied, a trifle sharply. “It would be improper of me to take advant—”
Elminster turned and made a very rude sound in Arclath’s direction. “Ye’re a noble of Cormyr, lad! ‘Improper’ is what ye were raised to do, and haughtily! An utter dolt ye must think me, to take me for someone who’ll swallow ‘my morals shine’ pretenses out of thy mouth! After all, a simple ‘aye’ or ‘nay’ would suffice for a man who had naught to hide.”
Arclath knew he should be whipping out his sword, afire with anger, but found himself feeling far too sheepish for any such nonsense. He settled for saying simply, “We talked last night; she’s very scared; she does trust me, and I touched her not. Truth, I swear.”
Elminster dragged off the helm, revealing a face glistening with sweat, for just long enough to meet the young noble’s eyes with his wise and twinkling old blue-gray ones, and reply, “I believe ye, lad.”
Then the helm came down again, and from within it, the old man added, “So, aye, I’m her great-grandsire, and I want her to take my place in the harness, saving the Realms. She’ll be needing help, mind; that’s why I’m admitting anything at all to ye, lad, rather than just snuffing out the pride of House Delcastle, here and now. Oh, and aye, I do need to get my hands on any items that house the ghosts of any of the Nine; ’tis vitally important.”
“And if, say, the Crown of Cormyr believes differently?” Arclath asked calmly as they started to move along the passage again. “And prefers these, ah, haunted magic items be retained here, in royal or war wizard hands, to defend the realm?”
“Lad, lad,” came the hollow voice from within the helm, “ ’tis the way of all rulers, and even more so of their lackeys and toadies, to latch onto anything that just might be of value or hold power—whether they understand its consequences or know how to wield it or not—and keep it safe forever, or until their realm falls, which always happens first. Trust these words, from one who’s ruled more realms than ye or any Obarskyr ever will, and saved this particular one we’re standing in a time or two, as well: I can make better use of them than Foril or Ganrahast or all the nobles of the realm put together. Trust me.”
“My dear long-departed grandfather,” Arclath replied carefully, “once told me that trusting any wizard is even more foolish than trusting any noble. I have found that to be wise advice.”
“Ye were well raised,” Elminster agreed cheerfully. “Yet how much can any of us trust anyone, really? We’ll have to talk more on this, ye and I.”
He stopped at a right-angled bend in the passage, slid open another panel in the wall, and waved Arclath through it, indicating that the Lord Delcastle should precede him.
Arclath bowed and obeyed, stepping into a new and better-lit passage—where he found himself face to face with an out-of-breath War Wizard Glathra, who had just come hastening along it.
“You’ve been looking for me, I hear; you have news?” she snapped.
“I do,” Arclath replied. “This is the wizard El—”
He turned, but the passage behind him was empty of a man in old, ill-fitting armor. He took a swift step to where the once-again-closed panel was, slid it open with only a moment’s difficulty, peered up and down the passage he’d just come from, finding it—of course—empty … and turned back to Glathra rather helplessly.
“Well, Elminster was with me, and—”
“I believe you,” Glathra said crisply. “If it really was Elminster and not some poser just claiming that infamous name, I’d not have wanted to trade spells with him nose to nose, anyhail. Report!”
Arclath nodded. “Well, he confirmed everything Amarune has told me: He’s her great-grandsire; he was waiting for her in her lodgings yestereve to tell her so; and he wants her to save the Realms as he’s been doing for centuries. Beginning with stealing some magic items that are apparently here in Suzail, and hold the ghosts of the Nine—you know about the Nine?”
“We do.”
“Ah, of course. Well, as it happens, that wasn’t all that I came here to tell you.”
Glathra leaned forward, for all the world like a hunting dog straining at the leash to be released to pounce. “Yes?”
“I’m … I’m not half as capable a spy as I thought I was. I am loyal to the Crown, mind, just not … guarding the realm is not half as easy as I thought it would be. Not to mention even less fun.”
Glathra’s stare was hard and level. “Others before you, Lord Delcastle, have discovered as much. A few of them have even admitted it.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
HUNTING ELMINSTERS
Watching Gods Above, was that the time?
An exhausted Wizard of War Glathra stumbled out her usual rear door of the palace, intent only on getting home to eat something—cold roast fowl from three nights back would have to do; she was too tired to get busy at her hearth—and soak her aching feet before falling—and this night, it would be falling—into bed.
Almost immediately she stopped dead, because someone was standing in her way. Swordcaptain Dralkin.
“Now what?” she snarled, by way of greeting.
Rather stiffly, he replied, “War Wizard Glathra, I’ve news that might well concern the safety of the realm. I thought you’d want to know.”
She closed her eyes wearily, but when she opened them again he was still standing there. “And it is?”
“Three of our younger noble lords—Windstag, Dawntard, and Sornstern—seem to be turning much of Suzail upside down right now, looking for magical hand axes. They’re offering large coin in the taverns frequented by nobles’ servants—the Rose and Dragon, the Servant Exalted, and the Hrelto—for any hand axe brought to them that’s magical when they test it, and came from any noble House. They have this chant about where they want folk to look: ‘up on a wall or hidden in a bedchamber or back hall.’ ”
Glathra sighed heavily. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“More than that,” he was already adding—her query just brought a vigorous nod as he went on talking. “There’ve been thefts and ransackings-by-night seeking things in many nobles’ mansions. Bodyguards killed or struck senseless, and many lords and ladies left seething this night at having their chambers looted.”
“Farruk,” Glathra said crisply. “Farewell, slumber.”
She stepped around him and started to stride down the street.
“I know who’s behind all this. Take me to the lodgings of the dancer Amarune Whitewave,” she snapped back at him, over her shoulder. “We’re hunting Elminsters.”
The cave was a long, narrow hovel of damp dirt, stones, and sagging old rough-tree furniture, more a hermit’s cellar than a druid den. Two small, flickering oil lamps hung from a crossbranch over a rude table, and somewhere behind their glows sat a stout, broad-shouldered old man, blinking at the band of adventurers past a fearsome beak of a nose. He had a long, shaggy white beard.
The floor was an uneven, greasy, hard-trodden litter of old bones and empty nutshells, and roots thrust out of the dirt walls here, there, and everywhere; on many had been hung a pathetic collection of rotting old scraps of tapestry and paintings.
“So ye’ve found Elminster,” wheezed the old man, “ye adventurers, and to earn thy hire would speak with me? Well, speak, then; I’ve naught to share, I fear, and if ye were expecting great magics or heaped gems, I’m afraid ye’ve come a century or so too late.”
“I am Sir Eskrel Starbridge, highknight of Cormyr,” Starbridge replied. “I’ve come to bring you back to Suzail with me, whe
re your presence is … desired.”
“L-leave Shadowdale?” the wizard quavered. “I’m—nay. Impossible.”
Around Starbridge, his dozen highknights—and the five war wizards, too—stood as still as stone. Legend insisted—shouted—that this old man blinking at them had spells enough to rend kingdoms, and had done so, more than once. To say nothing of toppling castles, snatching down dragons from the sky and rending them, and transforming charging armies into smears of blood on the earth and a red mist of gore blowing away on the breeze.
Starbridge had said he would try diplomacy first. Not a one of them thought it would succeed, but, well, if there was a time for prayer, this was it.
“Elminster,” Starbridge asked gently, “what keeps you here? We have woods as wild as these in Cormyr—the Forest Kingdom—and the farm on the far side of that ridge is fast disappearing beneath new saplings. What makes Shadowdale so special?”
The old man smiled. “All the Realms knows Elminster dwells here, so the fools all come to me. Fools like you.”
The walls erupted, the air full of hissing arrows, quarrels, and darts.
All of which struck air that did not quite glow, a foot or so away from every one of the Cormyreans, and shattered against it to fall harmlessly to the floor. The war wizards responded almost lazily, spells lashing the walls in red-orange fire that tore into the pale, struggling forms of howling doppelgangers hiding behind the tapestries, who convulsed in agony in the heart of those flames and died.
“Your … servants?” Starbridge asked, in the silence that followed. “Handmaidens?”
The old man behind the table flung himself out of his chair. A highknight darted after him.
“Narulph, stand where you are!” Starbridge roared. “Mereld?”
“Too late to hold it in its shape,” the war wizard snapped in reply, craning his neck. “Another doppelganger, shifting fast—I’ll have to blast it, or it’ll get away!”