by Ed Greenwood
Directing those aerial acrobatics all the while, she rushed through the cavern and out, then began the careful climb down the mountainside.
You should have cast a second flight spell on yourself, Symrustar mindspoke, after the second finger-bleeding slip.
“I should have done a lot of things these last dozen centuries,” El replied, watching a jaunty parade of stones dislodged by her boots plunge down, down to jagged rocks far below. Among those waiting stone points were treetops, hrast it! “I’ve never been the sharpest blade in the armory—and have spent a lot of time being one of Faerûn’s utter dullards.”
Well, so she had. Perhaps she’d been succumbing to her own essential nature. Or perhaps she’d just been trying to stay alive, as more selfish, reckless, and evil beings galore lashed out at her or at folk and places she loved and was moved—or sworn—to defend. Hrast them all …
By the obvious scars on the rocks around and below, the dragon had repeatedly clawed away foliage and the most easily climbed spurs of rock, to make its lair as inaccessible as possible to anything that couldn’t fly.
However, it was easier—if one had nerves of battle steel—to descend than come up from below. All you needed was the strength, agility—and resolve—enough to jump to the next mountainside over, in the right spot where a long ago storm or perhaps dragon battle had toppled a peak into a shower of great boulders that had tumbled down between the two heights to wedge between them, in a rugged, misshapen natural bridge.
El found what she judged to be the best spot, then leaped. After all, there would be time enough to work a feather fall, before she was dashed to blood-splattering pulp on those waiting rocks, much lower down …
She hoped.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
A FATE RICHLY EARNED
Elminster landed hard, skidding helplessly on loose scree, and crashed into a boulder.
The pain was wincingly intense. Drow ribs, it seemed, were no stronger than human ones.
She clung there, her teeth clenched, embracing the agony that pulsed at her every breath, until her arms and legs had stopped shaking.
Cool as winter ice, Prince of Lost Athalantar? Despite its edge, Symrustar’s mockery was … aye, affectionate. Of course, El. I love you, and you are all I have left, now. For my little while.
El sent warmth to surround and soothe that forlorn mind voice, then forced herself to climb down from the boulder and work her way into the stone-choked cleft. Off the open face of the mountainside and away from a returning dragon’s eyes, and not a moment too soon …
She lost herself in the slow, careful, and seemingly endless work of finding the next handhold and the next, deciding where to let go and fall, and where to rest and use the tiniest jet of silver fire to heal broken and bleeding fingers or restore shattered feet and ribs—and once, after an unexpected slip, most of the bones in her new body.
You’re not taking very good care of it, Symrustar teased. That made the rest of the descent much easier, because El spent much of it dredging up half-forgotten curses and rude descriptions to hurl at her mind guest, in what became a mirth-filled game for them both, as the fading echo of the spirited elf he’d met so long ago in Cormanthor protested in mounting mock horror at what she was being called, and declared herself scandalized and ruined and worse …
And then the endless climb was almost done, with no dragon plunging out of the sky to spew acid or bite or slash with cruel claws, and Cormyr was no longer a great green carpet spread out before her, but individual trees thrusting into the sky nearby, forming a closer horizon.
El paused in a crouch on the last ledge above the ground. She was about five man-heights up from the scrub and dead trees that descended to the ditch, and the lower three of those five weren’t rough mountain rock, but rather a flaring slope of loose earth and gravel, washed down the peak by many a storm and scored with countless channels carved by rushing water that had fled and was gone. She could see shadows under the closest trees, the ones that stood hard by the winding ribbon of Orondstars Road. Those shadows lay on the sometimes sun-dappled, usually gloomy forest floor of the very easternmost edge of Hullack Forest. The vast woodland that would probably be her bedchamber during the night ahead, as she slept within whatever spell-spun defenses she could mount. It would be best to get as far from the dragon’s lair as she could, being as all dragons could smell or sense magic to some small, oft-unreliable degree. And she’d better start without more delay, and—
There. Right there. She could drink from that spring and then just step in under the leaves and—
Hold, what’s this?
Out of the very spot under the trees she’d chosen, a man stumbled into view, exhausted and drenched with sweat. He clutched a dagger, blood streaming down his arm to drip from his knuckles and fingertips. He was about done in, staggering along on sheer determination. Hunter’s garb, light leather but very well made, almost a uniform—
A ring on the middle finger of either hand! A war wizard!
El spun around, lowered herself until she hung from her fingertips from the ledge, and let go, twisting in the air.
She landed in a half-turn on the slope, skidded, caught a foot in unyielding stone and ended up rolling head over heels, to a muddy halt in the ditch, crushing some nettles along the way, to look up and see the war wizard—
Sobbing his last, his dagger falling from his failing hand, as three blades ran him through from as many directions.
Too late, hrast it! Too often too late!
El hissed out rising fury, fists clenching. A fourth man came running out of the forest gloom, his sword drawn back to deliver a vicious chop to the throat of the Crown mage who was already vomiting blood, dying on his feet, only held up by the swords still through his body.
Why, gods, is that so frequent a fate for those who try to work good, or stand for order? El thrust out a hand and sent them lightning, her anger making it snarl rather than just crackle down her fingertips. Her long, eye-searing bolt sprang across the ditch and the road and the second ditch beyond, flashing brightly into the gloom, where it struck the men and their swords and split to race among them, roiling and ricocheting as they shouted and convulsed, caught in its brief bright coils.
The war wizard slumped, his head lolling, scarcely touched by the lightning at all … already dead. His four attackers staggered and screamed and danced, their arms and legs spasming involuntarily, their hair standing on end, and their eyes and mouths wide with pain. Then something flashed forth from the war wizard’s chest, bursting open the leather of his jerkin. Something bright, that spat many lightnings. A death-lightning amulet!
Elminster’s bolts were gentle in comparison, already fading—but the war wizard briefly became a rigid, spinning top that stabbed bolts of lightning in all directions. El was glad of being breast-down in mud and nettles, because the men in the trees—there were six or seven of them, or even more, coming at a run to share in the slaying, not just the four he’d seen—were taking a fierce punishment.
When the amulet was spent, and the stiff body of its wearer had toppled in silence to the dead leaves and fallen boughs, only three men still stood at the edge of the forest, all of them reeling and groaning, sorely wounded. Everyone else lay sprawled and still.
El found her feet, clambered over the ditch and the road and the ditch on the other side, and ran into the trees, toward the sharp seared-boar smell of cooked men she knew she’d find.
“Who are you?” she demanded sharply of the first man she reached who was still alive.
He turned a pain-wracked face to her, roared out wordless anger and pain, and tried to slash at her with a short sword she’d not noticed until then. His unsteady swing missed entirely and sent him crashing down onto his face. She ran on.
“Who are you?” she demanded of the next man. He gave her a bewildered look; half his face had sagged as if it was melting, and the pupils of his eyes were of very different sizes.
“Wh
o do you obey?” she snapped.
“B-b-broadshield,” he choked out, and he toppled. So these were the notorious Broadshield’s Beasts, outlaws who—
A shadow fell across the sky.
El raced for the nearest large tree. An arrow thrummed through the air right in front of her chin as she ran, and a second howled past just behind her. Then she was at the tree, around it, and plastered against its trunk, trying to become very still.
She could see more men coming her way now, striding through the forest with bows in their hands and murder in their hard eyes.
The foremost pair couldn’t be more than a dozen strides away. They lacked bows, but bore long knives, and would reach her in a breath or so. Thick underbrush crackled as they burst out of it to close on her, raising their knives—and suddenly something large, scaly, and black plunged and snatched, with blurring speed.
It left behind a patch of sunlight that hadn’t been there before, with several trees splintered and fallen and the leaves of another tumbling out of the sky, in the wake of a huge black dragon that banked along the mountainside so closely that its great batlike wings rippled at the touch of rocks racing past beneath them. As it climbed, more than branches and leaves fell from it. Something dark and wet fell, too. Something that looked like the leg of a man.
The new sunlit patch stood empty. The two Beasts who’d been hastening to kill Elminster were gone.
El kept very still, watching Alorglauvenemaus turn in the air, in a great arc that would bring it around and howling down out of the sky right … at her tree.
She backed hastily away to the next tree, keeping her eyes on the great black wyrm. The chest of gems was clutched in its jaws, its eyes blazed with anger, and its claws were slowly tightening through two wet bundles that had been men.
More of Broadshield’s Beasts had almost reached the patch of sunlight, and were slowing to peer at the scar the dragon had made.
It made another, right through them.
Shrieking men fled in all directions as great claws grabbed and then tightened. Wings flapped along the mountainside again ere the dragon climbed, its shoulders surging and its wings beating—and when it was as high as the lowest clouds, it let go of all it held in its claws. El watched tiny shapes tumble amid despairing cries, and shivered despite herself. Then as faint and distant splatterings began behind her, she turned and ran through the forest, seeking thickly tangled bushes deeper in the trees.
The splintering crashes of the dragon’s third and fourth visits came from well behind her, but by the time El dared to skulk warily back to the dragon’s scar, Alorglauvenemaus was flying slowly above the trees examining just one body in its claws. It recognized that dead man, flung the corpse down in disgust, and flapped back to its lair.
El melted back against a tree trunk and stayed there for a good long time, watching for the dragon’s return—but it didn’t reappear.
There was a time when I could have saved the lone mage, defeated all these outlaws and the dragon, too, without slaying them, and …
Aye, there had been a time.
We all grow old, Elminster, Symrustar reminded him. We all grow lesser. Every one of us, Chosen or commoner or rough beast. ’Tis the way of the world.
“I …,” El replied aloud, roughly. “I … grow tired of the way of the world. And increasingly it seems the world is growing tired of me.”
Are you angry? Or sad?
“Both. Sad more than angry, for now.”
For now. The voice in his mind deepened, sounding for a moment more like that of long-gone Khelben speaking doom than it did wry and mocking Symrustar.
“For now,” El whispered to the trees, keeping her eyes on the mountainside where the dragon would appear, if it emerged again from its lair.
Yet the breezes blew and the silences stretched, and there came no dragon.
Eventually she dared to go to the body of the fallen war wizard. That amulet wasn’t something all that many of Cormyr’s Crown mages walked around wearing; this must have been someone important. He either hadn’t worn one of the enchanted war wizard cloaks on this little forest foray, that could teleport their wearers away from harm, or had lost it somewhere along the way.
There was no hope of healing the man, after what the amulet had done; above his waist and below his shoulders, there just wasn’t much left of him. El relieved the dead fingers of their rings, swiftly checked the boots and belt for anything else of interest—two daggers and a few pouches of spell stuff, most of it spoiled—then hastened away into the forest, trying to walk more or less parallel to the winding Orondstars Road, but also to get well away from all the dead men. When dusk came stealing in, there’d be no shortage of hungry prowlers. It would be highly desirable to find a stream and walk along in it for some time, to throw off anything tracking her by scent. The rings, now …
As she walked, El examined them. The first, a standard war wizard ring. She slipped it onto her own hand, onto the middle finger of her left hand, just as its rightful wearer had worn it. The second one … could this be a commander’s ring? Nay, plain but with a little “dragon snout” triangle projecting from the band, along a wearer’s finger … ’twas that other sort. Aye, a … team ring, worn by members of perilous mission teams. Caladnei had instituted them. What luck! El slid it onto her other middle finger, and murmured the word that would make the little band identify its owner.
“Brannon Lucksar, wizard of war,” the ring announced solemnly, in a hard-edged male voice.
So she’d witnessed the last exhausted, stumbling moments of the life of Brannon Lucksar—the leader of the crack war wizard team based at Immerkeep, if she remembered rightly. Lucksar may well have been the last survivor of his team, hunted down and slain by Broadshield’s Beasts. Had they already killed the other war wizards?
El sighed. So much death … so many bad things she could do nothing about. Even when she was there in time, she managed little or nothing …
Lucksar’s team ring revealed to her mind that it … seemed to have the usual powers: it could record four verbal messages, empower a sending spell, and store a little healing magic. It could also, El recalled, be readily traced by from afar by other war wizards.
Walking warily on through the forest, El listened to the ring’s four messages. One was a congratulations for “Another task well-handled,” from some gruff-voiced unknown older man who concluded by telling Lucksar, “Your reward will be harder tasks, a fate richly earned.” Another was a breathless female whisper, “I love you; take care.” A third was a terse series of instructions for finding a hidden cache in a city alley somewhere … and the fourth implored: “Get done with this quickly, then get yourself to Castle Irlingstar to look into the murders there before Vandur and his lads make too much of a mess of things.”
Well, that much Elminster could and would do. She would go to Irlingstar—perhaps too late to stop Vandur making messes, but she’d go to Irlingstar, and there claim to be Wizard of War Brannon Lucksar. She’d say she fell down a shaft into the Underdark, fought fell creatures there, was mortally wounded, and died in an eerie place that must have been what some arcane sages call an earth node, where the magic of Faerûn itself surged strongly. Where she somehow awakened later in this drow body, put there by a magical curse or a whimsical deity or the mindless magic of that eerie place or something … Aye. She had mental ferocity enough to mind battle any wizard of war who tried to mindspeak her—
And if you don’t, I do, Symrustar piped up.
—and she’d do it. Impersonate Lucksar for a time, a normal man’s lifetime if need be. This would be her first stride along the road to recruiting the wizards of war to Mystra’s service, without revealing to Manshoon or anyone else that the infamous Elminster still survived.
“Ganrahast! There you are!”
The Royal Magician blinked, looked up from the large array of maps, floorplans, and written reports he was bent over, and smiled. “Ah, Glathra! You wanted to see me?”
“You’re hrasted right I do!” Glathra spat angrily, firmly slamming the door closed behind her, so no guard or palace servant would stray too near, and overhear. “It’s Storm Silverhand!”
“Ah! You’ve had your usual reports, and—?”
“I have, and our fellow wizards of war are almost unanimous in telling me that the woman seems to have wings! Or can translocate tirelessly, to whisk herself around like a god! It seems Storm Silverhand has been flitting here, there, and everywhere, all over Suzail and in naeding near every room in this palace, not to mention daily appearances in Waymoot and Espar and—and just about every last hamlet and village in all Cormyr! And they tell me she’s getting past patrols and gate guards and the like with a commander’s ring!”
Ganrahast nodded. “Those reports are correct.”
“Well, what by the Dragon is going on? Why is she being allowed to do this?”
“It’s the king’s will,” Ganrahast told Glathra gently. “I believe he values the loyal nobles of our land, and she is the Marchioness Immerdusk, however ancient the title. She has been doing vital work for the Dragon Throne. Soothing many nobles, seeking to bind them more tightly in loyalty to the Crown, in the wake of the disaster at the council.”
“Oh? All the reports that have come to my ears speak of her visiting commoners,” Glathra snapped. “In smithies, sundries shops, tanners—and brothels. Not nobles in their high houses.”