by Ed Greenwood
The High Court Mage frowned down at it. He hadn’t realized, when bringing it here today, just how little magic had been left in it. That could have been disastrous. As it was, well …
The ravaged body of the Srinshee still stood. She must still be alive—and he knew better than to touch her directly, even with his dagger. There were tricks the older casters knew. Best to simply blast her to nothingness.
He snapped his finger and said a certain word, and there was suddenly a staff in his hands—long and black, set with many silver runes. He let it wake slowly, thrumming in his hands—ah, that delicious feeling of power—before he poured white-hot death into his motionless foe.
The staff fell silent after only moments. He frowned, tried to send it away again, and found it dead—just so much dark wood, now. In puzzlement he threw it down and summoned a rod. He had two more scepters he could call to him after that, if the rod failed. Perhaps the Overmantle was deadening them. In frantic haste he called on all of its withering and life-draining powers.
The body facing him became a withered bag of skin once more, and what skin was left turned gray and rotten. But still the old sorceress stood.
Grunting in exasperated amazement, Ilimitar called first one scepter, and then the other. When it fizzled into crackling, smoking death, the first cold taste of foreboding filled his mouth, for the Srinshee still stood.
Her shattered head hung askew from a broken neck, but those blackened, bleeding eyes opened—to be revealed as two pools of flickering flame—and the mouth beneath them worked its broken jaw for a grinding moment and then croaked, “Are you done, Limi?”
“Corellon preserve me!” the mage shouted, in real horror, as he shrank away from her. Would she start to move toward him?
Yes! Oh, gods, yes!
He screamed as that broken body shuffled forward, out of its pit of melted rubble, and set footless stumps on the paving stones. He fell back, crying, “Stay back!”
“I don’t want to do this, Limi,” the mutilated thing said sadly, as it thumped slowly and awkwardly toward him. “The choice was yours, I fear, as it was when you began this battle, Limi.”
“Speak not my name, foul witch of darkness!” the High Court Mage howled, snatching out his last item of magic with trembling fingers. It was a ring on a fine chain; he slid it onto one of his fingers and pointed at her. The ring-finger swiftly lengthened into a lone, hooklike talon and began to grow scales. “You serve a foe of the realm,” he cried, “and must needs be struck down, that Cormanthor endure!”
The ring flashed. A last beam of black, deadly force shot out.
The shuffling body halted, shuddering with fresh violence, and Ilimitar laughed in crazed relief. Yes! It was finally over! She was falling.
The broken thing crashed into his shoulder and slid down his body, brushing him with its lips as it fell.
There was an instant of crawling magic that made Oluevaera Estelda retch uncontrollably as the Overmantle surged in through every orifice of her body, and then out again.
Then it was gone, like mist before a morning sun, and she was on her knees, whole again, before the body of Ilimitar—who had just simultaneously received every spell and magical discharge he’d poured into her.
She still hated that spell. It was as cruel as the long ago elven mage who’d devised it—almost as bad as Halgondas and his Overmantle. Moreover, its caster had to feel the pain of all that was done to them—and Ilimitar had been so enthusiastic in his attempted destruction that the pain would have driven most mages mad. But not this one. Not the old Srinshee.
She looked down at the heap of blasted, smoldering bones in front of her, and started to cry again. Her tears made little hissing sounds as they fell into the dying fires that flickered within what had been Ilimitar.
“Blood of Corellon, it’s raining trees now!” Galan Goadulphyn snarled, springing back and raising his cloak hastily before his face. The fallen duskwood bounced deafeningly as it shattered in front of him, hurling dust and splinters in all directions.
“There’s a spell duel going on up there, for sure,” Athtar said, peering upwards. “Hadn’t we better get out of here? We can come back for your coins later”
“Later?” Galan groaned, as they hastened away together. “If I know bloody yapping mages, they’ll split that mountain apart before they’re done, and either leave my cache revealed for every passing sprite to see—or they’ll bury it keep-deep under broken rock!”
There was another crash, and Athtar Nlossae looked back in time to see a sheet of rock plunging down the cliff, bouncing and shattering as it struck outcroppings in its fall. “You’re right, as usual, Gal—buried it is, or will be!”
As he bent his legs to following the elf in dusty black leathers just as fast as they both could travel, Galan began to sort through his collection of curses. Loudly.
“You can’t hope to escape my magics forever, coward!” Delmuth told Elminster, as elven mantle and human shield struck sparks from each other, and yet another mighty old elven spell curled away into harmless smoke.
They stood almost breast to breast, as close as their warring spell-barriers would let them. Elminster went on smiling silently, as the angry elf hurled spell after spell.
Delmuth had discovered that so long as mantle and shield touched, the surging effect of his own spells rebounding on him was minimal; his own defenses didn’t crumble away so quickly at each magical onslaught. So he’d advanced, and Elminster hadn’t bothered to retreat.
The only place to fall back was over the edge of a cliff, anyway, and the Athalantan mage was weary of running. Let the stand be made here.
The heir of House Echorn hurled another blast—this one past Elminster, avoiding both mage and shield, in hopes that it would rend rock and spray him from behind with stone shards. Instead, it ripped a trench through the rock and spat the stone over the edge of the cliff, away into nothingness below.
El kept his eyes on the elf lord. This had gone on long enough; if Delmuth Echorn wanted to see a death so badly, it’d have to be his own. Safe inside his shield, Elminster carefully made an elaborate casting, and then another that called up his mage-sight, and waited. One advantage to battling elves with human spells was that they largely didn’t recognize the castings, and so could be surprised by the final results.
This one was Mruster’s Twist, a further modification of Jhalavan’s Fond Return. It allowed a mage who could think fast to change spells that were being returned to their caster into different magics. Now if this Delmuth was just foolish enough to try to blast a certain annoying human to dust, and keep close to Elminster as he did it, so he didn’t notice that the spreading furies of his spells were left over from their first strikes, and not their rebounds …
Delmuth enthusiastically proved he was just foolish enough, hurling a spell El had never seen before that brought into being a tray of acid above the victim’s head and let its contents rain down.
The hissings and roilings of El’s tormented shield were spectacular. Delmuth never noticed when the rain of acid was twisted into a surging dispel effect that clawed silently at his mantle.
Still angry, and thinking his foe was finally cornered, Delmuth lashed out with a second spell. Elminster put on a scared look this time to distract the elf from noticing that his energy blasts again melted away into something silent, and it worked.
Delmuth raised both hands exultantly and lashed his human foe with bladed tentacles. El reeled and pantomimed pain, as it some part of the fading spell had actually reached him through his shield. And Delmuth’s twisted spell ate away the last strength of his own mantle.
To El’s mage-sight, the elf was surrounded now only by flickering, darkening wisps of magic, the failing shell of what had once been an impregnable barrier. “Delmuth,” he cried, “I ask ye one last time: can’t we end this, and part in peace?”
“Certainly, human,” the elf replied with a feral grin. “When you are dead, then there’ll be perfect pea
ce!”
And his slender fingers shaped a casting El did not know. Force flickered, visible only in its settling outline; it seemed to be the same invisible evocation that human mages wove into what were called walls of force.
Delmuth saw El watching intently, and looked up, gloating, as the last radiances shaped an invisible sword, floating before Delmuth with its point toward Elminster. “Behold a spell you cannot send back at me,” the elf lord chuckled, leaning low over it. “We call it a ‘deadly seeking blade’ and all of elven blood are immune to it!” He snapped his fingers and broke into open, rolling laughter as the blade leaped forward.
They were standing only a few paces apart, but El already knew what magic he wanted to turn this unseen blade of force into. Delmuth would have been wiser to have wielded it in his hand, and hacked at El’s shield as if it were a real blade, giving El no time to twist it in the brief contacts.
But then, Delmuth would have been wiser never to have lured Elminster here at all.
El twisted the blade into something else and flung it back. As it struck the elf, Delmuth’s laughter faltered. The last gasp of his mantle, striving vainly to protect him as it scattered into drifting sparks, lifted him up off the ground to kick his heels in empty air.
He stiffened as Elminster’s twisted magic struck him, and then grew still, his hands raised into claws in front of his breast, his legs straining, with the toes of his boots pointed at the ground. The paralysis El had bestowed upon him took firm hold, and all that El could see the elf lord move was his eyes, widening now in terror and rolling around to stare helplessly at the human mage.
Or perhaps not so helplessly. Delmuth could still launch magics that were triggered by act of will alone, like Elminster’s shielding spells—and in the elf lord’s eyes El saw terror be washed away by fury, and then by cunning.
Delmuth hadn’t been so scared for a long time. Fear was like cold iron in his mouth, and his heart raced. That a mere human could bring him to this! He could die here, floating above some windswept rock in the backwoods of the realm! He—
Yet steady … steady, son of Echorn. He had one spell left that no human could anticipate, something more secret and terrible even than the blade. They’d been pressed together mantle-to-mantle; for his own to have failed, the human’s must inevitably have collapsed, too. Wasn’t that why this Elminster had pleaded for the fight to end? And now the human must think him helpless, and was standing there vainly trying to think of some way of slaying him with a rock or dagger without breaking his paralysis. Yes, if the spell was cast now, the human could not hope to stop it.
The “call bones” spell had been developed by Napraeleon Echorn seven—or was it eight? he’d never paid all that much attention to his tutors—centuries ago, as a way of reducing giant stags to cartloads of ready meat. It could summon a particular assembly of bones to its caster, so that they tore their way right out of the victim’s body. If the caster chose to receive the skull, the victim could not hope but die. Though Delmuth couldn’t come up with a use, just this moment, for a blood-dripping human skull, there’d be plenty of time to think of one …
Smiling with his eyes, he cast the spell. Elminster, your skull, please …
He was still gloating—humming to himself, actually—when the world darkened and the brief, incredible pain began. He could not even shriek as red blood bubbled up into his mind and Faerûn went away forever.
Elminster winced as blood fountained. When the grisly, blood-drenched thing came hurtling at him, he used his shield like the warriors’ object it was named for, deflecting the bony missile past him and off the peak, into empty air.
The last prince of Athalantar looked at the headless floating body one last time, shook his head sadly, and said the words that would take him back to the room at the heart of the haunted castle, and the Srinshee. He hoped she hadn’t wakened and found him gone; he’d no desire to upset her unnecessarily.
The hawk-nosed young man took a step toward the nearest cliff, and vanished into thin air. The buzzards waiting in a tree nearby decided it was safe to dine now, and flapped clumsily aloft. Their long, slow glides would have to be aimed just right; it wasn’t every day that the food was floating in midair.
“Gal,” Athtar said patiently, as they struggled up the second sheer rockface in a row, “I know you’re upset about your cache—gods above, half the forest knows it!—but we’ll come back for them, really we will, and it isn’t serving any useful purpose to—”
Something fast and round and the color of wet blood fell out of the sky and swept Athtar’s face away.
The body in black leather, limbs wriggling and twitching, fell past Galan. The thing that had killed Athtar bounced off his chest on the way, rolling to a stop in a tangle of roots beside Galan’s face.
He found himself staring into the sockets of an elf skull drowned in fresh blood—for the brief instant before he lost his hold on the crumbling ledge and found himself falling down, down into the darkness that had claimed Athtar.
Elminster took one step into the dark chamber, and saw that something was very wrong. The Srinshee was gone, and a young, naked elven girl was on her knees before a sprawled, ashen skeleton, sobbing uncontrollably. Had his friend caught fire?
The young girl looked up, face streaming, and sobbed, “Oh, Elminster!” As she reached for him, El rushed into her arms, embracing her. Gods look down—this was the Srinshee!
“Lady Oluevaera,” he asked gently, as he stroked her hair and shoulders, cradling her to his breast, “what befell here?”
She shook her head, and managed to choke out the word, “Later.”
El rocked her, murmuring wordless soothings, for some time before her weeping subsided, and she said, “Elminster? Forgive me, but I am exhausted, and in grave danger of failing Cormanthor for the first time in my life.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Oluevaera lifted her youthful face to meet his gaze. She still had those wise, sad old eyes, El noticed. “Yes,” she whispered. “Go into danger once more. I cannot ask this; the peril is too great.”
“Tell me,” Elminster murmured. “I’m beginning to think hurling myself into danger is what Mystra sent me here to do.”
The Srinshee tried to smile. Her lips trembled for a moment, and then she said, “You may well be right. I’ve seen Mystra, while you were gone.” She raised a hand to forestall his questions, and said, “So you must stay alive to hear about it later. I’ve just power enough left to cast a body switch spell.”
El’s eyes narrowed. “To send me to where someone else stands, and him or her here.”
The Srinshee nodded. “The Coronal attends a revel this night, and there is bound to be someone angry enough to try to slay him.”
“Cast the spell,” El told her firmly. “I’m down a few spells, but I’m ready.”
“Will you?” she asked, and shook her head, impatiently brushing away fresh tears. “Oh, El … such honor …”
She sprang from his lap and ran quickly across the chamber. For the first time Elminster noticed that it was strewn with what looked to be wizards’ scepters of power, and even a staff. The Srinshee bent and plucked one up.
“Take this with you,” she said. “It has some little power left. One thing it can do is duplicate any spell you see cast by someone else while you are holding it. Handle it, and into your mind it’ll whisper its powers.”
Elminster took it and nodded. Impulsively she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Go with my good wishes—and, I know, Mystra’s blessing, too.”
El raised an eyebrow. Just what had happened here?
He was still wondering that as the Srinshee cast her spell, and blue mists whirled the world away again.
TEN
LOVE OFT ASTRAY
The love of an elf is a deep and precious thing. Misused or spurned, it can be deadly. Realms have fallen and been sundered for love, and proud elder houses swept away. Some have said that an elf is th
e force of his or her love, and all else just flesh and dross. It is certain that elves can love humans, and humans love elves—but in such meetings of the heart, sorrow is never far away.
SHALHEIRA TALANDREN, HIGH ELVEN BARD OF SUMMER-STAR
FROM SILVER BLADES AND SUMMER NIGHTS:
AN INFORMAL BUT TRUE HISTORY OF CORMANTHOR
PUBLISHED IN THE YEAR OF THE HARP
The mists rolled away and Elminster was in a garden he’d never seen before, a place of many tall, straight shadowtops soaring straight up like huge black pillars from a manicured lawn of mosses adorned with small mushroom plantings. High overhead, the leaves of the trees blotted out the sun completely, though El could see shafts of sunlight in the distance where there must be clearings.
Here the only light came from spheres of luminous air—globes that glowed faint blue, green, ruby-red, or gold as they drifted softly and aimlessly through the trees.
Elves in ornate silken robes were strolling among the shadowtops, laughing and chatting, and beneath each luminous globe floated a tray that held an array of tall, thin bottles, and layered platters of delicacies; at a glance, El recognized oysters, mushrooms, and what looked to be forest grubs in a plum or apricot sauce.
There was also an elf standing very near, and looking very startled. An elf Elminster had seen before—one of the High Court Mages who’d been with the Coronal when Naeryndam had taken him to the palace.
“Well met,” Elminster said to him, bowing politely. “Lord Earynspieir, is it not?”
The elven mage looked, if anything, more confused and alarmed than before. He nodded, “Earynspieir I am, human sir. Forgive me if I recall not your name, for I am in some anxiousness: where is the Coronal?”
Elminster spread his hands. “I know not. Was he standing a moment or so ago where I am now?”