by Ed Greenwood
Haemir Waelvor was shaking his head gingerly as if to clear it now, and his curses were gathering force.
He seemed on the verge of recovery while a certain ghostly Elminster certainly still hurt, acutely and all over.
Mystra curse him. He was going to drain these two lady sorceresses to husks while the last prince of Athalantar hovered over him on watch, powerless to stop him!
Of course, Elminster reflected wryly, an instant later, things could get worse—much worse. Right now, for instance.
One after the other, the outer wards were failing, sundering themselves in silent explosions of sparks at a certain point and fading away outwards from there. The center of this disruption was something that looked like a tall black flame, one that promptly split as it glided through the last ward, and died away to—reveal three tall, fine-boned elven males in robes whose sashes of flame-hued silk were adorned with twin falling dragons. The Starym had come.
“Hail, Lord Waelvor,” one said in tones of velvet softness, as the three figures strode forward together, treading air with a languid air of cold superiority. “What distress finds you here, in the empty night? Did yon ladies seek to defend themselves?”
“A watchghost,” Haemir hissed, his eyes glittering with mingled pain and anger. “It awaited, and struck me. I fought it off, but the pain lingers. And how does this fair night find you, my lords?”
“Bored,” one of them said bluntly. “Still, perhaps the old fool can provide us with some sport ere we send him to dust. Let us see.”
He strode forward, and the other two Starym drew apart to flank him and follow, moving their fingers in the intricate passes and gestures of mighty battle spells. They strode right past the Waelvor wizard and the crumpled bodies of the two fallen sorceresses. El hovered near Haemir, fearing he might take out his rage on the ladies, and watched the Starym strike.
From the cupped palms of one wizard white fire burst forth, rushing upwards in a sinuous column like an eel seeking the stars, only to burst apart into three long, serpentine necks that grew huge, dragonlike maws at their ends. Those heads shook themselves restlessly, and then bent and bit at the old stone tower. Where their teeth touched, stone silently vanished, melting away into nothingness and laying bare the chambers within.
From the fingertips of the second wizard red lances of racing fire then erupted, leaping into the revealed chambers of Mythanthar’s tower to smite certain things of magic. Some of those things exploded into bright showers of sparks, or blasts that rocked Starfall Turret and hurled slivers of its stones far away into the gathering darkness, to crash through trees to unseen distant landings. Others burst into rushing red flames, swirling into fiery pinwheels that hung here and there in the tower, pinned in place by the Starym wizard’s magic.
From the hands of the third mage a green cloud billowed, grew teeth and many clawed limbs with frightening speed, and flew forth into the tower, hunting Mythanthar.
A breath or two after its dive into Starfall Turret, something flared a vivid purple deep inside those shattered stones, and a bright bolt of that radiance snarled out, spitting aside the dismembered claws of the green monster as it came. Haemir Waelvor watched them spin down to crash into the shrubbery, and cursed in fear.
The three Starym flinched and scrambled away from the tower on the heels of his oath, as the purple radiance burst into three fingers that stabbed out at them, veering to follow each scrambling elf.
Personal mantles flared into visibility as they were tested; one mage stiffened, threw out his arms as his mantle turned to roiling purple and black smoke around him, and then fell hard on his face, and lay still.
The other two mages spun around and cried something to each other that El couldn’t catch; their voices were high and distorted in frantic fear. It seemed the old fool was providing them with just a trifle more sport than they’d expected.
The body of the fallen Starym spat sparks and sputtering wisps of dying spells as he expired. His head remained bent at a sickening angle against the old stump, but the rest of his body slowly melted its way into the ground.
Waelvor stared down at it in gaping amazement, but the two surviving Starym paid their relative no heed as they busily spun magic. Fingers flew and the very air around the two elves crackled and flowed, like oil sliding down the inside of a water-filled bowl. Tiny motes of light flickered here and there as the mages danced the measures of a long and intricate spell.
As the twin magics unfolded, two glowing clouds of pale green radiance faded into being above the heads of the Starym, shedding enough light to show the sweat glistening on corded necks and working jaws.
Then, with a silent flourish, one cloud coalesced into a sphere and began to spin. The second followed an instant later, and two globes of force hung in the air above the busy elven mages.
Haemir swore again, his features as sharp and white as if they’d been quarried out of milky marble.
A red mist streamed out of the riven turret, reaching for the intruders in a long, inexorable wave, and they were almost stumbling in haste as they plucked scepters, wands, gems, and various small and winking items out of their sashes and hurled them up into the spheres above their heads. Each item floated there, drifting lazily around among the other items in the spheres.
The red mist was only feet away when one of the Starym snapped out a single ringing word—or perhaps it was a name—and every item of magic in his sphere went off at once, tearing apart the very air in a darksome rift of glimmering stars that sucked in the sphere, the items, the red mist, and much of the gardens and front face of the tower before it vanished with a high sighing sound.
The other Starym mage laughed in triumph before he said the word that awakened the items in his sphere.
They rose, like flies disturbed from carrion on a hot day, and spat a deadly volley of bright beams into the tower, which burst apart amid deafening thunders, raining down stones all around and releasing a cloud of crimson dust as some ancient magic or other failed.
The rift in the wake of these beams was small, sucking in only the items themselves and the sphere that had contained them before it vanished; no doubt this was the way the spell was supposed to work.
The two surviving Starym were moving their hands again, weaving unfamiliar—but seemingly strong—magics as they stared into the tower. By their shared manner, Mythanthar must be visible to them, and still very much alive and active.
El made his decision. Scudding low across the darkened garden, he built up speed and smashed through Waelvor. This time the impact was like being hit across the chest by a solidly-swung log; it drove all the breath out of him in a soundless scream. He passed through the body of the mage and plunged into the head of the nearest Starym like a hurled spear.
The blow sent him spinning end over end through the night, shuddering in agony so great that it snatched all his breath away again, and a golden haze of dazedness began to swirl around him.
He had the satisfaction, however, of seeing the Starym he’d struck rolling on the ground, clutching his head and whimpering. The other Starym stared at his fellow in disbelief and so didn’t see the blackened figure that trudged out of the tower behind him, trailing smoke. An elf who could only be Mythanthar.
The old elf turned and looked back at the tiny flames that were now leaping from every stone of his shattered tower. He shook his head, leveled one finger at the mage who was still standing, and—as the Starym whirled around belatedly—vanished.
An instant later, a golden sphere erupted out of thin air, cutting the Starym neatly in two at chest level as it englobed his torso.
When the sphere imploded again an instant later, it took the upper body of the proud elven mage with it, leaving only two trembling legs behind. They took one staggering step and then parted company, toppling in different directions to the ground.
“You!”
The cry was both furious and frightened. El swirled around, still slowed and mind-mazed by his agonies, and
realized that the lone surviving Starym, now staggering up from the ground, meant him. The elf could see the human!
Now, if he could only survive to reach the Srinshee, and tell her …
The Starym spat something malicious, and raised his hands in a casting Elminster had seen before: a spell humans called a “meteor swarm.”
“Mystra, be with me now,” the last prince of Athalantar murmured, as four balls of roiling flame raced to positions around him, and exploded.
The last thing El saw was the body of Haemir Waelvor turning to ashes as it tumbled helplessly toward him, borne on roaring flames that were bursting forth to consume the world all around. Faerûn turned over, spun crazily, and then whirled away into hungry fire.
SIXTEEN
MASKED MAGES
The People looked upon EIminster Aumar, and saw, but did not understand what they saw. He was the first gust of the new wind sent by Mystra. And Cormanthor was like an old and mighty wall, that stands against such winds of change for century upon century, until even its builders forget that it was built, and was ever anything else but an unyielding barrier. There will come a day for such a wall when it will topple, and be changed by the unseen, unsolid winds. It always does.
That day came for the proud realm when the Coronal named the human Elminster Aumar a knight of Cormanthor—but the wall knew not that it had been shattered, and waited for its tumbling stones to crash to earth before it would deign to notice. That fall, when it came, would be the laying of the Mythal. But the stones of the wall being elven stones, lingered in the air for an astonishingly long while.…
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
Stars swam overhead, and eyeballs gleamed below. Elminster frowned as he fought his way back to awareness. Eyeballs? He rolled over—or thought he did—for a better look. The night around him slowly spun itself clear.
Yes, definitely: eyeballs. Scores of blinking and glistening eyeballs, flickering into being and disappearing again in a constant winking cloud as the bored and jaded elves of Cormanthor heard about the latest excitement and hastened to watch from a safe distance.
A few, by the way they drifted up to peer and blink at him, had definitely noticed the motionless, drifting ripple among the stars that was Ehninster—a ragged cloud of human-shaped mist, thinned from floating so long, senseless, above the riven stump of Mythanthar’s tower.
That still-smoking, charred heap of fallen stones was a sea of the little orbs, flitting here and there like curious fireflies as the eyes of distant elves peered at every last detail of the old mage’s revealed magic.
As Elminster watched them dart and peer with mild interest, he slowly became aware of his surroundings—and who he was—again.
Two Starym had died here, but of the third there was no sign. The bodies of the two sorceresses had also vanished; El hoped the Srinshee had whisked them away to safety and healing before less kind observers had spotted them.
Two of the floating eyes in the ruins below suddenly veered to look at the same thing, as if it had done something to interest them. Elminster swooped down to catch a look, startling several other blinking orbs.
The two eyes were staring at nothing. Or rather they stared at something blurred and twisted, rotating in the air and creating nothingness.
It was a cone or spiral of smoky strands that moved purposefully among the ruins, poking at a shelf here, and a pile of tumbled stone blocks there. Where it poked its open end, solid items vanished, whisked away to—elsewhere.
El drifted closer, trying to see what was disappearing. Stone blocks, aye, but only to clear a way through rubble to the space beyond. In that space—magic! An item here, a broken fragment of apparatus there, a stand yonder, a crucible just here … the helix of smoke was sucking up and stealing away things that Mythanthar had used to work magic, or that held spells stored within them.
Was this a thing Mythanthar himself was directing, to snatch away what could be salvaged before other Cormanthan hands seized what he was not there to defend? Or did it serve some other master?
It certainly seemed to know where magic might be found. El watched it root through a tangle of fallen spars—ceiling-beams—in one corner, to find whatever had rested on the table beneath, and then …
He drifted closer, to peer around the wreckage and see what the helix was after. There was—
Suddenly smoky lines were whirling all around Elminster, and Faerûn was twisting between them, rushing away. The magical gatherer must have been lurking below the lip of the overhanging debris, deliberately waiting for him. Everything was whirling, now, and El sighed aloud. Whither this time?
Mystra, he called almost plaintively, as he was whirled down and away into a darkening, sickening elsewhere, when is my task to begin? And what, by all the watching stars, IS it?
Long, long, he spiraled, until he almost forgot what stillness was, and could scarce remember light. Panic clutched at Elminster’s heart and thoughts, and he tried to scream and sob, but could not.
The whirling continued unabated, through a void that went on and on, heedless of the cries he tried to make. It made no difference to the void whether or not the ghost of a human called Elminster was present, silent or agitated.
He was beneath notice, and powerless.
Yet if he could do nothing, what was there to worry about? He had striven, and known the love of a goddess, and his fate now lay in Mystra’s hands. Hands that he knew could be gentle, belonging to one too wise by far to throw away a tool that could still see much use.
As if that thought had been a cue, there came a sudden burst of light around Elminster, and with it an explosion of colors. The smoky cage in which he moved veered into a misty blue area, and raced through it toward a lighter, brighter horizon. Was he rising? It seemed so, as he flashed through clouds of blue mist into—
A chamber he’d not seen before, its floor a glistening sea of black marble, its walls high, its ceiling vaulted. A mage’s spellhurling chamber, and in it one elven mage, floating upright, thin, and graceful, pale long-fingered hands moving in almost lazy gestures.
A masked mage, whose eyes flashed in surprise at Elminster’s sudden appearance.
The vortex of smoky lines was already whirling El across the chamber, to where a sphere of radiant white light floated, trailing mists of its own as if it was weeping.
The mage watched El spin helplessly across the room and plunge into the sphere, the smoky lines vanishing into the stuff of the sphere itself, leaving the human imprisoned. El tried to drift straight on and out through the curving far wall of the sphere, but it was as solid as stone, and his attempt merely took him on a looping journey around the inside of its curves.
He came softly to a stop facing the source of a brightening light outside the sphere: the masked mage was drifting closer, head cocked in obvious curiosity.
“What have we here?” the anonymous elf asked, in a cold, thin voice. “A human undead? Or … something more interesting?”
El nodded in grave greeting, as one equal to another, but said nothing.
The mask seemed to cling to the skin around its wearer’s eyes, and to move and flex with it. Beneath it, a superior eyebrow rose in amusement. “I require one thing of all thinking beings I encounter: their name,” the elf explained flatly. “Those who resist me, I destroy. Choose swiftly, or I shall make the choice for you.”
El shrugged. “My name is no precious secret,” he said, and his voice seemed to roll out across the chamber. Here, at least, he could be heard perfectly. “I am Elminster Aumar, a prince in the human land of Athalantar, and the Coronal recently named me an armathor of Cormanthor. I work magic. I also seem to have a blundering talent for upsetting elves whom I encounter.”
The mage gave Elminster a cold smile and a nod of agreement. “Indeed. Is your present
form voluntary? Good for spying out the secrets of elven magic, perhaps?”
“No,” said Elminster genially, “and not particularly.”
“How is it, then, that you came to be in the ruined home of the noted elven mage Mythanthar? Have you worked with him?”
“No. Nor am I pledged to any sorcerer of Cormanthor.” El doubted this masked wizard would consider the Coronal a sorcerer, and the Srinshee was a “sorceress.”
“I’m not accustomed to asking questions twice, and you stand very much within my power.” The masked mage drifted a foot or so closer.
El raised an eyebrow of his own. “And whose power would that be? A name for a name is the custom among the People as well as in the affairs of men.”
The masked mage seemed to smile—almost. “You may call me The Masked. Speak not again save in answer to my query, or I shall blow you away to nameless dust forever.”
El shrugged. “The answer is, I fear, as unrevealing as your name: simple curiosity took me thence, along with half the elves in Cormanthor, it seems, for I fairly swam in peering eyes.”
The masked mage did smile this time. “What, then, attracted your curious attention to that locale?”
“The beauty of two sorceresses,” El replied. “I wanted to see where they’d go, and perhaps learn their names and where they dwelt.”
The Masked acquired a cold smile. “You consider elf-shes fitting mates for human men, do you?”
“I’ve never considered the matter,” Elminster replied easily. “Like most men, I’m attracted to beauty wherever I find it. Like most elves, I see no harm in looking at what I cannot have, or where I dare not venture.”
The Masked nodded slightly, and remarked, “Most Cormanthans would deem this chamber around you a place they’d dare not venture into. And rightly so: to intrude here would cost them their lives.”
“And have ye come to a decision in the matter of my intrusion?” Elminster asked calmly. “Or was that decision made when ye ‘harvested’ me in the ruins?”