by Ed Greenwood
"I mean, wizard," Amglar explained in wearily patient tones that brought secret smiles to the lips of a few swordcaptains, "that it's the place our foes expect us. Just as they knew we'd pass by this spot."
He waved at the road behind them and the dark and silent bulk of the Standing Stone beyond. Three hundred armsmen and six score war horses lay dead along the north road, heaped cottage-high under the stars… and already the wolves were howling, nearer each time. Amglar tried not to think of the fallen. The dead were beyond his orders; it was the living he had to worry about.
"So?" the Zhentarim said coolly. "They hardly have enough blades to hold a ruin against us, even in the dark. And my spells can make it bright as day, so our archers can keep to the night and strike down well-lit targets as they please."
"I'm thinking there'll be traps there, not defenders," Amglar said heavily. "I don't suppose you can see into the place from here, can you? Or better: let our veteran swordcaptains look at things. They'll know traps better than either of us." To say anything else might make this Spellmaster hurl spells in a fury, and after what had befallen so far, that would be all the Sword of the South needed.
The Zhentarim was shaking his head. "No, it's much too far to send an eye. I'd have to have seen the hold before with my own eyes to scry it with any of the other magics I carry."
"You've nothing that can help us?" One of the three lancecaptains said, not bothering to keep the contempt out of his voice. The spellmaster made a silent show of looking him up and down and committing his face to memory, but all of them knew any hostile move the wizard made in this gathering would result in his death. Not a few of the personal belt daggers around the map would be poisoned, too.
"You're a brave man, sir of the lance," Nentor Thuldoum said in silken tones, "if a foolhardy one. A wizard of the Network always has something that can be turned to use, and it's always more than his foes-and others," he added pointedly, staring around at the impassive soldiers' faces, "expect. I have a spell ready that can create a beast to explore the ruins for us… but only I will be able to see through its eyes."
"And if there's an enemy wizard at the Roost?" Amglar asked quietly. "Will such a one be able to see you through it-and send any magic through you, to strike us here?"
"No," the spellmaster said. "In fact, it's unlikely that any wizard who meets my creature will escape alive."
"Cast your spell, then," Amglar ordered, his voice riding over a murmur of disbelief at the wizard's words from the officers. "The sooner we know, the sooner we can act."
"Stand back," the wizard said curtly. "All of you." He drew himself up and glared around at the black-armored men-and their sullen faces. "Let no man disturb my casting, on pain of death. Lord Manshoon's standing orders apply here as in the Keep."
By the time the last of those words left his mouth, Nentor Thuldoum stood alone in the center of an open space perhaps twelve paces across, ringed by a warily silent audience. He looked around at them and smiled. Good; the more who saw this, the better.
From the safe pouch at his belt, Thuldoum drew a small sphere of blown glass that held a veined, gelatinous mass trapped in its heart. He held it on his fingertips, and for the benefit of the assembled soldiers murmured an incantation that was far longer and more impressive than it needed to be.
Then he made a dramatic and totally unnecessary gesture, and blew the sphere gently out of his palm. It plunged to the hard-trodden earth in front of him and burst with a tiny singing sigh.
A drunken man's nightmare boiled up from where it had been, growing with frightening speed, rearing up until it was larger than a horse. Men gasped and backed away in gratifying alarm; the spellmaster smiled tightly at them and pointed west and a little south, into the trees. His creation gathered itself up and drifted obediently off across the road, soldiers scrambling to get out of its way.
It was a shapeless bulk of translucent gray-white jelly that swam and flowed constantly. Countless staring eyes and silently snapping mouths slid across its changing outer surface, appearing and disappearing with bewildering speed.
"A mouther!" one of the veteran armsmen gasped. The drifting thing did look like the deadly gibbering mouther of yore… though no gibberer had ever risen man-high off the ground and flown about at a wizard's bidding, so far as Thuldoum knew.
Then it was gone into the trees, and his world became a place of dark trunks and branches and shifting shadows, looming up before him, thick and tangled…
"Bring me a seat," he said, not breaking his vision from his creation, "and something safe to drink. Someone who knows traps and castles should stand by me, too-we'll both have questions to ask each other when my creature reaches the Roost." Galath's Roost, Mistledale, Flamerule 16
Galath's Roost had been blasted apart four centuries ago by mages who knew their business. Since that day, the small keep atop its stony height had been swallowed by the forest. Massive duskwoods and cedars rent what was left of its walls and yet held them up, their trunks cupping chambers that were open to the sky and walls that ran to nowhere. Their leaves all but hid the riven keep from view… but if one stood a little way off and in just the right spot, the faint flicker of a fire glimmered through the trees.
The room whence the fire came had one wall open to the night-but the two pilgrims who'd built the fire and now huddled around it had good and prudent reasons for not choosing any of the better-preserved rooms in the Roost. They were discussing that now.
"A good job, they did," the taller one said grudgingly.
"You're certain they left this room safe?" asked the other, clutching his expensive talisman of the god under his chin. The gilded image of Tyr's warhammer and scales shone back the firelight, serene and unchanging.
"All but that door," the first one replied, pointing. "If you go out that, a very large crate of rubble will fall on you."
"Ah," said the other. "I'd best go water the gods' gardens out the way we came in, then." He sipped from a battered tin cup, making no move to get up, and added, "A good thing we found that cellar, or they'd have seen us, sure."
"That was no cellar," his tall, lean companion chuckled, scratching under his much-patched tunic. "That was the castle cesspit."
"What?" the shorter pilgrim said, staring down at his boots and then at his elbows and his cloak-but finding no foulness. "Is my nose as bad as all that, then?"
"After four hundred years," his companion told him kindly, "dung is just dust."
"Huh," the shorter pilgrim agreed, and launched into a dry chuckle that ended in a fit of coughing. "I guess the Realms're covered deep in old dung, then. Urrrgh. Auuh." These last two comments accompanied a grunting attempt to rise-an attempt that ended in a disgusted wave of one dirty hand, and a return to a more or less comfortable lounging position against a pile of moss-cloaked rubble.
In all the activity, neither devotee of Tyr noticed a dark, many-eyed bulk slithering silently out of the night, over the stones in the ruined end of the room. As they decided aloud that a prayer to the Lord of Justice might be prudent before they wandered off into the woods to relieve themselves, the thing of eyes and jaws crept unnoticed toward them.
"'Tis your turn to begin the devotion," the shorter pilgrim mumbled.
"Do it be in truth, Jarald? Or've you just forgotten the words to the Call of the Just again?"
"I've not! I remember them well!" the shorter pilgrim said heatedly. "Will you plague me with the misdeed of one night down all the years to come?" Behind him, unseen in the flickering confusion where the firelight played on a broken end of stone wall, something that swam with many eyes and hungry mouths reared up, looming darker and larger, drifting tendrils of itself across the ceiling to hang above the two oblivious pilgrims.
"I don't rightly know," his taller companion said, with a slow grin. "How long did you plan to go on living?"
From the darkness above came a sudden swift movement…
6
War Comes To Mistledale
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p; The fire was dying down; he'd have to make this swift. The taller pilgrim cleared his throat, lurched forward from a seated position to his knees, and began. "Hear us, O Great Balance, as we hear thee! From our knees we cry to theeeee!"
His words ended in a surprised cry as he raised his eyes to the firelit ceiling-and found himself staring at an oozing, descending blob of jelly that swam with jaws and eyeballs! And all of those eyeballs were staring at him!
The horrid thing lunged at him, seven or more sets of fangs biting the air hungrily as they came. The pilgrim flung himself backward and to his feet, out of reach, and the thwarted reaching thing turned with fearsome speed and struck at the other pilgrim.
The shorter man was already on his feet, watching the monster with a surprisingly calm expression of curiosity on his face. He sidestepped the attacking tendril-and found a second questing arm reaching down, almost upon him. He was trapped between them. As they reached in, he shrugged and grimaced.
An instant later, the many-fanged mouths opened wide for their first savage strike-but the pilgrims were gone. Two clouds of dark, whirling globules stood for an instant where the men had been. And then the jaws bit down. On nothing.
The globules crashed to the floor in a red rain that spattered the stones and put the hissing fire out. Amid the sudden smoke of its dying, the floor ran with small puddles that moved together with purposeful speed.
The many-fanged monster peered suspiciously around the room and came slowly free of the ceiling to gather itself into a floating sphere of questing eyes and gnashing teeth. It echoed the dumbfounded astonishment of the distant Zhentarim who'd created it; he'd never seen anything of the like before. Was this a spell? Were the two pilgrims of Tyr doppelgangers who'd learned a new trick? Or… something else?
The floating monster glared around the ruined chamber, but nothing moved except the thick, dark red fluid on the floor. Two holy symbols lay amid the moving gore, and tin cups and scabbarded swords and knives leaned where the pilgrims had left them, but their clothes were gone. The monster bent its gaze again on the moving liquid.
Slowly, as if with great effort, the red fluid was gathering, joining into two ever-widening pools. The creature watched for a long time; the pools became two rising, glistening red humps. Purposefully the fanged thing flew across the chamber to hang above one pool, and extended a forest of mouths with questing tongues, intending to suck up the pool.
With surprising speed, the pool leapt upward to meet it, roaring in a red column that plunged into all the waiting mouths. The fanged creature darkened, shuddered-and flew apart in a wet explosion of staring eyeballs and slime.
Gelatinous fragments of its riven body were flung to the far corners of the rubble-strewn room… but before they could stain the walls or floor, these wet remnants faded silently away into the air, as if they had never been.
The swordcaptains standing around Nentor Thuldoum nearly swallowed their tongues in startled fear when the wizard let out a sudden raw scream, clawed blindly and convulsively at them all, and then flung himself back in his seat, clutching at his head. The wordless wet gargle in his throat rose again into a screaming, a high keening that went on and on… and men pulled back from the reeling Zhentarim and drew their blades. They shivered.
"What should we do, Lord?" a swordcaptain asked, hurrying to where Swordlord Amglar sat watching, his back against the ancient bulk of the Standing Stone.
The commander looked up expressionlessly at the anxious officer and shrugged. "Either this passes, or it doesn't. If the latter, we'll put arrows through him from well away until he falls silent, and then burn the body." Amglar reached for the wineskin and goblet that sat on the grass beside him, and his lips curved into a mirthless grin. "Wizards are all like that, inside," he told the swordcaptain softly. "If their control is ever broken, all the screaming and wide-eyed raving bursts out, for us all to see."
The man shivered. "What does that to wizards, Lord?"
Amglar shrugged. "It's but magic sweeping away restraint. Mages are just men and maids like all the rest of us. The problem with our kindly Zhentarim is that they all seem to forget that."
In a ruined chamber deep in the night-cloaked woods, two columns of dark, glistening liquid grew slowly darker and more solid, shifting into manlike shapes. One sharpened into the likeness of the shorter pilgrim while the other was still a glistening humanoid, eyes and mouth just swimming into view on a face of red slime.
"That body?" the unfinished one asked disgustedly.
"Again?"
"You'd prefer this?" The shorter pilgrim flickered and slid, its clothes and bristles melting away into ivory-skinned voluptuousness. A breathtakingly beautiful female human caressed itself provocatively, posing with its hands in a magnificent fall of flame-red hair.
"Where'd you see that?" the unfinished one asked.
The second Malaugrym smiled. "Well, it's a long story…" Tower of Ashaba, Shadowdale, early Flamerule 17
"Is there more moongleam?" Elminster asked hopefully, holding out his goblet.
Chin on hand, Shaerl shook her head. "Not this side of the cellars, and I'm in no state to climb stairs now. Not after-gods, Old Mage, it's been six bottles! Doesn't wine touch you?"
"No," Elminster told her. "I just like the taste."
Shaerl rolled her eyes. "Of course. Silly of me even to think you'd get tipsy, or take headaches from wine, like mere mortals."
"Look ye, lass, it took me the better part of a year to get the spell right-and after all that, Mystra laughed and changed me with a wave of her hand! I could have saved myself hours-nay, days-of painstaking research!"
"Aye," Shaerl agreed dryly. "I can see how long and hard it would have been, drinking every night away to see how long it took you to start reeling, and if 'twas different than the night before."
"That's not how I did it, lass!" Elminster growled at her.
Shaerl spread her hands in apology and sighed. "I'd have more sympathy, El, if I didn't look in the mirror every morn and see myself getting older, fast. Not all that long ago I was ordering my gowns slit thigh-high to catch the eyes of young blades at feasts, and having gowns made to match so my parents wouldn't see until the coach was around the first bend, and I could strip them off! Now I couldn't even get into any of those gowns… if I still dared to dress like that!"
"Why don't ye dare dress like that?" the Old Mage asked, trying to peer around the edge of the table to see her ankles. "A few years and a child don't ruin one's legs!"
"But they do add to one's belly. Never mind about me… you know what I'm talking about, Old Mage. You've had centuries-and may well have centuries more. I'll be lucky to see sixty summers."
" 'Tis not the shining thing ye think it, this longevity," Elminster told her gravely. "I bury friends every day, it seems… and one grows so tired of it all. If ye didn't need me so sorely in the days ahead, 'twould be so easy to just bid it all good-bye and lie down in a tomb somewhere to dream the ages away… but ye always need me."
"I do?" Shaerl asked challengingly, but hastily added, "No offense, Old Mage."
Elminster waved a dismissive hand. "Not ye personally-thou art one of the bright spots, lass. Cormyrean noble ladies who can think for themselves are rarer than they should be! I meant the Realms in general, and Shadowdale in particular. There's something here that the gods need very badly just now-and I must guard it from them."
"Ah, with us caught in the middle, as usual," Shaerl said sarcastically. "Wonderful."
"Ye wanted adventure when ye left the castle of thy father," Elminster reminded her. "So ye took the oath to Azoun and joined Vangerdahast's service, were sent to Shadowdale and promptly married the man ye were sent to spy on… so here ye are. Too late by far to criticize the bed ye made for thyself, dear."
"I know," Shaerl replied in exasperation. She got up, leaning on the table for support, and then strode restlessly about the room. "It's just-"
She threw up her hands in surrender, whirled arou
nd, and ran to the old wizard, flinging her arms around him.
"I'm just so scared, El," she said, tears standing in her eyes as she stared into his. Her lower lip trembled. "Every time Mourn goes out that door, I think it's the last time I'll see him alive. Zhentil Keep attacks us every gods-be-damned spring… and now the entire world seems torn apart, with gods everywhere and orcs and brigands, and magic going wild! Mourn needs me to be strong, I know, when what I want to do is run away from it all, just the two of us, and-"
"The two of us? Ye and this old wizard? Miss, I'll remind ye that ye're married!" Elminster said primly.
"I meant Mourngrym, you dolt," Shaerl said scornfully, voice wavering on the edge of tears.
"I know ye did, little one," Elminster said. He folded her gently into his arms. That brought the explosion of sobs he'd known it would. He held the lady of Shadowdale, murmuring comforting promises and stroking her hair until her tears were spent.
She lifted her head from his breast at last, red eyed and wild haired, and blinked at him tremulously, morose thanks in her eyes.
"Ah, ye're done!" Elminster said brightly. "Now, how about that wine?"
"Ooohh!" In mock rage Shaerl snatched up a cushion from the chair and belted him with it.
"That's better," the Old Mage said gruffly, through the rain of blows. "Beat the wits out of the only archmage left to defend Shadowdale, that's a smart girl."
Shaerl let fall the cushion as if its touch suddenly burned her fingers. "Sorry," she whispered, turning her head away.
Elminster chuckled and clapped her shoulder. "I was jesting, lass. Why don't ye settle into a slightly more cozy position on my lap-one in which thy knee isn't pressing hard into this old bladder, mind-an' I tell ye all the wild tales about which avatar is walking where in Faerun, and what a mess they're making of things. When ye're thoroughly scared, I'll pass on to news of the main Zhent army, currently being warmly entertained in Voonlar by several hobgoblin bands I sent thence… ah, dropped literally atop their camp, actually."