by Ed Greenwood
“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.
“Who 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 Faerun 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?”
If Glathra of the war wizards noticed that her superior’s smile seemed a little forced and weary around the edges, she took no notice of it. She was too angry to notice much of anything that didn’t bellow at her, thrust a sword or spear in her direction, or hurl a spell that sought to separate her back teeth from the rest of her.
“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.”
“Ah, that would be her other mandate. Her obedience to the commandment of the Lady of Mysteries, the goddess all mages once held dearest, and will again.”
“What commandment?”
“To make the Harpers once more strong and numerous.”
“What? And you’ve let her do this? Raise an ever-present army of traitors in our midst?”
Ganrahast smiled gently. “And how exactly should we go about seeking to stop her? When we can instead watch from afar, and so learn exactly who each Harper is, what their skills are, and where they dwell?”
Glathra stared at him, chastened. “Oh. Ah. I see.” Then her frown drew down again. “How do we know she’s not aware of our scrying, and deceiving us?”
Ganrahast shrugged. “We know she is aware of our scrying. She’s told me-and the king-that Harpers want a stable, just, happy Cormyr, lightly ruled by a benevolent monarch. Happily, that’s precisely what King Foril wants, too. Storm doesn’t mind if we know who most of the Harpers are; she sees it as a good check and balance on Those Who Harp.”
Glathra frowned, shaking her head. “Yielding up such a weakness … I don’t think I’ll ever understand senior Harpers-or these self-styled Chosen of Mystra, either.”
Ganrahast smiled again. “I don’t think we’re meant to.”
The chasm was deep, its sides bare rock that was jagged in some places and smooth in others; the hardened flows of a volcano that was now nowhere to be seen.
What could be seen was an eerie purplish radiance deep down in the stony gulf, a glow that was sometimes half-bright and sometimes very dim. Great drifts and serpentine coils of shadow shifted constantly in the chasm air, undulating back and forth. A warm, sulphurous wind was blowing up out of the chasm. Those shadows were the smoke of some strange elsewhere blown upward by it, undulating endlessly as they came.
Horrid creatures came with them, long human-headed snakes with wings. There were also little ribbonlike eels that flew without wings, and spent much of their time restlessly coiling and uncoiling in the air. There were fat, wrinkled ovals with four batlike flapping wings each, that saw by means of a single oversized eye, and had cruel underslung jaws like sharks … and there were other things. They streamed up into Faerun, riding the shifting smokes, in a tireless invasion that plunged almost gratefully into the dark wilderland forests above the chasm.
A sudden blue-white star flickered into being in midair above the gulf, in the heart of that flow.
The shifting shadows shrank back from it, bending away in their endless streaming … as it grew, faded, and coalesced into-
A long-limbed, unclad woman floating upright in the air with her long, long silver hair coiling and whipping around her like a great tangle of restless, energetic snakes. Her legs were together, but her arms were flung wide, and in her clenched hands were two things that blazed with vivid blue flames. A chalice and a sword.
Their flames howled and snarled in all directions with a quickening hunger, many of them arcing back and forth across their holder’s breast as the two blue fires sought to join, visibly scorching her.
She tossed her head in pain, biting her lip and moaning from time to time, as the blue flames grew brighter and larger, their searing tongues longer.
“Elminster,” the hovering woman gasped, “where are you? Be with me! Be with me now! Oh, I need your strength …”
She sobbed, then fought for air enough to cry, “Elminster! Hear me!”
That cry was loud and borne far on the rising wind from the gulf.
Yet aside from some cruel laughter from the winged snakes rushing past, there came no reply at all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE PENALTY FOR TREASON IS DEATH
The Simbul let her head loll back on her shoulders. She was exhausted, shaking with weariness, and far from done.
And the pain was only going to get worse.
Back and forth across her the blue fire raged, faster and faster, the howls of the two balls of blue flame around her hands becoming a loud and continual roar as they built higher and higher. The dark creatures riding the shadows shrank back and mewed in fear as they scrabbled past.
The Simbul’s hands were blackened yet uncharred, burned but not consumed. The tongues of blue flames were twice her height, towering blazes that stabbed at the sky-and leaned inward to touch in the air high above her. There the blue flames wrestled briefly, then blazed forth with renewed fury, forming a single raging, roiling sphere of blinding blue flame that …
Boiled over, collapsing down into the gulf like an extinguished geyser. Behind that flood, from the chalice and the sword in The Simbul’s hands, came lances of blue, rays of eerie light that stabbed down into the roiling shadows in the depths of the chasm.
The Simbul turned in the air, tilting over until she could look down into the gulf below, moving her shaking arms to aim the rays issuing from the items she held, her body trembling with the strain. Stabbing at the rift far below.
Back and forth she moved, shifting the unfailing rays to rain down on the purple glow in the depths, seeking to obliterate it.
Slowly that radiance faded, darkening, and the shifting shadows faded with it, becoming tattered and sporadic rather than unbroken snakes.
The Simbul held her vigilance, watching and aiming intently, making certain the vivid blue fire she directed was consuming the shadows …
Suddenly those dark ribbons started to whirl around her, as if being sucked down a drain, the stream of monsters becoming a few struggling individuals, the shadows around them receding to reveal … still emptiness.
Shadows no longer shifted.
The purple glow was gone.
No wind blew up out of the chasm. It was merely a gulf of darkness a
nd bare stones, not a rift breathing out a stream of monsters.
The Simbul floated slowly up out of the gulf, blasting the slowest of the last handful of monsters flapping toward the forests with a few fitful bursts of blue flame.
Then she flew away, slowly and wearily, hanging in the air like a dead thing.
Soon, Alassra, a soft yet mighty voice whispered out of the air all around her, the gentle words like thunder in her soul.
Soon shall come the rest you ache for. The rest you’ve richly earned.
The room was dark and small, but its furnishings were rich, and the lone chair was surprisingly comfortable for such an ornate monstrosity.
Sraunter the alchemist would have been nervous indeed, sitting alone in the dark, in a palatial Suzailan noble’s mansion where he knew he did not belong. Yet the future emperor of Cormyr was quite content to lounge in the chair in Sraunter’s body, booted feet up on a gilded side table, locked into the anteroom by his own hand.
He was not, strictly speaking, alone. He had the cowering remnant of Sraunter’s awareness for company, crushed into a dark corner of the man’s own mind, and he had several small eyeball beholderkin tucked into the bulging breast of his surcoat, in case he needed them to deliver swift messages, or warnings, or pursue anyone.
At that moment, however, he was relaxed and content, his attention several rooms away from his small, dark refuge.
In that other, brighter nearby room, a meeting was taking place. A moot he’d caused to occur with his mental meddlings. A gathering of several of his subverted nobles and as many other members of Cormyr’s nobility-men he hoped to recruit to his cause without having to invade their minds directly. For each mind he forced himself upon was one more possible gap in his armor, one more way for inquisitive wizards of war to detect him. So given the patience that the removal of Elminster afforded him, it was time to see if the unwitting could be swayed to his cause by argument and their own inclination alone, rather than coercion.