Elminster Enraged sos-3

by Ed Greenwood

  Dragonskorn turned and nodded to the helmsman, who could see the needle-sharp tops of the Rauntrils ahead just as well as he could. Such peaks were perils as well as landmarks, and-

  There was a sudden commotion behind him. The helmsman gaped. Dragonskorn spun around-and started gaping too.

  The woman standing on the deck amid his startled crew was tall and queenly, despite being barefoot and either lightly or entirely unclad. He couldn’t be sure which, through all her hair. It was silver, by the Wildwanderer, and almost as long as she was-and it was curling around her like a colony of angry snakes or hungry maggots or-or-

  “Who is your captain?”

  Her question brought no helpful replies, but that was hardly surprising. The crew happened to be all male and the Sword’s recent schedule had kept them long from the company of women, so their swords were out and the air rang with their responses, the politest of which was, “Who by the waiting, wanton charms of Sharess are you?”

  “I am best known as The Simbul. Which one of you captains this ship?”

  Before she could receive any useful reply, she caught sight of Dragonskorn, and said, “Ah! It would you!”

  She strode toward him. Valkur and Baervan, she was bare skinned!

  “Saer,” she said politely, “I have no quarrel with you or your crew, but I must have the blueflame in your hold.”

  “Blueflame?”

  “Some of the enchanted things you carry glow with an intense blue flame that looks like fire but is not hot, and ignites nothing. I require it of you.”

  “You do.” Dragonskorn looked her up and down. “And you expect me to just yield them up?”

  The Simbul sighed. “No,” she told him, her face grave, “I expect you to resist me. I’d rather you continued to live, instead, but … I know too much of humans, down the centuries, to expect your polite assistance. Yet I’d be grateful-delighted, even-if you’d surprise me.”

  Dragonskorn smiled-and then sneered. “Oh, I’ll surprise you, all right. Take her, men! Yet remember: as your captain, I get her first!”

  As the crew of the Sword roared in glee and converged on the lone woman in a rush, The Simbul regarded Dragonskorn sadly and shook her head.

  Then she lifted one empty hand and gave them fire.

  “Magic! She has magic!” one crewman shouted warningly as a ring of flames blazed up out of nowhere, and the closest running men to the silver-haired woman all crashed to the deck like discarded dolls. Cooked and sizzling discarded dolls.

  “Well of course she has magic,” someone else snarled. “She appeared on our deck out of farruking thin air, didn’t she?” That same someone else hurled a hand axe, hard and accurately, right at the woman’s head.

  The Simbul watched it come, her face calm, and made no move to duck or leap aside. By the time it flashed up close to her, the air was full of hurtling knives and cutlasses, converging on her like the men who’d hurled them. She stood motionless, and let them all rush right through her, the axe first, to bite into or clang off whoever was directly beyond her. Cries and curses rent the air.

  Then there rose another roar, this one of fury-and the surviving burly crew of the Sword charged at the woman from all sides, their arms out to grapple and throttle.

  In a swirl of silver hair that hooked ankles, slapped blindingly across faces, and curled tightly around necks, The Simbul moved at last, ducking and rushing and diving like a Calishite dancer.

  Metal weapons flashed through her as if she were but an illusion, though her hair and feet and fists were solid enough, as she tugged one man off-balance to sprawl onto the upthrusting sword of another, then leaned unconcernedly forward into the vicious slash of a third man to jab at his eyes with two rigid fingers. Screams and grunts started to drown out the curses.

  Yet the sky sailors were neither cowards nor weaklings. When at last they buried her under their combined brawn, punching and kicking, she soared up off the deck in a struggling ball of arms and legs and entwining silver hair-and let out another flash of magic that left everyone stunned and senseless, to fall like so much limp dead meat and crash onto the deck. Or rather, to fall onto the heads of their fellows, as unseen magic deflected each falling man subtly this way or that, to strike a man standing below.

  A breath or two later, the deck was strewn with groaning or silent sprawled men, with barely a handful still on their feet. The Simbul descended to the littered deckboards and resumed her stroll toward Dragonskorn. “I only want the blueflame in your hold,” she reminded him calmly. “Not to take lives or harm your crew.”

  Shaken, Dragonskorn drew the long, curving saber at his belt. He knew it was magical, having torn it from the dying hand of a wizard’s bodyguard who’d fired fatal lightnings from its tip at some of his crew, and having used it since to drink in bolts of lightnings in the storms the Sword sailed through. Aiming it at her, he fed her lightning.

  It snarled into her, crackling through her hair and along her arms and legs, and he saw pain on her face. Snarling, he sent more lightning into her.

  The Simbul kept coming at him, walking more slowly.

  “Die, hrast you!” he shouted. “Die!”

  Her teeth were clenched in a silent snarl, agony creasing her beauty, but still she came, trudging right into the flashing, snapping maw of what his blade could lash out.

  And then, with a snap and a spitting of sparks, his lightnings died. Leaving her an arm’s length away, smiling.

  “Thank you for that,” she murmured. “I feel much stronger now.”

  “Do you, witch?” he shouted, infuriated, and he flung his sword down, to clang on the deck at their feet. “Do you?”

  He sprang at her, clapping both hands around her throat. And squeezing, tightening his two-handed grip with all the straining strength he could muster, until his face was red and his arms quivered … and she sagged, her eyes large and pleading. Doomed.

  Vaeren Dragonskorn threw back his head and laughed in triumph. He was still laughing when her fingers closed around his elbows, broke them effortlessly, then slid down to his wrists and served them the same way.

  His grip broken, he whimpered in agony-and she swung him up into the air and hurled him high and far.

  Overboard, far beyond the Sword’s rail, to scream his way down and out of sight amid the clouds below.

  As The Simbul walked the rest of the way to the covered companionway that led below, no one disputed her passage, or dared to come anywhere near her.

  Elminster ran like a storm wind, racing along the passage with her hair streaming behind her and her eyes afire.

  There! There were the two war wizards, Rune and Arclath beyond them, peering her way, calling her name.

  And there, beyond them on the floor, sprawled in a dark and spreading pool of blood, was Lord Constable Farland, whose mind she’d so recently shared.

  A mind now fading and … gone.

  She had come too late. Once more.

  “Noooooo!” El screamed, a raw shriek of anguish that soared into fresh rage.

  Why could she never save the good ones?

  Why?

  There were, as it happened, only two blueflame items in the crowded hold. There were plenty of glows from other magics, flaring gold and copper and all the hues of the gems of Art as she reached out with the gentlest of seeking spells … but only the two sources of blueflame. A rod of office like a miniature Tymoran temple scepter, flared at both ends, and a crescentiform pectoral of beaten metal that looked like an oversized, too-low gorget.

  “Mystra,” she murmured, “what powers have these? And which ghosts are bound within them?”

  I know not, until you awaken them. I am … much less than I was.

  “I had guessed as much,” The Simbul said quietly. “How much do you remember?”

  Much and … not much. Memories mingled with memories, some my own, some from all of you Chosen and others loyal to me, those who survive and those who are … gone.

  “Can you sens
e us now, as we move around the Realms, striving on your behalf? Steal into our minds, and see what we’re doing?”

  Of course. You few. My daughters and my longest lover.

  “Lover? Elminster?”

  Elminster.

  “Wasn’t that the Mystra before you?” The Simbul dared to ask.

  Echoes in the Weave, my daughter, echoes in the Weave … we see and feel so much that happened before us, in the Weave; it becomes part of us, the memories of the Mystra who birthed you becoming part of me, so I become that Mystra …

  “I … see.”

  Then you see more keenly than I do, most of the time. I was mighty, once.

  The Simbul could think of no reply. She was too busy, all of a sudden, shivering.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  FEAR THE UNSEEN

  El,” Rune said anxiously, her eyes wide with fear, “we saw him slain! It was … a man, I think, half-seen, behind-”

  “Let me,” El snapped, kissing her, flooding into her mind, seeing it all in an instant.

  “… in …,” the dark elf finished her sentence in a murmur, already done. She let go of Amarune almost roughly, still afire with anger, and told them all, “We’ve a far better chance of fighting this slayer if we link our minds and stay linked, to share each other’s eyes.”

  “We?” Gulkanun asked.

  “All of us. Arclath, Amarune, you, Longclaws-and me. Linked, we’ll walk together, ready-armed, and approach prisoner after prisoner. We mind-touch each one and so eliminate them from suspicion, until we find the murderer.”

  “Who must be in the castle,” Longclaws agreed. “That sort of sustained attack can’t be worked through the wards.”

  Elminster and Gulkanun nodded in grim agreement. It was Gulkanun who reached out then, to take the dark elf’s hand.

  The linkage began as a disorienting, alarming experience. It was one thing to be cradled in the dark, wise power of Elminster’s mind, and quite another to share it with four other curious, fearful, and uncertain awarenesses, colliding and getting memories tangled together …

  El, Amarune asked in a trembling mind-voice, will we go mad?

  Fear not. I’m been mad for centuries. It’s not that bad.

  Centuries?

  Mreldrake sipped more tea.

  It was time to see and hear the results of the farscrying spell he’d left working while he’d made the latest adjustments to his slaying magic. Would Farland’s death leave them all despairing? Fleeing into the woods or swording each other or letting the prisoners go free? Well, of course, if he didn’t look, he wouldn’t know. He called up the spell.

  “Elminster!” two voices promptly shrieked together.

  Mreldrake spat out some curse or other, aghast … and discovered he’d spilled the dregs of his tea all over himself.

  Were they using a spell? No, they couldn’t be; it was the clever young noble and his doxy, who almost certainly hadn’t any talent for the Art between them, beyond being able to unleash magical trinkets they bought. They were shouting, no more and no less. Which meant Elminster must be someone inside Irlingstar, someone nearby in the castle.

  So Elminster must be in disguise, being as a certain imprisoned Mreldrake had already farscried every living person in Irlingstar, twice-including the two human skeletons walled up and forgotten in the foundations of the north tower-and not found Elminster.

  It had to be one of the war wizards!

  Rorskryn Mreldrake waited impatiently until the farscrying that the spell had preserved showed him the two war wizards-standing together, staring down in horror at what he’d done to Farland. Two of them, one with a hand that kept changing into different things-tentacles, polyps, strange nameless growths. A miscast shapechange spell … or, no, one being held always at the ready, for instant use against a foe!

  The other Crown mage wasn’t powerful enough to hope to cast a shapechange magic that was more than illusory, or that would last longer than the time the casting took. So this “Longclaws” had to be Elminster.

  Mreldrake stood up, carefully cast the spell that was now his crowning achievement, reached out into distant Irlingstar-and diced Imbrult Longclaws into so many ribbons of bleeding meat.

  Wizard of War Jarlin Flamtarge was unaccustomed to skulking, but he was young and agile and possessed a good sense of balance.

  So with Manshoon riding his callow mind and guiding him with the guile and wisdom of many dark years, he had moved through the castle largely unseen-and the few who had seen him had been swiftly silenced. Heh. Fear the unseen …

  All the shouting had come from this direction, so …

  He stole from room to room, until he was close enough to see and hear murmuring voices.

  “Linked, we’ll walk together, ready-armed, and approach prisoner after prisoner. We mind-touch each one, and so eliminate them from suspicion, until we find the murderer.”

  “Who must be in the castle. That sort of sustained attack can’t be worked through the wards.”

  Jarlin peered cautiously out the door of his room, whose former noble occupant now lay dead and out of sight.

  There they were, nodding and holding hands, swaying and saying incoherent things; establishing their linkage. And releasing each other, to turn and walk in his direction in smooth unison, truly united.

  Then came a dark swirling and much blood, as the shorter of the two war wizards collapsed in a welter of gore.

  The other Crown mage erupted into a ringing shout of anger and grief, the noble and his dancer whirled to cry to the drow, “Do something!”

  So Elminster was here-and the drow was Elminster!

  “Hide in the woman, of course, Old Foe …,” Manshoon said aloud, in Sraunter’s cellar. Then he bore down hard, making Jarlin an utter automaton for the moment. Your hands be mine, all of you mine to move …

  He forced Jarlin through the crackling, searing ward, into a charge at the shapely dark elf. Yes, pounce on Elminster and deliver a paralyzing touch spell, rather than trying to blast him from the cell with a battle spell.

  If this dark elf was a body Elminster had possessed, he could trap the Sage of Shadowdale in it, and hold the drow captive for torture and interrogation because there were things it could not do, that the unfettered Elminster could.

  Pounce, my pawn!

  Jarlin rushed, crashing through Gulkanun and then Arclath Delcastle, then leaping to grapple with the drow-

  Darkening air, as sharp as a razor, sliced down murderously at the lithely ducking drow-and cut Jarlin Flamtarge in two.

  “No!” His mind slapped with the wildly flaring agony of his dying pawn, Manshoon seethed, clutching his head and snarling in wordless rage. Who was this unseen slayer?

  Head ringing, he forced himself to straighten, then he bent all his strength to concentrating his will.

  He was the mightiest of mages, the emperor-to-be, not any of these puny magelings hurling nastiness around a prison castle! Not even Elminster had power enough to stand up to him! He would do what no other could manage, these days. He would reach back into that dead mind and force Flamtarge’s severed torso to work a spell. Just one.

  It would come unexpectedly from a dead man, and buy him the time he needed to frustrate this slayer, to keep him from killing Elminster before he, Manshoon, could capture Elminster and peel open his mind and force every sneering secret from him at last.

  Steeling himself, the future emperor of Cormyr cast a spell, wrapped it around his will, and flung his awareness at distant Irlingstar.

  The air glowed suddenly, the unseen blade of air audibly striking something unseen and magical.

  “You’re using the wards as a shield!” Arclath gasped.

  Elminster nodded grimly. There was another ringing shriek, as the air on the other side of the drow’s head flashed into brief radiance.

  “ ’Tis a man behind it,” El announced calmly. “One man, far from here …” Her face eased. “Gone. Didn’t want to be seen longer, and recognized.
Which means it’s someone who thinks they will be recognized, by one or more of us.”

  “M-manshoon?” Rune asked.

  The drow shook her head. “No. His mind, I’d know in an instant.”

  “Naed,” Gulkanun gasped, behind them. “Oh, naed!”

  Hearing the horror in his voice, they whirled around-in time to see the severed torso of the young stranger writhe and spasm and shove at the flagstones to sway unsteadily upright.

  Dark, wet blood was still pumping out of it, and its hands glistened with gore, hands that moved in sudden, deft gestures as the torso swayed.

  Arclath cursed and drew back his blade to chop down those hands and ruin whatever magic was being worked, but Elminster flung out a swift and strong arm to catch and hold the young noble’s sword arm.

  “Someone afar is working through this dead man, to cast a spell I know. Let him work it. It will keep the unseen slayer out of this passage for some time.”

  “What if he goes on to cast something that fries us?”

  “Then I’ll let you chop him apart, bloodthirsty young Delcastle.”

  “Won’t Arclath be in danger, if he tries that?” Rune asked quickly.

  The dark elf gave her a grim smile. “Of course.”

  Manshoon groaned. He’d done it, but his head …

  Later. Give in to the pain later.

  Right now, he had to earn his superiority one more time, and beat everyone.

  He already knew the best “tracer” among the war wizards: Ondrath Everwood, a quiet and timid youngling who spent most of his days in a nondescript upper floor office of an unassuming building in Suzail-one of the Crown’s “hidden houses” in the city-farscrying for Crown and court, to order.

  Ondrath Everwood didn’t get out enough, to breathe fresh air and see the sun. So it was high time someone paid him a social call.