by Ed Greenwood
“My father,” Sornstern replied triumphantly, “and he had it from that infamous hot-breeches Old Mage the tales all tell about: Elminster of Shadowdale. In return for hiding the Sage of Shadowdale for a night and letting him drain a decanter of half-decent wine. The old fool thought he was getting Father’s best.”
The two lordlings snorted and sneered together for the thousand-thousandth time over the gullibility of the lower classes, ere Windstag stiffened as another thought struck him.
Leaning forward excitedly, he asked, “So just how many of the Nine were bound into items? How many does Marlin control?”
Sornstern shrugged. “I think just the two, but in truth I know not. I did notice that Marlin said nothing at all about blueflame ghosts to us, for a good long time after he was sending them out into the city.”
Windstag smiled. “Would you, if you stood in his boots? They’re his secret weapon against the Obarskyrs.”
“Or us,” Sornstern told his friend thoughtfully. “Or us.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
FEARFUL FOR GOOD REASON
If ye can hurry, lass, now would be a fair good time to do so,” Mirt growled from the mouth of the alcove.
“Helmed horrors?” Storm asked, not moving from where she lay pressed against Amarune, forehead to forehead. She was so close …
“Aye. A dozen or more. Floating down the street as menacing as ye please. Striding on air.”
Storm closed her eyes. “How far off?”
El was almost completely himself again. Almost.
“About ten strides. Nay, six now. Too stlarned close—!”
Mirt grunted that last word as the foremost empty suit of armor descended onto the cobbles in front of him and swung its greatsword, its baleful inner fire pulsing.
Steel rang on steel as Mirt parried, puffing. He dared not duck aside with the lasses behind him needing to be shielded. The horror swung again as a second one floated down to the cobbles.
Mirt shook his head. The moment it walked up beside the first one, he was a dead man. “Storm?” he growled. “Got any miracle magic? I need it now!”
“Aye,” came a familiar deeper, rougher man’s voice from behind him. “I believe I do.”
Mirt sighed with relief and lurched aside. As the horror promptly stepped forward into the spot where he’d stood, to swing its sword again, Elminster murmured something—and the night exploded in an angry emerald flame.
Or was it a bolt of something else? With a weird burbling sound that was part exulting song and part keening saw, it spiraled down the street in a slowly expanding, blazing cone, plucking the walking suits of armor up into itself as it went. Every last one of them.
Greatswords, gauntlets, and helms could be seen whirling around and around the moving, expanding glow, swept down it as it sputtered, darkened, sputtered again—and abruptly winked out.
Leaving the street dark and empty, save for one blackened, bouncing helm that clanged on the cobbles and fetched up beside Mirt’s boots, ruby red internal fire still roiling inside it.
El reached down with one of Amarune’s long-fingered, graceful hands, caught up the helm, and murmured something swift and simple over it that made its red fire shrink smoothly into an endlessly whirling sphere. Then he tossed it to Storm. “Keep this for healing later, when we need it.”
He stalked along the street toward the corner. Mirt lurched along warily in his wake. Shapely young lass or not, she moved like Elminster when he was angry—and when Elminster was angry, things tended to get spectacular.
Dardulkyn was no longer at his window, and the panel inside was closed across the hole where Arclath had burst through it.
Elminster regarded the broken shards around the edge of the missing window for a long, silent breath, then lifted his arms and unhurriedly worked a spell.
The mansion wall vanished with a roar, laying bare the innards of half a dozen rooms and causing an overhang of suddenly unsupported roof-slates to groan, lean forward—and drop, one by one, to shatter loudly on the ornate iron fence below.
Mirt gaped, then winced.
As a door at the back of one of the shattered rooms flew open and an astonished Larak Dardulkyn stared at the sudden ruin of one end of his home.
He glared at the young mask dancer, who still stood with arms raised in the last gesture of her casting. Throwing up his own arms dramatically, he spat out an angry-sounding spell.
The air was suddenly full of flame, snarling spheres of it that expanded with frightening speed as they rushed through the air at Rune. Mirt cowered back around the corner, flinging out an arm to warn Storm, knowing even as he did so that he was too late to do anything, too late even to cling to life, as—
Above them, the highest of the fiery spheres came to an abrupt, shuddering stop in midair, as if it had struck an unseen wall. Its angry orange-red flames went blue, then green, then blue-silver—and fell away to nothing, plunging toward the cobbles like spilled sand but vanishing utterly before they landed.
Timidly, Mirt peeked around the corner again.
This time it was Dardulkyn who was gaping. His spell was gone as if it had never been—and he’d watched it shatter in midair, seen the angry young lass down the street foil one of his greatest battle magics in an instant.
She couldn’t do that. No one could.
“Who—who are you?” he snarled, turning a ring in frantic haste to call up his strongest shielding magics. Without waiting for a reply, he ran across the riven, open-to-the-night room, heading for where his mightiest magical staff awaited, behind its own panel.
“The name,” came the calm, almost insolent reply, “is Elminster.”
Rune’s nimble fingers moved again—and even as Dardulkyn wrenched open the panel and closed his hand triumphantly around the gleaming black grip of his most potent staff, feeling its power thrumming through him, Elminster’s next spell struck.
The sound was like a thunderclap, despite the stormless night sky. This magic was no tidy vanishing, but a series of bursts that blew apart several deeper rooms of Dardulkyn’s mansion, hurling their stones and plaster and all high and far into the night sky in the general direction of Jester’s Green. Plucking the crackling, angrily pulsing, and ultimately exploding staff from the mage’s hands in the midst of their punishing tumult, the bursts whirled it away across the night sky with the rest of the wreck … and left. As the last rolling echoes of the magic rebounded off nearby buildings, and dazed and bewildered folk started to thrust their heads out windows, a stunned and terrified Larak Dardulkyn clung to the edge of the opened panel amid the smoking ruins.
His grand black robes were shredded, and many busily winking motes of light appeared and disappeared up and down his body in mute memorial to the shielding and warding magics that had kept him alive but paid the price.
With a sound that began as a groan but ended as a sigh, a fanglike remnant of an interior wall toppled over into collapse.
Leaving Dardulkyn clinging to nothing at all.
He fell to the littered floor in a huddled heap, only his terrified stare telling Mirt that he was still alive.
Above the fallen wizard, his four direhelms hung in midair, a motionless square facing inward, guarding doors that were no longer there.
At the sight of them, Elminster sighed. Then he moved one hand in a swift, complicated spellweaving.
For many pounding heartbeats, nothing seemed to happen. Then, there came a single clink. Followed by another. And another.
Something fell.
Then, in a series of clinks and clanks, pieces of armor plate fell from all four floating menaces. More followed, in an ever-swifter sequence of plummeting. Until nothing was left floating at all, and heaps of metal festooned the floor around the quivering Dardulkyn.
Who could only watch, mewing in disbelieving fear from time to time, as the fallen metal started to rust before his eyes with uncanny speed.
By the time he’d swallowed twice or thrice, it had all crumbled
to reddish brown powder. Even the sword hilts.
“You can cry now,” Elminster told the huddled archwizard gently. “As wizards seem to be all too fond of saying, these days: We all have to start learning about the world sometime.”
Marlin Stormserpent had hurried home groaning in fear. It had all gone wrong!
What to do now, what to do now?
Did he even have any blueflame ghosts at his command, anymore?
He couldn’t get that sight of one of his ghosts being hurled across the Promenade out of his head. It had looked just like an ordinary hiresword, a man who could be killed as swiftly—and stlarn it, easily—as other men, a man with a sword who just happened to have some pretty blue flames around him. Why, a hedge wizard could conjure up such a look!
He’d thought himself so powerful, so important …
The ghosts had made short work of Huntcrown, but—but—
Were they anything more, now, than bright banners pointing him out as a traitor to anyone who cared to look?
Ganrahast, the royal magician? That snarling bitch, Lady Glathra? The king?
He had a brief, dreadful vision of a chopping block in the palace stableyard, and Crown Prince Irvel waiting beside it with a large, sharp sword and a ruthless smile—
Shaking his head to banish that imagining, Marlin strode across the room, bound for his favorite decanter. He’d made a proper mess of—
Oh, no.
Behind him, rich blue radiance had blossomed seemingly out of nowhere and glinted back reflections from all his decanters. Clapping one hand to the hilt of the Flying Blade and snatching up the Wyverntongue Chalice with the other, Marlin whirled around.
The ghost was smiling, of course. The blueflame ghosts always did. Wide, terrible smiles, malicious or madly gleeful, and obviously false.
At odds right now with the angry hiss Treth Halonter, who long ago had been the best warrior of the Nine, was giving Marlin as he strode through the wall. His worn and nondescript leather war harness looked torn and battered, some of the leather hanging in frayed tatters. In the heart of fainter, more flickering blue flames than usual, the warrior leaned forward threateningly.
“Sent us into the maw of mighty magics, you did,” he whispered, as if wounded inside. “You pewling, prancing idiot.”
Marlin somehow got himself around behind the table he’d grabbed the Chalice from, and from the skimpy shelter of its far side snapped fearfully, “You serve me! Remember?”
Drawing his sword in desperate haste, he held it up before him, with the Chalice, as if they were holy things that could ward off the furious ghost.
“I do. Oh, I do,” Halonter replied, glowering over his wide smile. “In fact, lordling, I’ll never forget.”
“I—I’m sorry. I saw the—what happened to the door. Uh, and you. But I really couldn’t have foreseen that any wizard of war would be so crazed as to destroy part of his own palace just to smite you! Could I?”
Still wearing that terrible grin, Halonter swung his sword in a deft arc that severed a row of fresh, unlit candles and the neck of one of Marlin’s oldest decanters, slicing it without shattering the vessel or toppling it.
Marlin shivered at the thought of how sharp the ghost’s blade must be.
“No, I couldn’t,” he answered himself shakily.
“No,” Halonter hissed, “you couldn’t.”
He took a menacing step forward, until he was against the table and Marlin could smell Halonter’s faint, acrid reek. Like soured wine and a mix of many spices.
“More fool you,” the ghost added, shoving the table forward.
It might well have pinned Marlin painfully against his best sideboard, but fortunately for the noble, a stone replica of a figurehead of a long-ago Stormserpent ship flanked the piece, massive and solid and as immobile as the wall behind it. The table struck it and could be shoved no farther.
With a snarl the ghost spun around and stalked away, across the room.
“Relve!” he spat. “How did he fare?”
“I—I—”
Stammering in dread, Marlin had gotten no farther by the time the wall Halonter had come through glowed blue again—a dark, feeble blue—that became the hunched-over, staggering Relve Langral.
The second ghost’s flames were weak, flickering shadows, and he looked as if he’d lost a brawl with a cleaver-wielding butcher. Or three.
“You,” he snarled at Marlin, “sent me up against some sort of mighty phantom! A mistress of the blade, or lady master of the blade, or whatever the tluin one calls a woman who can make her sword dance and pirouette and pour stlarning wine for her! Her sword was part of her—its touch seared me! She could fly; she could fade away; it was all I could stlarned well do to parry! Send me no more to fight proud ghost princesses in their very palaces! Bah!”
He lashed out with his sword, but the slash that should have shattered a row of unopened, expensive bottles of vintages from afar sliced only empty air as his leg gave way. Langral staggered helplessly sideways and crashed to Marlin’s carpet.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Marlin gabbled desperately, rushing to help the fallen rogue—but halting abruptly as Halonter thrust out his blade warningly.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Use us wisely,” Halonter hissed. “Less often. And not soon. We both need time to heal.”
“You can heal in—in here?” Marlin burst out, waving the Chalice.
Halonter gave him a long and silent look that clashed in its naked balefulness with his wide and tireless smile.
Marlin shrank back from him, then scuttled to the side door and through it into his robing room, hurriedly shoving a chair to block the closed door. From behind it, he began forcing the two blueflame ghosts back into their items.
Halonter said not a word but never stopped glaring. From the floor, Relve became hissingly, profanely hostile.
It was not until they were both gone, and Marlin was standing alone and drenched with sweat, that he realized what had frightened him most of all.
Both ghosts had been deeply scared.
Well, so was he.
“I must flee Suzail,” he told the room around him, grimly. “Right now.”
Kicking the chair aside, he strode back to the table, set the Chalice on it, then stormed around the room plucking up things he’d need.
“Weathercloak, lantern, coins in plenty, spare dagger, my old hunting boots rather than these stylish things …”
The King’s Forest came into his head. Yes, that’s where he’d go.
Even now, when all the lords who mattered were here in Suzail and the fate of the realm on a carving platter in their midst.
Yes, he was going.
Why? Because, stlarn it, he was afraid.
Lady Glathra’s glare flashed before him, then Halonter’s baleful look, then the weight of the dark and evil will that had ridden his mind so often …
“I’m stlarned well fearful for good reason,” he snarled aloud, striding back to the table to stare down at what he’d accumulated.
Oh, he’d need a royal warrant to get the city gates opened, by night. Good thing his father had been of the generation who thought every noble House should bribe courtiers for a handful of the things, in case of future need.
The warrants were yonder, hidden in the drawer on the underside of the little Amnian table, with the—yes—poisoned daggers he’d probably also need.
Ah! He’d be lighting that lantern how, exactly? Flints and strikers, the ones that adorned their own tinderbox. After all, he’d have no servants to call on, out there in the forest.
The forest. Where in the forest?
He could hardly go to the Stormserpent hunting lodge. The moment Glathra’s wolves found him missing from home, that’s where they’d go looking.
No, it would have to be another lodge he knew, one where he’d be less likely to be found.
Which meant a place belonging to one of his admittedly few friends, his
band of fellow traitors.
Windstag.
Given his wounds, the stain he’d brought on himself hunting the hand axe, and his vanity, Windstag wouldn’t be setting foot barefaced outside the gates of Staghaven House for days. Which meant he wouldn’t be using his lodge for some time, being as no other living Windstag had any stomach at all for hunting.
That’s where he’d go.
But not alone. Not in those wild reaches. Not when the king’s foresters might well treat him as badly as any desperate outlaw with a sharp knife.
He’d take three of his men, the best bodyguards left that he could trust.
As much as he could trust anyone, of course.
And wearing the wry and bitter grin that thought brought to his lips, Marlin hastened out of the room with his bundle, seeking saddlebags.
After all, he’d also be taking the four fastest horses.
“One spell too many,” El muttered as Storm wearily lay down atop him again and took hold of his chin—Rune’s smooth chin—in both hands to press and keep their foreheads together.
Their minds sank into each other in the familiar melting … and the healing began anew. Neither of them wanted to notice how dark and tired Storm’s mind was.
“Always the grand gesture,” she hissed, her breath holding a hint of cinammon. “The one last touch. The magic too far.”
“ ’Tis important, Stormy One,” he replied. “The right impression can save a dozen battles, or more. Cow thy enemies—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” She sighed. “Just cow them with fewer castings next time, hey?”
“I will, love,” he murmured. “Or ye’ll be the one staggering and falling, I know.”
Storm murmured something wordless and contented against him, her mind warming in a flare of pleasure.
El wondered very briefly what he’d said to cause that reaction … and then forgot it along with everything else, as the healing reached the stage where he always slid into oblivion.
Wonderful oblivion …
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
HIDING AND SEEKING