by Ed Greenwood
“That roster of the fallen is true, every one … and yet, bold lion, there was a time when you admired strong she-wizards! Or does your memory of fair Cormanthor and the glorious time of Myth Drannor fade?”
“Nay, but Mystra bids me nurture magic, not stand idly by whilst one ambitious mage, man or maid, cuts down wizard after wizard, snuffing out so much learning in moments!”
“So why have you not long since cloaked yourself in wrath and mighty weavings and lain waste to Aglarond, trampling down this Simbul at its heart? Are you afraid?”
Elminster snorted. “Foolish I may be, but afraid? Only of doing the wrong thing, if I may flatter myself thus far. Nay, whenever I resolve to challenge this Simbul, I hear Mystra whispering, ‘Look well, first.’ ”
“And so?”
“I’ve been too busy with other matters of magical import and service to Mystra. Yet too much time has passed, and ’tis more than fitting that I now cast down this Simbul … after looking at her deeds and manner as Mystra bids, of course.”
“You seem to have already made up your mind she must die, Sword of Mystra. Yet it might not prove so simple as all that; do you not fear defeat and death at the hands of this obviously mighty mageslayer? She is dangerous … she could kill you.”
Elminster spread his hands. “I could be overwhelmed and slain at any time, and what will the measure of my life be then? I am nothing but some small part of the service I have done to others.”
The flames seemed to shape a smile for him; a smile he knew so well that tears welled up again almost to choke him.
“I fade, El, so heed me now: If you go to Aglarond, go armed for the worst spell battle of your life. Go also with an open mind and prepare to be surprised.”
There was a great puff of spark and ash, and the fire went out, plunging the room into darkness.
AHHH, AND YOU WERE SURPRISED. YOU CERTAINLY DID YOUR PART TO MAKE FAIR FAERÛN AN EXCITING PLACE FOR MAGES—BUT I’M STILL NOT SEEING THE SECRET MAGIC I SEEK, AM I?
[bright images flying]
“Rumor, Lord Elminster, runs like a yapping dog; the truth creeps like a silent snail in its wake.”
Elminster sighed and nodded. “A nice phrase, Thauntar. Yet the wizards are dead—and an impressive heap of them, too.”
The one-eyed warrior shrugged in his mismatched old armor and replied, “I try to see truth, as the Lady we both serve taught me to, and I apprehend you may have heard far more than what is true. The treaty is not a war alliance, but a non-aggression pact. Aglarond achieves its own survival—for a few years, at least—and Thay wins an unopposed chance to infiltrate and influence.… In the longer term, they will absorb Ilione’s realm with a minimum of cost and effort.”
Elminster shrugged.
Thauntar raised one rusty gauntlet and added, “Moreover, this agreement was won only after the one called the Simbul slaughtered three sets of visiting Thayan emissaries.”
“Aye, and why would she do that? Were they all rude to her?”
“What Thayan isn’t rude to nigh everyone outside Thay? But there’s more, Lord: All of those envoys turned out to be wizards eager to spell-slay everyone in the palace, once they were settled inside it.”
“I heard this Simbul blasts almost every mage she meets with—and yet I can scarce believe the sum of her harvest, in so short a time!”
“The Simbul, Lord … and mark my words: she destroys only those who strike against Aglarond.”
“Oh, come—mages from Cormyr?”
“An embassy arrives from a city in Chessenta this very night, Lord. Yet Thayan agents lurk within its ranks. So, too, did Cormyr unwittingly harbor serpents of Thay.”
Elminster frowned. “I thank thee for thy counsel, wise Thauntar. I will go and see this Thay-slayer for myself.”
“That’s always best,” the warrior agreed. They nodded and then embraced, clapping each other’s shoulders. Waving their hands in salutes, they parted—the one in a whirl of spell sparks, and the other trudging on up over the hill in worn boots.
I SUPPOSE YOU LOVED HIM TOO, THIS BRAWNY WARRIOR?
NO, but Mystra did.
AND?
And nothing. He died.
HAH! HER TIME AND ATTENTION WASTED!
Not so. She does not regard humans as tools, to be measured by their usefulness to her ends of the moment, but rather as flowers to be nurtured in a garden. Each passing year holds a better display, and affords grander possibilities.
[diabolic snort, clawing aside of memories like cobweb curtains, pain visited on gasping wizard]
STOP WASTING MY TIME, ELMINSTER.
The Mouth of Moreyeus shuddered in open fear as the slender, wild-haired woman in the simple mauve gown languidly made the hand sign for peaceful parley. Her waist was girt about with a sash, not a belt, and she bore no weapon. Even her feet were bare on the grass of the courtyard.
“Aglarond bids you welcome,” she said with a smile that held sly amusement. Her hair was a fall of white splendor, but her eyes were dark mysteries. “All who would be our true friends are welcome here.”
Behind the gold-bedecked, many-ringed Mouth, in his gold-woven garments and spade beard, the other envoys and factors regarded her in silence. Some trembled openly. Others clenched white hands on weapons or talismans. Not a few were drenched with sweat.
She gave them all a warm, almost motherly smile and turned to lead them up the last bends of the path. Gracious and regal she seemed, more a ruler than an apprentice. Only a few stray motes of light, drifting like restless stars in her wake, revealed the might of her risen Art—a spell shield that would turn any treachery striking at her back. Not a man present thought that those little stars were visible by accident. ’Twas said that leaves did not dare drop in Aglarond without the Simbul’s expressly granted will.
The path wound amid pools of lily pads. Tiny bright fish called sunsilver leaped to snatch gnats from the air. The trail led up across shaded garden slopes to a side entrance of the palace. Warmed by the Simbul’s smile as she ushered them across the threshold, the embassy filed within. The seneschal stepped into their wake—and casually blasted certain of the men ahead of her to ash with a bright arc of ravening spells.
The untouched survivors screamed.
Behind a nearby tree, Elminster snarled a soft incantation. It spun an image of himself and set it in midair outside the door.
“Murderess!” he snapped. “Turn and behold thy doom! Thy slaughter has gone on long enough! I challenge thee!”
The bright silver lance of the spell that would have blasted him, had he been a living man, lashed out even before she spun around, eyes flashing. “Begone, minion of Thay.”
“I am no friend to Thay,” the bearded, floating man in black told her.
“If you do their work, you are a Thayan to me. All enemies of Aglarond are Thayans at heart, whatever allegiance they profess,” she snapped back.
Elminster raised an eyebrow. “Come forth and fight,” he said softly, “Slayer-from-behind.”
“I invited possible spies and vipers into this, the palace of the great queen,” the Simbul replied, darting a look behind her at coughing, staggering men. Lost in the smoke of her spells, they were blindly swinging swords. “They are thus my responsibility. I choose when and where to fight, man—and have no interest in petty duels. Get you gone.”
Elminster gave her a crooked smile in reply. He turned, eyes never leaving hers, and aimed his arm like crossbow. Bright bolts lashed out from his fingers. A palace turret flew apart and collapsed into the gardens with a roar.
That made her mouth gape open. His smile tightening, Elminster lifted his other hand and toppled a slender trio of spires.
Eyes blazing, the Simbul raised both hands over her head. From linked fingers, she smote him with a hungry flood of lightning.
The titanic bolt roared forth, shredding his spell-spun image in an instant. It bounced and screamed its way through the gardens and out of sight, quite drowning out Elmi
nster’s brief gasp of pain as he shuddered behind his tree.
“Ha!” the Simbul cried in triumph.
In reply, the turret beside the doorway where she stood blazed from top to bottom with sudden ruby flames—slumped into a hot river of rock.
“Fight me, or lose your palace,” a door gong beside her explained calmly. With a shriek of rage the Simbul turned and blasted it.
Another turret crashed down, and a sentry’s helm rolled out of its ruin past the Simbul’s feet. “Oh, is this a race to bury Ilione’s throne?” it asked.
The Simbul’s eyes burst into flames. Her hair writhed around her in a tempest as she rose into the air, arms as swift as speeding arrows. “Reveal my foe!” she howled. The air around her crackled with gathered power. “Show me this snake!”
Abruptly the sky filled with curving trails of force, a great web of crisscrossing paths … and there, behind a tree, a man who even now was weaving another spell.
The Simbul hurled tears of death at him, a magic whose slowly descending curtains of force would block any translocation. She snapped the word that would bring her girdle of scepters from her chambers to her.
Even as she buckled it around her waist, bright blades of force sheared away her deadly curtains, sending their energies spinning through the air. One whirling fragment became a snarling ball of flame and crashed among cottages downhill. It shook the ground, and fires rose there with greedy speed.
The Simbul turned from that destruction and tearfully screamed out her rage. Two of her scepters tore open the ground under her foe’s feet, spilling him end over end down the garden.
Few wizards would have dared to use both of those wands together. The magic snarling out of them seared the Simbul’s hands. Rampant energy clawed its way up and down her body, almost choking her. She bounded barefoot forward through the air and screamed, “Take this fray elsewhere, man, or so help me, I’ll bind us together with spells and hurl myself into the heart of Waterdeep—or an inner chamber of Candlekeep!”
Needles of force that were curling around her like gigantic pincers slowed to a stop. Her challenger’s voice came back to her: “Where, then?”
“Crommor’s Fang,” she spat. “Know it?”
“See ye there, murderess,” came the level reply—an instant before bolts of force raced down to strike her mantle. The Simbul’s world became a deafening inferno of numbing, dancing white fire.
A few familiar words snatched her out of raging doom and hurled her across half the Sea of Fallen Stars to the Fang. She was wont to hurl her wildest magics on it, or lie alone on its rocky height to look up at the stars. This time the Simbul was not kissed by the cool breezes of sunset, but rather muffled, warmed, and slowed in the heart of a bright, shimmering dome of magic.
Mystra, but this man was fast! A dueling ward of old Myth Drannor! She’d seen only one other, and that—
The ground beneath her grew stabbing spears of stone. They thrust up in energetic, many-pointed fury. The Simbul snarled an incantation that would turn them back on their source. One of two of the dissolving razors laid open her legs. She fell hard on unforgiving stone amid ribbons of her own blood.
The stones rocked under her with the fury of a distant explosion. Her challenger had no greater like for his spears than she did. The Simbul smiled grimly and used her trickling blood in a spell that snatched her across the Fang to where another human was bleeding. As the world whirled, she thumbed a locket at her belt and broke a tiny crystal therein.
Magic thrummed like a releasing bow. It rushed out around her, spinning a cage. Nose to nose in its crackling heart—a place where no spells could kindle—the Simbul and her challenger stared at each other. Her magic had happened to capture one of the few trees on the Fang, and its thorny branches groaned as the cage tightened around them. The air would be full of hard-driven splinters in a moment—
A scepter became a knife in her hand and thrust up at his ribs. It bit home. Her hawk-nosed, bearded foe kicked her hard in the crotch, hurling her upward. The knife trailed his blood through the air. Her hand struck a tree branch with numbing force and the knife tumbled away.
The man palmed it out of the air like a juggler. She bounced on the ground, losing her breath in a helpless groan. He pounced, crashing down atop her.
They rolled together. Her tightening magic sang around them. The Simbul saw the knife sweep back for the slash that would lay open her throat.
Desperately she flung up her hand to guard herself. Bright steel burst through it, the wet point jutting out of the back of her hand.
Mystra, such pain!
Sobbing uncontrollably, the Simbul thrashed on the ground, seeking to hurl her foe off and away, so she could snatch the fang of her torment out, and—
The weight atop her was suddenly gone. A searing chill flowed out of her, and the blade of her dagger melted away like smoke.
Elminster stared down at the silver fire cascading over the Simbul’s fingers. Her wound closed, and she winced, shaking her hand as if she could wave away the pain.
“Ye—ye serve Mystra!” he gasped, at last.
She looked up at him from under tresses of suddenly silver hair that curled and writhed like snakes. “Of course,” she replied calmly. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Twenty-Three
FIRE IN HELL
Echoing darkness, the labyrinth empty …
I am afraid. I … cannot think. Where are my wits … where are my memories? Where am—I? There is nothing left. Nothing but fear. I am afraid. I am so alone. Dark, drifting … cold, all the brightness fled away. I am afraid.
AHA! SILVER FIRE AT LAST! BUT IS THIS ALL? HAS YOUR GODDESS SNATCHED AWAY FROM YOU EVERY … LAST … LITTLE SECRET I CRAVED? I’LL SMASH YOU INTO BONE SHARDS AND POWDER! I’LL MAKE YOU SCREAM FOR AN EON, KEPT ALIVE IN TORMENT, BLIND AND WRITHING, AS LEMURES FEED ON YOU AND THEN VOMIT YOU FORTH FOR THE NEXT TO GNAW ON! I’LL—GAAHH! HUMANS!
Here I am. Over here, in Nergal. Back in my bones, nothing is left. Nothing at all. He has won.
INDEED, PUNY HUMAN WIZARD, HOW COULD IT BE OTHERWISE? [gloating] YOUR MEDDLING GODDESS MAY HAVE STOLEN HER SILVER FIRE FROM ME, AND HER TRUE SECRETS, TOO, BUT I HAVE YOUR MEMORIES—CENTURIES AND CENTURIES OF WHERE THIS ENCHANTMENT IS HIDDEN AND HOW TO AWAKEN THAT MAGIC, AND ALL THOSE GATES, TOO….
I DARE NOT STRIDE INTO FAERÛN AND AMUSE MYSELF PROPERLY—BUT OH, HOW MANY DUPES I CAN COMMAND AMONG YOUR CRINGING HUMANS, ARMED WITH WHAT YOU KNOW AND THE FAVORS OWED YOU TO RAID YOUR TORIL AT WILL AND BRING BACK EVER MORE MAGIC TO ME.… AH, BUT HELL WILL TREMBLE AT LAST!
[whirling images of Avernus, awareness flung far]
AND LET IT BEGIN NOW, WITH THE SMASHING AND HUMBLING OF YOUR LITTLE PLAYTHING, COME CALLING TO SAVE HER ELMINSTER!
[magic rushing out of Nergal like a mad torrent, rolling diabolic laughter, rock pinnacles topple onto a lone human figure]
HAHA!
[Head snaps up. Silver hair writhes. Lightning crackles, bursting rock into dust and rubble, hurled far away. Two eyes glow like flames within the tumult of roiling dust. A low, soft hiss somehow comes across half Avernus to their ears.]
“So, devil. There you are. Taste you now what I give to Thay.”
[Art rushes, so quick and bright that Nergal grunts in amazement. His bat wings beat in sudden urgency, arching and twisting and—Hell explodes in bright fury. The archdevil spins helpless through shrieking air, a broken human in one fist.]
FIRES OF THE PIT, BUT SHE’S STRONG! WELL, WE’LL JUST HAVE TO …
Gaze upon her longer. Such grace, even in fury. Fascinating …
AYE, AYE, SUCH—WHAT ARE YOU DOING, HUMAN? WHISPERING IN MY HEAD WHEN I SHOULD BE—
[bright inferno, roar of diabolic pain, bodies hurled helpless once more, two blazing eyes following amid silver flame]
ENOUGH! ELSEWHERE, AND LET HER FIGHT ACROSS HALF HELL TO FIND US!
Red lightning wreathed them. It died, leaving them elsewhere in Avernus. Nergal’s taloned hand came do
wn on Elminster’s shoulder and spun a chain and collar out of nothing.
Red lightning came again.
“Right behind us,” Nergal growled, “blasting everything that stands against her. From lair to lair of my rivals we go, and let Avernus be laid waste!”
He roared with laughter—and they were elsewhere again. Red smoke and lightning rolled around their feet.
The outcast devil looked back and shook his head in what might have been admiration—or might have been fear.
“Devils tumbling down broken out of the skies,” he murmured. “It won’t be long before He of Nessus is alerted. I’d not want to be your little lady-love then!”
Lightning again, and darkness. A pit of offal, Elminster chin-deep and strangling on his collar as the firm-held chain kept him from drowning.…
COMFORTABLE AGAIN AT LAST. NOW, WHERE WERE WE?
HO. YES. FROM ONE SPELL DUEL TO ANOTHER. STILL, ’TIS BETTER THAN THE LAST MEMORY WE SHARED: SEDUCING APPRENTICES SEEMS A MITE HOLLOW AFTER HELL-HARROWING AT THE HANDS OF PERSISTENT GODDESSES.
Hmm. I fear ye require more refined judgment than ye presently possess.
[snort of dismissal, single mind lash] CLEVERNESS LATER, WIZARD. SHOW TIME NOW:
[image proffered]
WHY, THAT’S STIRRING IN ME! WHERE ARE YOUR—
Deep within ye, devil. Ye have it all, now. Elminster in thy head.
I—I—
See her, devil. Such magnificence, as she throws back her head and glares fearlessly around Hell, seeking us. See her as I do. How can one break or bend such a bright blade? She could be everything to ye! She could be thy warrior-scourge of Hell, smiting all who stand against thee, loving thee as fiercely and hungrily as she now slays.…