by Ed Greenwood
“Here we go,” Rune said to no one in particular, as the yelling mercenaries crashed through the last few strides of brush and fell upon them.
The two false monks were hurling their spells already, magics that told him they were powerful wizards indeed—arcanists of Thultanthar, most likely—as they stared at Elminster across the spellcasting cavern with looks that mingled hatred and sneering triumph.
There was time for him to elude death, but only just. An escape that concerned only himself and the Weave immediately around him, and though it meant agony when done so swiftly, it could be done in mere moments.
If you were a master of the Weave.
And if his mastery failed now, or he was an instant too slow, he would be as dead as if those spells struck him …
Elminster gave himself to the Weave, pouring himself into it in all directions at once, throwing back his head and trying to scream in utter silence. The pain …
And by the time a fell emerald glare flared to visit death upon him, and a forest of slicing force blades hissed into being to rain down and make that demise doubly sure, Elminster was a mere seeing sentience in the moving air.
There were many who muttered that the Sage of Shadowdale was a great bag of wind, and El reflected wryly that they’d only been wrong about the “great bag” part.
“You must tell me how to manage that,” Amarune muttered, as the sounds of the siege suddenly came back to them—and various broken mercenary bodies slid bloodily down trees all around them, to crash limply to the forest floor.
“If I have to try it much more often,” Storm whispered raggedly, her face gray, “you may just have to learn it on your own.”
She sagged, and Arclath leaped to catch her before she fell. She leaned gratefully on his arm.
“I’m not the Weave master Elminster is, or some of my sisters were,” she said grimly. “I was always more interested in people. Speaking of which …”
Flinging out her hair to clutch at tree trunks like a drunken man keeping his feet by grabbing onto anything and anyone handy, she set off through the blood-drenched forest toward the stand of duskwoods. Most of the mercenaries had come at Storm, but more than a few had gone crashing up the nearby slope into the duskwoods.
“Well?” Arclath asked, glancing at Rune and then at the bladesinger who nodded her approval of their departure. He started to pick his way over downed trees and fallen elves after Storm. “How fared our oh-so-friendly high mages?”
“This,” the bard replied heavily, as he and Rune caught up with her, “is bad.”
The small stand of duskwoods looked like the nest of some gigantic forest carnivore, a great, untidy ring-shaped heap of bodies—besieging mercenaries, most of them, but at the heart of it, elves.
Including every last one of the high mages, who’d been overrun and cut down. Storm looked from one to another of their slack, staring faces amid all the blood, and shook her head.
“Small wonder there are so few high mages, and fewer as the years pass.”
Now naught but roaring wind, Elminster blew himself across the cavern, racing at the two furious and almost certainly counterfeit monks who’d just sought his death. Seeking not to slay them—though momentarily blinding them and driving them down to cowering helplessness was both tempting and useful if he wanted to get well away—but just to escape.
They cowered as he came howling at them, clapping their hands to their faces, but still, the air in front of Elminster was glowing and changing. He knew the two cowering mages had had no time to work other spells. So was there a third foe, hitherto hidden and—?
Wind or not, he was ensnared.
The air had become a net, formed in but a handful of instants.
Formed from the wards of Candlekeep, and by one of these two monks kneeling before him. A forming that had been done by calling on the Weave.
And as he felt the tightening net, its shape was all too familiar. It had been snatched so hastily into being by someone working with the Weave as Elminster himself had trained them to do.
Which meant one or both of these two monks almost had to be Chosen of Mystra he himself had trained.
He was nigh certainly facing one or two of the Seven Sisters.
El forced the net away with an ease he’d learned twelve centuries ago. Its creator fought him, but it was as if she was tugging vainly on the string of a kite he had clutched firmly to his chest. With the force of his will, El twisted the net inexorably into a magical wall against any other spells these two might send against him.
The struggle made the wall shimmer once or twice into visibility. Behind its protection, Elminster took on his own usual ancient and bearded shape.
And watched astonishment dawn across the faces of the two monks.
“Your turn,” he told them calmly.
Reluctantly, they took on their proper shapes too, and he found himself facing two tall women he’d treated as his daughters, long, long ago.
Sisters, tall and furious. Alustriel Silverhand and Laeral Silverhand Arunsun.
Laeral was the first to break the silence. “El,” she asked grimly, “why are you here? What are you up to?”
“I’m seeking Khelben’s writings, as ye very well know, to try to find out what he was up to. Because it’s time.”
“It’s past time,” Alustriel corrected. “It was past time the day you turned against Khelben, and we Moonstars.”
“I ‘turned against’ no one,” El replied sternly. “I followed the bidding of the Lady we all serve—or claim to.”
“We have all obeyed Mystra,” said Laeral, “and continue to do so. You reared us, El—do you not know how much we love you? Do you think we would have taken different paths without her blessing, and still remained her Chosen? You were closer to her than the rest of us, and know full well she revealed things to you and gave tasks to you that she did not share with us—can you not accept that she did the same with each of us, and that she chose not to reveal it to you?”
“Nor can any of us roll back the years and undo what has been done and said,” Alustriel added. “We three stand here now. Is it to be war between us, or common cause?”
“That will depend,” Elminster said wryly. “Are we agreed in this much: that Shar seeks to destroy Mystra and remake the Weave as her own? And that if she succeeds before the Sundering of Toril and Abeir is complete, she will be named the goddess of magic on the Tablets of Fate, and darkness and shadow will hold sway in the Realms forever?”
Both sisters nodded.
“We are,” Laeral confirmed, “and it is now our turn for asking, Elminster. I ask again: why are you here?”
It was time for full truth. El cleared his throat and began.
“I’ve worked with the Weave for more centuries than I care to remember, and have labored on it mightily these last seven years, mending and restoring it. Yet rifts and roilings recur in it constantly; it has not collapsed, but is forever in peril of doing so. Where I was the meddler among thrones, mansions, guildhalls, and cottages, Khelben was the Weavemaster. If there is a key to restoring the Weave to stability, to rebuilding it to be the strong and pervasive web we once enjoyed, Khelben knew that vital secret and recorded it—and one of the places he must have hidden that record is here, in the great library of Candlekeep. I must find that key, master it, and restore the Weave.”
He started to pace. “And if I can reason thus, so can any wise wizard. The Shadovar will come here—they have undoubtedly come here already, dwelling here as monks. While the wards stand, they can be rooted out and thwarted—but if the wards fall, the entire might of Thultanthar can be hurled against us, and all the lore stored here lost in the fray. I have slipped through these wards many a time, and know their strength, if not all their nuances. I can hold these wards up, if anyone can.”
He brought himself to an abrupt halt, regarded them both, and said flatly, “That is why I am here.”
Their frowns told him they were considering his words, but
no more.
So he smiled and asked gently, “So why, ladies fair, are ye here? Posing as monks of Candlekeep, and moving or hiding all of the books I’ve sought? Are ye hiding the word of Khelben from the disguised Shadovar within these walls? Or just hiding from the Realms, as war rages, ravaging it?”
The two sisters looked at each other. Then Alustriel tossed her head and told him, “While you mastered the natures of all who dwell in Faerûn, and how best to sway and cozen them, and set about doing that so very well, Khelben foresaw the Sundering, and set about preparing for it.”
She looked again at Laeral, who nodded, so she went on. “We have been monks here for more than a century, after arranging matters so the wider Realms thought us dead. Itching to act in matters large and small, yet keeping our silence and our secrets and learning the cold price of patience, to serve the greater cause. Making copies of the tomes here Khelben did not write, and sending them forth to other libraries, so that they might survive what is soon to come. Watching and waiting for the moment we must destroy Candlekeep.”
“What?”
“What name do the elves have for us, El?”
“What do ye mean, ‘destroy Candlekeep’?”
“What name do the elves have for the Moonstars, El?”
“Answer my—Tel’Teukiira.”
“Yes, and what is written in Amagal’s Tome about the Tel’Teukiira?”
El frowned. “That’s one of the books I’ve been seeking these past days, and cannot find. I read it just once, centuries ago, and in great haste, seeking words of power that could compel elder dragons before they could ravage three kingdoms. I don’t remember! So tell me: what is written in Amagal’s Tome about the Tel’Teukiira?”
“The Tel’Teukiira will save us from the Three Who Wait in Darkness, the Prefects, and ourselves.”
El gave them his best quizzical raised eyebrow. “Even so-called ‘true prophets’ get things plainly wrong, despite their habit of writing and speaking cryptically, for the gods are all too fallible. Ye’ve both lived long enough and seen enough to know that. Even if Amagal could see the future with clear precision—as even the gods cannot—how do ye know this is the time? And who precisely, for certain, are the Three Who Wait in Darkness, the Prefects, and ‘ourselves’?”
“As it happens, Amagal did not see the future,” Laeral said dryly. “He merely passed on a more ancient foretelling, purportedly uttered by Chauntea at her birthing, when Toril itself came to be—and Amagal mangled it while doing so. That older prophecy is thus: ‘When worlds are sundered once more, and Toril itself stands in peril, only the Tel’Teukiira can save us from the Three Who Wait in Darkness, the Prefects, and ourselves.’ ”
“I can guess that the Shadovar have something to do with the Three Who Wait, but who are the Prefects? And who could Chauntea—if it was the Allmother—have meant by ‘ourselves’? The gods?”
Both sisters shrugged.
El regarded them sourly. “All right, who did Khelben think ‘ourselves’ meant? And how did he—or the two of ye—come to conclude ye must destroy Candlekeep?”
“Do not think we have not debated this down the years, El,” Alustriel told him ruefully. “Confronting Khelben, when we still could, as fiercely as you are confronting us now.”
“More than once,” Laeral put in sadly, “I wasted time disputing when we were abed together. Time I would give almost anything to have back now.”
“We have argued it and argued it,” Alustriel added, “and asked Mystra as much as we dared, and pieced together every hint we could find in what all the gods have said—Jergal in particular, hinted much—and threw all we could learn at Khelben. And he stood fast.”
“So what, by the Lady’s Secrets, did he believe?”
“That ‘ourselves’ meant those of us alive at the time, and the follies and mistaken beliefs that will lead us astray. The Prefects were what the senior officers of Candlekeep were collectively called by the monks beneath them in rank, at its founding; a term that soon faded into disuse and was forgotten. And we agree with you that the Three Who Wait in Darkness are probably Shadovar—and are certainly agents of Shar, for she is ‘the Darkness.’ ”
Elminster nodded. “I find myself still waiting for a good reason Candlekeep must be destroyed. I have spent my life preserving lore so that the Art will not be forgotten, but flourish. If I am not to fall upon anyone seeking to smash this great storehouse of lore and destroy them utterly, the reason for my forbearance had better be good.”
“Candlekeep’s wards are the mightiest surviving wards on or under Toril. Myth Drannor’s mythal is the greatest extant mythal. They are the greatest sources of stored magical energy in all the Realms—and both must be destroyed to keep their energies from Shar, and Telamont Tanthul, her most capable agent.”
“Myth Drannor now, too? The mythal I helped raise so long ago, with so many dear to me who are now gone? Lus, Laer, have ye both gone mad?”
“We may well sound so, El, and believe me it grieves us to think of such great and lasting magics thrown down too … but hear us out.”
“My ears attend ye,” Elminster told them dryly. “Make it good.”
Laeral gave him a sigh, then a smile, and then the words, “The elves of Cormanthor are a proud and truly noble people, but that pride is what it has always been—their greatest weakness. Most of them can’t believe mere human arcanists, however skilled in sorcery, can defeat them. Yet they will never hold their city against what the Shadovar can muster against them. The monks in this great fortress around us are just as deluded; they trust in the wardings alone for defense. Telamont will seize the power here, then that of the mythal, and with it will tame the Weave and remake it into a true ‘Shadow Weave.’ And with that, Shar will finally become the greatest goddess she has so often boasted of being.”
Elminster lifted his head as if to say something, but Laeral raised a forefinger to forestall him and added, “With the Weave augmenting the Shadow Weave and controlled by it, Shar will have a Shadow Weave that is more than an echo of the Weave we have served and strengthened for so long—she will govern the world with her Shadow Weave, and will be able to transform it into what she seeks. Oblivion. The world we know will become an endless night of hunting and slaughter, with all order and lore destroyed—and Shar exulting in the continual loss of life and all history forgotten, only the hounds that serve her knowing what they destroyed, and keeping those secrets within the ranks of those who serve her. It will be eternal nightmare.”
“So you see,” Alustriel added, “we must destroy the great wards here, and the Last Mythal there, rather than let them fall into Telamont’s hands.”
El shook his head. “Ye deem the elves weak, thanks to their pride, yet spare Telamont the same judgment. He has pride and overconfidence enough for any score of archmages.”
“I know it will take some time to come around to seeing things as Khelben did,” Laeral added gently. “It took us years. Years I’m afraid you don’t have.”
“Ladies, I very much doubt there are enough years ahead for us all, for there to be enough to bring me to thinking the old stiffnec—the Blackstaff was right in this. The old saying about ‘defending the castle so fiercely that it was destroyed in the defending’ comes to mind. In short, I have not heard such utter madness since Khelben was alive.”
Laeral winced. “It has not been so long, El, that his death does not pain me. Please listen—”
“Ye please listen, the both of ye. Ye speak of destroying two of the greatest surviving magical treasures of our world, achievements that may never be replaced once they are gone, to say nothing of surpassed. Even if that vandalism means nothing to ye, consider the danger ye plunge all the Realms into if they are destroyed. Two great storehouses of active Art, brought down, will inevitably release such a flood of magical energies that the Weave would be torn to shreds. Every bit of it to fail would become wild magic, a spreading chaos that could well banish governable magic from the world.
If ye thought the Spellplague was bad, imagine Toril and Abeir awash in unleashed and roiling power, yet with every last sentient being powerless to wield or steer any of it, because ‘magic’ as we know it has failed utterly. A second and greater Spellplague!”
Laeral shook her head and opened her mouth to speak, but El held up a forestalling finger and swept on.
“The two worlds will separate, aye, are sundering even now—and with the Weave gone, there will be nothing to safeguard any stability at all. Toril and Abeir were rocked by the first Spellplague, but what was left of the Weave still protected Toril then, like a tattered suit of armor. A suit, may I remind ye, that I have spent centuries strengthening and patching and fastening together ever more securely, which is why it survived at all when Mystra fell.”
Elminster started to pace in his agitation, waving his arms like an exasperated tutor. “Without any protection at all, order cannot hold! The raging chaos of magic will strike all the Art stored in items—paltry sparks, but there are thousands upon thousands of them!—and all that unbridled energy must go somewhere! If the Srinshee is right—and I believe she is—both worlds will most likely collapse into uncounted shards, with all life on them swept away in tumult and agony. Do ye not care about our world, and everyone in it? What price victory, if we all die—and the Realms with us? What sort of triumph is that?”
“That will not happen, Old Mage,” Alustriel snapped, “if we do as Khelben saw we must. You conjure dire fantasies, when you should face the truth. The Blackstaff studied this for centuries, and at first thought as you do, but then—”
“Made another of his misjudgments? The Lady knows I’ve made a generous share of grave mistakes, but Khelben made more of them, and stubbornly stood by what he’d decided, even after his folly became clear to all, longer than any mage not green and young I ever met. His stubbornness was his hallmark—”
“And his strength.” Laeral’s voice was as firm as a forge hammer striking iron. “Nor is this a contest of who’s more worthy or more ‘right.’ In this case, this most important case of all, Khelben studied longer and harder than any of us, and reluctantly came to this one conclusion, and we agree with him. And you yourself have spoken of how the Srinshee promised to return in Myth Drannor’s hour of need—so where is she, if that gravest hour of need is truly upon us?”