by Ed Greenwood
“Be happy with your dancer, my son,” she gasped, blood welling out of her mouth with every word. “Live long, and win yourself a happier ending than I have …”
Then she slumped, her eyes fixed on his, going dark and endlessly staring.
Lord Delcastle collapsed in racking sobs. Amarune cradled his shoulders, holding him close.
Elminster watched them for a moment, then reached out and gently stroked Marantine Delcastle’s eyelids down over her staring eyes. One wouldn’t stay down, retreating to give her a grotesque wink.
“This is enough, and more than enough,” the Sage of Shadowdale snarled suddenly, standing bolt upright. He spun away and stalked across the heaped dead, reaching out with his mind as he went.
He was three rooms away before he found a noble, buried under three others, who wasn’t quite dead yet.
The mind was going dark, sliding inexorably into extinction, but there was still a glimmer …
Elminster plunged savagely into that dying mind, to read whys and whos and …
“Manshoon! Of course!”
He stalked through the house and out into the Delcastle gardens.
Looking up into the sky, with the bloodstained sward of the manor grounds stretching out on all sides, he threw back his head and furiously called Manshoon to battle.
He did not have to wait long.
Rising into the sky above bustling Suzail came six, seven … nine spherical hulks the size of small coaches, gaping-mawed flying spheres that looked dead and rotting, covered with snowy and sickly green furred molds—yet moving, their dangling eyestalks lifting and writhing as folk shouted and ran, on the streets below.
As one, they drifted purposefully toward Delcastle Manor.
The only man standing in the Delcastle gardens watched them come, his lip curling. Manshoon had sent his beholders rather than coming in person. Of course.
Elminster raised his hands, murmured a spell that smote undead with silver fire—and blasted them down.
In an instant, every last death tyrant burst into drifting dust, like so many puffs of smoke.
More came, rising up into the sky in slow menace. War horns sounded from the palace and the royal court, horn calls that were answered from the city gates and the harbor tower.
El waited until all the menacing eye tyrants were close enough to reach with one casting, then served them the same way he had the first wave.
Four out of this dozen did not fall into dust, but kept coming. So Manshoon did command some living beholders, after all …
El lashed them with a net of lightnings that would feed on magic sent against it, and watched the beholders shoot forth rays and beams that only strengthened the crackling bolts that seared them. One fell from the sky, another burst like a raw egg, and the last two burned as they came, spinning and shrieking in their ongoing agonies.
El greeted them with a spell of many fireballs, blasts of flame he tried to send inside their many-fanged mouths. His aim was true, and flaming gobbets of beholder hurtled across the city sky.
Men in robes appeared by the gates and past the fountain at the far end of the Delcastle gardens: war wizards, with wands in their hands, intent on Elminster.
He ignored them, reaching forth with his mind, trying to reach Manshoon. Who had to be nearby, who was probably lurking somewhere just yonder, beneath where the beholders had risen.
El had his silver fire, but there was no Weave everywhere around him that he could call on or wrap himself in or ride elsewhere on an instant’s whim. There was just him, and the dwindling spells he had ready, against a foe obviously prepared for the day.
“Saer!” a stern voice called, from the gardens behind him. “Surrender! Have done! This unlawful mage duel—”
Elminster ignored the rest. If these converging war wizards were that foolish, if they could not see the peril to their city and their kingdom—or were already subverted by Manshoon—Suzail might well be doomed. He needed their aid, not their attempts to arrest or oppose him. Another beholder came, a much smaller one, and it was trailing something that looked like a tiny cloud …
The first volley of wand blasts clawed at the mantle spell El had cast around himself, and reduced it to shimmering, snarling fury.
He translocated himself to the fountain, felled one of the war wizards there with a sharp chop to the back of the neck, snatched the wand from the fool’s failing hand, and subsumed its power to invigorate and steady his failing mantle.
All around him, shouting Crown mages hurled spells and fired wands and—
He was elsewhere again, at the gates this time, punching another wizard of war and seizing another wand.
It exploded in El’s grasp, the flash almost blinding and deafening him, even as his mantle drank it and kept his hand from destruction. Then he was caught in a barrage of twenty wand blasts, thirty …
In searing agony he took himself back to where he’d first been standing, arriving in a stagger, his mantle gone and his contingency melting spell after spell out of his mind to meet and counter what the Crown mages were hurling at him. Some of them were showing battle cunning, firing their wands even before he reappeared, anticipating where he’d …
The beholder, utterly unscathed, ignored by the war wizards in their eagerness to smite a lone man within easy reach, was close now, descending as it neared the Delcastle walls.
And here he was, magic giving out, beset by these young fools.
“Ganrahast,” he snarled, “don’t you train your wizards any more? Can’t they see? And think?”
Spells flashed down from the sky, fireballs that hurled war wizards into the air, burned and broken, and lightning bolts that stabbed across the garden, spearing Crown mage after Crown mage.
They were coming from the air behind the lone beholder … Blood of Bane, Manshoon had devised eyeball beholderkin that could unleash spells! A swarm of them!
A spell winked forth from one, then another, lashing down …
Well, at least some war wizards had finally discovered wits enough to look up and see where the slayings that sought them were coming from. They fired their wands into the sky, casting spells at the beholder, too, in a quickening inferno above El’s head that rent the sky like storm thunder.
That beholder exploded.
Wild lightning stabbed down, blazing beholderkin were flung in all directions like embers from an erupting volcano, the gardens rocked as its trees blazed up into one great bonfire, and … sudden silence fell.
The sky was empty, fires burned everywhere in the gardens as charred tree trunks spat sparks, and … bodies were everywhere.
More war wizards arrived, stalking warily forward in a slowly tightening ring around one man.
Who was on his knees, just two spells left in his weary mind and his body shrieking with silent pain. His skin crackled like brittle parchment paper and fell away as he tried to rise, the seared flesh beneath stinking like roast boar.
So this was how it was all going to end, after all these centuries. Blasted apart by young fools lashing out at the wrong target.
Fitting, somehow.
“Mystra,” he whispered. “Alassra. I loved you both.”
They were moving in for the kill, somber and wary, wands aimed and fists thrust forth with awakened rings aglow on their knuckles.
“Now,” someone commanded sternly—and the barrage began.
“Idiots,” El spat, as darkness claimed him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
DOING WHAT NEEDS To BE DONE
The wizards of war fired carefully, concentrating on the mouth and hands of the man on his knees, trying to make sure there’d be no sudden flurry of spells coming back at them.
“No closer,” one warned his fellows. “Contingencies. Blast him from right where you’re standing.”
They lashed the dying man with spell after spell. Magics that raged and snarled, but seemed suddenly not to be touching their target. Instead, they were rising up aroun
d him, in a bright and climbing spiral that licked the sky like a great tongue of flame. Blue flame.
A flame that suddenly sank down into a fury of raging fire, fiery tongues of eye-searing-bright silver and of that same rich blue, that became … a tall and furious woman aglow with raging blueflame and silver fire.
“Fools! Ungrateful wretches!” she howled, her silver hair suddenly stabbing out in all directions around her. “Have your miscast magic back!” Deadly spells howled out from her in all directions across the gardens, hurling war wizards out over the walls and against the manor and its gates with shattering, splattering force. When none were left standing, she spun around, fell to her knees, and embraced her Elminster.
“My love,” she gasped, between kisses, “have me again, now—and forever!”
When their lips met, there wasn’t much left of the man in her arms except the seared and blackened head she was holding, and a mangled wisp of shoulders and torso beneath.
Silver fire flowed into him, poured into him as Alassra Silverhand’s tears fell like rain and her body darkened, and she spent all she had into healing and restoring and sharing. Her own body started to melt away, her legs becoming his, her arms dissolving as his grew …
Farewell, my love. Her last mindspeech echoed in every head for blocks around, reducing bewildered Suzailans to helpless tears, melting them with its tenderness. They wept, but knew not why.
Her long fingers went last, melting away from his jaw with a sigh, errant silver hairs drifting away.
The Simbul was gone. Forever.
Leaving a restored, whole man, dazed and tottering as he found his feet. He was tall and hawk-nosed, and his eyes were blue but glowed with silver—and blazed with rage.
He was alive and whole because his love had sacrificed herself to save her Elminster, pouring all her life-force into restoring him. He felt young again, strong. The Art was alive and dancing within him, with more silver fire roiling around than he could comfortably hold for long.
Ah, so this was what had been driving his Alassra mad: all the seething, roiling silver fire inside her. Oh, it hurt; it was burning him, fighting to burst out of him. Well, he’d indulge it, and soon!
Folk rushed toward him. El turned to give them death, but found they were Arclath and Amarune, their bone white faces wet with tears, their mouths working.
“El? El, is it you?” Rune managed to sob, reaching for him. Just as Alassra had so often reached for him …
She rushed into his arms, clung to him tightly, and cried his name. El looked bleakly over her shoulder at Arclath, who was standing uncertainly nearby, staring back at him. Looking scared.
Well, so he should, this young noble. He knew what he was looking at. He saw an archwizard who wanted to deal death to so many.
“What good is it all?” Elminster rasped at Lord Delcastle, almost pleadingly, his own tears coming, coursing from despairing holes of eyes. “To have all this power, to work all these centuries serving a bright cause, helping folk—if I cannot save the ones I love? Tell me it has all been worth it! Tell me!”
Arclath swallowed, on the trembling edge of tears. No one should ever look so … desolate. Nothing should ever happen that was bad enough to make a mighty wizard’s face look like this. “I—”
“Tell me,” Elminster howled, “so I can tell you that you lie, and lash out at you! Smiting you down just as unfairly as this world has so often treated me! Mystra spit, I have been through this so many times! You’d think I’d be used to this by now, this loss, this treachery, the—the bedamned unfairness of it all!”
With two angry strides done in less time than it took Arclath to even think of reaching for his sword, the Sage of Shadowdale had spun Rune out of his arms with infinite gentleness, stepped past the heir of House Delcastle and gripped Arclath’s arms with the crushing force of two owlbear talons, the better to turn him until they faced each other. He roared into Arclath’s paling face, “Yet I never get used to it, lad! Under this armor of drawling cynicism and world-weary jesting, I cry the very same way I cried when the magelords swept down on my village and left me kinless and alone in Athalantar! Again and again I lose those I love—places I love, entire families I love, whole kingdoms I hold dear! Well, I’m sick of it—sick, d’ye hear?”
He flung Arclath aside like a child’s doll and stalked across the corpse-littered Delcastle lawns, snarling, to stop at the edge of a flower bed, fling up his arms, and roar, “Enough! By the silver fire within me, by the Art I love and wield, by all the faces of those lost and fallen that I grieve, I go now to war! In their name let me rage, in their memory shatter and despoil and hurl down! ’Tis time to hurl castles into the air, and snatch soaring dragons down from it! Eorulagath!”
That last word crashed around Suzail like a clap of thunder, rolling from spire to balcony and rooftop, splitting windowpanes, as half-deafened citizens winced and staggered.
Before the echoes of that word of power started to fade, lightning split the sky, raging around Elminster like an impatient blue-white cloak of flames. Up the crackling lightning swept, bearing the tall thin wizard his own height above the scorched turf, and more—and then he was gone, in a blinding flash of light, borne elsewhere in an instant.
On hands and knees in the rubble, clinging to stones with numbed fingers as the backlash made every hair on his body crackle and stand on end, Arclath Delcastle winced, feeling his teeth rattle.
Wherever the Sage of Shadowdale had taken himself, Arclath hoped it was far, far away. He did not want to be as close to Elminster, just now, as, say, on the same continent.
For centuries Elminster had kept his grief, and much of his temper, tightly leashed. No longer. Oh, by Mystra, no longer.
He was trembling to let it loose now, to indulge his rage at last …
“At last!” he bellowed atop the Old Skull in Shadowdale, seeing folk running from the inn below to gape up at him, gouts of silver fire escaping his mouth with every word. “Let scores be settled!”
He stood suddenly in a cellar, where a self-styled incipient emperor was hastily scrambling up from a seat among glowing scrying spheres.
An unlovely woman who had until recently been an understeward in the palace stood in front of Elminster, reaching for a wand and snarling a curse.
With a grim smile, El took hold of the deadly end of the wand—and let Fentable trigger it.
Nothing happened at its tip, but as Manshoon gaped in astonishment, and the intruder in his cellar held back the startled would-be emperor’s spells without even looking up, the full fury of the wand’s magic washed back out through the hand that held it.
Corleth Fentable was ashes and charred bones, well on their plummeting way to the floor, in an instant.
Former Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake was brewing a fresh pot of tea and wondering if his captors would ever let him set foot outside his far-too-familiar room again, before they killed him—when one wall of his prison abruptly vanished. In silence, and without any mess or disturbance at all. It was simply … gone, to reveal a street outside lined with many buildings, and a gentle breeze, and—
A man stepping out of that empty air, at least one floor above the street, to give him a smile that held no warmth at all.
“I think your greatest spell had best die with you,” Elminster told him.
It was the last thing Mreldrake ever saw or heard.
El calmly swung the kettle off the hearth and poured it into the teapot, ignoring the man-high wisp of swirling ashes beside him.
The spell that should have blasted him, the hearth, and most of that side of the room to dust and tumbling stones appeared to do nothing to him at all.
Nor did the two spells hurled after it.
In their room-rocking wake, El looked up from the pot at the hurlers of those magics, the three shades who’d kept Mreldrake captive in this room. He dispensed another smile that held neither mirth nor fondness. “Tea?” he asked, as mildly as any kindly hearthside hostess.
<
br /> He did not give them a chance to reply.
The flames, or tendrils, or whatever they were appeared out of nowhere to snatch Harbrand and Hawkspike out of the corner of the cavern where they glumly waited to die.
The next thing they knew, they were both sitting on the floor of their landlady’s office, stark naked, and she was rising from her desk to stare down at them, open-mouthed in astonishment.
Harbrand and Hawkspike stared back up at her, suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of how much coin they owed her.
“Madam,” a tall wizard said politely from behind them, just before he vanished, “I give you: Danger For Hire.”
Alorglauvenemaus rolled over with a grunt of pain. The only healing spell he could cast while in this great body helped but little. It was going to take a long time, and castings beyond his counting yet, before …
He hadn’t troubled to even try to think what magic those two poltroons had managed to awaken, to snatch themselves away from him. There would be time enough later to learn what it had been. Learn leisurely, as he tore them apart at the joints so slowly, and learned so much more …
“Hesperdan,” said a quiet voice from behind him, “it is over.”
“Elminster!” the wyrm growled, twisting its head as it flung itself over again, so it could get the Old Mage with acid before—
The man who’d once been his ally, who mind-melded with him in the days before his treachery, was smiling an almost affectionate smile.
He went right on smiling as the great wall of silver flame rushing out of him broke over Hesperdan and took everything away in an instant, plunging him into bubbling silver oblivion …
“Ruin him,” Lord Breeklar sneered. “Buy up all his debts before nightfall and rouse him from his bed at sword point to demand payment. Then let him stew until morning. I want him out of his house before highsun tomorrow. Offer to hire his wife and daughters as bedmates in one of my brothels.”