by Ed Greenwood
El stared at the gate grimly, and raised his hands. “Gates,” he told the air softly, “I can handle.” He worked a magic that Mystra herself had given him and sent it splashing down on the maw that was still releasing hordes of fiends.
It washed over the gate with a menacing crackle of spell energy, and there were screams and roars from the fiends emerging from it. Yet when the raging fires of the spell fell away, long moments later, the gate stood unchanged.
Elminster gaped at it. How could—?
A moment later, he had an answer … of sorts. The last flickering, floating motes of light caused by his spell brightened, rose up to face him, and shaped themselves into letters in one of the elder elvish tongues he’d learned to read in Myth Drannor; it was a language only he and several hundred elf elders could read. Floating in the air, the letters spelled out a blunt message: “Leave alone.”
As El stared at them in utter bewilderment, they fell into shapeless tatters of light then faded away, trailing down into wisps of smoke to join the chaos and death below. Fiends looked up, snarling. This could only be from Mystra … couldn’t it?
Well, if not her, who else?
The last prince of Athalantar looked down at the fiends capering in the ruins of Myth Drannor and asked the world bitterly, “What good is it to be a mage, if ye don’t use thy power to do good, by shaping the world around ye?”
The answer came from the air behind Elminster: “What good can it be, save by blind mischance, if you try but lack eyes and wits powerful enough to see the shape you’re sculpting?”
The voice was low and calm but filled with a musical hum of raw power that he’d only ever heard before when Mystra spoke. It sounded male and somehow both familiar and wholly new and strange.
Elminster spun around. He stood alone; the Height was empty but for a few trees and the wind stirring them.
He stared hard at the empty air, but it stayed empty.
“Who are ye, who answer me? Reveal thyself,” he demanded. “Philosophy comes hard when the lectures are delivered by phantoms.”
The empty air chuckled. Suddenly it held two glimmering points of light, miniature stars that circled each other lazily, then whirled around with racing speed and burst into a blinding cascade of starry motes of light.
When the flood of brightness fell away, Elminster beheld a robed man standing behind it. He was white-bearded and black-browed, and his calm eyes shone very blue before they filled with all the colors of the rushing rainbow. As Elminster watched, the man’s eyes darkened to black shot through with tiny, slowly moving stars.
“Impressive,” Elminster granted amiably. “And ye are …?”
The chuckle came again. “I meant it not as a show, nor yet as a herald’s cry of my identity … but since we seem to be speaking suchwise, why don’t you have a guess?”
El looked the man up and down. Old, ancient even, and yet spry, perhaps as young as some fifty-odd winters. White-haired, save for the brows, forearms, and chest, where the hair was black. He was empty-handed, with no rings in evidence, wearing simple, spare robes with flared sleeves and no belt or purse; bare feet below—feet that could afford to be bare, because they hovered a few inches off the ground, never quite touching.
Elminster looked up from them to the wise face of their owner, and said softly, “Azuth.”
“The same,” the man replied, and though he did not smile, El thought he seemed somehow pleased.
Elminster took a step forward, and said, “Forgive my boldness, High One, if ye will … but I serve Mystra in a manner both close and personal—”
“You are the dearest of her Chosen, yes,” Azuth said with a smile. “She speaks often of you and of the joy you’ve brought her in the times she’s spent playing at being mortal.”
The prince of Athalantar felt joy and a vast relief. In his sigh of contentment and relaxation he almost stepped backward off the Height. At that moment a barbed whip arced around at his face, from the air off to his left, and something unseen took him around the shoulders as he swayed on the edge of oblivion then snatched him forward, away from the cornugon an instant before its reaching talons could thrust into Elminster’s eyes. He found himself skimming across the scorched stones of the hilltop, Azuth receding before him so they always faced each other from the same distance.
“M-my thanks,” El stammered, as they came to a gentle halt. He felt himself lowered into a comfortable, lounging position, lying on yielding but somehow solid air. Azuth was also sitting on nothing, facing him, across a fire that suddenly sprang out of nowhere. Flames danced up from air a handspan above the unmarked rock of the Height. El looked at it, then around at a sky now full of bat-winged, scaled, hissing fiends, clawing at the air with widening, many-toothed smiles as they dived nearer.
“I don’t wish to seem ungrateful or critical, High One,” he said, “but yon fiends can’t fail but notice this light, and we’ll have them visiting.”
Azuth smiled, and for an instant his arms seemed to flow with slowly marching lights, winking and sparkling. “No,” he replied in the calm, musical voice that was at once splendid and laced with excitement—and at the same time soothing and reassuring. “This Height, henceforth, is shielded against fiends—of all kinds—so long as my power endures. Now hearken, for there are things you should know.”
Elminster nodded, bright-eyed in his eagerness. His manner brought the ghost of a smile to the lips of the Lord of Spells, who caused both of their hands to be suddenly full of goblets of wine that smoked and glowed. The god began to speak.
Over Azuth’s left shoulder, a hulking red monster of a fiend flapped huge wings in a booming clap of fury, clawed at air that seemed to resist it, and burst into flames. With fire raging up and down its limbs, it gibbered, fangs spraying green spittle, and a flash of unleashed magic burst from its taloned hands and crawled across an unseen barrier for long moments before rebounding with a flash and roar that plucked the pit fiend from its clawing perch on empty air, sending it tumbling away through the air like a tattered leaf.
The god ignored this, as well as the wails and moans of watching, circling fiends that followed, as he addressed Elminster like a gentle teacher, speaking at ease in a quiet place. “All who work magic serve Mystra whether they will or no,” he said. “She is of the Weave, and every use of it strengthens her, reveres her, and exalts her. You and I both know a little of what is left of her mortal side. We’ve seen traces of the feelings and memories and thoughts she clings to in desperation from time to time, when the wild exultation of power coursing through the Weave—that is the Weave—threatens to overwhelm her sentience entirely. No entity, mortal or divine, can last in her position forever. There will be other Mystras, in time to come.”
A hand that trailed tiny stars pointed to Elminster, then back at Azuth’s own chest. “We are her treasures, lad—we are what she holds most dear, the rocks she can cling to in the storms of wild Art. She needs us to be strong, far stronger than most mortals … tempered tools for her use. Being bound to us by love and linked to us to preserve her very humanity, she finds it hard to be harsh to us—to do the tempering that must be done. She began the tempering of you long ago; you are her ‘pet project,’ if you will, just as the Magisters are mine. She creates her Chosen and her Magisters, but she gives the training of them to others, chiefly me, once she grows to love them too much or needs them to be distant from her. The Magisters must needs be distant, that creativity in Art be untrammeled. You, she has grown to love too much.”
Elminster blushed and ran a finger around the rim of his goblet. Fiends clawed the air in the distance as he looked down—and was abashed as he might not have been at another time—to find the vessel full of wine again after he had drunk deep.
Azuth watched him with a smile and said gently, “You are now wanting to hear much more of how the Lady of Mysteries feels for you, and not daring to ask. Moreover, you are also dying to know more about what ‘Magisters’ are and can find tongue to say
nothing for fear of deflecting me from whatever wonders I was going to reveal if left to speak freely. Wherefore you are riven and will remember but poorly what follows … unless I set you at ease.”
Elminster found himself wanting to laugh, perhaps cry, and grope for words all at once. He managed a nod almost desperately, and Azuth chuckled once more. Behind him, the air roiled with sudden raging green fire that came out of nowhere, and from its heart boiled two pit fiends, reaching out mighty-thewed and sharp-clawed limbs to clutch at the Lord of Spells … limbs that caught fire for all of the time it took Elminster to gasp in alarm before they met with some invisible force that melted them away, boiling off flesh and gore like black smoke. The screams were incredible, but Azuth’s gentle, kindly voice cut through them like lantern light stabbing into darkness.
“Mystra loves you as no other,” the god told the mage, “but she loves many, including myself and others neither of us know about, some in ways that would astonish or even disgust you. Be content with knowing that among all who share her love, you are the bright spirit and youth she cherishes, and I am the old wise teacher. None of us is better than the other, and she needs us all. Let jealousy of other Chosen—of other mages of any race, station, or outlook—never taint your soul.”
Elminster’s goblet was full again. He nodded his understanding to the god through its wisps of smoke, as a score of winged she-fiends stabbed at the god with lances that blazed with red flame—and the air, with a silent lack of fuss, ate both weapons and fire.
One of the dusky-skinned fiend-women strayed a little too close to Azuth in her boldness and lost a wing to hungry empty air in a single blurred instant. Shrieking and sobbing, she tumbled away, falling to death below—a death that came rather more swiftly than the waiting ground, as other erinyes, eyes blazing with bloodlust, swooped on her and drove their lances home. Transfixed, the stricken erinyes stiffened, spurted blood in several directions, and fell like a stone.
Ignoring all of this, the god spoke serenely on. “Magisters are wizards who achieve a measure of special recognition—powers, of course, as we spell hurlers measure things—in the eyes of Mystra, by being ‘the best’ of her mortal worshipers in terms of magical might. Most achieve the title by defeating the incumbent Magister and lose it by the same means—a process often fatal.”
As cornugons and pit fiends raged around the Height, watching their spells claw vainly at the god’s unseen barrier, Azuth sipped from his own goblet and continued, “Our Lady and I are working to change the nature of the Magister right now—though not overmuch—to make the Magisters less killers-of-rivals and more creators of new spells and ways of employing magic. Only one wizard is the Magister at a time. By serving themselves, they serve to proliferate and develop magic … and there is no greater way to serve Mystra. The purpose of her clergy is more to order and instruct, so that novices of the Art don’t destroy themselves and Toril many times over before they’ve mastered basic understandings of magic … but were this task not governing them, the priests of Mystra would bend their talents more to what we now leave to the Magister.”
Azuth leaned forward, the fire brighter now, and said through the flames, “You serve Mystra differently. She watches you and learns the human side of magic in all its hues from your experiences and the doings of those you meet—foes and friends alike. Yet the time has come for you to change, and grow, to serve as she’ll need you to, in the centuries ahead.”
“Centuries?” Elminster murmured and discovered suddenly that he needed the contents of his goblet rather urgently. “Watches me?”
Azuth smiled. “Indiscretions with alluring ladies and all. Set all thoughts of that aside—she needs the entertainment ‘you just being you’ affords her more than she needs someone playacting to impress her. Now attend my words, Elminster Aumar. You are to learn and grow by using as little magic as possible in the year ahead. Use what is needful and no more.”
Elminster sputtered over his goblet, opened his mouth to protest—and met Azuth’s kindly, knowing, almost mocking gaze. He drew in a deep breath, smiled, and sat back without saying anything.
Azuth smiled at that, and added, “Moreover, you are not to have any deliberate contact with your own pet project, the Harpers, until Mystra advises you otherwise. They must learn to work and think for themselves, not forever looking over their shoulders for praise and guidance from Elminster.”
It was Elminster’s turn to smile ruefully. “Hard lessons in independent achievements and self-reliance for us all, eh?” he ventured.
“Precisely,” the Lord of Spells agreed. “As for me, I shall be learning to guide and minister to the mages of all Toril without Mystra to call upon, for a time.”
“She’s—‘going away’?” El’s tone made it clear that he didn’t believe a goddess truly could withdraw from contact with her world, her worshipers, and her work.
Azuth’s smile deepened. “An inevitable task confronts her,” he said, “that she dare not put off longer; contingencies that must be determined and ordered, for the good and stability of the Weave. Neither of us may hear from her or see any manifestation of her presence or powers for some time to come.”
“ ‘Dare not’? Does Mystra serve the commands of something higher, or do ye speak of what the Weave requires?”
“The Weave by its very nature places constant demands on those attuned to it and who truly care for it … and the nature of all life and stability on this world it dominates. It is a delight and a craft—and something of a game—to anticipate the needs of the Weave, to address those needs, and to make the Weave something greater than it was when you found it.”
“I don’t believe ye quite revealed the nature of the Lady’s ‘inevitable task,’ or whom—if anything—she answers to and obeys,” Elminster said with a smile of his own.
Azuth’s own smile broadened. “No, I don’t believe I did,” he replied softly, merriment dancing in his eyes as he raised his goblet to his lips.
Elminster found himself sinking gently and being brought upright, to stand on the stony ground once more with a landing as soft as a feather landing on velvet. Once, long ago, in Hastarl, the young thief Elminster had spent several minutes watching a scrap of pigeon-down floating down onto a cushion, ever so slowly … and he still judged those minutes well spent.
Azuth was standing, too, bare feet treading an inch or so of air. It seemed their converse was at an end. Though he hadn’t even looked at the raging fiends, they were suddenly tumbling away in all directions, wreathed in white flames, their bodies dwindling in struggling silence as they went. The siege of the Height, it seemed, was at an end.
The High One didn’t seem to step forward, but he was suddenly nearer to Elminster. “We may not respond, but call upon us. Look to see us not, but have faith. We do see you.”
He reached out a hand; wonderingly, Elminster extended his own.
The god’s hand felt like a man’s … warm and solid, gripping firmly.
A moment later, Elminster roared—or tried to; the breath had been shocked right out of his lungs. Silver fire was surging through him, laced with a peculiarly vivid deep blue streak that must be Azuth’s own essence or signature. El saw it clearly as jets of flame burst forth from his own nose, mouth, and ears.
It was surging through him, burning everything it found, wrenching him in spasms of utter agony as organs were consumed, blood blazed away, and skin popped as the flesh beneath boiled away … through swimming eyes, Elminster saw Azuth become an upright spindle of flame—a spindle that seemed somehow to watch him closely as it swooped nearer and murmured (despite its lack of any mouth El could see), “The fire cleanses and heals. Awaken stronger, most precious of men.”
The spindle whirled nearer, touching the nimbus of magical fire around Elminster, fed by the silver jets still erupting from him—and the world suddenly leaped aloft with a silver-throated roar, whirling Elminster up into ecstasy and ragged ruin, torn apart into dark droplets spewed into a looping
river of gold … gold too bright to look upon, outshining the sun.
The last Prince of Athalantar lay sprawled on the stones, senseless, with silver fires raging around him and two goblets floating nearby, a cruising spindle of flame between them. The flames touched the goblet Elminster had held, and it jumped a little and vanished into the conflagration, spewing forth fat golden sparks some moments later.
Then the spindle of flame touched the flames raging around Elminster. They rushed into it, and the reinforced, towering Azuth-flames collapsed with a roar that shook all Halidae’s Height, washing over Elminster—who convulsed, but did not awaken—then gathered themselves. With sinuous grace and suddenly leisurely speed, the flames rose into a column and flowed up over the edge of Azuth’s floating goblet into the steaming wine there. Length after length of roaring flame followed behind, vanishing into the liquid.
In the end, all that was left was that goblet, wisps of wine rising off its brimful contents like smoke whipped by a breeze.
It was the first thing Elminster saw—and drank—the next morning.
The goblet vanished into the air during his last swallow, leaving nothing behind. Elminster smiled at where it had been, got up, and left the Height with a lighter heart and a body that felt new and young again. He stopped at the first still pool of water he came across to peer down to look at his reflection and be sure that it was his. It was, hawk nose and all. He grimaced at his reflection, and it made the face it was supposed to make back at him. Thank Mystra.
Two
DOOM RIDES A DAPPLE GRAY
And in the days when Mystra revealed herself not, and magic was left to grow as this mage or that saw best or could accomplish, the Chosen called Elminster was left alone in the world—that the world might teach him humility, and more things besides.
