The Temptation of Elminster

by Ed Greenwood

  “I’ve wandered these fair realms for some decades now,” Wanlorn replied brightly, seeming not to notice Arunder’s sarcasm or unveiled insinuations, “seeking knowledge. I’d hoped that Myth Drannor would teach me much—but it gave me only a lesson in the primal necessity of outrunning fiends. I’ve poked here and peered there but learned little more than a few secrets about Dasumia.”

  “Have you so? Seek you lore about magic, then—or is your quest for mere treasure?”

  At that last word, the warrior Harbright glanced up from his noisy and nonstop biting and swallowing for a moment, fixing Wanlorn with one level eye to listen to whatever response might be coming.

  “Lore is what I chase,” Wanlorn said, and the warrior gave a disgusted grunt and resumed eating. “Lore about Dasumia—but instead I seem to find a fair bit about the Art. I suppose its power drives those who can write to set down details of it. As to treasure … one can’t eat coins. I’ve enough of them for my needs; alone and afoot, how would I carry more?”

  “Use a few of them to buy a horse,” Harbright grunted, spraying an arc of table with small morsels of herbed boar. “Gods above—walking around the kingdoms! I’d grow old even before my feet wore off at the ankles!”

  “Tell me,” Lord Felmorel addressed Wanlorn, leaning forward, “how much did you see of the fabled City of Song? Most who even glimpse the ruins are torn apart before they can win clear.”

  “Or did you just wander about in the woods near where you imagine Myth Drannor to be?” Arunder asked silkily, plucking up a decanter to refill his glass.

  “The fiends must have been busy hounding someone else,” the hawk-nosed man told the Mantimera, “because I spent most of a day clambering through overgrown, largely empty buildings without seeing anything alive that was larger than a squirrel. Beautiful arched windows, curving balconies … it must have been very grand. Now there’s not much lying about waiting to be carried off. I saw no wineglasses still on tables or books propped open where someone was interrupted in their reading, as the minstrels would have us all believe. No doubt the city was sacked after it fell. Yet I saw, and remember, some sigils and writings. Now if I could just determine what they mean.…”

  “You saw no fiends?” Arunder was derisive—but also visibly eager to hear Wanlorn’s reply. The hawk-nosed man smiled.

  “No, sir mage, they guard the city yet. ’Twill probably be years, if ever, before folk can walk into the ruins without having to worry about anything more dangerous than a stirge, say, or an owlbear.”

  Lord Felmorel shook his head. “All that power,” he murmured, “and yet they fell. All that beauty swept away, the people dead or scattered … once lost, it can never be restored again. Not the way it was.”

  Wanlorn nodded. “Even if the fiends were banished by nightfall,” he said, “the place rebuilt in a tenday, and a citizenry of comparable wit and accomplishments assembled the day after, we’d not have the City of Beauty back again. That shared excitement, drive, and the freedom to experiment and freely reason and indulge in whimsy that’s founded on the sure knowledge of one’s own invulnerability won’t be there. One would have a players’ stage pretending to be the City of Song, not Myth Drannor once more.”

  The Mantimera nodded and said, “I’ve long heard the tales of the fall, and have even faced a fell fiend—not there—and lived to tell the tale. Even divided by their various selfish interests and rivalries, I can scarce believe that so grand and powerful a folk fell as completely and utterly as they did.”

  “Myth Drannor had to fall,” Barundryn Harbright rumbled, spreading one massive hand as if holding an invisible skull out over the table for their inspection. “They got above themselves, you see, chasing godhood again … like those Netherese. The gods see to it that such dreams end bloodily, or there’d be more gods than we could all remember, and none of ’em with might enough to answer a single prayer. ’Sobvious; so why do all these mages keep making this same mistake?”

  The wizard Arunder favored him with a slim, superior smile and said, “Possibly because they don’t have you on hand to correct their every little straying from the One True Path.”

  The warrior’s face lit up. “Oh, you’ve heard of it?” he asked. “The One True Path, aye.”

  The mage’s jaw dropped open. He’d been joking, but by all the gods, this lummox seemed serious.

  “There aren’t many of us thus far,” Harbright continued enthusiastically, waving a whole, gravy-dripping pheasant for emphasis, “but already we wield power in a dozen towns. We need a realm, next, and—”

  “So do we all. I’d like several,” Arunder said mockingly, swiftly recovered from his astonishment. “Get me one with lots of towering castles, will you?”

  Harbright gave him a level look. “The problem with over- clever mages,” he growled to the table at large, “is their unfamiliarity with work—not to mention getting along with all sorts of folk and knowing how to saddle a horse or put a heel back on a boot or even how to kill and cook a chicken. They seldom know how to hold their drink down, or how to woo a wench, or grow turnips … but they always know how to tell other folk what to do, even about turnip-growing or wringing a chicken’s neck!”

  Large, hairy, blunt-fingered hands waved about alarmingly, and Arunder shrank away, covering his obvious fear by reaching for a distant decanter. Wanlorn obligingly moved it nearer to the mage but was ignored rather than thanked.

  Their host cut into the uncomfortable moment by asking, “Yet, my lords, True Paths or the natures of wizards aside, what see you ahead for all who dwell in this heart of far-sprawling Faerûn? If Myth Drannor the Mighty can be swept away, what can we hold to in the years to come?”

  “Lord Felmorel,” the wizard Arunder replied hastily, “there has been much converse on this matter among mages and others, but little agreement. Each proposal attracts those who hate and fear it, as well as those who support it. Some have spoken of a council of wizards ruling a land—”

  “Ha! A fine tyranny and mess that’d be!” Harbright snorted.

  “—while others see a bright future in alliances with dragons, so that each human realm is a dragon’s domain, with—”

  “Everyone as the dragon’s slaves and ultimately, its dinner,” Harbright told his almost-empty platter.

  “—agreements in place to bind both wyrm and people against hostilities practiced on each other.”

  “As the dragon swept down, its jaws gaping open to swallow, the knight stared into his doom, shouting vainly, ‘Our agreement protects me! You can’t—’ for almost the space of three breaths before the dragon gulped him up and flew away,” Harbright said sarcastically. “The surviving folk gathered there solemnly agreed that the dragon had broken the agreement, and the proposal was made that someone should travel to the dragon’s lair to inform the wyrm that it had unlawfully devoured the knight. Strangely, no one volunteered.”

  Silence fell. The hulking warrior thrust his jaw forward and shot the wizard a dark and level gaze, as if daring him to speak, but Thessamel Arunder seemed to have acquired a sudden and abiding interest in peppered lizard soup.

  Wanlorn looked up at his host, aware of the Lady Felmorel’s continuing and attentive regard, and said, “For my part, Lord, I believe another such shining city will be a long time in coming. Small realms, defended against orcs and brigands more than aught else, will rise as they have always done, standing amid lawless and perilous wilderlands. The bards will keep the hope of Myth Drannor bright while the city is lost to us, now and in foreseeable time to come.”

  “And this wisdom, young Wanlorn, was written on the walls of the ruined City of Song?” Arunder asked lightly, emboldened to speak once more, but carefully not looking in Harbright’s direction. “Or did the gods tell you this, perhaps, in a dream?”

  “Sarcasm and derision seems to run away with the tongues of wizards all too often these days,” Wanlorn observed in casual tones, addressing Barundryn Harbright. “Have you noticed this, too?�
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  The warrior grinned, more at the wizard than at the hawk-nosed man, and growled, “I have. A disease of the wits, I think.” He waved a quail-lined spit like a scepter and added, “They’re all so busy being clever that they never notice when it strikes them personally.”

  In unspoken unison both Harbright and Wanlorn turned their heads to look hard at the wizard. Arunder opened his mouth with a sneer to say something scathing, seemed to forget what it was, opened his mouth again to say something else, then instead put a glass of wine up to it and drank rather a large amount in a sputteringly short time.

  As he choked, burbled, and wheezed, the warrior reached out one shovel-sized hand to slam him solidly between the shoulder-blades. As the mage reeled in his seat, Harbright inquired, “Recovered, are you—in your own small way?”

  Into the dangerous silence that followed, as the wizard Arunder struggled for breath and the Lady Nasmaerae lifted a hand both swift and graceful to cover her mouth, Lord Esbre Felmorel said smoothly, “I fear you may have the right of it, good sir Wanlorn. Small holds and fortified towns standing alone are the way of things hereabouts, and things look to stay that way in the years ahead—unless something befalls the Lady of Shadows.”

  “The Lady—?”

  “A fell sorceress,” the warrior put in, raising grim eyes to meet those of the hawk-nosed man.

  Lord Esbre nodded. “Bluntly put, but yes: the Lady of Shadows is someone we fear and either obey or avoid, whenever possible. None know where she dwells, but she seeks to enforce her will—if not to rule outright—in the lands immediately east of us. She’s known to be … cruel.”

  Noticing that the wizard seemed to have recovered, Lord Esbre sought to restore the man’s temper by deferring to him with some joviality. “You are our expert on things sorcerous, Lord Arunder—pray unfold for us whatever of import you know about the Lady of Shadows.”

  It was time for fresh astonishment at Lord Esbre’s feast table. Lord Thessamel Arunder stared down at his plate and muttered, “There’s no—I have nothing to add on this subject. No.”

  The tall candles on the feast table danced and flickered in the heart of utter silence for a long time after that.

  A dozen candles flickered at the far end of the bedchamber like the tongues of hungry dragon hatchlings. The room was small and high-ceilinged, its walls shrouded in old but still grand tapestries that Elminster was sure hid more than a few secret ways and spy holes. He smiled thinly at the serenity awaiting him, as he strode past the curtained and canopied bed to the nearest flame.

  “Wanlorn am I,” he told it gently, “and am not. By this seeming, in your service, hear me I pray, O Mystra of the Mysteries, O Lady most precious, O Weaving Flame.” He passed two fingers through the flame, and its orange glow became a deep, thrilling blue. Satisfied, he bent forward over it until it almost seemed as if he’d draw the blue flame into his mouth, and whispered, “Hear me, Mystra, I pray, and watch over me in my time of need. Shammarastra ululumae paerovevim driios.”

  All of the candles suddenly dimmed, sank, guttered, then in unison rose again with renewed vigor, building like spears of the sun to a brighter, warmer radiance than had been in the room before.

  As warm firelight danced on his cheek, Elminster’s eyes rolled up in his head. He swayed, then fell heavily to his knees, slumping forward into a crawling posture that became a face first slide onto the floor. Lying senseless among the candles, he never saw the flame spit a circle of blue motes that swirled in a circle around him and faded to invisibility, leaving the candle flame its customary amber-white in their wake.

  In a chamber that was not far away, yet hidden down dark ways of spell-guarded stone, flames of the same blue were coiling and writhing inches above a floor they didn’t scorch, tracing a sigil both intricate and subtly changing as it slowly rotated above the glass-smooth stones. They licked and caressed the ankles of their creator, who danced barefoot in their midst as they rose and fell around her knees. Her white silk nightgown shimmered above the flames as she wove a spell that slowly brought their hue up into her eyes. It spilled out into the air before her face like strange tears as the Lady Nasmaerae whirled and chanted.

  The room was bare and dark save for the spell she wove, but it brightened just a trifle when the flames rose into an upright oval that suddenly held the slack face of the hawk-nosed Wanlorn, sprawled on the stones of his bedchamber amid a dozen dancing candles.

  The Lady of Felmorel beheld that image and sang something softly that brought the half-lidded eyes of the sleeping man closer, to almost fill the scene between the racing flames. “Ooundreth,” she chanted then. “Ooundreth mararae!”

  She spread her hands above the flames and waited for them to well up to lick her palms, bringing with them what she so craved: that dark rush of wit and raw thought she’d drunk so many times before, memories and knowledge stolen from a sleeping mind. What secrets did this Wanlorn hold?

  “Give me,” she moaned, for the flood was long in coming. “Give … me …”

  Power such as she’d never tasted before suddenly surged through the flames, setting her limbs to trembling and every last hair on her body to standing stiffly out from her crawling, tingling flesh. She struggled to breathe against the sudden tension hanging in her body and the room around her, heavy and somehow aware.

  Still the dark flood did not come. Who was this Wanlorn?

  The image in the loop of flame before her was still two half-open, slumberous eyes—but now something was changing in those encircling flames. Tongues of silver fire were leaping among the blue, only a few at first, but faster and more often, now washing over the entire scene for a moment, now blazing up brighter as the wondering dancer watched.

  Suddenly the silver flames overwhelmed the blue, and two cold eyes that were not Wanlorn’s opened in their midst. Black they were, shot through with twinkling stars, but the flames that swam from them like tears were the same rich blue as were spilling from Nasmaerae’s own.

  “Azuth am I,” a voice that was both musical and terrible rang out of the depths of her mind. “Cease this prying—forever. If you heed not, the means of prying shall be taken from you.”

  The Lady of Castle Felmorel screamed then—as loud and as long as she knew how, as blue flames whirled her off her feet and held her captive and struggling, upright in their grip. Nasmaerae was lost in fear and horror and self-loathing, as the blue flames of her own thought-stealing spell were hurled forcibly back through her.

  She shuddered under their onslaught, fell silent as she writhed in helpless and spasmodic collapse, then howled with a quite different tone, like a lost and wandering thing. All the brightness had gone out of her eyes, and she was drooling, a steady stream plunging from the corner of her twisted mouth.

  The eyes that swam with stars regarded the broken woman for several grim moments, then spat forth fresh blue flames to enshroud her in a racing inferno that raged for only moments.

  When it receded, the barefoot woman was standing on the stone floor of the spell chamber, her fiery weavings shattered and gone. Her nightgown was plastered to her body with her own sweat, and her hands shook uncontrollably, but the desolate eyes that stared down at them were her own.

  “You are Nasmaerae once more, your mind restored. You may consider this no mercy, daughter of Avarae. I’ve broken all of your bindings—including, of course, the one that holds your Lord in thrall. Consequences will soon be upon you; ‘twould be best to prepare yourself.”

  The sorceress stared into those floating, starry eyes in helpless horror. They looked back at her sternly and steadily even as they began to fade away, dwindling swiftly to nothingness. All of the magical light in the chamber faded and failed with them, leaving only emptiness behind.

  Nasmaerae knelt alone in the darkness for a long time, sobbing slightly. Then she arose and padded like a wan-eyed ghost along unseen ways she knew well, feeling turns and archways with her fingertips, seeking the sliding panel that opened into
the back of the wardrobe in her own bedchamber.

  Thrusting through half-cloaks and gowns, she drew in a deep, tremulous breath, let it out in a sigh, and laid her fingers on her most private of coffers, on the high, hidden shelf right where she’d left it.

  The maids had left a single hooded lamp lit on the marble-topped side table; the needle-slim dagger caught and flashed back its faint light as she drew it forth, looked at it almost casually for a moment, then turned it in her hand to menace her own breast.

  “Esbre,” she told the darkness in a whisper, as she drew back her hand for the stroke that would take her own life, “I’ll miss you. Forgive me.”

  “I already have,” said a voice like cold stone, close by her ear. A familiar arm lashed out across her chest to intercept the wrist that held the dagger.

  Nasmaerae gave a little startled scream and struggled wildly for a moment, but Lord Esbre’s hairy hand was as immovable as iron, yet as gentle as velvet as it encircled her wrist.

  His other hand plucked the dagger out of her grasp and threw it away. It flashed across the room to be caught deftly by one of the dozen or so guards who were melting out from behind every tapestry and screen in the room now, unhooding lanterns, lighting torches in wall sconces, and moving grimly to bar any move she might make toward the door or to the wardrobe behind her.

  Nasmaerae stared into the eyes of her lord, still too shocked and dazed to speak, wondering when the storm of fury would come. The Mantimera’s eyes blazed through a mist of tears, burning into her, but his lips moved slowly and precisely as he asked in tones of quiet puzzlement, “Self-slaying is the answer to misguided sorcery? You had a good reason for placing me in a spell-thrall?”