by Ed Greenwood
Tabarast snatched at the reins of the growling mule—until now, he hadn’t known mules could growl—made sure he still had hold of the other mule’s bridle, and looked back down the road. “Finished playing at bold knights on horseback?” he snapped. “We’re on an important mission, remember?”
An upside-down Beldrune, who’d been staring at his booted feet a good way up the tree, above him, looked back at his colleague groggily for a moment, then slowly unfolded himself back into the road. When he was upright again, he raked showers of dust from his hair with one hand—wincing at the pains in his back this activity caused—and snarled, “With all the shouting you’re doing, it’s a safe bet that Elminster isn’t within forty farms of here!”
The tree seemed to flicker for a moment, but neither of the two esteemed mages noticed.
Six
AT THE RIVEN STONE
Let stones be riven and the world be changed,
When next two such as these meet,
With howling chaos in the sky
And deception a gliding serpent round their feet.
Author unknown
from the ballad Many Meetings
composed sometime before The Year of the Twelverule
Sunlight stabbed down, and Elminster smiled. He was still in lands he’d never seen before, but more than one farmer along this rising road had assured him he was heading toward the Riven Stone.
Out of habit El glanced back to see if anyone was following him, then up at the sky; taking bird-shape had been a favorite tactic of elf mages who didn’t look with friendly eyes on the first human who’d walked into their cozy midst, and changed Cormanthyr forever. Right now, however, both places seemed empty of foes—or any living creature, for that matter.
Briefly El wondered how far along the road those two bumbling mages had gotten to yestereve on their recalcitrant mules. He chuckled. The way Mystra’s whims ran, no doubt he’d find out soon enough.
The sky was blue and clear, and a brisk wind blew just this side of chilly; a grand day for walking, and the last prince of Athalantar was enjoying it. Rolling farm fields with rubblestone walls spread out on either side of the road; here and there, boulders too big to be moved thrust up out of the tillage like tomb markers or the snouts of gigantic, petrified monsters of the underearth.…
He was obviously remembering too many bards’ ballads, and too few hours of plowing and haying. The air had that wet, earthy smell of fresh-plowed land, and if a certain Athalantan had to walk Toril alone, days like these at least made one feel alive and not a doddering survivor staggering toward a waiting grave.
The laughter of swift rushing water came to Elminster’s ears from off to the left, and over the brow of the next rise its source came into view. A stream rushed past, cutting away across the fields in a small, deep-cut gorge. Ahead, it ran beside the road for a time, in its fall from what had to be a mill.
Ah, good. According to the last farmer, this must be Anthather’s Mill. A tall fieldstone building, towering over a fork in the road. A fork, of course, which was bereft of any signs.
The stream rushed out of the pool below the mill dam, a creaking wheel turning endlessly in its wake. Men smudged white with flour were loading a cart by the roadside, adding bulging sacks to an already impressive pile. The horses were going to have a hard pull. One of the men saw El and murmured something. All of the men looked up, took their measure of the stranger, and looked back to their work, none of them halting in the hefting, tossing and heaving for a moment.
El spread his hands to show that he meant to draw no weapon, stopping beside the nearest man. “Well met,” he said. “I seek the Riven Stone, and know not my road from here.”
The man gave him an odd look, pointed up the left-hand road, and said, “ ’Tis easy enough to find, aye—straight along that, a good stride, until you’re standing in the middle of it. But yon’s just a stone, mind; there’s nothing there.”
El shrugged and smiled. “I go following a vow, of sorts,” he said. “Have my thanks.”
The miller nodded, waved, and looked down for the next sack. Somewhat reassured, Elminster strode on.
It took some hours of walking, but the Riven Stone was clear enough. Tall and as black as pitch, it rose out of scrub woods in a huge, helmlike cone—cloven neatly in half, with the road running through the gap. There were no farms nearby, and El suspected the Stone enjoyed the usual “haunted” or otherwise fell reputation such landmarks always attracted—if they weren’t deemed holy by one faith or another.
No sigils, altars, or signs of habitation met his view as he came around the last bend and saw just how large the stone was. The cleft must have been six man-heights deep or more, and the way through it was long and dim. The inside surfaces of the stone were wet with seeping groundwater, and the faintest of mists drifted underfoot there in the gap.
There, where someone was standing awaiting him. Mystra provides.
Elminster walked steadily on into the gap, a pleasant smile on his face despite the stirrings in him that his freedom to wander would end here—and darker forebodings.
Those misgivings were not lessened by what met his eyes. The figure ahead was human and very female. Alone and cloakless, dark-gowned, tall and sleek of figure; in a word, dangerous.
Had Elminster been standing in a certain dark hall in Tresset’s Ringyl as a scepter fell to dust, rather than panting on a hilltop over the remains of a stag-headed shadow, he’d have seen this beautiful, dark-eyed sorceress before. As it was, he was looking into a pair of proud, cold dark eyes—did they hold a hint of mischief? Or was that suppressed mirth … or triumph?—for the first time.
Her legs, in black boots, were almost impossibly long. Her glossy black hair fell in an unbound flood that was longer. Her skin was like ivory, her features fine; just the pleasant side of angular. She carried herself with serene fearlessness, one long-fingered hand playing almost idly with a wand. Aye, trouble. The sort of sorceress folk cowered away from.
“Well met,” she said, making of those words both a challenge and a husky promise, as her eyes raked him leisurely from muddy boots to untidy hair. “Do you work”—her tongue darted into view for an instant between parted lips—“magic?”
Elminster kept his gaze steady on those dark eyes as he bowed. Mindful of Azuth’s directive, he replied, “A little.”
“Good,” the dark lady replied, making the word almost a caress. She moved the wand in her hand ever so slightly to catch his eyes, smiled, and said, “I’m looking for an apprentice. A faithful apprentice.”
El didn’t fill the silence she left after those words, so she spoke again, just a trifle more briskly. “I am Dasumia, and you are—?”
“Elminster is my name, Lady. Just Elminster.” Now for the polite dismissal. “I believe my days as an apprentice are over. I serve—”
Silver fire suddenly surged inside him, its flare bringing back an image of the cracked stone ceiling of the best bedchamber in Fox Tower, and words of silver fire writing themselves across the ceiling, vivid in the darkness: “Serve the one called Dasumia.” El swallowed.
“—ye, if ye’ll have me,” he concluded his sentence, aware of amused dark eyes staring deep into his soul. “Yet I must tell ye: I serve Holy Mystra first and foremost.”
The dark-eyed sorceress smiled almost lazily. “Yes, well—we all do,” she said coyly, “don’t we?”
“I’m sorry, Lady Dasumia,” Elminster said gravely, “but ye must understand … I serve Her more closely than most. I am the One Who Walks.”
Dasumia burst into silvery gales of laughter, throwing her head back and crowing her mirth until it echoed back off the stony walls flanking the two mages. “I’m sure you are,” she said when she could speak again, gliding forward to pat Elminster’s hand. “Do you know how many young mages seeking a reputation come to me claiming to be the One Who Walks? Well, I’ll tell you—a dozen this last month, fully two score the month before that, snows and all, and one before
you so far this month.”
“Ah,” Elminster replied, drawing himself up, “but they none of them were as handsome as me, were they?”
She burst out laughing again and impulsively hugged him. “A dream-vision told me to look for my apprentice here—but I never thought I’d find one who could make me laugh.”
“Then ye’ll have me?” El asked, giving no sign that he’d sensed her hug delivering many probing magics. More than one warm stirring in his innards told him Mystra’s silver fire was hard at work countering hostile attempts to control and influence—and to leave behind at least three means of slaying him instantly by her uttering trigger words. Ah, but it was a wonderful thing to be a wizard. Almost as marvelous as being a Chosen.
Dasumia gave him a smile that held rather more triumph than welcome. “Body and soul I’ll have you,” she murmured. “Body and soul.” She whirled away from him and looked back over her shoulder to purr provocatively, “Which shall we sample first, hmmm?”
“Now, really, Droon! I ask you: would we have had such widespread mastery of magic, such legions of capable or nearly capable mages, from sea unto sea and to the frozen wastes and uttermost east, if Myth Drannor still stood proud? Or would we have had closed, elite ranks of those who dwelt or had free admittance to the City of Song—and the rest of us left to fight for what scraps the glittering few deigned to toss to us, or that we could plunder from old tombs—and the liches lurking in them?” Tabarast turned in his saddle to make a point, almost fell out of it despite the tangle of sashes and belts he’d lashed himself on with, and thought it prudent to face forward again, merely gesturing airily with one hand. His mule sighed and kept on plodding.
“Come, come! We speak not of gems, Baerast,” Beldrune replied, “nor yet cabbages—but magic! The Art! A ferrago of ideas, a feast of enchantments, an endless flood of new approaches and—”
“Free-flowing nonsense spoken by young mages,” the older mage retorted. “Surely even you, young Droon, have seen enough years to know that generosity—truly open giving, not to an apprentice one can keep beholden or even spell-thralled—is a quality rarer and less cultivated in the ranks of wizards than in any other assembly of size or import in Faerûn today, save perhaps an orc horde. Pray weary my ears with rather less morology, if it troubles you not overmuch to do so.”
Beldrune spread despairing hands. “Is any view that differs from your own but worthless idiocy?” he asked. “Or can it be—panoptic wind trumpet that you are—that some small shred of possibility remains that some truths the gods may not as yet have revealed unto wise old Tabarast, shrewd old Tabarast, unthinking old Tab—”
“Why is it that the young always resort so swiftly to personal offenses?” wise old Tabarast asked the world at large, loudly. “Name-calling and ridicule greet arguments that speak to a point, not foremost a person to attack or decry. Such a rude, unsettling approach makes a mountain of every monticule, a pernicious tempest of every chance exchange of remarks, and blackens the names of all who dare to hold recusant views. I disapprove strongly of it, Droon, I do. Such scrannel threats and blusterings are no worthy substitute for well-argued views—and all too often hold up a shield for jejune, even retrorse sciamachy, bereft of sense and waving bright purfle and clever verbiage where meaning has flown!”
“Uh, ah, ahem, yes,” Beldrune said weakly. When Tabarast was riled, two words in ten was fair going. “We were speaking of the influence of fabled Myth Drannor on the practice of the Art across all Faerûn, I believe.”
“We were,” Tabarast confirmed almost severely, urging his mule over the summit of a monticle with a flourish of his tiny riding whip. The fact that it had broken in some past mishap, and now dangled uselessly from a point only inches above the handle, seemed to have utterly escaped his notice.
Beldrune waited for the torrent of grand but largely junkettaceous utterances that invariably accompanied any of Tabarast’s observations of simple fact, but for once it did not come.
He raised his eyebrows in wonderment and said nothing as he followed his colleague over the hill. Hipsy—and plenty of it. ’Twas past time for hipsy. He slapped at the grand cloak rolled and belted at his hip, found the reassuring solid smoothness of his flask beneath it, and drew it forth. Tabarast had made this blend, and it was a mite watery for Beldrune’s taste, but he didn’t want to have to sit through that argument again. Next time, it’d be his turn, and there’d be more of the rare and heady concoction he’d heard called “brandy,” and less water and wine.
Hmmm. Always assuming they both lived to see a next time. Adventure had seemed a grand thing a day ago—but he’d been thinking more of an adventure without mules. He’d be a hipshot, broken man if they had to ride many more days. Even with all the belts and sashes and lashings—which of course gave the demon-brained beasts a means of dragging mages who’d had the misfortune to fall out of their saddles helplessly along in the dirt until they could haul themselves handover-hand to the bridles, receiving regular kicks in the process—he’d fallen off more than twenty times thus far today.
Tabarast had managed an even more impressive Faerûn-kissing total, he reflected with a smirk, watching the old wizard bucketing down a steep descent with both legs sticking out like wobbling wings on either side of his patient mount. In another moment, he’d be—
Something that was dark and full of stars rushed past Beldrune like a vengeful wind, dealing his left leg a numbing blow and almost hurling him from his own saddle. He kept aboard the snorting, bucking mule only by digging his hands into its mane like claws and kicking out in a desperate, seesaw fight for balance.
Ahead of him, down the hill, he could see what was bearing down on poor, unwitting Tabarast: a slim, dark-cloaked elven rider bent low in the saddle of a ghostly horse, with a lightning-spitting staff floating along at his shoulder. Beldrune could see right through the silently churning hooves of the conjured mount as the elf swept down on Tabarast, swerved at the last instant to avoid a hard and direct collision, and stormed past, hurling mage and mule together over on their sides.
Beldrune hurried to his colleague’s aid as swiftly as he dared, but Tabarast was working some magic or other that hoisted himself and the bewildered, feebly kicking mule upright again, and shouting, “Hircine lout! Lop-eared, fatuous, rude offspring of parents who should’ve known better! Ill-mannered tyrant of the road! Careless spellcaster! I shall impart some wisdom to your thumb-sized brain—see if I don’t! It almost need not be said that I’ll school you in humility—and safe riding—first!”
Ilbryn Starym heard some of those choice words, but didn’t even bother to lift his sneer into a smile. Humans. Pale, blustering shadows of the one he was hunting. He must be getting close now.
Elminster Aumar—ugly hook nose, insolence always riding in the blue-gray eyes, hair as black and lank as that of a wet bear. That familiar, hungry tang rose into Ilbryn’s mouth. Blood. He could almost taste the blood of this Elminster, who must die to wash clean the stain his filthy human hands had put on the bright honor of the Starym. As he topped a rise, Ilbryn stood up in the stirrups that weren’t there and shouted to the world, “This Elminster must die!”
His shout rang back to him from the hilltops, but otherwise the world declined to answer.
Dusk almost always came down like a gentle curtain to close a glorious sunset at Moonshorn. Mardasper liked to be up on the crumbling battlements to see those sunsets, murmuring what words he could remember of lovelorn ballads and the chanted lays of the passing of heroes. It was the only time of the day—barring unpleasant visitors—when he let his emotions out, and dreamed of what he’d do out in Faerûn when his duty here was done.
Mardasper the Mighty he might become, stout-bearded, wise, and respected by lesser mages, rings of power glittering on his fingers as he crafted staves and tamed dragons and gave orders to kings that they dared not disobey.
Or he might rescue a princess or the daughter of a wealthy, haughty noble and ride away with her,
using his magic to stay young and dashing but never taking up the robe and staff of a mage, keeping his powers as secret as possible as he carved out a little barony for himself, somewhere green.
Pleasant thoughts, soul-restoring and necessarily private … Wherefore Mardasper Oblyndrin was apt to grow very angry when something or someone interrupted his time alone, up on the battlements, to watch another day die into the west. He was angry now.
The wards warned him. The wards always warned him. Raw power, not held in check or under governance, always made them shriek as if in pain. Snarling at the happenstance, Mardasper was thundering down the long, narrow back stair before the intruder could have reached the doorstep. Precipitous it might be, but the back stair led directly to the third door in the entry hall; when the front door was hurled open, to bang against the wall and shudder at the impact, Mardasper was in place behind his lectern, white to his pinched lips and quivering in anger.
He stared out into the gathering night, but no one was there.
“Reveal,” he said coldly, uttering aloud what he could have caused the wards to do silently, seeking to impress—or cause fear in—whoever was out there, playing pranks. It took magic of great power to force open the Tower door, with its intertwined glyphs, layers of active enchantments, and the runes set into its frame and graven on its hinges.
Too much power, he would have thought, to burn in any prank.
The wards showed him nothing lurking within their reach. Hmmph; perhaps that nose-in-the-air elf had left a timed magic behind and miscast on the timing. He couldn’t think of anything fast enough to smite open a door and leave the reach of the wards so swiftly—and magic mighty enough to breach the door from afar would leave traces behind in the wards. So would a teleport or other translocation. The door’s own magics should prevent a spell cast on it from surviving to take effect at any later time … so who—or what—had forced the door open?
