by Ed Greenwood
El inclined his head. “And the dangerous part?”
The Srinshee chuckled at the young human’s tone.
“This is hardly the time for levity, young Prince,” the Coronal said severely. “If you choose the wrong thing to bring forth—that is, something we judge to be wrong—the penalty will be your death.”
In the silence that followed he added, “Think, young human, on what the most fitting thing you can acquire here might be. Think well.”
Winking lights were suddenly occurring about the Coronal’s body. He raised his hand to the Srinshee in salute, turned within the rising lights, and was gone. The radiances streamed toward the ceiling for a moment more, and then silently faded away.
“Before you ask, young sir, a moon is a human month,” the Srinshee said in dry tones, “and no, I’m not his mother.”
El chuckled. “Ye tell me what ye are not—tell me, I pray, what ye are.”
She adjusted the air until she was sitting upright, facing him. “I am the councilor of Coronals, the secret wisdom at the heart of the realm.”
El glanced at her, and decided to dare it. “And are you wise?”
The old sorceress chuckled. “Ah, a sharp-witted human at last!” She drew herself up grandly, eyes flashing, conjured a scepter out of nowhere into her hand, and snarled, “No.”
She joined in El’s startled shout of laughter, and let herself down to walk toward him, seeming so frail that El found himself reaching out to offer her a steadying arm.
She gave him a look. “I’m not so feeble as all that, lad. Don’t overreach yourself, or you’ll end up like yonder worm.”
El looked about. “ ‘Yonder worm’?” he asked hesitantly, seeing no beast or trophy of one, but only rooms of treasure.
“That passage,” the Srinshee told him, “is vaulted with the bones of a deep-worm that rose up from gnawing in the deep places and came tunneling in here, hungry for treasure. They eat metal, you know.”
El stared at the vaulting along the indicated passage. It did look like bone, come to think of it, but … He looked back at the sorceress with new respect. “So if I offer you violence, or try to leave this place, you can slay me by lifting one finger.”
The old elf shrugged. “Probably. I don’t see it happening, unless you’re far more foolish—or brutish—than you look.”
El nodded. “I don’t think I am. My name is Elminster … Elminster Aumar, son of Elthryn. I am—or was—a prince of Athalantar, a small human kingdom that lies—”
The old sorceress nodded. “I know it. Uthgrael must be long dead by now.”
El nodded. “He was my grandsire.”
The Srinshee tilted her head consideringly. “Hmmm.”
El stared at her. “You knew the Stag King?”
The Srinshee nodded. “A … man of vigor,” she said, smiling.
Elminster raised an incredulous eyebrow.
The old sorceress burst out laughing. “No, no, nothing like that … though with some of the maids I danced with, such could have befallen. In those days, we amused ourselves by peering at the doings of humans. When we saw someone interesting—a bold warrior, say, or a grasping mageling—we’d show ourselves to him by moonlight, and then lead him on a merry chase through the woods. Some of those chases ended in broken necks; some of us let ourselves be caught. I led Uthgrael through half the southern High Forest until he fell exhausted, at dawn. I did show myself to him once later, when he was wed, just to see his jaw drop.”
El shook his head. “I can see that it’s going to be a long moon down here,” he observed to the ceiling.
“Well!” The Srinshee affected outrage, and then chuckled. “Your turn; what pranks have you played, Elminster?”
“I don’t know that we need to go into that, just now …” Elminster said in dignified tones.
She caught his eye.
“Well,” he added, “I survived for some years by thieving in Hastarl, and there was this …”
Elminster was hoarse. They’d been talking for hours. After the second coughing fit took him, the Srinshee waved her hand and said, “Enough. You must be getting tired. Lift the lid of that platter over there.” She indicated a silver-domed tray that rested atop a heap of armor, amid a spill of octagonal coins stamped from some bluish metal Elminster had never seen before.
El did so. Beneath the lid was steaming stag meat, in a nut-and-leek gravy. “How came this here?” he asked in astonishment.
“Magic,” she replied impishly, plucking a half-buried gilded decanter from the heart of a heap of coins at her elbow. “Drink?” Shaking his head in wonder, El extended his hand for it. She tossed the decanter carelessly in his direction. It spun toward the floor, and then swooped smoothly up into his hand.
“My thanks,” El said, taking firm hold of it with both hands. The Srinshee shrugged, and the young man suddenly felt something cold atop his head. Reaching up, he found a crystal glass there.
“Your hands were both full,” the sorceress explained mildly.
As El snorted in amusement, a bowl of grapes appeared in his lap. He laughed helplessly, and found himself sliding down the coins he’d been leaning against, as they slumped onto the floor. One rolled away, and he smashed it to the floor with his boot heel, to stop it.
“You’re going to get awfully sick of those,” the elven sorceress told him.
“I don’t want coins,” El told her. “Where would I spend them, anyway?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to shift them all to get at what’s buried,” the Srinshee said. “I keep the best stuff packed about with coins, you see.”
El stared at her, and then shook his head, smiled wordlessly, and applied himself to eating.
“So what brings an elven sorceress who can advise Coronals and blow away deep-worms and lead crowned kings on wild wood chases to some vaults underground no one ever sees?” he asked, when he’d eaten all he could.
The old sorceress had eaten even more, gorging herself on platter after platter of fried mushrooms and lemon clams without seeming discomfort. She leaned back on empty air again, crossed her legs on some invisible floating footstool, and replied, “A sense of belonging, at last.”
“Belonging? With cold coins and the jewels of the dead?”
She regarded him with some respect. “Shrewdly said, man.” She set her glass on empty air at her elbow and leaned forward. “Yet you say that because you don’t see what is here as I do.”
She plucked up a tarnished silver bracelet, chased about with the body of a serpent. “Pay heed, Elminster. This is what you need me for: to make the choice the Coronal charged you to, and win your life. This arm ring is all Cormanthor has left of Princess Elvandaruil, lost in the waves of the Fallen Stars three thousand summers ago, when her flight spell failed. It washed up on Ambral Isle when Waterdeep was yet unborn.”
Elminster fished a gleaming piece of shell out of the heap beside him. It was pierced at all four corners, and from there fine chains led to silver medallions set with sea-horses picked out in emeralds, with amethyst eyes. “And this?”
“The pectoral of Chathanglas Siltral, who styled himself Lord of the Rivers And Bays before the founding of your realm of Cormyr. He unwittingly took to wife a shapechanger, and the monstrous descendants of their offspring lurk yet, tentacled and deadly, in the waterways of Marsember and what humans call the Vast Swamp.”
El leaned forward. “Ye know the provenance of every last bauble in these vaults?”
The Srinshee shrugged. “Of course. What good is a long life and an adequate memory if you don’t use them?”
El shook his head in wonder. After a moment, he said, “Yet forgive me … the folk who wore or fashioned these can’t all be kin to ye—if this Siltral fathered no elves, for instance. Yet you feel you belong … to what?”
“To the realm of my kin, and others of the People,” the sorceress said calmly. “I am Oluevaera Estelda, the last of my line. Yet I rise above the family rivalries of House against
House, and consider all Cormanthans my kin. It gives me a reason for having lived so long, and another to go on living, after those I first loved are gone.”
“How lonely is it, at the worst?” El asked quietly, rolling forward to look deep into her eyes.
The withered old elf met his gaze. Her eyes were like blue flames against a storm sky. “You are far kinder, and see far clearer, than any human I’ve ever met before,” she said quietly. “I begin to wish the Coronal’s judgment did not hang over you.”
El spread his hands. “I’d rather not be here, either,” he said with a smile.
The Srinshee answered it with one of her own, and said briskly, “Well, we’d best be getting on with it. Dig out that sword by your knee, there, and I’ll tell you of the line of elven lords who bore it …”
Some hours later, she said, “Would you like some nightglade tea?”
El looked up. “I’ve never had such a drink, but if it isn’t all mushrooms, aye.”
“No, there are other things in it, too,” she replied smoothly, and they chuckled together.
“Yes, there are mushrooms in it, and no, it’s not harmful, or that different from what haughty ladies drink in Cormyr and Chondath,” she added.
“Oh, you mean it’s like brandy?” El asked innocently, and she pursed her lips and chuckled again.
“I’ll make some for us both,” she said, rising. Then she looked back over her shoulder at Elminster, who was patiently digging a breastplate out from yet another pile of coins. It was fashioned of a single piece of copper as thick as his thumb, and sculpted into a pair of fine female breasts with a snarling lion’s jaws below them. “Don’t you ever sleep, man?” she asked curiously.
El looked up. “I get weary, aye, but I no longer need to sleep.”
“Something your goddess did?”
El nodded, and frowned down at the breastplate. “This lion,” he said. “It has eyes set into its tongue, here, and—”
The bust of the long-lost Queen Eldratha of the vanished elven realm of Larlotha was of solid marble, and as tall as the length of Elminster’s arm. It came flying at him at just the right angle, and struck him almost gently behind his right ear. He never even knew it had hit him.
He awoke with a splitting headache. It felt as if someone were jabbing a dagger into his right ear, pulling it out, and then thrusting it home once more. In. Out. In. Out. Arrrgh.
He rolled around, groaning, hearing coins slither as his boots raked across them. What had happened?
His eyes settled on the soft, unchanging lights above him. Gems, set in a vaulted ceiling. Oh, aye—he was in the Vault of Ages. With the Srinshee, until the Coronal came to test him on his choice of what to take out of here.
“Lady? Lady—uh—Srinshee?” he asked, and followed his words with another groan. Speaking had awakened a fresh throbbing in his head. “Lady … ah, Oluevaera?”
“Over here,” a weak, ragged whisper answered him, and he turned toward the sound.
The old sorceress was lying spreadeagled on a heap of treasure, her gown in tatters and smoke rising lazily from her body. A body, largely bared now, that featured many wrinkles and age-spots, but seemed unmarked by recent violence. El crawled toward her, holding his head.
“Lady?” he asked. “Are ye hurt? What befell?”
“I attacked you,” she said ruefully, “and paid the price.”
El stared at her, bewildered. “Ye—?”
“Man, I am ashamed,” she said, lips quivering. “To find a friend, after so long, and throw friendship aside for loyalty to the realm … I did what I thought right—and find my choice was wrong.”
El laid his pounding head on the coins beside the Srinshee so that he could look into her eyes. They were full of tears. “Lady,” he said gently, stricken by the sadness in her voice, “for the love of thy gods and mine, tell me what happened.”
She stared into his eyes, forlorn. “I have done the unforgiveable.”
“And that was?” El almost pleaded, gesturing wearily at her to let words pour from her mouth.
She almost smiled at that as she replied sadly, “Eltargrim asked me to try where he failed; to learn all I could from your mind while you slept. But time passed, a day and a night, and still you were sorting through the treasures, with nary a sign of sliding into slumber. So I asked you, and you said you never slept.”
El nodded, coins shifting under his cheek. “What did you hit me with?”
“A bust of Eldratha of Larlotha,” she muttered. “Elminster, I’m so sorry.”
“So am I,” he told her feelingly. “Can elven magic banish headaches?”
“Oh,” she gasped, putting a hand to her mouth in chagrin. “Here.” she reached out with two fingertips, touched the side of his head, and murmured something.
And like cool water lapping down his neck, the pain washed away.
El gasped his thanks, and slid down the coins until he was sitting on the floor again. “So ye set to work on my mind once I was stunned, and—”
Remembering, he whirled and rose to bend anxiously over her. “Lady, there was smoke coming from ye! Were ye hurt?”
“Mystra was waiting for me, just as she waited for the Coronal,” the Srinshee told him with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “She cares for you, young man. She thrust me right out of your mind, and told me she’d placed a spell in your mind that could blast me to dust.”
El stared at her, and then let his mind sink down to where, for so long, no spells had lain ready. He was going to have to do something about that. Without even a single spell to hurl, and no gem to call on, he was defenseless in the midst of all these proud elves.
Aye, there it was. A deadly magic he’d never known before—so mighty, and so simple. One touch, and elven blood would boil in the body he’d chosen, melting it to dust in a few breaths regardless of armor and defensive magics, and …
He shivered. That was a slaying spell.
When his senses returned to the here and now, cool fingers as small as a child’s were tugging at his wrist, towing his hand to rest on smooth, cool flesh. Flesh that felt like—
He stared down. The Srinshee had bared her breast and placed his hand firmly upon it.
“Lady,” he asked, staring into the sad blue flames of her eyes, “what—?”
“Use the spell,” she told him. “I deserve no less.”
El gently shook his hand free, and lifted what was left of her gown back into place. “And what would the Coronal do to me then?” he asked her, in mock despair. “That’s the trouble with ye tragic types—no thought for what happens next!”
He smiled, and saw her struggling to give him one in return. After a moment, he saw that she was crying, silent tears welling from her old eyes.
Impulsively he bent and kissed her cheek. “Ye did the unforgiveable, aye,” he growled in her ear. “Ye promised me nightglade tea—and I’m still waiting!”
She tried to laugh, and burst into sobs. El dragged her up into his arms to comfort her, and found that it was like cradling a crying child. She weighed nothing.
She was still sobbing, arms around his neck, when two steaming cups of nightglade tea appeared in the air in front of his nose.
Elminster had long since lost count of the things that he thought most clever. There was a crown that let its wearers appear as they had done when younger, and a glove that could resculpt the skin of battered or marred faces with its fingertips. The Srinshee had set these, and other things he most fancied, aside in a chest in the domed central chamber, but he’d seen less than a twentieth of the treasures held here, and the Srinshee’s eyes were growing sad again.
“El,” she said, as he tossed aside a flute that had belonged to the elven hero Erglareo of the Long Arrow, “your time grows short.”
“I know,” he said shortly. “What is this?”
“A cloak that banishes blight from trees whose trunks it is wrapped around, or plants it is draped over, left to us by the elven mage Raeranth
ur of—”
He was already trudging away from her, toward the chest for things he fancied. The Lady Estelda fell silent and sadly watched him walk away from her. She dared not aid him even by shifting coins, for fear one of the court mages, eager for this human intruder’s death, was scrying her from afar.
Elminster returned, looking weary about the eyes. “How much longer?” he asked.
“Perhaps ten breaths,” she said softly, “perhaps twenty. It depends on how eager they are.”
“For my death,” El growled, leaning past her. Was it an accident that she’d rested her hand on this crystal sphere thrice in the last little while?
“What’s this?” he asked, scooping it up.
“A crystal through which one can see the course of waterflows through the realm, on the surface or underground; every handspan of their travel, clearly lit for your eye to see beaver dams, snags, and sources of foulness,” the Srinshee told him, quickly, almost breathlessly, “crafted for the House of Clatharla, now fallen, by the—”
“I’ll take it,” El growled, starting past her. He stopped in midstride and kicked at the hilt of a blade buried under the coins. “This?”
“A sword that cuts darkness, and the undead things called shadows—though I believe wraiths and ghosts also—”
He waved a dismissive hand and set off back down the passage toward the chest. The Srinshee adjusted the jeweled gown he’d unearthed and insisted she put on—it persisted in sliding off one aged shoulder—and sighed. They’d be here at any moment, and they—
Were here now. There was a soundless flash of light in the domed central chamber, and El stiffened, finding himself suddenly ringed with unfriendly looking elven sorceresses. Six of them there were, all holding scepters trained at him. Tiny sparks winked and flowed along those deadly things. Along the passage El saw the Srinshee coming up behind him. She snapped her fingers as she came, and a seventh scepter was suddenly in that hand, leveled and ready.
He turned his back on her slowly, knowing who’d be awaiting him in the other direction. Rulers always liked to make entrances. Behind two of the sorceresses was an old elf in white robes, with eyes like two pools of stars. The women slid sideways smoothly to make a place for him in the ring of death. The Coronal.
