Spellstorm

by Ed Greenwood

  She wrinkled her nose at it, and then at him. “Uncooked onion? You Waterdhavians are barbarians!”

  “Compliments, compliments,” he replied amiably, picking up his knife and returning to his chopping.

  Across the kitchen, Elminster sniffed at one of Myrmeen’s bowls. “That’s perfect, lass. It just has to cool, covered over and somewhere dark, before we pour it into little bottles—ye saw the crates of them down in the cellars, yes?—and stopper them and label them before anything can get mixed up.”

  He moved to the next bowl, picked it up—and there was a sharp, insistent knocking on the nearest door. The door into the entry hall.

  Elminster, Myrmeen, and Mirt all looked at each other. Then they caught up the best weapons they had, and in unspoken accord went to the feast hall door instead, to slip out and go around to see who was knocking.

  Just in case, El and Myrmeen flanked Mirt as he set aside the bar, shot the bolt, unlocked the door, and opened it.

  Outside stood a huge crowd of identically armored men, swords and axes drawn. Gleaming new coat of plate, open-faced helms with great-rib noseguards—and not a badge nor blazon to be seen. Head to toe metal, save that they wore heavy hobnailed leather boots, armor plated just down the top of the foot, to the toes. Swords and hand axes, daggers at belts. Like thousands of blankshield mercenaries, only far better equipped than most.

  They pressed forward with enthusiastic shouts, trying to force their way in.

  In their path stood Mirt, shoulder to the door and shoving hard. The door thundered under the impacts of charging warrior after charging warrior, but Mirt, his floppy boots sliding on the stone floor, snarled and lowered his head and shoved harder.

  The door got to a little more than half-closed, shuddering under many blows, when the first arms appeared around its edge, thrusting and slashing at the air with swords and hand axes. Reaching for Mirt, reaching for anyone, seeking to hack.

  Elminster parried some of them coolly with a cooking tray, but amid its loud clangor, Myrmeen reached in with the largest kitchen cleaver she’d been able to find and tried to lop off limbs, armor shrieking under her blows. Plate armor prevented her performing butchery, but sword after sword she dashed from numbed fingers, and one gauntlet failed and left its wearer screaming and yanking back a hand that let fall fingers amid much blood.

  Elminster snatched up the door bar and thrust its end into helmed faces and across mailed throats, bludgeoning everyone he could reach. A warrior made a grab for the end of the bar to wrest it from his grasp, but Myrmeen hacked that hand away viciously and Elminster thrust the timber into that man’s armored gut, folding him up and dumping him back into a retching, arm-flailing collapse that knocked two of his fellows to the floor—and gave Mirt his chance.

  The moneylender snorted his way forward like an angry bull and slammed the door shut, crushing some trapped hands to the accompaniment of shrill shrieks of agony and the clatter of fallen and bouncing weapons—and Myrmeen leaped to shoot the bolt home even before the door was locked. Elminster slammed the door bar into its cradles a bare instant later.

  That timber was still settling into place as the Sage of Shadowdale turned and sprinted into the butlery, leaving Mirt and Myrmeen to stare after him in surprise in the bare instant before both of the other kitchen doors started to thud and thunder under a heavy and continuous onslaught of bodies and axe blades.

  El ran hard, heading for the kitchen stairs. Four other staircases led down into the cellars, five if one counted the secret plate and cutlery cupboard stair, and he had to get to the heavy door at the bottom of these stairs and secure it before that army of warriors—not Purple Dragons by the looks of them, so who were they?—came swarming up the stairs to infest all the food rooms attached to the kitchen.

  There was no one in sight, and he was tempted to race past the cold cellar to the wine and wrestle a handkeg or two onto the bottom steps before seeing to the door. The top of the flight of stairs was fitted with only a flimsy wooden gate, designed to keep people or things that toppled over from falling down the entire flight of steps, so it was this door or no defense at all.

  The temptation to procure kegs passed in the time it took him to race to the bottom, where El swung the heavy door shut with a deep boom, shot its stout double bolts, and turned to hurry back up the stairs. Too swiftly; his foremost foot caught on a tread and he almost went face-first onto the steps. All that saved him was his swiftness, but he reared back so suddenly that he overbalanced and fell back two steps.

  At the same moment that something dropped from above to crash heavily onto the treads where he’d been—something that reached out with raking arms as it fell past, trying to claw him.

  It was—

  Gods, it was Calathlarra!

  Elminster leaped back a few steps more, until his shoulders met the door with a thud—and what was left of the Runemaster came slithering down the steps after him.

  Her head lolled lifelessly, the eyes glazed and staring, able to see him, yet not quite focused. Her mouth was open and drooling, in part because her shriveled face was slashed across by her death wounds, the deep slices left by Tabra’s poisoned fingernails.

  Her own lacerated and broken fingers had been bound tightly together with strips torn from a shift, and their fingernails cut to sharp points tipped with glistening dark purple and green; venoms. A few fingers bore long, wickedly pointed metal finger sheaths that turned them into talons. There was a venom-coated knife at her belt, and she was hauling herself down the steps at El with her taloned hands, dragging her legs behind her.

  “Shaaan’s work,” El murmured aloud, as he hastened to the left-hand end of the bottom step. The Serpent Queen’s undead slayer turned to follow him in eerie silence, descending another few steps ere it reared up to rake at him again.

  El raced to the other end of the step and upward, springing into the air and kicking out as he went, a—yes!—perfectly timed kick that brought the sole of his boot hard into her reaching talons and dashed them down and aside, turning her body so her desperate slash with her other arm, across her own body, couldn’t help but fall far short of ever reaching him.

  Then he was up the stairs in a panting rush, and whirling to face the Serpent Queen’s slithering slayer, who was clawing her way around and coming up the stairs after him, nails scraping on the steps.

  Coming with alarming ease and speed. Ah, but of course she’d be faster than he’d prefer.

  “Mirt! Myrmeen!” he shouted. “Get ye out here!”

  Whatever replies they might have made were lost in the sudden, deafening boom of the locked door that separated the passage wrapping around the stair from the feast hall. At least two of the small army of warriors on the other side of it must have taken a run at it and struck it with their shoulders together.

  Calathlarra swarmed up the steps and slashed at his feet as she came; El jumped back and looked around wildly for something to defend himself with. One slash from a fingernail—

  “Mirt!” he bellowed again. “Myrmeen!”

  There was a thunderous crash from the door, a different sort of sound than the earlier boom. Sharper, and with an edge to it that bespoke splintering. They were using their hand axes this time, half a dozen of them, the blades biting in unison. It was a large, imposing paneled door, fitted with glossy-polished relief carvings of the Halaunt arms surrounded by a wreath of sculpted grapes and sheaves of wheat and a pleasant array of fruits and vegetables. It had a stout lock, but no bar El could use to fend off poisoned claws, and no cradles for one; the Halaunt builders hadn’t anticipated the need for a barricade between the feast hall and the various pantries. Those axes would be through it in short order.

  “What, El?” Myrmeen called, through the door that led into the butlery. “We’re just bottling the remedies, and—”

  “Get a sack, bring what ye can, and get me one of the roasting spits!”

  Myrmeen came running past the door that the edges of axe blades
were now crashing through, and peered past El. She winced in disgust at the sight of Calathlarra, who was now undulating along the passage from the stairs as she hauled herself along with her taloned hands. “Just how does a wizard animate someone into undeath if magic doesn’t work, hey?”

  “Doesn’t work reliably, lass,” El called back, as he sped past the axe-imperiled door to unlock the door at the end of the passage, into the south servery. Domed platters, there were huge domed platters in there that he could use as shields … So that was the casting that had so sorely harmed Luse, the most recent time …

  Calathlarra came slithering after him, and he had the satisfaction of snatching up a platter that had many handholds worked into its raised and ornamented edge all around it, of a size and weight to make an ideal shield, before he turned back in time to reach out with a long fireplace rake and—hook the door half-closed, pinning the undead Runemaster against its frame.

  She spat and squalled, making noise for the first time, sounding utterly enraged through the wet burbling.

  When she tried vainly to claw him, finding him out of reach, yet trying again and again, El sprang high and came down hard with his boot heels on both of her arms, slamming them to the floor broken—only to have her tug hard and arch back to pull them free. He had to leap back or be toppled over, and the force of her pull, with his weight gone, had her back out of the doorway into the passage, so he slammed the door.

  And raced across the servery to open the cupboard that had the secret panel at the back of it. In a trice he was in the pitch-dark plate and cutlery store, a long and narrow closet lined with shelves and drawers. It had another sliding panel right across from him that gave into the other end of the passage, so he could come running around to the staircase again. To reach the fast-being-hewn-down door into the feast hall, with the open door of the butlery beside it, and Calathlarra slithering back along the passage. She was moving more slowly now, trying to haul her slithering self along on shattered arms. Before she got there, Mirt burst out through the butlery door to confront her, with a triumphant roar.

  He was brandishing a skewer of dripping roast braerwing like a rapier, a sack of stoppered bottles over his other shoulder, and right behind him was Myrmeen with a bare skewer in one hand and her preferred and smaller cleaver in the other; she bore a sack tied around her neck like a cape, that held cheeses, sausages, and the largest kitchen cleaver, which she’d used when defending the kitchen door.

  “They’ll be through the kitchen doors in a breath or two!” she shouted to Elminster, and he called back, “This way! Come with me!”

  Mirt jabbed at Calathlarra’s face with his skewer, she reared up to menace him hissing like a snake and drew back both arms to rake at him—and he turned and ran, following Myrmeen around the staircase to Elminster.

  As the demolished feast hall door collapsed in shards and splinters and half a dozen warriors fell through it and onto Calathlarra with shouts and clangs and in utter confusion.

  She clawed wildly amid all the rolling armored bodies, but El didn’t tarry to see any more. “Come,” he panted, leading the way back into the darkness of the plate and cutlery closet, and along it—Myrmeen’s cleaver in her sack banging against the unseen drawers on either side of her as she came—to the secret stair. It was a swift spiral of banging and bumping and soft cursing that delivered them in a few panting instants up into the ruined upper floor. Where the world seemed very different, with warped and uneven boards groaning underfoot, and the pale light and chill of predawn leaking in through scores of rents and places of mold and peeling collapse.

  The doors weren’t locked up here. Most of them weren’t even closed, thanks to warpage; El led the way in haste through a warren of small former servants’ dens and low-ceilinged attics, out into … the roofless room, where he’d tarried earlier, with its pleasant view of the Halaunt woods and rolling hills. Dawn was threatening behind him, where the roofs, gables, and ornate stone chimneys of Oldspires blocked his view of all but a tiny strip of roiling spellstorm and the trees and lawns beyond; in the other direction, at the edge of the nearest trees below, he could see Purple Dragons and war wizards standing amid the trunks, looking up at him.

  “Send in the Dragons!” he called to them, and tried to use the Weave to take his words to them, in rolling ripples that in normal circumstances would reach them in an instant, easily and surely … but now were lost and dragged down by the still-roiling spellstorm. He tried again, with the same result.

  “Save your wind,” Mirt growled from behind him. “I saw a doorstop, in that room with the wardrobes. We drag it out, we scratch “Send Dragons: Gate Invasion of Cormyr” on it, and I hurl it high and hard, aiming for those idiot faces down there.”

  “Do it,” El agreed.

  “Right. Hold this. Eat some.”

  And Elminster found himself holding a dripping skewer of well-roasted braerwing, with Myrmeen grinning at him from the far side of it. “I’ll gnaw this side, while you bite at that one,” she suggested.

  “Lass, lass, what are we coming to? Where’s the wine, the servants to pour it, the nicely laid table, the godsbedamned chair for my old backside?”

  “Complaints, complaints,” Myrmeen dismissed his words serenely. “Next you’ll be complaining again that we’re sharing Oldspires with too many murderers.”

  “Well, we are. This house holds altogether too many murderers for my liking, lass.”

  “For anyone’s liking, unless they revel in death,” Myrmeen muttered. “Now eat, for I see much fighting and running in our near future and a distinct lack of leisure to sit at tables and dine at ease. Oh, and I closed the secret panels behind us. Hopefully, after they’ve finished butchering Calathlarra—and they’ll have to dismember her to stop her, and probably find a chest or something to confine her fingers in—it’ll take them some time to find the way we took, and where we’ve gotten to.”

  “Well, not long at all,” Mirt pointed out, returning with the doorstop, “if we stay up here bellowing to the dawn breeze.”

  As he spoke, dawn broke over the roofs and chimneys behind them. “Ah,” he said in satisfaction, kneeling down and hauling out his dagger to assault the glossy-black-painted doorstop, “decent light to do this by.”

  “And for crossbowmen to have a go at us by,” Myrmeen snapped, pointing. “Damned if those Dragons down there aren’t readying death for us!”

  “So sit ye down,” El told her, doing so and taking the skewer with him, to force her down, “and stop giving reckless fools a target.”

  “Scoot over yonder on your behinds,” Mirt suggested, “now that they can’t see you. So if they do waste bolts on loosing blind at where we were, they’ll have no hope of hitting us.”

  “I was not,” Myrmeen reminded him, shifting across warped boards, taking the skewer with her, and so towing Elminster with it, “born yesterday. Nor even the day before that.”

  She watched El twice try to take a bite of still-steaming braerwing and twice have his meal move away from the reach of his jaws as she kept going.

  He acquired a frown, looked up at her, and instead of uttering the complaint she was expecting, said, “So we have three days of spellstorm left, and four wizards; Shaaan, Tabra, Malchor, and Manshoon still flourishing—and possibly holed up in their rooms, possibly not. Plus at least one undead on the loose that Shaaan’s probably responsible for and was certainly animated within these walls since our arrival, rather than getting in afterward. We also have at least a score of warriors in full plate hunting us through Oldspires, and a gate open somewhere in the house. Moreover, Alusair is gone or enfeebled and in hiding, and Lord Halaunt’s mindless body has been left behind in a kitchen that said army of warriors have almost certainly taken over by now … have I missed anything?”

  “The Halaunt ghosts,” Myrmeen pointed out, “the intruders—two so far, and who knows how many more before we’re done here—and whoever else the war wizards and Dragons out there decide to send in thro
ugh their ringwall. Oh, and the Lost Spell, wherever it may be.” She twinkled at him. “I’m sure we’ve both missed something, but surely that’s enough to be keeping us busy for now?”

  “Done,” Mirt announced, before El could reply, and held up the doorstop. It bore the words he’d suggested on one side, and “Orders of Ganrahast” on the other.

  El grinned. “Nice touch. That’ll stop them dismissing it out of hand, at least.”

  The moneylender nodded, lurched to his feet, took two slow steps while swinging the doorstop back and forth by his side, and then hurled it underhanded, in a mighty heave that sent it sailing high and far.

  A crossbow bolt snarled past him, heading for the empty sky beyond.

  And above. Mirt sank down muttering curses, and padded on hands and knees to the skewer, to claim a meal. “Idiots,” he growled, jerking a thumb in the direction of the Cormyreans at the edge of the trees. “Do they think bolts can turn by themselves in midair, to plummet down at us?”

  “Shall we relocate, regardless?” Myrmeen suggested. “This is a pleasant enough venue, but someone of military competence may be down there, and prevail after the thicker heads have failed and run out of oh-so-bright ideas.”

  “Relocate where, lass?” Mirt rumbled, around mouthfuls of braerwing. “We’re fleeing too many warriors to stand against—but may just wind up fleeing right into their arms, so to speak.”

  She shrugged.

  Mirt looked to Elminster.

  “I’d like to thank the cooks,” the Sage of Shadowdale announced. “Very nice. Best I’ve eaten in ages, actually.”

  “Old Mage,” Mirt growled, “you may not have noticed, being an ancient and doddering archmage and the most gleaming Chosen of Mystra and all, but we’re in the middle of a little private war here, and—”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Elminster interrupted severely. “We ancient and doddering archmages sometimes need more time to do that than we used to. Especially when we’re distracted by delicious and much-needed food. Yum.” He swallowed, wiped his lips with one forefinger, and said briskly, “Right. Follow me.”