Spellstorm

by Ed Greenwood

  “As I observed earlier,” Myrmeen said in a surprisingly calm voice, suddenly looming up over them, “charming discipline. So we have no food.”

  “Well,” Mirt rumbled, “not here. There are cellars full beneath us, because Torr’s warriors just haven’t had time enough to spoil or carry all of it off. Not without magic—and if Shaaan could hurl around that sort of magic, she wouldn’t need to be cutting the fingernails of the dead to points and tipping them with poison.”

  Myrmeen shook her head in slow and silent exasperation, and looked at Elminster. “I have a new appreciation for you, Sage of Shadowdale. These madwits matters drive me wild, and you’ve put up with them for centuries. I cannot believe you aren’t babbling, screeching mad!”

  Elminster smiled. “Are ye sure I’m not?”

  Into the little silence that followed those words, Mirt coughed and said, “So we’d best be waving our swords and walking all wary down to the cellars now, eh? There are sacks in the south servery we can use to carry the food back.”

  “Aye, let’s do that,” El agreed. “But as before, no splitting up. We go together, ready for trouble.”

  “Lots of spices are missing,” Mirt put in, and then added with a frown, “and the cleaning oils, too! Y’know, the ones you rub into the cutting boards or the countertops after they’ve been stained or you’ve had to scrape them. What in the Hell’s kindling blazes would hireswords—or Serpent Queens, for that matter—want with such things?”

  Myrmeen’s frown was deeper. “You know, come to think of it, I think the oils went missing earlier. I’d thought you’d moved them, and forgot to ask you where …”

  “Right, so our little armed foray will be like going to market,” El concluded. “Food, spices, and cleaning oils. We have to eat—and more importantly, drink—for three more days before the spellstorm passes. Three days of dodging poison. So we must stock up wisely—and let us be about it.”

  So they set out. The food mess diminished swiftly as they got farther from the kitchen, but the bodies, fallen weapons, and blood were strewn in profusion everywhere. Thankfully, Torr’s hireswords hadn’t smashed or carried off all the servants’ hand lanterns, so three full ones were swiftly found and lit.

  “They keep a messy battlefield, these mercenaries,” Myrmeen remarked, as they left the plate and cutlery storeroom behind, and she led the way down the spiral stair.

  “Careful, Mreen,” El murmured. “Shaaan could very easily have left one of her envenomed at the bottom, to rake ye as ye slide open the panel.”

  Myrmeen nodded and descended more warily.

  “Adventurers explore dungeons and battle monsters,” Mirt commented, lurching after her. “We mount expeditions down to larders to get food.”

  “It’ll sound better in the ballads,” Myrmeen promised. “If I write them, that is.”

  “Better start now,” the moneylender told her. “We may be too busy dying later.”

  “NOT A SIGN of her,” Mirt mused aloud, as he forked the last sausage up out of the sizzling oil. “Wonder where she’s hiding?”

  Shaaan might have done any number of things down in the cellars, but none had left much of a trace. So Mirt, Myrmeen, and Elminster had cautiously retrieved their sack of antidotes from the foot of the staircase that was so uncomfortably near the gate, and a goodly amount of food from the larder cellars, and lugged it back to the kitchens.

  Where Myrmeen had openly enjoyed the sight of the eldest and mightiest surviving Chosen of Mystra, and the closest thing in Toril to a Weavemaster, washing down sinks and countertops, then scrubbing floors on his knees.

  They’d gathered and set out what they’d need to make an evening meal and more antidotes, then made morningfeast. And then, girding themselves for battle once more, set out for the rooms of Malchor and Manshoon at the far end of Oldspires, and delivered the meals.

  Malchor had invited them in and gravely thanked Elminster for his life, as well as them all for the meal, but Manshoon had called through the door for them to leave the food outside his threshold and he’d get it later, so they’d done that.

  “So tell me, El,” Myrmeen had murmured, as they’d departed, “the silver fire you gave to him, through Alusair … he has that forever, now?”

  “Nay,” he replied. “Mystra didn’t prepare him to host it, and he can’t do that for himself without my aid or her aid or the assistance of another sufficiently powerful servant of Mystra, so it will slowly leak from him, its healing done, and find its way back to her—and she will in turn give it to me again.”

  “So what if she just decides to keep it?” Mirt rumbled. “Gathering all the power from all her Chosen, bit by bit and oh so casually, to become mightier?”

  El gave them the sad ghost of a smile. “No god goes unwatched, these days, and this Mystra ascended into a—call it a balance of forces—that will visit pain and instability on her if she grows too powerful. Divinity is a burden as well as a boon.”

  “And you know this how?” Myrmeen asked softly.

  “A good point, lass. That’s where the faith that priests speak so often of comes in. We mortals must trust what we are told and shown by the gods, and even the gods lie. Especially the gods lie.”

  “In other words,” Mirt said, “this could all be so many empty words spewed out from altars and in our dreams and by manifested gods looming over the landscape like sky-filling titans to bellow directly … but ’tis all we have, so we may as well accept it as given and get on with our lives.”

  “Exactly,” El agreed. “Ye’d make a good sage.”

  “Hunnh. Do sages eat better than moneylenders? I hadn’t noticed that.”

  Before returning to the kitchen to make themselves morningfeast, get started on the evening meal, and make more antidotes, the three had gone hunting Shaaan again—with an utter lack of success.

  Though the ceilings above them had trembled once, as if an unseen and silent giant’s fist had punched Oldspires hard enough to move it a few inches south.

  Someone had miscast another spell—which meant that poor Alusair was probably lost in silent suffering somewhere. Again.

  There was no way to prove the source of the spell was Shaaan, of course. It was more likely Manshoon, testing to see if he could make his magic obey him.

  They avoided the adjacent rooms given to Malchor and Manshoon, but checked in on Tabra. She was abed again, but serenely reading a book from the Halaunt library, propped up on her pillows, and Myrmeen checked that it was nothing to do with magic (it was, in fact, Arthredran’s Lives of Illustrious Nobles, widely held to be flattering where it wasn’t fanciful, but universally judged a good read.

  Then they searched every other room on the ground floor of Oldspires, without finding any hint of the Serpent Queen.

  It seemed as if Shaaan had simply … vanished.

  “There are a lot of cellars in this mansion,” Mirt had growled at last. “And wardrobes, and decaying attics. Hells, she could even be out on the rooftops, just waiting until dark. Or curled up behind a tapestry or behind furniture, like a sleeping snake.”

  “Not like a sleeping snake,” Myrmeen sighed. “She is a sleeping snake.”

  THE MISMATCHED TRIO was moving cautiously closer to her, down what had been the busiest passage in Oldspires—back when there were enough living people in the mansion to make any part of it “busy.” They walked warily, with weapons ready, stepping around the sprawled bodies of fallen warriors. Of which there were many.

  “Could she have come to some agreement with the liches, and gone through the gate?” That was the warlike kitchen wench, all frowning alertness and raised blades.

  “Would you risk dealing with liches?” That was the wheezing man with the paunch and the floppy wrecks of old boots. One of them almost trod on Shaaan, but she kept motionless.

  “Hmm. Good point, good point.” The kitchen woman again. The wizard Elminster, walking behind them, said not a word, but looked amused as they passed her by.

&nb
sp; The three walked on in silence for a bit, and when they spoke again, far down the passage, their voices were barely audible.

  Shaaan smiled to herself as all the sounds of the trio hunting her died away into the gloomy distance.

  That fat man could lurch along with surprising speed when he wanted to.

  One more thing to remember.

  For a little while, at least; if things went well, he’d not be alive much longer.

  She lay still, listening patiently, until she was sure they were several rooms away and unlikely to return. Her attempt to animate another dead warrior had failed utterly, but the chaos her casting had caused should have eliminated that helpful ghost Elminster kept talking with, for at least a day or so.

  So there would be no lurking spy to see one of the sprawled and dead warriors in the passages clamber carefully upright, so as to make as little sound as possible, and walk warily northward, closer and closer to the rooms of Malchor and Manshoon.

  Pinning her hair up and rubbing a little pitch from a cold firehearth onto her chin before pulling the helm down over her head had ensured that she looked enough like an unshaven male warrior to escape notice among so many sprawled corpses. The hardest part had been finding a dead man close to her in size and build, followed by getting the armor off him.

  Since then, it had simply been a matter of patience, and she had plenty of that. Just like the liches she’d seen waiting so patiently for someone to come within reach. She’d almost made that mistake, their gate had lured her so strongly, but … she had wary mistrust of attractive things to spare, too.

  Right now, she went right on being patient. Whenever anyone was near, she lowered herself quietly to her knees, then delicately arranged herself in a lifeless sprawl and played dead. When she was as certain as she could be that no one was near, she’d rise once more and sneak northward, toward the man she sought.

  Oh, she despised him, all right. His string of failures, his self-absorption, his towering arrogance … but he was almost certainly the most powerful wizard of those left. After herself, of course. Malchor seemed a gentle old man used to getting his way, who loved acting mysterious, and who—like Elminster—was far less than his reputation. Aye, trading on what legend made of you had taken both of them far, but cut no ice with her.

  She who knew what real might at magic was.

  Under her borrowed warrior’s gauntlets, she wore metal fingertip sheaths tipped with a wide array of deadly venoms, in case of rejection or betrayal.

  The man she sought would be an utter fool not to ally with her, given what the situation here at Oldspires had become … but then, most men were utter fools.

  And a few swift strides past the grand staircase—her lip curled; “grand” only in the dreams of one sad and lonely old noble—and around a great dead hulk of a monster that looked impressively disgusting in death, and had probably seemed much, much worse when it had been alive.

  And she was at the door she sought.

  She knocked very softly, trying not just to avoid rousing Malchor, but to make her knocking sound feminine. After all these years, Manshoon still looked as if flirtatious blandishments worked on him.

  “And who might it be, who knocks without?” his voice came through the door, sounding amused.

  “A woman of the Art, who comes alone. On matters personal.”

  There. If that didn’t do it …

  It did.

  The door opened about a hand width, revealing the unsmiling but somehow clearly pleased Zhentarim lord—or at least, a hand width-wide head-to-toe slice of him—inside the room beyond. Regarding her with interest but a total lack of surprise.

  “Hail, Serpent Queen,” Manshoon greeted her. “I wondered when you’d come seeking my aid. With only three days left of spellstorm.”

  Arrogant bastard. Well, she had poisons that could ravage vampires; he could die like all the rest.

  “I, too, can count the passing days. May I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “To speak with you.”

  “About?”

  Shaaan didn’t bother to sigh. She’d half expected him to be this tiresome.

  “An alliance. The two of us against everyone else inside this house—and the forces of Cormyr that surround it, on guard against the likes of us.”

  Manshoon half smiled. “An attractive notion, I’ll grant, yet I fail to muster the barest beginnings of the trust I would need to feel to seriously entertain such a crazed notion. So, ‘Serpent Queen,’ my answer is: no.”

  The door started to close.

  And Shaaan gave him a half smile of her own and let fly with the spell she had held ready.

  Hoping against hope that this time, this time, it would go off without a hitch.

  It did.

  The door exploded inward and Manshoon with it, lost in a blast that sent the entire front wall of his room hurtling out through his windows and into the surrounding spellstorm.

  “A fool to the last,” Shaaan decreed triumphantly, listening to the shouts of those watching from afar—and no doubt hurrying now, to try to get a better view. O-ho, they’d built a rickety scaffolding of hastily felled Halaunt trees to try to see over the restless fogs, and it was now starting to sway under the weight of too many peering, climbing, imperiously shouting men … how sweet.

  Yet even in the bright heart of her triumph, Shaaan was far too old and experienced a spellhurler to turn her back and stroll away until the roiling dust of her spell had cleared and she could be sure Manshoon of the Zhentarim was either lost in the mind-devouring fog, or pieces of him were to be seen bloodily decorating his bedchamber.

  She did, however, sidestep toward the wall where the Chamber of the Founder met the grand staircase, so she was partially sheltered behind dead spider-scorpion monster. Purely out of defensive habit.

  Which turned out to be prudent indeed, a moment later, when a flood of forked and spitting lightning bolts came racing at her out of the drifting cloud of debris underneath the now-gone windows.

  And staggered her, despite the constant mantle emanating from her gorget. Which had been patchy to wavering to nonexistent all the time she’d been in Oldspires, and was sadly failing now.

  Manshoon’s spells were obviously working, too.

  Her acid bolts were best saved until the cloud whirled up by her initial blast was gone, revealing him, so she gave him a reversion of gravity, to whirl him up into an ungentle meeting with the ceiling.

  And it failed, flooding the room instead with a glorious butterfly-blue radiance and the sound of a singing trumpet.

  Shaaan sighed. If it came to battle, she’d hoped to be swift and relatively quiet, so as to avoid having Elminster and his two bumbling jesters of servants trying to harass her backside, but this damned chaos of unreliable magic …

  Abruptly her blue glow was gone, swept away by a sudden driving rain, water pounding straight down from … nowhere at all. The floor under her feet shuddered briefly, as if she’d been standing on a raft that a small wave had passed under, and then the rain ended, as swiftly as it had begun, leaving a drenched and darkly handsome vampire glaring at her across scorched and tumbled wreckage.

  Manshoon’s second spell had gone awry, too.

  She shrugged, and fed him acid.

  Or tried to.

  Her racing bolts formed and faded at about the same time as they started to move, filling the air with a sharp and unfamiliar smell that made Shaaan think of kitchen fires involving things never meant to be cooked.

  She stepped into the doorway leading to the grand staircase and rubbed at her gorget, hoping its mantle would do better than last time. Her limbs were still tingling and spasming.

  A flash and a snarled curse, followed by a soundless blow that smote at her ears and rolled away through the mansion, marked the failure of his next spell.

  Hmm. Perhaps a more personal magic, of less power …

  She worked one of her oldest, simplest spells. She always kept several of
her own version of vipergout ready, and if it worked now …

  It did! The nine little vipers plunged out of her mouth in an eager flood and went racing at her foe, wriggling in an utter frenzy.

  Go, my pets, and give the mighty Manshoon nine little problems. Nine deadly distractions to dog him while we fight. And if magic was going to be this faulty here and now, ’twas time to join their wriggling ranks, get close, and use her venoms.

  And if the Zhent tried to take sneering refuge in the thought that a vampire could shrug off many poisons, destruction would greet him all the sooner. Under the caps on the sheaths she wore on the smallest fingers of both her hands were venoms that dissolved flesh.

  And she’d never heard of a flourishing skeletal vampire.

  She hastened. The faster she reached him, the fewer spell hurlings she’d have to risk.

  He tried once more, bathing her momentarily in ale-brown murk that rang with weird clanging echoes and smelled strongly of mint, and then she scrambled over the fallen litter of what was left of his bed, her armor shrieking briefly on its forceful way through jagged ends of wood and metal, and strode right at him.

  His body wavered for a moment, as he sought to become a mist and then a bat, then lapsed back into cursing, glaring solidity, drawing a dagger and backing into an area of clear floor where he could move swiftly.

  There he awaited her, vipers undulating over the surrounding debris as they converged.

  “You would have been wiser to accept my offer,” Shaaan told him as she came for him, “but then, wise judgments have never been your strong suit, have they? And now, as they say, it’s too late.”

  Her vipers slithered down into Manshoon’s little chosen battleground, and reared up around him menacingly.

  Shaaan gave him her nastiest, softest smile, raised her hands to try a spell that should tear him apart in agony, and added, “Much, much too late.”

  He flung the dagger at her face, hard and accurately.

  She caught it with casual ease, and tossed it away over her shoulder.

  “I was catching and throwing knives while I danced naked on tavern tables long, long before you were born. Care to try again?”