by Ed Greenwood
Manshoon stared at her for a moment, then shook his head.
“Well, then,” she asked, “care to die? Again?”
And she strode toward him, not bothering with the spell. Let this be personal, and let it be now.
CHAPTER 20
The Snake Sleepeth Not
MANSHOON CALMLY WENT TO ONE KNEE FOR A MOMENT AND DREW another dagger from the back of one boot, then rose to meet her charge.
The vipers struck at him, reared up, and tried again, heedless of his tramplings, until they could move no more. He stamped once or twice, but otherwise paid them no heed, trusting in the protection of his tall boots as he kept his attention on Shaaan.
Seeing a splintered table leg lying on the littered floor, he snatched it up to serve him as a club, more to fend off than to hit. He knew better than to let her get within arm’s reach. Her plate armor left only her head vulnerable to his dagger, and she was a walking arsenal of venoms and other poisons. He was more or less immune to many poisons, thanks to long and patient years of dosing himself with ever-larger amounts, and she’d had more years and more expertise in poisons to more than do the same. So almost certainly she had no fear of her own poisons.
Which meant that every last edge, point, and surface of her, from head to toe, could be coated in venom.
And she was smiling her soft smile that promised death and walking right at him, one arm half-raised, ready to intercept his improvised club.
He briefly entertained the notion of flailing at her with all his strength, to shatter that arm and batter her to the ground where he could crack her skull and then every bone he could reach, to leave her lying helpless and dying, but not dead so any deadly contingencies on her wouldn’t trigger.
Let her pant in agony for a day or more, in a truly slow and miserable demise. He felt no pity at all for poisoners.
Yet all this was mere fantasy. What was really happening was a deadly dance of leaping, turning, and swift shuffling, so he was always facing her and always fending her off, while she constantly tried to get past his guard and claw him with the metal tips that adorned all her fingers. He tried to use his strength to drive her back into rubble, where her footing would be perilous, but he was facing a woman as tall and long of arm and agile as himself, and she knew exactly what he was trying to do and merely danced back out of reach, plucked up a surviving viper, flung it at his face, and charged in after, time after time.
And one of these times, Manshoon reflected, shaking the ichor of the latest serpent off his hand, he wouldn’t be swift or deft enough, and would get bitten before his razor-sharp dagger severed the viper’s head in midair.
And always the woman who called herself the Serpent Queen smiled at him, the smile that held no love nor mirth nor friendly favor, as she danced and ducked and lunged like the best swordsmen, trying to do just one thing.
Get close enough to embrace him.
Ironic, that, considering how many women who’d embraced him and yielded themselves to him out of fear, that now the crown was on the other head, and it was he who—
Damn!
His backswing with the club dipped just too low, and she sprang high and came down backside first on it, sitting it toward the floor, her weight too much for his arm. Which meant she sprang off it and right into him, face-first and lips reaching—
He twisted around in desperate haste and let go the club so he could stagger free, pivoting on his heel, trying to—
Failing. She clawed at him, and when he drove his dagger up at her fingers as viciously as he could, she clutched at it, risking severed fingers, long enough to fold it in between their bodies, so she could lunge, her bosom to his chest, collarbone to collarbone with his dagger trapped between them, and—
There was a jab at the base of his neck, fleeting but painful, and she shoved him away and backflipped, crashing through the ruined skeleton of his bed to wind up half the room away, laughing in triumph.
“And so you’re stung, and can count on four hands—four hands—the breaths you have left to live, unless you beg me! Beg me well enough, proud Lord of the Zhentarim, to give you the antidote—that only I have devised, so I am the only source. You’ll have to kneel to me at last!”
And with a wild peal of laughter, she turned and sprinted … and was gone, leaving Manshoon standing alone, staring after her, and clutching at his neck where sticky blood was welling out.
The point of his dagger was red with it, and must have made the wound in his neck. Yet could he risk the chance that his blood was flowing only because of that? She’d been close enough to kiss him, had been kept from doing so purely by his own desperate twisting and fending, but … he had to admit he hadn’t been able to defend all of himself, all over.
He couldn’t risk it.
The last viper reared up to strike—and he took great satisfaction in booting it across the room, to thump into the wall. Where he pinned it in place with his dagger, snarling out heartfelt curses, then jerked his dagger free and ran after the Serpent Queen.
He knew where she’d be headed.
SHAAAN LAUGHED LOUD and long as she plunged down the stairs into waiting darkness, the full-throated bellows of mirth that men indulged in all the time, and so few women allowed themselves.
And why not gloat? She was the Serpent Queen, and had styled herself thus so ruthlessly and regally down the centuries that some obeyed her out of respect for the title, not out of terror.
But terror was best. Terror was always best.
It even worked on Manshoons, and the founder of the Zhentarim was as worldlywise and long-lived—if you counted all of his various selves—as herself, not to mention far more accomplished than the Harpers and their ilk gave him credit for. They dwelled on his defeats and failures, not all that he’d built and ruled.
And for all that, he was doomed. She’d only managed to nick him with his own drawn dagger—and been sliced by it herself, in the doing. Yet her ruse had worked; that little gloat she’d done had duped him, and now he would be following her, running after Shaaan as she raced down to the cellars, would have to pursue …
Down to that gate, of course. Elminster and the rest of them must have arrived in Oldspires through it, and cloaked it somehow from her. Until their cloaking spell had faded and then failed, as unreliable as all other magic in the heart of the spellstorm.
Of course they’d tried to hide it from her.
She knew how to use it. Not stepping through it to reach its other end; any fool could do that, and many such wayfarers even did it by accident, blundering forward, not knowing where they were going or even that any translocation was involved.
No, she knew how to call on a gate’s power to power her own spells.
Which meant that here in Oldspires with magic unreliable and ringed by the out-and-out ravening chaos of a spellstorm, the gate was the key to everything.
She’d explored ancient gates a time or seven before, down her years, and successfully wrested energy from them before. Given an open gate, and the right spells—spells she’d readied while in hiding down in the cellars—she could drain energies from the gate to steady her spells. In the chaos of wild magic prevailing inside Oldspires—where, after all, some spells had worked, sometimes—her spells, and hers alone, should be reliable.
Racing down the grand staircase into the waiting gloom, she looked up and back.
And there was Manshoon, face white with fury, racing after her.
And behind and above the Zhent, the figure of—Malchor Harpell, staring down at them both, his expression grim.
As he reluctantly set foot on the stairs and followed.
Shaaan laughed again, loud and long, scaring up echoes.
Come, fools! Come to your deaths!
The more, the merrier.
ELMINSTER SWUNG ONE more cellar door shut, turned away from it, and told Mirt and Myrmeen, “Enough. For now, at least, we’ve spent quite enough time searching for the Serpent Queen. I suspect we’ll find her soon en
ough—when she wants to be found. I’d rather turn to dealing with something of wider importance than personal survival and victory here inside this mansion.”
“He’s going to say something grand,” Mirt told Myrmeen.
“Yes,” she replied, “and it’ll be something quite likely to get us killed.”
The Sage of Shadowdale gave them a rather weary smile, and said, “I’m going back to the gate the liches have opened, to have a go at closing it.”
“That’ll definitely get us killed,” Mirt told Myrmeen. “He’s trying to make up for not managing to do it last time.”
“If ye two jesters are quite finished,” El told them, “I don’t plan to imperil ye—both of ye can watch from the doorway as I come at it from behind.”
“Right,” Myrmeen replied, “we’re with you, El. Yet we would both appreciate knowing why, in this house full of murderous wizards and with the busy poisoner among them on the loose and in hiding, you feel the need to go after this gate, that wasn’t even part of our discussions beforehand or even well after arriving here, and do so now. Why can’t it wait until our murderer is caught, or has run out of mages to kill?”
Elminster nodded. “Fair enough. I don’t want to tackle the gate, with the Art so unreliable and the Weave in such turmoil from the leakages of all the gates. Larloch’s liches outnumber me and, for all I know, work very well together despite their master not mindriding and guiding them. I gamble much, if I try. It’s not a wise chance to take, and I lack the foolish overconfidence in my own abilities that will let me charge serenely ahead, taking on that many liches. Yet if I can close the gate, it cuts off an escape route for Shaaan that’s also a way in for more monsters or armies or whomever and whatever else the liches want to send. Moreover, the gate is a source of magical power she might use to try to anchor her spells, to make them powerful and, crucially, reliable in this spell-chaos we stand in.”
“So this has become about the needs of the moment, the here and now, after all,” Myrmeen pointed out.
“Nay,” El told her grimly. “Beneath our fates and the task Mystra gave me to try to do here, this meeting of mages that was supposed to nudge them toward eventual accord and instead led to so many deaths, the gate is part of something wider and deeper.”
“The liches,” Mirt said suddenly.
“The liches,” El confirmed. “Freed from Larloch’s yoke, they can now meddle and dabble, just as I and countless cabals of wizards—right up to the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards—do. Reflect on this gate standing open. Even if guarded by the war wizards and Purple Dragons now surrounding this house, it gives Larloch’s liches the ready means to become active behind the scenes in the politics of Cormyr. They know precisely how their master worked for so long, because they were his agents, the enacting part of that work. What if they decide to slowly and subtly subvert the minds of many nobles? They would be in no hurry, and don’t want to rule openly; their way would be to have fronts, duped hands and minds willing to do their bidding, whatever it is.”
Myrmeen shivered. “Knowing that, I could never feel safe in my own land again.”
“Aye, indeed,” El agreed, sounding almost satisfied. “Now, as I recall, the gate is this way …”
THE GLOW OF the gate was as bright as ever. Shaaan smiled and hurried the other way, into the first pitch-dark cellar of the chain of rooms she could use to work her way around behind it. Why give the liches the opportunity to know who she was, and lash out at her?
She had to cast her draining spell before Manshoon found her missing from in front of the gate, and either tried to treat with the liches himself, or headed elsewhere to search for her.
And if she cast it properly, and this gate wasn’t markedly different from the others she’d experimented with, she’d be able to draw on its energies over quite a distance—certainly from every nook and cranny of Oldspires. Which meant it was worth sacrificing one of her small magical baubles—the garter that enabled teleportation, perhaps—to steady her casting of the draining spell. After all, she dared not try to use the garter’s powers in this chaos of the Art, or to try to go from within the spellstorm to somewhere beyond it, so …
One last door snatched open, and she was panting her way along a cluttered room to the back of the gate, clawing at the straps that held the plate of armor covering the back of her right leg as she went. No need to get it off; if it hung free and she could get a hand in to touch the garter …
There! Done, and she was close enough. She stopped, fought down her swift breathing, put one hand to the garter and pointed with the other at the gate, and cast the spell.
“Anathroaz ilzurviss faezlar”—then the zigzag gesture as she visualized the flames of the gate sliding down her arms and into her, and then—“Varathos omdreth houlooond!”
And it was done. The garter was crumbling to dust under her fingertips as she fumbled for the straps that would buckle the plate closed again, doubting she’d have the time—
She didn’t.
There was Manshoon, stepping warily through the archway that faced the gate. He saw her in the gloom beyond it instantly.
That might have had something to do with the ruby-red bolt of searing-through-everything force she sent at him, well under the gate, at ankle level.
“One might call it,” she murmured aloud, pleased at the visible flow of cold blue flames down to join the bolt and augment it, “the first step in the de-feet of Manshoon.”
Bathed in ruby-hued flickerings, her target sprang hastily back, smoke rising from his boots, and he tried to retreat back through the archway. He disappeared out through it with a stumbling fall backward and a shout of pain.
Faint cold laughter erupted from the gate. The liches were watching.
Blue-white speeding bolts raced into the cellar from where Manshoon had disappeared.
Shaaan curled her lip. Really? This was the best the mighty lord of the Zhentarim could manage?
He must be even more feeble in wits and might of the Art than she’d thought.
She put a hand to her gorget and called on the energies of the gate to augment her mantle, so the arriving bolts would feed her protective power rather than harm her.
And damned if the man didn’t peek around the edge of the archway to see the results of his attack, like any eager novice! She lashed him with a raking claw of force, talons that should—
That did nothing. She wasn’t the only one with a mantle.
Manshoon stepped back into the archway and spread his arms dramatically, like a priest in full supplication behind an altar, casting a spell Shaaan didn’t recognize.
And then, beyond Manshoon frowning and then spitting out a curse, nothing happened.
Ah, this unreliable magic was truly a curse.
Unless, that is, you had your own source of power to ground your spells and make them happen as they were intended to. Shaaan smiled smugly and let fly once more.
By his involuntary screams, the stabbing lightnings encaging him hurt a lot.
So much for your puny mantle, Manshoon the Manyfaced. Now let’s see a little more of your tears, hmm?
Shaaan raked him with fire, then stabbed at him with conjured halberds. This was fun, and almost too easy; the man was so pitiful, it was like tormenting a helpless pet.
And then another man—Malchor Harpell—appeared behind the writhing Manshoon, frowned at Shaaan, and let fly at her with what was obviously a prepared spell.
A spell that set the liches to muttering as it roared past the gate and came at her, snarling as it rushed closer, its circular maw spinning, a great concentric spiral of countless whirling fangs.
This was trouble.
Shaaan dragged all the energy she could out of the gate, so that it flickered and bobbed—great hissing consternation from the liches—and flung it up like a shield, messy and roiling, no time for elegance or even to brace and buttress it to do a proper job, what with—
Malchor’s spell tore through it and flung ravening
spellfire in all directions, searing through the very walls and ceiling in an instant. In a dozen small places were rents that shouldn’t cause a collapse in the old mansion, and—
And what was she doing thinking of all-the-godsbedamned Cormyrean countryside architecture when some of that fire was inevitably going to come lashing through her?
It did.
Ohhhh, the pain!
Shaaan screamed, long and loud and raw, as her mantle collapsed and she crashed through stacked coffers and chests and old, canvas-wrapped tapestries or some such, the fires clawing at her melting scales and flesh and simply devouring the stored things she was falling through. Yet even as ravening fire ravaged her, the fires of the gate were rushing in to fill and soothe and restore, and she just had to endure a few interminably long moments of sheer gasping agony before she was clambering her way out of half-melted debris, more or less whole—though there wasn’t much left of her armor, and what there was dangled in twisted, bubbled, half-melted grotesquerie—to face Malchor and Manshoon with snarling defiance.
Whereupon she was amused to see them both finish hastily casting spells that should have destroyed her utterly before she could recover … and watch their spells fail miserably. One evoked a plume of drifting beige smoke, and the other, a brief sound as of tinkling miniature bells, and then nothing at all.
They tried again, both of them weaving spells with great urgency and precision, as Shaaan calmly removed the most hampering pieces of armor and casually conjured herself a new defensive ward, drawing on the power of the gate to craft a floating shield.
Malchor’s spell failed, but Manshoon’s came racing at her, a great shadowy dragon’s head with jaws agape to bite and rend.
She intercepted it calmly with the shield, but Manshoon smilingly did something deft and sudden with his dragon head that collapsed the shield to one side while the head burst past it and at her.
Shaaan was forced to claw energy out of the gate in unseemly haste to keep the dragon head from biting down on her, and it flickered and darkened momentarily, so sudden and severe was her draining.
