Elminster in Hell

by Ed Greenwood

  “One of the palace guards. He’s on Shyrrhr’s tunnel gate, tonight. If you need a friend or protector in the palace, Lady, you could find no better than he. Look for an old man with a white mustache. He said you’d said little and kept to your armor these past days; he knew something was amiss and as good as told me that it wasn’t Piergeiron inside the armor. Folk can tell, lass. Folk can always tell.” He shrugged. “Besides, if I’d been wrong, your sire owes me a turn or two. ’Tis not my habit to leap upon every lady I meet, you know.”

  “Lately?” Asper asked him, eyebrow raised. “Is there not a tunnel from here to Blackstaff Tower that we might use?”

  “Aye,” said Mirt and Aleena together and chuckled. “Come,” said the fat moneylender, striding toward a pillar. “This way.”

  Aleena frowned. “Here? But it’s down—”

  Mirt grinned at her. “Trust me, Lady.” He said. “There’re ways and ways, in this place. You’d want to miss a chance at giving that surly grim-chin outside the door a fright, no? When he finds you gone, it’ll give him a short breath or two!”

  Shaking her head, Aleena joined them. “Father warned me about you, once. But I had no idea—”

  “They never do,” Mirt purred, as stones parted to open a narrow, secret way. “Mind your heads, ladies.…”

  A hungry mouse in a corner of the room had time to draw only three breaths after the secret door closed and before a midair flickering filled the chamber.

  Cold flames raced outward and around. Out of them leaped a masked figure, blade ready in hand. The room was dark and empty. After a quick and silent look around, it shrugged and stepped within the flames once more. The fire and light dwindled to nothing, and darkness returned.

  The mouse scurried out in case the strange visitor had left something edible, but there was nothing. Not like the old days. Things were never like the old days, the mouse reflected, slowly and dimly. Perhaps that was the way of the world.

  LORD OF THE PIT, WIZARD, WHERE IS THE DEVIL-DAMNED MAGIC?

  [silence, mindworm burrowing grimly on through vaulted darkness]

  “Through here,” Mirt wheezed, trotting bent over low. “The way opens out—”

  “So it does! All the more danger for someone who’s a lord of Waterdeep, but Faerûn is a dangerous place!”

  The voice was cheerful and unexpected, very close to Mirt’s ear. The Old Wolf was faster than he looked. He had his sword raised and ready, in just the right spot, and he ducked back with a snarl.

  His would-be slayer hissed out a curse. Slender steel sang out in a vicious thrust that skewered only air.

  Mirt’s stouter blade lashed in over it, biting hard into leather and flesh beneath. The man sobbed at the sudden pain. Mirt brought his sword back trailing a dark ribbon of blood and batted his attacker’s sword down.

  They strained, steel against steel. Mirt used his free hand, candle and all, to deliver a punch to where the wound must be. His foe groaned and shuddered, reeling back. For the first time, Mirt dared to scuttle out of the passage into the room.

  Asper snapped his name, tense and low, from behind Aleena.

  Mirt growled, “Still alive—and dancing with a masked man, for a change.”

  “My turn,” Asper replied. “You killed the last ruthless slayer who attacked us, remember?”

  “Huh,” Mirt grunted in reply. He swung steel with all his strength to parry another deadly thrust. The blow struck the slender sword. It clanged from stone to stone and must have numbed his foe.

  The gloved and masked man waved his sword as if he was fanning flames, staggered backward along the side passage he’d attacked from, spun around, and raced away.

  Mirt scrambled after him, thankful that this new passage was full-height.

  “Who is it?” Asper called, pelting after him.

  Aleena clanked and stumbled along in their wake, clumsy in her armor.

  “I know not,” Mirt snarled, bounding down a short flight of steps with his wounded attacker stumbling along just out of reach. “Someone who knows what I am and how to find me, obviously—ho! Your name, Sword-for-Brains! A lady demands it!”

  Gasping, the slender masked figure scrambled across a chamber and plunged into the stinking darkness of a sewer-arch. Mirt bounded after him with grunting enthusiasm.

  Ahead, a flickering light flared. Mirt glimpsed his leather-clad foe lunging through a wheel of cold white flames. The flames blazed in a slowly turning ring, perhaps a handspan from a stone wall. A gate, gods be thanked again.

  He came to a lurching halt, ignoring a rat that scurried out to see if his boots might be supper, and peered around the chamber. Reeking pipes let into it. Channels carried sewage along one side of the room. The vaulted ceiling was webbed with old, tiny cracks. There was no way onward that didn’t involve cold flames.

  Mirt eyed the rat that fearlessly nibbled his boot, and peered at the gate again—ere his blade stabbed down.

  Its curving length rose an instant later when Asper burst into the room. She spun away from his steel even as he snatched it back, and skidded to a halt within easy reach of the flames.

  “You didn’t have to wait,” she grinned, nodding at it. “We could hardly have gotten lost with no other way on, hey?”

  The Old Wolf’s blade barred her way. He held up a warning finger, dipped his sword to transfix the rat, and tossed it lightly into the ring of fire.

  There was a flash, a loud sizzle, and a smell that made the armored warrior entering the chamber gag and sag back. Aleena raised a disgusted hand. She winced in the sudden blazing light of the whirling wheel of flames. It flared bright, shrank, flared again … and was gone, leaving nothing but a little smoke behind, and the stink of cooked sewer rat.

  “That might have been you,” Aleena gasped hollowly, between gulps of nausea.

  Asper tossed her head. If she was frightened, she gave no sign of it. Only anger was on her face as she glared around the room. “He could be in the lowest of the Hells by now,” she said bitterly, “or in the next sewer over—and we’ll never know.”

  AMUSING, ELMINSTER? I LAUGH? NOW SHOW ME MAGIC.

  Somewhere in Waterdeep, a vial clattered onto a table-top. There came a sigh of satisfaction. A moment later, a gloved hand reached down to the table and took up a silver harp pin. Chuckling, the figure waved, bringing cold flames to pinwheel out of nothingness. The leather-clad form leaned through this fresh flickering and was gone.

  MAGIC, YES, AND ANOTHER MEMORY GIVEN YOU BY MYSTRA, BUT AGAIN I FIND NOT WHAT I SEEK! THIS IS RIDICULOUS! WIZARD, GET ON WITH IT!

  The tale unfolds, Lord Devil.

  [bright images flying]

  The time before dawn grew more difficult as he got older. Durnan stood in the cold, getting dressed for another long, long day. The Yawning Portal was his home and his life, and he loved it dearly, but sometimes—these dark fore-dawns, usually—he wanted to be somewhere else. Somewhere that did not allow innkeepers to rise before highsun, when their old aching feet and shanks were thoroughly warmed by the sun, and someone else had the cooking fires lit long ago, and a hot meal ready, and—

  The high, ragged scream made Durnan jump half out of his hose. Tamsil, from the taproom downstairs! He hopped awkwardly, kicked his garments away with a curse, snatched up his sword belt by the hilts, and launched himself bruisingly through the door frame into the dimness.

  In the brief whirl of his naked charge down the stairs, he shook the hilts in his hands for all he was worth until the belt fell away, roaring wildly all the while to distract whoever might be attacking his daughter. Tam was more than old and curvaceous enough to catch the eye of a thief who might think that innkeepers are actually allowed to sleep, and—

  Skidding through a doorway with sword and dagger glittering in his hands, Durnan found himself with no foe to fight.

  Tamsil and her mother Mhaere both looked up at him with eyes large and dark with fear. His wife was holding a double crossbow in her hands, its strings still thrumm
ing enough to tell him that both quarrels had been fired. No foe lay dead or groaning on the floor before them—but it did offer the discerning naked innkeeper’s eye a lavish display of broken crockery and fresh blood.

  “Are you all right?” Durnan snapped. “And where is—” He gestured at the wreckage on the floor. “—he?”

  Mhaere smiled thinly. “Yes, and gone. A masked man, armed with a blade. He—”

  She drew in a deep, shuddering breath that told him she wasn’t half as calm as she appeared to be, threw back her head to gasp for air, then resumed speaking as gently as if she’d been discussing the weather. “In leathers, alone, not familiar to me. An oval—an upright oval, like a lady’s gazing-glass—of flames that were cold white, not hot, was suddenly right there, and he stepped out of it and charged at Tamsil. Thank Tymora, she was carrying water—yon ewer you see in pieces on the floor—and flung it in his face.”

  Durnan turned slowly to peer around the field of battle, nodding. “Whereupon you,” he replied, “took up the ready-bow from behind the bar and gave him both bolts.”

  “Chest and shoulder,” Mhaere added, and he could hear the satisfaction in her voice. “He fled back through the hole in the flames, and they were gone, just like that, and him with them.”

  Durnan stalked across the room like a hairy panther and pounced on something small on the floor. “Dropping something as he left you,” he growled in bafflement, as he picked it up. He was holding a silver harp pin.

  “Papa,” Tamsil said in her high, clear voice, “I don’t ever want to see that man again. How can we stop him ever coming back?”

  “The only way you can ever really stop any foe,” Durnan muttered, staring at the pin in his hand. “I must find him—and he must die.”

  MY MY, MYSTRA’S MEMORIES CERTAINLY MAKE YOUR TORIL SEEM AN INTERESTING PLACE. I’M NOT SEEING THE MAGIC I SEEK YET, THOUGH, AM I?

  Ten

  HARPERS HUNT BY MOONLIGHT

  The Lady Mage of Waterdeep bent over the silver harp pin on the table, lying amid the eerie, softly raging glows of her spells, and murmured, “There. In a moment, we’ll see—”

  Obligingly, the pin exploded, bolts of lightning snarling hungrily across the room as the world went white and Laeral’s body was hurled helplessly away.

  A certain Old Wolf scrambled up out of his chair as the lightning that should have slain Aleena melted and toppled a brazier instead. It was still falling across Mirt’s seat when Laeral smashed into him and drove him back into the tangle. They crashed to the floor together, bouncing with tooth-jarring force. Flames flickered briefly here and there around the room and then went out.

  Pinned under a brazier, splintered furniture, and a wizard sobbing in pain, Mirt glared briefly up at a blinding-bright sphere that floated near the ceiling: Laeral’s safeguard. Having absorbed most of the unleashed magic, it was slowly fading back into invisibility. The ceiling above was decorated with a collection of scorch marks that told him little disasters like this one had occurred a time or two before. He wasn’t sure if that was reassuring—after all, Blackstaff Tower still stood.

  “Lass?” he asked roughly, struggling to get out from under. “Are you well?”

  He was answered by three sets of moans and curses, one of them from atop his breast. He took gentle but firm hold of the Lady Mage and thrust her up into the air so he could slide to freedom. “What befell?”

  “There was a trap on that pin,” Laeral said, panting. She rolled off his hand and found her own wincing way to her knees, “left behind deliberately to harm anyone using spells on it. No Harper would do such a thing. Someone is trying to mislead us all into thinking a Harper killed Resengar.”

  Mirt nodded. “This fails to surprise me,” he said, turning his head to see how Asper and Aleena fared. Beside him, Laeral toppled silently over onto her face.

  Flames flared up from her body as it struck the floor, writhing, and Mirt roared out a heartfelt curse and a cry for aid. As he rolled the Lady Mage over, Asper ran for the door—and the alarm-gong on the wall just outside it.

  Only his smallest belt flask held water, and Mirt dashed it into Laeral’s face and pawed at her nose and cheeks to try to keep the flames at bay—greenish-yellow tongues of hot fire that seemingly rose from nothing. Magical fire, of course, damned wagonloads of praise be to Mystra, and all that. It ignored all of his ineffectual attempts to douse it; though it somehow didn’t spread to him, the Old Wolf was heartily glad when the room suddenly filled with stern-faced Tower apprentices.

  He was thrust aside in an instant, and the room erupted in tense castings and snapped orders and suspicious peering. Their health assured, Asper, Mirt, and Aleena were thrust into chairs in the most distant corner of the room and sternly bidden to wait and not stir.

  Just now, none of them felt like doing anything but sitting dazedly and letting the numb tingling die away. Young apprentices were still scurrying in with more chairs. Hard questioning lay in the future of Laeral’s three unexpected late-night guests.

  Amid the nervous tumult, a tall figure limped into the room. Aleena rose in a flurry of clanking armor to run to him.

  “Gently, ’Leen,” Piergeiron cautioned as she rushed to throw her arms around him. Scowling apprentices reached out to claw her back. Piergeiron made straight for the nearest chair, wobbling a little as he came. His face was tight and white with pain.

  “Well, young lion?” Mirt said, looking into his eyes.

  Those eyes were oddly green, a strangeness that seemed to grow as the Open Lord of Waterdeep collapsed into the chair and gasped, “Perhaps I’ll live.” As his daughter reached him at last and rained kisses on his face, he caught hold of both chair arms and shook himself, wincing.

  “Weak as a gutter kitten,” he hissed, waving Aleena back to her chair. “Now, will all the watching gods—or any of the rest of you—kindly tell me just what is going on?”

  Mirt held up a hand to forestall anyone else saying anything and turned to the apprentice standing watchfully beside his chair. All four of them had acquired such sentinels, he noted, and they did not look entirely friendly.

  “How fares the Lady Laeral?”

  “That’s not for me to say, merch—” the young wizard began, his voice as cold as the edge of a drawn blade. He fell silent in astonishment as a long, slender hand took hold of his arm from behind, and its owner followed, giving him a quelling look.

  “I, too, perhaps will live a bit longer,” Laeral told them, a wry smile on her lips. “A clever trap beneath the Harper enchantments—or at least, what I thought were Harper spells.” She gave Piergeiron a friendly nod and turned her head to regard Mirt. “You were about to say something important, I believe?”

  Mirt nodded and looked in turn to Piergeiron. “Tell us what you last remember—of what befell before you ended up here.”

  The paladin drew in a deep, quavering breath, lifted his head to stare thoughtfully at the spell-scorched ceiling, and said, “I was … charmed by a spell, cast by one who came on me unawares, in private. A man, by the mind-touch, young and full of rage and excitement. He forced from my mind the names, faces, and abodes of all the lords of Waterdeep.”

  Around the circle of chairs and apprentices, there was a silent bristling, a sudden tension that was almost a gasp.

  “He thanked me … mockingly,” Piergeiron said slowly, remembering, “and then came around from behind me to bow—all sweeping arms and snooty flourishes, a parody of a courtier—and swept a sword from behind his back and ran me through. He wore a mask, and I don’t think, if he’d removed it, I would have known him. His blade went through me—”

  Aleena hissed in disgust and fear, and her father threw her a smile as he continued, “—and struck the back of my chair. That broke the charm, and I roared at him and rose. He tried to slash open my throat, but I managed to draw my own blade—”

  Aleena was already holding it out to him, hilt first, in its scabbard. Piergeiron gave her another smile, took it,
and laid it across his knees.

  “—and he seemed disinclined to cross swords. He threw a spell into my face—force bolts that burned, like daggers stabbing. It threw me to my knees. He fled into the next room. I got there crawling—just in time to see his back foot vanishing through a gate.”

  “An oval of flickering fire?” Asper asked. “Cold flames? Shrank away after that?”

  Piergeiron gave her a thin smile. “Indeed. Is he a friend of yours?”

  Asper gave him a withering look, and his smile broadened. “Forgive me, Lady,” he said, “that was unworthy of me—and an insult to you. I fear my jests are apt to be awkward.”

  “Yet, look you here, Paladinson,” Mirt growled, beckoning one of the Tower apprentices over. The wizard blinked back at him until Laeral gestured that he should heed the summons; Mirt gave him a false, sweet smile and plucked the silver harp pin from the man’s hand, holding it out to Piergeiron with a flourish. “This matter does question friendships, as it happens.”

  The First Lord of Waterdeep peered at it. “Yes, the Harpers have always been friends,” he said slowly, frowning. “Or perhaps had been until now.”

  “This has gone on long enough,” Mirt growled, and lifted his gaze to Laeral. “Get Elminster to the palace, away from all your wards—and take all of us there, too, to meet him. Now.”

  As quickly as if she’d been his youngest maidservant, the Lady Mage of Waterdeep nodded and trotted from the chamber, leaving her apprentices staring from her dwindling figure to Mirt, then back again. “Elminster,” someone muttered, in tones of awe.

  WELL, QUITE THE MIGHTY SAVIOR WIZARD YOU WERE. A PITY I’M NOT SEEING MUCH OF THE MAGIC YOU PROMISED.

  [mind lash]

  [pain]

  [mind lash]

  [writhing pain]

  [mind lash]

  STUPID HUMAN! THINK I’LL SIT PATIENTLY TO BE DUPED FOREVER?

  [mind lash]

  Half a world away, in a tomb deep under Myth Drannor, a glowing ring of wraithlike figures flickered like so many man-high candles, cold and white in the gloom.