by Ed Greenwood
“El?” Storm whispered.
“Who did that?” the Sage of Shadowdale’s familiar voice snapped, out of Rune’s beautiful mouth.
“Dardulkyn. The most powerful archwizard in Suzail, probably in all Cormyr. He’s standing in yonder window.”
“Is he, now? Well—”
The second spell struck then, a blast that plucked them up and hurled them like gale-driven leaves down the street, tumbling and helplessly cursing.
“Enough of this,” Elminster spat, when they were all lying on the cobbles again. “Storm, heal me!”
“He’s sending his helmed horrors after us—”
“Then start healing me now.”
Storm turned her head. “Mirt, help me. We need to get around that corner, then find a doorway or an alcove for me to use, while you gallantly hold off all helmed horrors until I’m done restoring El.”
Mirt gave her a wordless, wary “you’ll be lucky” grunt, then started crawling. “I must warn ye,” he growled as he wormed slowly past her, looking rather like a kitchen midden heap on the move, “that my vanquishing-helmed-horrors skills are a mite rusty. Piergeiron only has—er, had—two of ’em, and thought ’em too precious for us to really smite.”
“All we need is for you to delay them long enough,” Storm replied, crawling to where she could reach Arclath and roll his stiff body over. Reaching back, she tugged at Amarune to keep her crawling, too.
“Huh,” Mirt growled, reaching out a hand to help roll the frozen young noble. “The older I get, the longer ‘long enough’ seems to get.”
“I’ve noticed that, too,” Storm agreed, scrambling forward to catch and cradle Arclath’s head before it crashed down on a cobble. “I believe some call it ‘progress.’ ”
“Oh? ‘Some’? What do others call it?”
“The general decline of the realms, sliding ever faster and inevitably into the Abyss, crawling chaos, and eventual obliteration.”
“Ah. So, I should make my coins now, hey?”
“Hey,” Storm agreed, breaking into a smile.
Broryn Windstag could not remember a time before Delasko Sornstern had been grinning at his elbow. They’d done nigh everything together for years; they still did almost everything together.
And in the wake of Stormserpent’s vow to carry out Lord Illance’s bold plan, they had wasted no time hastening to their favorite “private place,” a certain shady back corner of the Sornstern family gardens, where they could talk things over without being overheard by anyone.
It would have dumbfounded them both—and plunged them into cold, despairing terror at the thought of all the treasons they’d so casually discussed—to learn their every jocular comment was being overheard and committed to memory by a Highknight of the Crown who’d been tailing Windstag for years. A certain Sir Talonar Winter, who looked very much like the better portraits of the great King Azoun, fourth of that name, and who was lounging above them on a bough of a mighty shadowtop at that moment.
A man who’d become so comfortable on that bough overhanging the bower where the two friends were wont to talk that he could arrive and depart soundlessly, even in utter darkness, tall and spike-topped Sornstern walls or no walls.
Yet the two lordlings remained blissfully unaware of their audience, and so spoke untrammeled by prudence. Just as they were discussing Marlin Stormserpent’s chances just then.
“Yes, straight through the perimeter wall of Stormserpent Towers. Solid stone feet thick, mind, not where there was a gate or hidden door. Strode without stopping, blue flames and all, leaving not so much as a scorch mark.”
“Not a secret door?” Windstag asked disbelievingly, a second time.
“Not,” Sornstern confirmed. “He swore to this, insisting he was sober and had seen it all very clearly. The two of them stepped through a wall without muttering any sort of spell. In a spot where the stones were solid—he checked, just after. And Indur would never embellish or tell us false. He knows full well his neck would pay the price.”
Windstag nodded. “So tell me about these blueflame ghosts.”
Sornstern leaned back to look up at the night stars—what few of them he could see around the great dark canopy of the shadowtop looming overhead. Even if he’d had a glowstone on a pole to peer properly by, he had no chance of seeing the Highknight who was listening so intently, because the Highknight was not in the habit of handing such chances to others, even headstrong and idiotic young noble lordlings.
Not that Delasko Sornstern was looking for anyone. He was enjoying the moment, savoring this rare time when Windstag was listening to him.
“My father, Haedro,” he began slowly, “has a hobby.”
He paused then, just to see Broryn lean forward eagerly and acquire the first signs of impatience. Before it could flare into anger, he continued.
“He collects lore and relics of famous adventurers of the past. Years ago, he heard all about those famous adventurers, the Nine. Not the heroic tales bards and old tavern gossips like to tell, but all about the Nine. How they ended, to be specific.”
“The Silverhair Sister—Lurl or Laeral or some such—fell under a god’s curse, right? After she put on the Crown of Horns, and it ate her brain?”
Sornstern winced at Windstag’s words. “Y-yes, you could put it that way. She went evil, at least until the Lord Archmage of Waterdeep, the Blackstaff, rescued her and took her as his wife—”
“Funny how that happens, hey? Off with that gown and behold my cure!” Windstag leered.
Out of long habit, Sornstern supplied the expected nod and enthusiastic grin. “Yes, I’ve noticed that, too! What we missed by not being born mighty wizards, hey?”
“Hey, indeed. So, she went mad and bad, and the Nine scattered, never to reunite,” Windstag almost chanted. “See? I remember a little of what my tutors droned on about … see?”
Sornstern nodded and grinned again. “Well done, to have emerged from that flood of drivel with anything salvaged at all! You have it right, and some of the Nine were hired by a certain rich merchant of Athkatla. Unbeknownst to them, that merchant was under the influence of an archmage who desired to bind longevity and resilience into magic items by imprisoning the vitality of living beings within them, and—”
“Those Amnians! Sell their own left arms, they will! Can’t trust them for half a trice or the scrapings off a copper coin!”
“Ah … well said, you can’t indeed! Well, this wizard easily overcame the adventurers with spells and bound them into items of his making. Later, at least one, more likely two, of these enchanted things fell into the hands of the Stormserpents.”
For the first time, Windstag stopped looking enthusiastic. An eye-narrowing thought had struck him. “Just how is it that you know that?”
“My father,” Sornstern replied triumphantly, “and he had it from that infamous hot-breeches Old Mage the tales all tell about: Elminster of Shadowdale In return for hiding the Sage of Shadowdale for a night and letting him drain a decanter of half-decent wine. The old fool thought he was getting Father’s best.”
The two lordlings snorted and sneered together for the thousand-thousandth time over the gullibility of the lower classes, ere Windstag stiffened as another thought struck him.
Leaning forward excitedly, he asked, “So just how many of the Nine were bound into items? How many does Marlin control?”
Sornstern shrugged. “I think just the two, but in truth I know not. I did notice that Marlin said nothing at all about blueflame ghosts to us, for a good long time after he was sending them out into the city.”
Windstag smiled. “Would you, if you stood in his boots? They’re his secret weapon against the Obarskyrs.”
“Or us,” Sornstern told his friend thoughtfully. “Or us.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
FEARFUL FOR GOOD REASON
Gellurt? Mraukhar? Gone, lords. Out yon door, shouting
Death was hard at their heels, to slice them and turn out
&
nbsp; Their innards for passing flies, as it lately served their friends.
You do well to back away, for no one is here left alive but me
And I tell you, soft but true, that they fled fearful for good reason.
Morold the Mad Knight, in Act III, Scene I of the
play Darth Thorn Horn by Mydantha “Ladyminstrel”
Marlest first performed in the Year of the Risen Elfkin
If ye can hurry, lass, now would be a fair good time to do so,” Mirt growled from the mouth of the alcove.
“Helmed horrors?” Storm asked, not moving from where she lay pressed against Amarune, forehead to forehead. She was so close …
“Aye. A dozen or more. Floating down the street as menacing as ye please. Striding on air.”
Storm closed her eyes. “How far off?”
El was almost completely himself again. Almost.
“About ten strides. Nay, six now. Too stlarned close—!”
Mirt grunted that last word as the foremost empty suit of armor descended onto the cobbles in front of him and swung its greatsword, its baleful inner fire pulsing.
Steel rang on steel as Mirt parried, puffing. He dared not duck aside with the lasses behind him needing to be shielded. The horror swung again as a second one floated down to the cobbles.
Mirt shook his head. The moment it walked up beside the first one, he was a dead man. “Storm?” he growled. “Got any miracle magic? I need it now!”
“Aye,” came a familiar deeper, rougher man’s voice from behind him. “I believe I do.”
Mirt sighed with relief and lurched aside. As the horror promptly stepped forward into the spot where he’d stood, to swing its sword again, Elminster murmured something—and the night exploded in an angry emerald flame.
Or was it a bolt of something else? With a weird burbling sound that was part exulting song and part keening saw, it spiraled down the street in a slowly expanding, blazing cone, plucking the walking suits of armor up into itself as it went. Every last one of them.
Greatswords, gauntlets, and helms could be seen whirling around and around the moving, expanding glow, swept down it as it sputtered, darkened, sputtered again—and abruptly winked out.
Leaving the street dark and empty, save for one blackened, bouncing helm that clanged on the cobbles and fetched up beside Mirt’s boots, ruby red internal fire still roiling inside it.
El reached down with one of Amarune’s long-fingered, graceful hands, caught up the helm, and murmured something swift and simple over it that made its red fire shrink smoothly into an endlessly whirling sphere. Then he tossed it to Storm. “Keep this for healing later, when we need it.”
He stalked along the street toward the corner. Mirt lurched along warily in his wake. Shapely young lass or not, she moved like Elminster when he was angry—and when Elminster was angry, things tended to get spectacular.
Dardulkyn was no longer at his window, and the panel inside was closed across the hole where Arclath had burst through it.
Elminster regarded the broken shards around the edge of the missing window for a long, silent breath, then lifted his arms and unhurriedly worked a spell.
The mansion wall vanished with a roar, laying bare the innards of half a dozen rooms and causing an overhang of suddenly unsupported roof-slates to groan, lean forward—and drop, one by one, to shatter loudly on the ornate iron fence below.
Mirt gaped, then winced.
As a door at the back of one of the shattered rooms flew open and an astonished Larak Dardulkyn stared at the sudden ruin of one end of his home.
He glared at the young mask dancer, who still stood with arms raised in the last gesture of her casting. Throwing up his own arms dramatically, he spat out an angry-sounding spell.
The air was suddenly full of flame, snarling spheres of it that expanded with frightening speed as they rushed through the air at Rune. Mirt cowered back around the corner, flinging out an arm to warn Storm, knowing even as he did so that he was too late to do anything, too late even to cling to life, as—
Above them, the highest of the fiery spheres came to an abrupt, shuddering stop in midair, as if it had struck an unseen wall. Its angry orange-red flames went blue, then green, then blue-silver—and fell away to nothing, plunging toward the cobbles like spilled sand but vanishing utterly before they landed.
Timidly, Mirt peeked around the corner again.
This time it was Dardulkyn who was gaping. His spell was gone as if it had never been—and he’d watched it shatter in midair, seen the angry young lass down the street foil one of his greatest battle magics in an instant.
She couldn’t do that. No one could.
“Who—who are you?” he snarled, turning a ring in frantic haste to call up his strongest shielding magics. Without waiting for a reply, he ran across the riven, open-to-the-night room, heading for where his mightiest magical staff awaited, behind its own panel.
“The name,” came the calm, almost insolent reply, “is Elminster.”
Rune’s nimble fingers moved again—and even as Dardulkyn wrenched open the panel and closed his hand triumphantly around the gleaming black grip of his most potent staff, feeling its power thrumming through him, Elminster’s next spell struck.
The sound was like a thunderclap, despite the stormless night sky. This magic was no tidy vanishing, but a series of bursts that blew apart several deeper rooms of Dardulkyn’s mansion, hurling their stones and plaster and all high and far into the night sky in the general direction of Jester’s Green. Plucking the crackling, angrily pulsing, and ultimately exploding staff from the mage’s hands in the midst of their punishing tumult, the bursts whirled it away across the night sky with the rest of the wreck … and left. As the last rolling echoes of the magic rebounded off nearby buildings, and dazed and bewildered folk started to thrust their heads out windows, a stunned and terrified Larak Dardulkyn clung to the edge of the opened panel amid the smoking ruins.
His grand black robes were shredded, and many busily winking motes of light appeared and disappeared up and down his body in mute memorial to the shielding and warding magics that had kept him alive but paid the price.
With a sound that began as a groan but ended as a sigh, a fanglike remnant of an interior wall toppled over into collapse.
Leaving Dardulkyn clinging to nothing at all.
He fell to the littered floor in a huddled heap, only his terrified stare telling Mirt that he was still alive.
Above the fallen wizard, his four direhelms hung in midair, a motionless square facing inward, guarding doors that were no longer there.
At the sight of them, Elminster sighed. Then he moved one hand in a swift, complicated spellweaving.
For many pounding heartbeats, nothing seemed to happen. Then, there came a single clink. Followed by another. And another.
Something fell.
Then, in a series of clinks and clanks, pieces of armor plate fell from all four floating menaces. More followed, in an ever-swifter sequence of plummeting. Until nothing was left floating at all, and heaps of metal festooned the floor around the quivering Dardulkyn.
Who could only watch, mewing in disbelieving fear from time to time, as the fallen metal started to rust before his eyes with uncanny speed.
By the time he’d swallowed twice or thrice, it had all crumbled to reddish brown powder. Even the sword hilts.
“You can cry now,” Elminster told the huddled archwizard gently. “As wizards seem to be all too fond of saying, these days: We all have to start learning about the world sometime.”
Marlin Stormserpent had hurried home groaning in fear. It had all gone wrong!
What to do now, what to do now?
Did he even have any blueflame ghosts at his command, anymore?
He couldn’t get that sight of one of his ghosts being hurled across the Promenade out of his head. It had looked just like an ordinary hiresword, a man who could be killed as swiftly—and stlarn it, easily—as other men, a man with a sword
who just happened to have some pretty blue flames around him. Why, a hedge wizard could conjure up such a look!
He’d thought himself so powerful, so important …
The ghosts had made short work of Huntcrown, but—but—
Were they anything more, now, than bright banners pointing him out as a traitor to anyone who cared to look?
Ganrahast, the royal magician? That snarling bitch, Lady Glathra? The king?
He had a brief, dreadful vision of a chopping block in the palace stableyard, and Crown Prince Irvel waiting beside it with a large, sharp sword and a ruthless smile—
Shaking his head to banish that imagining, Marlin strode across the room, bound for his favorite decanter. He’d made a proper mess of—
Oh, no.
Behind him, rich blue radiance had blossomed seemingly out of nowhere and glinted back reflections from all his decanters. Clapping one hand to the hilt of the Flying Blade and snatching up the Wyverntongue Chalice with the other, Marlin whirled around.
The ghost was smiling, of course. The blueflame ghosts always did. Wide, terrible smiles, malicious or madly gleeful, and obviously false.
At odds right now with the angry hiss Treth Halonter, who long ago had been the best warrior of the Nine, was giving Marlin as he strode through the wall. His worn and nondescript leather war harness looked torn and battered, some of the leather hanging in frayed tatters. In the heart of fainter, more flickering blue flames than usual, the warrior leaned forward threateningly.
“Sent us into the maw of mighty magics, you did,” he whispered, as if wounded inside. “You pewling, prancing idiot.”
Marlin somehow got himself around behind the table he’d grabbed the Chalice from, and from the skimpy shelter of its far side snapped fearfully, “You serve me! Remember?”
Drawing his sword in desperate haste, he held it up before him, with the Chalice, as if they were holy things that could ward off the furious ghost.
“I do. Oh, I do,” Halonter replied, glowering over his wide smile. “In fact, lordling, I’ll never forget.”
