by Ed Greenwood
That armor would have saved his life, but he’d be in great pain. And alone once more, as Manshoon wanted him to be.
Aye, this was much better. He busied himself casting another scrying spell to look into that crypt again as soon as possible. Spending days tainting its wards to let him through had been worth every irritating moment, after all.
“Storm?” he gasped when he knew he was Elminster again. He was lying sprawled on stone, afire with pain.
Silence was the only reply offered by the darkness.
“Oh, lass,” he whispered. “Oh, no. Not like this …”
Mystra be with me.
Or … will I join her?
Elminster swam back to consciousness again. The pain was even worse, this time.
The armor was torn and crumpled where it wasn’t missing. He was burned in all those bare places, yet shivering. He lay on the cold hard smoothness, feeling life run out of him … slow, sticky, and inexorable.
The faint glows of the tombs were gone … or was his sight merely dimming as he started to die?
No, there was new light.
Fey witchlight.
Alusair had arrived, and her ghostly glow with her.
“Hail, fair princess,” he murmured, trying to smile.
Metal clinked and tinkled; Alusair was fighting to pluck away shards of Duar’s shattered armor that kept falling through her fingers.
“Damned magic!” she hissed. “Once I could command this entire palace-and now I can’t farruking pick up a stlarning plate of armor!”
“How … mighty … fallen,” Elminster offered, choking on welling blood.
“Hey, now, Old Mage,” the ghostly Steel Princess replied tenderly, her face floating perhaps a hand’s length away from his, “rest easy. If you’re fated to die here, at least you’ll die clowning around in stolen armor-and if we kiss and cuddle as much as I can manage, you’ll go in the arms of a lass trying to make love to you. Isn’t that what most men want?”
“Not … dead … yet,” Elminster managed. “But so damned … weak …”
Which was when a feeble whisper rose from the open door in front of them both, and something dark slithered into view. A wraith, a dark cloud barely able to lift itself far enough off the flagstones to drift, creeping like smoke toward them.
“And how d’you think I feel?” it asked testily.
It was a voice they both knew.
Vangerdahast.
The whisper was coming from all that was left of him. He was obviously a Dragon no longer. And just as obviously barely alive-or barely undead-too.
“Elminster,” Alusair said insistently, “use the codpiece! Heal yourself, before it’s too late!”
Elminster blinked at her, nodded almost absently, obeyed-a glow that brought some measure of relief promptly washing over him-and went back to staring at the dark wraith-thing on the floor. It was looking back at him with what seemed to be a lopsided grin.
“Again,” the ghostly princess commanded, and Elminster obeyed, the pain ebbing still more.
“Vangerdahast?” he asked in disbelief, peering hard.
“Aye,” came the growled reply. “There’d be a lot less of me if Myrmeen hadn’t loved me enough to force the last of her life into me. Yet she did, so this is all that’s left of Vangerdahast, once Royal Magician and Court Wizard of Cormyr. Ruler of a dark and empty closet of a crypt, these last few years. Ever since that snake who stole my ring sealed me in.”
“Who?” Elminster demanded weakly. “Who did it?”
“His name,” Vangerdahast hissed, “I know not. Nor did I see his face. Yet he works here at the palace-I feel the ring near too often for his station to be anything else-and schemes to bring down the Obarskyrs, and fartalks Sembians who send him coin and give him commands, and orders foolheaded young nobles to do the butchery. Which will befall at a council of some sort, by his recent talk.”
Alusair and Elminster exchanged glances. “And what else did you overhear?”
“Nothing useful. I can hear only through the ring, and only for moments ere I collapse into wisps, exhausted, and must spend agonizingly long gathering myself together again.”
“Is …” Elminster realized how helpless he felt. “Can I help ye, somehow?”
“Leave me the codpiece. I can feed on that and gather myself to carry it. I’ll scare a few guards when they see a disembodied codpiece floating feebly along the passages.”
Alusair chuckled. “I can carry small things, briefly; I could carry your cod.”
“Then let’s be going places,” Vangerdahast said faintly. “How soon’s this council?”
“Highsun on the morrow,” El and Alusair chorused grimly.
The dark, wispy cloud that was Vangerdahast somehow managed to look disgusted.
“Always charging in at the last instant, aren’t you?” he asked Elminster. “When it comes to my Cormyr, couldn’t you dispense with the dramatics, for once? Just once?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
RUNE, RUNE, GONE AWAY
Alusair had never thought the palace cellars were so big before. She had very little strength and solidity left to call on, to try to drag the crawling, badly wounded Elminster along.
The chill of her touch was obviously causing him pain; he was gasping as well as shivering, his face twisted. They’d left Vangerdahast behind a long time before, or so it seemed, but, were only-what? — three passages along.
As they turned into a fourth, Alusair sighed at what they’d all been reduced to. “Are you going to last as far as where the healing magics are cached?”
“Have … to …,” Elminster snarled, ducking his head and shuddering.
“Don’t die on me, Old Mage! Don’t you die on me!”
“Die while a spirited lass has her fingers inside me? No fear! Ahhh, blast ye, that hurts! I’m … I’m too old for this!”
“Hah! Stop me vitals!” she joked.
Elminster smiled a little sadly. “Already happened, remember?”
Alusair took advantage of her spectral state to become long and thin, so she could thrust herself around ahead of him and swing her head back to face his and give him a dark look. “Thank you for farrukin’ reminding me, Old Mage.”
Elminster winced. “You play with sharp claws out.”
“Always did,” she said softly. “Would again, if I had it all to do over again. Folk respect sharp claws and sneer at those who are nice and kindly. Wish it were otherwise, but … ’tis not. Damn the gods.”
“Look,” Arclath told the coldly frowning wizard, “I was meeting with Lady Glathra and the king himself, and-”
“No doubt you were,” the wizard of war replied grimly. “Yet the Lady Glathra has left the palace on … secret Crown business, and my orders are very clear. All nobles are to absent themselves from the palace until invited inside for council. No exceptions, and no excuses accepted. You have a home of your own to go to, and I’m sure you know the way there, Lord Delcastle. Your journey begins yonder.”
His imperiously pointing hand indicated exterior doors that two Purple Dragons-who were not very carefully suppressing smirks-were drawing open. Arclath eyed the wall of Purple Dragons right behind the coldly firm mage, inclined his head in polite defeat, and turned for the door.
“Mind you inform Glathra-or the king-at your first sight of either of them that you conducted me out of the palace, and that I can be found at Delcastle Manor,” he told the wizard, turning on his heel in the doorway to do so. “I suspect a failure on your part to do as much will not go over well-and were I you, I might risk royal displeasure, but the wrath of the Lady Glathra, now …”
At least one of the Purple Dragons chuckled.
Which was when there was a sudden commotion behind Arclath, and he spun around in time to see that one of the Dragons at the door had thrust a spear out to bar the path of a weathered old man in even more battered leather clothing-and the old man had jerked on the spear, hauled the soldier within reach, got him in a
n armlock, and spun him around to make him into a living shield against the spear of the other door guard.
“Is this the way ye greet arriving lords of Waterdeep, now?” he demanded gruffly.
The wizard of war stepped forward, reaching for a wand at his belt-and Arclath took great pleasure in clapping a hand around the mage’s wrist and snapping, “Try to avoid a diplomatic disaster, Saer Wizard!”
“Stirge!” one of the Dragons behind the sputtering mage shouted suddenly, pointing out the open door.
The battered old man spun around, the Dragon under his arm struggling but being dragged with him-and lashed out with a dagger that had suddenly appeared in his hairy free hand.
Gutted and with one wing sliced through, the flapping stirge tumbled to the ground, where the old man brought a firm boot down on its head.
“Stirges? In daylight, at the very doors of the palace?” the wizard snarled, struggling to wrench his arm free of Arclath’s grip.
“It’s the pet of the Lord Marlin Stormserpent,” Arclath informed him. “Or was.”
“And what was it doing out and about?” a Dragon growled. “He sent it?”
Arclath frowned. “We can but guess.” He looked the wizard straight in the eye, as they stood nose to nose, and added, “Unless you’d like to do something of real service to the Crown-and go and ask him?”
Elminster shook his vials out of his boots, then decided he didn’t need them, and put them back. The healing potions Alusair had poured down him were enough. He was back to being as good as he got, these days.
“Storm,” he asked the ghostly princess sadly, “what was left of her?”
“Nothing,” Alusair told him. “Did you not feel her ring working? Right in the heart of the blast, it took her away somewhere. No, there wasn’t a trace of her-not one drop-in the crypt.”
She watched him peel off the last of the shattered armor. “Now I’ve one to ask you, El. Who hurled that spell at you?”
The Sage of Shadowdale shrugged. “A wizard?” he offered helpfully. “Lass, I know not. Truly.”
“One of the wizards of war you didn’t manage to kill recently?” Alusair asked a little coolly.
Elminster shrugged again. “Life wasn’t simple a century ago, but I used to know a little about what was going on right around me. A little.”
Manshoon frowned. Who was this gruff old man who tossed Purple Dragons about fearlessly and called himself a lord of Waterdeep? The man was just then lurching off down the promenade with the rolling gait of a sailor … could it be one of Elminster’s disguises?
Surely not. Yet the man seemed somehow familiar. Seen long before, in, yes, Waterdeep …
Oh, surely not. Mirt? It couldn’t be.
Or could it?
Manshoon shook his head.
It was, by Bane: Mirt the Moneylender. Once Mirt the Merciless, and still not a man anyone should turn his back on. He peered intently into the scene …
Mirt stood in the middle of a busy Suzail street and cursed bitterly.
The taverns and clubs of Cormyr’s capital were deafeningly crowded bastions of revelry this day, to be sure, awash in excited nobles and their servants making merry on the eve of some grand council or other.
Every last one of them he’d managed to get a reply from was stone-cold certain it was the Year of the Ageless One. Which meant nigh a century had passed, somehow, and Asper and Durnan and nigh all the folk he’d ever known were long dead.
Naed.
Well, those two lordlings’ purses would be empty long before morning, buying him what he needed to get very, very drunk.
Two floors above where Alusair’s healing potions had been cached, and at the far end of another wing of the vast and grandly sprawling palace, was a state chamber so remote from the great rooms of state that it was very seldom used.
Yet to those who liked crimson draperies and soft, overstuffed beds of matching hues, the Room of the Fire Wyrm was a favorite. It had become so favored for trysts among the palace staff, in fact, that the war wizards had taken possession of its keys almost forty years earlier, and had kept it shut up ever since, except when one of them was present.
One of them was there right then. She had locked the doors from the inside after entering, and she was not alone.
Raereene was her name, and at that moment she wore only a hungry expression and her long, glossy fall of blue-black hair. The young palace server atop her, Kreane, was gasping out her name repeatedly as panting passion seized them both.
Their ardor might have more than cooled if they’d known who was watching them through the eyes of the smiling portrait of King Duar, which hung across the room, facing the great lamp-studded hanging sculpture of the fire wyrm for which the cavern was named.
Princess Alusair Obarskyr had ridden and been ridden by many panting men in her day, and her eyes were two ghostly flames of hunger and longing as Elminster came up beside her in the secret passage.
Without a word, he put his hand on where her shoulder would have been had it been solid, and he bent to look through the eyes of Duar’s queen, where she’d been painted pressed happily against his shoulder.
“Gods,” Alusair growled quietly, “I miss this!”
“As do I,” Elminster muttered. “As do I. Yet enjoy the memories, lass; isn’t that why ye made them? Hmm?”
Alusair gave him an angry glare. “Wizards may decide to ‘make’ memories,” she hissed. “Sane folk do not.”
Elminster shrugged. “No wonder all those sane folk are so forgetful, and so much evil and confusion flourishes as a result.”
He bent his head and devoted himself to peering through the eyes of the portrait, enjoying the view of the lovers.
“Aren’t you going to go down there?” Alusair teased, passing a hand through him.
Elminster winced, and it turned into an involuntary shiver; her “touch” had a chill that was almost heart-stopping. “And frighten or mortify them into rousing the whole palace in their terror? And never helping us, all the rest of their lives, befall what may? Playing the randy old goat got me a surprisingly long way a century ago, and for about a thousand years before that, but I’ve tired of it. And grown increasingly bad at it, too. I mean, look ye at what’s left of me, lass! Who’s going to be charmed by this?”
“Blind women with numb fingers,” Alusair replied promptly.
After a moment of shared struggling to throttle mirth into silence, they sniggered together.
“Seen enough?” Alusair teased a while later.
“Nay, lass, but-forgive me-ye’re too cold for me to tarry near any longer. My old bones …”
“I know,” the ghost princess replied sadly. “I know. ’Tis why I’m watching yon lovers; they’re making me feel warm. Go, then, old friend, and fare you well. New kitchen fires will be lit by now, down nigh the stableyard doors, for the baking. Take the passage along behind the ovens, and you’ll feel warm enough, right soon.”
“Thank ye,” Elminster whispered, patting a shoulder his hand plunged through, leaving his fingers feeling like icicles.
Frowning in pain, he turned away and walked slowly along the passage.
Azuth and Mystra, if he could hand over his tasks and causes to one like Alusair! The Steel Princess as she’d been in life, that is, not the ghost she had become …
If only … nay. That way lay madness and an utter waste of his thoughts and time. He had one successor to hand, and little else to choose from.
Amarune Whitewave was what he had to work with, and she was young and strong and vigorous and … would have to do.
Yet she must still be won over from thinking him some sort of crazed old fool who lusted after her or who was too madwits to need heeding at all, to, well, embracing her heritage.
“I can’t trust anyone else,” he muttered aloud. “Everyone else will end up saving the Realms for themselves to rule.”
Idly he tapped a spot on the passage wall where he’d have hidden a door if he’d been bu
ilding this part of the royal palace-and a long-hidden door obligingly groaned open. To reveal a passage, complete with a spike-studded trap. A trap that had claimed a … war wizard, by the looks of him. Walled up for centuries and mummified into a withered, dessicated husk in his robes.
Something winked at Elminster from the throat of those robes. A pendant-enchanted, of course; that was where the glow had come from-dangling from the shriveled remnant of a neck.
“Ah,” he said, brightening. “This will do, indeed. Alassra can be herself again. For a little while.”
It was early evening, and it didn’t seem that long since Tress had dragged Amarune out of a deep sleep and had told her to get ready and take the stage.
The snakeskins merchant was close with his coins and was one of those whose eyes burned into her flesh even as he dared not get bolder, but he’d been a good patron for three years, and seemed honest enough. His name was Raoryndar or Rindlar, or some such.
So when he’d told the others at the table Amarune was dancing above about three lordlings scouring the city menacing everyone with their swords, to yield up any hand axes they might own, she’d believed him-and promptly had left the stage, hurriedly pulled on her clothes, and hastened for Delcastle Manor.
Arclath had told her more about those three since they’d brawled in the Dragonriders’ … he must know about it right swiftly, must-
Amarune found herself coming to a rather breathless halt in front of the gates of Delcastle Manor sooner than she’d thought she’d be. “L–Lorold?” she asked, by the hole next to the knocker. “May I speak with Arcl-the Lord Delcastle?”
The porter slid open his spy plate, and she was aware of the guards stepping forward to peer at her through the bars.
“Lady Amarune,” the porter greeted her formally. “You are welcome, if you’ll accept our escort to the house proper. The Lord Delcastle is at home and has given orders that you are to be admitted, if you come alone.”
