Elminster Enraged: The Sage of Shadowdale, Book III (Forgotten Realms: Sage of Shadowdale)

by Ed Greenwood

  And in distant Irlingstar, his forceblade silently faded away.

  “We’ve got to get out of here! All of us!”

  If the kitchen staff or the guards of Irlingstar were unwilling to take orders from a dark elf—even a beautiful female one—they didn’t show it. Elminster rushed up and down the passages, parting the wards to let prisoners out of their cells. She was ordering the abandonment of Castle Irlingstar immediately, regardless of what Ganrahast or anyone else might say or think later. No one argued.

  A few of the freed prisoners promptly attacked her—or Gulkanun, or Rune and Arclath—and there were several brief, nasty tussles, but every one of them ended with the nobles defeated. Nor were hostilities renewed; the promise of getting out of “this deathtrap,” backed up by the fear of being left behind, alone and warded into a cell without food or water to face the unseen slayer, convinced everyone.

  In a surprisingly short time, they were gathered at the main gates, and then spilling out of the castle together—cooks, guards, prisoners, staff, and all. Only to come to a dismayed halt.

  Something blocked Orondstars Road. Something large, dark, and scaly.

  The black dragon Alorglauvenemaus was waiting for them, and it was smiling. Its first spew of acid melted the frontrunners into wounded, dying agony.

  One of them was Elminster.

  Panting in pain, her legs gone at the knees and her pelvis and belly slowly melting, El propped herself on one elbow and fought to make her failing body cast protective magic.

  Now, El. Now I repay you, by giving you my last. I loved you. Farewell, old rogue—and conquer!

  Symrustar’s mind-voice was warm and weeping. Before El could even think of a protest, the last of her washed through his mind, clearing it of pain, of weary worrying, of everything except what had to be done. A shielding, thus …

  Amid all the shouting, scattering, fleeing folk of Irlingstar, she was almost done, gasping and shuddering out the last words of the spell, when the dragon noticed her.

  Alorglauvenemaus turned its head toward the nearest trees of Hullack Forest, hard by the road, and commanded, “Now.”

  Two crossbows cracked, and two heavy war quarrels sped out of the treegloom. One took the struggling drow through the shoulder, and the other tore out her throat on its way past.

  Even before Rune could gasp, Harbrand and Hawkspike stepped out of concealment to peer at the results of their archery. Each of them trailed the bow they’d just fired, and cradling a second, loaded crossbow.

  Seeing that the drow was down, they stepped back into the forest. Whereupon Amarune ducked her head down and sprinted for Elminster, Arclath right behind her.

  She was halfway there when a crossbow quarrel crashed into her shoulder, plucked her off her running feet, and left her down and sobbing in the road.

  Arclath flung himself atop her, to shield her. Gulkanun fell to the ground right behind him.

  “Can you heal her?” Arclath asked the war wizard pleadingly.

  Gulkanun shook his head and snapped, “Stay with her. I’ll go to Elminster. If anyone knows how to twist this or that handy arcane spell into healing, she will. Er, he will.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’m doing this,” Gulkanun said flatly. “Even if it means the end of me, that … matters not. Nothing matters, since my Longclaws was taken from me.”

  He rolled over and up, leaping to his feet and running, changing direction sharply once, twice, and—a crossbow quarrel slammed into him as he reached Elminster.

  Snarling in pain, he fell onto what was left of the dying drow. Silver fire flared, the quivering shaft of the quarrel melted away—and Elminster flooded into Gulkanun’s mind.

  The wizard rolled over, dragging the dissolving drow torso over as a shield, and worked a swift spell. Then he stood up to face the dragon.

  “Oh, that was boldly done,” Alorglauvenemaus said mockingly, and he spewed a great cloud of acid right at Gulkanun.

  Another rift closed, and of course more monsters slain. At last.

  The Simbul stared at deep gashes in her left shoulder as she drifted away from her latest battlefield, exhausted and reeling. The blueflame items in her hands flickered dully, almost spent.

  “I am becoming blueflame,” she mumbled. “Mystra, it hurts, and the madness is coming back … I can feel it …”

  Not long now, loyal daughter, came Mystra’s firm reply. Not long until you can rest forever.

  The cloud of acid struck something unseen in front of Elminster, and boiled away. Good. The shielding he’d just cast was broad and high, and protected Arclath, Rune, and most of the Irlingstar folk still on the road.

  The nobles who’d ducked down into the ditches were not so fortunate. Even before El stepped back to heal Amarune with a burst of silver fire, many acid-melted Cormyrean lordlings screamed, gurgled, and died.

  Gulkanun had retreated to the back of his mind, no longer despairing. El sent him a reassuring rush of warmth and gratitude, then turned and worked the mightiest battle spell he could swiftly hurl.

  Before it could take wing, the great black dragon was struck. By his shielding spell first, its edge of force thinned like Mreldrake’s blade. It sliced deeply, almost severing one great wing, even as Elminster’s whirling spheres of flame slammed into the rest of Alorglauvenemaus.

  Writhing on the road, its lashing tail and wings churning up dust, the scorched dragon screamed in pain.

  The sound was almost deafening, and in its growing agony the dragon rolled over and over, like a wounded man down in a fight and trying to get clear, its tail and intact wing flailing the road and ditches alike.

  Elminster raised his arms—Gulkanun’s arms—to hurl another spell at the dragon.

  And the air above Alorglauvenemaus winked, four bright stars appearing out of nowhere, stars that flashed and then were gone—leaving behind four rotting, mold-covered beholders of monstrous size.

  Hanging menacingly in midair, their eyestalks and tentacles writhing, they stared down at the wizard standing in the road.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  WIN YOURSELF A HAPPIER ENDING

  Manshoon,” El muttered angrily, and he worked a spell that should maim at least four death tyrants before they could spread apart to fly at him from all sides.

  He was halfway through that magic when another two crossbow quarrels came humming out of the trees.

  He swayed aside and one missed—but the other crashed into him, spoiled the spell, and hurled him down on his back on the road, winded and in pain.

  He could taste blood, and in the sky above the beholders were floating menacingly forward.

  Behind them, the dragon was fleeing, lurching along the road like a gigantic wounded dog in an anxious hurry to be elsewhere, its tongue hanging out as it panted.

  “Enough of this,” El snarled, fighting the pain. “Rune, Arclath—clasp your hands firmly around some part of me. And let any noble who wants to do the same.”

  Arclath Delcastle was neither dull nor slow-witted. “Where are you taking us?”

  “The royal gardens in Suzail,” El gasped.

  “I dem—requested this audience,” Lady Dawningdown said sharply, “because I now have rather more than the usual number of complaints. Your Majesty will appreciate—”

  King Foril Obarskyr, who walked at her side as they wended their way along some of the shadier paths of the royal gardens, nodded politely. He’d become very good at politely appreciating nobles’ bitter complaints, long before his first meeting with Lady Jalassra Dawningdown—and that meeting had been happier decades ago.

  Lady Glathra and the lord warder walked a pace behind them, and several watchful veteran highknights were farther ahead.

  “—that a lady of breeding and station, such as myself, who has reached the golden age I now enjoy, no longer takes pleasure in the jolting of a saddle, and prefers to travel in the relative comfort of a coach! I hope you’ll agree that any Cormyrean who
can afford such a conveyance should have the perfect right to—”

  The highknights shouted as they were bowled over by the sudden appearance, amid a bright blue flash of magic, of more than a dozen ragged bodies, tumbling out of nowhere atop them.

  The lord warder cast a swift shielding, and Lady Glathra dragged out her two most puissant wands and yelled for the rearguard of highknights and war wizards to get themselves over here, right now.

  “The king is under attack!” someone bellowed from across the gardens, and knights and Purple Dragons started converging from everywhere, swords out and running hard.

  The sudden scramble and fray would have ended in real bloodshed if strong forcecages and shielding spells hadn’t come into being around the new arrivals.

  As it was, hurrying highknights unceremoniously bowled Lady Dawningdown over. Whereupon some ill-smelling and disheveled young lordlings, in haste to loudly complain to the king about the murderers he was letting loose into his prisons to just dispose of anyone he desired dead, trampled the toppled lady face first into a freshly manured flower bed. Whereupon Lady Dawningdown discovered she had just acquired something to really complain about.

  When it all got sorted out, the complaining prisoners were hustled away by most of the Purple Dragons. Many of the wizards of war and highknights, with Lord Warder Vainrence, conducted King Foril to safety elsewhere.

  Leaving Lady Glathra to glean some detailed sense of what had happened at Irlingstar, so as to deliver a proper report to the king.

  “Consider yourself under arrest,” she began, giving Gulkanun a glare and keeping both of her wands leveled at him. “We will decide on the future of your career in service to the Crown later. For now, I require—”

  “Oh, for the sake of the Dragon Throne!” Amarune snarled in utter exasperation, plunging into a somersault that became an extended double-leg kick at the back of the war wizard’s head.

  Glathra went down like a felled sapling.

  Leaving Arclath, Amarune, and Elminster all gazing wearily at each other.

  “My place,” Arclath suggested. “I want a feast, a bed, and most of all a bath.”

  They all fervently agreed—even Gulkanun, inside the mind he was sharing with Elminster.

  In a corner of the royal gardens, Lord Wenderwood reached a decision and abruptly stood up.

  He’d been sitting on a bench under a sculpted felsul tree, patiently awaiting his turn to talk to the king on that day’s garden stroll.

  The guard who’d been escorting Lord Wenderwood had gone running to old Foril the moment the war wizard bitch had shouted for help, and hadn’t yet returned. The guard was starting to, though, trudging back to inform his noble charge that royal audiences were unexpectedly over for the day.

  So much Lord Wenderwood, with his monocle or without, could already see for himself. In truth, there was nothing at all wrong with his eyesight, and he’d readily recognized Lord Delcastle, a number of other young lords who’d recently been shut up in Irlingstar—and the flash of a translocation spell.

  His master would very much want to hear about this. Accordingly, Lord Wenderwood turned his back on the approaching guard, who was still two intervening flower beds away.

  It was the work of but a moment to unleash the eyeball beholderkin from inside the breast of the best Wenderwood formal jerkin, to send it back to Lord Manshoon.

  This Everwood had a young, quick, useful mind. He should have done this months ago!

  Manshoon stretched his new body’s arms and legs, looked down at them approvingly, and nodded. Yes, this would do very well.

  Now, back to the scrying spheres. That backlash shouldn’t have done much—

  One of his eyeball beholderkin swooped down the cellar stairs like a bird, hung there in front of his face, and hissed at him. Manshoon touched it with a finger. And smiled.

  “Well done, Wenderwood!” he said aloud, clapping his hands in delight and reaching out to the mind of that noble.

  “So, off to Delcastle Manor the conquering heroes stroll, hey?” He stroked his chin thoughtfully, as an evil smile spread slowly across his face.

  “Yes,” he murmured aloud. “Magic seems to fail again and again, so let us try older, more brutal methods.”

  He went to gather what he’d need to work a spell to reach out to all of his subverted nobles at once. Well, all who were still in Suzail.

  He needed them to hurry to Delcastle Manor at once. With their freshest poison and favorite weapons.

  “Lord Durncaskyn?”

  The voice was polite, and cultured, and unfamiliar. Durncaskyn looked up from his desk.

  A well-dressed man with the sort of slender walking stick only nobles and the wealthiest Sembian merchants used was standing at the door to his office, an expensive leather scroll case in his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “King’s Lord Lothan Durncaskyn?”

  “Yes,” Durncaskyn repeated. “The king can only afford one local lord here in Immerford, let me assure you. And who might you be?”

  The man strode to Durncaskyn’s desk, uncapped one end of the scroll case, and with a deft flick of his wrist spun a document out of it, flipped it up in to the air with a practiced flourish to unfurl it, and thrust it at Durncaskyn.

  “I am known professionally as Rantoril, and I’m here to honor this agreement.”

  Durncaskyn took the parchment, but kept his eyes on its deliverer—as the man smoothly drew something long and slender and steely out of the case, and drew it back to launch a stabbing lunge.

  Durncaskyn was already hurling himself and his chair over backward, so he missed seeing whatever it was that felled Rantoril, but he heard the meaty smack of its strike. And the heavy thud of the assassin hitting the floor.

  He rolled to his feet, snatching out his belt dagger, and … found himself ringed by booted feet.

  He looked up.

  The tall and slender woman smiling down at him had hair as silver as polished ceremonial court plate armor—hair that hung down to her knees. She was dressed like a forester, in leathers and high boots, and wore a long sword at her hip that looked like it had come from the royal armory.

  “Storm Silverhand,” she introduced herself gently, reaching out a hand to help him up.

  Durncaskyn took it, and he was astonished at her strength. The owners of the other boots proved to be youngish men and women who were also clad as foresters, but had normal hair. One or two of them might even have been Immerfolk. Some of them were lifting Rantoril’s limp body and bearing it away.

  “Who … what …?”

  “I’m the Marchioness Immerdusk, traveling the realm in the name of the king. These good people are Harpers—as am I—and your recent visitor was a Sembian who’s never been known as Rantoril before. He’ll sleep for a day or two. He was hired by Lord Leskringh.”

  “Leskringh? That old—”

  “—hind end of a rothé, as you were going to say, has been taken into custody and will be tried by his peers within a tenday, with Rantoril giving evidence. I’m afraid one of your clerks was badly wounded; I’ll be leaving a Harper in his place to guard you.”

  She clasped Durncaskyn’s arm affably, steered a goblet of his own wine into his hand, then strode for the door.

  Durncaskyn blinked. “But … where are you going?”

  “To greet the relief force Mirt is bringing you, before one of them strikes down the wrong person and plunges all this end of Cormyr into civil war,” she replied sweetly, without slowing.

  “No,” Arclath breathed. “Gods, no.”

  A moment ago, their trudge to the gates of Delcastle Manor had been a matter of weariness. Until they’d seen the gates standing open, askew, bodies sprawled beyond them.

  Arclath had rushed forward, Rune racing to stay at his side and Elminster right behind.

  Arclath’s home looked like a battlefield.

  There were pools of blood, buzzing with flies, inside the gates and up the drive, with forever-sil
ent Delcastle retainers and splendidly dressed men—Great Gods, prominent noblemen of Cormyr!—lying dead everywhere.

  They’d been much hacked, their lifeless staring eyes almost hidden beneath swarming flies. The fighting had been with swords and daggers, and it had been brutal.

  The doors of the mansion itself yawned open, with dead men heaped on the steps. Arclath rushed inside, calling his mother’s name, with El and Rune right behind him. They found more dead Delcastle servants, and more dead nobles.

  Aside from the flies, there was a terrible silence. No moaning wounded, no defiant men with blades … just the dead.

  Arclath made for his mother’s bedchamber.

  Lady Marantine Delcastle was sitting propped up against the end of her palatial bed, her legs pinned under three dead nobles. More slaughtered lords made a thick and bloody carpet all the way to the door.

  She was covered with blood, her head slumped onto her shoulder. A slender sword, crimson and black with darkening gore, had fallen from her hand, but she still clutched a dagger, ready on her breast.

  Her fine gown was slashed to ribbons, one shoulder carved open to the bone. Many blades had pierced her.

  “Mother!” Arclath wept, clawing dead men aside to uncover her, reaching to cradle her.

  At his touch, she stiffened and whimpered. El cast a swift spell to heal, and another to banish pain.

  Arclath’s look was beseeching. “Can you save her?”

  El shook his head, slowly and grimly. “Too many poisons warring in her—every last one of these lords must have tainted their blades. Only the poisons struggling in her veins has kept her alive this long, but … no. ’Twould need a god, Arclath, and I’ve never been one of those.”

  He reached out to cup Marantine’s cheek, to lift her head upright. “Yet the pain is gone from her now. That much I can do.”

  Arclath embraced his mother fiercely, his arms trembling, and kissed her.

  She opened her eyes and managed a twisted smile up at him through his tears.