Elminster Enraged

CHAPTER ONE

He had been falling forever.

Drifting. Sifting. Down, down, trickling through cold, stony darkness in a vague, half-awake state as his ashes worked their separate ways down through earth and rocks and stone dust, into … open emptiness amid the chill rock. It was a cavern of the Underdark, part of a network-Elminster knew this from the gentle but ceaseless flow of damp, mineral-scented air drifting from distant elsewheres.

Whole once more-well, as “whole” as a swirling cloud of ashes could be-he turned to face the source of that breeze. He was back in the Underdark, and curiously safer than on all of his previous visits. To travel alone in the Underdark is to be desperate and all too often swiftly doomed, but he was now drifting along bodiless, attractive prey to nothing. He hoped.

He drifted along seeking a body, just as so many stealthy hunters in the deep gloom all around him were no doubt doing. In the endless dance of death in the dark, El sang silently to himself, recalling one of his favorites among Storm’s ballads. Ah, but she and he had been at this for a long time …

Serving Mystra. Our Lady of Mysteries, the goddess of magic. Who had been swept away in the Spellplague, but had returned. “Returned” after a fashion, that is. Lessened, to be sure. Yet She was his beloved tyrant now as before, her commandments were still the map by which Elminster steered his life.

However difficult or nonsensical that life might sometimes seem, without Her his life would have ended long, long ago, though it might have been a much easier, happier life. Still … he’d felt lost without her, the past century. Obeying Mystra had become not just habit, but what gave him purpose.

Mystra had ordered Elminster to recruit Cormyr’s wizards of war to her service, so he would do that. She’d told him to work with Manshoon, so he’d try to do so. Though the founder of the Zhentarim was as hot as ever to destroy a certain Sage of Shadowdale, El could not-would not-seek to slay Manshoon. No matter how richly the mad fool deserved to be blasted apart … or torn asunder and left to perish in slow agony. No matter how much Elminster ached to break him, humble him, and then destroy him forever.

He found himself staring at memories of Manshoon’s startled, furious, and pain-wracked face on the various occasions when El had humbled or slain him … and as those images rose into his mind in a long and varied flood, his flare of rage faded into satisfaction. He had dealt with the founder of the Zhentarim fittingly before, and likely would again, in time to come.

Now, though, his orders ran along different lines. He and Manshoon were to gather blueflame, and Mystra also wanted her trusted Elminster to train his descendant Amarune Whitewave to succeed him, in time, as her Chosen.

Her young, defiant face came to mind. Spirited, reckless, beautiful. El tried to sigh, his ashes swirling with the effort. His successor; he knew very well what sort of life that would mean for Amarune. El wanted very much to guard Rune, to hide her and watch over her very closely, to keep her from even a tiny measure of what he’d suffered … but that would be a mistake, likely a fatal error. A coddled Chosen would be weak, easily shattered. Rune was going to have to take what the likes of Manshoon would delight in hurling at her.

Not that Elminster of Shadowdale could protect her properly just now, anyway. Here he was, bodiless again. Easily defeated by the mad, weakened dolt Manshoon had become. The powers of the Chosen of Mystra were almost all lost to him, his own Art faded far from what it had once been … and the Spellplague had shattered and twisted all magecraft. Many spells were now nigh useless, difficult at short range and impossible from afar-and dangerous to a caster’s mind, regardless. Every last spell that sought to pry into or control minds, translocate, or detect things was unreliable and fraught with peril, and most of them were beyond Elminster’s skills as long as he lacked a body to study and incant and recall magics no longer familiar.

Aye, the shattering of the Weave-of Mystra, who was the Weave-had wrought great change in the Art. Just as the Realms themselves had been transformed, with entire lands fading away and being replaced. Yet not everything had changed. Not down in the Underdark, for instance. Where the usual dangers were still … usual.

Elminster drifted, keeping close to the rocky floor to avoid being swept apart if the breeze strengthened. Eerie glows beckoned here and there, the barely visible amethyst hues of rock radiations and the brighter, varicolored radiances of scores of fungi-some edible, some ambulatory and semi-sentient, and all of them dangerous. That standstool was deadly to eat, and this nearer one deadly just to touch, whereas yonder scabrous green-white and brown growths stole body heat from any living creature that ventured too near … aye, being bodiless had its advantages. Thank the twisted humors of the gods for such small favors.

Elminster drifted along, shaping his ash motes into a long, undulating line, hoping that if he were spotted-for a man who sought a body to inhabit risked such-he’d be mistaken for an errant strand of cave spiderweb. And down here, such would most likely be alert patrols of drow.

Ah! To think of a foe is to find him, as the saying went. Hastening out of yon side passage, at full speed were sleek black bodies, a score or more, heavily armored. A drow war band, ready for battle but moving with more speed than prudence; warriors fronting spider priestesses. The shapely backs of a few of Lolth’s holy worshipers were acrawl with message spiders, and many tame blade spiders scurried alongside the patrol and across the rock ceiling above … eight such, nay, ten … twelve, other sorts of spiders among them, like an eagerly hurrying pack of war-hounds. Definitely a war band.

El had little hope of finding whence they’d come, but wherever they were bound in such a hurry could only be … interesting. A battle meant bodies, and a drow or drow foe weakened or mind-mazed might offer the perfect new body for a down-to-ashes old archmage. Not that he’d puzzled over this decision; he was already rushing after the drow as they sped down the passage, faces into the breeze, heading along an obviously familiar route.

He felt their destination before he saw it. Those who worked long with the Weave grew used to feeling the ebbs and flows of natural forces, and even with his might gone, El could feel a strange, unsettling pulsing, a repeated echoing, a rippling …

Rippling, aye, that was the best word. Wave after wave of … weakness, a momentary sucking emptiness succeeded by a surge of energies, then weakness again, rolling over him repeatedly like waves heading for a beach. Ripples that grew stronger as the drow rushed on, headed for the source of the disturbance. It was something that could now be seen ahead, pulsing in time to the ripples he felt. With each sucking, reflections of purple-blue radiance flashed across the rocks, then faded as the next surge of energy came, then flashed again, over and over.

Elminster had seen that particular hue before. That precise shade of glowing purple-blue meant a rift. The drow were rushing to a planar rift, a break where his own world and another had connected by way of a breach uncontrolled and inevitably growing or changing … seldom for the better. Hence the feeling of weakness: the very fabric of Faerun was being tugged or sucked at nearby, somewhere up ahead.

The drow rushed on, forcing El to hurry to keep up. Other drow war bands streamed out of side passages into the widening way ahead, all of them racing toward the rift. The passage rose, curved, then hooked around a great shoulder of rock into a large cavern where several passages converged-and a purple-blue sea was raging.

The rift was like a great giant’s eye on its side, opening vertically to flood its purple-blue light across the cave, its pulse a deep, thunderous, inexorable heartbeat.

And out of the dazzling heart of the rift, a nightmare menagerie was pouring out into the cavern and crashing into an outnumbered, battered line of drow who struggled to stop them, weapons flashing. This was the battle the drow war bands were rushing to join.

The beasts from the rift surged into the drow defenders, charging and sometimes rearing above the dark elves. There were hulking, shell-armored monsters with great mandibles and long, barbed stabbing antennae-or what looked like antennae. They were the largest, but were outnumbered by tigerlike cats that savaged the drow with the snapping jaws that darted and lunged at the end of the long, eel-like tentacles that sprouted in profusion from their powerful leonine shoulders. There were stranger rift creatures, too, including pillarlike glistening things that swayed as they fought, spitting long needles with deadly aim, lances that impaled dark elves and plucked them off their booted feet and hurled them away to crash against the cavern walls.

A great bloody fray raged in front of the rift, as the endless flood of monsters struggled over a growing heap of bodies, fallen drow mingled with a wild variety of dead or dying rift beasts. El could see great cages along the far walls of the cavern, barred enclosures rocking under the frenzied attempts of caged monsters to break out.

So this rift had been there long enough for local drow to mount a standing guard over it, and to establish a routine of capturing or slaying the beasts arriving through it. Aye, the creatures in that cage were probably intended as steeds, those in yonder distant cage as pack beasts, and the smaller motley heaps of squirming, crowded beasts filling that line of cages were probably intended to become food. If El knew anything at all about drow, they’d be seeking monsters they could use as weapons against Underdark foes, too.

Aye, probably the beasts in those cages, the ones almost buried in struggling drow and newly arrived monsters. A creature that looked like a great razor-toothed lamprey, and as large as the oldest sawmill back in Shadowdale, briefly reared up out of the tumult to shed struggling drow into a rain of blood-drenched dark elf body parts … and El got a glimpse of shattered, open cages beyond it.

Empty cages. Monsters had gotten free in the midst of the fighting, and were taking savage revenge on their captors.

Not that any drow seemed chastened or frightened in the slightest. The war band El had followed hurled itself into the nearest fighting without hesitation, the spiders racing up rift monster bodies to where they could bite and stab, the dark elf warriors drawing blades and plunging into the slaughter, and the priestesses stopping just shy of the fray to work a flurry of spells.

Ah, but mindless combat is always popular entertainment, El reminded himself wryly-then stopped, gaping in unthinking astonishment. Below him, priestesses gasped and cursed aloud, awed by the same sight.

The vivid purple-blue light of the rift had momentarily darkened, occluded by something gigantic moving through it, crushing smaller beasts in its way as it came, wriggling and humping like a gigantic inchworm. It slid out into the cavern, vast and glistening and blood red, its huge maw gulping a path through struggling dark elves and monsters alike.

Then it reared, towering. It was a worm, of a sort El had seen only once before-but that one had been a tortured captive in Avernus, an imprisoned, keeningly insane hulk cruelly enchanted to continually regrow itself as it was endlessly devoured alive by an ever-changing rabble of lesser devils. This one was no captive, and it was aroused and hungry, its great helm-shaped head almost black with rage.

A glaragh, such creatures were called in the Hells. But this one was far bigger than the huge captive he’d seen. It was as long as a Suzail street and as thick around as a three-floor house. It crashed through stalactites as it reared, but was unable to stand on its tail thanks to the low cavern ceiling. Elminster had seen hundreds of oversized worms in his time, from the infamous purple worms to the rockgnawers that ate endless passages out of solid bedrock in the deepest places of the earth, but this one beat them all.

Eight tentacle arms sprouted down the length of the monster worm, each ending in a sucking maw and a retractable bone talon that jutted like a spear when the beast desired but vanished back into hiding the rest of the time-and that meant “glaragh,” and only glaragh.

The mighty worm shuddered for a long, swaying moment as it was struck by spell after spell hurled by drow priestesses amid a hail of spears and darts-then crashed down into the midst of the largest knot of drow, crushing many to a bloody pulp. It surged forward, wriggling so as to strike out in as many directions as possible. Its tail lashed out, straightening in a great sweep that slapped foes into spattering meetings with cavern walls, ere it slid forward like an impatient snake to maraud freely among screaming, vainly fleeing priestesses.

Two or three of the larger rift monsters gave challenge as it came at them, roaring or rearing in defiance-and the glaragh tore them apart with glee, dashing the remains aside with its tail as it advanced. It was heading into the passage breeze, El noticed.

What carnage! Not that drow deaths tugged overmuch at his heart at the best of times, but once the glaragh reached the surface, its slayings would likely be human. Nor was this a lone peril. The many invading beasts endlessly pouring through a rift …

Mystra, preserve us all. That prayer, made out of long habit, carried little force now. Yet who else should be prayed to, to close rifts?

El glanced at that purple-blue sundering, yawning wider than ever, the deep drumbeat of its pulsings almost deafening now that the battle clamor had died down to the scattered moans and cries of the dying. Even if he’d had a body and all the spellbooks he could think of at hand, he might not be able to seal it and mend the Realms around it. Not without a Weave he could work with, or the right artifacts of power to expend, blueflame or otherwise.

Perhaps not even then.

Aghast, El looked one last time into the flood of lesser monsters coming through the rift, the stream of beasts quickening once again, flooding out into the cavern to overwhelm the few fleeing drow the glaragh hadn’t slain. Then he turned to fly after the great worm, fearing for the future of Faerun around him more than he’d done in years. He’d been facing a slow, sour decline and his own powerlessness for nigh a century, but this … A hundred rifts like this one, a thousand …

Mystra forfend. Hells, every god forfend!

Yet all he could do just now, without a body, was watch as the glaragh slid onward, roving at will, devouring everything it desired, shattering all who stood against it. An eerie whuffling arose from it-the glaragh smelled the drow trails branching off into the side passages.

Abruptly, it shook itself and stopped whuffling, gliding off toward the source of the breeze instead, undulating like a swimming snake as it gathered speed. Off it went into the Underdark, faster and faster.

With a grim line of ashes in pursuit. This was the very thing Mystra wanted him to stop, and right now El couldn’t do a hrasted thing about either worm or rift. He had been humbled like most wizards in the Realms; his reputation now far outstripped his power. And when he faced a foe who realized that …

“Rorskryn Mreldrake, what do you think your fate would be, if you walked into the royal palace of Suzail this evening?”

Mreldrake could just make out two cold eyes staring into his own, out of the dark shadow of the questioner’s cowl. Eyes that … glowed. Their regard was neither friendly nor comforting. Not in the slightest.

He swallowed, and strove to sound calm, even casual. “Imprisonment and lengthy spell interrogation. I would be regarded as a traitor to the Dragon Throne.”

Three cowled heads nodded, ere the centermost spoke again. “I’m glad you’re aware of that,” came the flat reply. “It buys you our acceptance.”

Mreldrake waited, trying to avoid showing his fear.

“Acceptance of your proposal,” added the leftmost figure. They sat facing him, their faces hidden in their deep cowls. “We shall feed and house you, and bring to you what we deem prudent of what you request for your spell researches-in return for your complete obedience, your compliance to remain within these walls, and betimes your willingness to take direction from us regarding the nature of your magical work.”

“Should you offend against this pact,” the last of three murmured softly, “the price will be your life.”

“Terms that should be clear and simple enough for even a wizard of war to understand,” the centermost cowled mage said coldly.

“Former wizard of war,” Mreldrake dared to say. He got a silent shrug by way of reply, ere the three cowled figures rose abruptly in a swirl of dark robes and strode for the door.

Something glowed in the air above the vacated center seat. It was a disembodied human eyeball, floating in midair, wreathed in a faint and fading blue radiance.

It stared coldly at Mreldrake. He gazed glumly back, not hiding his sigh.

Across the room a heavy iron door slammed. He heard the rattle of a key in a lock, ere that sound was drowned out by the sharp klaks of heavy metal bolts crashing into place. One, two, three bolts.

He was locked in. By wizards greater in Art than he might ever be. One of them-the cold-voiced, tall one who’d sat in the center of the trio-had eyes that glowed more than a man’s would. By their pale gleam, he’d seen enough of the dark, dull-skinned, drawn face around them, with its black teeth and tongue, to recognize a shade. He was a captive of fell Netheril-or of renegade Netherese.

Not that he could begin to tell which alternative was worse.