Elminster Enraged

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The wizards of war fired carefully, concentrating on the mouth and hands of the man on his knees, trying to make sure there’d be no sudden flurry of spells coming back at them.

“No closer,” one warned his fellows. “Contingencies. Blast him from right where you’re standing.”

They lashed the dying man with spell after spell. Magics that raged and snarled, but seemed suddenly not to be touching their target. Instead, they were rising up around him, in a bright and climbing spiral that licked the sky like a great tongue of flame. Blue flame.

A flame that suddenly sank down into a fury of raging fire, fiery tongues of eye-searing-bright silver and of that same rich blue, that became … a tall and furious woman aglow with raging blueflame and silver fire.

“Fools! Ungrateful wretches!” she howled, her silver hair suddenly stabbing out in all directions around her. “Have your miscast magic back!” Deadly spells howled out from her in all directions across the gardens, hurling war wizards out over the walls and against the manor and its gates with shattering, splattering force. When none were left standing, she spun around, fell to her knees, and embraced her Elminster.

“My love,” she gasped, between kisses, “have me again, now-and forever!”

When their lips met, there wasn’t much left of the man in her arms except the seared and blackened head she was holding, and a mangled wisp of shoulders and torso beneath.

Silver fire flowed into him, poured into him as Alassra Silverhand’s tears fell like rain and her body darkened, and she spent all she had into healing and restoring and sharing. Her own body started to melt away, her legs becoming his, her arms dissolving as his grew …

Farewell, my love. Her last mindspeech echoed in every head for blocks around, reducing bewildered Suzailans to helpless tears, melting them with its tenderness. They wept, but knew not why.

Her long fingers went last, melting away from his jaw with a sigh, errant silver hairs drifting away.

The Simbul was gone. Forever.

Leaving a restored, whole man, dazed and tottering as he found his feet. He was tall and hawk-nosed, and his eyes were blue but glowed with silver-and blazed with rage.

He was alive and whole because his love had sacrificed herself to save her Elminster, pouring all her life-force into restoring him. He felt young again, strong. The Art was alive and dancing within him, with more silver fire roiling around than he could comfortably hold for long.

Ah, so this was what had been driving his Alassra mad: all the seething, roiling silver fire inside her. Oh, it hurt; it was burning him, fighting to burst out of him. Well, he’d indulge it, and soon!

Folk rushed toward him. El turned to give them death, but found they were Arclath and Amarune, their bone white faces wet with tears, their mouths working.

“El? El, is it you?” Rune managed to sob, reaching for him. Just as Alassra had so often reached for him …

She rushed into his arms, clung to him tightly, and cried his name. El looked bleakly over her shoulder at Arclath, who was standing uncertainly nearby, staring back at him. Looking scared.

Well, so he should, this young noble. He knew what he was looking at. He saw an archwizard who wanted to deal death to so many.

“What good is it all?” Elminster rasped at Lord Delcastle, almost pleadingly, his own tears coming, coursing from despairing holes of eyes. “To have all this power, to work all these centuries serving a bright cause, helping folk-if I cannot save the ones I love? Tell me it has all been worth it! Tell me!”

Arclath swallowed, on the trembling edge of tears. No one should ever look so … desolate. Nothing should ever happen that was bad enough to make a mighty wizard’s face look like this. “I-”

“Tell me,” Elminster howled, “so I can tell you that you lie, and lash out at you! Smiting you down just as unfairly as this world has so often treated me! Mystra spit, I have been through this so many times! You’d think I’d be used to this by now, this loss, this treachery, the-the bedamned unfairness of it all!”

With two angry strides done in less time than it took Arclath to even think of reaching for his sword, the Sage of Shadowdale had spun Rune out of his arms with infinite gentleness, stepped past the heir of House Delcastle and gripped Arclath’s arms with the crushing force of two owlbear talons, the better to turn him until they faced each other. He roared into Arclath’s paling face, “Yet I never get used to it, lad! Under this armor of drawling cynicism and world-weary jesting, I cry the very same way I cried when the magelords swept down on my village and left me kinless and alone in Athalantar! Again and again I lose those I love-places I love, entire families I love, whole kingdoms I hold dear! Well, I’m sick of it-sick, d’ye hear?”

He flung Arclath aside like a child’s doll and stalked across the corpse-littered Delcastle lawns, snarling, to stop at the edge of a flower bed, fling up his arms, and roar, “Enough! By the silver fire within me, by the Art I love and wield, by all the faces of those lost and fallen that I grieve, I go now to war! In their name let me rage, in their memory shatter and despoil and hurl down! ’Tis time to hurl castles into the air, and snatch soaring dragons down from it! Eorulagath!”

That last word crashed around Suzail like a clap of thunder, rolling from spire to balcony and rooftop, splitting windowpanes, as half-deafened citizens winced and staggered.

Before the echoes of that word of power started to fade, lightning split the sky, raging around Elminster like an impatient blue-white cloak of flames. Up the crackling lightning swept, bearing the tall thin wizard his own height above the scorched turf, and more-and then he was gone, in a blinding flash of light, borne elsewhere in an instant.

On hands and knees in the rubble, clinging to stones with numbed fingers as the backlash made every hair on his body crackle and stand on end, Arclath Delcastle winced, feeling his teeth rattle.

Wherever the Sage of Shadowdale had taken himself, Arclath hoped it was far, far away. He did not want to be as close to Elminster, just now, as, say, on the same continent.

For centuries Elminster had kept his grief, and much of his temper, tightly leashed. No longer. Oh, by Mystra, no longer.

He was trembling to let it loose now, to indulge his rage at last …

“At last!” he bellowed atop the Old Skull in Shadowdale, seeing folk running from the inn below to gape up at him, gouts of silver fire escaping his mouth with every word. “Let scores be settled!”

He stood suddenly in a cellar, where a self-styled incipient emperor was hastily scrambling up from a seat among glowing scrying spheres.

An unlovely woman who had until recently been an understeward in the palace stood in front of Elminster, reaching for a wand and snarling a curse.

With a grim smile, El took hold of the deadly end of the wand-and let Fentable trigger it.

Nothing happened at its tip, but as Manshoon gaped in astonishment, and the intruder in his cellar held back the startled would-be emperor’s spells without even looking up, the full fury of the wand’s magic washed back out through the hand that held it.

Corleth Fentable was ashes and charred bones, well on their plummeting way to the floor, in an instant.

Former Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake was brewing a fresh pot of tea and wondering if his captors would ever let him set foot outside his far-too-familiar room again, before they killed him-when one wall of his prison abruptly vanished. In silence, and without any mess or disturbance at all. It was simply … gone, to reveal a street outside lined with many buildings, and a gentle breeze, and-

A man stepping out of that empty air, at least one floor above the street, to give him a smile that held no warmth at all.

“I think your greatest spell had best die with you,” Elminster told him.

It was the last thing Mreldrake ever saw or heard.

El calmly swung the kettle off the hearth and poured it into the teapot, ignoring the man-high wisp of swirling ashes beside him.

The spell that should have blasted him, the hearth, and most of that side of the room to dust and tumbling stones appeared to do nothing to him at all.

Nor did the two spells hurled after it.

In their room-rocking wake, El looked up from the pot at the hurlers of those magics, the three shades who’d kept Mreldrake captive in this room. He dispensed another smile that held neither mirth nor fondness. “Tea?” he asked, as mildly as any kindly hearthside hostess.

He did not give them a chance to reply.

The flames, or tendrils, or whatever they were appeared out of nowhere to snatch Harbrand and Hawkspike out of the corner of the cavern where they glumly waited to die.

The next thing they knew, they were both sitting on the floor of their landlady’s office, stark naked, and she was rising from her desk to stare down at them, open-mouthed in astonishment.

Harbrand and Hawkspike stared back up at her, suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of how much coin they owed her.

“Madam,” a tall wizard said politely from behind them, just before he vanished, “I give you: Danger For Hire.”

Alorglauvenemaus rolled over with a grunt of pain. The only healing spell he could cast while in this great body helped but little. It was going to take a long time, and castings beyond his counting yet, before …

He hadn’t troubled to even try to think what magic those two poltroons had managed to awaken, to snatch themselves away from him. There would be time enough later to learn what it had been. Learn leisurely, as he tore them apart at the joints so slowly, and learned so much more …

“Hesperdan,” said a quiet voice from behind him, “it is over.”

“Elminster!” the wyrm growled, twisting its head as it flung itself over again, so it could get the Old Mage with acid before-

The man who’d once been his ally, who mind-melded with him in the days before his treachery, was smiling an almost affectionate smile.

He went right on smiling as the great wall of silver flame rushing out of him broke over Hesperdan and took everything away in an instant, plunging him into bubbling silver oblivion …

“Ruin him,” Lord Breeklar sneered. “Buy up all his debts before nightfall and rouse him from his bed at sword point to demand payment. Then let him stew until morning. I want him out of his house before highsun tomorrow. Offer to hire his wife and daughters as bedmates in one of my brothels.”

His steward bowed and hastened out, leaving the noble to sit back in his chair and smile. His gaze fell upon the decanters left ready on the tray, and he idly selected one as he looked at the next sheaf of parchments.

So many debtors yet to punish, so many business partners still to swindle. Ah, work, work, work …

How he enjoyed it all. Why-

“Breeklar, ye’re far from the worst of Suzail’s lords, but gleefully destructive to those who come within thy reach and notice. Not to mention needlessly rude to marchionesses.”

The voice that shouldn’t have been there was coming from close behind Breeklar’s right ear. He spun around, his fist rising with its poison-fang ring at the ready.

“Who are you, and how dare-?”

There was no one there.

One of his decanters clinked. The lord whirled back, furious-and lost his nose as heavy cut crystal crashed across his face.

The man who’d swung it and calmly replaced it on the tray, albeit spattered with Breeklar’s blood, also held all of the papers from Breeklar’s desk.

“I should really read all of these, to learn who ye should be repaying, but I have a lot of nobles to deal with, and ye really aren’t worth the trouble. Die, worthless parasite.”

Lost in his pain and bewildered rage, Lord Breeklar didn’t even have time to protest as coins burst out of his coffers and chests, all over the room, to rush into his mouth and nostrils, pouring down his throat, choking him.

His office held a lot of contracts, bonds of indebtedness, and copies of the threatening missives he’d sent. By the time his steward and underclerks came running, the bonfire was impressive.

Almost good enough to serve the helplessly wide-jawed, purple faced dead man slumped in his chair as a fitting pyre.

In a deep, corpse-strewn Underdark cavern, weary drow warriors raised a ragged cheer as reinforcements arrived. Just in time to deal with a fresh flood of nightmarish creatures out of the widening rift.

Scaled, undulating bodies surged, tentacles lashing out with terrifying speed. Drow were plucked into the air and crushed, or their necks broken, almost before they could scream. Then they were flung down among their fellows with bone-shattering force-and the long, dark, powerful tentacles reached for fresh victims.

More and more monsters crowded through the rift, almost too quickly to get past those busily slaughtering the drow with such ease. The sickly purple-white glow was deepening, flooding out into the passages around like a deadly gas, roiling and billowing.

Drow blew war horns in desperation, priestesses worked spells to alert their distant city, and those who could fell back. The peril was deepening, the rift large enough to split the cavern clear across, now, and the beasts coming through it too numerous to hold back. The battle was lost.

From one of the passages a silent thunder rose, a roaring in every mind, a teeth-chattering call that held hunger and malice and rising fear.

Fear that made it break into an audible, endless whispering scream long before its source burst into view, encircled and lashed by a moving cage of blue flames that forced it along the passage, burned into it repeatedly as it squalled and shrieked and rushed into the cavern.

It was the glaragh, much grown but seared and blackened and shuddering in agony, its tail lashing helplessly under the goad of the merciless web of blue flames. Straight at the rift it raced, or was herded, trumpeting wild pain even as it devoured and mindslew everything in its path. Deadly tentacles flailed in vain ere they were sucked in or crushed under that vast, racing bulk, and small hills of rotting, long-dead drow corpses vanished as the glaragh plowed through them without slowing in the slightest.

Then purple flames blazed up to meet the blue, too bright and furious for the handful of surviving drow to watch-and the thunderous scream of pain ended abruptly.

The glaragh was gone, driven back to wherever it had come from, and the rift it had come through was dying in its wake in an ear-shredding high singing of devouring blue flames.

Blinded and deafened, drow fell to their knees or staggered blindly until they struck stone and slid down it, to roll around clutching their heads. Above their moans, the conflagration in the cavern slowly faded, and all light and tumult with it, leaving behind only darkness.

And the strewn dead, to show that there had once been something here to fight for-or against.

A lone blue flame burned in midair, moving slightly, almost as if it were peering this way and that to make sure the task was done.

Then, almost impudently, it winked out.

Manshoon frantically raced around the cellar, snatching up a wand here and an orb there. He couldn’t be without that, or those, or the-

The glows of his scrying spheres all winked out at once.

A moment later, all the magics bundled in his arms went off together, destroying his forearms and much of his face in a single roaring instant.

He staggered back blindly, wracked in agony, fighting to see anything through his helpless tears.

“Ye couldn’t resist,” Elminster said disgustedly from nearby. “Ye’ve never been able to resist.”

Manshoon managed a curse. Something stole through his body. A tingling, a magic that … that left his limbs frozen, unable to obey him.

He could still think and speak, but …

“Thy undeath gives me an easy hold over thee,” El told him grimly. “So I can begin to avenge just a few of those ye’ve slain, the lives ye’ve blighted.”

“Oh?” Manshoon spat defiantly. “So who made you the righter of wrongs?”

“Mystra. Yet I don’t right all wrongs. Even after a thousand years, I haven’t time. So I do what is needful about some, a little of what I can regarding others, and forgive the rest.”

“Forgive?” Manshoon managed a sneer. “As priests do?”

“As all of us do, or should. If ye can’t forgive a wrong, ye become its prisoner-or rather, shackled to thy own hatred, thy own thirst for revenge. I’ve grown weary of imprisonment, so I do a lot of forgiving.”

“So why not forgive me?”

“I should. Ye’re crowing-to-thyself crazed, after all, and less able to withstand it than I am-and too much of a deluded fool to see how a hidden one is manipulating thee.”

“What?”

“Nay, I’m not going to tell thee. Let that be the little worm that gnaws at ye, as you perish. Let that be my revenge.”

“Revenge!” Manshoon spat, trying to see the potions he’d hidden among Sraunter’s useless concoctions and dyes and acids, on the shelves yonder, through eyes that wouldn’t stop streaming. “What would you know of revenge, meddler? You’ve always had a goddess-and your fellow Mystra slaves-to guide you and guard you and do it all for you.”

“Aye,” El agreed gently. “And one of them was you.”

“Pah! I pretended to serve, to get the magic I wanted!”

“Ye think she didn’t know that? Just what d’ye think a goddess is, anyhail?”

“A larger shark, a larger wolf, among all the rest of us. You’re a fool if you think otherwise.”

“Can ye really see only wolves, Manshoon?”

“There are only wolves-and sheep. And when the sheep are gone, it’s a wolf-eat-wolf world out there.”

“Is it? Well then, we should be doing something to change that, shouldn’t we?”

“Change! Everything changes, Old Fool-but nothing truly changes. Just the names and faces of those on the thrones, until they’re hurled down by the next names and faces!”

“Ye can change thyself, Manshoon. Ye can be better. We can all be better.” Elminster turned away, then added over his shoulder, “Some of us try that, from time to time, in our lives. Most of us don’t bother.”

Manshoon bared his teeth in a wordless snarl of defiance, and raced across the room to the shelf. That bottle, and that one, all he had to do was smash them, drink splinters and all, and-

He was half an instant away from the shelf when it vanished in a racing flood of silver fire, a flood he crashed into a moment later, rebounding off the sagging, softening remnant of what had been a solid cellar wall, and-

Staggering until he fell, his very limbs melting, caught in a ravaging he couldn’t escape, couldn’t fight, couldn’t withstand …

“I did not come here to taunt with ye and let ye escape, Manshoon. I came here to destroy thee.”

Manshoon heard that, but no longer had lips or tongue or mouth to reply. He was going … he was joining the silver roaring … he was torn away into it …