Elminster Must Die

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After one long look that he knew had left him hotly blushing, Delnor kept his eyes on the rush-strewn floor as he hastened through the tables of the Dragonriders’ Club. By the Diligence of Torm, when had the trip grown so long?

He was acutely conscious of his palace messenger’s uniform, and of the dozens-scores-of eyes that must be following him as he made his way right up to the front table where Lord Delcastle was lounging.

In the brightest lights of the stage right above Arclath’s easy smile, the same mask dancer was performing-with an air of defiance, no less! — posing and pirouetting around a glossy-smooth prowboard that had been thrust into the edge of the stage. It allowed her to move her body out until it overhung the wine-sipping noble.

Delnor firmly closed his eyes and groped his way the last few steps to the empty chair across from Arclath, who considerately removed his feet from it in the last instant before the crimson-faced palace messenger sat down both heavily and with great relief.

“Well met,” came the noble’s sardonic greeting as Delnor thankfully closed his hand around a proffered flaretop goblet and drank deeply. “What news?”

The mask dancer thrust her face in the new arrival’s direction for long enough to tender Delnor a brief, hard stare before returning to deftly catching Arclath’s steady stream of tossed coins out of the air, and putting them into dozens of small clips she’d braided into her long hair. Delnor saw her attach a gleaming golden lion then whirl away to smile at the next table, long hair swirling and sleek hips …

He swallowed again and looked away into the darkness-straight into the expressionless gaze of Tress, who was standing with her arms folded, keeping steady watch over her prized dancer and Lord Delcastle’s front table from a dark alcove beside the stage.

Delnor gave the club owner a weak, wavering smile and transferred his gaze to Arclath, who leaned forward through the sudden din of music that arose just then to accompany the dancers-a merry rhythm of longhorn, lute, tantan, and hand-drum, being played somewhere above their heads and coming down through holes around the pillars-to murmur, “So, now, what banners have you seen coming through the gates? What word has reached the palace of this or that noble’s arrival for this Council of the Dragon?”

For his part, Delnor was almost itching with curiousity as to what the Lord Delcastle had learned about the eavesdropping dancer, who was at that moment almost insolently performing right above them again. Something had obviously happened between them.

He risked the swiftest of glances up at the dancer-long enough to see quite vividly that she wore only sparkles, sweat, and her mask-and resigned himself to hearing about it later. Leaning forward until his nose was perhaps a finger’s length from Arclath Delcastle’s, he started muttering names across the table.

When a noble wants to hear which fellow nobles have come to town, and is paying for the drinks, the duty of a lowly courtier is clear.

“… And so she opened her arms for meeeee!” Broryn Windstag roared, off-key and more shouting than singing but too drunk to care.

Spreading his arms wide in a dramatic flourish, he crashed bodily through the doors of the Dragonriders’ Club as his fellow nobles stumbled on through the next verse of the song, words slurred and half-forgotten. Lord Dawntard was drunk, but then Dawntard was always drunk. Delasko Sornstern was the soberest of the three, but that wasn’t saying much, and he was drinking hard to try to overtake his hero Windstag in the race to oblivion.

Arclath peered hard back over his shoulder at the disturbance. Windstag, Dawntard, and Sornstern. Trouble. The crowd of loud roisterers with them were either their bodyguards or the hangers-on that any nobles who spend coins like water in the finer taverns of Suzail will attract, when said nobles will cheerfully buy anyone who howls approval at them wine-flagons and skins and bottle after bottle of wine.

“Full trouble!” Tress snapped, striding out of her alcove to wave a warning to all of her bodyguards. By then Windstag had spotted the reason he’d just gotten up from the floor-the bare-bodied dancers up on the distant stage. He promptly kicked a chair out of the way with a wicked grin, with no heed at all for what might become of its half-drunk occupant.

When the others at that table shouted at him angrily, he flung the half-full bottle in his hand into the face of the loudest one, then used that freed hand to pluck up the table and overturn it on all their heads, roaring with laughter.

Men sprang up on all sides, some of them just bolting away from the unfolding trouble, and others to find room to snatch out sword or dagger.

“Hah, so it’s blades, is it?” Dawntard snarled. “Well, we know that game!” Behind him, a dozen bodyguards and well-wishers drew steel in singing unison.

“That table, that one, and that one!” Windstag bellowed, pointing at the three tables closest to the stage-at one of which Delnor sat, huddled in his seat and staring at the drunken nobles in open-mouthed horror. “They’re ours, now! Get clear of them, or die!”

Arclath was waiting, with sword out and a rather dangerous smile growing across his face. Windstag’s roar brought the wealthy merchants at the other two tables to their feet, too, some of them busily snapping orders to their own bodyguards.

“The Watch!” Tress barked at someone. “Get the Watch! Now!”

Then Windstag let loose a wordless shout of exultation and charged.

Dawntard and Sornstern hastily joined in, and all the intruders were trotting and lurching forward, shouting and hacking furiously and wildly at everyone and everything in their way. Someone threw a chair, someone else hastily drained a bottle and then hurled it-and the Dragonriders’ erupted.

On the stage, some of the mask dancers screamed and fled, others cowered, and the one at the front with the coins in her hair, bare as she was, crouched down behind the prowboard as if it were a castle rampart and she were a warrior awaiting the right moment to spring over it into battle.

A merchant screamed and gurgled as he was hacked at, another shrieked as a sword seeking his life sheared away one of his ears, and bottles shattered against pillars and tables, showering the surging men with glass as patrons slipped, fell, swore, and stabbed at each other.

A large, much-scarred sailor went down, a richly dressed merchant staggered away weakly spewing out both his dinner and all the wine he’d drunk, and a club bouncer threw a chair at a noble he couldn’t reach, felling two bodyguards who got in its way.

As if that had been a signal, the air was suddenly full of hurtling chairs. With many wounded groaning and sagging, men slugged each other with fists and bottles and dagger pommels, bodyguards rushed to hurl aside anyone who got too close to their clients, and tables got upended.

Merchants fled in all directions, and Tress and her staff seemed to have vanished. Resistance melted away from in front of Windstag and Dawntard and their hard-faced bodyguards.

Leaving a panting, wild-eyed palace messenger, a few merchants who were more angry than frightened, and the coolly unruffled Lord Arclath Delcastle between the sword-swinging intruders and the stage.

“Stand aside, unwashed vermin!” Windstag roared.

“Go home, drunken disgraces!” Delcastle snapped back. “You stain the families you belong to, and will answer to the king for it!”

“Yes!” Delnor shouted desperately. “Leave this place, in the name of the king!”

Ignoring Delcastle, Windstag sneered at the palace messenger. “And who are you to call on the Crown for aid? Jumped-up commonborn lout! When our day comes, we’ll not have to put up with the likes of you! We’ll just order you beheaded and sit and sip wine and watch from the farruking palace windows as you scream and wet yourselves and die!”

“Since when,” Arclath Delcastle inquired icily, “did your drunken lawlessness have anything at all to do with anyone’s rank or birth? Windstag, you’re a bully and a coward, and-”

With a wordless roar of rage, Broryn Windstag went for Delcastle, six bodyguards at his side. Almost casually one of them tripped Delnor, and he hit the floor hard, gurgling out a vain plea. Arclath Delcastle cursed as he ducked, darted, and slashed as swiftly as any mask dancer, buying himself room to spring up onto the stage.

“That was a palace messenger, you fool,” he spat at Windstag. “You’d better start for the docks right now, before-”

“Before what?” Kathkote Dawntard sneered. “You think a noble lord will face the slightest punishment for felling some palace lackey who dared to offer us violence? Without every noble in all Cormyr rising to rid themselves of all courtiers-and any Obarskyr foolish enough to stand up for such dross, too?”

“Not that we should leave any noble witnesses to this little unpleasantness,” Windstag snarled. “Kill him!”

He was pointing at Delcastle.

“Carve him apart, so there won’t be enough left for even the keenest war wizard to enspell and interrogate, then snatch the dancer and bring her. Search those rooms back there, and haul out all the other dancers, too! I find I’ve a hunger for more than dancing!”

There was a general shout of mirth as everyone joined in his bawled laughter, and men with drawn swords rushed the stage.

Across which Lord Arclath Delcastle raced and spun and sprang and hacked like a wild thing, seeking to just stay alive.

One man reeled back, blinded by a blood-spurting cut across the forehead; another clutched at his punched throat and crashed to his knees, choking; and a third staggered back and fell heavily off the stage, clawing at where Delcastle’s slender sword had burst through his shoulder.

But by then Delcastle battled a vicious storm of steel, beset on all sides by men made wild by drink and wilder by bloodlust and eagerness to impress their noble masters.

“A rescue!” he shouted, parrying desperately. “Anyone! A rescue!”

A man in front of him shrieked and fell, his toes pinned to the floor by a dagger that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Then the man beside him toppled, his eyes bulging in astonished pain, as something very hard struck him in the back of the head.

By the time that man fell, Delcastle’s attackers were turning to see who his ally was-the person the beset lordling was already grinning at as he went right on fencing for his life.

It was the mask dancer-who wore only sparkles, sweat, and copious spatters of blood-none of it her own. She’d tossed aside her mask, her hair swirling free, and there was a blood-drenched, dripping sword in one of her hands and a clean dagger clutched pommel-foremost in the other.

She faced them, panting-and promptly sliced the face of a bodyguard who’d foolishly lowered his sword to leer at her.

“Kill her!” Windstag roared drunkenly. “I can rut with her corpse!”

Heads turned as his men stared at him in disbelief, even in the midst of furiously clanging steel.

“W-well,” the nude dancer hissed at him, “now that we all know how certain noble lords prefer to spend their dallying time …”

“Get her! Get her! Get her!” an enraged Windstag bellowed loudly enough to make the roofbeams echo. “Kill them both! Kill them all!”

He sprang onto the stage, his bodyguards hastening to follow. Windstag and his men came up from behind the men fighting Arclath Delcastle and crashed into them, shoving them helplessly forward in sprawling chaos.

For just a moment, through a gap in all the onrushing bodies, Lord Delcastle caught sight of Delnor’s senseless, staring face.

Then it was gone behind the looming brawn of men trying to kill him, and he was fighting for his life again.

And somewhere behind him, so was she, this Amarune whose name he’d only just learned.

Just in time for them both to lose their lives together, it seemed, when such trifles would no longer matter. Ever.

In the darkest back corner of the royal crypt, three levels below any part of the palace where the sun ever reached, the lone old wizard stiffened, his eyes momentarily flashing blue fire.

“Something’s happened,” Elminster said grimly. “Something’s been awakened. Strong magic, old magic. Hmmph. Like me.”

All around where he was sitting loomed huge stone Obarskyr sarcophagi, where dead kings, queens, princes, and princesses of Cormyr crumbled slowly and silently into dust. The magic in this place lay like heavy armor, deadening his senses to all but the strongest disturbances but hiding him very effectively from any war wizard who might seek to lessen the task of all those diligent Purple Dragons by casting the right sort of seeking spell.

Someone among these latter-day wizards of war must know the right sort of seeking spell or how to look it up in an old grimoire. If they read anything at all, anymore …

It happened again, a surge in the magic within and around him that was like a great silent shout, sending him wincing and shuddering back against the nearest stone coffin.

A powerful unleashing … but what?

There had been a time when he could have walked within a day’s ride of Suzail and would have known in an instant precisely what had been done, when anything that powerful disturbed the Weave. Aye, there had been a time …

“I can’t save the Realms anymore,” he whispered into the gloom. “Not alone.”

Sudden tears made the glows around him swim and slide. “I can’t even protect Cormyr, stlarn it! The ghosts of the Nine could, aye, if properly commanded-but I need them to heal Alassra. So which will it be? The land? Or my lady?”

The silent darkness offered no answer, and Elminster was damned and blasted if he could decide on one just then.

He couldn’t sit and hide there any longer; he had to think. To do that, he needed room to walk and pretend he was still smoking his old pipe and … and to stop pretending about a lot of things.

The dead around him were dust, their days done, and so were his. He just hadn’t had the good sense to die yet and leave all his cares and causes behind, hand the endless fight on to someone else young and vigorous and having even the slightest hope of winning some new vict-

Aye, that was it, right there. Hope.

That was the rarest treasure for him, these days. Fading, forlorn hope. Hope that his Alassra could be herself again, hope that … that …

Oh, for the love of Mystra, he had to get out of there!

In a whirlwind of lurching haste he was out of the crypt and hurrying along dark and deserted passages, moving more from memory than by sight, heading for the nearest way out of the palace and into the night air.

He had to … had to … what was he going to do?

Wheezing, he climbed a stair, coming out onto another level that was thankfully dark and empty. Well, and so it should be: if he’d been commanding the wizards and soldiers of this place, he’d have had many more pressing matters to deal with than some old man who might or might not be a thief!

Mayhap they had nothing else at all to worry their heads over, but somehow he could scarce believe that. That they might choose not to see some looming crisis or other, before it lifted its fanged head in their faces and bit them, that he could believe, oh aye, and-

At the head of the next stair, he walked straight into a man rushing past.

A man in robes who staggered and cursed, turned, stared, and snarled, “You!”

Smiles of the gods, it was Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake!

“My pleasure,” Elminster assured him firmly, lunging forward to where he could trip the younger man off balance.

He did so, leaving Mreldrake winded and staggering-then knocked him cold with an elbow up under his jaw before the war wizard could think of some suitably nasty spell to cast.

Elminster guided the senseless Mreldrake in a long, loose-limbed sag down the wall to the floor, relieved him of a certain formidable scepter, then hastily departed that passage, breathing hard. He was obviously out of practice at stealing out of palaces.

But then, he was out of practice at a lot of things.

“Amarune!” Arclath called, kicking, punching, and hacking at downed and furiously struggling men before they could clamber back to their feet. “To me! Back-to-back-we’ll make a stand!”

Those words were still coming out of his mouth when something long and shapely hurtled past his left shoulder. It was Amarune, feet first-slamming into Windstag’s chest and bearing him back off the stage, staring and agape, arms and legs splayed out comically.

He struck the floor below with a crash that shook the club from end to end and left Windstag stunned and winded, his limbs jouncing as limply as a cloth doll’s. Amarune sprang up from atop him and raced off down the room, leaving Arclath alone and surrounded on the stage.

He leaped after her, landing on the littered floor at a hard run, sprinting for the distant street doors with more than a dozen men after him. Bare and beautiful, the long-legged dancer vaulted the bar ahead and vanished from view behind it.

Why hadn’t she made for the doors? Was there a cellar way out? Or a strong-cellar below that she could barricade herself in? Was-

Amarune bobbed back up again, face set in a snarl of anger, and started hurling bottles hard and accurately at noble and bodyguard faces alike. Arclath ducked low, staggering but not slowing, but needn’t have bothered; none of them came spinning his way.

He saw a man go down behind a wild spray of wine, and another man’s head snap back as a hard-thrown bottle caromed off it … and then they all seemed to forget Arclath and charged at the bar, roaring for her blood.

The dancer kept right on throwing as they came, bright anger on her face. Five men down, six … then the foremost were at the bar and hacking at it wildly with their blades, trying to drive her back so they could clamber over it, and-

A door slammed open not far from the bar, and Tress came storming into the room with the mustered Dragonriders’ staff right behind her, a motley array of improvised weapons in their hands. A swift breath later, the street doors beside the bar burst open to let hard-faced Purple Dragons pour into the room with their swords drawn.

“A rescue! A rescue!” Amarune shouted, pointing straight at Dawntard and Sornstern. “Yon three nobles just felled a palace messenger and tried to kill Lord Delcastle!”

Tress brought the Dragonriders’ staff to a hasty halt. The bodyguards and hangers-on were slower to stop but soon faltered under the cold glares of advancing Purple Dragons.

Back by the stage, three bodyguards were helping a groaning, groggy Windstag to his feet, his arms about their shoulders.

“Which three nobles?” the patrol swordcaptain snapped at Amarune.

She pointed. When her finger reached Kathkote Dawntard, he sneered, “Hah! The word of some lewd dancing wench against the sworn testimony of lords of the realm?”

“I, too, am a lord of the realm,” Arclath Delcastle snapped, “and my words will support every one of hers against you.”

“Ah, but there’s just one of you, and these lying low-life riffraff who will, of course utter any falsehood against a noble, against three of us,” Dawntard jeered, pointing rather unsteadily at Delasko Sornstern and the staggering Broryn Windstag.

The Purple Dragon swordcaptain had heard enough. “Him senseless and you so drunk you can barely stand? I think we’ll be needing our wizards of war to peer into your minds before I believe you!”

Dawntard paled and raised his sword threateningly. The Dragon officer gestured disgustedly to one of his men, who had stolen around to stand behind Dawntard. The soldier obediently and efficiently used the pommel of his belt dagger to club the sneering noble to the ground.

“Saer Swordcaptain, I’m ready to freely answer all questions,” Arclath offered affably, shooting Windstag a stare of challenge.

“Uh, urh … so am I,” that noble said sullenly. “We … we were drunk, is the truth of it.” He looked around, wincing at all the blood among the sprawled bodies, and added reluctantly, “The House of Windstag will make amends for all of this, Swordcaptain. We were in the wrong.”

Then he gave Arclath a long and murderous look.

The Purple Dragon officer wagged a finger. “I saw that, O most noble heir of Windstag. Should anything befall Lord Delcastle, I’ll know who to set the wizards to questioning.”

Windstag’s reply was short, emphatic, and extremely rude.