Elminster Must Die

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

He was in another alley-which reeked almost as much as the one he’d left, but of mildew and old mold and rotting greens-out behind one of Suzail’s better eateries.

At that time of night, only the slugs, snakes, and rats were likely to overhear an old man who stood there talking to himself.

Which was why Elminster had chosen it. He had thorny matters to decide on and no one to debate them with but himself.

He should not, could not, do what he was contemplating doing to that young woman, blood of his or not, downward dead end of a life she’d landed herself in or not. Bed of thorns or not, ’twas the bed she’d chosen, and not for him to … to do what every last king or baron or petty lordling did every day-force changes on the lives of others, to get their own way. Sometimes, for mere whim.

Yet he was not so low. No, he was lower and had been for centuries.

Yet the task-the burden-was his, his duty, and he wanted to go on.

Wanted, but could not, not alone, not old and without firm control of his magic …

“No, I told that Dragon truth,” he growled at last. “Growing older … waiting to die. And if I wait too long and die without doing what’s needful, it all ends right then. All my work, all the paltry few protections I’ve been able to give the Realms down these centuries. And that must not happen. Ever. The work must go on.”

He paced a few scowling steps, setting a snake to hastily slithering away somewhere safer, then turned and snapped to the empty air, “Even if it costs one more young lass her life. Or at least the carefree, naive freedom to waste her life doing nothing much of consequence.”

He walked a few more steps and whispered, “ ’Twill kill her.”

He walked a few more.

“And I’ll do it to her. I will.”

Thrusting his head high, he strode off purposefully into the night.

Amarune’s hands tightened like claws on her arms, and he could feel her starting to shake.

After a moment, she hissed, “I have to see who … who got killed.”

“Lady,” Arclath murmured, “is that wise?”

The glare she gave him then was fierce indeed. “It is necessary. Just because I didn’t happen to have been born a man, it doesn’t mean I was born without a brain or a life or-”

“Easy, Rune, easy.” He turned her around, rotating them both closer to the body and somehow just not seeing Swordcaptain Dralkin’s arm thrust out like a barrier-until the officer was forced to withdraw it or strike a woman-with a casual deftness that made her blink. “Now?”

She nodded. “Now.”

“Deep breath and look down, then,” he murmured, making the last half turn. She looked down-square into the gaping, contorted, white face of a dead man, whose throat was sliced open in a great wound that had half-severed his neck and had spilled a good-sized pond of dark and sticky blood across the cobbles. The sliced neck was bent at a horrible angle …

It was Ruthgul.

She turned her head away sharply, starting to really shake. The Purple Dragon swordcaptain started forward with a frown, one arm rising to reach out to her, and Arclath spun her away again, turning her in his arms until he could see her paling face.

One good look at her, and his grip on her arms tightened. “Lady,” he said firmly, “you’re coming home with me.”

“N-no,” she replied with equal firmness, twisting free of him to back quickly away and raising her voice for the Purple Dragons to hear. “I’m not. I am going to my bed, Lord, and alone. Right now.”

The faces of Dralkin and several other nearby Dragons hardened-and they stepped forward every bit as swiftly and deftly as Arclath, to bar the young Lord Delcastle’s way to Amarune.

He eyed their stern faces, brawn, and hands ready on sword hilts for a moment, then shrugged, smiled, and gave the dancer an airy wave. “Until your next shift, then!”

“Until then,” she replied heavily-and hastened away.

Only to recoil in bewildered fear as she passed Ruthgul’s body, looked down at it despite herself … and saw that it was magically changing into the likeness of someone else.

A man she didn’t know at all.

Shaking her head-what, by all the gods, was going on? Had Ruthgul been someone else all those years, or was that someone who’d been impersonating him and had paid the price? — she ducked into a side alley and trotted hastily along it to reach the door to her abode on a side of the building the Lord Delcastle couldn’t see.

Arclath regarded the stone-faced Dragons, who were forming a wall of burly uniformed flesh to prevent him following the dancer or getting a better look at the dead man-whose change he’d half-glimpsed, and confirmed from some of their reactions-with a broadening smile. Giving them a theatrical sigh, he observed, “Women! I’ll never understand them!”

“Whereas they,” Dralkin told him warningly, “understand you all too well, Lord. As, now, do we.”

“Bravely challenged, good Swordcaptain,” Arclath replied airily, turning with a wave of farewell to stroll off back the way he’d come, “yet you don’t, you know. No one understands me! Save perhaps one person, a little.”

“That would be me,” a sharp voice said suddenly at his elbow.

It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a wizard of war by the name of Glathra.

“I’ve listened in to a lot of what you’ve said and done this night,” she added briskly, “so spare me all the fanciful tales and instead yield me a few plain answers.”

“Not without something decent to drink,” he said, giving her a courtly bow. “So beautiful an interrogator deserves no less.”

“I believe we have water in the palace that doesn’t have too many squirming things floating in it,” she replied dryly, as war wizards and Purple Dragons appeared from all sides to close in around them. “Come.”

“Your command is my wish, Lady,” the Lord Delcastle told her lightly-almost mockingly-as he offered her his arm. She ignored it, but when she turned, pointed toward the distant royal palace, and started walking, he fell in beside her.

Amid the suddenly tight ring of their watchful Purple Dragon escort.

Amarune was half-expecting to find Talane waiting in her rooms, but there was no sign of her. Or anyone.

Not even under the bed.

Her heaps of soiled clothing lay just as she’d left them, the untidy little mountain range of her laziness. By the state of them, the undisturbed dust, and the way her other minor untidynesses reigned unaltered, it didn’t look as if any intruder had so much as thought of entering Amarune’s rooms.

When she finally dared to believe that and relax, weariness broke over her like a harbor storm, leaving her reeling.

She staggered across the room, suddenly very tired-yet still scared, a rising fear that got worse as her thoughts started racing through all the possibilities of Ruthgul’s murder, the drunken wizard of war who’d known who she was-did they all know? Why hadn’t they done anything to her, then? — and Talane …

Amarune was shaking so hard, she was almost a shuddering by the time she clawed at a certain hiding place until a bedpost yielded and she could haul out a slender and precious flask of firewine. Taking a long pull, she reeled across the room again, flinging back her head to gasp loud and long at its fiery bite.

When she fetched up against a wall, Amarune got the stopper back in, then took the flask with her as she lurched to her bed and flung herself down on it.

“What by all the Hells am I going to do?” she hissed aloud.

The walls maintained their usual eloquent silence, and she sighed, let her shoulders sag in the first part of a shrug of helplessness she didn’t bother to finish, then in sudden irritation pulled off her boots, one after the other, and flung them hard against the wall.

Wrenching off the cloak was harder, and she was panting by the time she whirled it into the air and watched it swirl down to the floor.

The sweat-soaked robe came off with comparative ease, and she hurled it onto the highest peak of her piled-up dirty laundry.

Whereupon the heap rose up with a grunt, and a bearded old man was smiling at her, her smallclothes still decorating his head.

Amarune stared at him then flung herself up off the bed, opening her mouth to scream-and Elminster hurled himself atop her, moving surprisingly fast for such such seemingly old bones, and thrusting two or three of her underclouts into her mouth to stifle her shrieks.

They bounced on the bed together, the old man on top and Amarune clawing at him and making muffled “mmmphs” as his bony old knees and elbows landed on various soft areas of her anatomy.

Growling, she started to swing and kick at him wildly, and the old man sighed, plucked up her-thankfully empty-copper chamberpot from where he’d found it earlier under the edge of the bed, and brained her with it.

The room spun and swam. Gods and little chanting priests, the minstrels told truth: one does see stars … sometimes …

Amarune fell back on her pillows, clutching her head and groaning.

Whereupon the old man got off her, caught up her cloak from the floor, and wrapped it firmly around her, pinioning her arms to her sides, and propped her up on her pillows like a firmly efficient nurse.

“I’m very sorry I had to do that to ye, lass,” he announced, trundling back down to the foot of her bed and perching there, “but we must talk. I need ye. Cormyr needs ye. Hells, the Realms needs ye.”

Amarune groaned again, trying to peer at the gaunt, white-haired intruder as she struggled free of her cloak. He made no move toward her. The moment she could move her arms freely, she clutched the cloak more tightly around her-though it was more than a little too late to guard any thin wisp of modesty she might still have possessed. He was obviously waiting for her to speak, so she did.

“Who … who are you?”

“Elminster,” came the prompt reply. “I used to be a wizard. Yes, that Elminster. Well met, Great-granddaughter.”

Amarune couldn’t help herself. “Great what?”

She stared at him in the sudden silence, open-mouthed. He filled the pause by smiling and nodding, but by then she was frowning again.

“Elminster? But you can’t be! Why-”

“ ‘Can’t’? Did I hear the word ‘can’t’? Amarune, do ye know anything about wizards, at all?”

“But how-? The goddess Mystra …”

“Ye will be unsurprised to learn,” the old man told her in very dry tones, “that ’tis a long story. Right now, I’d rather hear just what ye-and young Lord Delcastle-are up to.”

“Why?”

Elminster regarded his great-granddaughter with something that might have been exasperation, or just might have been new respect.

“This has been a long evening already, aye? Let’s go somewhere that has good wine and decent food and talk a bit. I’ve found dancers like to talk. Anything to keep from doing the other things customers expect them to do, I suppose.”

“So this Amarune is the famous Silent Shadow,” Wizard of War Glathra Barcantle mused, sounding entirely unsurprised. “You obviously didn’t know that until just now, so what made you suspicious of her? Or were you governed by a paramount interest in a mask dancer who might be willing, for coins enough, to do more for you than merely dance?”

Arclath Delcastle stared rather coolly back at his interrogator. “I’ve seldom seen a need to pay anyone to fill my bed, Lady Wizard. Handsome, remember? Noble? Dashing, yes?”

Glathra’s expression remained coldly unimpressed.

He sighed, waved dismissively, and added, “Ne’er mind. I was interested in her for a reason you already know; I wanted to learn why she’d been listening to what Halance, Belnar, and I were discussing about the council. Particularly now that Halance and Belnar are so suddenly and violently dead. Though I grant that it’s both unusual and unfashionable for nobles to be so, in this day and age, Lady Glathra, I do happen to be loyal to the Crown.”

“We know that,” she replied quietly, “and that’s why I’ve brought you here. We have a proposition for you, Lord Delcastle.”

“ ‘We’?” Arclath asked pointedly, staring around the room. The two of them were sitting facing each other across a shining expanse of table, and the palace chamber around them was bare of all guards, war wizards, scribes, or anyone else. Just a few portraits, a tapestry or two, and a lone closed door. “Have you a twin? Or are you using the royal ‘we,’ and there’s been a royal marriage I’m not privy to that I should be congratulating you about, Lady?”

As if his questions had been a signal, one of those tapestries was thrust aside by a firm hand, and Delcastle found himself staring into the wise old eyes and familiar face of King Foril Obarskyr of Cormyr.

The High Dragon of the Forest Kingdom was wearing a simple circlet on his brow and hunter’s garb of jerkin, belt, breeches, and boots of plain leather. Of the finest make and tailored to fit his lean, trim body. A simple belt knife rode his hip, and discreet rows of plain rings-most of them enchanted, no doubt-adorned his fingers. He was smiling.

“Nothing so dramatic, Lord Delcastle,” the king said dryly.” The Lady Glathra was speaking on my behalf and was aware of my presence-as, now, are you.”

By then, Delcastle was out of his chair and down on one knee. Foril looked pained and waved at him to rise.

“Up, up, lad; I’ve servants enough to do that far too often for me as it is. I need your loyalty and your friendship, not your knees ruined on my behalf. Nobles who can be eyes and ears for me are rare and precious things in this kingdom, now as ever; we need to talk.”

“Majesty,” Arclath replied with a smile, rising, “it so happens that talking is one of my strengths.”

“I find myself strangely unsurprised,” the king told him dryly, taking up his chair and coming forward to the table.

Amarune knew The Willing Smile only by its reputation. A rundown, seedy, low-coin brothel on a formerly fashionable street in Suzail, where wrinkled old harridans and a few wide-eyed younglings desperate for quick coin entertained toothless old men desiring to deceive themselves that they were still bold lions of youth and vigor whose very names left Cormyr in awe.

She was surprised to find it a clean, quiet, and dimly lit grand house that seemed to stretch on forever, run by a matron more motherly than alluring, who obviously regarded Elminster as an old and trusted friend.

“Mother” Maraedra patted the limping graybeard on the arm when he greeted her, nodded after he murmured in her ear for a moment, and then led them through lushly carpeted halls adorned with many full-length portraits that were probably doors into the rooms of the women depicted in them, to a back room decorated like a successful but careful-with-coin family’s private parlor, where a table was set for four.

Humming to herself, she shuffled through a door and returned almost immediately to set before them bowls of cubed redruth goat cheese, biscuits, and an herbed paste of oil and crushed and roasted vegetables.

Then she slipped out again, holding up a finger as if in warning to them to say nothing until her return-and again, came back into the room swiftly, this time with tallglasses, which would have done any noble House proud, and a large decanter.

Then she bowed, smiled, and backed out of the room, waving in silent farewell, and in the same gesture, as she pulled the door closed on herself, bade them converse.

Elminster gave her a low bow, waved Amarune to a chair, and poured her wine. She peered at it critically, suddenly realizing she was ravenous and thirsty, and sipped. It was very good wine, perhaps the nicest she’d ever tasted.

Elminster spread paste on a biscuit with a small, almost circular paddle-a knife of sorts, but it could never be used to stab anyone-and handed it to her. When she took it, he thrust a cube of cheese her way.

“I’m neither a princess nor helpless,” she murmured, but gently. He seemed to mean well, and, well … many old folk had curious courtesies.

“Good,” he replied. “I’m counting on that. So-though it knows this not, yet-is this grand old world around us.”

Munching hard, Amarune settled for raising her eyebrows in a bewildered “Are you always this crazed?” look.

Elminster smiled. “Ye are by now fairly certain I’m a madwits. Ye have some doubts, though they diminish, that I am who I say I am and that we’re related, and ye want to know what I’m raving on about-without much wanting to have any part of it. Do I read ye right thus far?”

Amarune helped herself to more cheese and spread herself another biscuit. “Hard and steady into the harbor, so far,” she agreed, fixing him with her best “This had better impress me” look.

“Ye are young, agile, good-looking, and no fool. So ye have figured out that the career of a thief bids fair to be a short one, and mask dancing will win ye fair coin only so long as thy looks hold out. No noble lordling until young Delcastle has shown signs of sweeping ye off the Dragonriders’ stage and into his mansion with a title around thy throat, and ye face at least two dark foes and know not where to run. In short, thy young life is looking darker ahead, not shining and bright.”

“Still heading hard and true for the nearest wharf,” Amarune agreed grimly. “Right now, I can’t even pay for this cheese-let alone the wine-without leaving myself too short to please creditors who are quite likely to treat me far more harshly than Mother Maraedra.”

“I’m paying, lass. Considering what I’m going to be asking ye to do, filling thy boots with gold right up as high as thy throat won’t begin to be fee enough.”

“You want me to take part in one of your spells? As some sort of sacrifice? Does it involve bedding thirteen nobles at once?”

Elminster chuckled. “Nay to your last query, and ‘in a manner of speaking’ is a fair but also fairly useless answer to your first two questions. I want to train ye.”

“As some sort of wizard? Sorry, but-”

“As my successor.”

“Doing what, exactly?” Amarune eyed the old man across the table sidelong. She found him likeable but nothing near trustworthy. He probably was mad, and just how, it seemed, she was about to find out.

“I am … old. More than a thousand winters old. Yet I live still, because … I have a job to do. Ye might call it ‘Meddler On Behalf of Mystra.’ I wander the world meddling in things-the way kings rule, the way folk think, how they roast meals when they can get meat; all of that-to make the Realms better. Oh, and get no thanks for it, save many attempts to kill me.”

“So I’d expect, if you meddle with how kings rule. So Mystra has been dead for a century, and you’re giving up, is that it?”

“Almost,” he whispered.

Studying him, Amarune went on munching, astonished at how quickly the cheese and biscuits seemed to have vanished. The old man had eaten, so far as she could recall, just one of each. She frowned; were they tainted with something?

“You eat the last few,” she ordered.

Elminster smiled, shrugged, and started spreading himself a biscuit.

Watching him devour some cheese then the biscuit and wash them both down with wine, Amarune asked curiously, “Weren’t you the one who was supposed to have been Mystra’s lover, or some such?”

“Yes,” Elminster agreed simply.

“So who warms your bed these days?”

“A mad queen. Not often.”

Amarune shook her head then watched him refill her glass.

Well, this would make a good slumbertime tale, until she fell on her face and into the land of dreams …

“Tell me more,” she said, sipping. Happy dancing hobgoblins, but this wine was good!