The Temptation of Elminster

Four: Stag Horns And Shadows

The farmer's eyes were dark with suspicion and sunken with weariness. The fork in his hands, however, pointed very steadily toward Wanlorn's eyes and moved whenever the lone traveler did, to keep that menace on target.

When the farmer finally broke the long, sharp silence that had followed the traveler's question, it was to say, "Yuh can find the Lady of Shadows somewhere over the next hill," a sentence the speaker ended by spitting pointedly into the dirt between them. "Her lands begin there, leastways. I don't want to know why yuh'd want to meet her…an' I don't want yuh standing here on my land much longer, either. Get yuh boots yonder, and yuh in 'em!"

A feint with the fork underscored the man's words. Wanlorn raised an eyebrow, replied, "Have my thanks," in dry tones, and with neither haste nor delay got his boots yonder.

He did not have to look back to know the farmer was watching him all the way over the crest of the hill, he could feel the man's eyes drilling into his back like two drawn daggers. He made a point of not looking back as he went over the ridge…and in lawless country, no sensible traveler stands long atop any height, visible from afar. Eyes alert enough to be watching for strangers are seldom friendly ones.

As he trotted down the bracken-cloaked hillside that was his first taste of the Lands of the Lady, he briefly considered becoming a falcon or perhaps a prowling beast… but no, if this Lady of Shadows was alert and watchful, betraying his magical abilities at the outset would be the height of foolishness.

Not that the man who was Wanlorn, but who'd walked longer under the name of Elminster, cared over much about being thought a fool. It was a little late for that he thought wryly, considering the road he'd chosen in life…with his stealthy departure from Castle Felmorel not all that many steps behind him. Mystra was forging him into a weapon, or at least a tool.. and in all the forging he'd seen, those rains of hammer blows looked to be a little hard on the weapon.

And who was it long ago who'd said, "The task forges the worker"?

It would be so much easier to just do as he pleased. using magic for personal gain and having no care for the consequences or the fates of others. He could have happily ruled the land of his birth, mouthing-as more than one mage he'd met with did…the occasion al empty prayer to a goddess of magic who meant nothing to him.

There was that one thing his choice had given him: long life. Long enough to outlive every last friend and neighbor of his youth, every colleague of his early adventure and magical workings and revelry in Myth Drannor.

And every friend and lover, one after another, of that wondrous city, too.

Elminster's lips twisted in bitterness as remembered faces and laughter and caresses rushed past his mind's regard, one after gods-be-cursed another … and the plans with them, the dreams excitedly discussed and well intended, that blow and dwindle away like morning mist in bright sunlight and come to nothing in the end.

So much had come to nothing in the end….

Like the village in front of him, it seemed. Roofs fallen in and overgrown gardens and paths greeted him, with here and there a blackened chimney stabbing up at the sky like a dark and battered dagger to mark where a cottage had stood before fire came, or a vine-choked hump that was once a fieldstone wall or hedgerow between fields. Something that might have been a wolf or may have been another sort of large-jawed hunting beast slunk out of one ruined house as Elminster approached. Otherwise the village of Hammershaws seemed utterly deserted. Was this what Lord Esbre had meant by the Lady of Shadows seeking to 'enforce her will" on these lands? Was every such place ahead of him going to be deserted?

What had happened to all the folk who dwelt here?

A few strides later brought him a grim answer. Something dull and yellow-gray cracked under his boots. Not a stone after all, but a piece of skull… well, several pieces, now. He turned his head and walked grimly on.

Another stride, another cracking sound, a long bone, this time. And another, a fourth … he was walking on the dead. Human bones, gnawed and scattered, were strewn everywhere in Hammershaws. What he'd thought was a collapsed railing on a little log bridge across the meandering creek was actually a tangle of skeletons, their arms dangling down almost to the water. El peered, saw at least eight skulls, sighed, and trudged on, looking this way and that among leaning carts and yard-gates fast vanishing under the bramble and creeping tallgrass that had already reclaimed the yards beyond them.

None but the dead dwelt in Hammershaws now. El poked into one cottage, just to see if anything of interest survived, and was rewarded with a brief glimpse of a slumped human skeleton on a stone chair. The supple mottled coils of an awakened snake glided between the bones as the serpent spiraled up to coil at the top of the chair. It was seeking height to better strike at this overbold intruder. As its hiss rose loud in that ravaged room, Elminster decided not to stay and learn the quality of the serpent's range and aim.

The road beyond Hammershaws looked as overgrown as the village. A lone vulture circled high in the sky, watching the human intruder traverse a fading way across the rolling lands to Drinden.

A mill and busy market town, was Drinden, if the memories of still-vigorous old men could be trusted. Yet this once bustling hamlet proved now to be another ruin, as deserted as the first village had been. El stood at its central crossroads and looked grimly up at a sky that had slowly gone gray with tattered, smoke-like storm clouds. Then he shrugged and walked on. So long as one's paper and components stay dry, what matter a little rain?

Yet no rain came as El took the northwestern way, up a steep slope that skirted a stunted wood that had once been an orchard. The sky started to turn milky-white, but the land remained deserted.

He'd been told the Lady of Shadows rode or walked the land in the company of dark knights he'd do well to fear, with their ready blades and eager treacheries and vicious disregard for surrenders or agreements. Yet as he walked on into the heart of the domain of the Lady of Shadows, he seemed utterly alone in a deserted realm. No hoofbeats or trumpets sounded, and no hooves came thundering down into the road bearing folk to challenge one man walking along with a saddlebag slung over his shoulder.

It was growing late and the skies had just cleared to reveal a glorious sunset like melted coins glimmering In an amber sky as Elminster reached the valley that held the town of Tresset's Ringyl, once and perhaps still home to the Lady of Shadows. He found that it, too, was a deserted, beast-roamed ruin.

Forty or more buildings, at his first glance from the heights, still stood amid the trees that in the end would tear them all apart. Sitting amidst the clustered ruins were the crumbling walls of a castle whose soaring battlements probably afforded something winged and dangerous with a lair. El peered at it as the amber sky became a ruby sea, and the stars began to show overhead.

The long-dead Tresset had been a very successful brigand who'd tried his hand at ruling and built a slender-spired castle…the Ringyl…here to anchor his tiny realm. Tressardon had fallen within days of his death.

Elminster's lips twisted wryly. 'Twould be an act of supremely arrogant self-importance to try to read lesson or message for himself out of such local history. Moreover, from here at least he could see no spiderweb gate like the one in his dream set into the walls of the ruined castle. It could take days to explore all of what was left of the town…assuming, of course, that nothing lived here that would want to eat him or drive him away sooner than that…and nothing he could see but the Ringyl itself stood tall or grand enough to possibly incorporate the gate in his dream. Or at least, he reminded himself with a sigh, so it looked from here.

He'd time for just one foray before true nightfall, by which time it'd probably be most prudent to be elsewhere … perhaps on one of those grassy hilltops in the distance, beyond the shattered and overgrown town. A wise man would be setting up camp thereon right now, not scrambling down a slope of loose stones…and mm human bones…for a quick peer around before full night came down. But then Elminster Aumar had no intention of becoming a wise man for some centuries yet…. The shadows were already long and purple by the time Elminster reached the valley floor. Thigh-high grass cloaked what had once been the main road through the town, and El waded calmly into it. Dark, gaping houses stood like graying giants' skulls on either side as he walked quietly forward, sweeping the grass side to side with a staff he'd cut earlier to discourage snakes from striking and to uncover any obstacles before his feet or shins made their own, more painful discoveries.

Night was coming down fast as Elminster walked through the heart of deserted Ringyl. A tense, heavy silence seemed to live at its heart, a hanging, waiting stillness that swallowed echoes like heavy fog. El tapped on a stone experimentally but firmly with his staff. He could hear the grating thud of each strike, but no answering echo came from the walls now close around. Twice he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he whirled he was facing nothing but trees and crumbling stone walls.

Something watchful dwelt or lurked here, he was sure. Twilight was stealing into the gaps between the roofless buildings now, and into the tangles where trees, vines, and thorn bushes all grew thickly entwined. El moved along more briskly, looking only for walls lofty enough to hold the spiderweb gates of his dream. He found nothing so tall… except the Ringyl itself.

Gnawed bones, most brown and brittle enough to crack and crumble underfoot, were strewn in plenty along the grass-choked street. Human bones, of course. They grew in abundance to form almost a carpet in front of the riven walls of the castle. Cautiously Elminster forged ahead, turning over bones with his staff and sending more than one rock viper into a swift, ribbonlike retreat. Darkness was closing down around him now, but he had to look through one of these gaps In the wall, to see if …

Whatever had torn entire sections of wall as thick as a cottage and as tall as twenty men was still inside, waiting.

Well, perhaps one need not be quite so dramatic. El smiled thinly. It's a weakness of archmages to think the fate of Toril rests in their palm or on their every movement and pronouncement. A spiderweb-shaped gate would be sufficient unto his present needs.

He was looking into a chapel or at least a high-ceilinged hall, its vaulted ceiling intact and painted to look like many trees with gilded fruit on their branches though strips of that limning were hanging down in tongues of ruin. All this stood over a once polished floor in which wavy bands of malachite were interwoven between bands of quartz or marble…a floor now mantled in dust, fallen stone rubble, birds' nests and the tiny bones of their perished makers, and less identifiable debris.

It was very dark in the hall. El thought it prudent not to conjure any light, but he could hardly miss seeing the huge oval of black stone facing him in the far wall. Sparkling white quartz had been set into that wall to form a circle of many stars…fourteen or a dozen irregularly shaped twinklings, none of them the long-spindled star of Mystra…and in the center of that circle a carving as broad as Elminster's outstretched arms stood out from the wall: a sculpted pair of feminine lips.

They were closed, slightly curved in a secret smile, and El had a gnawing feeling that he'd seen them, or something very like them, before. Perhaps this was a speaking mouth, an enchanted oracle that could tell him more…if he could unlock its words at all, or understand a message not meant for him. Perhaps it was something less friendly than that.

Well, such investigations could wait until the full light of morning. It was time, and past time, to leave Tresset's Ringyl and its watchful shadows. El backed out of the gaping ruin, saw nothing lunging at him out of the darkness, and with more haste than dignity headed for the hills.

The heights on the far side of the Ringyl weren't yet touched by moonlight, but the glittering stars cast enough light to make their grassy flanks seem to glow. El looked back several times on his determined march up out of the town, but nothing seemed to stir or follow him, and the many eyes that peered at him out of the darkness were no larger than those of rats.

Perhaps he would have time to win some sort of slumber, after all. The hilltop he chose was small and bare of all but the ever-present long grass. He walked it in a smallish ring, then opened his pack, took out a cloth scrip full of daggers that glowed a brief, vivid stormy blue when unwrapped…radiance that promptly seemed to leak out of them, dripping and dancing to the ground…and retraced his steps around the ring. He drove a dagger hilt-deep into the soil at intervals and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like an old and rather bawdy dance rhyme. When the ring was complete, the Athalantan turned back along it and drove a second ring of daggers in, angling each of these additional blades into the turf on the inside of the ring, so that its blade touched the vertical steel of an already-buried dagger. He held out his hand, palm downward and fingers spread, said a single, soft word over them, wrapped his cloak around himself, and went to bed.

"What, pray tell, are you reading?" The balding, bearded mage set aside a goblet whose contents frothed and bubbled, looked up unhurriedly over his spectacles, elevated one eyebrow at a fashionably slow pace, and replied, "A play … of sorts."

The younger wizard standing over him…more splendidly dressed and still possessing some of his own hair…blinked. "A 'play,' Baerast? And 'of sorts'? Not an obscure spellbook or one of Nabraether's meaty grimoires?"

Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses peered up over his spectacles again, more severely this time. "Let there be no impediment to your dawning understanding, dearest Droon," he said. "I am currently immersed in a play, to whit 'The Stormy Knight, Or, The Brazen Butcherer.' A work of some energy."

"And more spilled blood," Beldrune of the Bent Finger replied, sweeping aside an untidy stack of books that had almost buried a high-backed chair and planting himself firmly in it before it even had time to wheeze at its sudden freedom. The crash of tomes that followed was impressive in both room-shaking solidity and in the amount of dust it raised. It almost drowned out the two smaller thunderings that followed, the first occasioned by the clearance of the footstool of its own tower of tomes by means of a hearty two-footed kick, and the second caused by the collapse of both back legs of the old chair.

As Beldrune abruptly settled lower amid scattered literature, Tabarast laid a dust-warding hand over the open top of his goblet and asked through the roiling cloud of dancing motes, "Are you quite finished? I begin to weary of this nuisance."

Beldrune made a sound that some folk would have deemed rude and others might judge impressive and by way of elaborating on this reply uttered the words, "My dear fellow, is this…this burgeoning panoply of literary chaos my achievement? I think not. There's not a chair or table left on this entire floor that isn't guarding its own ever-growing fortress of magical knowledge at your behest, and…"

Tabarast made a sound like a serpent's skull being crushed under an eager boot heel. "My behest? Do you now deny the parcenary of this disarray around us? I can confute any claims to the contrary, if you've a day or two to spare."

"Meaning my wits are that slow, or words so slow and laborious to come to your lips that…atch, never mind. I came not to bandy bright phrases all evening but to banish a little lonely befuddlement by talking a while."

"A prolusion I've heard before," Tabarast observed dryly. "Have a drink."

He pulled on the lever that made the familiar cabinet rise from the floorboards to stand between then and listened to Beldrune pounce on its contents from the far side with an absence of continued speech that meant young Droon must be very thirsty.

"All right.. have two," he amended his offer.

The sounds of swallowing continued. Tabarast opened his mouth to say something, remembered that a certain topic was by mutual agreement forbidden, and shut it again. Then another thought came to him.

"Have you ever read 'The Stormy Knight?'" he asked the cabinet, judging Beldrune's head to be inside it.

The younger wizard raised his head from clinkings and uncorkings and gurglings, looking hurt. "Have I not?" he asked, then cleared his throat and recited,

What knight is that

who yonder comes riding

bright-arrayed in armor of gold

his sash the dripping blood of his foes?

There was a pause, then, "I did it in Ambrara, once." You were the Stormy Knight?" Tabarast asked in open disbelief, his small round spectacles sliding down his nose in search of unknown destinations.

"Second Undergardener," Beldrune snapped, looking even more hurt. "We all have to start somewhere.”

Taking a large and dusty bottle firmly in one fist, he plucked its cork and hurled the stopper back over his shoulder where it hit the Snoring Shield of Antalassiter with a bright ping, glanced off the Lost Hunting Horn of the Mavran Maidens, and fell somewhere behind the man-high, dust-covered mound of scrolls and books that Tabarast considered his "Urgent Reading of the Moment." He drained the contents of the bottle in one long and loud swallowing that left him gasping, with tears trailing down his face, and in urgent need of something that tasted better.

A knowing Tabarast silently handed him the bowl of roast halavan nuts. Beldrune dug in with both hands until the bowl was empty, then smiled apologetically, burped, and took his worry stone from its drawstring pouch. Thumbing its smooth, familiar curves seemed to calm him.

Settling back in his chair, he added, "I've always preferred 'Broderick Betrayed, Or, The Wizard Woeful.'"

"This would be my turn," the older mage replied with a dignified nod, and in the manner of an actor on center stage threw out his hand and grandly declaimed:

That so fat and grasping a man

Should have the very stars bright in his hands

To blind us all with their shining

Blotting out his faults in plenty.

His huge and howling ghost

Doth prowl the world entire

but loves and lingers most

upon this very same and lonesome spot

Where gods loved, men killed, and careless elves forgot.

"Well," Beldrune said after a little silence, "not to deny your impressive performance…your usual paraph, and then some!..but it seems we've returned again to the subject we agreed was forbidden: the One Who Walks, and just what Mystra meant by creating a Chosen One as her most esteemed mortal servant."

Tabarast shrugged, his long and slender fingers tracing the wisps of his own beard thoughtfully. "Men collect what is forbidden," he said. "Always have, always will."

"And mages more so," Beldrune agreed. "What does that tell us about those who follow our profession, I wonder?"

The older mage snorted. "That no shortage of witty fools has yet fallen over Faerun."

"Hah!" Beldrune leaned forward, stroking one splendid silk lapel eagerly between forefinger and thumb, the worry stone momentarily forgotten. "Then you grant that Our Lady will take more than one Chosen? At last?"

"I grant no such thing," Tabarast replied rather testily. "I can see a succession of Chosen, one raised after another falls, but I've yet been shown no evidence of the dozen or more you champion, still less of this Bright Company of star-harnessing, mountain-splitting arch-wizards some of the more romantic mages keep babbling about. They'll be begging Holy Mystra to issue merit badges next."

The younger mage ran one hand through his wavy brown hair, utterly ruining the styling the tower's maid-of-chamber had struggled to achieve, and said, "I quite agree with you that such things are ridiculous-and yet could they not be used as a mark of accomplishment? Meet a mage and see seven stars and a scroll on his sash, and you know where he stands?"

"I know how much time he's willing to waste on impressing folk and sewing little gewgaws onto his undergarments, more like," Tabarast replied sourly. "Just how many upstart magelings would add a few unearned stars to grant themselves rank and hauteur accruing to power and accomplishments they do not in fact possess? Every third one who knows how to semi that's how many! If we must talk about this…this young elf-loving jackanapes, who seems to have been a prince and the slayer of the mighty Ilhundyl and the bed mate of half a hundred slim elf lasses besides, the object of our discourse shall not be his latest conquest or idle utterance, but his import to us all. I care not which boot he puts on first of mornings, what hue of cloak he favors, or whether he prefers to kiss elf lips or human ones…have we understanding and agreement?"

"Of course," Beldrune replied, spreading his hands. "But why such heat? His achievements…as a Chosen One favored by the goddess Herself, mind…do nothing to belittle yours."

Tabarast thumbed his spectacles back up to the bridge of his nose and muttered, "I grow no younger. I've not the years left to encompass what that youn…but enough, I'll say no more. I beg leave to impart to you, my young friend, things about this One Who Walks of rather more importance to us both. The priests of the Mantle, for ins…"

“The priests of the which?"

"The Mantle … Mystra's Mantle, the temple to Our Lady in Haramettur. I don't suppose you've ever been therein."

Beldrune shook his head. "I try to avoid temples to Holy Mystra," he said. "The priests tend to be nose-in-the-air sorts who want to charge me coffers full of gold for casting…badly…what I can do myself with a few coppers of oddments."

Tabarast flapped a dismissive hand and replied, "Indeed, indeed, all too often … and I've my own quarrel with their snobbery…pimply younglings sneering down their noses at such as myself because we wear real, everyday, food-stained robes, and not silks and sashes and golden cross-garters, like rakes gone to town of an ardent evening. If they truly served wizards and not just awestruck young lasses who 'think they might have felt Mystra's kiss, awakening at midnight this tenday last, they'd know all true mages look like rag heaps, not fashion-pretty popinjays!"

Beldrune looked hurt…again…and gestured down the front of his scarlet silk tunic. The gesture made it ripple glassily in the lamplight, its cloth-of-gold dragons gleaming, the glittering emeralds that served them as eyes a-winking, and the fine wire wrought into spirals that passed for their tongues bobbing. "And what am I? No true mage, I suppose?"

Tabarast passed a weary hand over his eyes. "Nay, nay, good Droon…present company excepted, of course. Your bright plumage doth so outshine mine aged eyes that I overlook it as a matter of course. Let us have no quarrel over your learning or able mastery of realm-shaking magics, you are, before all the gods, a 'true mage,' whatever by Mystra's gentle whispers to is. Let us by more heroic efforts resist the temptation to drift away into other matters, and…if discuss the forbidden we must…speak plainly. To whit: the priests of the Mantle say that the One Who Walks is free to act on his own, that is, to make just as bad a hash of things as you and I are free to do … moreover, that it is holy Mystra's will that he be left to blunder and choose and hurl recklessness on his own, to 'become what it is needful he become.' They want us all to pretend we don't know who or what he is, if we should meet with him.'

Beldrune rested his chin on one hand, a fresh and smoking goblet raised in the other. "Just what is it that they say he must become?" he asked.

"That's where their usefulness ends," Tabarast snorted "When one asks, they go to their knees and groan about 'not being worthy to know,' and 'the aims of the divine are beyond the comprehension of all mortals'…which tells me right there that they haven't figured it out yet…then they rush into an almost puppy-panting whirl of 'oh, but he's important! The signs! The signs!'"

Beldrune sipped deeply from his goblet, swallowed, and asked, "What signs?"

Tabarast resumed the ringing voice of doom that he'd used to delivered the lines from Broderick, and intoned: "In this Year of Laughter, the Blazing Hand of Sorcery ascends the starry night cloak, for the first time in centuries! Nine black tressym landed upon the sleeping princess Sharandra of the South and delivered themselves of four kittens each upon her very bosom! (Don't ask me how she slept through that or what she thought of the mess when she did wake!) The Walking Tower of Warglend has moved for the first time in a thousand years, taking itself from Tower Tor to the midst of a nearby lake! A talking frog has been found in Candlekeep, wherein also six pages in as many books have gone blank, and two books appeared that have never been seen by any Faerunian scholar before! The Well of the Bonedance in Maraeda's run dry! The skeleton of the lich Buardrim has been seen dancing in…ah, bah! Enough! They can keep it up for hours!"

"Gullet Well's gone dry?"

Tabarast favored Beldrune with a look. "Yes," he said mildly. "Gullet Well has gone dry…for whatever real reason. I saw the dead horses to prove it. So there you have it. Tell me, good Droon, you get out and about more than I do, and hear more of the gossip…however paltry or deliberately fabricated it may be…among our fellow workers-of-Art. How say the mages about this One Who Walks? What do the trendy wizards think?"

It was Beldrune's turn to snort. "Trendy wizards don't think," he retorted, "or they'd take care never to be caught up in any trend. But as to what's being said … of him, less than nothing. What our colleagues seem to have heard out of whatever the priests have proclaimed can be boiled down to great secret excitement and preening over the chance to be named a Chosen of Mystra…and thereby get all sorts of special powers and inside knowledge. They seem to view it as the most exclusive club yet, and that someone is certain to privately contact them to join, any day now. If Mystra is selecting mortal mages to be Her personal servants, endowing them with spells mighty enough to shatter mountains and read minds, each and every mage wants to get into this oh-so-exclusive group without appearing in the slightest to be interested in such status."

Tabarast raised an eyebrow. "I see. How do you know I'm already not a Chosen and reading your mind even now?"

Beldrune gave his friend a wry smile. "If you were reading my mind, Baerast," he said, "you'd be trying to smite me down, right now…and blushing to boot!"

Tabarast lifted the other eyebrow to join the first. "Oh? Should I bother to venture further queries?" he asked. "I suspect not, but I'd like to be prepared if your incipient anger bids fair to goad you into muscular and daring feats that I must needs resist … You do feel incipient anger, don't you?"

"No, not a moment of it," Beldrune replied cheerfully. "Though I could probably work up to it, if you continue to guard that jar of halavan nuts so closely. Pass it over."

Tabarast did so, freely giving his colleague a sour look along with it and saying, "I value these nuts highly, one might even say they are precious to me. Con duct thy depredations accordingly."

The younger wizard smiled wryly. "All mages, I daresay, conduct their depredations while considering-if they take time to consider at all…what they're about to seize or destroy to be precious. Don't you?"

Tabarast looked thoughtful. "Yes," he murmured. "Yes, I do." He lifted an eyebrow. "How many of us, I wonder, fall so into exultation at our own power that we try to seize or destroy everything we deem precious?'

Beldrune scooped up a handful of nuts. "Most of us would consider a Chosen precious, would we not?" he asked.

Tabarast nodded. "The One Who Walks is going to have an interesting career in time soon to come," he predicted softly, his face very far from a smile. "Pour me something." Beldrune did.

Lightning rose and snapped out, splitting the night with a bright flash of fury. El blinked and sat up. Blue arcs of deadly magic were leaping and crackling from dagger to dagger around his ring, and in the night beyond something was thrashing wetly…something that was being avoided by a score or more slinking, prowling things that looked like ragged shadows, but moved like hunting cats. Elminster came fully awake fast, peering all around and counting. The thrashing hadn't ended, and anything that could survive such a lash of lightning was something to be respected. Respected twenty-fold, it seemed.

He folded his cloak, slung it through the straps of the saddlebag in case hasty flight should be necessary, and stood up. The prowling shadows were moving around his roused ring from right to left, quickening their pace for a charge to come. Something was urging or goading them, something El could feel as a tension in the air, a growing, heavy, and fell presence with the force and fury of a hailstorm about to break. Shaking his hands and wriggling his fingers to leave them loose and ready for frantic casting to come, he peered into the night, trying to see his foe.

He could feel when he was facing it, its unseen gaze transfixing him like two hot sword tips, but he could see nothing but roiling darkness.

Perhaps the thing was cloaked in a wall of these prowling shadows. It might be best to conjure a high, glowing sphere of the sort folk called a "witchlight," just to see what he faced. Yet he had only one such spell. If his foe dashed it to darkness, El would be blinking and blinded for too long a time to keep his life against a concerted attack from many prowling things.

Should he…then it came. The shadows swerved and moved in at him on all sides in a soundless charge of rippling darkness.

His wards crackled and spat blue-white, leaping death into the night. Shadows stiffened, reared, and danced in agony amid racing, darting lightning. El spun around to make sure his ring had held in all places against this initial charge.

It had, but the shadow beasts weren't drawing back. Weeping as they perished, dwindling like smoke before the fury of the lightning crawling through them, they clawed and convulsed and tried to hurl themselves past the barrier. El watched and waited, as his lightning flickered and grew dim, dying with the creatures it was slaying. By the Lady, there were a lot of them.

It would not be long now before the spell failed utterly and he'd stand alone against the onslaught. He had one teleport spell that could snatch him from this peril aye, but only to a place back along his wanderings, leaving these Lands of the Lady in front of him once more, and who knew how much a foe who was expecting him could muster for his second visit?

Here and there, as dying shadows roiled away into smoke, his spell was being brought to collapse: the daggers were rising from the ground, their cracklings and radiances fading, to leap at shadows. They would fly hungrily, points first, at anything outside the ring, he'd best stay where he was and hope they'd reap a good crop of shadow beasts before his unseen foe tried something else. Such as a spell of its own.

Green, many-clawed lightning was born in the night…in the hand of something manlike, bare-bodied and stag-headed that juggled its conjuration in wickedly long fingers for a moment beside its hip, then hurled it at Elminster.

Snarling and expanding as it came, that ball of spell lightning burst through the last tatters of his ring shield without pause and rushed hungrily at the Athalantan, who was already muttering a swift phrase and angling his hand up, palm slanted out, in a curious gesture.

Lightning struck and rebounded, springing away as if it'd been struck, to go howling back the way it'd come. El could see red eyes watching him intently now and felt the weight of a mirthless smile that he could not see, as the figure simply stood and let the lightning flow back into it to be swallowed up as if it'd never been.

Elminster's raised, warding hand flickered with a radiance of its own, then was itself again. His spell still lurked, though, awaiting another attack … or two, if this stag-headed foe struck swiftly.

The last few slinking shadows rushed to the stag-headed being and seemed to flow up and into it. El used its moment of immobility to launch an attack of his own, tossing a dagger into the air that his Art made into thirty-three blades. He swept them all, whirling and darting, down upon his foe.

Antlers dipped swiftly as the figure of shadows ducked away, emitting what might have been a low growl or might have been an incantation. The thing stiffened and sent out a high, shrill cry that might have been a human woman taking a blade in the back (for Elminster had heard such a sound before, in the city of Hastarl, several centuries ago), as blades bit deep. There was a flash of unleashed magic, motes of light raining to the ground like water dashing off a warrior's shield in a heavy rain, and the whirling, stabbing blades were abruptly gone.

El pressed his advantage, winning this spell duel was certainly needful if he wanted to keep his life…no mage bent on capture hurls lightning…and it would be the act of a fool to stand idly awaiting the next spell Silent Antlers here wanted to bury him with.

He smiled thinly as his fingers traced an intricate pattern, their tips glowing as the casting concluded.

Many, many of the things he'd done since that day when a mage-ridden dragon had pounced on Heldon and torn his life asunder could be viewed as acts of a fool.

"I'm a fool goaded by fools, it seems," he told his half-seen assailant pleasantly. "Do you attack all who pass this way, or is this a personal favor?"

His only answer was a loud hiss. He thought it ended with the stag-headed being spitting at him, but he couldn't be certain. His spell took effect then, with a roar that drowned out all other sounds for a time.

Blue flames blossomed around those night-black, spiderlike fingers and on the antlers beyond. The screams came in earnest this time.

El risked time enough to look all around, in case a lurking shadow was on the prowl…and so, glancing back over his own shoulder, he escaped being blinded when a counterspell set the night aflame.

It consumed his wardings in an instant, sending him staggering back among the smoke of shattered spells. Heat blistered his left cheek, and he heard hair sizzle as tears washed the sight from his left eye.

Softly and carefully through the pain, Elminster said the waiting word that awakened the final effect of the spell he'd already cast…and the blue flames cloaking the extremities of his foe blazed up in an exact echo of those that had just struck him.

The shriek that split the night was raw and awkward, born of real agony. El caught a brief glimpse of antlers thrashing back and forth before the flames died and heard harsh gasping receding eastward, amid the swish and crackle of grasses being trampled.

Something large fell in the grass, at least twice. When silence came at last El glided three quick steps to the west and crouched, listening intently to the night.

Nothing. He could hear the long grass stirring in the breeze, and the faint cry of some small wild creature dying in the jaws of another, far off to the south.

At length, El wearily drew the last enchanted dagger he owned…one that did nothing more than glow upon command…and threw it in the direction the sounds had gone, to strike and there illuminate the night.

He took care not to approach its glow too closely and to keep bent low over the grass … but nothing moved, and no spell or prowling shadow came leaping out of the night. When he looked where the dagger's light reached, all that could be seen was a broken trail leading a little way to a confused heap of crumbling and smoking bones, or antlers … or perhaps just branches. Something collapsed into ash as he drew nearer, something that had looked very much like a long, slim-fingered hand.

Dangling strips of paint quivered, fell, and were followed enthusiastically by the vaulted ceiling itself, leaping to the floor below with a deafening, dust-hurling crash. In its wake, the entire Ringyl shook.

Flung stones were still pattering down nearby buildings and crashing through bushes when the hall where an Athalantan had earlier seen stars rocked, groaned, and began to break apart. Gilded fruit shattered as the wall they were painted on burst asunder, splitting a dark oval and spitting sparkling stars into the night.

Sculpted stone lips quivered as if hesitant to speak, seemed to smile even more for an instant, then broke into many fragments as the widening crack reached them and spat stony pieces out to roll and crash across the trembling hall. The lips toppled, sighed into oblivion, and left a gaping hole in the wall where they'd been.

Echoes of the earth's fury that had caused this cleaving rolled on … and out of the hole in the wall, framed by a few surviving stars, something long and black and massive slid into view.

With a growing, grating roar, it canted over on the stony rubble and rattled out into the room: a black catafalque whose upthrust electrum arms held aloft a coffin and several scepters for a few impressive moments before toppling over on its side and crashing into and through the floor.

Shards of floor tile leaped into the air, chased by crawling purple lightning that spat out of the riven coffin. Electrum arms, smashed and twisted in the fall, melted as shattered scepters in their grasp died amid their own small and roiling magical blazes. One arm spat a scepter intact out onto the dust-choked pave an instant before failing protective magics flickered the length of the coffin, hung silent and grappling in the air for a long, tense time of silence, then collapsed in a small but sharp explosion that transformed coffin, catafalque, and all into dark dust and hurled it in all directions.

Amid the tumult, the scepter on the floor gave its own small sigh and collapsed into a neat outline of gently winking dust.

Silence fell in earnest upon the riven hall, and all was still save for the dust drifting down.

Not long afterward, the starlight grew stronger over Tresset's Ringyl, until a mote of blue-white radiance could clearly be seen drifting down out of the starry sky…descending smoothly, like a very large, bright, and purposeful will-o'-wisp, into the heart of the riven hall.

The light came to a smooth stop a handspan or so away from the floor and hung for a moment above the dust that had been the scepter…dust that winked and flickered like blown coals beneath its nearness.

There was a flash, a faint sound like bells struck at random, very far off, and the dust was a scepter once more…smooth and new-lustrous, glimmering with stored power.

A long-fingered, feminine hand suddenly appeared out of empty air, as if through a parted curtain, to grasp the scepter and take it up.

It flashed once like a winking star as it rose. As if in answer the hand grew an ivory-hued arm, the arm a bare shoulder that turned, allowing a glossy flood of dark hair to cascade over it, and rose into a neck, ear, line of jaw…then a beautiful, fine-boned face. Cold was her visage, serene and proud, as she turned dark eyes to look around at the ruined hall.

The scattered quartz stars glowed as if in greeting as the rest of the body grew or faded into view, turning with fearless, unconcerned grace to survey the shattered hall. A beautiful, dark-eyed sorceress held up her scepter like a warrior brandishing a blade in victory and smiled.

The scepter flashed and was gone, the sorceress with it, leaving sudden darkness behind, and only three glows flickering in that gloom: the scattered quartz stars. As the lengthening moments passed, those faint fires faded and went out, one by one, until lifeless darkness reigned in Tresset's Ringyl once more.

"Holy Lady," Elminster said to the stars, on his knees in what had once been his ring of daggers, with the sweat of spell battle still glistening on him, "I have come here, and fought…perhaps slain…at thy bidding. Guide me, I pray."

A gentle breeze rose and stirred the grasses. El watched it, wondering if it was a sign, or some evil thing his words had awakened, or simply uncaring wind, and continued, "I have dared to touch ye, and long to do so again. I have sworn to serve thee and will so, if ye will still have me…but show me, I pray, what I am to do in these haunted lands… for I would fain not blunder about, doing harm In ignorance. I have a horror of not knowing."

The response was immediate. Something blue-white seemed to snap and whirl behind his eyes, unfolding to reveal a scene in its smoky rifts: Elminster, here and now, rising from his knees to take up pack and cloak and walk away north and east, briskly and with some urgency … a scene that whirled away to become day light, falling upon an old, squat, untidy stone tower that seemed more cone or mound than lofty cylinder. A large archway held an old, stout wooden door that offered entrance with no moat or defenses to be seen…and that arch displayed a sequence of relief-sculpted phases of the moon. Elminster had never seen it before, but the vision was clear enough. Even as it faded, he was leaning down to take up his belongings and begin his walk.

No more visions came to him. He nodded, spoke his thanks to the night, and set off.