The Temptation of Elminster

Seven: Deadly Spells Forbear Thee

It was a cool day in late spring…the third greening of Toril to come and go since two mages had met in the Riven Stone…and the sky was ablaze in red, pink, and gold as the sun, in a leisurely manner, prepared to set. A tower rose like an indigo needle against that sky of flame, and out of the west something small and dark came flying to bank in a wide loop around that tower.

Heads looked up at it: a flying carpet, with two humans seated upon it, their figures dark against the fiery sky wherever the rays of the setting sun hadn't turned them the hue of beaten copper.

"Beautiful, is it not?" Dasumia purred, turning from surveying the tower. A green glint that El had long ago learned presaged danger was dancing in her eyes. She slid forward onto her elbows, cradling her chin in her hands, and regarded the tower with an almost satisfied air.

"Lady, it is," Elminster said carefully.

A teasing eye rolled up to stare into his own orbs. Ye gods, trouble indeed, Mystra defend.

His Lady Master pointed at the tower and said, "A wizard named Holivanter dwells there. A merry fellow, he taught the beasts he summoned to build it all sorts of comical songs and chants. He keeps talking frogs, and even gave a few of them wings with which to fly."

The carpet banked smoothly around the tower on its second orbit of the spire. The tower rose like a fairytale needle from neat, green walled gardens. Ruby-hued lamps glimmered in several of its windows, but it seemed otherwise tranquil, almost deserted.

"The house of Holivanter … pretty, isn't it?"

"Indeed, Lady," El agreed and meant it.

"Slay him," Dasumia snapped.

El blinked at her. She nodded, and pointed down at the slim tower with an imperious hand.

El frowned. "Lady, I…"

Little flames seemed to flicker in Dasumia's eyes as she locked her gaze with his. One elegant eyebrow lifted.

"A friend of yours?"

"I know him not," El replied truthfully. There was no way he could send a warning, or a defense, or healing, the man was doomed. Why betray himself in futility?

Dasumia shrugged, drew forth a dark, smooth rod from a sheath on her hip, and extended it with languid grace. Something caused the air to curdle in a line, racing down, down..

… And the upper half of Holivanter's tower burst apart with a roar, spraying the sky with wreckage. Smaller purple, amber, and blue-green blasts followed as various scorched magics within the tower exploded in their turns. El stared at the conflagration as its echoes rolled back from nearby hills, and debris hurtled at them. Blackened fingers spun past the carpet, trailing flame. Holivanter was dead.

Dasumia rolled back onto one hip and propped herself up with one arm, the other toying with the rod. "So tell me," she told the sky, in silken-soft tones that made Elminster stiffen warily, "just why you disobeyed me. Does killing mages come hard to you?"

Fear stirred cold fingers within him. "It seems … unnecessary," El replied, choosing his words very carefully. "Does not Mystra say the use of magic should be encouraged, not jealously guarded or hampered?"

Ah, Mystra. Her word had led him here, to serve this beguiling evil. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be a Chosen of Mystra, but in his dreams, El often knelt and prayed, or repeated her decrees and advice, fearing it would entirely slip away from him if he did not. Sometimes he feared that the Lady Dasumia was stealing his memories with creeping magic or walling them away behind mists of forgetfulness, to make him entirely her creature. Whatever the cause, it was getting harder, as the months passed, to remember anything of his life before the Riven Stone….

Dasumia laughed lightly. "Ah, I see. The priests of the Lady of Magic say such things, yes, to keep us from slaying thieves who steal scrolls … or disobedient apprentices. Yet I pay them little attention. Every mage who can rival me lessens my power. Why should I help such potential foes rise to challenge me? What gain I from that?"

She leaned forward to tap Elminster's knee with the rod. He tried not to look at the little green lights winking into life around it and wandering up and down its length almost lazily. "I've seen you on your knees to Mystra, of nights," she told him. "You pray and plead with her, yes, but tell me: how much does she talk to you?"

"Never, these days," El admitted, his voice as low and as small as the despair he felt. All he had to cling to were his small treacheries, and if she ever discovered those…

Dasumia smiled triumphantly. "There you are-alone, left to fend for yourself. If there is a Mystra who takes any interest in mortal mages, she watches while the strong help themselves, over the bodies of the weak. Never forget that, Elminster."

Her voice became more brisk. "I trust your labors haven't faltered in my absence," she commented, sitting up…and raising the rod to point at his face like a ready sword. "How many whole skeletons are ready?"

"Thirty-six," Elminster replied. She lifted that eyebrow again, obviously impressed, and leaned forward to peer into his eyes, dragging his gaze to meet hers by the sheer power of her presence. El tried not to wince or lean away. In some ways, the Lady Dasumia was as, as…well, awesome at close quarters and as irresistibly forceful in her presence…as Holy Lady Mystra Herself. How, a small voice in the back of his mind asked, could that possibly be?

"You have been hard at work," she said softly. Td thought you'd spend some time trying to get into my books and a little more poking around my tower before you got out the shovels. You please me."

El inclined his head, trying to keep satisfaction-and relief…from his face and voice. She must not have discovered his rescue work, then.

With his spells, her most obedient apprentice had healed a servant and whisked him to a land distant, laden with supplies and white with fear. She'd taken the man to her bed but tired of him as the Year of Mistmaidens began, and one morning she had turned him into a giant worm and left him impaled on one of the rusting spits behind the stables to die in slow, twisting agony. El had left the transformed body of a man who'd died of a fever in the servant's place. Restless and reckless meddling, perhaps. Doom-seeking lunacy, that, too. Yet he had to do such things, some how, working small kindnesses to make up for her large, bold evils.

It hadn't been his first small treachery against her cruelty … but there was always the chance that it would be his last. "My honesty has always outstripped my ambition," he said gravely.

Her mockery returned. "A pretty speech, indeed," she said. "I can almost believe you follow Mystra's dictates to the letter."

She stretched like a large cat and used the rod over one shoulder to scratch her back, putting it within easy reach of Elminster. "You must have far more patience than I do," she admitted, her eyes very dark and steady upon him. "I could never serve such an arbitrary goddess."

"Is it permitted to ask whom ye do serve, Lady Master?" El asked, extending his hands in a mute offering to accept the enchanted rod.

She poked at her back once more, smiled, and put the rod into his hands. Two of the rings she wore blinked as she did so.

Dasumia smiled. "A little higher … ah, yessss." Her smile broadened as El carefully used the rod to scratch the indicated spot, but she kept her eyes fixed on his hands, and the rings that had winked a moment ago now flickered with a constant flame of readiness.

"It's no secret," she said casually. "I serve the Lord Bane. His gift to me was the dark fire that slays intruders and keeps more cautious mages at bay. Did you know there's some fool of an elf who tests my wards with a new spell every tenday? He's been at it for three seasons now, as regular as the calendar, almost as long as you've been with me." She smiled again. "Perhaps he wants your position. Should I order you to duel him?"

El spreads his hands and said, "If it's your wish, Lady. I'd as soon not slay anyone unnecessarily."

Dasumia stared at him in thoughtful silence for quite a long time as the carpet rushed on away from the smoking stump of the tower and the dying day, and finally murmuring, "And deprive me of the entertainment elven futility brings me? No fear."

She rose up on her knees in a single smooth motion, plucked the rod out of El's hand, resheathed it, and in the same continuous movement reached out with both hands to take hold of his shoulders. Her slender fingertips rested lightly upon him, yet Elminster suddenly felt that if he tried to move out of their grasp, he'd find them to be claws of unyielding iron. In three years, this was the closest contact between them.

He held still as his Lady Master brought her fare close to his, their noses almost touching, and said, "Don't move or speak." Her breath was like hot mist on Elminster's cheeks and chin, and her eyes, very dark and very large, seemed to be staring right into the back of his head and seeing every last secret he kept there.

She leaned a little way forward, just for a moment, and their lips met. An imperious tongue parted his own lips-and something that burned and yet was icy raced into his mouth, roaring down his throat and coiling up his nose.

Agony…burning, shuddering, get-away-from-it agony! El sneezed, again and again, clawing at fabric in a desperate attempt to keep from falling, knowing his whole body was shuddering. He was convulsing and sprawling on the carpet, sobbing when he could find breath enough … and he was as helpless as a child,

Yellow mists cavorted and flowed before his eyes, the darkening sky overhead kept leaping and turning, and he was thrashing against claws that held him with painful, immovable force.

For what seemed an eternity he coughed and struggled against the yellow haze, drenched with sweat, until utter exhaustion left him able to spasm no more, and he could only lie moaning as the lessening surges of pain ebbed and clawed their ways through him.

He was Elminster. He was as weak as a dried, rolled-up leaf blown in the wind. He was…lying on his back on the flying carpet, and the only thing that had kept him from falling off it in his throes was the iron grip of the sorceress he served, the Lady Dasumia.

Her hands loosened on him, now. One left his bruised bicep…in which it had been sunk inches deep, like an anchor of iron throughout his thrashings…to trail across his brow, thrusting oceans of sweat away.

She bent over him in the gathering gloom of falling night, as the breezes of the lofty sky slid over them both, and said softly, "You have tasted the dark fire. Be warned, if ever you betray me, it shall surely slay you. As long as you worship Mystra more than you revere me, Bane's breath shall be agony to you. Three apprentices, down the years, have kissed me unbidden, none lived to boast of it."

Elminster stared up at her, unable to speak, agony still ruling him. She looked into his eyes, her own orbs two dark fires, and smiled slowly. "Your loyalty, however, outstrips theirs. You shall duel my worst foe for me and best him…when you are ready. You'll have to learn to kill first, though, swiftly and without reckoning the cost. He'll not give you much time for reflection."

At last El found the strength to speak. His voice was thick-tongued and halting, but it was speech nonetheless. "Lady, who is this foe?"

"A wizard Chosen by Mystra as her personal servant," the Lady Dasumia replied, looking away toward the last traces of the setting sun. Beneath them, the carpet started to descend. "He left my side to do so and though he could not follow the narrow path the Lady of Magic set for him and is now called the Rebel Chosen, he's not returned to me. Hah! Mystra must be unable to concede that anyone could turn from blind worship of her."

Her eyes were burning as she turned back to meet Elminster's gaze, and added in tones once more light and casual, "Nadrathen is his name. You shall slay him for me."

The last prince of Athalantar looked at the night sky rushing past and shivered once.

The rustling and croaking of night had begun in earnest in the thick stand of hiexel and thornwood and duskwood nearest the castle. As the flying carpet descended toward the tallest of the black towers, a pair of eyes blinked amid the fissured bark of a lightning-scarred duskwood and slowly sharpened into a coldly angry elven face. Roused anger glittered in Ilbryn Starym's eyes as he said softly, "Your wards may still my ears, proud Lady, but my spells work well enough when you are out over the wide world. Don't count overmuch on your apprentice. His life is mine."

He glowered at the tallest towers of the lady's castle long after the carpet was gone from view, until his glare slid suddenly into a calmer look, a frown of thoughtfulness rather than fury. "I wonder if anything in that mage's tower survived?" he asked the night. "It's worth the journey to see.…"

Dark-hued radiance flashed and curled like smoke, and the duskwood glared no more.

Dasumia's castle rose up into the sky above them in dark, forbidding ramparts. Tabarast watched the flying carpet disappear into its many-turreted heart and grunted. "Well, that was exciting," he said. "Another day of splendid and energetic furtherance of the Art, I must say."

Beldrune looked up from the tankard of magically warmed soup he was cradling and spoke in tones of some asperity. "My memory may be failing me from time to time, esteemed Baerast, but did we, or did we not, agree to moan no more about wasted time and forgone opportunities? Our mission is, and remains, clear. Callow idiot this One Who Walks may be, but he-and what he chooses to do…are the most important developments in the Art in all Toril just now. I think we can afford to obey the dictates of a goddess…the goddess…and miss a few years of peering at fading, dusty writings in hopes of finding a new way of conjuring up floating lantern lights."

Tabarast merely grunted in wordless acknowledgment. A few lights blinked into life high in the turrets of Dasumia's castle, and the night noises resumed around them. They kept silent for a long time, crouched on little stools at the end of the hedgerow that marked the edge of the nearest tilled field to the Castle of the Lady, until Beldrune murmured, "Mardasper must have given us up for dead by now."

Tabarast shrugged and said, "He guards Moonshorn Tower, not we."

"Hmmph. Did he ever tell you about his fiery eye?"

"Aye. Something about a curse … he lost a spell duel to someone, and his service as guardian was payment to the priests of the Mysteries, to break the magic and restore him. Another poor mage-wits, driven into the service of the Lady who governs us all."

Beldrune lifted his head. "Do I hear the faith of Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses retunding? The divine graces of Holy Mystra losing their hold after all these years?"

"Of course not," Tabrast snapped. "Would I be sitting here the night through in all this cold damp if they were?" He thumbed the lid of his tankard open, took a long pull, and looked back at the castle towers in time to see one of the glimmering lights go out.

They sat and waited until their tankards were empty, but nothing else happened. The castle, it seemed, was asleep. Tabarast finally turned his gaze from it with a sigh. "We're all pawns of the Lady who minds the Weave, though…aren't we? It just comes down to whether you delude yourself into thinking you're free or not."

"Well, I am free," Beldrune snapped, his lips tightening. "By all means let these funny ideas prance through your head, Tabarast, and govern your days if you want them to, but kindly leave me out of the 'foolish puppet' drawer in your mind. You'll live longer if you grant that other mages might have scrambled out of it, too."

Tabarast turned to fix the younger mage with a wise and keen old glare." Which other mages?"

"Oh, just the ones you meet," Beldrune grunted. "All of them."

Far from the turrets Tabarast and Beldrune were watching, and farther still from the shattered, smoking stump that had been the tower of Holivanter, another wizard's tower stood against the night sky.

This one was a modest roughstone affair studded with many small, loosely shuttered windows, sun boxes of herbs hanging from their sills. It stood alone in the wilderlands, bereft of village or muddy lane, and deer grazed contentedly around its very door…until a mist rising silently out of the grass settled upon them, and they sank down into oblivion, leaving only bones behind.

When there were no eyes left to see it, a chill, chiming whirlwind stole to the base of the tower and began to rise.

Floating up past climbing roses and ivy in eerie silence, it gathered itself in the air like a coiling snake…and lunged through a chink in a shutter halfway up the tower, pouring itself into the sleeping darkness beyond.

Dark chamber within opened into dark chamber, and the misty wind whirled, moaned as it gathered its might in that second room, a place of books and scroll-littered tables and dust…and became an upright, gliding thing of claws and jaws that slid out into the spiral stair at the heart of the tower, and up.

At the top of the tower, candlelight through an ill-fitting door danced reflections down the staircase, and an old and rough voice was speaking, alone, oblivious to the danger creeping closer, as clawed mists came gliding.

At the heart of a chalked symbol set with many candles, an old man in much-patched robes was on his knees, facing the chalk image of a pointing human hand. A blue radiance outlined the hand, and both it and the chalkwork were his doing, for he had dwelt long alone.

"For years I've served you, and the Great Lady, too," the wizard prayed. "I know how to smash things with spells and to raise them, too. Yet I know little of the world outside my walls and need your guidance now, O Azuth. Hear me, High One, and tell me, I pray: to whom should I pass on my magic?"

His last word seemed to echo, as if across a great gulf or chasm, and the blue conjured radiance suddenly shone almost blindingly bright.

Then it went out entirely as a wind rose out of the very floor, flowing from the chalked hand. The candles flared wildly, spat flames, and went out under its rushing onslaught, and out of the darkness that followed their deaths came a voice, deep and dry: "Guard yourself, faithful Yintras, for danger is very close to you now. I shall gather your Art unto me in the time of your passing … worry not."

With a crackle of leaking energy and a strange singing of the air, something blown on that wind flowed around the old wizard, winding around his trembling limbs to cloak him in warmth and vigor. With an ease and agility he hadn't felt in years, the old man sprang to his feet, raised his hands, and watched tiny lightnings crackle from one arm to the other with pleased wonder in his eyes, amid the gathering glimmer of unshed tears in his eyes. "Lord," he said roughly, "I am unworthy of such aid as this. I…"

Behind him, the door of the spell chamber split from top to bottom, shrieking its protest as more than a dozen claws literally tore it apart, tossing down the splinters to reveal an open, empty door frame.

Something that glowed with a pale, wavering ghostliness stood at the head of the stair…something large, menacing, and yet uncertain. A thing of claws and ever-shifting jaws and tentacles and cruelly barbed mandibles. A thing of menace and death, now advancing leisurely into the spell chamber at an almost gloating, slow pace.

Yintras Bedelmrin watched death come for him, floating over wards that would have seared limbs at a touch, and swallowed, trembling.

Lightning leaped within him, as if in reminder, and suddenly Yintras threw back his head, drew in a deep breath and spoke as loudly and as imperiously as he could. "I am armored by Azuth himself, and need fear no entity. Begone, whatever you are. Go from here, forever!"

The old wizard took a step toward the thing of claws, lightning still leaping from arm to arm. Ghostly radiance rose up in a menacing wall of claws and reaching tentacles…but even as it did so, it was flickering, trembling, and darkening. Holes were opening in its overreaching sub-stance, holes that grew with it.

With horrifying speed it expanded to loom almost to the ceiling, towering over the old man in the many-patched robes. Yintras stood watching it, not knowing what to do and so doing nothing.

A fatal creed for an adventurer, and no better for wizards. He quailed, inwardly, knowing death could come in moments, horrified that he might embrace it when he could have escaped it…just by doing the right thing, or something.

Claws snatched at him in a horrible mass lunge that left him entirely unaware that a tentacle that had grown savage barbs and long-fanged jaws was snaking around through the darkness to stab at him from behind and below.

Lightning cracked, raged white-hot in the air of the spell chamber and was gone again, leaving…when his streaming eyes could see again…a feebly flickering gray mist cringing and writhing in the air by the door.

Yintras drew in a deep breath and did one of the bravest and most foolish things in his life thus far. He took a step toward the mist, chuckled, then took another step, raising his arms despite the lack of lightning or any feeling of surging or lurking power.

The mist gathered itself as if to do battle with him, rising and thickening into a small but solid mass, like a ready-raised shield trailing away into formlessness. The old wizard took another step, and the strange mist seemed to tremble.

He stretched forth a hand as if to grasp it. In a sudden wash of frigid air and a chiming of tiny, bell-like sounds, the mist broke into a swirling stream and was gone out the door in a flash, leaving only a mournful snarl in its wake.

Yintras watched it go and stared at the emptiness where it had been for a long anxious time. When at last he believed that it was truly gone, he went to his knees again to speak his thanks. All that came out were sobs, in a quickening rush that he found himself powerless to stop.

He crept forward in the darkness on knees and fingertips, trying to at least shape Azuth's name. Then he froze in surprise and awe. Where his tears had fallen, candle after candle was springing to life by itself, in a silently growing string of dancing warmth.

"Azuth," he managed to whisper at last. "My thanks!"

All of the candles went out in unison, then flared into life again. Yintras knelt in their midst, touched by glory and grateful for it. Sadness laced the edges of his bright delight too, and beneath all, he felt empty, utterly drained. He touched the smudged chalk that had once been the outline of a pointing hand and started to cry like a child.