Spellstorm (27 page)

Shaaan smiled, her front teeth becoming serpent fangs as her neck elongated horribly,
into an undulating and snakelike thing that could easily bob and swerve sideways to
menace the Zhentarim’s neck and face from many angles.

“Oh, I await that coming time eagerly,” she hissed. “You refused Mystra’s mantle,
and are about a tenth as powerful and important as you deem yourself. Even if you
were as mighty as you believe yourself to be, you could not match my power. Some of
us, Manshoon, don’t waste our time posturing and harassing others. We quietly go about
what we choose to do, avoiding empty grandeur—and so, when the testings and challenges
come, we’re strong enough to easily best pretenders. You should have learned that
long ago. Yet you have not, and stand here almost as blind in your arrogance as that
fool Telamont Tanthul was. Go now, little toy, and I’ll show you a small measure of
mercy: I’ll not blind you by spitting poison—or do worse to you by biting.”

Manshoon snarled wordless defiance, but as he backed away and felt for the door handle
behind him, the sweat of fear started to run down the back of his neck.

Then the door closed between them, and he turned and ran.

There was a time when he’d not have backed away. He’d have attacked without hesitation,
trusting in his sleeping selves to rise and continue on if he fell. That aggression
had won many battles, taken down many foes.

Yet the confident boldness to launch such attacks was no longer his; he’d lost a lot
of the arrogant ignorance that had made it possible.

There was always someone more powerful, always someone two steps or more ahead of
you.

He should never have refused Mystra.

With her as his sword, he could have felled foes like this spiteful bitch Shaaan,
and even the likes of Larloch and Ioulaum, and lorded it over all wizards of Toril.

Yet he’d have had to do her bidding. He’d not thought that price worth paying then … what
about now?

The sweat was trickling down his back like an icy river.

With magic wild and failing in this place, would she even hear him, if he pleaded
with her now?

And what about her hound, the faithful slobbering Elminster?

Did she even want Manshoon?

The sweat kept right on trickling.

M
ALCHOR
H
ARPELL STOOD
alone in his bedchamber in the depths of the night, his truss at last unlaced and
his old and aching feet immersed in a bowl of warm water.

Blessed relief.

Yet he found himself shaking his head sadly.

What a murderous debacle this has been, this clawing scramble for a Lost Spell that
can’t be worth all this, he thought to himself.

This accord won’t last two days and nights through. If that. Yet it’s a first step
I’d never have thought either Manshoon or Shaaan could agree to, let alone would agree
to. Doomed, we all are, and our accord too, but like a banner, it’s a beacon, a thin
measure of hope. Will the younger wizards of today, and mages yet unborn, be able
to take more steps, to walk farther than we do? To forge some sort of real, lasting
peace or code of conduct?

He shook his head again, doubtfully, and said aloud into the dimness of his room,
“Poor Alastra.”

“P
OOR
A
LASTRA
,” M
IRT
muttered, putting goblets away in a cupboard and noticing he was handling one she’d
admired and chosen for her use. When the tidying away was almost complete and the
countertops nigh bare, the kitchen of Oldspires looked so much
bigger
.

“Enough dallying,” Elminster told his fellow servants of the household. “We go and
search now.”

Myrmeen yawned, tossed down a towel, and found herself yawning again. “I know this
has to be done, but
sleep
is something I have to do occasionally, too!”

“Now,” Elminster told her, “is the only time when we can be sure our ‘guests’ are
locked in their rooms. Their
own
rooms, and Tabra as well as the three. Luse is patrolling the passages diligently,
and will come flying back to us if anyone ventures out of their rooms or tries to
get into the kitchen. This is the best time to search.”

“For what, exactly?”

“Skouloun or Maraunth Torr,” Mirt growled, “or pieces of them.”

“Charming,” said Myrmeen. “Whither first?”

“The eastern rooms,” El replied. “That is, everything due north of the entry hall.
Shaaan’s bedchamber opens into them, but ever since all the guests arrived and we
entertained them in the Red Receiving Room, we’ve barely set foot in any of them,
barring the main passage. And I doubt a fire’s been laid or lit in the Summer Room
in a decade or more;
anything
could be hidden up that chimney.”

“If someone’s going to be looking up a chimney while pieces of corpse come falling
down it to slam smack into their faces,” Myrmeen suggested crisply, “suppose you volunteer
for peering duty—while I and my trusty cleaver stand guard against anyone sneaking
up behind us.”

“Fair enough,” El agreed easily.

“You didn’t just speak of the Summer Room on a whim,” Mirt rumbled, wagging a finger.
“I know your intonations, now; you’ve been thinking of it. Why?”

“It’s as large as the feast hall, is clear across the other side of Oldspires and
away from the bedchambers and where we’re usually busy, and so makes an ideal neutral
meeting ground for our guests. I’ve been deliberately avoiding it since I took the
time to string those threads across its doorways.”

Myrmeen nodded. “So we can see if anyone’s entered it since.” She gestured with her
cleaver. “Lead on.”

The Red Receiving Room was dark and deserted, the shutters that connected it to the
servery they’d used when the wizards had first arrived still firmly closed and fastened.
The corner closet was locked, but El turned with broken thread ends dangling from
his fingers to show them that the dumbwaiter inside had been used. But by whom, and
down to the underservery or up to the ruinous upper floor?

“Check above and below later, right?” Mirt growled. “Do the rest of these rooms first?”

El nodded, and led the way. The next room along was the library, home to the sort
of books that a noble who intended to impress assembled, plus a row of well-used horseflesh
bloodlines tomes. Nothing was out of place, and the chamber was dusty, the air stale.
Genuinely disused, probably undisturbed since their own hasty search upon arriving.

That left the armor court, which was really just the end of the main passage beyond
a pair of massive square pillars, some staircases, and … the Summer Room.

Where they found Elminster’s threads disturbed.

The large, lofty room beyond was deserted, and the clouds of the earlier hours of
the night had blown on, to let cold moonlight flood in through the three tall and
wide windows, and paint the room pearly silver.

Myrmeen strolled toward the trio of glassed-in arches, to gaze out at the surroundings
by night. The mists of the spellstorm would probably look impressive indeed, all shimmering
and swirling silver in the moonl—

She gasped, stiffened, and pointed, all in one convulsive movement, and El and Mirt
peered quickly.

They were in time to see the dark shape of a cloth-masked face at the bottom corner
of one window—in the instant before it vanished, racing west.

All three of them rushed to the westernmost bay window, and were rewarded—by the way
the outer wall of Oldspries turned north there, and the brightness of the moonlight
outside—with a glimpse of a lone dark figure, almost certainly a man in leathers or
close-fitting dark heavywork clothing, fleeing along the mansion wall, and out of
sight around the corner, where the mansion turned west again.

“So we’re not alone here, within the spellstorm!” Mirt almost roared. “What by the
Nine Hells happened to the War Wizards and their vigilance and their splendid and
mightily puissant ring-shaped wall of force?”

El shrugged. “Something, obviously. And without that barrier … well, to someone without
the Art, yon spellstorm’s just mist, remember?”

Myrmeen nodded grimly. “All of our guests are—or were—mages of power. Any one of them
could have ordered their own army of stealthy slayers to follow them to Oldspires,
to help out if things went bad and it came to battle.”

“And things did,” Mirt grunted. “So, just how many lurking murderers are we hosting?”

Elminster gave them a lopsided grin. “In the realm, ye mean, or just here in Oldspires?”

M
YRMEEN AND
M
IRT SIGHED IN UNISON
.

“When you’ve finished failing to be funny, Old Mage,” added the former Lady Lord of
Arabel, examining the window in front of her, “answer me this: the windows all over
Oldspires open, don’t they?”

“Aye, from the inside. From the outside, they’d have to be forced.”

“Unless someone inside opens them to help someone outside get in,” Mirt pointed out.

Myrmeen waved her cleaver. “And Malchor and Manshoon—and for that matter, Skouloun
and Maraunth Torr—all have bedchambers with windows in their outside walls.”

“Aye,” Elminster told them both. “We’re in the cesspond, good and proper. As usual.
Now, shall we continue with the search? I’d say we leave Malchor, Manshoon, Shaaan,
and Tabra alone; search around them, so to speak.”

“Yes, I’m more interested in these armies of war wizard–defeating intruders we didn’t
know we were hosting a few breaths back, myself,” Myrmeen said sarcastically. “Lead
on, Sage of Shadowdale.”

Elminster did that. Their search was swift but thorough, peering through room after
room after wearying room. Twice, Alusair swept up to them like a gently glowing wind
to tell them that the four wizards—Tabra and the triad of the uneasy truce—were in
their bedchambers, alone, and staying there.

The dark ground-floor rooms they illuminated briefly with Myrmeen’s hand lantern were
all empty of humans, alive or otherwise, and of anything suspicious. So they descended
into the undercellars, where Mirt took two steps and then turned and growled at Elminster,
“There’ll be a wood chute, aye? Where Halaunt’s foresters or gardeners or stablejacks
deliver down here the wood they’ve felled and split, for all those fireplaces we’ve
just seen?”

The Sage of Shadowdale looked back at him for a moment, nodded slowly, and said, “Thank
ye; my mind is slower than it should be. Of
course
. This way!”

They hastened through a warren of twisting passages, flung wide a door—most of the
undercellar doors were wider than the doors on the ground floor, and fastened with
hasps and wooden pegs, not locks—and Elminster led the way down some worn stone steps
into a room with a deeper floor than its neighbors, which was piled high with wood.

The air was fresh, thanks to a damp breeze that shouldn’t have been there.

It was coming from … yes, the wood chute, where the stout wooden weather hatch had
been levered up and jammed open with a half log. In the moonlight spilling down the
chute, the splintered edge of the hatch looked fresh.

Someone had
just
forced a way in, down the wood chute, into Oldspires.

“Our man at the window?” Myrmeen asked, pivoting on one boot heel to look all around
her, cleaver at the ready.

“Or the army he brought with him,” El murmured, peering closely at the chute just
below the hatch. Then he amended, “Nay, I’d say two at most came in this way … more
likely just the one intruder.”

Their man at the window or not, the intruder was nowhere to be seen in the wood cellar,
so they went out and on through the undercellars, searching warily now, weapons ready
and expecting an attack.

That didn’t come, through cellar after cellar.

In the southwestern corner of the undercellars, they came upon a room that held many
wine casks horizontally, in cradles. There, El glanced at the floor, flung up a warning
hand, then reached for the lantern. Myrmeen passed it to him, and in its light he
peered closely at the floor, proceeding with his nose near the floor like a dog puzzling
out a scent along the row of casks, then around the endmost cask.