Spellstorm (30 page)

“News,” she announced crisply, as Myrmeen and Elminster came to their own halts looking over Mirt’s shoulders at her. “I found someone
unfamiliar skulking around the passages—a masked man, in leathers, with several daggers about his person—and did my ghost act. He was impressed.”

“Terrified,” Myrmeen interpreted.

“Indeed,” the ghost princess agreed dryly. “He fled in some haste, up into the unsafe upper floor, and hid himself there.”

“Lock up the kitchen and food stores first,” El decided, “then let’s talk to this skulker.”

“Talk,” Myrmeen echoed, deadpan, hefting her cleaver. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”

“T
HIS LOOKS NO
more prepossessing than it did earlier tonight,” Mirt grunted, ascending stairs that creaked alarmingly under his weight. The cracking sounds were so loud that they echoed back off the nearest trees. He winced, and turned to regard Alusair. “Did it do this when you chased our masked marvel up here?”

“I’m lighter on my feet,” she replied dryly, drifting past him upright, with her arms folded across her chest.

Mirt sighed heavily. “Life continues to be
so
unfair.”

“A sentiment others have voiced before ye,” Elminster told him. “And will again, after ye’re gone.”

“And my companions continue to cheer me,” Mirt added sourly. “Now, where’s this skulker? I want to have at him for robbing me of the last few hours of slumber I might have managed to snatch before morning. Let me land a few good punches in someone’s face, and I’ll feel I’ve accomplished something.”

“You grow up on the docks of Waterdeep?” Myrmeen asked.

“Near enough, lass, near enough.” Mirt started along the unevenly warped floor of the widest passage on the upper floor—one made for lugging furniture along, where most of the others were narrower. Many doors lined its walls. “So, Princess, whither away?”

“Straight ahead, then follow the passage where it doglegs right,” she replied, “and—”

She stopped, in a sudden swirling flare of cold and ghostly radiance. “Hold,” she snapped.

“Onto who?” Mirt asked, but obediently lurched to a stop.

“Four threads across our path, see?” Alusair warned. “They weren’t there when I chased our intruder this way.”

“Taut threads says trap to me,” Mirt growled.

“Says trap to
anyone
,” Myrmeen snapped. “El, do you want to play expert again? I can shine the lantern wherever—”

Something seemed to erupt behind them like an invisible fist, lifting them off their feet into a forward stumble that almost pitched Mirt through the wall of threads. It smote their ears, too, in a soundless blast that rattled teeth and thrust like a needle through eardrums and then … passed and was gone.

“What,” Mirt rumbled, turning around and clawing the pry bar, which he’d found in the kitchens and adopted as his weapon of choice, out of his belt, “was
that
?”

“A spell that went awry,” Elminster said grimly, looking back the way they’d come. “Cast up our backsides while we stopped to deal with this rather obvious ‘trap.’ ”

“Our skulker’s a wizard? Or is this the work of one of our guests?”

“The latter, I’m thinking,” El replied, stretching out one hand like a priest bestowing a blessing and holding up his other in a “stop and silence” signal. His companions gave him both until he shook his head, sighed, and relaxed again.

“The Weave reveals nothing but the ripples of a powerful magic, just cast right here,” he announced, “which is obvious enough. It was meant to be a smiting spell of some sort, an unleashing to deal harm. I …”

He broke off, and then asked quietly, “Luse?”

The flickering in the air in front of the threads was dark and feeble, a mere wavering line of radiance.

“A few more spells going awry like that,” Alusair whispered raggedly, from somewhere near the floor, “and I’ll find my final rest at last.”

“Ye should get back to Lord Halaunt’s body and rest within it, lass,” El said gravely.

“And miss the
fun
?” Alusair’s mocking whisper was a hollow, husking echo of her usual self.

“And miss the fun,” El confirmed sadly. “Just tell us where thy skulker hid himself, and we’ll do the rest. There’s nothing to bind him to where ye saw him hide, mind; he could be anywhere in Oldspires by now.”

“After you deal with these threads, trap or no trap,” the ghost princess hissed, “and take the passage on through the dogleg, it ends in a little square room with three doors. The leftmost is another passage, much narrower, the rightmost opens into a storage attic, and between them, the widest one—the way our skulker went—opens into a large room crammed full of stout wooden crates stacked high. He went behind some of them, and can force them to topple by kicking at them with his shoulders braced against a wall, so beware!”

“Thank ye,” Elminster said. “Now
please
, lass, take thyself out of this peril and survive to haunt the morrow.”

“Not willingly,” Alusair husked, and drifted away along the floor, like a shadowy eel that left a chill in its wake.

The Sage of Shadowdale watched her go, then flung up a hand to request immobile silence from Mirt and Myrmeen, closed his eyes, and sank his concentration into the Weave. An ever-rushing tangle of bright flows, wavering and trembling from time to time like rippling reflections in disturbed water … and there she was, Alusair, a dark and tattered retreating coalescence. He reached out with the moving brightness and fed her power, hearing her hiss in glad pain, and grow brighter, writhing and trembling—

“Look you,” Mirt rumbled, from where he’d flattened himself against the passage wall to peer along the threads, “I can’t see anything these threads trigger. No dart-and-spring-bow mounts, no eyes redirecting the force of their disturbance up or down to a falling block or spear or some such …”

“
Don’t
touch them,” El snapped, surfacing out of the bright surf of the Weave into the bleaker here and now of the ruined passage. “What if they’re poisoned?”

“So a mere touch … our skulker’s Shaaan?”

El spread his hands. “Her, or working with her, or more likely nothing to do with her at all, but she saw an opportunity to deal death, knowing we’d come up here.”

“Is there a way around these?” Myrmeen asked. “Or can we burn them, and just go back there and wait for the fumes to clear?”

“There where the spell that tried for us and failed came from,” Mirt reminded her.

Myrmeen sighed, rolled her eyes, and said, “I’m getting a mite tired of shrinking from shadows. When I could be sleeping. Or
getting back to the stew the Serpent Queen might be poisoning right now.”

“Enough of this,” Mirt growled, and threw his pry bar, putting a backspin on it so it descended as it whirled—and neatly took down all four threads to the floor on its way to clang, bounce once, and slide, dragging them with it … to a stop.

Nothing happened. No explosions, no racing darts or spears, and nothing came crashing down.

“Treat them as poisoned, don’t step on them or touch them, leave the pry bar where it lies,” the Lord of Waterdeep intoned patiently, “and let’s
get going
—or the death that claims me will be one of old age.”

And he swallowed a yawn and lurched forward. Myrmeen gave Elminster a shrug and followed.

He shrugged back, and brought up the rear.

The passage floor proved spongy just before the dogleg, but Mirt avoided putting his boots right through it by rushing forward in a crouch to where the floor was firmer, muttering, “In the ballads, things are more heroic than falling through floors!”

A moment later, he called back over his shoulder, “Middle door?”

“Middle door,” Myrmeen confirmed.

And then the silent smiting of air and ears and jaws came again, this time in a blast that tore up from the floor beneath the old moneylender’s boots and slammed him against the ceiling.

He let out a loud snarl of pain that almost drowned out the faint wail of agony that arose behind Elminster—who whirled around, knowing it came from Alusair, but seeing no trace of her.

So he was left grimly wondering if that was because there was no trace left to find.

L
USE
! L
USE
! A
LUSAIR
Nacacia!
El knew his mind shout would be painful to her, but in those first moments he was too upset to curb it.

By all the backsides that have ever warmed the Dragon Throne
, her thought came back to him, as feeble as it was angry,
that it should come to this: someone speaking my second name to me. El, I
hate
Nacacia. Never call me by that name again. Vangerdahast knew I hated it and delighted in using it and it alone when I was young. I don’t want to kill him for that, I just want to tear out his vocal cords so he can’t speak
.

Ye’re
—
well, not alive, but still with us! Well enough that ye can spit coherent fury at me
.

Yes. Now can I just be left alone to slide down these stairs and suffer?

Only if ye’re sure ye can make it to the kitchen
. Elminster reached out to her through the Weave, gathering power to feed her, and she writhed and trembled in agony as he steadied her and poured power into her.

Old Mage, I am sure of
nothing.
I’m astonished to learn that archmages can be sure of anything. But mostly, I’m in pain. Leave me be. I want to groan, and moan, and say very unladylike things, and I want to be alone to do it
.

Reluctantly Elminster stopped feeding her power, and watched her shudder back to some sort of normalcy, a battered image of the Steel Princess once more, rather than an eel-like torn and sagging thing.
Mystra bless and keep thee, Luse
.

Why now? Why couldn’t she have done that back when I was fighting the Tuigans? Or helping me smite the dragon before it could kill my father? Or in my worst moments of being regent? Why are gods never there when you need them?

Elminster had no answer for that, and they both knew it.

M
IRT CAME LIMPING
groggily back to Myrmeen and Elminster to growl that there wasn’t much floor left of the place where the passage ended in the three doors—and that he couldn’t recognize the shrouded-in-darkness room on the ground floor below that the spell that had flung him into the ceiling had come from.

“Is there enough floor left to let us get to that middle door?” Myrmeen asked.

Mirt shrugged. “I’m no builder, lass—and I’m a mite heavier than you.”

“A mite? That wobbling barrel of a belly is a ‘mite’?”

“Lass, you need no cleaver, not while you’ve got that tongue of yours!”

Myrmeen chuckled, put the lantern on the floor, and set off briskly down the passage to where the dust was still swirling and tiny fragments
of floor were tinkling and rattling back down from the ruined ceiling they’d been hurled into.

Mirt and Elminster followed her more cautiously, El plucking up the lantern as he went. He felt weak and light-headed in the wake of using the Weave to bolster Alusair; some of the energy he’d given her must have come from him.