“The venison will be fine, thanks. A little mulled wine?”
“Here in my hand, Lady,” the maid said happily. “Thought I’d remembered rightly.”
“Thank you, Shaloale,” Alastra replied, accepting the jug and the jack. The maid’s surprised smile was dazzling.
“Fancy you remembering my name!”
“I always remember those who are kind to me,” Alastra replied, nodding as the maid bustled out to fetch the soup. “And otherwise,” she murmured to the closing door.
She liked this inn. The Falcon’s Fair Roost. Good name for a roadside inn in the wilderlands halfway to anywhere. Old but clean and well kept. A rather plump brindle cat had crept into the room and was purring at her from her pillow.
“So,” she asked it gently, “who are you, really?”
The cat blurred just long enough to show her shining eyes she knew; Delgorn, a local Harper agent she’d met with a time or six.
“Stay the night?” Alastra asked, patting the bed.
The cat purred louder, then abruptly went silent and vanished down under the bed. Alastra turned in time to accept the soup from the maid and receive the rather breathless news that the venison would be “up in a trice.”
“Bring me twice the usual,” she said swiftly. “I find myself
very
hungry.”
The moment the door had swung closed again, a voice from under the bed informed her, “So am I.”
Alastra chuckled. “What you see in a lady well over a century old is beyond me, lad.”
“I see a veteran Harper mage I am proud to work with, a mentor I am proud to serve, and someone of whom I remain in admiring awe. Not to mention a splendid woman who looks barely past thirty, and impishly good-natured. Former apprentice of both Elminster of Shadowdale and Khelben the Blackstaff, lover of Malchor Harpell—”
“Delgorn,” Alastra interrupted, all levity gone from her voice, “just where did you hear
that
?”
“You talk in your sleep,” came the reply. “I’m sorry, Lady Alastra, I had no idea Malchor was a secret.”
“Secret no longer, obviously. So you know where I’m heading.”
“Oldspires, where all the other mad wizards have gone, to see that no harm comes to Malchor Harpell.”
“That is
not
for passing on,” Alastra said severely, “to anyone.”
“Lady, I obey.”
Alastra sighed. “
Try
to keep the mockery out of your voice when you say that, lad.”
It was true. She had long secretly loved Malchor Harpell—the
kindest
adventuring wizard she’d ever met—and by the sounds of who was gathering at Oldspires, even he might need help.
Moreover, the Harpers should know all about who got the Lost Spell and what they tried to use it for—and who better at the Art among the Harpers was handy?
None but Alastra. “It’s all up to you,” she murmured to herself.
“Pardon? Ah, you don’t have to leave until morning, do you?” Delgorn asked in a plaintive whisper, his fingertips tracing a velvet-soft path up past her right knee.
Her fault, for changing into a gown.
“The venison’s coming,” she warned.
Her warning went unheeded, until she clamped her knees together with viselike firmness.
Young Harpers, these days.
CHAPTER 5
Very Bad, Very Soon
T
HE ROOM AROUND THEM WAS HIGH-CEILINGED, GRANDLY ORNATE
, and dark. Cobwebs in the lofty corners told them that Lord Halaunt didn’t employ maids or jacks with long-pole mops, or didn’t look up much … or just didn’t care.
Well, he was past caring about
anything
now, but …
The four of them stood facing each other in a conspiratorial little group in the unwelcoming entry hall of Oldspires, listening to the one of them who wasn’t really a lord pretend to be one.
“You haven’t got the voice quite right,” Mirt commented. “Sharper, more waspish—and more phlegmy, too. Rough, as if he needed to clear his throat but didn’t bother.”
“Is this waspish enough?” Lord Halaunt snapped. “I’m a princess, not an actress!”
“All princesses are actresses,” Elminster told her. “Some of them are poorer than others, I’ll grant, but—”
“El, don’t make this any harder for me,” Alusair told him. “This old man’s body is heavy, and all the joints are stiff, and hurt. He hasn’t taken very good care of it.”
Myrmeen Lhal chuckled. “This is going to be a long tenday, I can tell.” She turned on her heel, surveying the gloomy, dark-paneled hall all around them. Cross-vaulted ceiling with gargoyle-head bosses, so thickly festooned with cobwebs that it looked like a forest of hanging gray curtains.
Well, at least it was better than the servants’ quarters on the upper floor; Lord Halaunt obviously believed in his household enjoying fresh air, given all the gaps in the roof that had been there long enough to warp and rot floors, not to mention let large colonies of birds roost and soil plentifully … “And I had no idea that the customary garb of a second cook was not only this unflattering, but scratchy. I’m starting to itch all over.”
“Well, scratch yourself,” Mirt suggested. “Unless you’d like me to oblige.” He thrust his face forward in a leer so broad and tongue-waggingly exaggerated that the other three standing in the hall all burst into mirthful laughter.
“I doubt it’ll be the full tenday,” El put in, when he stopped chuckling. “The spellstorm’s been in existence for five days now. It only has five days left.”
“Before every last hedge wizard in Faerûn can come storming in here to try their luck, you mean?” Myrmeen asked dryly. “I hope Lord Halaunt pays the local farmers well, because his larders might well be empty, a few days after that.”
She knew whereof she spoke, for they’d finished touring Oldspires, ruined upper floor and all, and were now standing conferring in its dimly cavernous entry hall.
Vangerdahast had obeyed Ganrahast and remained behind in Suzail to help Ganrahast and Vainrence handle nobles. So just four from Suzail had appeared in a deserted cellar of the mansion, through a temporary portal El had conjured. Very shortly thereafter, Lord Halaunt had rather gruffly and stiffly ordered his servants to hasten away from Oldspires for a paid holiday, seen them get ready for travel, put heavy bags of coins in their astonished hands, and packed them off to Suzail through the same humming and flickering temporary cellar portal. El had created it with Mystra’s aid, linking to one of the mansion’s many existing gates to bypass the spellstorm. She’d assured him that no such aid would be forthcoming to any of the guest wizards trying the same way of getting in, and El’s gate was now closed.
The four had made the brief trip through it from Suzail with Alusair wrapped chillingly around El to keep from being torn at by the gate’s writhing magical energies. The cold she’d visited upon the Sage of Shadowdale had been more than bone chilling. Now, El could breathe again, but he was
still
rubbing his cold limbs and flexing numbed fingers
after unwrapping them from around the battered copper chamberpot he’d insisted on bringing along, which he’d stuffed full of the new Sembian innovation that was now sweeping Cormyr and racing west along the trade roads: darvorr, or chamberpot wiping cloths. Which had met with Myrmeen’s firm approval.
“Sorry, Old Mage,” the ghost princess apologized, her own voice coming incongruously out of Lord Halaunt’s lips.
“Lass, lass, the day I can’t enjoy the embrace of a spirited woman …” El started to say, but at that moment Mirt and Myrmeen finished their separate surveys of the gloomy hall, turned back to face their companions from different directions, and announced in almost perfect unison, “This is
not
going to go well.”
Elminster shrugged. “Ye’re quite likely right, yet it’s worth a try. Mystra wants us to try this, and if it succeeds, we can achieve much of lasting worth.”
“You sound like a Waterdhavian noble trying to cozen investors,” Mirt growled. “So where’s the wine cellar?”
El chuckled. “Not quite so fast, Old Wolf. Mystra has just sent me a … smell.”
“A
smell
?”
“That would seem the act of an odd sort of goddess, I’d say,” Myrmeen agreed.
Elminster rolled his eyes. “It’s a wordless warning. A sharp smell in my mind. She knows I’ve secured the Lost Spell, and—”
Mirt gaped. “You have?”
“Ye should watch sly old men a mite more closely. We’re apt to be dangerous, ye know. Yes, I found it; his lordship isn’t—wasn’t—a very imaginative man. Under his pillow, for the love of Mystra! A pillow embroidered “Here rests a Talking Skull, nightly,” no less! At least Halaunt could poke fun at himself. And the spell is now safe. Mystra knows that, and I’d say she’s therefore ready to let our, ah, guests in.”
He closed his eyes, frowned in concentration, and twisted the nearest threads of the Weave over, pulling light through them and then fine-tuning and drawing them together so … he could share what he could see through it with the others, riding its shimmering flows of force—Myrmeen gasped in throaty pleasure as they became visible all around her, and Mirt threw back his head in amazement—out through the solid walls of the mansion
and the thick, swirling fog of the spellstorm, to the clear and breezy air above the fields beyond.
Where quite a few haughty and confident men and women stood, none too close to each other, facing the spellstorm.
Most of them were shifting restlessly from foot to foot, obviously unaccustomed to being kept waiting. One of them, robes swirling, had struck a grand pose and was working a mighty magic that caused an intricate tracery of glowing lines to appear in the air above and in front of him, and hang there as immobile as a castle wall—but infinitely prettier.
“Alammath druawh ilbrue taraunt-tal,” he intoned, his hands shaping intricate gestures that made the glowing lines brighten and thicken.
“Resurmregard!”
And he flicked his raised fingers in a shooing gesture that made the glowing lines roll away from him through the air, into the shifting smokes of the spellstorm.
Murmurs arose as the fog obediently parted, drifting aside to lay bare a narrow passage through them.
As wizards started to converge on it, peering and looking excited, its creator walked warily forward—and the fog obediently receded before him, extending the passage to reveal more of Lord Halaunt’s goat-cropped lawn.
The triumphant wizard raised his hands on both sides, to be ready to hurl back the fogs if they closed in on him, and strode along the passage he’d made.
Mirt made a wordless growl deep in his throat, and pointed to a mage far back across the lawns, whose hands had just darted through a swift spellweaving.
“Seeking to dispel the work of Laragaunt and doom him,” Elminster announced, watching. “I doubt Mystra will let him succeed.”
The effect of the surreptitious spell was immediate; the outer opening in the great hemisphere of fog, where the new passage began, started to fill in, the spellstorm tumbling forward like smoke let out of a window. Several of the boldest mages, on the brink of following Laragaunt along the passage he’d created, recoiled hastily. In a matter of moments, that end of the passage was gone, lost in thick fogs once more.
Laragaunt looked back, then turned and started to hasten—and obligingly the spellstorm continued to yield before him. He came out of the fogs in haste, into the open area right around the stone walls of the old mansion, gasped in relief, and made for the doors.
Only to find them closed and locked.
Almost contemptuously he worked a minor spell, to work the lock rather than damaging the door … and they all watched his face change as nothing at all happened.
He looked doubtfully over his shoulder at his passage, just as the last of it faded away, the fogs drifting in from both sides to swallow it. He stood on a narrow strip of lawn that stretched away along the walls of the mansion for as far as he could see in both directions, presumably encircling Oldspires like a green ribbon—that might now be his prison. For the roiling fog now stood like a great, unbroken hedge or fence around the strip of grass, walling him in.
Laragaunt tried the doors with all his strength, then sighed, stepped back to peer up at Oldspires, then set off around the house in search of other ways in.
“All doors and windows closed, locked, and barred or shuttered,” El remarked. “I made sure the servants obeyed thy orders.” He looked at Lord Halaunt.
Alusair snorted. “ ‘My’ orders.”
“Has a ring to it, hey?” Mirt offered, and received a withering look from her that would have been far sharper if made with her own features. Lord Halaunt’s expression was forbiddingly withering most of the time.
Myrmeen went to a massive high-backed seat along one wall, and cautiously seated herself. No clouds of dust or storm of scurrying rats arose, and it didn’t collapse under her, so she relaxed, and after a moment moved to one end where she could recline into its padding.
“We should enjoy this leisure, I’m thinking,” she said. “There’ll be precious little once all
that
lot are in here with us.”
Mirt joined her. “Good idea.”
Elminster’s Weave vision worked well no matter where they were, so they all took seats and watched the powerful spellhurlers out on the lawn one by one hurl mighty spells at the spellstorm, trying to pierce it and get in.
And one by one, Mystra let them succeed.
Laragaunt of Threskel trudged into view several times, making increasingly gloomy circuits of the outside of the rambling mansion. By the last one, he was peering up at high windows, trying to judge what could be climbed to—and forced open, once one was somehow perched precariously up there.
“That’s all of them,” Myrmeen murmured. “Eleven strong, I see.” Out of habit, she looked around for a weapon.
Five women and six men milled warily by the walls of Oldspires, peering all around and glaring at each other. The fogs were unbroken again, walling them in and stretching up overhead in a dome that enclosed the mansion. The sun shone down through the dome as if through a light haze, but for the height of two tall men up from the ground, the spellstorm was like thick, dark roiling smoke.