The Temptation of Elminster

be swept away, what can we hold to in the years to come?'

'Lord Felmorel,' the wizard Arunder replied hastily, 'there has been much converse on this matter among mages and others, but little agreement. Each proposal attracts those who hate and fear it, as well as those who support it. Some have spoken of a council of wizards ruling a land…'

'Ha! A fine tyranny and mess that'd be!' Harbright snorted.

'…while others see a bright future in alliances with dragons, so that each human realm is a dragon's domain, with…'

'Everyone as the dragon's slaves and ultimately, its dinner,' Harbright told his almost-empty platter.

'…agreements in place to bind both wyrm and people against hostilities practiced on each other.'

'As the dragon swept down, its jaws gaping open to swallow, the knight stared into his doom, shouting vainly, 'Our agreement protects me! You can't…' for almost the space of three breaths before the dragon gulped him up and flew away,' Harbright said sarcastically. 'The surviving folk gathered there solemnly agreed that the dragon had broken the agreement, and the proposal was made that someone should travel to the dragon's lair to inform the wyrm that it had unlawfully devoured the knight. Strangely, no one volunteered.'

Silence fell. The hulking warrior thrust his jaw forward and shot the wizard a dark and level gaze, as if daring him to speak, but Thessamel Arunder seemed to have acquired a sudden and abiding interest in peppered lizard soup.

Wanlorn looked up at his host, aware of the Lady Felmorel's continuing and attentive regard, and said, 'For my part, Lord, I believe another such shining city will be a long time in coming. Small realms, defended against orcs and brigands more than aught else, will rise as they have always done, standing amid lawless and perilous wilderlands. The bards will keep the hope of Myth Drannor bright while the city is lost to us, now and in foreseeable time to come.'

'And this wisdom, young Wanlorn, was written on the walls of the ruined City of Song?' Arunder asked lightly, emboldened to speak once more, but carefully not looking in Harbright's direction. 'Or did the gods tell you this, perhaps, in a dream?'

'Sarcasm and derision seems to run away with the tongues of wizards all too often these days,' Wanlorn observed in casual tones, addressing Barundryn Harbright. 'Have you noticed this, too?'

The warrior grinned, more at the wizard than at the hawk-nosed man, and growled, 'I have. A disease of the wits, I think.' He waved a quail-lined spit like a scepter and added, 'They're all so busy being clever that they never notice when it strikes them personally.'

In unspoken unison both Harbright and Wanlorn turned their heads to look hard at the wizard. Arunder opened his mouth with a sneer to say something scathing, seemed to forget what it was, opened his mouth again to say something else, then instead put a glass of wine up to it and drank rather a large amount in a sputteringly short time.

As he choked, burbled, and wheezed, the warrior reached out one shovel-sized hand to slam him solidly between the shoulder-blades. As the mage reeled in his seat, Harbright inquired, 'Recovered, are you…in your own small way?'

Into the dangerous silence that followed, as the wizard Arunder struggled for breath and the Lady Nasmaerae lifted a hand both swift and graceful to cover her mouth, Lord Esbre Felmorel said smoothly, 'I fear you may have the right of it, good sir Wanlorn. Small holds and fortified towns standing alone are the way of things hereabouts, and things look to stay that way in the years ahead…unless something befalls the Lady of Shadows.'

'The Lady…?'

'A fell sorceress,' the warrior put in, raising grim eyes to meet those of the hawk-nosed man.

Lord Esbre nodded. 'Bluntly put, but yes: the Lady of Shadows is someone we fear and either obey or avoid, whenever possible. None know where she dwells, but she seeks to enforce her will…if not to rule outright…in the lands immediately east of us. She's known to be… cruel.'

Noticing that the wizard seemed to have recovered, Lord Esbre sought to restore the man's temper by deferring to him with some joviality. 'You are our expert on things sorcerous, Lord Arunder…pray unfold for us whatever of import you know about the Lady of Shadows.'

It was time for fresh astonishment at Lord Esbre's feast table. Lord Thessamel Arunder stared down at his plate and muttered, 'There's no…I have nothing to add on this subject. No.'

The tall candles on the feast table danced and flickered in the heart of utter silence for a long time after that.

A dozen candles flickered at the far end of the bedchamber like the tongues of hungry dragon hatchlings.

The room was small and high-ceilinged, its walls shrouded in old but still grand tapestries that Elminster was sure hid more than a few secret ways and spy holes. He smiled thinly at the serenity awaiting him, as he strode past the curtained and canopied bed to the nearest flame

'Wanlorn am I,' he told it gently, 'and am not. By this seeming, in your service, hear me I pray, 0 Mystra of the Mysteries, O Lady most precious, 0 Weaving Flame.' He passed two fingers through the flame, and its orange glow became a deep, thrilling blue. Satisfied, he bent forward over it until it almost seemed as if bed draw the blue flame into his mouth, and whispered. 'Hear me, Mystra, I pray, and watch over me in my time of need. Shammarastra ululumae paerovevim driios.'

All of the candles suddenly dimmed, sank, guttered, then in unison rose again with renewed vigor, building like spears of the sun to a brighter, warmer radiance than had been in the room before.

As warm firelight danced on his cheek, Elminster's eyes rolled up in his head. He swayed, then fell heavily to his knees, slumping forward into a crawling posture that became a face first slide onto the floor. Lying senseless among the candles, he never saw the flame spit a circle of blue motes that swirled in a circle around him and faded to invisibility, leaving the candle flame its customary amber-white in their wake.

In a chamber that was not far away, yet hidden down dark ways of spell-guarded stone, flames of the same blue were coiling and writhing inches above a floor they didn't scorch, tracing a sigil both intricate and subtly changing as it slowly rotated above the glass-smooth stones. They licked and caressed the ankles of their creator, who danced barefoot in their midst as they rose and fell around her knees. Her white silk nightgown shimmered above the flames as she wove a spell that slowly brought their hue up into her eyes. It spilled out into the air before her face like strange tears as the Lady Nasmaerae whirled and chanted.

The room was bare and dark save for the spell she wove, but it brightened just a trifle when the flames rose into an upright oval that suddenly held the slack face of the hawk-nosed Wanlorn, sprawled on the stones of his bedchamber amid a dozen dancing candles.

The Lady of Felmorel beheld that image and sang something softly that brought the half-lidded eyes of the sleeping man closer, to almost fill the scene between the racing flames. 'Ooundreth,' she chanted then. 'Ooundreth mararae!'

She spread her hands above the flames and waited for them to well up to lick her palms, bringing with them what she so craved: that dark rush of wit and raw thought she'd drunk so many times before, memories and knowledge stolen from a sleeping mind. What secrets did this Wanlorn hold?

'Give me,' she moaned, for the flood was long in coming. 'Give… me …'

Power such as she'd never tasted before suddenly surged through the flames, setting her limbs to trembling and every last hair on her body to standing stiffly out from her crawling, tingling flesh. She struggled to breathe against the sudden tension hanging in her body and the room around her, heavy and somehow aware.

Still the dark flood did not come. Who was this Wanlorn?

The image in the loop of flame before her was still two half-open, slumberous eyes…but now something was changing in those encircling flames. Tongues of silver fire were leaping among the blue, only a few at first, but faster and more often, now washing over the entire scene for a moment, now blazing up brighter as the wondering dancer watched.

Suddenly the silver flames overwhelmed the blue, and two cold eyes that were not Wanlorn's opened In their midst. Black they were, shot through with twinkling stars, but the flames that swam from them like tears were the same rich blue as were spilling from Nasmaerae's own.

'Azuth am I,' a voice that was both musical and terrible rang out of the depths of her mind. 'Cease this prying…forever. If you heed not, the means of prying shall be taken from you.'