The Temptation of Elminster

He turned, his hand upon the pull-ring of the door, and asked, 'Why else would a mage come to Moon-shorn Tower?'

Mardasper's head snapped up from the ledger, and his good eye blinked in surprise. The other one, El noticed, never closed.

'I know not,' the guardian said, sounding almost embarrassed. 'There's nothing else here.'

'Why came ye here?' El asked gently.

The guardian locked eyes with him in silence for a time, then replied, 'If my stewardship here is faithful and diligent for four years…two being already behind me…the priests of Mystra have promised to end the spell upon me that I cannot break.' He pointed at his staring eye and added pointedly, 'How I came to have this is a private matter. Ask no more on this, lest your welcome run out.'

El nodded and opened the door. Probing magics sang and snarled around him for a moment. Then the darkness inside the door became a shrinking, receding web that melted away to reveal a smooth-worn, plain stone stair leading up. As the last prince of Athalantar set his hand upon its rail, an eye seemed to appear in the smooth stone just above his hand and wink at him.. but perhaps it was just his over-weary imagination. He went on up the stair.

'To work!' The balding, bearded mage in the stained and patched robe threw up the shutter and set its support bar firmly in the socket, letting sunlight spill into the room.

'Aye, Baerast,' the younger wizard agreed, wrapping his hands in a cloth to keep dust from them before he caught up the next support bar, 'to work it is. We've much to do, to be sure.'

Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses peered over his spectacles a trifle severely and said, 'The last time you made such enthusiastic utterance, dearest Droon, you spent the entire day with some Netherese chiming-ball child's toy, trying to make it roll by itself!'

'As it was meant to do,' Beldrune of the Bent Finger replied, looking hurt. 'Is that not why we labor here thus, Baerast? Is restoring and making sense of the scraps of elder magic not an exalted calling? Doth not Holy Mystra Herself smile betimes upon us?'

'Yes, yes, and aye besides,' Tabarast said dismissively, waving away the argument like three-day-old feast table scraps. 'Though I doubt overmuch if she was impressed by a failed effort to resurrect a toy.' He hefted the last support bar. 'Yet, passing on from that trifle, let us recollect together.'

He thrust the last bar into its socket, settled it with a slap, and turned to the vast and uneven table that filled most of the room, in several places almost touching the massive and crammed bookshelves ranked along the walls.

Sixty or more untidy piles of tomes rose here and there from a carpet of scrolls, scraps of old parchment, and more recent notes that completely covered the table, in places the writings were three layers deep. The papers were held flat by a motley assortment of gems, ornate and aged rings, scraps of intricate wire or wrought metal that had once been parts of larger items, candle-topped skulls, and stranger things.

The two mages thrust out their hands above the pages and moved them in slow circles, as if a tingling in their fingertips would locate a passage they were seeking. Tabarast said slowly, 'Cordorlar, writing in the failing days of Netheril… the dragonsblood experiments…' His hand shot out to grasp a particular parchment. 'Here!'

Beldrune, frowning, said, 'I was tracing a triple-delayed-blast fireball magic some loosejaw named Olbert claimed to have made by combining earlier magics from Lhabbartan, Iliymbrim Sharnult, and…and … agghh, the name's gone now.' He looked up. 'So tell me: what dragonsblood experiments? Stirring the stuff into potions? Drinking it? Setting it aflame?'

'Introducing it into one's own blood in hopes that it would bring a human wizard longevity, increased vigor, the same immunity to certain perils that some dragons enjoy, or even full-blown draconic powers,' Tabarast replied. 'Various mages of the time claimed to have enjoyed successes in all of those areas. Not that any of them survived or left later evidence we've found yet, to bear out any such claims.' He sighed. 'We've got to get into Candlekeep.'

Beldrune smote his forehead and said, 'That again? Baerast, I agree, wholeheartedly and with every waking scrap of my brain. We do indeed have to be able to look at the tomes in Candlekeep…but we need to do so freely, whenever thoughts take us hence, not in a single or skulking visit. I somehow doubt they'll accept us as the new co-Keepers of Candlekeep if we march in there and demand such access.'

It was Tabarast's turn to frown. 'True, true,' he said with a sigh. 'Wherefore we've got to make the most of these salvaged scraps and forgotten oddments.'

He sighed again. 'No matter how untruthful and incomplete they may be.'

He poked at one yellowing parchment with an almost accusatory forefinger, adding, 'This worthy claimant boasts of eating an entire dragon, platter by platter. It took him a season, he says, and he hired the greatest cooks of the time to make it palatable fare by trading them its bones and scales. I began to doubt him when he said it was his third such dragon, and that he preferred red dragon meat to the flesh of blue dragons.'

Beldrune smiled. 'Ah, Baerast,' he said. 'Still clinging to this romantic delusion that folk who go to the trouble of writing are superior sorts who always set down the truth? Some folk lie even to their own diaries.'

He waved at the ceiling and walls around them and added, 'When all this was new, do you think the Netherese who dwelt or worked here were the great paragons some sages claim them to be…wiser than we, more mighty in all ways than the folk of today, and able to work almost any magic with a snap of the fingers? Not a bit of it! They were like us…a few bright minds, a lot of lazy-wits, and a few dark and devious twisters of truth who worked on folk around them to make others do as they desired. Sound familiar?'

Tabarast plucked up a falcon's head carved from a single palm-sized emerald an age ago and stroked its curved beak absently.

'I grant your point, Droon, yet I ask myself: what follows? Are we doomed to wallow in distortions and untruths as the years pass, with but seventeen spells to show for it…seventeen?'

Beldrune spread his hands. 'That's seventeen more magics than some mages craft in a lifetime of working the Art,' he reminded his colleague mildly. 'And we share a task both of us love…and, moreover, are granted the occasional personal reward from Herself, remember?'

'How do we know She sends those dream-visions?' Tabarast said in a low voice. 'How do we really know?'

Moonshorn Tower shook all around them for the briefest of instants, with a deep rumbling sound, somewhere a stack of books collapsed with a crash.

Beldrune smiled crookedly and said, 'That's good enough for me. What do you want Her to do, Baerast? Dole out a spell a night, written across our brains in letters of everlasting fire?'

Tabarast snorted. 'There's no need to be ridiculous, Droon.' Then he smiled almost wistfully, and added, 'Letters of fire would be nice, though, just once.'

'Old cynic,' the younger mage responded with an air of offended pomposity, 'I am never ridiculous. I merely afford a degree of jollity that has never failed to please even more discerning audiences than yourself, or should I say especially more discerning audiences than yourself.'

Tabarast mumbled something, then added more loudly, This is why we accomplish so little, as the hours and days pass unheeded. Clever words, clever words we catch and hurl like small boys at skulltoss, and the work advances but little.'

Beldrune gestured at the table. 'So take up some new scrap, and let's begin,' he challenged. 'Today we'll work together rather than pursuing separate ends and see if the Lady smiles on us. Do start, old friend, and I shall keep us to the matter at hand. In this my vigilance shall be steadfast, but as nothing to my wroth.'

'Isn't that 'wrath,' m'boy?' Tabarast asked, his hand hovering once more above the table.

'Lesser beings, dearest mage of my regard, may well indulge in wrath…I feel wroth,' Beldrune replied loftily, then added with a snarl, 'Now take up a paper, and let's be about it!'

Tabarast blinked in astonishment and took up a paper. '…That so surpasseth all mine previous… other mages decry such.. Yet will I prevail, the truth being my guide and guardian,' methinks, methinks, methinks, ho ho hum … Hmmm. Someone writing in the South, before Myth Drannor but probably not ail that long before, about a spell to put a mage's wits and all in the body of a beast, to make it prowl at his bidding for a night, or stay longer or forever within it should his own body be threatened or lost.'