Elminster in Hell

weaves?'

The Royal Magician did not bother to smile at the weak joke. 'As an Obarskyr prince once said of a far grander gift than this,' he said grimly, 'it's just a rug. There must be forty or more like this around the palace. Woven in Wheloon eighty years back or so. Bought in bulk, in 1306, when the Lion Tower was built and all the furniture moved about. Proper chaos that was, too.'

Feeling the stares of his two companions, Vangerdahast gave them both a glare and added, 'Yes, I was here in 1306. The weather was fine that year, and the five before it, too, as I recall. I'll thank you to direct your disbelief elsewhere, and spare me any comments about wizards' dotage.'

Sardyl sighed. 'Secret passages?'

Her master gave her a weary look. 'You've been reading too many fantasy books, my dear.' Alaphondar, who'd been about to ask the same thing, shut his mouth with an audible snap.

The Royal Magician gave the sage a withering glance and waved his hand at the chamber around. 'Look you: The stones are solid, with nothing to raise or lower them, floor or ceiling-and there's no room in the walls for secret doors or passages. The curve you see is because the walls here are the same walls that form the outside of the tower.' One of his hands went to a belt-pouch, hesitated with visible reluctance, and then dipped within.

There was a small glass sphere in the wizard's fingers when he raised his hand again. He murmured a word over it. Sudden light winked and moved within its depths.

'Stored magic?' Alaphondar asked, leaning forward for a better look.

Vangerdahast nodded. 'These hold but one spell-and it's a spell that works only once in a particular place. Once I've called this forth, another spell of the same sort will never manifest successfully in this room.'

'And it's a…?'

The Royal Magician left the sage's question hanging unanswered in the air as he went to the windows, closed and latched the shutters, and put his back to them. 'In a moment,' he announced, 'we should see an image, a person. Identify it if you can-and fix its features in your mind if you can't.' He felt Sardyl's question without bothering to meet her gaze, and added, 'My magic will be seeking the likeness of the last person to use transloca-tional magic into or out of this room.'

As he spoke, the glass sphere flashed with a vivid golden flame and shattered, tiny shards tumbling musically through his fingers.

A moment later, the air in the middle of the room shimmered, seemed lojlow for a moment, and suddenly grew misty. Gray wisps coiled, lengthened, and became- very suddenly-sharp and distinct. They were looking at a woman, or rather at the faint, flickering image of a woman's upper torso, die rest of her lost in the mists. She looked determined, even eager, as she raised slender bare arms and moved her fingers in the most graceful casting Sardyl had ever seen. Suddenly, she was gone, leaving two fading motes of starry light.

It was a long moment before she realized the woman hadn't been wearing anything but rings and a necklace. It was another before she heard Vangerdahast swallow in a way he rarely did.

Sardyl knew what that sound meant and turned in time to see grief in Vangerdahast's softened face. The Royal Magician looked like just what he was: an old man struggling not to cry. That was all she saw before his face hardened.

He looked up at her with what could only be called a defiant glare.

Wordlessly she put a comforting hand on his arm-something Alaphondar would never have dared to do-and asked her question with her eyes.

'Amedahast,' he replied gruffly. 'High Magess of Cormyr, into the reign of Draxius. This was her “by-herself” chamber, long ago. No one's used translocational magic here since her time-not really a surprise, that, given the wards.'

The wizard strode a few paces to the wall, peered at the map, and touched a tiny monogram in one corner of it. “Aye, here's her mark. She drew this… more than seven hundred summers ago.'

Alaphondar looked around the room once more, and shook his head. No, it really was too small to hide anything from them. 'If your missing Bolifar were in this room,' he said carefully, 'and didn't just go back down the stairs after you left him, perhaps he left by way of the window, in wraithform.'

Vangerdahast shook his head. 'No holes in those shutters, and no gaps for air to slide through. Saw you the dust when I opened them? No. Something darker happened here, I can feel it.'

His scribe was nodding. She could feel it, too, as strong as when she'd been here before. There was something about this room. A watched feeling…

Alaphondar shrugged irritably, and said, 'I'm for the bed. I've seen your nothing and have far too much to do tomorrow to stand here yawning any longer. The gods give you good slumber-though for the life of me, you don't deserve it.'

As the sage turned and left, the wizard and his scribe looked at each other. In unspoken accord, they frowned and turned to prowl the room again, searching for what must be there.

With a sudden growl of impatience at his own failing wits, Vangerdahast cast a magic-seeking, advanced on the map and the lamp, and sighed sourly. He leaned back against the wall. The map held its complex weave of old spells, and the lamp, flame and all, was bereft of enchantment. The rug also bore only the magics of long ago.

Bolifar Geldert, it seemed, had simply vanished from this room. Simply and impossibly. 'Impossible,' in Vangerclahast's experience, always meant magic.

The sage's desire for bed seems wiser than before,' he said quietly. 'Come, lass. Let's spell-lock this room and go. There'll be plenty of time to search fruitlessly on the morrow.'

Sardyl nodded and said nothing, but then she usually did.

You don't seem to feature in this yet, mage. You will he teaching vangekdahast about magic before this is done, won't you? Or is a little of this necessary?

[mind slap, red pain flaring like flames in the vaulted darkness]

If ye refrain from that, Nergal, 'twill unfold faster!

[diabolic growl of warning]

[fresh images flaring]

Between great paintings and tapestries, sheets of polished copper striped the palace walls. Lamplight reflected from the metal, throwing a warm glow onto its face and flashing back onto carefully motionless, watching guards. Standing in pairs along the walls, the guards kept their faces expressionless as the Royal Magician escorted his scribe past them to the door of her chambers.

'Get some sleep,' he told her grimly, his voice low enough to reach her ears alone. 'There'll be plenty of time to worry about Bolifar's fate in the morning. Set your spell shield.'

Sardyl nodded and bowed to him. She looked pale and on the verge of tears, her eyes large and dark.

After another wordless moment, Vangerdahast put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Lady Crownsilver slid gently out from under it and went into her room.

The Royal Magician stood like a statue, listening as his scribe closed and bolted her door. It was barely a breath later before he heard the tiny singing sound that meant she'd set her spell shield within.

Vangerdahast nodded grimly at the closed door and cast a spell of his own. As he turned away for the long trudge to his own chambers, the guards were startled to see a fist-sized eye hovering behind the wizard's back, keeping a lookout for him.

The conjured eye saw nothing suspicious on the journey, nor was there anything amiss as the Royal Magician entered his familiar rooms, set his own wards, passed into an inner spell chamber, and turned to his workbench. Without even pausing to light a lamp, he worked a mighty magic to trace Bolifar Geldert.

The mighty magic collapsed into darkness, failing utterly.

Vangerdahast frowned down at the fading ashes and wisps of smoke that had been his spell. He sighed for perhaps the hundredth time that night and headed for a closet he rarely opened. A hooded thing waited there.

The spell on the closet door gave him enough dim red radiance to drag the hood off and toss it aside. The revealed speaking-stone atop its pedestal was a chipped, sloping mass of rock, not the polished crystal sphere favored by the fashionable mages of Sembia and Cal-imshan. Just now, Vangerdahast couldn't have cared less what it looked like. Six guards whose minds were free of magic had agreed that Bolifar had gone up those stairs- and not come down.