Elminster Enraged

man. Who turned, saw him, gave the young lord an unlovely grin, and dashed away into the trees, running like a storm wind.

Rune watched open-mouthed. Gods, the man was fast!

Arclath started to sprint after the outlaw leader, but after a few strides gave up with a shrug and turned back. The spell hurling men were out onto the road, still striking down outlaws with emerald flame.

“War wizards,” Arclath identified them. “Down, Rune!”

Amarune ignored him. A blasting spell could kill her if she was cowering on the road just as easily as if she was standing up, after all. She watched the mages come, trotting forward with wands in their hands. She could see Purple Dragon badges on the shoulders and breasts of their leather jerkins. Jerkins, yes, over breeches, with leather belts and baldrics hung thickly with rows of pouches-not a pointed hat or a robe to be seen. Yet they were wizards, all right; two had just turned and caused walls of fire to erupt on the road, immolating the barrier of felled trees.

Others fanned out among the Dragons, peering alertly here and there. “Who’s in charge here? Who’s the ranking officer?” one called, in the stern tones of someone used to giving commands.

Before anyone could reply, an oddly lumpy black arrow sped out of the trees and struck him in the side.

A moment later, he burst, drenching a fellow wizard beside him with glowing green wetness.

It was acid, by the way that second mage’s flesh started to melt away from his bones as he screamed. Two vainly running steps later he collapsed, and his shrieks abruptly faded. His arms, flung up too late to shield his face, were down to bare bone, and abruptly fell off, revealing a toppling-from-bony shoulders skull. Rune stared at the small heap of tangled bones and sticky, slumping mess-and was suddenly and violently sick, all over the road in front of her.

Another arrow found another wizard, with the same grisly result. And another.

Then the outlaws came charging down out of the trees, bows in their hands, loosing more black arrows as they came. Rune could see the bladders bound to the arrows as Beasts ran right past her.

The outlaws ignored her and Arclath and even the armored Purple Dragons, spending all of their attention- and arrows-on the Crown wizards.

Who suddenly broke and fled back into the forest from whence they’d come. The outlaws raced after them.

“Let not a one of them live!” they heard Broadshield bellow. “Kill them all!”

The walls of fire suddenly moved to try to block the pursuing outlaws, but they merely turned and outran them, crashing out of sight amid the trees.

Arclath shook his head. “I thought I knew the realm,” he muttered, “but this … this is beyond belief. Outlaws hunting wizards of war like game birds-or vermin-in the forest!”

“Catch those horses!” a Purple Dragon ordered other Dragons, pointing. Then he trotted over to Arclath and Amarune, his sword drawn. It was the lionar who’d earlier given the orders to “ride hard” from the first volley of outlaw arrows, and later to retreat from the barrier.

“Prisoners!” he snapped. “Come with me.”

Arclath hefted his loop of chain meaningfully, but the lionar gave him a look of disgust and said, “Don’t be a fool, lord. We’d all welcome the excuse to kill you-defending ourselves in the thick of your hired outlaw attack, mind-and be able to turn back rather than riding on to Irlingstar. There are dangerous outlaws in these woods!”

Arclath let go the loop and spread his hands.

“That’s better,” the sandy-haired officer told him. “Now mount up-we’ll help, if you need it. Our way on now stands clear.”

There was nothing left of the barrier but ashes and a few laggard wisps of smoke. The walls of fire still raged off to one side of the road, but there was ample room to lead the snorting, balking horses past the flames and over the hot ashes, and on.

Rune didn’t disdain Arclath’s help in mounting, as the few surviving Dragons handled them both with more speed than gentleness, as they hurried to get them past the battlefield. The fallen, both outlaw and soldier, and the surplus riderless, wandering horses were abandoned without a backward glance.

“We must hurry,” the same Dragon, who seemed to be in command, told them curtly. “Make no unnecessary noise.”

No sooner was his back turned and the horses were on the move, then Rune leaned close to Arclath. “Those arrows-what were they?”

“Black-painted shafts with bladders of acid attached to them. Black dragon acid,” he replied grimly. “How they work, exploding inside a body like that, I’m not quite sure. How they got that much black dragon acid in the first place, and what they make the bladders from, that the acid doesn’t eat through them in the space of a swift breath-now that I’d dearly love to know!”

“Silence!” the nearest Dragon snapped.

Arclath rolled his eyes and gave the surrounding Realms silence. Just as mute, Rune rode thoughtfully at his side, more than a little shaken.

The alchemist’s cellar was crowded-and stank. Death tyrants rotted; it was one of the things death tyrants did. Thrust together along one wall, their eyestalks interlaced, they still took up more room than most men would find comfortable.

Yet Manshoon, currently inhabiting Immaero Sraunter’s body, was certainly not like most men.

He was calmly reclining on what was left of the undead beholder that was in the worst shape of all in his slave stable, a half-collapsed mass of festering putrefaction, thoughtfully studying a lone glowing white sphere that floated in midair above him.

In its depths could be seen a fast-moving but silent scene of a battle on a forest road where gouts of green flame were erupting, Purple Dragons were dying, and outlaws were loosing arrows everywhere.

Beside him, perched gingerly on a stool and staring up at the same unfolding entertainment, was a middle- aged woman of nondescript looks who was obviously terrified and on the verge of being violently sick thanks to the reek of the death tyrants. Thus far, terror was overriding nausea.

Aside from the cowed woman herself, only Manshoon knew who this woman really was-though a great many courtiers in the nearby palace would have recognized the trembling man she’d been before Manshoon’s spells had altered her. Manshoon had compelled the disgraced suspected traitor Palace Understeward Corleth Fentable to flee the palace. Now Fentable was with him in the cellar, ready to be a replacement body-someone unfamiliar in Suzail-if Manshoon needed to depart Sraunter for any reason, and in the meantime to be a “pair of hands, plus audience” assistant.

More than once, as the fighting on the distant Orondstars Road unfolded, Manshoon chuckled at what he saw. That did not make the cowering Fentable relax much.

When it was done, the much-diminished prisoner escort hastening on along the road, Manshoon waved a hand to dismiss the scene, rose, and stretched.

“No sign of Elminster,” he murmured to Fentable, “so I have destroyed him! I have! Hmm … unless he sent these wizards of war. And they are clearly the outlaws’ intended quarry, not the prisoners nor their escort. The outlaws were hoping the Crown mages would appear, were ready for them, are eager to hunt them now; their attack on the escort was purely a lure for the mages. So what makes lawless plunderswords bold enough to openly attack-to chase-war wizards? Or what scares or coerces them so well that they prefer facing battle spells to turning on the one that sent them?”

Somewhere else-somewhere furnished with gibbering mouthers as seating, not rotting death tyrants-two watchers beheld the same battle. They saw it in the depths of Manshoon’s scrying sphere, too, because they were watching Manshoon.

Unlike the vampire’s magic, theirs conveyed not just the image of the alchemist’s cellar, but all the sounds from it. The taller watcher had mastered stronger scryings than Manshoon commanded more than two thousand years ago, as well as the habit of often watching what certain others were up to. Which was one of the reasons he was still around to watch anything.