Elminster Enraged

head of the stairs.

“Well met,” he said wryly, nodding to the lord constable as an equal. “Duth Gulkanun,” he added, tapping his own chest. Then he looked down the stair. His face went as expressionless as Imbrult’s had, and stayed that way. Neither of them had loved their superior. “Vandur. Pushed, I take it?”

Farland nodded.

Gulkanun shrugged. “I’ll thank whoever did this for their valuable service to Cormyr and to the two of us, after we imprison them and worm the ‘why’ of their deed out of them. Did anyone see it happen?” He looked sharply at Arclath and Amarune.

Who both shook their heads, keeping silent. It seemed safest.

“The murderer, presumably,” Longclaws said dryly, pulling off his cloak and draping it over his still- shapeshifting left hand with the deft ease of long practice.

“Well, now, I’d never have thought of that. I knew I was right to call in some brilliant wizards of war when things started to go wrong,” Farland said sarcastically.

“Lord Constable,” Arclath asked soothingly, “have you anything strong to drink in your office, or some other location where we could all sit down together in relative privacy?”

“Away from my other noble guests, you mean?” Farland asked with a tight smile, closing the gate across the head of the stair and locking it with a rattle of keys. He turned back in the direction of his distant office. “Come.”

As they fell into step around him, Longclaws taking the rear and Gulkanun the fore without any discussion or signal, Amarune asked, “Lord Constable, where are all the-ah, ‘guests’? I expected they’d be gathered here to gawk and smirk.”

“As per standing orders,” the tall war wizard told her, “we cast fear serpents down the passages when we set about the tasks Vandur gave us.”

“Fear serpents?”

“Spells that move on from where they’re cast, as far as they can drift without encountering a large and unyielding obstacle-like a wall or door. They make folk move away by radiating magic that makes anything that can smell or hear feel fearful and sick. They drove the nobles out of the passages, into their cells. Fear serpents fade fast; the effects will be gone soon.”

“So the murderer was immune to this spell?”

“Bore a Purple Dragon badge or the Crown ring most wizards of war wear, more likely,” Gulkanun replied, “or just fought through the magic. It can be done.”

“So we might be looking for a traitor among us,” Arclath said softly. “The guards, I mean.”

“We always look for traitors among us,” Farland told him grimly. “Day in and day out. Sometimes we even find them.”

Elminster sank back down amid the rocks, his eyes and throat stinging from the caustic reek of years upon years’ worth of dragon dung.

There were no side caverns. Everything narrowed to clefts and then mere cracks in the solid rock, all running in the wrong directions to reach the surface without passing through the dragon’s great cavern. She could abandon her drow body, of course, and easily drift up to the Realms Above as a trail of ashes. But, no. She’d fought in this body, reveled in its agility and freedom from ever-present pains, and did not want to relinquish it soon. She loved it. Nor did she want any part of the cruelty that would be leaving the ruined echo of Symrustar Auglamyr trapped to slowly die alone, in a body the fading Chosen was far too diminished to control.

And the dragon was awake.

Worse yet, it was a wyrm she knew. Wherefore it also knew her, albeit as a man with a different smell, and those memories-and most dragons had very good recall of the memories they chose to retain, remembrances they polished brightly and kept sharp-would make it eagerly hungry for vengeance.

Alorglauvenemaus had once, some seven centuries back …

But no, what mattered now wasn’t long gone days and the deeds done in them. The dragon was awake, malice glittering in its eyes as it fixed its glare on the dark hole it usually backed up to void into, awaiting an intruder.

It knew something alive was lurking nearby, beyond that opening, and it had risen and recurled itself atop its great hoard, settling itself amid the clinkings and slitherings of great drifts of collapsing coins into a new position that put its head chin-down amid its heaped loot, facing the back cleft in which it had smelled and heard life moving.

Movements that had continued, albeit with great stealth and patience, after it had twice spat gouts of slaying acid down the hole.

Something was down there, something that wanted to come up. And it would come while Alorglauvenemaus yet waited, for there was nothing more patient than a dragon.

El could have conjured a spying eye to peer at the wyrm, perhaps even goading it into spewing more acid-but doing so would tell it what it faced, and some dragons had mastered or collected enough magic to do great harm to wizards. Moreover, she didn’t need to see the dragon move into a new pose of vigilance to know what it was doing; she’d heard enough dragons, even taken a dragon’s shape herself in the past, to know it was ready and waiting for her.

No, she knew better magic to employ. In some ways, dragons could be as easily goaded as dwarves lost in gold lust. Threaten their hoard, move and handle treasures they deemed theirs, and the wyrms had to fight hard to resist the rages that awakened in them.

Alorglauvenemaus would have to fight harder than some, for it had begun to settle into the sedentary, stay- at-home life of the dragon that no longer boldly fared forth to forge respect and fear, making a place for itself forcibly in the life of the part of the Realms it chose as its dominion. It made bargains with humans and other lesser beings to work for it, to be its arms and jaws and bearers of influence, while it increasingly sat and pondered and slept. Alorglauvenemaus would feel more threatened than a young dragon, yet more angry and eager for a fray than a wyrm sliding from ancient into its twilight.

El rolled over to face the unseen dark stone ceiling overhead, biting her own lip to get the trace of blood she’d need to make the magic properly powerful, spread her arms wide, and began to cast the spell.

She worked slowly and carefully, opting for calm precision and near silence rather than the swift, bold gestures that went with a shouted battle incantation.

Either would work, for one who knew the Art well enough. And Weave or no Weave, she knew her magic.

It was a very old spell, powerful but essentially simple. Some Netherese mages had called it “the Awakening,” when they weren’t being too fanciful in namings that sought to claim older magics as their own. The Awakening, stronger and less limited than other such magics. It was rarely used these days, when wizards had become walking repositories of minor magics worn on the fingers, toes, earlobes, and everywhere else, and its casting would unleash the unintended unless they stripped away and left behind all of that enchanted clutter.

They got it from us, those arrogant archwizards, Symrustar said tartly.

“Aren’t all human archwizards arrogant?” El thought.

The answer came with a tone of amusement. Those particular arrogant archwizards.

Elminster sent her mind guest a silent smile. She had already removed the scepters and everything else magical she carried or wore, and left them in a cleft in the cavern below this one. She’d known the spell she would need, and the one that would be necessary after that, too.

“Rise, Alorglauvenemaus,” she whispered, after the first incantation was done. “Time to dance!”

Then she rolled over and ran for the cavern wall, hard by the nearest side of the opening into the cavern. In any cave, stalactites could fall like daggers when explosions set the stone to really shaking.