Elminster Enraged

Elminster’s bolts were gentle in comparison, already fading-but the war wizard briefly became a rigid, spinning top that stabbed bolts of lightning in all directions. El was glad of being breast-down in mud and nettles, because the men in the trees-there were six or seven of them, or even more, coming at a run to share in the slaying, not just the four he’d seen-were taking a fierce punishment.

When the amulet was spent, and the stiff body of its wearer had toppled in silence to the dead leaves and fallen boughs, only three men still stood at the edge of the forest, all of them reeling and groaning, sorely wounded. Everyone else lay sprawled and still.

El found her feet, clambered over the ditch and the road and the ditch on the other side, and ran into the trees, toward the sharp seared-boar smell of cooked men she knew she’d find.

“Who are you?” she demanded sharply of the first man she reached who was still alive.

He turned a pain-wracked face to her, roared out wordless anger and pain, and tried to slash at her with a short sword she’d not noticed until then. His unsteady swing missed entirely and sent him crashing down onto his face. She ran on.

“Who are you?” she demanded of the next man. He gave her a bewildered look; half his face had sagged as if it was melting, and the pupils of his eyes were of very different sizes.

“Who do you obey?” she snapped.

“B-b-broadshield,” he choked out, and he toppled. So these were the notorious Broadshield’s Beasts, outlaws who-

A shadow fell across the sky.

El raced for the nearest large tree. An arrow thrummed through the air right in front of her chin as she ran, and a second howled past just behind her. Then she was at the tree, around it, and plastered against its trunk, trying to become very still.

She could see more men coming her way now, striding through the forest with bows in their hands and murder in their hard eyes.

The foremost pair couldn’t be more than a dozen strides away. They lacked bows, but bore long knives, and would reach her in a breath or so. Thick underbrush crackled as they burst out of it to close on her, raising their knives-and suddenly something large, scaly, and black plunged and snatched, with blurring speed.

It left behind a patch of sunlight that hadn’t been there before, with several trees splintered and fallen and the leaves of another tumbling out of the sky, in the wake of a huge black dragon that banked along the mountainside so closely that its great batlike wings rippled at the touch of rocks racing past beneath them. As it climbed, more than branches and leaves fell from it. Something dark and wet fell, too. Something that looked like the leg of a man.

The new sunlit patch stood empty. The two Beasts who’d been hastening to kill Elminster were gone.

El kept very still, watching Alorglauvenemaus turn in the air, in a great arc that would bring it around and howling down out of the sky right … at her tree.

She backed hastily away to the next tree, keeping her eyes on the great black wyrm. The chest of gems was clutched in its jaws, its eyes blazed with anger, and its claws were slowly tightening through two wet bundles that had been men.

More of Broadshield’s Beasts had almost reached the patch of sunlight, and were slowing to peer at the scar the dragon had made.

It made another, right through them.

Shrieking men fled in all directions as great claws grabbed and then tightened. Wings flapped along the mountainside again ere the dragon climbed, its shoulders surging and its wings beating-and when it was as high as the lowest clouds, it let go of all it held in its claws. El watched tiny shapes tumble amid despairing cries, and shivered despite herself. Then as faint and distant splatterings began behind her, she turned and ran through the forest, seeking thickly tangled bushes deeper in the trees.

The splintering crashes of the dragon’s third and fourth visits came from well behind her, but by the time El dared to skulk warily back to the dragon’s scar, Alorglauvenemaus was flying slowly above the trees examining just one body in its claws. It recognized that dead man, flung the corpse down in disgust, and flapped back to its lair.

El melted back against a tree trunk and stayed there for a good long time, watching for the dragon’s return- but it didn’t reappear.

There was a time when I could have saved the lone mage, defeated all these outlaws and the dragon, too, without slaying them, and …

Aye, there had been a time.

We all grow old, Elminster, Symrustar reminded him. We all grow lesser. Every one of us, Chosen or commoner or rough beast. ’Tis the way of the world.

“I …,” El replied aloud, roughly. “I … grow tired of the way of the world. And increasingly it seems the world is growing tired of me.”

Are you angry? Or sad?

“Both. Sad more than angry, for now.”

For now. The voice in his mind deepened, sounding for a moment more like that of long-gone Khelben speaking doom than it did wry and mocking Symrustar.

“For now,” El whispered to the trees, keeping her eyes on the mountainside where the dragon would appear, if it emerged again from its lair.

Yet the breezes blew and the silences stretched, and there came no dragon.

Eventually she dared to go to the body of the fallen war wizard. That amulet wasn’t something all that many of Cormyr’s Crown mages walked around wearing; this must have been someone important. He either hadn’t worn one of the enchanted war wizard cloaks on this little forest foray, that could teleport their wearers away from harm, or had lost it somewhere along the way.

There was no hope of healing the man, after what the amulet had done; above his waist and below his shoulders, there just wasn’t much left of him. El relieved the dead fingers of their rings, swiftly checked the boots and belt for anything else of interest-two daggers and a few pouches of spell stuff, most of it spoiled-then hastened away into the forest, trying to walk more or less parallel to the winding Orondstars Road, but also to get well away from all the dead men. When dusk came stealing in, there’d be no shortage of hungry prowlers. It would be highly desirable to find a stream and walk along in it for some time, to throw off anything tracking her by scent. The rings, now …

As she walked, El examined them. The first, a standard war wizard ring. She slipped it onto her own hand, onto the middle finger of her left hand, just as its rightful wearer had worn it. The second one … could this be a commander’s ring? Nay, plain but with a little “dragon snout” triangle projecting from the band, along a wearer’s finger … ’twas that other sort. Aye, a … team ring, worn by members of perilous mission teams. Caladnei had instituted them. What luck! El slid it onto her other middle finger, and murmured the word that would make the little band identify its owner.

“Brannon Lucksar, wizard of war,” the ring announced solemnly, in a hard-edged male voice.

So she’d witnessed the last exhausted, stumbling moments of the life of Brannon Lucksar-the leader of the crack war wizard team based at Immerkeep, if she remembered rightly. Lucksar may well have been the last survivor of his team, hunted down and slain by Broadshield’s Beasts. Had they already killed the other war wizards?

El sighed. So much death … so many bad things she could do nothing about. Even when she was there in time, she managed little or nothing …

Lucksar’s team ring revealed to her mind that it … seemed to have the usual powers: it could record four verbal messages, empower a sending spell, and store a little healing magic. It could also, El recalled, be readily traced by from afar by other war wizards.

Walking warily on through the forest, El listened to the ring’s four messages. One was a congratulations for “Another task well-handled,” from some gruff-voiced unknown older man who concluded by telling Lucksar, “Your reward will be harder tasks, a fate richly earned.” Another was a breathless female whisper, “I love you; take care.” A third was a terse series of instructions for finding a hidden cache in a city alley somewhere … and the fourth implored: “Get done with this quickly, then get yourself to Castle Irlingstar to look into the murders there before Vandur and his lads make too much of a mess of things.”