Elminster Enraged

of Lolth before, though young and of little accomplishment, but she has no mind but mine, now. We should waste no more time, but work together henceforth.

Yes, oh yes! Starting how? What should we do right now? I-Gulkanun thought.

Rough hands were suddenly clawing at Gulkanun, pulling him away from the drow he dimly realized he’d been embracing like a lover.

He turned, mind a-tumble with Elminster and the glory he’d brought shining in it, to look into the angrily frowning face of Imbrult Longclaws.

Who’d silently opened his door and charged forth to haul his friend Gulkanun out of a dark and fell embrace, one hand outflung to shove the drow back and away with a fine disregard for feminine anatomy. “I thought she’d seduce you, the first farruking moment she got the cha …”

Imbrult’s rush of words faded into awed silence as the glory-and Elminster-flooded into his mind, too.

Under the lash of Vandur’s tongue and arrogance, he and Gulkanun had begun as fellow sufferers and silent allies, but become fast friends. They’d worked together for four long years, and liked and respected each other more than anyone else in either’s life. They were … El was showing them their gratitude and friendship for each other, how they truly felt. Their joined minds reeled. Duth’s thoughts and memories plunged into Imbrult’s, and vice versa, in a happy maelstrom of mingling and discovery.

Their faces were wet with tears, their arms were around each other, and they were making excited, inarticulate noises they only dimly noticed as the thoughts flashed back and forth among the two of them and Elminster. Around them and through them and cradling them, the great and glory-filled mind of Elminster …

We must do this! Oh, Cormyr! To banish hunger and want and treachery forever, and …, Imbrult thought.

Abruptly, their excited sharing was rudely interrupted again. This time it was Farland breaking the link. Gulkanun and Longclaws staggered, half-dazed.

The lord constable had torn the dark elf back and away from the two men, and held her with a dagger to her throat.

“I’ve heard all the tales about drow,” he growled, “and didn’t quite believe they were the seductresses some have said, but I guess …”

“It’s not what you think,” Gulkanun snapped.

Farland’s sneer was savage. “I guess not, hey, Saer Hurlspells?”

Then his face changed and he stiffened, trying to scream and failing. Something was flooding into his mind …

It was time to go adventuring again.

Oh, not in an overbold way that would alert the wizards of war and the entire court to his presence and ambitions. Not something even a nearby Harper would notice, unless one was actually standing by the roadside when he intercepted those two Crown mages who’d ridden out from Hultail.

No, this time he could revert to the way he’d fought in the early days, when the Zhentarim were a bright new idea and rising power, rather than rulers of anywhere or anyone. And he could do it with an assist from his own later days-and Chancsozbur’s tomb. It had been years since he’d even thought of that reckless fool. A man so steeped in his own overconfident stupidity as to think he could get away with swindling Manshoon. Breaking all his joints and leaving him with two worms to slide up his nose and devour him slowly from within had been a fitting fate for the dolt, but his service to Manshoon hadn’t ended there. Oh, no.

Lord Chess had been sent to seize Chancsozbur’s holdings and sell them off before his kin could arrive to claim them, and to use the coin to construct the elaborate tomb-a modest stone mausoleum on a wooded hillside near Masoner’s Bridge. The fool’s bones still lay in a great stone block of a coffin, its lid adorned with Chancsozbur’s effigy-and the floor concealing a stone-block-locked turntable that could be used to swivel the coffin aside and reveal a stair down to a lower chamber.

The men Chess had brought with him had made short bladework of Chancsozbur’s arriving kin, leaving no one to command the keys to the mausoleum save the Brotherhood. So for decades the Zhentarim had used the upper room as a smuggling way den, while in the room below their First Lord Manshoon had carefully stored several of his clones to await future needs. His other selves were all gone now, of course, awakened after deaths or taken elsewhere to more secure hideholds.

Yet all of that had left Manshoon knowing the tomb very well. Which made it a safe teleport destination. From there, he could readily translocate from landmark to landmark he could see ahead in the desired direction, to intercept those two war wizards. So the tomb awaited, only a teleport casting away …

Ah, but wait. Chores first. Banishing the scrying spheres, Manshoon cast the spell that hid most of Sraunter’s cellar-death tyrants and all-behind a false, conjured stone wall. Someone might blunder down here, a thief or busy- nosed Crown inspector or Watchman; everyone was suspicious of alchemists, after all. So let them find Sraunter’s noisome cesspit and the usual refuse of old broken furniture and the like, not a waiting row of undead beholders.

If an intruder broke his spell and saw what was behind it … well, they were on their own. He’d left his tyrants awake and under commandment to slay and pursue all life. If someone did unleash them, they’d probably still be hard at it when he got back. There was a lot of life in Suzail.

Gelnur Farland was drowning in shame and disgust and anguish. Mind-raped by a dark elf whose throat was right there under his blade, that he should have killed before she … What was this, by Crown and-?

The mind flooding into his was male, and human, and old, dark with the weight of many, many memories. A wizard’s mind, a-oh, no, no, was this a war wizard trying a mind-ream? Were they both going to be driven mad? Was it starting already? Was-

The intruding mind was as powerful as a looming castle, if he’d been a small toy cottage. An overwhelming dark and warm flood, it raced through his thoughts, his own memories, looking hard for something. Seeking … any evidence of disloyalty to the Crown, or that Gelnur Farland had anything to do with the murders in Irlingstar. And finding none, and smiling inside Gelnur’s head with such a flood of pleasure that Farland moaned aloud.

Who was this, by …

An old bearded mage walking alone, long of Shadowdale. Old Mage, Old Sage, he of all the tales about the Doombringer of Mystra, the man who’d been a maid and a …

He could see more and more of the intruder’s mind, and was being shown ever more of it, memories splendid and terrible, devils and dragons in the sky and the City of Song and terrible battlefields beyond counting …

Elminster am I. Aye, ye know me. I am the one of thy grandsire’s tales, and one of the stories told in the taverns about the Chosen of Mystra.

“By the fabled kisses of Alusair!” the lord constable gasped aloud.

Oh, a fitting oath, for they were sweet, they were indeed …

Whimsically, Elminster shared two vivid memories, thrusting the scenes into Farland’s mind like two turning, winking gems, one after the other.

The first … a fireside, by night, in the open forested wilds of northern Cormyr, among many laughing men in armor, making camp and hobbling mounts-splendid horses. Then walking among these merry noblemen in their bright armor to a tall woman who was unstrapping and tossing aside her own gleaming, firelit plates of armor, plate of the finest make, curved and molded to fit her sleek body … bared in the firelight. She turned to him with a bright smile and embraced him to take a kiss, not grant it … Alusair, young and warrior strong and proud, the spirited, wanton, wild princess …

The fireside faded, and in the darkness beyond it the second gem rushed up and swallowed Farland, plunging him into the dark stillness of an empty, cobwebbed, echoing high hall: the royal palace of Suzail, in the infamous haunted wing. And out of the gloom came a gliding shadow with the gleam of spectral armor and the same tumbling fall of hair and the same face, but older and etched by sadness and loss and fury after driving fury. It stole up swiftly, in a rush that embraced to take a kiss, but at the last moment hesitated to plead wordlessly for it … and cried what were but ghost shadows of tears when a kiss was granted. Followed by lips that hungered and brought icy searing pain as they stole the warmth of life from Elminster as he kissed her, Alusair the life-stealing