Elminster Must Die

“If this information is anywhere near truth,” Ganrahast pointed out.

Vainrence shrugged. “Like you, I suspect the veracity of anything I’m freely told. Yet can we dare not take this seriously?”

“When we could be dooming the king? And most of the senior nobles of the realm with him? Hardly.”

Vainrence spared himself enough time to curse. After a moment, Ganrahast joined him.

“I’ll put the hilt in my mouth,” Elminster whispered, settling himself on his side on the cold stone floor, “and share what my mind sees with thine, for as long as the magic holds out.”

Alusair nodded and put out her hand to him.

Her touch was no more solid than a whisper, but her chill was deep, plunging him into uncontrollable shiverings in an instant.

Yet his word was his word, and she’d led him to a hidden Obarskyr dagger and offered him its magic without hesitation, so …

There was an instant of whirling nausea as El unleashed the spell and found it caught up in strong new wards that tore and twisted …

Until he could ride them, become one with them, and melt through them.

Typically unsubtle, brute force magework.

Wizards, these days …

Ganrahast started to pace. The windowless room near the top of the north turret held only an empty wardrobe, plain wooden bench, and a table along the wall beside it where a row of storm lanterns were kept ready, so he had plenty of room to stride.

That, the cloaking spells they’d cast on the chamber long before, and the room’s deserted remoteness were why the two men liked to use it.

Vainrence was right, of course. They couldn’t ignore the tip, even if it had come from someone quite likely paid to pass it on by a disguised someone else who likely intended it as misdirection. There was very little they could do about that; since the Spellplague, the mind-reaming that had once made Cormyr’s wizards of war so feared-and effective-was useless.

The Crown’s decreed death penalty for trying a mind-reaming was quite beside the point. Attempts by any wizard to use the reaming spells always resulted in that mage being driven to idiocy or instantly and severely spell- scarred. So regardless of Foril’s laws and the longtime refuge of no war wizard facing trial for what no king or courtier learned about, not a single war wizard dared mind-ream anyone-unless the mage was already dying and did it as a “last loyalty.”

If things had been otherwise, a lot of sneering noble heads would probably long since have left their shoulders … but things weren’t otherwise, and all Cormyr knew it.

“My turn,” Ganrahast said quietly. “I overheard something interesting at the feast. Rumors about some nobles trying, sometime in the near future, a little foray into the haunted wing. What I could not learn-because the gossipers didn’t know-was whether this was to be a lark, some sort of dare or rite of passage, or yet another attempt to get at all the treasure and prisoners and chained pleasure maidens we’re supposed to keep hidden away there.”

“You mean there aren’t any pleasure maidens?” Vainrence joked. “Years I’ve been serving the Crown, years, man, in hopes of …”

“Har har har, Rence. Think about it. We’ll double the guards on all ways in, of course. Who’s behind it, that’s what I’d like to know.”

As everyone in the palace and most who worked in the royal court knew very well, the haunted wing of the palace really was haunted. Even war wizards avoided it as much as they could. The Blue Fire had twisted layers upon layers of wards cast down the centuries into dangerous magics no war wizard dared tamper with.

The Spellplague had wrought one good thing in the royal quarter of Suzail, and one thing only. No portal or any other sort of translocation magic worked properly anywhere within, into, or out of the palace, court, or royal gardens anymore, so the Crown was spared one worry. No one could magically whisk marauding monsters, would- be assassins, or small armies into the haunted wing or anywhere else near where the council would be held.

Ganrahast, Vainrence, and the most senior courtiers had already talked about raising spells to seal off the haunted wing during the council. The war wizards would have done so without wasting breath on a single word of discussion if they’d quite dared to cast wards that powerful inside the palace or had known the best web of spells to try to construct.

“The Shadovar, perhaps?”

With that quiet murmur, Vainrence voiced the longtime fear of both men: that Shadovar wizards had killed and were now impersonating the heads of many powerful noble families of Cormyr, and doing the same with courtiers, so they’d soon gain control of the realm by stealth, without a sword being drawn or a spell hurled.

These dark thoughts had already made them suspicious of certain efforts, promoted by the War Wizard Baerold, to collect items of magic said to house the trapped essences of the Nine.

After all, Baerold just might be a Shadovar trying to use-and use up-the war wizards as his agents to get his hands on what three now-dead wizards had written of as the “blueflame ghosts” the Nine had become, which could be commanded by one who held the items that contained them, and who knew how to compel them.

Might be, but might not be, either. Ganrahast and Vainrence were the most powerful of the current wizards of war, and their spells-that fell far short of the mind-reaming of old-could find no hint of Baerold being anything more than a young, ambitious, rather romantic mage of middling skills and training. So they watched him very closely and were careful not to advance his training with any sort of alacrity.

Like most Cormyreans with ears, Ganrahast and Vainrence had heard legends of the Nine, the legendary band of adventurers destroyed more than twoscore-and-a-hundred summers earlier, when Laeral Silverhand-later famous as the Lady Mage of Waterdeep, and consort of the Blackstaff, Khelben Arunsun-was possessed by the fell Crown of Horns.

Being war wizards, they knew a little more about the Nine. Most nobles of Cormyr had heard rumors that some of the Nine still existed, trapped in magic items, and could be summoned forth from those items by those who held them-and knew how-to fight as the item-bearer’s slaves.

Unless those three wizards, whose writings had been proven true in all other respects, had told the exact same lie, Ganrahast and Vainrence also knew the rumors of “blueflame ghosts that could be commanded as deadly slaves” were true.

With two men trying to pace back and forth in it, the room near the top of the north turret suddenly seemed small and crowded.

Elminster was suddenly back in darkness, the only radiance a faint glow from the ghostly face bending over him. The dagger had melted away entirely, its magic spent; his mouth held only the taste of old iron, a tang like long-shed blood.

He was cold, damnably cold …

The ghost of Alusair drew back from him. “Still alive, El?”

“Still alive,” he mumbled through chattering teeth. “At least they’re not plotting against the king, those two.” Shaking his numbed arms to try to get some feeling back into them, he rolled over. “What of our greedy young robber noble and his merry band?”

“I’m going after them,” Alusair announced, her eyes two dark holes in what was little more than a woman- shaped wisp of gray, a glow so faint it was barely there at all. “I won’t slay them-yet. I, too, want to know what they’re up to, here in my home. Yet there is something I must know, Old Mage.”

She drifted closer to Elminster, her eyes darker still.

“Are you on Cormyr’s side in this? Or still playing your larger games across the Realms, using us all like pawns on a chessboard?”

Elminster regarded her gravely. “I have always been on Cormyr’s side, Princess. Yet, aye, I’ve always played those larger games, as ye put it, too. I must. There is no one else who can save the Realms.”