Elminster Must Die

Then Halance Tarandar realized what the subtle changes in her gaze had meant, and stopped in midstride, a little chill finding its way down his back.

She’d been listening to their every word.

Why?

“She’s my kin, all right,” Elminster muttered to Storm, letting go of the pendant. “Taking as much interest in doings at court as we do. Too much interest for her continued health, as it happens; yon courtier, a kindly and overworked young chamberjack, has just realized how much attention she was paying to them when young Lord Delcastle took him and a friend out to the club she dances at. Right now he’s wondering whom she’s working for, or what scheme she’s hatching herself. He’ll report as much to Delcastle, too, but thankfully for her-and us-he’s too falling-down tired to do it yet. We should be able to get to her first.”

“And bring Ganrahast and Vainrence and all their keen wizards down on her head?” Storm asked warningly.

El gave her a scowl. “She’s young and of my blood,” he growled. “She should welcome a little adventure.”

“A little, yes,” Storm replied. “I’m not so sure she’ll stay smilingly welcoming when half the realm comes after her. We’re used to it, remember?”

“Hmmph. Better for Cormyr if all its younglings happily take on anything the world hurls at them.”

“You’re sounding like a gruff old noble,” the silver-haired bard teased him.

“I’m feeling like a gruff old noble,” Elminster snapped back. “Distinctly underappreciated and beset by suspicious wizards of war at every stride I take. Not to mention experiencing a glut of foes that’s flourishing, not diminishing.”

Storm shrugged. “As I said, we’re used to that. Ride easy, El. Yes, you had to destroy more wizards and highknights than Cormyr should lose, but it hasn’t gotten really dark yet, for us or for young Amarune.”

“That,” the Sage of Shadowdale muttered, “is precisely what’s souring me. I’ve a feeling this is going to go very bad.”

“And I have a feeling you’re not going to be disappointed,” Storm sighed, putting a comforting arm around his shoulders.

He gave her another scowl, but it faded into something close to a wry grin.

Ere he shook his head and told her, “Just two of us, lass, until we secure Amarune’s loyalty and get her competent enough to do what we do and keep herself alive. Then we’ll be three. Not enough, not near enough.”

The air around them dimmed, then, as an enchantment on the cache abruptly took hold of them both.

Ganrahast had cast trap spells on the remaining caches that slowed every movement of someone who violated a cache without murmuring the correct password or wearing the right sort of enchanted ring.

Elminster and Storm had time to recognize what was happening and start to say so to each other, eyes meeting in dismay … but they lacked even a moment more to do anything about it.

“Such a simple trap! It seems the Chosen of Mystra are mighty no longer. So you are brought low at last, old foe. At last.”

The glow of the conjured spell-scene was by far the brightest light in the vast and gloomy cavern. In its heart, Elminster and Storm stood despondently facing each other in a secret passage deep in the royal palace, their faces grim as they started to speak words so slowly it would take them hours to finish.

“At last,” the beholder said again, smiling crookedly.

It was a very big smile, because the eye tyrant was as large across as the front door of any grand mansion. It had tentacles, some of them ending in hands of three opposed pincers, as well as eyestalks. The mind the tentacled hulk had begun life with was not the mind that still inhabited it.

It spent almost all of its time alone-and like many a loner who had not held that role lifelong, by choice, it spoke aloud to itself often.

“Yet the time to strike is not quite yet. Not with all the magics still tied to you. I’ve no wish to be destroyed alongside you in the fury of their unleashing. Your slaying must befall at just the right time. So I shall watch and wait still more. Yet now I know my wait will-finally-not be long.”

The eye tyrant smiled. “As your torment deepens, will you save the kingdom you so love, the rock you stand on when saving all the Realms one more time-or will you let that rock crumble and shatter to save the madwoman you love?”

It drifted across the cavern to a floating cluster of small, glowing spheres, each one a scrying eye that was busily showing its own moving, silent scene of a different place in the Realms. Sounds would arise from those images only if the beholder willed matters so.

At that time, it seemed to prefer the sound of its own voice.

“I need not even muster an attack on Cormyr, so feeble have you become. The pieces already in play upon the board will serve well enough. Soon, soon will come my revenge-and at last, at long last, Elminster of Shadowdale will die a final death.”

The tentacled terror drifted back to the large, three-dimensional image of Elminster and Storm, frozen in the narrow passage.

“And you will die, Elminster, knowing it is I who have slain you,” the beholder whispered, almost fondly.

It gave the cavern around a dry little chuckle. “Soon, soon …”

Halance fought again to keep his jaws shut. He could not seem to stop yawning.

Gods, but he was tired-with a whole day of work ahead of him, a day that bid fair to be a very full one, too.

Behind the dark weight of weariness, the chamberjack never felt the cold, cruel presence that was watching him from afar, lurking deep in his own mind.

Around him, the royal court was abuzz. Not just with the ever-mounting confusion and endless rearrangements for the council-coming down on them all very soon-but at what had befallen in the palace the previous night.

The uproar was bringing war wizards in all haste from every corner of the realm, a worried-looking Understeward Corleth Fentable had murmured to Halance. More than a dozen Purple Dragons dead-and Belnar Buckmantle, too. Murdered at their posts by unknown intruders who’d beheaded most of them and had departed by some secret way that had the highknights as well as the war wizards mightily upset.

Fentable had looked more than worried, come to that. He’d looked sick … and he happened to be one superior that Halance liked, trusted, and respected. The man must know things he wasn’t allowed to tell underlings, to make him look that way.

Halance shook his head. Things always happened all at once, stlarn it. When everyone was already too busy to tend to them properly. “Beshaba’s kiss,” the older courtiers called it. Mischance, farruking, ever-irritating mischance …

Manshoon smiled darkly. Mischance or artful manipulation.

Halance yawned again. He had to find Arclath and warn him that the mask dancer had been listening to their talk the night before and might well be the paid informant of some noble client or other.

Yet he hadn’t time to be seeking nobles across the fair city, with all the daily moving of furniture and linens and replacement of oil lamps to be done.

Not with all the extra council preparations on his desk, the untidy heap of fresh scrawled notes from Fentable and Mallowfaer and the gods alone knew who else about this, that, and the other little details.

Now prepare the lure …

Note, make a note; Halance snatched up a fresh scrap of parchment from the pile given him to make his senior chamberjack notes, and a quill from his stand, and wrote hastily, “Tell Arclath Delcastle, Belnar murdered. Also, the dancer in the Dragonriders’ was listening to all we said.”