Elminster Must Die

as awareness returned. The wild fire faded from her eyes, and she stared into Storm’s gaze as they lay on the wet rock nose to nose.

Then she wrinkled her nose.

“Faugh!” she spat. “I stink!”

And she flung herself into the water, dragging Storm with her.

The pool was every whit as cold as Storm had expected, numbing her instantly. She’d be chilled for a day or more, thanks to her soaked breeches and boots, but that was a worry for later.

At the moment, Alassra was laughing with delight amid water aglow as the last of the cloak’s magic passed into her and it crumbled to nothingness. “Did you bring some soap? Or one of those new Sembian scents?”

Storm made a face. “Do I look as if I want to stink like a cartload of jungle flowers crushed into the blended lees of an extensive wine cellar?”

“You,” her sister said happily, “look like you can and do shrug off everything and serenely take from life what you seek, letting all else drift away without getting bothered over it.”

She spread her limbs and floated, submerged except for her face. “Thank you, Storm. Thank you for myself back … for a little while. So, what’s afoot in the wider world outside this hidehold? What are you up to? And El-where’s he right now, and what foolishness is driving his deeds?”

“Meddling in Cormyr, as usual,” Storm replied. “He sent me because he wants all the fun for himself.”

“Hah, as usual,” her sister told the cavern ceiling. “He always tries to keep me away from the best moments, too. I’d have slain thrice the Red Wizards, down the years, if he wasn’t always-”

“Alassra,” Storm told her with mock severity, hauling herself out of the water and hissing at the chill she felt as streams of it ran from her to rejoin the pool, “you haven’t left two-thirds of the Red Wizards alive, so far as any of us can tell, at any time since you started defending Aglarond. You couldn’t have claimed three times the Thayan lives you did. Trust me.”

“Oh?” Alassra grinned archly. “Why start now, after all these years? Tell me more news. Not about El-you’re helping him, of course-but of the wider Realms. Any kings toppled? Dragons tearing cities apart? Realms obliberated by angry dueling archwizards?”

“Oh, all of those,” Storm chuckled, running both hands through her hair to shed fresh streams of water as she cast a swift glance back at the manacles and the rest of the magic she’d brought. “Where to begin?”

“Thay, of course,” her sister said promptly. “I always want to hear what calamities have befallen the Thayans lately. Why, alathant so partresper I … what’s kaladash, ah-”

Their eyes met, and the wildness was back in the Simbul’s. And a moment of desperation, too, almost of pleading, before they rolled up in her head. Then they sank half-closed, making her look sleepy.

“S-sister-,” she managed, in one last struggling entreaty.

Storm plunged grimly back into the pool and reached for her sister as Alassra started to slip under, babbling in earnest.

That hadn’t lasted long.

Mystra damn it all.

Storm tugged her feebly thrashing sister-who was starting to bark like a dog-up out of the water, rolling her far enough away from it that only a determined crawl-and Alassra was beyond doing anything in a manner that might be termed “determined”-could get her back to a swift drowning before Storm returned.

Then she crawled back to her cloak and the manacles, water running from her soaked breeches and boots in floods that thoroughly drenched the sloping stone beneath her knees.

Storm shackled her sister to the wall ring, wrists crossed and hands behind head. That put most of her back in the water again-but unless something tore Alassra’s arms from their sockets, the short length of the manacles would keep her face clear of the surface.

Giving Storm time enough to gather plenty of wood for a large fire and rocks to warm around it, to get herself and her sister dry.

Drenched and dripping, jerkin in hand to bundle twigs in, she lowered her head and trudged grimly back out through the ward again.

She hadn’t expected the cloak to win Alassra’s sanity back for long-its enchantments were relatively feeble, after all-but it had lasted a much shorter time than she’d expected.

Which was, as they said, bad. Storm hadn’t brought all that many enchanted gewgaws with her.

Huh. El had better liberate a lot of magic from the royal palace or the nobles of Cormyr coming to council, if he ever wanted to see his beloved sane again.

Once Lass was over the initial frenzy, the rage that always accompanied her slide back into idiocy-and who wouldn’t scream and fight, knowing they were sinking back into that? — she’d be fine. A survivor who’d fight like a tiger to cling to life. The ankle-chain didn’t keep her from the water; it kept her from walking out of the cave, absorbing the ward as she went.

Even chained a long way from it, she was unwittingly reaching out and leeching its power, draining it ever- so-slowly to keep herself alive. Water, she had, and food she needed not, as long as she had magic to drink from afar …

Yet if ever Lass got out to wander the vast forest that surrounded the Dales and cloaked most of the land between Sembia and the Moonsea, she’d be just one more clever prowling beast awaiting fearful foresters’ arrows. And the jaws and claws of larger, stronger prowling beasts.

Those were watchmens’ manacles, recent Cormyrean forgework stolen from down in the Dale. They neither had nor needed keys, and locked or opened by sliding complex catches on both shackles at once, something that could be done easily except by anyone wearing them, the cuffs being rigid. Unless they were put on a shapeshifter, or someone who had tentacles, that is …

Well, Lass had always hated malaugrym and doppelgangers and anything with tentacles; she was hardly likely to work any magic that could give her such features, even if she did somehow regain sanity enough to work any magic at all.

Those thoughts took Storm back out through the torments of the field-she really noticed, then, how much feebler they had become-into the forest where full night had fallen, bringing a darkness that would be deep indeed until the clouds thinned and let the moon shine down.

Which made the tiny, leaping orange glows over to her right all the more noticeable. She couldn’t see the fire, only the light it was throwing up onto the leaves of overhanging trees; a campfire in one of the hollows on the edge of Shadowdale, where travelers who lacked coin for inns or wanted not to be seen down in the dale often spent nights.

They might be merely passing through, or they could be trouble. Which meant she could not ignore them.

As silently as she knew how-which was very slowly, in this poor light-Storm crept closer to the flames.

There were eight well-armed, fierce-looking adventurers in the hollow. Three were huddled asleep in their cloaks; two stood watch with their backs to trees, facing out into the night; and a trio were muttering together as they banked their fire with clods of earth. Their talk told Storm they were trouble, all right.

“Harper’s Hill,” one was saying. “Three different men down in the dale said he’ll be thereabouts, if he’s to be found at all.”

“I heard he lurks around Storm Silverhand’s farm-with her and a lot o’ ghosts and the like,” another put in.

“Nay,” said the last of the three. “Ulth and I searched there a day back. No crops sown this year, and a garden run wild. The house stands open and empty. They say in the dale the Lady Storm walks out of the woods when she pleases-mayhap twice a year, now, no more-and no one knows when she’ll appear or why. Never stays more than a night, seems to avoid her farm, then is gone into the trees again.”

“Crazed, all of them,” the first man offered, spitting thoughtfully into the fire. “Been thus a long time, now.”

“So what do we do if we can’t find Elminster?” the second man asked, sounding younger and less assured than the other two. “Search the backside of every tree between here and Sembia? That’s a