Elminster Must Die

He lifted a finger, almost as if he was a pompously lecturing tutor, and spoke even more softly. “So I’ll keep your secret, but in return I demand a price, Lady. No, don’t look at me like that; my price is one truthful answer, no more. Tell me plainly, now: Whom do you work for? Just who is interested in what I and Halance and Belnar were talking about, that you had to listen so hard?”

“I was interested,” Amarune told him truthfully, “because I’m curious. Too curious. And I’m working for no one but myself.” She hesitated, then added, “Though someone is now seeking to force the Silent Shadow to work for her, by threatening to unmask me to the Dragons. A woman every bit as agile as I am, who calls herself ‘Talane.’ ”

“Talane,” Arclath murmured, frowning. “Not a name I’ve heard before, but I’ve a feeling, by all the Watching Gods, that I’ll be hearing it again.”

“Swordcaptain Dralkin?” a Dragon telsword gasped then, trotting out of the night right past them. “We’ve found a word written in blood up on that rooftop.”

“From where the body probably fell, yes,” the swordcaptain agreed curtly, advancing from the group standing around the corpse sprawled in its pool of blood, and sending Arclath and Amarune a glare that told them clearly “move away and don’t listen.” When neither of them moved, he shrugged and asked the telsword curtly, “What word?”

“A strange one. Might be a name,” the telsword replied. “ ‘Talane.’ In Common: T-a-l-a-n-e.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I USED TO BE A WIZARD

He was in another alley-which reeked almost as much as the one he’d left, but of mildew and old mold and rotting greens-out behind one of Suzail’s better eateries.

At that time of night, only the slugs, snakes, and rats were likely to overhear an old man who stood there talking to himself.

Which was why Elminster had chosen it. He had thorny matters to decide on and no one to debate them with but himself.

He should not, could not, do what he was contemplating doing to that young woman, blood of his or not, downward dead end of a life she’d landed herself in or not. Bed of thorns or not, ’twas the bed she’d chosen, and not for him to … to do what every last king or baron or petty lordling did every day-force changes on the lives of others, to get their own way. Sometimes, for mere whim.

Yet he was not so low. No, he was lower and had been for centuries.

Yet the task-the burden-was his, his duty, and he wanted to go on.

Wanted, but could not, not alone, not old and without firm control of his magic …

“No, I told that Dragon truth,” he growled at last. “Growing older … waiting to die. And if I wait too long and die without doing what’s needful, it all ends right then. All my work, all the paltry few protections I’ve been able to give the Realms down these centuries. And that must not happen. Ever. The work must go on.”

He paced a few scowling steps, setting a snake to hastily slithering away somewhere safer, then turned and snapped to the empty air, “Even if it costs one more young lass her life. Or at least the carefree, naive freedom to waste her life doing nothing much of consequence.”

He walked a few more steps and whispered, “ ’Twill kill her.”

He walked a few more.

“And I’ll do it to her. I will.”

Thrusting his head high, he strode off purposefully into the night.

Amarune’s hands tightened like claws on her arms, and he could feel her starting to shake.

After a moment, she hissed, “I have to see who … who got killed.”

“Lady,” Arclath murmured, “is that wise?”

The glare she gave him then was fierce indeed. “It is necessary. Just because I didn’t happen to have been born a man, it doesn’t mean I was born without a brain or a life or-”

“Easy, Rune, easy.” He turned her around, rotating them both closer to the body and somehow just not seeing Swordcaptain Dralkin’s arm thrust out like a barrier-until the officer was forced to withdraw it or strike a woman-with a casual deftness that made her blink. “Now?”

She nodded. “Now.”

“Deep breath and look down, then,” he murmured, making the last half turn. She looked down-square into the gaping, contorted, white face of a dead man, whose throat was sliced open in a great wound that had half-severed his neck and had spilled a good-sized pond of dark and sticky blood across the cobbles. The sliced neck was bent at a horrible angle …

It was Ruthgul.

She turned her head away sharply, starting to really shake. The Purple Dragon swordcaptain started forward with a frown, one arm rising to reach out to her, and Arclath spun her away again, turning her in his arms until he could see her paling face.

One good look at her, and his grip on her arms tightened. “Lady,” he said firmly, “you’re coming home with me.”

“N-no,” she replied with equal firmness, twisting free of him to back quickly away and raising her voice for the Purple Dragons to hear. “I’m not. I am going to my bed, Lord, and alone. Right now.”

The faces of Dralkin and several other nearby Dragons hardened-and they stepped forward every bit as swiftly and deftly as Arclath, to bar the young Lord Delcastle’s way to Amarune.

He eyed their stern faces, brawn, and hands ready on sword hilts for a moment, then shrugged, smiled, and gave the dancer an airy wave. “Until your next shift, then!”

“Until then,” she replied heavily-and hastened away.

Only to recoil in bewildered fear as she passed Ruthgul’s body, looked down at it despite herself … and saw that it was magically changing into the likeness of someone else.

A man she didn’t know at all.

Shaking her head-what, by all the gods, was going on? Had Ruthgul been someone else all those years, or was that someone who’d been impersonating him and had paid the price? — she ducked into a side alley and trotted hastily along it to reach the door to her abode on a side of the building the Lord Delcastle couldn’t see.

Arclath regarded the stone-faced Dragons, who were forming a wall of burly uniformed flesh to prevent him following the dancer or getting a better look at the dead man-whose change he’d half-glimpsed, and confirmed from some of their reactions-with a broadening smile. Giving them a theatrical sigh, he observed, “Women! I’ll never understand them!”

“Whereas they,” Dralkin told him warningly, “understand you all too well, Lord. As, now, do we.”

“Bravely challenged, good Swordcaptain,” Arclath replied airily, turning with a wave of farewell to stroll off back the way he’d come, “yet you don’t, you know. No one understands me! Save perhaps one person, a little.”

“That would be me,” a sharp voice said suddenly at his elbow.

It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a wizard of war by the name of Glathra.

“I’ve listened in to a lot of what you’ve said and done this night,” she added briskly, “so spare me all the fanciful tales and instead yield me a few plain answers.”

“Not without something decent to drink,” he said, giving her a courtly bow. “So beautiful an interrogator deserves no less.”

“I believe we have water in the palace that doesn’t have too many squirming things floating in it,” she replied dryly, as war wizards and Purple Dragons appeared from all sides to close in