Elminster Must Die

and then chose the handle of the right-hand door.

“Dead in about ten breaths from now,” Elminster finished his sentence for him briskly, “if ye step blindly through yon door. The elder Lady Illance is changing her gown in the chamber beyond, and her guards are very swift with their blades. Their poisoned blades, may I add, despite Crown law.”

Arclath whirled around. “What? They’d not dare! The-”

Elminster shook his head. “Ye are blind indeed, young Delcastle. Nigh every last noble at council will be breaking one Crown law or another-and they’ll all have weapons, spells on themselves, and some sort of forbidden magic or poison about their persons. Are ye sure ye’re a noble? Know ye nothing?”

Arclath stared at the old wizard, eyes narrowing. “You’re … you’re Elminster, aren’t you?”

El smiled, nodded-and slumped into a rather stiff parody of a courtly bow that left Arclath rolling his eyes and grinning.

Then he shook his head, still smiling, and said, “Well, I know I can’t walk around the palace asking for your advice and warnings at every second step without half-a-dozen war wizards and Dragons pouncing on us both!”

Elminster produced a grin of his own and went to the suit of armor. Plucking off its close-visored helm, he calmly emptied a dead mouse and its nest out of it, lowered it onto his head, and replied hollowly from inside it, “That’s why ye’re about to acquire a bodyguard. Help me on with all the rest of this clobber. Duar was about my size, I see, and he’s far too long dust to be wanting it all back now.”

“About your height, maybe, but he was twice your girth and even larger in the shoulders,” Arclath sighed, “but I doubt we dare tour the palace looking for a better fit.”

“I suppose not,” Elminster agreed cheerfully. “Besides, this is the suit with the enchanted codpiece-and I just might need it. Ye never know.”

His grotesquely broad wink left Arclath rolling his eyes again, but El was already sliding open the secret panel and waving Arclath through it. The noble stepped into the gloomy space beyond, and El followed.

The moment the panel closed behind them, the left-hand door at the end of the room swung open to reveal Glathra Barcantle and a man wearing a crown whom half Suzail knew at a glance: King Foril. They had been listening, and their faces were grim.

“So Elminster is after the Nine and believes them to be here,” Glathra said gloomily.

The king nodded. “He must not gain them. Any he does find, we must take back from him. Arclath can help us with that.”

“Can, yes,” Glathra muttered, “but will he?”

Foril sighed. “Distasteful as it seems, it’s high time to compel a few of our oh-so-loyal nobles to demonstrate their loyalty to Cormyr. Do whatever you must.”

Marlin was high-hearted with excitement, but Lothrae was coldly calm.

The words had all come out in rather a babbling rush, true, in his anxiousness to inform Lothrae that a third member of the Nine was bound to an item, somewhere which apparently half Suzail knew about!

“Contain yourself, Marlin,” Lothrae said curtly. “It will be the height of folly to rush off searching all Faerun for magic that could be anywhere, when the council is almost upon us. We must be careful, avoid doing things that will draw both attention and suspicion, and keep our minds on seizing the right opportunity.”

“But we need all the magic we can get,” Marlin protested. “The Spellplague was unpredictable. Like a Dragon Sea windstorm, it left some things untouched here whilst utterly destroying castles’n’all over there. And it’s not done yet! Things’re still changing, stlarn it.”

“All of this is both true-and irrelevant. The ‘but the Spellplague’ argument can and has been used to justify anything and everything,” Lothrae replied coldly. “Were you to advance such an argument at court, expect to be openly sneered and laughed at; for far too many years, every single argument began thus. ‘But the Spellplague’ nothing.”

“But if someone else gets the axe-”

“Then you’ll know whom to kill to gain it, without turning all Suzail upside down and alerting much of it to your name and interests in the doing,” Lothrae snapped. “And with that said, leaving it clear to both of us that you have nothing more useful to add to our shared wisdom just now, this converse is at an end.”

The glowing air above the orb went dark, Lothrae’s image winking out, fading, and falling, all in less time than it took Marlin to draw breath to protest.

He was alone amid the dust-covered Stormserpent discards again.

Lothrae had been … irritated. From the outset. Not by news of the axe, so … what? The timing of the contact? Had he been busy or in danger of being discovered or overheard?

Marlin frowned as he restored things to the way he liked to leave them and left the room.

The orbs had come from Lothrae and were old magic. When either of the men entered the rooms where their orbs were kept, a spell cast by an outlander wizard Lothrae had hired and then murdered when his work was done made the other feel that a contact was about to come.

Early on, Marlin had usually felt Lothrae’s approach to his orb, wherever it was, and had hastened to the disused tower of the family mansion. These days, he usually went to his orb and initiated their converses.

Was Lothrae losing interest in their alliance? Or wanting him to keep silent for a time? Or was there some danger or difficulty at Lothrae’s end?

Well, the silent dust around him was hardly likely to offer him any answers. And somewhere out there, probably nearby, was a hand axe that held a secret …

Manshoon sighed.

Marlin Stormserpent. Young. Rash. And at that moment, nigh blind with excitement.

Idiot lordling. So utterly, utterly predictable.

The serving maid whose mind the soon-Emperor of Cormyr was riding shrugged off the stained old sheet to give her sneer the space she felt it needed.

Young Stormserpent had just rushed past her and was dwindling down the curving stair, all oblivious to his surroundings. She probably needn’t have bothered embracing the old broken statue and casting its dust sheet over them both. Just sitting still right under his nose would probably have been sufficient.

Blind idiot lordling.

“Things’re still changing,” she murmured, as Manshoon spoke through her. “But you grow no whit wiser, Marlin oh-so-ambitious Stormserpent. Nothing more useful to add to any shared wisdom just now, I’d say. Yet you’re one of the brighter-witted lordlings of the realm. All the gods help us.”

Lord Broryn Windstag was right out of breath, Sornstern was in a hardly better state, and even Kathkote Dawntard was panting and going purple. They were all wearing revel masks they’d very recently snatched down off the wall of a shrieking noblewoman’s boudoir-but hadn’t begun their foray with those masks, and in any case, whatever “protection” the slips of black, betrimmed silk afforded them would last only as long as they could keep out of the hands of the authorities.

Their search for the hand axe had grown increasingly frantic, and they’d had to bruise more than a few folk along the way. War wizards and Purple Dragons were after them, with the city roused; aye, it was death or exile if they didn’t manage to get clear away-and stay there for long enough for doubt and planted false rumors and a few convenient “accidents” to befall key witnesses …

Gasping for breath as they stumbled up the back stair of an expensive address just off the promenade, with the senseless body of its guard tumbling to a stop behind them, the three started to wonder aloud at how they came to be doing it so wildly, rashly, and precipitously. Or for that matter, at all.

“Was some spell at work on our minds?” Windstag snarled.

“Well, even if one wasn’t, that’s got to be our claim if we get caught!” Sornstern panted, reeling against the stairpost as they reached the upper floor.