Elminster Must Die

“Have … to …,” Elminster snarled, ducking his head and shuddering.

“Don’t die on me, Old Mage! Don’t you die on me!”

“Die while a spirited lass has her fingers inside me? No fear! Ahhh, blast ye, that hurts! I’m … I’m too old for this!”

“Hah! Stop me vitals!” she joked.

Elminster smiled a little sadly. “Already happened, remember?”

Alusair took advantage of her spectral state to become long and thin, so she could thrust herself around ahead of him and swing her head back to face his and give him a dark look. “Thank you for farrukin’ reminding me, Old Mage.”

Elminster winced. “You play with sharp claws out.”

“Always did,” she said softly. “Would again, if I had it all to do over again. Folk respect sharp claws and sneer at those who are nice and kindly. Wish it were otherwise, but … ’tis not. Damn the gods.”

“Look,” Arclath told the coldly frowning wizard, “I was meeting with Lady Glathra and the king himself, and-”

“No doubt you were,” the wizard of war replied grimly. “Yet the Lady Glathra has left the palace on … secret Crown business, and my orders are very clear. All nobles are to absent themselves from the palace until invited inside for council. No exceptions, and no excuses accepted. You have a home of your own to go to, and I’m sure you know the way there, Lord Delcastle. Your journey begins yonder.”

His imperiously pointing hand indicated exterior doors that two Purple Dragons-who were not very carefully suppressing smirks-were drawing open. Arclath eyed the wall of Purple Dragons right behind the coldly firm mage, inclined his head in polite defeat, and turned for the door.

“Mind you inform Glathra-or the king-at your first sight of either of them that you conducted me out of the palace, and that I can be found at Delcastle Manor,” he told the wizard, turning on his heel in the doorway to do so. “I suspect a failure on your part to do as much will not go over well-and were I you, I might risk royal displeasure, but the wrath of the Lady Glathra, now …”

At least one of the Purple Dragons chuckled.

Which was when there was a sudden commotion behind Arclath, and he spun around in time to see that one of the Dragons at the door had thrust a spear out to bar the path of a weathered old man in even more battered leather clothing-and the old man had jerked on the spear, hauled the soldier within reach, got him in an armlock, and spun him around to make him into a living shield against the spear of the other door guard.

“Is this the way ye greet arriving lords of Waterdeep, now?” he demanded gruffly.

The wizard of war stepped forward, reaching for a wand at his belt-and Arclath took great pleasure in clapping a hand around the mage’s wrist and snapping, “Try to avoid a diplomatic disaster, Saer Wizard!”

“Stirge!” one of the Dragons behind the sputtering mage shouted suddenly, pointing out the open door.

The battered old man spun around, the Dragon under his arm struggling but being dragged with him-and lashed out with a dagger that had suddenly appeared in his hairy free hand.

Gutted and with one wing sliced through, the flapping stirge tumbled to the ground, where the old man brought a firm boot down on its head.

“Stirges? In daylight, at the very doors of the palace?” the wizard snarled, struggling to wrench his arm free of Arclath’s grip.

“It’s the pet of the Lord Marlin Stormserpent,” Arclath informed him. “Or was.”

“And what was it doing out and about?” a Dragon growled. “He sent it?”

Arclath frowned. “We can but guess.” He looked the wizard straight in the eye, as they stood nose to nose, and added, “Unless you’d like to do something of real service to the Crown-and go and ask him?”

Elminster shook his vials out of his boots, then decided he didn’t need them, and put them back. The healing potions Alusair had poured down him were enough. He was back to being as good as he got, these days.

“Storm,” he asked the ghostly princess sadly, “what was left of her?”

“Nothing,” Alusair told him. “Did you not feel her ring working? Right in the heart of the blast, it took her away somewhere. No, there wasn’t a trace of her-not one drop-in the crypt.”

She watched him peel off the last of the shattered armor. “Now I’ve one to ask you, El. Who hurled that spell at you?”

The Sage of Shadowdale shrugged. “A wizard?” he offered helpfully. “Lass, I know not. Truly.”

“One of the wizards of war you didn’t manage to kill recently?” Alusair asked a little coolly.

Elminster shrugged again. “Life wasn’t simple a century ago, but I used to know a little about what was going on right around me. A little.”

Manshoon frowned. Who was this gruff old man who tossed Purple Dragons about fearlessly and called himself a lord of Waterdeep? The man was just then lurching off down the promenade with the rolling gait of a sailor … could it be one of Elminster’s disguises?

Surely not. Yet the man seemed somehow familiar. Seen long before, in, yes, Waterdeep …

Oh, surely not. Mirt? It couldn’t be.

Or could it?

Manshoon shook his head.

It was, by Bane: Mirt the Moneylender. Once Mirt the Merciless, and still not a man anyone should turn his back on. He peered intently into the scene …

Mirt stood in the middle of a busy Suzail street and cursed bitterly.

The taverns and clubs of Cormyr’s capital were deafeningly crowded bastions of revelry this day, to be sure, awash in excited nobles and their servants making merry on the eve of some grand council or other.

Every last one of them he’d managed to get a reply from was stone-cold certain it was the Year of the Ageless One. Which meant nigh a century had passed, somehow, and Asper and Durnan and nigh all the folk he’d ever known were long dead.

Naed.

Well, those two lordlings’ purses would be empty long before morning, buying him what he needed to get very, very drunk.

Two floors above where Alusair’s healing potions had been cached, and at the far end of another wing of the vast and grandly sprawling palace, was a state chamber so remote from the great rooms of state that it was very seldom used.

Yet to those who liked crimson draperies and soft, overstuffed beds of matching hues, the Room of the Fire Wyrm was a favorite. It had become so favored for trysts among the palace staff, in fact, that the war wizards had taken possession of its keys almost forty years earlier, and had kept it shut up ever since, except when one of them was present.

One of them was there right then. She had locked the doors from the inside after entering, and she was not alone.

Raereene was her name, and at that moment she wore only a hungry expression and her long, glossy fall of blue-black hair. The young palace server atop her, Kreane, was gasping out her name repeatedly as panting passion seized them both.

Their ardor might have more than cooled if they’d known who was watching them through the eyes of the smiling portrait of King Duar, which hung across the room, facing the great lamp-studded hanging sculpture of the fire wyrm for which the cavern was named.

Princess Alusair Obarskyr had ridden and been ridden by many panting men in her day, and her eyes were two ghostly flames of hunger and longing as Elminster came up beside her in the secret passage.

Without a word, he put his hand on where her shoulder would have been had it been solid, and he bent to