them all to one side with him, to see if the giant would hurl its spells at where he should have been.
It did not. From one hand flashed a spreading arc of lightning, leaping from cloud to cloud in a blinding needle to spear a sphere that Elminster hurriedly thrust its way. The sphere lit up blue-white for a moment, then slowly faded into darkness, flickering once, and was gone.
Elminster barely saw it. His eyes were on the giant's other hand, which had made a throwing motion but seemed empty. What could-? Then his eyes narrowed, and he shifted spheres into a line, out from himself toward the giant.
One sphere flared almost immediately, lit from within by tongues of fire, and was gone. A delayed blast fireball.
'So we think ourselves clever, do we?' Elminster asked the night almost absently, and launched his response.
The spell was one he'd always thought unfair, one called 'disintegrate' that devoured matter as if it had never been, wiping out struggling creatures and things of beauty alike, visiting such prompt oblivion that El thought it something no mage should habitually use. Ah, high principles. The Old Mage shrugged, and used it now.
One vast arm was his target, to see if an overbalanced giant would fall, or if a one-armed giant could hurl only one spell at a time. He peered into the falling night, and obligingly, the arm that had hurled the stealthy fireball vanished.
Not far away, The Masked One lifted a sweating face and gasped out a heartfelt curse on Mystra and Tymora both-fickle women, to turn their faces away in the moment of his triumph. Now the old man falling from the sky had a chance, when his memories and mastery should already have been flowing into an impatient Thayan necromancer. The Masked One snarled and raised his hands to cast a spell he hadn't expected to have to use.
And in a place of shifting shadows, Milhvar of the Malaugrym stared into his scrying globe and smiled, stroking the shimmering stuff of the cloak of shadows in his ringers. Soon would come the time to use it. Soon.
Thay, Kythorn 19
To a warm and scented pool where several pairs of soft hands stroked a bored Zulkir with oil, there came a sudden commotion. The cause of this commotion rose up, alarm on his face, spilling silent slaves away from him, and said aloud, 'My cloak and towels to the Turret of Stars, at once!' Not waiting to hear their murmured replies, he uttered the word that took him there. Someone was hurling around more magic than any man should be able to harness, out there in the night, in the very heart of Thay! Even if this was no attack or act of treachery, thousands of bindings could be broken! Why had no one informed him? Why was he always the last to learn of such things?
As the stars over Thay glittered and swam, the giant lurched and turned ponderously, raising its remaining arm in silence to point at the Old Mage, who shrugged and began the casting of a firestorm.
The weaving he was attempting was a slow and complex thing, denying it much use on battlefields or in sorcerous duels, but this strange drifting struggle was unlike most duels. This might well be the fire spell's best chosen time.
The giant struck first. A fiery comet streaked skyward, well above the Old Mage, and burst, raining down fiery death from above. El finished his casting with a flourish and looked up to enjoy the show. He'd not seen a Rain of Fire light up the darkness since three magefairs ago.
And then he saw the spreading rainbow that was his foe's other sally, and muttered a curse of old Myth Drannor.
Thay, Kythorn 19
In a tower whose spires stroked the stars, a tall robed figure turned sharply away from the battle he'd been watching-the wrestlings of a captured couatl and a winged devourer he'd conjured into existence not long be-fore- and said aloud, 'Something's amiss!'
He turned to the west, in time to feel the surge again. Greater magic than he'd ever felt on the move before, even in the battles where massed Red Wizards had together hurled storms at the witches of Rashemen. Greater magic than any mortal should be able to control.
Perhaps it was out of all control, or perhaps a god had come to Thay. The robed archwizard shuddered and tapped a crystal sphere, awakening it to floating life. He must know what doom might be hurtling toward them all.
El willed his undergarments to take him to one side again and thrust himself backward, twisting his fall into an eddy in the air that gave him time enough to cast a spell he'd used before. Bringing the spell up one word short of its close, Elminster fell through the night-more quickly now, as he willed it-and watched the giant's disjunction suck in the spheres of his epuration spell, drinking them one by one.
He glanced up. The spheres had absorbed the entire rain of fire before being destroyed, and he should be out of range of the disjunction by now. He spoke that last word, and silver spheres bubbled out around him once more. Now he had no more epuration spells left.
He turned in the air, his clout and undervest tugging at him in response to his direction, and sent himself on a long glide toward the giant, trailing silver spheres. He had to get a better look at things.
It was the work of but a moment to send a flaring eye away from him, whistling away like a tiny tear of flame. He watched it dwindle speedily toward the giant as the titan's next attack came.
Roiling purple beams that would have wracked and forcibly transformed his body lanced past. Elminster rolled aside to be well clear of them and watched the flight of his probe.
It plunged into magical shadow and lit up the smoky form of the giant from within. In the spreading glow, Elminster saw the tendrils of conjured matter expanding, moving slowly to re-form the missing arm, and also saw the flashes of moving energy that sustained and animated the shadowy titan. Flashes emanating not from a man, but from… an item, a small bar or baton that hung in the giant's heart, winking and turning as it strove to move the giant to grasp at Elminster again.
Aha. So this giant was being directed from elsewhere, That-scepter, was it? — might be worth a look, if he could ever get to it.
Elminster summoned up his mage-sight as he plunged ever closer to his gigantic foe. 'Far be it from me to cast aspersions on your origins, mighty Ao,' he murmured, 'or even to inquire too closely about such things, notions of blasphemy being what they are, but… Ao, you bastard!'
He screamed those last words as he saw silver spheres crumbling close around him under the assault of an attack meant to transform his body to stone, and a second attack, breaths behind the first, intended to shatter his petrified form.
This was enough, and more than enough. Folk were dying in the Realms while wild magic raged and avatars walked, as he wasted time playing with this ungainly wizard's nightmare. Well, at least there'd be no more spells of open rending sent his way-not now.
At that thought he plunged into the giant's smoky body, spheres close around him. Sudden lightnings raged, but the spheres bought his life with their own, one after another, and held breathable air between them, and he went on.
Down, down, spiraling in the lightning-lashed gloom toward the quickening, rushing lights that marked the consternation of whoever was making the giant move. Silver spheres were falling away like mist before an open flame now, but he was close, very close… and falling like a flung stone, hands outstretched.
Then a sphere flashed into being around his goal, a shimmering, rainbow-hued sphere of light right in front of him, banishing the shadowy heart of the giant like tattered smoke with its power, pulsing as it promised his death.
A prismatic sphere. Thanks again, Ao.
Elminster put his hands back and then swept them together sharply before him, and silver spheres flashed willingly past him to their doom, flaring into vivid flashes of red, orange, and yellow as they bored through the deadly multilayered barrier in his path.
