pursue that path.'
'I have,' Valmaxian said, turning to offer a weak smile to his teacher. 'I apologize.'
Kelaerede returned Valmaxian's weak smile with a strong one. 'You're young and impatient, Val. You're merely five hundred years old-you know that, don't you?'
'You've told me.'
'It's true,' Kelaerede said. 'I could have made the same mistake myself at that age. When I was as young and frustrated as you are I might have done what you're considering doing now, but I didn't. I was warned away by my own teacher the same way I'm warning you now. Decades pass fast enough for our people, Val, and it may be decades before you are able to do what you set out to do today. It could be decades more before you're ready to go out on your own-a century maybe-but you will do it, Val. You will succeed.'
Valmaxian looked up at the dome so far above his head and forced another weak smile.
'Yes,' he said, 'Yes, I will succeed. Yes, I will.'
In a much smaller room, a tenday later, Valmaxian spread a scroll out on a rough flagstone floor. The scroll had been cut from a lamb's hide, carefully tanned to a nearly paper thinness. The writing on it was in Kelaerede's careful hand. Only a handful of elves on all of Toril could have written the runes, sigils, and fell diagrams inscribed there.
He glanced around the simple chamber, checking one last time that everything was ready. The furniture had been moved out, a single thin taper burned in an iron candlestick, and he'd firmly shuttered the narrow arched window.
Valmaxian wore a common robe of rough wool. His hands were shaking. He drew in a deep breath and held it, counting to twenty before exhaling. He sat on his knees on the cold stone floor, a third of the way into the room with the single locked door at his back. In front of him, past the expanse of the scroll, was nothing: fifteen feet or so of floor then blank wall. The thirty-foot high ceiling seemed excessive for so small a room, but it was one of the reasons he chose it.
The gate would be twenty feet in diameter.
He rubbed his eyes, took three quick breaths, and started to read.
It was difficult going. The words were hard to say. Instructions not meant to be read aloud were interwoven with them, advising on proper cadence, tone, timbre, even earnestness and enthusiasm. Likewise there were instructions for the proper gestures. His hands and fingers had to move in a very precise way and at very specific intervals.
At least three times in the course of the minute it took to cast the spell Valmaxian almost stopped. He knew he should stop but also knew he had to go on.
The last word echoed into silence in the still air and Valmaxian dropped his shaking, sweating hands to the floor. He didn't know what to do with them.
He blinked when the light first appeared-a soft violet traced with blue-and it didn't so much grow brighter as more plentiful. It formed a ball first, about the size of Valmaxian's fist. The young elf looked at it with increasing anxiety.
He'd started it, and there was no way to stop it.
The ball of light continued to grow. It was as big as Valmaxian's head when it started to spin. As it spun faster, the ball flattened out on top, becoming a whirling oval of blue-violet light. Flashes of white appeared, smearing into traces of brilliance. The light grew rapidly and became a flat disk that slowly tipped up on one edge. It held its place perpendicular to the floor eight feet from the tip of Valmaxian's nose. There was no heat, but the young Gold elf perspired all the same. He blinked but never looked away.
All at once the disk opened in the center and spun itself to form a ring. Beyond it, Valmaxian was able to make out irregular shadows. The light from the spinning ring interfered with his natural ability to see in the dark. He strained to focus on the space in the center of the ring, and after a few blinks he was sure he was looking at a wind-carved boulder. The curved rock had almost the shape of a woman, at least as tall as Valmaxian. The ring reached its full diameter of twenty feet and the violet light dimmed. Valmaxian saw more of the misshapen rocks loosely sprinkled across a broken landscape of talus and coarse sand. The deep red sky was striped with clouds of black dust whipped by a buffeting wind.
Another shape formed in the swirling dust: a shadow two heads taller than the tallest elf. It walked on two legs, swinging long, apelike arms at its side, its head and shoulders studded with irregular horns and spikes.
Valmaxian held his breath as he watched the demon step through the gate into his little room. The spell had been specifically designed to call but one creature from all the endless malignancy of the Abyss, one nabassu, one thing.
It looked like a gorilla, but with huge, batlike wings rustling behind it. Its broad, flat face was dominated by a wide mouth held open by two upturned tusks. Its little nose was pushed back between two startlingly intelligent, silver eyes that seemed to reflect the light of the candle and the spinning magic gate as though they were made of polished platinum. Grotesquely naked, its skin was blotchy and gray.
Valmaxian tried to swallow but couldn't. His throat closed tight. The demon noticed that and smiled, drawing back half a step.
'En-' Valmaxian started to say, then coughed. He made sure to keep his eyes from meeting the demon's. 'En'Sel'Dinen.'
A low growl rolled out of the fiend's mouth, followed by a drifting mist of green vapor. 'Ah… you called…' the beast said, its voice like thunder heard from the bottom of a well.
'I am Valmaxian,' said the elf, forcing a confidence into his voice that he didn't really feel.
'Well,' the demon replied, 'good for you. And Kelaerede?'
Valmaxian managed to swallow finally then said, 'He forbade me from calling you. I had to steal the scroll.'
The demon made a sound that Valmaxian thought must be a laugh.
'I require your service,' the elf said.
'Ah,' said the demon, 'and I thought this was a social call.'
Valmaxian felt his face flush. He kept his eyes to one side.
'You know enough not to look me in the eyes,' En'Sel'Dinen observed. 'Kelaerede-he's your master?' 'He is my teacher.'
'And what has he taught you about me?' the demon asked.
'Enough,' Valmaxian said, his eyes wandering over En'SePDinen's misshapen toes. A tiny insect scurried under one ragged yellow toenail.
'Wealth, then, is it?' the demon asked. 'Power? Magic?'
'Yes,' Valmaxian whispered.
The demon laughed.
Valmaxian cleared his throat and said more clearly, 'Magic. The others will follow.'
The demon stopped laughing and leaned slightly forward. 'Nothing comes without a cost,' it said. 'What are you willing to spend?'
'Anything,' Valmaxian said. 'I don't know.'
'Neither do I,' the demon replied, 'but I'll think of something. A single sacrifice. A sacrifice to be decided later.'
Valmaxian felt his own mouth curl up into a smile, though deep down he didn't want to smile. 'Anything,' he said again. 'Anything.'
The 76th Year of the Amethyst (-6964 DR)
The fireball exploded in the exact center of a circle formed by freestanding columns of bleached marble, simple cylinders each a thousand feet tall. The circular expanse of the interior was a floor of identical white marble a mile in diameter. Valmaxian sat on a ladder-back chair of polished mahogany far enough away from the explosion that his spidersilk robe wasn't ruffled by the wind from the Shockwave. He couldn't feel the heat, either.
'Did you melt it?' Valmaxian asked in a quiet, relaxed voice.
An enchantment he'd created himself took hold of the soft tones and transported his voice clearly across the
