“I-uh-fair fortune, lady!” the highest-ranking Dragon said hastily, throwing wide the door just as Storm reached for it. She thanked him with a bright smile, stepped out into the night-and stopped, so suddenly that only Amarune’s grace and balance kept Elminster from walking right into her.
Mirt the Moneylender was coming down the Promenade, hustling hard and groaning for breath, making for their door just as fast as he could lurch. Behind him, Storm could see the reason for his haste.
Two blueflame ghosts were right on his heels, swords out, with unpleasant grins on their faces.
“A rescue!” Mirt gasped. “A rescue, stlarn it!”
“Of course,” Storm said, running to him and taking the winded lord by one shoulder. “Rune!”
Elminster took the Waterdhavian’s other arm, and they hustled him back through the door.
“Change of plan!” Storm barked at the frowning guards. “Fetch all the Crown mages you can find here, at once!”
They gaped at her.
“Now!” she roared, trying to sound just like Glathra. “Go! Run as you’ve never run before! Run!”
The guards ran-three of the youngest right away, the others as Storm gave them glares and finally let go of the panting old lord and advanced on them, snarling like an angry wolf.
“They’re right behind us,” El murmured, kicking the door shut and swinging Mirt around against the passage wall.
Storm sprang to bar the door. “I’m hoping Luse-”
Two blades burst through the door and bit into the door bar in her hands.
She tugged, even as the blueflame slayers pulled, freeing and withdrawing their swords. Storm hastily barred the door.
A moment later, the wards alongside it flared into sudden visibility, bulging and glowing as the ghosts sought to walk right through the thick stone palace wall.
“There’s no time to wait for Alusair,” Elminster growled. “If I go wild-witted, Stormy One…”
“Of course,” Storm replied, readying her blade.
The ward went blinding white, flared into wild, spitting lightning in front of Elminster, spat forth an angry shower of sparks-and a glowing blue sword burst through that radiance, its wielder right behind it.
Elminster smiled, sidestepped the sword, and gently said a spell right into the ghost’s face.
All sound went away in an instant, or so it seemed-but swirling dust and racing cracks across nearby plaster wall adornments told El he’d just been deafened. The ghost’s blue light winked out, leaving behind an immobile, blackened skeleton holding a sword, and the palace ward shrank away, retreating along the passage in both directions like two racing grassfires.
Only to roil in the distance momentarily-and come rushing back.
The blue flames rekindled, the motionless skeleton was once more a solid-looking man on the move-that the wards slammed into from both sides.
Whereupon Elminster’s sight went away, too. He was briefly aware of flying helplessly through the air, then encountering something smooth, flat, and very hard.
Only to rebound back off it, to walk forward blindly on legs that suddenly seemed made of rubber or perhaps of string…
“They could build palaces, in those days,” he observed brightly, or thought he did, before lightning stabbed him in thousands of places and took all Suzail away.
The blast smote Fentable’s ears like a hard-swung kitchen skillet, its bright flare slashing the night as if the darkness were a smooth-stretched cloak that could be sliced with a knife.
Cringing in the doorway with hands clapped to his ears, Fentable blinked at the sudden brightness, but clearly saw the old and massive palace door blown high into the air and flung across the Promenade to smash hard into the stone front of a grand shop-below-and-clubs-above building, then crash to the ground in splintered ruin, raising dust.
Right behind the whirling door tumbled a figure wreathed in flickering blue flames.
It struck the shop front lower down, on a central pillar flanked by the shuttered shop windows, and slid limply down the unyielding stone to the ground.
Fentable might have been terrified, but Manshoon was merely astonished.
He stared at the felled host, then at the gaping doorway whence the door had come.
Framed in it was the mask dancer, Amarune Whitewave, reeling unsteadily as she stared out into the street, arms raised and flung wide, lightning playing angrily around her hands.
She’d just blasted down a blueflame ghost?
Just what had happened to this hitherto unskilled-at-Art young mask dancer, descendant of Elminster, to make her an archwizard in… what, days?
Manshoon’s eyes narrowed.
The very cobbles underfoot shook as the door burst out of its frame and went flying.
Pressed hard against the Promenade side of the palace wall right beside that door, a blueflame ghost watched another blueflame ghost hurtle past.
Then, not even looking to see what befell that fellow slayer, and caring less, it ducked through the gaping doorway into the palace.
Right past a reeling, drooling, empty-eyed lass in the grip of snarling lightning it raced, and a groaning, also-reeling, silver-haired woman beyond, to pursue a fat man stumbling along a narrow passage that led deeper into the palace, trailing a muttered sea of curses.
The ghost smiled gleefully as it ran and raised its sword.
Mirt saw the blue reflections of its flames looming up close behind him and turned grimly to give battle.
The ghost’s grin widened. One slash at most this might take, two for sport, and then A sword that was more ghostly shadow than steel slashed at blue flames-and sliced them into dark nothingness.
The running ghost faltered in sheer astonishment.
And found itself staring into a smile as full of grim glee as its own, adorning the floating face of a ghostly woman in leather half-armor, her helmless hair flowing free as she stood in midair like a shield, barring the way to the panting, wheezing old lord.
“Dare to come into my palace to slay a man, against my laws, in my kingdom?” the ghost of Alusair Obarskyr whispered, that terrible smile still on her lips. “Prepare to pay my price.”
Amarune staggered out of the palace and started to topple into the street-but silver tresses caught her, and a strong, shapely arm swept her upright again.
“Easy, El!” Storm murmured, embracing the dazed dancer from behind and holding her upright. “Easy!”
El?
Manshoon stared in disbelief at the two women across the street for one moment.
In the next moment, riding a soundless shriek of fear and rage, he departed Corleth Fentable in reckless haste, leaving the understeward drooling and staggering as badly as the mask dancer. With no Storm Silverhand to catch him, Fentable promptly collapsed on his face on the cobbles.
An instant after, a beholder the size of a child’s head burst out of his robes and darted off into the night.
Jaws dropped, and men shouted at that, and Manshoon had the vague recollection that some Purple Dragons hastened along the street to investigate the blast.
Bah! Right now, he cared not if all the world knew that the palace understeward carried a beholderkin in his armpit.
Elminster of Shadowdale was alive!
It took him surprisingly little time to race across streets lined with mansions, past spires, towers, and domes, to a particular open-for-breezes window of Truesilver House.
The Lady Deleira Truesilver caught sight of the hovering beholderkin before her maids did, and abruptly ordered everyone from the room. If any of them saw her pluck a particular pendant up out of the open coffer on her sidetable, or draw a dagger from a sheath affixed to the underside of that same table, they gave no sign of it.
In the space of two quick breaths, the room was empty and its door closed in their wake.
Manshoon ignored dagger and pendant and wasted no time in niceties. “Talane,” he ordered, “find the
