wizard Elminster, who is alive and using bodies not his own. Slay anybody he inhabits-destroy him utterly. Make very sure he is dead, then call on me to make certain. Hurry!”
“How will I know him?” she asked, tossing down both pendant and dagger.
The beholderkin darted at her like an oversized wasp, its eyestalks writhing.
She almost managed not to flinch as eyestalks slid greasily into her nostrils and ears, clinging for the fleeting moment Manshoon needed.
He thrust an image of Amarune Whitewave-reeling unsteadily in a doorway, staring at nothing with lightning playing around her upflung hands-into Talane’s mind, then stripped away the lightning from that vision.
“This is the guise he’s hiding in right now.”
The beholderkin drew back far enough to give the Lady Deleira Truesilver a menacing glare. “Find Storm Silverhand, and force her to reveal who is Elminster and who is not. Don’t slay her until you are certain. Kill her, too, but after. Foremost and above all, your task is to bury Elminster deep!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
S torm staggered, sobbing in pain. Magic was surging out of the body in her arms, clashing snarlingly with the palace wards.
Where Elminster’s magic struck at the wards and the wards struck back, energies were loosed. They swirled around Storm and Amarune, feeling first like fire and acid, then more like a slaver’s salted lash she’d felt long ago… or the whirling, ruthlessly slicing edges of a priest’s conjured barrier of many blades…
To keep them both alive, she shoved Amarune out into the night, away from the wards. Back into the Promenade, both of them seared and hurting, where she fell heavily to her knees, Amarune a limp weight in her arms.
Suddenly swords ringed her, their deadly tips pointed down in a glittering circle.
“Surrender!” a Purple Dragon barked. “Show us empty hands, and declare yourselves.”
Storm looked up at him, panting, and forced down pain enough to gasp, “We’re wizards of war, soldier! Burning inside from wild magic! For your own safety, keep back from us and from yon doorway, all of you!”
Soldiers went pale and gave ground. Wincing, Storm wrapped her arms around Rune and rolled, taking them both farther out into the street. Two Dragons stalked suspiciously alongside them but were called away by their swordcaptain.
Gritting her teeth, Storm stood up, hauling the still-blind, dazed Amarune with her, and walked the dancer slowly away into the night.
“El?” she hissed, as they reached the mouth of a side street on the far side of the Promenade.
The only reply she got was a wordless, feeble moan.
Far down the side street she caught sight of a hunched-over, stumbling man fleeing away from her. He was wreathed in dim, feebly flickering blue flames.
“Ghost brought low,” Storm hissed aloud.
As she said that, the distant figure turned a corner and was gone.
Unimpressed by her eager smile, the blueflame ghost attacked fearlessly, a sneer on its face and confidence in its almost careless slash.
Alusair deftly struck its sword aside with her own ghostly blade and in the same twisting slash cut deep into its side, flying as she did so to keep herself close to the bright blue aura and her blade hitting home, slicing up and over its torso, the tip bouncing on rib after rib, heading for its throat.
Blue flames shrank from the silver-gray mist of her sword, parting and darkening, laying bare the man beneath. Alusair soared up out of reach of his frantic backswing and hacked at the back of his sword arm, just above the elbow, as she passed.
The blueflame ghost’s sword clanged to the palace floor, and Alusair whirled and came back at him in a slicing pass. She didn’t quite dare to try a hard thrust through him, or a beheading, because every touch of the ghost’s flaming aura to her sword-which was part of her, solidified by her will out of the same spectral essence that made up the rest of her-ate at her undeath.
It would be folly to slay this intruder at the cost of her own existence, and leave her beloved palace evermore unguarded.
So she contented herself with great slashes, slicing body and arms, looping around the ghost in a relentless weaving of sharp steel that reduced it to cowering in a heap around its blade, growing dimmer and dimmer.
Abruptly it sprang up and fled with a wail of pain and fear, heading at a frantic run right back out of the palace, waving its sword wildly to try to shield itself against Alusair’s blade.
“Greatly weakened, at least,” the ghostly princess told the empty passage in satisfaction, halting just in front of the roiling chaos of the violated ward seeking to knit itself together again, to watch the ghost dwindle across the Promenade. It fled into the mouth of a side street and kept going, fast.
Outside, Dragons were assisting a reeling, mumbling Palace Understeward Fentable to his feet. He looked confused or drunk, and the soldiers holding him up were talking excitedly about a “beholder, like in the tales, but only the size of a child’s chamberpot!”
One of them was keeping the tip of his sword near Fentable’s throat. “Beholderkin, I think such are called. Heard one of old Dhargust’s sagely lectures about eye tyrants, two summers back. He says there’re still some of them hiding in the heart of the Hullack, just waiting their chance to conquer the realm!”
“Well, I’ve heard some have been seen right here in Suzail!” an older Dragon growled. “Never mind about distant forests we should all stay well out of, we’ve got-”
Alusair leaned forward to hear better, frowning in interest.
Which was when something hard and sharp burst right through her from behind, thrusting her forward into the seething energies of the wards.
Coldly scornful laughter accompanied that ruthless blow, and as Alusair writhed in helpless agony, torn by the full fury of the wards, she was dimly aware of a sword being pulled roughly back out of her, spinning her misty body around.
A blade that had burst right through her.
A sword that sliced ghosts as readily as the living.
Floating near the floor, awash in pain, Alusair stared up at her assailant.
Who was standing in the open doorway just beyond the roiling wards, the sword in her hand and a cruel smile on her face.
It was the death knight Targrael, the crazed Highknight. Lady Dark Armor.
Who hissed down at her, “I guard the Forest Kingdom and care for it, not you, wasted and foolish old bitch of a failed regent! I go now to hunt down a great foe of Cormyr-but when I’ve time to spare, I’ll be back to finish you! Depend upon it.”
Manshoon was gone, leaving Talane excited.
She was, yes, delighted she’d been ordered to hunt down Amarune.
So, the lass was really Elminster? If she’d known that, she’d not have been quite so bold at her first meeting with the Whitewave wench-but no matter. If he’d ever been the towering spellhurler of all those wild tales, the Sage of Shadowdale must now be a weak husk of his former self for Manshoon to entrust this slaying to her. Castles shattered and blown into the clouds, dragons tamed or slaughtered in the skies, archwizards dueled and left as smoking heaps of ash…
Grand tales, to be sure. Yet, perhaps that’s all they’d ever been.
Talane looked down at her shapely self, crisscrossed by broad belts of leather festooned with no fewer than nine scabbarded daggers-all razor sharp and finely balanced for throwing, even the one she’d hurled into a cheating Sembian merchant’s eye not all that long ago-and pronounced herself ready.
Which was a good thing, considering Manshoon’s burning desire for urgency in this matter.
She checked her hollow right boot heel for keys to certain doors in her mansion and found them right where
