rangers, to boot.
The younger-looking man yonder had worn a far older, bearded body when they’d first encountered him. One touch of his old, dark, and vast mind-that they’d both hosted and seen even more of-would tell anyone that he was far older than he appeared to be.
Yet, it was still rather staggering to hear Storm and Elminster calmly confirming they were, or had been, Chosen of Mystra. A little daunting, too, to hear that they seemed to think they still were.
Fallen from power yet serving a goddess the realms thought was gone, but whom they still talked to and worked for.
It was also more than a little sobering to hear fat, wheezing old Mirt telling the tale of how he was enspelled and forced into a blueflame item in Waterdeep almost a century ago. Against his will but by a foe desperate to avoid being slain by Mirt, one in so much of a hurry to avoid that fate that he laid no spells of compulsion on Mirt- so the Waterdhavian had emerged from a handaxe a few days back, here in Suzail, controlled by no one.
“So who are these Imprisoners?” Amarune asked at last, sinking down on the stool beside Mirt to sample the fat man’s seafood, er, concoction, and finding it surprisingly good. “Are they still alive?”
El shrugged. “With wizards, one can never tell.”
“Heh,” Mirt agreed. “Too true.”
He turned and hurled the carving knife he was holding the length of the kitchen, to neatly split a melon on the end counter, and added, “Which is why I prefer to rely on more primitive means of coercion and decision making, unwashed lout that I am.”
Amarune and Arclath couldn’t keep themselves from grinning.
Until Elminster’s head snapped up, his eyes flaring with a brief white light. He shook himself like a drenched dog ridding itself of water and announced, “My spell worked. Lord Huntingdown’s under attack. Someone’s out by day, now, hunting noble lords who can command blueflame ghosts.”
“So what do we do?” Rune asked, scrambling to her feet.
“Watch,” Elminster replied. “No more. Unless the ghost master everyone’s seeking is found. Then we’ll watch the great battle that will ensue, awaiting our best chance to rush in. I’ll conjure up a scrying eye.”
“While noble after noble of Cormyr gets butchered?” Arclath snapped. “In case you haven’t noticed, Old Mage, I’m a noble of Cormyr. And even with all our faults, Cormyr needs us. I am not going to let the realm discover that the hard way, when most of us are dead and our lands have gone lawless, given over to brigands and warring greedy merchants eyeing lordships.”
“So, ye want to run to Huntingdown Hall right now and carve up random folk?” El asked mildly. “And this well help whom, exactly? And how?”
“Pah!” Arclath snarled. “Always the clever words, always the-”
“Being exactly right,” Amarune interrupted crisply. “Listen to the man, love!”
Arclath stopped midsnarl to stare at her, a bright grin growing across his face.
“What?” she demanded, frowning.
“You called me ‘love,’ ” he murmured.
Mirt rolled his eyes, as El and Storm grinned.
“So, while these two younglings bill and coo for a bit,” the Waterdhavian rumbled, “tell me if I have all this straight: The Simbul can tell ye much more about these Imprisoners if she’s sane. But to get her that way, ye need to work magic on her, wherever she’s hidden, that will drink some gewgaw or other that’s the prison of a blueflame ghost. Presumably this gewgaw ye’re searching for, that someone in Suzail is hiding.”
“Ye have it straight,” El confirmed. “More than that, if I’m to recruit the war wizards to serve Mystra-as she has bidden me to do-I need The Simbul at my side. No one mage can slay and defeat them.”
Mirt spread his hands. “Then what’re we waiting for?”
“Some way of finding the hidden blueflame item,” Storm explained. “If the various hunts for it go on, the nobles may do that finding for us. Killing many of their fellows in their search. Hence Lord Delcastle’s objection.”
“That I have not withdrawn,” Arclath put in, from where he and Amarune stood in each other’s arms.
“So, instead of waiting until another dozen nobles are dead-and the wizards of war, Manshoon, and anyone else lurking near who’s interested have had another dozen chances to swoop in and seize the blueflame item, we try to lure the ghost master into using his ghost again on ground of our choosing, so as to lay hands on the item,” El announced. “The Blue Flame must dance.”
“Because using mask dancers as lures works so well,” Storm sighed.
“This will be different,” El said sharply. “None of us will be on that stage.”
“An illusion, sent from afar? They’ll see through it in an instant,” Storm told him.
“Not an illusion,” the Sage of Shadowdale replied and pointed at Amarune. “She will be the Blue Flame.”
“What?” Arclath roared, breaking free of his beloved’s embrace to confront Elminster.
“Easy, young lion,” the wizard replied, “easy! She’ll be dancing on the floor of an empty room somewhere, for me-and before ye get all huffily defensive of her virtue, lordling, know that I intend to have ye standing there as her bodyguard, never fear! My magic will make her image, mirroring her movements and wreathed in blue flames, of course, seem to dance on the stage of whatever club we’d most like to see destroyed.”
“Destroyed?”
“Aye. When the war wizards, Manshoon, the nobles’ various pet wizards, and our ghost master all converge on it to snap at our lure, that club won’t last long.” Arclath nodded, then grew a wry smile. “I know a suitable place. Let’s do it.”
Word spread across Suzail like the howling winds of a shorestorm gale. She who was known as the Blue Flame was going to dance-a performance not to be missed.
No one knew quite where word of this had first come from, but everyone agreed on the where and the when.
It was to happen on the eve of the Festival of Handras, Suzail’s annual late-Mirtul reception for the senior caravan traders of the Sword Coast, when it was customary for such far traders and wagonmasters to present “fresh wonders from the Sword Coast” in dockside warehouses, where free food and drink were served to all who came to gaze on the latest goods, curios, and exotic fashions.
And the dance would take place at The Bold Blazon, an exclusive club catering to certain jaded young nobles and socially ambitious folk those nobles liked to drink, trade, and sleep with.
As it happened, the Blazon was not one of Lord Arclath Delcastle’s haunts, because the nobles who liked to frequent it included several of his longtime foes and rivals, such as Maerclorn Wintersun-the younger heir Lord Wintersun, not the patriarch-and Kathkote Dawntard.
In vain the proprietor of the Blazon, a greedy, shave-pated, many-earring-adorned snob by the name of Daerendygho Vrabrant, protested that he’d arranged no such performance for Handras Eve or any other night, had never even met the Blue Flame, and did not desire to host such “epicene diversions” at the Blazon.
Besieged with demands from half Suzail to rent stage-side tables, atop the clamorings of all his usual patrons, he hurriedly hired extra security-only to discover that dozens of nobles were outbidding him to buy the “first loyalty” of his security force to obey them first, rather than him. In other words, to let those nobles into the Blazon at will, and allow them to bring along extra friends and their own wine, weapons, and anything else they might desire.
Despairing and seeing both ruin and the palace dungeons in his nightmares, Vrabrant went to the wizards of war in secret and entreated their help in providing “unseen security.”
Not that Elminster or any of his companions knew about that entreaty until later-though Arclath slowly came to suspect the Sage of Shadowdale had anticipated it.
“Count me out,” Vainrence said with a grin, slurring the words.
The eyes of Ganrahast and Glathra met above the lord warder, and it was Glathra who said gently, “We didn’t expect you to leap up out of this bed and do anything about it, Rence. We just wanted you to know the particular disaster we were wading into, this time.”
“After all, once you asked about it,” the royal magician added, “we had to admit that, yes, all Suzail is talking about it, for you to hear about it in here.”
“So who is this Blue Flame?”
