Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [82]
He spun another spell thoughtfully but left it hanging, lacking but a final word to call it into being and send it on its way. Best to wait a bit and let this titanic construct exhaust a few spells more before battle began in earnest. Above and around him, balls of fire met silvery spheres and winked out of existence together in velvet silence.
The giant destroyed the last few fireballs itself, banishing them to spreading steam by the touch of gray-white rays of conjured cold. They hissed out from its hands like angry drifts of cloud, and Elminster's eyes narrowed. Lesser strikes, so soon?
Those must be one of the forms of a freezing sphere spell. Did the thing hurl only duplicates of the same spell? Perhaps it was some sort of projected image raised by an over-clever Red Wizard, and merely aped spells-in duplicate that the Thayan was casting, somewhere far below.
As silver spheres spun and darkened before him, drinking in drifting cold, Elminster let loose his hanging spell. The ruby ray stabbed down, right between the two whirlpools of darkness that served the giant for eyes. Wisps of cloud blocked his view of its striking, but an instant later, when El tumbled out of the pale, clinging cloudy drift, the giant stood unchanged.
It stepped forward, shaking the earth far below, as if goaded by his spell, or as if it now knew just where he was and intended to finish him. Elminster sighed, gathering silver spheres around him in a falling wedge, and pulled 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