Crown of Fire - Ed Greenwood [114]
Tessaril nodded, "Shandril may fall under Fzoul's control, or be twisted by Zhentarim magic-or spellfire itself-once she uses it in unbridled anger rather than to defend. If she becomes something akin to a Zhentarim, we must try to control her power by using you as hostage to her good behavior." She turned away, sighed, and said to the wall, "As Manshoon would have."
Mirt saw swirling mists for a moment, and then his boots struck something hard, Flagstones, He staggered, and waved his weapons out of habit. They struck nothing.
He stood in a courtyard somewhere in the Citadel of the Raven-he could see raven banners flapping overhead. There were folk screaming and running through the courtyard nearby, and the ground suddenly heaved underneath him, Mirt crouched to keep his balance, He watched in amazement as flagstones rippled and heaved, as if a giant wave were passing underneath them, All around him soldiers were fleeing, running away from a lone figure standing not far away, near the gates of a tall tower. Shandril, of course; the spell on the gem was set to deliver him about twenty paces from her, Mirt's eyes widened as he saw what she was fighting: a ring of beholders, Ye gods! Couldn't the lass just have a nice, comfortable fight with half-a-dozen evil archmages? Or a dragon or two? Liches, now-aye, liches were good, even mind flayers…
The Old Wolf was running toward her by then, boots kidding on the broken flagstones of the courtyard, What use he'd be to her, the gods alone knew; he could barely see the lass now, outlined in a white halo of fire, Streamers of spellfire lashed out from it-and beholders died, or reeled back in a shower of sparks, blackened and burning.
The beholders drifted above her like angry dragons, baffled, They were used to foiling the magic of foes with the large eyes in their bodies-but spellfire tore through their anti-magic fields as if nothing were there. They had magic of their own that lashed out from the snakelike eyestalks writhing atop their bodies. But spellfire drained away or boiled into nothingness the rays from their eyes, and it stabbed out at them in return. When their own disintegrating gazes were not brought to bear quickly enough, spellfire lashed through their defenses, and they died, The Old Wolfs ears were ringing by the time he got close to her: the din of shrieking, air-ripping, crashing magic was incredible. A particularly violent spellblast shook the courtyard and threw him to his knees-and that saved his life. A beholder that would have crushed him with its fall crashed down in front of him instead, body blazing. Mirt got a good whiff of the reek of burning beholder, and was violently, uncontrollably sick, As he raised his head, the eye tyrant's body plates shattered from the heat within, and their darkened shards bounced past him.
Mages of the Zhentarim saw Mirt, a lone man in the midst of that field of ruin and magical chaos, but they could not have done anything to aid or attack him, even if they'd known who he was: a whirling spellstorm had begun to form over the courtyard, created by the struggle between magic and spellfire.
Mages who tried to cast spells screamed, their minds burned to cinders-or they watched in horror as their magic went wild, creating mis-shapen flowers or rains of frogs or worse, Spell-lightning arced repeatedly from the gathering storm cloud to the tallest spires of the citadel around, humming and crackling, Men plunged to their deaths from those heights, cooked alive, or fell into piles of bone and ash where they stood. And still the battle raged on.
Such a mighty outpouring of wild magic had to go somewhere-and it did:
Far to the west of the citadel, near the Border Forest, a great meadow of red-petaled flowers quivered, bowed slowly in a spreading ripple that washed from one end of the scarlet field to the other, and then straightened again, One after another, the flowers all quietly turned blue.
In the woods near the shaking citadel, along the foot of the Dragonspine Mountains,