Elminster in hell - Ed Greenwood [33]
Ah, a whiff of mystery! Snow me more!
Of course.
"If what Lady Crownsilver says is true," the sage said, an edge of asperity in his voice as he knuckled the last sleepiness from his eyes, "I've been brought up several hundred stairs to see nothing."He took two restless steps along the passage and then turned back to look up the last flight of stairs. At its top, the mightiest wizard in Cormyr stood glowering at a closed door.
The sage burst out, "Is there no trace of him? I mean-could the man not simply have taken himself away somewhere? There're over a thousand rooms in this wing alo-"
The Royal Magician turned and gave the Court Sage a level look. "Alaphondar," he said flatly, "we know our work. I'd not have summoned you to bear witness without trying to trace the man first. My spells would find him, if he were alive and anywhere in Faerun, unless he's magically shielded." He turned his head to the third person present. "Is that your seal, lass?"
"It is, milord," Sardyl said quietly, her fingers poised over the door ring. "Shall I break it'"
Vangerdahast frowned. "No, let me." He made a little wave of his hand that everyone in the palace knew meant "stand back," and cast a spell that neither the sage nor the scribe had ever seen before. They heard a snarl of magic race away from the other side of the door, a faint whistling echo as if it had struck the walls and come shuddering back, and then-silence.
Sarclyl and Alaphondar both looked at the Royal Magician. Vangerdahast stood with his head bent to one side, listening intently to the stretching silence. After a long time, he stepped forward and flung open the door.
The turret room was just as Sardyl had left it.
Alaphondar frowned. "Who lit the lamp?"
"Bolifar, apparently," Sardyl replied. The sage looked at Vangerdahast as if expecting a different answer but received no utterance at all. The Royal Magician was hastening to the shutters.
He held his hands over them for a moment before turning the thumb-keys on their locks and throwing them wide. Long-unused wood squealed and stuck momentarily. Dust curled up from the sill into the wizard's face. Vangerdahast sneezed like a bull bellowing in a thunderstorm. The sage and scribe joined the Master of the War
Wizards at the sill. They looked down over a sheer drop of a hundred feet at the cobbled courtyard below and saw the faces of startled guards in the lantern light, gazing back up at them.
Vangerdahast let the sentinels get a good look at his face, watering eyes and all, but said nothing. These shutters hadn't been opened for some time. Anything entering or leaving by way of them would have been reported. He nodded sourly. He hadn't expected to see blood below or anything of interest hanging from the turret roof above, and his expectations were met.
The Royal Magician drew his stout body back into the room and turned, rocking slightly like a heavily laden cart dragged around a tight corner. "Is there anything," he snapped at Sardyl, "different about the room since your earlier look? Anything at all… the smallest detail or impression."
The shapely Crownsilver turned with more grace than the portly wizard. She wrinkled her nose as well as her brow when she frowned. "The rug… it seems different, somehow… more worn." She shrugged and added, "Yet how can that be?"
Neither man replied. Vangerdahast was already bending over the rug suspiciously, gathering its weave in his hand and plucking it up to glare at the solid stones of the floor beneath. Alaphondar knelt and almost angrily poked and prodded at hitherto-hidden flagstones, seeking a seam that would part or something that would shift.
After some fruitless time he sighed, straightened his back, and looked at Vangerdahast. "Well, O master of weaves?"
The Royal Magician did not