Elminster in Myth Drannor - Ed Greenwood [68]
"This tomb of traitors was always your favored spot to bring pupils to try castings, remember?" he spat at her.
Gods, yes, she'd brought Ilimitar here to Castle Dlardrageth, twice. Tears came at the memory, and as the High Court Mage flung down his scepter and wove a spell to bring the roof down on her, he snarled, "Regretting your folly now, eh? Too late, old witch! Your treachery is clear, and you must die!"
In reply the last Lady Estelda merely shook her head and calmly wove the magic that awakened the ancient enchantments the Dlardrageth had used to raise these halls. When Ilimitar's spell smashed and clawed at the ceiling, instants later, his magic turned to fire that rained back down at him.
He staggered back, coughing and shuddering-his mantle must be weak, she thought-and shouted, "Seek not to escape me, Oluevaera! No part of the realm is safe for you now!"
"By whose decree?" she cried, fresh tears on her cheeks. "Have you slain Eltargrim, too?"
"His folly is not yet open treachery to Cormanthor, but something that can be corrected once the human- and you, with your lying tongue-are gone. I will hunt you down wherever you flee to!" He muttered an incantation on the heels of that shout.
"I've no intention of fleeing anywhere, Ilimitar!" the Srinshee told him angrily. "This realm is my home!"
The air before her exploded in flames. From each blossoming ball of fire a beam shot out, to link with the other fireballs. Oluevaera ducked away from one whose heat threatened to blister her shoulder and whispered words that would dissolve a spell into strengthening her mantle.
"Is that why," the High Court Mage snarled in reply, "you protected a human, keeping him alive and counseling him into flattering the Coronal enough to win an armathor out of the old fool? He'll just be the first of a scheming, grasping horde of the hairy ones, if we let him live! Can you not see that?"
"No!" the Srinshee shouted, over the crash and roar of his next spell attack. "I fail to see why loving Cormanthor and working to strengthen it must place me in the situation of having to slay one honorable human-who came here to keep a promise to a dying heir, and deliver a kiira to an elder House, Ilimitar!– or be slain by you, unless I destroy you: a mage in whom I awakened mastery of magic, and have been proud of these six centuries!"
"Always you twist folk with clever words!" he shouted back, and went right on into snarling the incantation of another spell.
The Srinshee found herself weeping again. "Why?" she sobbed. "Why do you force me to make this choice?"
Her mantle shuddered then, as purple lightnings of magical force sought to drain its vitality. Through the tumult, as paving stones cracked underfoot in a ragged, deafening chorus, her newfound foe cried, "Your wits are addled by love, old hag, and corrupted by the Coronals' dreams! Can you not understand that the security of the realm must be paramount over all other things?"
The Srinshee set her teeth and lashed out with lightnings of her own; his mantle lit up briefly under their strike, and she saw him staggering. "And can you not see," she shouted at him, "that this man is the security of our realm, if we but guard him and let him grow into what Eltargrim sees?"
"Bah!" Ilimitar the mage spat derisively. "The Coronal is as corrupt as you are! You and he both stain the good name of our court, and the trust our People have put in you!" The chamber rocked around them as his latest spell clawed its way along every inch of her mantle, but could not break it.
"Ilimitar," the Srinshee asked sadly, "are you mad?"
The chamber fell suddenly silent, with smoke eddying around their feet, as he stared at her in genuine amazement.
"No," he said at last, in almost conversational tones, "but I think I've been mad for years not to see the game you and the Coronal have been playing, moving Cormanthor ever so gently-deftly, like the sly oldlings you both are-toward the day when humans would dwell among us, and outbreed us, and in the