Elminster in Myth Drannor - Ed Greenwood [70]
The worm was largely done, now. It never touched the limbs or head when it had a body to feast upon, a body now little more than rags of skin upon hollowed-out, empty bones. How was it that she was still standing?
Ilimitar frowned, and hurled a quartet of small forcebolts into her-the sort one uses to fell woodcutters or running rabbits. Her ravaged body still stood.
He was nearly out of useful battle spells. He shrugged and picked up the fallen scepter, raking her with emerald fire until the scepter sputtered and died, drained away.
The High Court Mage frowned down at it. He hadn't realized, when bringing it here today, just how little magic had been left in it. That could have been disastrous. As it was, well…
The ravaged body of the Srinshee still stood. She must still be alive-and he knew better than to touch her directly, even with his dagger. There were tricks the older casters knew. Best to simply blast her to nothingness.
He snapped his finger and said a certain word, and there was suddenly a staff in his hands-long and black, set with many silver runes. He let it wake slowly, thrumming in his hands-ah, that delicious feeling of power-before he poured white-hot death into his motionless foe.
The staff fell silent after only moments. He frowned, tried to send it away again, and found it dead-just so much dark wood, now. In puzzlement he threw it down and summoned a rod. He had two more scepters he could call to him after that, if the rod failed. Perhaps the Overmantle was deadening them. In frantic haste he called on all of its withering and life-draining powers.
The body facing him became a withered bag of skin once more, and what skin was left turned gray and rotten. But still the old sorceress stood.
Grunting in exasperated amazement, Ilimitar called first one scepter, and then the other. When it fizzled into crackling, smoking death, the first cold taste of foreboding filled his mouth, for the Srinshee still stood.
Her shattered head hung askew from a broken neck, but those blackened, bleeding eyes opened-to be revealed as two pools of flickering flame-and the mouth beneath them worked its broken jaw for a grinding moment and then croaked, "Are you done, Limi?"
"Corellon preserve me!" the mage shouted, in real horror, as he shrank away from her. Would she start to move toward him?
Yes! Oh, gods, yes!
He screamed as that broken body shuffled forward, out of its pit of melted rubble, and set footless stumps on the paving stones. He fell back, crying, "Stay back!"
"I don't want to do this, Limi," the mutilated thing said sadly, as it thumped slowly and awkwardly toward him. "The choice was yours, I fear, as it was when you began this battle, Limi."
"Speak not my name, foul witch of darkness!" the High Court Mage howled, snatching out his last item of magic with trembling fingers. It was a ring on a fine chain; he slid it onto one of his fingers and pointed at her. The ring-finger swiftly lengthened into a lone, hooklike talon and began to grow scales. "You serve a foe of the realm," he cried, "and must needs be struck down, that Cormanthor endure!"
The ring flashed. A last beam of black, deadly force shot out.
The shuffling body halted, shuddering with fresh violence, and Ilimitar laughed in crazed relief. Yes! It was finally over! She was falling.
The broken thing crashed into his shoulder and slid down his body, brushing him with its lips as it fell.
There was an instant of crawling magic that made Oluevaera Estelda retch uncontrollably as the Over-mantle surged in through every orifice of her body, and then out again.
Then it was gone, like mist before a morning sun, and she was on her knees, whole again, before the body of Ilimitar-who had just simultaneously received every spell and magical discharge he'd poured into her.
She still hated that spell. It was as cruel as the long ago elven mage who'd devised it-almost as bad as Halgondas and his Overmantle. Moreover,