Elminster in Myth Drannor - Ed Greenwood [72]
Delmuth raised both hands exultantly and lashed his human foe with bladed tentacles. El reeled and pantomimed pain, as it some part of the fading spell had actually reached him through his shield. And Delmuth's twisted spell ate away the last strength of his own mantle.
To El's mage-sight, the elf was surrounded now only by flickering, darkening wisps of magic, the failing shell of what had once been an impregnable barrier. "Delmuth," he cried, "I ask ye one last time: can't we end this, and part in peace?"
"Certainly, human," the elf replied with a feral grin. "When you are dead, then there'll be perfect peace!"
And his slender fingers shaped a casting El did not know. Force flickered, visible only in its settling outline; it seemed to be the same invisible evocation that human mages wove into what were called walls of force.
Delmuth saw El watching intently, and looked up, gloating, as the last radiances shaped an invisible sword, floating before Delmuth with its point toward Elminster. "Behold a spell you cannot send back at me," the elf lord chuckled, leaning low over it. "We call it a 'deadly seeking blade'-and all of elven blood are immune to it!" He snapped his fingers and broke into open, rolling laughter as the blade leapt forward.
They were standing only a few paces apart, but El already knew what magic he wanted to turn this unseen blade of force into. Delmuth would have been wiser to have wielded it in his hand, and hacked at El's shield as if it were a real blade, giving El no time to twist it in the brief contacts.
But then, Delmuth would have been wiser never to have lured Elminster here at all.
El twisted the blade into something else and flung it back. As it struck the elf, Delmuth's laughter faltered. The last gasp of his mantle, striving vainly to protect him as it scattered into drifting sparks, lifted him up off the ground to kick his heels in empty air.
He stiffened as Elminster's twisted magic struck him, and then grew still, his hands raised into claws in front of his breast, his legs straining, with the toes of his boots pointed at the ground. The paralysis El had bestowed upon him took firm hold, and all that El could see the elf lord move was his eyes, widening now in terror and rolling around to stare helplessly at the human mage.
Or perhaps not so helplessly. Delmuth could still launch magics that were triggered by act of will alone, like Elminster's shielding spells-and in the elf lord's eyes El saw terror be washed away by fury, and then by cunning.
Delmuth hadn't been so scared for a long time. Fear was like cold iron in his mouth, and his heart raced. That a mere human could bring him to this! He could die here, floating above some windswept rock in the backwoods of the realm! He-
Yet steady… steady, son of Echorn. He had one spell left that no human could anticipate, something more secret and terrible even than the blade. They'd been pressed together mantle-to-mantle; for his own to have failed, the human's must inevitably have collapsed, too. Wasn't that why this Elminster had pleaded for the fight to end? And now the human must think him helpless, and was standing there vainly trying to think of some way of slaying him with a rock or dagger without breaking his paralysis. Yes, if the spell was cast now, the human could not hope to stop it.
The 'call bones' spell had been developed by Napraeleon Echorn seven-or was it eight? he'd never paid all that much attention to his tutors-centuries ago, as a way of reducing giant stags to cartloads of ready meat. It could summon a particular assembly of bones to its caster, so that they tore their way right out of the victim's body. If the caster chose to receive the skull, the victim could not hope but die. Though Delmuth couldn't come up with a use, just this moment, for a blood-dripping human skull, there'd be plenty of time to think of one…
Smiling with his eyes, he cast the spell. Elminster, your skull, please…
He was still gloating – humming to himself, actually – when the world darkened