Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [118]
Not that she had much aptitude for magic. Whitewave was very little more than an accomplished thief, and could be slain with ease—but she was far more useful as Elminster’s tormentor. If she repudiated her ancestor, it would crush the old fool more than anything Manshoon himself could do.
And Elminster must suffer.
Rejection or betrayal at the hands of everyone the Sage of Shadowdale depended on should bring on that suffering nicely, before an unexpected longtime foe—the oft bested and belittled Manshoon—revealed himself and killed the old goat.
Manshoon smiled at his decanter. “And when Elminster is dead and these hands have slain him, I’ll be out from under his shadow at last,” he told it. Then he noticed it seemed to have half-emptied itself rather quickly.
He shook his head. That was the problem with decanters …
It was time to bid farewell to the mind of Marlin Stormserpent, too. A young fool doomed by his own ambitions, yet thus far playing his useful—if unwitting—part.
“I have loosed him like a wild arrow among the court and nobility of Cormyr, to see how many lives he can reap before he’s brought down,” he purred. “Whereupon someone else will seize the blueflame ghosts and use them against their rivals and foes … and so on.”
Watching that bloody, ongoing game would be great entertainment.
Wherefore it was almost time for young Stormserpent’s guide Lothrae to fall silent—which meant, of course, a certain meddling Manshoon would be departing the mind of Understeward Corleth Fentable, too.
Something moved in the distant darkness, a boldly striding, curvaceous shadow. Targrael, there at last and offering him the double-bladed dagger precisely as he was compelling her to—with one of its points held against her own throat and her other arm behind her, so he could destroy her with ease with the gentlest of shoves.
“It’s not just a matter of avoiding detection as the wizards of war start prying in earnest, just before the council,” he told her with a smile as he took the proffered dagger. “I’ll soon be too busy to move my pawns around, with nobles galore arriving in a great flood of highborn scorn and pomposity. My attention will be on a series of subtle mind-invasions of lords and ladies of the realm, to decide who will be my future tools, and who—in a land burdened with far too many troublesome nobles—is swiftly expendable.”
“Of course, Lord,” Targrael murmured, going to her knees before him.
Manshoon smiled down at her, seeing in her mind as well as her eyes that if he wasn’t compelling her to this subservience, she’d be trying to swiftly and savagely slay him right then.
“Let’s get you back to your nice cold tomb to await more slavery to me,” he murmured, letting go of decanter and goblet.
Both floated contentedly where they were, in midair, as Manshoon drew his Lady Dark Armor to her feet and waved her away on her last stroll through the palace—for a while.
A part of his awareness went with her, riding and compelling her, but her part was done; almost all of Manshoon’s attention was back on what he’d conjured at the center of the cavern; his scrying scenes, his many eyes on Cormyr.
In a wider ring outside their glows, his living beholder slaves hung still and silent in the air, eyestalks hanging as limp as the fronds of dead plants. He’d given some of them bone-shearing pincers, too. They were ready to be unleashed up into the palace whenever necessary to make Foril’s courtiers, wizards, and guards alike very busy.
Or sent out to guard the ways into this cavern, relieving their undead counterparts, his death tyrants, to spread slaughter and mayhem in the halls and chambers of state above.
Yet that was the same brute force approach that had failed Manshoon time and time again down the centuries, before Fzoul—and, gods blast the man, a certain Sage of Shadowdale—had taught him patience.
Not to mention deftness and subtlety. Never use a mace to smash what an apparently random breeze could topple.
Wherefore it was time to watch and learn and do the right subtle