Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [119]
Oh, there were formidable foes standing in his way, to be sure … but there was only one Manshoon.
“One Emperor but many bodies,” he murmured. “None of them the copies of myself Elminster could so easily find and destroy. Neither he nor the foes of my future will be able to recognize me as easily as the Sage of Shadowdale did. That’s one mistake behind me now, forever.”
The nearest of his scrying scenes was a view of a small and nondescript office among a trail of similar offices at the rear of the palace, where Sir Eskrel Starbridge was sitting sourly behind his desk.
Manshoon sent his mind racing out. He’d prepared the highknight’s mind already, and his arrivals had become deft; Starbridge should feel only a slight irritation, if Manshoon did nothing but eavesdrop on the thoughts rushing past …
The desk was, as usual, littered with scraps of paper covered with encoded scrawls. Starbridge gazed at them idly as he listened to the last of his agents and contacts reporting in. Two more senior highknights had been slain in as many days, leaving Eskrel Starbridge right where he’d dreaded ending up—behind that desk.
The desk had a spell on it cast by the legendary Vangerdahast, one barely understood by his successors. That spell empowered a faint, almost ghostly voice to speak to whoever sat at the desk, all the way from distant Shadowdale, where the stone linked to the spell on the desk had been carried on mission. Through the link, Starbridge’s predecessor had given commands to that northern dale and had heard reports. All of them, like the one just ending, saying the same thing.
Shadowdale had been hunted high and low for any sign of the legendary Old Mage, but it seemed Elminster couldn’t be found at the moment.
Bah. Shared failure was no easier to swallow than a personal failing.
Not that sitting exasperated in this stuffy little room was going to mend anything.
“Must I do everything myself?” Starbridge growled. “Am I doomed to spend my life surrounded by blundering incompetents?”
At least two of the wizards and highknights crowded into the office stiffened, but most grinned wryly, and young Baerengard even dared to jest, “Well, you did choose to dwell in Cormyr, sir.”
Starbridge gave the youngling a sour look. When he’d been Baerengard’s age, idiots this callow would never have been considered for the mantle of highknight, but these dozen-some filling his office were almost all the highknights the Forest Kingdom had left. Untrustworthy, insolent puppies.
“I will lead an expedition to hunt down Elminster,” he declared. “I’ll take nigh all of you, plus a few of the more competent wizards of war—those with brains enough not to get themselves killed if they try something so difficult as camping, and who’re capable of enough basic civility that we can stomach their company. Those here in this room, for instance. We leave tonight.”
Several highknights stirred as if they wanted to speak, but only one plunged into dispute with him. Young Narulph, of course.
“I think an expedition is far less than wise—is, in fact, a very bad idea, given that Ganrahast and Vainrence still can’t be found. Is it right and prudent that we depart the palace at this time, when the Obarskyrs may need our aid at any moment, with all the nobles of the realm gathering here for the council?”
Highknights had always owned the right to speak bluntly to superiors—even the reigning monarch or regent—without fear of reprisal, and the open debate this fostered had time and again served the realm well, but Starbridge had little time for Narulph’s usual “Do nothing is best” stance.
“I’ll have none of that,” he snarled. “If the roof above our heads fell in and killed us all right now, there are still plenty of wizards of war left to defend Cormyr. Some of them—Arbrace, Belandroon, and Hawksar, to name three—are even almost as competent as they themselves think they are.”
The handful of mages present all grinned at that.
“If we’re not here