Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [125]
“I was interested,” Amarune told him truthfully, “because I’m curious. Too curious. And I’m working for no one but myself.” She hesitated, then added, “Though someone is now seeking to force the Silent Shadow to work for her, by threatening to unmask me to the Dragons. A woman every bit as agile as I am, who calls herself ‘Talane.’ ”
“Talane,” Arclath murmured, frowning. “Not a name I’ve heard before, but I’ve a feeling, by all the Watching Gods, that I’ll be hearing it again.”
“Swordcaptain Dralkin?” a Dragon telsword gasped then, trotting out of the night right past them. “We’ve found a word written in blood up on that rooftop.”
“From where the body probably fell, yes,” the swordcaptain agreed curtly, advancing from the group standing around the corpse sprawled in its pool of blood, and sending Arclath and Amarune a glare that told them clearly “move away and don’t listen.” When neither of them moved, he shrugged and asked the telsword curtly, “What word?”
“A strange one. Might be a name,” the telsword replied. “ ‘Talane.’ In Common: T-a-l-a-n-e.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
I USED TO BE A WIZARD
He was in another alley—which reeked almost as much as the one he’d left, but of mildew and old mold and rotting greens—out behind one of Suzail’s better eateries.
At that time of night, only the slugs, snakes, and rats were likely to overhear an old man who stood there talking to himself.
Which was why Elminster had chosen it. He had thorny matters to decide on and no one to debate them with but himself.
He should not, could not, do what he was contemplating doing to that young woman, blood of his or not, downward dead end of a life she’d landed herself in or not. Bed of thorns or not, ’twas the bed she’d chosen, and not for him to … to do what every last king or baron or petty lordling did every day—force changes on the lives of others, to get their own way. Sometimes, for mere whim.
Yet he was not so low. No, he was lower and had been for centuries.
Yet the task—the burden—was his, his duty, and he wanted to go on.
Wanted, but could not, not alone, not old and without firm control of his magic …
“No, I told that Dragon truth,” he growled at last. “Growing older … waiting to die. And if I wait too long and die without doing what’s needful, it all ends right then. All my work, all the paltry few protections I’ve been able to give the Realms down these centuries. And that must not happen. Ever. The work must go on.”
He paced a few scowling steps, setting a snake to hastily slithering away somewhere safer, then turned and snapped to the empty air, “Even if it costs one more young lass her life. Or at least the carefree, naive freedom to waste her life doing nothing much of consequence.”
He walked a few more steps and whispered, “ ’Twill kill her.”
He walked a few more.
“And I’ll do it to her. I will.”
Thrusting his head high, he strode off purposefully into the night.
Amarune’s hands tightened like claws on her arms, and he could feel her starting to shake.
After a moment, she hissed, “I have to see who … who got killed.”
“Lady,” Arclath murmured, “is that wise?”
The glare she gave him then was fierce indeed. “It is necessary. Just because I didn’t happen to have been born a man, it doesn’t mean I was born without a brain or a life or—”
“Easy, Rune, easy.” He turned her around, rotating them both closer to the body and somehow just not seeing Swordcaptain Dralkin’s arm thrust out like a barrier—until the officer was forced to withdraw it or strike a woman—with a casual deftness that made her blink. “Now?”
She nodded. “Now.”
“Deep breath and look down, then,” he murmured, making the last half turn. She looked down—square into the gaping, contorted, white face of a dead man, whose throat was sliced open in a great wound that had half-severed his neck and had spilled a good-sized pond of dark and sticky blood across the cobbles. The sliced neck was bent at a horrible