Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [140]
Arclath whirled around. “What? They’d not dare! The—”
Elminster shook his head. “Ye are blind indeed, young Delcastle. Nigh every last noble at council will be breaking one Crown law or another—and they’ll all have weapons, spells on themselves, and some sort of forbidden magic or poison about their persons. Are ye sure ye’re a noble? Know ye nothing?”
Arclath stared at the old wizard, eyes narrowing. “You’re … you’re Elminster, aren’t you?”
El smiled, nodded—and slumped into a rather stiff parody of a courtly bow that left Arclath rolling his eyes and grinning.
Then he shook his head, still smiling, and said, “Well, I know I can’t walk around the palace asking for your advice and warnings at every second step without half-a-dozen war wizards and Dragons pouncing on us both!”
Elminster produced a grin of his own and went to the suit of armor. Plucking off its close-visored helm, he calmly emptied a dead mouse and its nest out of it, lowered it onto his head, and replied hollowly from inside it, “That’s why ye’re about to acquire a bodyguard. Help me on with all the rest of this clobber. Duar was about my size, I see, and he’s far too long dust to be wanting it all back now.”
“About your height, maybe, but he was twice your girth and even larger in the shoulders,” Arclath sighed, “but I doubt we dare tour the palace looking for a better fit.”
“I suppose not,” Elminster agreed cheerfully. “Besides, this is the suit with the enchanted codpiece—and I just might need it. Ye never know.”
His grotesquely broad wink left Arclath rolling his eyes again, but El was already sliding open the secret panel and waving Arclath through it. The noble stepped into the gloomy space beyond, and El followed.
The moment the panel closed behind them, the left-hand door at the end of the room swung open to reveal Glathra Barcantle and a man wearing a crown whom half Suzail knew at a glance: King Foril. They had been listening, and their faces were grim.
“So Elminster is after the Nine and believes them to be here,” Glathra said gloomily.
The king nodded. “He must not gain them. Any he does find, we must take back from him. Arclath can help us with that.”
“Can, yes,” Glathra muttered, “but will he?”
Foril sighed. “Distasteful as it seems, it’s high time to compel a few of our oh-so-loyal nobles to demonstrate their loyalty to Cormyr. Do whatever you must.”
Marlin was high-hearted with excitement, but Lothrae was coldly calm.
The words had all come out in rather a babbling rush, true, in his anxiousness to inform Lothrae that a third member of the Nine was bound to an item, somewhere which apparently half Suzail knew about!
“Contain yourself, Marlin,” Lothrae said curtly. “It will be the height of folly to rush off searching all Faerûn for magic that could be anywhere, when the council is almost upon us. We must be careful, avoid doing things that will draw both attention and suspicion, and keep our minds on seizing the right opportunity.”
“But we need all the magic we can get,” Marlin protested. “The Spellplague was unpredictable. Like a Dragon Sea windstorm, it left some things untouched here whilst utterly destroying castles’n’all over there. And it’s not done yet! Things’re still changing, stlarn it.”
“All of this is both true—and irrelevant. The ‘but the Spellplague’ argument can and has been used to justify anything and everything,” Lothrae replied coldly. “Were you to advance such an argument at court, expect to be openly sneered and laughed at; for far too many years, every single argument began thus. ‘But the Spellplague’ nothing.”
“But if someone else gets the axe—”
“Then you’ll know whom to kill to gain it, without turning all Suzail upside down and alerting much of it to your name and interests in the doing,” Lothrae snapped. “And with that said, leaving it clear to both of us that you have nothing more useful to add to our shared wisdom just now, this converse is at an end.”
The glowing air above the orb went dark, Lothrae’s image winking out, fading, and falling, all in less time than it took Marlin to draw