Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [143]
“Well, Elminster was with me, and—”
“I believe you,” Glathra said crisply. “If it really was Elminster and not some poser just claiming that infamous name, I’d not have wanted to trade spells with him nose to nose, anyhail. Report!”
Arclath nodded. “Well, he confirmed everything Amarune has told me: He’s her great-grandsire; he was waiting for her in her lodgings yestereve to tell her so; and he wants her to save the Realms as he’s been doing for centuries. Beginning with stealing some magic items that are apparently here in Suzail, and hold the ghosts of the Nine—you know about the Nine?”
“We do.”
“Ah, of course. Well, as it happens, that wasn’t all that I came here to tell you.”
Glathra leaned forward, for all the world like a hunting dog straining at the leash to be released to pounce. “Yes?”
“I’m … I’m not half as capable a spy as I thought I was. I am loyal to the Crown, mind, just not … guarding the realm is not half as easy as I thought it would be. Not to mention even less fun.”
Glathra’s stare was hard and level. “Others before you, Lord Delcastle, have discovered as much. A few of them have even admitted it.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
HUNTING ELMINSTERS
Watching Gods Above, was that the time?
An exhausted Wizard of War Glathra stumbled out her usual rear door of the palace, intent only on getting home to eat something—cold roast fowl from three nights back would have to do; she was too tired to get busy at her hearth—and soak her aching feet before falling—and this night, it would be falling—into bed.
Almost immediately she stopped dead, because someone was standing in her way. Swordcaptain Dralkin.
“Now what?” she snarled, by way of greeting.
Rather stiffly, he replied, “War Wizard Glathra, I’ve news that might well concern the safety of the realm. I thought you’d want to know.”
She closed her eyes wearily, but when she opened them again he was still standing there. “And it is?”
“Three of our younger noble lords—Windstag, Dawntard, and Sornstern—seem to be turning much of Suzail upside down right now, looking for magical hand axes. They’re offering large coin in the taverns frequented by nobles’ servants—the Rose and Dragon, the Servant Exalted, and the Hrelto—for any hand axe brought to them that’s magical when they test it, and came from any noble House. They have this chant about where they want folk to look: ‘up on a wall or hidden in a bedchamber or back hall.’ ”
Glathra sighed heavily. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“More than that,” he was already adding—her query just brought a vigorous nod as he went on talking. “There’ve been thefts and ransackings-by-night seeking things in many nobles’ mansions. Bodyguards killed or struck senseless, and many lords and ladies left seething this night at having their chambers looted.”
“Farruk,” Glathra said crisply. “Farewell, slumber.”
She stepped around him and started to stride down the street.
“I know who’s behind all this. Take me to the lodgings of the dancer Amarune Whitewave,” she snapped back at him, over her shoulder. “We’re hunting Elminsters.”
The cave was a long, narrow hovel of damp dirt, stones, and sagging old rough-tree furniture, more a hermit’s cellar than a druid den. Two small, flickering oil lamps hung from a crossbranch over a rude table, and somewhere behind their glows sat a stout, broad-shouldered old man, blinking at the band of adventurers past a fearsome beak of a nose. He had a long, shaggy white beard.
The floor was an uneven, greasy, hard-trodden litter of old bones and empty nutshells, and roots thrust out of the dirt walls here, there, and everywhere; on many had been hung a pathetic collection of rotting old scraps of tapestry and paintings.
“So ye’ve found Elminster,” wheezed the old man, “ye adventurers, and to earn thy