Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [153]
“Mind you inform Glathra—or the king—at your first sight of either of them that you conducted me out of the palace, and that I can be found at Delcastle Manor,” he told the wizard, turning on his heel in the doorway to do so. “I suspect a failure on your part to do as much will not go over well—and were I you, I might risk royal displeasure, but the wrath of the Lady Glathra, now …”
At least one of the Purple Dragons chuckled.
Which was when there was a sudden commotion behind Arclath, and he spun around in time to see that one of the Dragons at the door had thrust a spear out to bar the path of a weathered old man in even more battered leather clothing—and the old man had jerked on the spear, hauled the soldier within reach, got him in an armlock, and spun him around to make him into a living shield against the spear of the other door guard.
“Is this the way ye greet arriving lords of Waterdeep, now?” he demanded gruffly.
The wizard of war stepped forward, reaching for a wand at his belt—and Arclath took great pleasure in clapping a hand around the mage’s wrist and snapping, “Try to avoid a diplomatic disaster, Saer Wizard!”
“Stirge!” one of the Dragons behind the sputtering mage shouted suddenly, pointing out the open door.
The battered old man spun around, the Dragon under his arm struggling but being dragged with him—and lashed out with a dagger that had suddenly appeared in his hairy free hand.
Gutted and with one wing sliced through, the flapping stirge tumbled to the ground, where the old man brought a firm boot down on its head.
“Stirges? In daylight, at the very doors of the palace?” the wizard snarled, struggling to wrench his arm free of Arclath’s grip.
“It’s the pet of the Lord Marlin Stormserpent,” Arclath informed him. “Or was.”
“And what was it doing out and about?” a Dragon growled. “He sent it?”
Arclath frowned. “We can but guess.” He looked the wizard straight in the eye, as they stood nose to nose, and added, “Unless you’d like to do something of real service to the Crown—and go and ask him?”
Elminster shook his vials out of his boots, then decided he didn’t need them, and put them back. The healing potions Alusair had poured down him were enough. He was back to being as good as he got, these days.
“Storm,” he asked the ghostly princess sadly, “what was left of her?”
“Nothing,” Alusair told him. “Did you not feel her ring working? Right in the heart of the blast, it took her away somewhere. No, there wasn’t a trace of her—not one drop—in the crypt.”
She watched him peel off the last of the shattered armor. “Now I’ve one to ask you, El. Who hurled that spell at you?”
The Sage of Shadowdale shrugged. “A wizard?” he offered helpfully. “Lass, I know not. Truly.”
“One of the wizards of war you didn’t manage to kill recently?” Alusair asked a little coolly.
Elminster shrugged again. “Life wasn’t simple a century ago, but I used to know a little about what was going on right around me. A little.”
Manshoon frowned. Who was this gruff old man who tossed Purple Dragons about fearlessly and called himself a lord of Waterdeep? The man was just then lurching off down the promenade with the rolling gait of a sailor … could it be one of Elminster’s disguises?
Surely not. Yet the man seemed somehow familiar. Seen long before, in, yes, Waterdeep …
Oh, surely not. Mirt? It couldn’t be.
Or could it?
Manshoon shook his head.
It was, by Bane: Mirt the Moneylender. Once Mirt the Merciless, and still not a man anyone should turn his back on. He peered intently into the scene …
Mirt stood in the middle of a busy Suzail street and cursed bitterly.
The taverns and clubs of Cormyr’s capital were deafeningly crowded bastions of revelry this day, to be sure, awash in excited nobles and their servants making merry on the eve of some grand council or other.
Every last one of them he’d managed