Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [96]
And somewhere behind him, so was she, this Amarune whose name he’d only just learned.
Just in time for them both to lose their lives together, it seemed, when such trifles would no longer matter. Ever.
In the darkest back corner of the royal crypt, three levels below any part of the palace where the sun ever reached, the lone old wizard stiffened, his eyes momentarily flashing blue fire.
“Something’s happened,” Elminster said grimly. “Something’s been awakened. Strong magic, old magic. Hmmph. Like me.”
All around where he was sitting loomed huge stone Obarskyr sarcophagi, where dead kings, queens, princes, and princesses of Cormyr crumbled slowly and silently into dust. The magic in this place lay like heavy armor, deadening his senses to all but the strongest disturbances but hiding him very effectively from any war wizard who might seek to lessen the task of all those diligent Purple Dragons by casting the right sort of seeking spell.
Someone among these latter-day wizards of war must know the right sort of seeking spell or how to look it up in an old grimoire. If they read anything at all, anymore …
It happened again, a surge in the magic within and around him that was like a great silent shout, sending him wincing and shuddering back against the nearest stone coffin.
A powerful unleashing … but what?
There had been a time when he could have walked within a day’s ride of Suzail and would have known in an instant precisely what had been done, when anything that powerful disturbed the Weave. Aye, there had been a time …
“I can’t save the Realms anymore,” he whispered into the gloom. “Not alone.”
Sudden tears made the glows around him swim and slide. “I can’t even protect Cormyr, stlarn it! The ghosts of the Nine could, aye, if properly commanded—but I need them to heal Alassra. So which will it be? The land? Or my lady?”
The silent darkness offered no answer, and Elminster was damned and blasted if he could decide on one just then.
He couldn’t sit and hide there any longer; he had to think. To do that, he needed room to walk and pretend he was still smoking his old pipe and … and to stop pretending about a lot of things.
The dead around him were dust, their days done, and so were his. He just hadn’t had the good sense to die yet and leave all his cares and causes behind, hand the endless fight on to someone else young and vigorous and having even the slightest hope of winning some new vict—
Aye, that was it, right there. Hope.
That was the rarest treasure for him, these days. Fading, forlorn hope. Hope that his Alassra could be herself again, hope that … that …
Oh, for the love of Mystra, he had to get out of there!
In a whirlwind of lurching haste he was out of the crypt and hurrying along dark and deserted passages, moving more from memory than by sight, heading for the nearest way out of the palace and into the night air.
He had to … had to … what was he going to do?
Wheezing, he climbed a stair, coming out onto another level that was thankfully dark and empty. Well, and so it should be: if he’d been commanding the wizards and soldiers of this place, he’d have had many more pressing matters to deal with than some old man who might or might not be a thief!
Mayhap they had nothing else at all to worry their heads over, but somehow he could scarce believe that. That they might choose not to see some looming crisis or other, before it lifted its fanged head in their faces and bit them, that he could believe, oh aye, and—
At the head of the next stair, he walked straight into a man rushing past.
A man in robes who staggered and cursed, turned, stared, and snarled, “You!”
Smiles of the gods, it was Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake!
“My pleasure,” Elminster assured him firmly, lunging forward to where he could trip the younger man off balance.
He did so, leaving Mreldrake winded and staggering—then knocked him cold with an elbow up under his jaw before the war wizard could think of some suitably nasty spell to