Elminster_ The Making of a Mage - Ed Greenwood [103]
Ilhundyl's mouth was suddenly dry. A woman twice as tall as he stood looking across the empty air between them. A tall, regal lady of blue flame, her eyes dark and level as they met his.
Sudden fear rose to choke him. Ilhundyl muttered a hasty word and sketched a sign in the air, and the winking lights rose bright around him, bearing him away…
* * * * *
Elmara groaned, coughed weakly, and opened her eyes. Dawn had come to Faerun again… and, it seemed, had found her still in it. She was lying half in water and half on sand, with the endless crash of the surf all around. Fingers of foaming water ran up the sand past her. El watched its flow, feeling weak and sick, and then tried to lift herself. Sand sucked at her, then she was on hands and knees… whole and unhurt, it seemed, just a little dizzy.
The beach was deserted. A cool, salty onshore breeze blew past her and made her shiver. She was naked except for the Lion Sword, still on its thong around her neck. Elmara sighed, and wobbled to her feet. There was no sign of houses or docks or fences… just stunted trees, rocks, and a tangle of grasses, old stumps, and bushes where the beach ended and the living things began.
She took a step forward, then froze. In the sand in front of her, someone had scratched one word: "Athalantar."
El looked down at the word in the sand, and then at her bare limbs, and shivered. She coughed, shook her head, lifted her chin, and strode away from the water, heading toward the rising sun.
*****
In a place where guardian spells glowed night and day, deep in the Castle of Sorcery, a man settled down to read.
"Garadic," he said coldly, and sipped his drink.
The scaled minion reluctantly shuffled forward out of the shadows and gingerly opened Ondil's Book of Spells, where it lay on a lectern at the far end of the chamber from his master. Always-vigilant protective spells massed and swirled around the lectern, but no lightnings nor creeping death came. The revealed page was blank.
"Bring it," was the next cold command.
When the lectern stood before his high, padded chair, Ilhundyl set down the goblet of emerald wine and waved the scaled, shambling thing away. He turned the next page himself.
It was as blank and creamy as the flyleaf before it had been. He turned it back. So was the next… and the next… and the next… every one of the pages was blank! Ilhundyl's face froze, and a frown crept in around his eyes.
He spoke a word that made all the radiances in the room dim. The floor glowed briefly, and there came a grating sound, as a flagstone there moved back to reveal a hole. Very quickly, as if it had been waiting, a slyly questing tendril rose from unseen depths below. It touched the book delicately, almost caressingly, and then enfolded it-only to recoil, disappointed, and sink down again. That meant there were no hidden writings, nor portals or linkages to other spaces and other tomes. The book was empty.
Sudden rage seized Ilhundyl then. He rose from his seat in black anger, striding through portals that slid open and curtains that parted at his approach. His furious walk ended half the castle away, before a large sphere of sparkling crystal. It stood atop a black pedestal, alone in a small room of many lamps.
He glared into the depths of the sphere. Flames and flickerings appeared and coiled there, fueled by his anger. Ilhundyl stared into the crystal as the flames within it slowly grew, reaching flickering talons up its curving sides, and suddenly he was shouting. "I'll blast her bones! If she's drowned, I'll raise her-and then smash her bones like hurled eggs, and make her beg for release! No one tricks Ilhundyl! No one!"
He spat a word of summoning, and halfway across the Castle of Sorcery, where he cowered in concealing shadows, the winged and warty shape of Garadic rose hastily and flapped down the swiftest ways to his master's side.
Ilhundyl glared into the crystal, summoning up the young, hawk-nosed face from his memory. The