Elminster's Daughter - Ed Greenwood [6]
Halfway across that span the air seemed to sparkle, and he was suddenly facing a silent woman in a clinging, flowing gown… a gown of pale moonglow, to match the tatters streaming across the sky overhead.
Elminster smiled and bowed his head in greeting. "Fair even, Ieiridauna. Are Mirt and Asper at home?"
Smiling silently, the watchghost nodded and stretched one long and shapely arm back to point at the door behind her. Then she drifted forward tentatively to touch the Old Mage's cheek with her other hand. Elminster took a slow step to meet her.
The soft brush of her fingertips chilled him deeply as it stole a little life-force, but Elminster turned his head to kiss those icy fingers, then clasped Ieiridauna gently against him.
Her breath was like a icy thread of glacier-wind, and her shoulders and breast seem to grow more solid the longer he embraced her, but suddenly his encircling arm was empty, and the watch-ghost was past him, weepingly softly and saying into his ear, "Too kind, great lord, too kind! You must not give me too much."
Elminster turned and said softly, "Lady, 'tis my hope that you abide in Faerun for at least an age to come, to bear witness and whisper wisdom-and the life is mine to give."
The watchghost shook her head and knelt to him, her head and shoulders silvery-solid but the rest of her mere shiftings in the night air. "You do me too much honor, Lord Chosen."
Elminster chuckled. "Ah, yell have me blushing yet, lass!" He struck a mock-heroic pose, pulled a face at her, then winked, waved, and went to the door. Ieiridauna's gentle sobs followed him.
The plain dark door opened before his hand could touch it, and a bristle-moustached face peered out of deeper darkness at him. "Seducing my watchghost again, El? Is there no end to your lecherousness?"
Elminster spread serene hands. " Twould seem not, Lord Walrus. Nor my meddlesome curiosity, when it comes to the affairs of others-such as the overly rich of Waterdeep."
Mirt grunted and beckoned him inside. "This had better be good-ye interrupted us in the midst of Asper dancing."
"Ah!" Elminster said quickly, as they stepped between two motionless helmed horrors, into a lamplit bedchamber dominated by a massive many-pillared bed. "Pray continue!"
Mirt's lady love unfolded herself from a seemingly impossible pose. She'd been balanced on her shoulders on the bed, head looking back down its length as her legs arched over her to clutch a gem between her toes and dangle it in front of her own nose. She tucked her legs back in one graceful movement, tossing the gem upward in a sparkling of reflected glows, caught it deftly, and said firmly, "Later. I'll hear fewer lewd comments this way. What befalls?"
"Yell pull something, doing that," the Old Mage commented, watching Asper flip herself forward and to one side in a deft, sinuous movement to end up reclining along the edge of the bed facing him.
She twinkled a fond smile at him. "Indeed: the undivided attention of a moneylender and a Chosen of Mystra. Drink some of yon wine and speak."
Elminster raised his eyebrows, held out his hand, and a decanter lifted itself from a forest of its fellows atop a tall, ornately carved greatchest and drifted into his grasp.
"No wonder mages are such drunkards," Mirt muttered. "Why, if I could do that…"
"You'd never have to get out of bed at all," Asper murmured sweetly. "El?"
"I come from Cormyr," the Old Mage replied, uncorking and sniffing appraisingly at the mouth of the bottle. "Where coins in profusion enough that they'd best be described as 'huge heaps of wealth' are being spent on a secretive campaign to overthrow the Obarskyrs and put a new king on Cormyr's throne."
"So what else is new?" Mirt grunted. "Our so-called nobles spend in like manner here, seeking to learn who each hidden Lord