The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [141]
Elminster stopped in front of it and stared at the unfamiliar curves and crossings. He didn't recognize any of these sigils. They looked both complex and old, and that of course suggested lost Netheril… or any of a score of its echoes, the fleeting realms that had followed its fall, with their self-styled sorcerer-kings, if any of the rotting old histories he'd read down the years had it right.
Only this one was glowing. El stared at it intently. "Sentience slumbreth here," he murmured, "but whose?"
Only silence answered him. The last prince of Athalantar acquired the ghost of a smile, sighed, and cast an unbinding.
The quiet echoes of his incantation were still rolling back to him from the walls all around when a ghostly head and shoulders erupted from the pale starry glow of the rune.
The eyes were dark and melting flecks in a head whose long and shapely neck yearned up from shoulders of striking beauty. Long hair flowed down over lush breasts, but it seemed his unbinding could free no more of this apparition from the grip of the now pulsing rune.
"Free me!" The voice was a tattered whisper, sighing from a lonely afar. "Oh, if the kindness and mercy of the gods mean anything to you, let me be freer
"Who are ye?" El asked quietly, taking a pace back and kneeling to look more closely into the ghostly face, "and what are these runes?"
Ghostly lips seemed to tremble and gasp. When her voice soared out once more, it held the high, singing note of one who has triumphed over pain. "I am Saeraede… Saeraede Lyonora. I am bound here, so long I know not how many years have passed."
At the last few words, she seemed to grow dimmer and sank back into the rune as far as her shoulders.
"Who bound ye here?" Elminster asked, casting a quick look at the empty, watchful darkness all around. Aye, that was it, he could not shake the feeling that he was being watched… and not merely by the dark and spectral eyes floating near his feet.
"I was bound by the one who made these runes," the whispering shade told him. "Mine is the will and essence that empowers them, as the seasons pass."
"Why were ye bound?" El asked quietly, staring into eyes that seemed to hold tiny stars in their depths, as they melted pleadingly into his.
Her answer, when it came, was a sigh so soft that he barely heard it. Yet it came clearly: "Karsus was cruel."
The eyebrows of the last prince of Athalantar flew up. He knew that name. The Proudest Mage of All, who in his mad folly had dared to try to seize the power of godhood and suffered everlasting doom.
The name Karsus meant peril to any mage of sense. Elminster's eyes narrowed, and he stepped back and forthwith murmured a spell. Bound spirit, undead, wizardly shade or living woman, he would know truth when she spoke it…and falsehood. Of course, this Saeraede was likely to have been a sorceress of some accomplishment, perhaps an apprentice or rival of Karsus, for her to have been chosen for such a binding. She would know he'd just cast a truthtell.
Their eyes met in shared knowledge, and Elminster shrugged. She would answer as truthfully as she could, concealing only by her brevity. Like dueling swordsmen, they'd have to weigh each other's words and fence carefully. He cast a spell he should have used before entering the shaft, calling up a mantle of protection around himself, and stepped forward again.
Unseen beyond the faint shimmer of his mantle, fresh fury flared in eyes watching from the deep darkness at the back of the cavern.
"What will or must ye do, if freed?" El asked the head.
"Live again," she gasped. "Oh, man, free me!"
"What will freeing ye do to the runes?"
"Awaken them once each," the ghostly head moaned, 'and they'll then be exhausted."
"What powers have the awakened runes?"
They call up images of Karsus, who instructs all who view them in ways of magic. Karsus meant them for the education of his clone, hidden here."
"What became of it?" El asked sharply, hurrying to hear her answer as the truthtell ran out.
Dark, star-shot eyes