The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [31]
"Use a few of them to buy a horse," Harbright grunted, spraying an arc of table with small morsels of herbed boar. "Gods above…walking around the kingdoms! I'd grow old even before my feet wore off at the ankles!"
"Tell me," Lord Felmorel addressed Wanlorn, leaning forward, "how much did you see of the fabled City of Song? Most who even glimpse the ruins are torn apart before they can win clear."
"Or did you just wander about in the woods near where you imagine Myth Drannor to be?" Arunder asked silkily, plucking up a decanter to refill his glass.
"The fiends must have been busy hounding someone else," the hawk-nosed man told the Mantimera, "because I spent most of a day clambering through overgrown, largely empty buildings without seeing anything alive that was larger than a squirrel. Beautiful arched windows, curving balconies… it must have been very grand. Now there's not much lying about waiting to be carried off. I saw no wineglasses still on tables or books propped open where someone was interrupted in their reading, as the minstrels would have us all believe. No doubt the city was sacked after it fell. Yet I saw, and remember, some sigils and writings. Now if I could just determine what they mean…."
"You saw no fiends?" Arunder was derisive…but also visibly eager to hear Wanlorn's reply. The hawk-nosed man smiled.
"No, sir mage, they guard the city yet. 'Twill probably be years, if ever, before folk can walk into the ruins without having to worry about anything more dangerous than a stirge, say, or an owlbear."
Lord Felmorel shook his head. "All that power," he murmured, "and yet they fell. All that beauty swept away, the people dead or scattered… once lost, it can never be restored again. Not the way it was."
Wanlorn nodded. "Even if the fiends were banished by nightfall," he said, "the place rebuilt in a tenday, and a citizenry of comparable wit and accomplishments assembled the day after, we'd not have the City of Beauty back again. That shared excitement, drive, and the freedom to experiment and freely reason and indulge in whimsy that's founded on the sure knowledge of one's own invulnerability won't be there. One would have a players' stage pretending to be the City of Song, not Myth Drannor once more."
The Mantimera nodded and said, "I've long heard the tales of the fall, and have even faced a fell fiend-not there…and lived to tell the tale. Even divided by their various selfish interests and rivalries, I can scarce believe that so grand and powerful a folk fell as completely and utterly as they did."
"Myth Drannor had to fall," Barundryn Harbright rumbled, spreading one massive hand as if holding an invisible skull out over the table for their inspection. "They got above themselves, you see, chasing godhood again… like those Netherese. The gods see to it that such dreams end bloodily, or there'd be more gods than we could all remember, and none of 'em with might enough to answer a single prayer. 'Sobvious, so why do all these mages keep making this same mistake?"
The wizard Arunder favored him with a slim, superior smile and said, "Possibly because they don't have you on hand to correct their every little straying from the One True Path."
The warrior's face lit up. "Oh, you've heard of it?" he asked. "The One True Path, aye."
The mage's jaw dropped open. He'd been joking, but by all the gods, this lummox seemed serious.
"There aren't many of us thus far," Harbright continued enthusiastically, waving a whole, gravy-dripping pheasant for emphasis, "but already we wield power in a dozen towns. We need a realm, next, and…"
"So do we all. I'd like several," Arunder said mockingly, swiftly recovered from his astonishment. "Get me one with lots of towering castles, will you?"
Harbright gave him a level look. "The problem with