The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [52]
Tabarast and Beldrune frowned at the stranger in unison, then turned their backs, drew in side by side, and continued their investigations in muttered tones.
El gave their eloquent backs and shoulders a wry, exhausted smile, then shrugged and peered at another parchment. It was something about Grafting a spike-studded torture coffin so that folk latched into it were teleported elsewhere rather than suffering impalement, and it was written with that squaring of the letters that marked its origin as the south shore of the Sea of Fallen Stars. The glint of metallic inks shone back at him, and the page had reached that soft brown state just before crumbling begins… as old as he was, or older. El looked at the next page, sliding aside a Netherese ocular to do it.
He gave the beautiful item a second glance. The enchantments that would affix it over a wearer's eye were gone, but the gem would still, by the looks of it, afford vision of heat, and even through wood or stone a handspan thick or less. With the curled filigree around it, it looked like a giant, elegant tear that would glisten endlessly on a lady's cheek.
What a lot of work. Grafting far in excess of its usefulness, done for the sheer joy of mastering the Art and creating something that would last… and there must be a thousand times a thousand such items, scattered all over a world so rich in natural magic that all of them could be said to be frivolities.
And was Elminster Aumar, in truth, one more frivolity?
Perhaps, and perhaps he was destined to leave behind little more than these endless dusty scraps of parchment, the confused and unfinished ideas of centuries… yet that flow of mistakes and vain strivings and occasional triumphs or destructive disasters was the Art, with Mystra the gatekeeper of the Weave from which it all came and to which it all returned.
Enough. He was standing in a parchment-littered room in Moonshorn Tower, here and now, and the flow of magics or the very nature of Art were alike in their irrelevance His world was a place of hunger, and thirst, feeling cold or hot…or feeling so gods-spitting tired that he could barely keep his eyes open an instant longer.
Wait! There…he'd seen that writing before. The fine, flowing hand of Elenshaer, who'd been so good at crafting new and unusual wardings in Myth Drannor…until he'd been torn apart by a Phaerimm he'd rashly caged in too-feeble spells to do a little experimentation… a victim, some would say, of that arrogant assumption of elven superiority and of the ethical right to transform, mutilate, or tamper with "lesser beings," even if they're not truly lesser beings, that afflicts so many of his race. An unfortunate moment of misjudgment and another of carelessness, others would term it. And who was to say which view was right or if any of it truly mattered? Seeing the slender elf laughing and gesturing, fluted wineglass in hand, in his memory of a terrace that no longer stood, amid folk who no longer lived, El slid aside other writings to expose all of Elenshaer's missive.
It was a spell, of sorts. Or rather, the beginnings of a "hook" of Art that would allow an additional power to be added to an existing ward by the casting of another spell into the invisible hook…which would then draw the spell Into the weaving of the ward and permit the caster to govern and adjust its effects. Elminster read the spell over silently until it approached its ending and stopped.
Elenshaer had followed a common elf mages' practice. He'd set down the crowning part of the casting on another paper, kept elsewhere. His abode would have held thousands of such papers, with Elenshaer's memory as the only link of what paper went with which. There'd even been a rogue mage in the City of Song, Twillist, who'd sought power by pilfering such "ends" of spells, trading them to young apprentices and others eager for more knowledge and power in exchange for lesser, but