He glared at the young mask dancer, who still stood with arms raised in the last gesture of her casting. Throwing up his own arms dramatically, he spat out an angry-sounding spell.
The air was suddenly full of flame, snarling spheres of it that expanded with frightening speed as they rushed through the air at Rune. Mirt cowered back around the corner, flinging out an arm to warn Storm, knowing even as he did so that he was too late to do anything, too late even to cling to life, as Above them, the highest of the fiery spheres came to an abrupt, shuddering stop in midair, as if it had struck an unseen wall. Its angry orange-red flames went blue, then green, then blue-silver-and fell away to nothing, plunging toward the cobbles like spilled sand but vanishing utterly before they landed.
Timidly, Mirt peeked around the corner again.
This time it was Dardulkyn who was gaping. His spell was gone as if it had never been-and he’d watched it shatter in midair, seen the angry young lass down the street foil one of his greatest battle magics in an instant.
She couldn’t do that. No one could.
“Who-who are you?” he snarled, turning a ring in frantic haste to call up his strongest shielding magics. Without waiting for a reply, he ran across the riven, open-to-the-night room, heading for where his mightiest magical staff awaited, behind its own panel.
“The name,” came the calm, almost insolent reply, “is Elminster.”
Rune’s nimble fingers moved again-and even as Dardulkyn wrenched open the panel and closed his hand triumphantly around the gleaming black grip of his most potent staff, feeling its power thrumming through him, Elminster’s next spell struck.
The sound was like a thunderclap, despite the stormless night sky. This magic was no tidy vanishing, but a series of bursts that blew apart several deeper rooms of Dardulkyn’s mansion, hurling their stones and plaster and all high and far into the night sky in the general direction of Jester’s Green. Plucking the crackling, angrily pulsing, and ultimately exploding staff from the mage’s hands in the midst of their punishing tumult, the bursts whirled it away across the night sky with the rest of the wreck… and left. As the last rolling echoes of the magic rebounded off nearby buildings, and dazed and bewildered folk started to thrust their heads out windows, a stunned and terrified Larak Dardulkyn clung to the edge of the opened panel amid the smoking ruins.
His grand black robes were shredded, and many busily winking motes of light appeared and disappeared up and down his body in mute memorial to the shielding and warding magics that had kept him alive but paid the price.
With a sound that began as a groan but ended as a sigh, a fanglike remnant of an interior wall toppled over into collapse.
Leaving Dardulkyn clinging to nothing at all.
He fell to the littered floor in a huddled heap, only his terrified stare telling Mirt that he was still alive.
Above the fallen wizard, his four direhelms hung in midair, a motionless square facing inward, guarding doors that were no longer there.
At the sight of them, Elminster sighed. Then he moved one hand in a swift, complicated spellweaving.
For many pounding heartbeats, nothing seemed to happen. Then, there came a single clink. Followed by another. And another.
Something fell.
Then, in a series of clinks and clanks, pieces of armor plate fell from all four floating menaces. More followed, in an ever-swifter sequence of plummeting. Until nothing was left floating at all, and heaps of metal festooned the floor around the quivering Dardulkyn.
Who could only watch, mewing in disbelieving fear from time to time, as the fallen metal started to rust before his eyes with uncanny speed.
By the time he’d swallowed twice or thrice, it had all crumbled to reddish brown powder. Even the sword hilts.
“You can cry now,” Elminster told the huddled archwizard gently. “As wizards seem to be all too fond of saying, these days: We all have to start learning about the world sometime.”
Marlin Stormserpent had hurried home groaning in fear. It had all gone wrong!
What to do now, what to do now?
Did he even have any blueflame ghosts at his command, anymore?
He couldn’t get that sight of one of his ghosts being hurled across the Promenade out of his head. It had looked just like an ordinary hiresword, a man who could be killed as swiftly-and stlarn it, easily — as other men, a man with a sword who just happened to have some pretty blue flames around him. Why, a hedge wizard could conjure up such a look!
He’d thought himself so powerful, so important…
The ghosts had made short work of Huntcrown, but-but Were they anything more, now, than bright banners pointing him out as a traitor to anyone who cared to look?
Ganrahast, the royal magician? That snarling bitch, Lady Glathra? The king?
He had a brief, dreadful vision of a chopping block in the palace stableyard, and Crown Prince Irvel waiting beside it with a large, sharp sword and a ruthless smile Shaking his head to banish that imagining, Marlin strode across the room, bound for his favorite decanter. He’d made a proper mess of Oh, no.
Behind him, rich blue radiance had blossomed seemingly out of nowhere and glinted back reflections from all his decanters. Clapping one hand to the hilt of the Flying Blade and snatching up the Wyverntongue Chalice with the other, Marlin whirled around.
The ghost was smiling, of course. The blueflame ghosts always did. Wide, terrible smiles, malicious or madly gleeful, and obviously false.
At odds right now with the angry hiss Treth Halonter, who long ago had been the best warrior of the Nine, was giving Marlin as he strode through the wall. His worn and nondescript leather war harness looked torn and battered, some of the leather hanging in frayed tatters. In the heart of fainter, more flickering blue flames than usual, the warrior leaned forward threateningly.
“Sent us into the maw of mighty magics, you did,” he whispered, as if wounded inside. “You pewling, prancing idiot.”
Marlin somehow got himself around behind the table he’d grabbed the Chalice from, and from the skimpy shelter of its far side snapped fearfully, “You serve me! Remember?”
Drawing his sword in desperate haste, he held it up before him, with the Chalice, as if they were holy things that could ward off the furious ghost.
“I do. Oh, I do,” Halonter replied, glowering over his wide smile. “In fact, lordling, I’ll never forget.”
“I–I’m sorry. I saw the-what happened to the door. Uh, and you. But I really couldn’t have foreseen that any wizard of war would be so crazed as to destroy part of his
own palace just to smite you! Could I?”
Still wearing that terrible grin, Halonter swung his sword in a deft arc that severed a row of fresh, unlit candles and the neck of one of Marlin’s oldest decanters, slicing it without shattering the vessel or toppling it.
Marlin shivered at the thought of how sharp the ghost’s blade must be.
“No, I couldn’t,” he answered himself shakily.
“No,” Halonter hissed, “you couldn’t.”
He took a menacing step forward, until he was against the table and Marlin could smell Halonter’s faint, acrid reek. Like soured wine and a mix of many spices.
“More fool you,” the ghost added, shoving the table forward.
It might well have pinned Marlin painfully against his best sideboard, but fortunately for the noble, a stone replica of a figurehead of a long-ago Stormserpent ship flanked the piece, massive and solid and as immobile as the wall behind it. The table struck it and could be shoved no farther.
With a snarl the ghost spun around and stalked away, across the room.
“Relve!” he spat. “How did he fare?”
“I–I-”
Stammering in dread, Marlin had gotten no farther by the time the wall Halonter had come through glowed blue again-a dark, feeble blue-that became the hunched-over, staggering Relve Langral.