Take the most beautiful she-drow, Symrustar suggested tartly. Drow males and human men are alike in this: beauty distracts them from instantly seeking to slay. They’d rather have some fun first.
“Cynical,” El muttered, “yet astute.”
The one does not preclude the other, man. Even among humans. As for elves, have you so utterly forgotten your days in Cormanthor?
“No,” Elminster whispered. “Never.”
Gently, El. I did not mean to wound.
“I bear many wounds,” he murmured. “The worst healed are those I carry in my mind.”
Carefully wrapped in shrouds and hidden away, I see.
Elminster winced again.
In the rubble-heaped cauldron where the prow of stone had been, most of the drow were dead or maimed, half-crushed or missing limbs. El floated into the intact rooms deeper along the surviving side of the citadel where Symrustar had been slain.
This may be the wiser place to search, his newfound guest said approvingly. Or the most dangerous-the most powerful priestesses had chambers in this direction.
“The glaragh stole every mind it could reach,” El told her. “Unless other drow come before I’m done, I don’t expect battle.”
Nor did he find any. Staring drow were everywhere, their bodies intact but their minds quite gone, some of them silent and seemingly unaware of him or anything, others slinking away like cowed dogs at any nearby movement.
He floated through room after room, the furnishings growing grander, with ever increasing numbers of poisonous guardian spiders-some curled into tight balls of agony or spasming, quivering insanity, others frozen in awe, thanks to the abrupt disappearance of the drow minds to which they’d been linked.
He found priestesses clad in elaborate high-cowled spider robes, who bore scepters and wands of darkly menacing power. Some were slumped in spots that suggested they’d been guarding locked rooms beyond them-and in one such room Elminster was astonished to find a long table surrounded by mindless, feebly fumbling male drow whose robes, enchanted rings, and wands suggested they were wizards of some sort. Laid out upon the table were spellbooks.
Human spellbooks! Tomes and grimoires and mages’ traveling handyspells books, brought down into the Underdark from the World Above, the surface Realms El knew. Dark elves were collapsed over the pages or fallen back in their chairs away from them. These wizards had obviously been studying when the glaragh struck.
El peered at this rune-adorned page and that, feeling the silver fire roiling within him; more, now, than he could comfortably carry. He could hurl it forth at foes, aye. If he did not, it would leak slowly away in his wake … or he could make use of it as he’d done a time or two before in his a thousand-some summers. Expend a trifle here and a trifle there, to brand particular spells from these pages before him into his mind for a good long time. Forever, if no silver fire burned them away again. Making them magics he could henceforth cast by silent force of will alone. Only a few, for each one he branded into his sentience stunted and constricted it. He must choose carefully.
After he chose the best body to become his new home. He might need an excess of silver fire to break enchantments on it, or purge poisons or internal ills from it. Yes, he must find a body first.
El coiled around the fallen priestess who’d been guarding the room of the tomes. A tall, sleek drow-or would have been were she not sprawled in her own drool all over the scuttling-spider-crowded stone floor of a citadel passage. Her arms and legs were flung wide, spiders biting them as if avenging years of slights.
Aye, and that was another concern; any of these myriad fist-sized and smaller arachnids might be eyes and ears for the Queen of Spiders. El had no desire to fight scores upon scores of ruthless spider priestesses or the minions they could command, or earn the furious attention of an insane and rapacious goddess best dealt with when a restored and whole Mystra stood at his back.
At last you reach the obvious conclusion that you must hurry, Elminster.
“Yes, Mother,” El answered Symrustar mockingly. He was rewarded by a mental image of her giving him a witheringly scornful look, her face looming up so suddenly in his mind that he flinched. And promptly felt the warm flare of her satisfaction.
“Not now,” he told her grimly, and he started to steel himself mentally, steadying and gathering his will. This might be rough …
El hovered before the beautiful but alarmingly slack face of the priestess-then plunged down into her open mouth, seeking the nasal passages to drive up to storm and occupy the dark, hopefully empty mind.
He was in! And it was empty; he was falling, plunging into unknown depths, rolling …
There followed a few moments of whirling, sickening disorientation, a seemingly longer time of feeling queasily “not right” … and then the body was his, moving fingers then legs at his command, rolling over-and up, as lithely as he’d done in his youth on the rooftops of long-vanished Athalantar.
He had a body once more!
“Lady,” he asked aloud, the words coming out as a deep squawk at first, ere settling into a softer, higher-pitched echo of his former voice, “are ye still with me?”
Oh yes, Lord Aumar. You’ll not be rid of me that easily.
“Ah, lass, this is in no sense an attempt to be rid of ye-but if taking a body is this easy, it occurs to me that ye could have one, too, with my help, and take back thy fire and live on!”
The reply, from the back of his mind, was slow in coming.
That was cruel, Elminster. I am much too far gone for that. There’s not enough of me left to do more than think, and mindspeak. I can’t even … no. I can’t. If you tried to bestow silver fire on me now, even a little, it would rend what is left of me, and snuff me out like the candlestub I’ve become. I’m … I’m almost done. Don’t leave me.
“Lady, I’ve no such intentions, I assure ye! I-”
Always had a glib tongue. Let us speak no more of this, waste no more of the time neither of us has left. The silence of this citadel must have been noticed already. There are-or were-portals to other drow holds somewhere in this place; you may very soon have rather hostile visitors.
“I-aye, ye have the right of it. The spellbooks …”
Hurry, man, hurry.
Elminster hurried, clawing through the keys he found on his new body’s belt with long, deft, able fingers. This shapely, graceful, and pain-free body was clad in diaphanous robes of a hue he hated, and covered with hrasted spider badges! Impatiently he tore at the cloth.
That’s the El I remember. All shes should go bare, yes?
“Lady,” he growled aloud-it came out as an angry purr-“ye’re not helping!”
I will, Elminster, I promise. When I can, as I can. This I swear.
The sudden fiery determination in the voice in his mind almost scorched him.
Touched, El found himself on the verge of tears-larger, oilier tears than any of his human bodies had wept. He sniffled.
Stop that. Spells, remember?
“Yes, dear,” he replied mockingly. There was silence for a moment in the back of his mind, then the delicious thrill of a feminine chuckle.
How many Chosen had paid with their lives, down all the long years? Do we mean so little to Mystra?