He was alive and whole because his love had sacrificed herself to save her Elminster, pouring all her life-force into restoring him. He felt young again, strong. The Art was alive and dancing within him, with more silver fire roiling around than he could comfortably hold for long.
Ah, so this was what had been driving his Alassra mad: all the seething, roiling silver fire inside her. Oh, it hurt; it was burning him, fighting to burst out of him. Well, he’d indulge it, and soon!
Folk rushed toward him. El turned to give them death, but found they were Arclath and Amarune, their bone white faces wet with tears, their mouths working.
“El? El, is it you?” Rune managed to sob, reaching for him. Just as Alassra had so often reached for him …
She rushed into his arms, clung to him tightly, and cried his name. El looked bleakly over her shoulder at Arclath, who was standing uncertainly nearby, staring back at him. Looking scared.
Well, so he should, this young noble. He knew what he was looking at. He saw an archwizard who wanted to deal death to so many.
“What good is it all?” Elminster rasped at Lord Delcastle, almost pleadingly, his own tears coming, coursing from despairing holes of eyes. “To have all this power, to work all these centuries serving a bright cause, helping folk-if I cannot save the ones I love? Tell me it has all been worth it! Tell me!”
Arclath swallowed, on the trembling edge of tears. No one should ever look so … desolate. Nothing should ever happen that was bad enough to make a mighty wizard’s face look like this. “I-”
“Tell me,” Elminster howled, “so I can tell you that you lie, and lash out at you! Smiting you down just as unfairly as this world has so often treated me! Mystra spit, I have been through this so many times! You’d think I’d be used to this by now, this loss, this treachery, the-the bedamned unfairness of it all!”
With two angry strides done in less time than it took Arclath to even think of reaching for his sword, the Sage of Shadowdale had spun Rune out of his arms with infinite gentleness, stepped past the heir of House Delcastle and gripped Arclath’s arms with the crushing force of two owlbear talons, the better to turn him until they faced each other. He roared into Arclath’s paling face, “Yet I never get used to it, lad! Under this armor of drawling cynicism and world-weary jesting, I cry the very same way I cried when the magelords swept down on my village and left me kinless and alone in Athalantar! Again and again I lose those I love-places I love, entire families I love, whole kingdoms I hold dear! Well, I’m sick of it-sick, d’ye hear?”
He flung Arclath aside like a child’s doll and stalked across the corpse-littered Delcastle lawns, snarling, to stop at the edge of a flower bed, fling up his arms, and roar, “Enough! By the silver fire within me, by the Art I love and wield, by all the faces of those lost and fallen that I grieve, I go now to war! In their name let me rage, in their memory shatter and despoil and hurl down! ’Tis time to hurl castles into the air, and snatch soaring dragons down from it! Eorulagath!”
That last word crashed around Suzail like a clap of thunder, rolling from spire to balcony and rooftop, splitting windowpanes, as half-deafened citizens winced and staggered.
Before the echoes of that word of power started to fade, lightning split the sky, raging around Elminster like an impatient blue-white cloak of flames. Up the crackling lightning swept, bearing the tall thin wizard his own height above the scorched turf, and more-and then he was gone, in a blinding flash of light, borne elsewhere in an instant.
On hands and knees in the rubble, clinging to stones with numbed fingers as the backlash made every hair on his body crackle and stand on end, Arclath Delcastle winced, feeling his teeth rattle.
Wherever the Sage of Shadowdale had taken himself, Arclath hoped it was far, far away. He did not want to be as close to Elminster, just now, as, say, on the same continent.
For centuries Elminster had kept his grief, and much of his temper, tightly leashed. No longer. Oh, by Mystra, no longer.
He was trembling to let it loose now, to indulge his rage at last …
“At last!” he bellowed atop the Old Skull in Shadowdale, seeing folk running from the inn below to gape up at him, gouts of silver fire escaping his mouth with every word. “Let scores be settled!”
He stood suddenly in a cellar, where a self-styled incipient emperor was hastily scrambling up from a seat among glowing scrying spheres.
An unlovely woman who had until recently been an understeward in the palace stood in front of Elminster, reaching for a wand and snarling a curse.
With a grim smile, El took hold of the deadly end of the wand-and let Fentable trigger it.
Nothing happened at its tip, but as Manshoon gaped in astonishment, and the intruder in his cellar held back the startled would-be emperor’s spells without even looking up, the full fury of the wand’s magic washed back out through the hand that held it.
Corleth Fentable was ashes and charred bones, well on their plummeting way to the floor, in an instant.
Former Wizard of War Rorskryn Mreldrake was brewing a fresh pot of tea and wondering if his captors would ever let him set foot outside his far-too-familiar room again, before they killed him-when one wall of his prison abruptly vanished. In silence, and without any mess or disturbance at all. It was simply … gone, to reveal a street outside lined with many buildings, and a gentle breeze, and-
A man stepping out of that empty air, at least one floor above the street, to give him a smile that held no warmth at all.
“I think your greatest spell had best die with you,” Elminster told him.
It was the last thing Mreldrake ever saw or heard.
El calmly swung the kettle off the hearth and poured it into the teapot, ignoring the man-high wisp of swirling ashes beside him.
The spell that should have blasted him, the hearth, and most of that side of the room to dust and tumbling stones appeared to do nothing to him at all.
Nor did the two spells hurled after it.
In their room-rocking wake, El looked up from the pot at the hurlers of those magics, the three shades who’d kept Mreldrake captive in this room. He dispensed another smile that held neither mirth nor fondness. “Tea?” he asked, as mildly as any kindly hearthside hostess.
He did not give them a chance to reply.
The flames, or tendrils, or whatever they were appeared out of nowhere to snatch Harbrand and Hawkspike out of the corner of the cavern where they glumly waited to die.
The next thing they knew, they were both sitting on the floor of their landlady’s office, stark naked, and she was rising from her desk to stare down at them, open-mouthed in astonishment.
Harbrand and Hawkspike stared back up at her, suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of how much coin they owed her.
“Madam,” a tall wizard said politely from behind them, just before he vanished, “I give you: Danger For Hire.”
Alorglauvenemaus rolled over with a grunt of pain. The only healing spell he could cast while in this great body helped but little. It was going to take a long time, and castings beyond his counting yet, before …
He hadn’t troubled to even try to think what magic those two poltroons had managed to awaken, to snatch themselves away from him. There would be time enough later to learn what it had been. Learn leisurely, as he tore them apart at the joints so slowly, and learned so much more …