“Hesperdan,” said a quiet voice from behind him, “it is over.”
“Elminster!” the wyrm growled, twisting its head as it flung itself over again, so it could get the Old Mage with acid before-
The man who’d once been his ally, who mind-melded with him in the days before his treachery, was smiling an almost affectionate smile.
He went right on smiling as the great wall of silver flame rushing out of him broke over Hesperdan and took everything away in an instant, plunging him into bubbling silver oblivion …
“Ruin him,” Lord Breeklar sneered. “Buy up all his debts before nightfall and rouse him from his bed at sword point to demand payment. Then let him stew until morning. I want him out of his house before highsun tomorrow. Offer to hire his wife and daughters as bedmates in one of my brothels.”
His steward bowed and hastened out, leaving the noble to sit back in his chair and smile. His gaze fell upon the decanters left ready on the tray, and he idly selected one as he looked at the next sheaf of parchments.
So many debtors yet to punish, so many business partners still to swindle. Ah, work, work, work …
How he enjoyed it all. Why-
“Breeklar, ye’re far from the worst of Suzail’s lords, but gleefully destructive to those who come within thy reach and notice. Not to mention needlessly rude to marchionesses.”
The voice that shouldn’t have been there was coming from close behind Breeklar’s right ear. He spun around, his fist rising with its poison-fang ring at the ready.
“Who are you, and how dare-?”
There was no one there.
One of his decanters clinked. The lord whirled back, furious-and lost his nose as heavy cut crystal crashed across his face.
The man who’d swung it and calmly replaced it on the tray, albeit spattered with Breeklar’s blood, also held all of the papers from Breeklar’s desk.
“I should really read all of these, to learn who ye should be repaying, but I have a lot of nobles to deal with, and ye really aren’t worth the trouble. Die, worthless parasite.”
Lost in his pain and bewildered rage, Lord Breeklar didn’t even have time to protest as coins burst out of his coffers and chests, all over the room, to rush into his mouth and nostrils, pouring down his throat, choking him.
His office held a lot of contracts, bonds of indebtedness, and copies of the threatening missives he’d sent. By the time his steward and underclerks came running, the bonfire was impressive.
Almost good enough to serve the helplessly wide-jawed, purple faced dead man slumped in his chair as a fitting pyre.
In a deep, corpse-strewn Underdark cavern, weary drow warriors raised a ragged cheer as reinforcements arrived. Just in time to deal with a fresh flood of nightmarish creatures out of the widening rift.
Scaled, undulating bodies surged, tentacles lashing out with terrifying speed. Drow were plucked into the air and crushed, or their necks broken, almost before they could scream. Then they were flung down among their fellows with bone-shattering force-and the long, dark, powerful tentacles reached for fresh victims.
More and more monsters crowded through the rift, almost too quickly to get past those busily slaughtering the drow with such ease. The sickly purple-white glow was deepening, flooding out into the passages around like a deadly gas, roiling and billowing.
Drow blew war horns in desperation, priestesses worked spells to alert their distant city, and those who could fell back. The peril was deepening, the rift large enough to split the cavern clear across, now, and the beasts coming through it too numerous to hold back. The battle was lost.
From one of the passages a silent thunder rose, a roaring in every mind, a teeth-chattering call that held hunger and malice and rising fear.
Fear that made it break into an audible, endless whispering scream long before its source burst into view, encircled and lashed by a moving cage of blue flames that forced it along the passage, burned into it repeatedly as it squalled and shrieked and rushed into the cavern.
It was the glaragh, much grown but seared and blackened and shuddering in agony, its tail lashing helplessly under the goad of the merciless web of blue flames. Straight at the rift it raced, or was herded, trumpeting wild pain even as it devoured and mindslew everything in its path. Deadly tentacles flailed in vain ere they were sucked in or crushed under that vast, racing bulk, and small hills of rotting, long-dead drow corpses vanished as the glaragh plowed through them without slowing in the slightest.
Then purple flames blazed up to meet the blue, too bright and furious for the handful of surviving drow to watch-and the thunderous scream of pain ended abruptly.
The glaragh was gone, driven back to wherever it had come from, and the rift it had come through was dying in its wake in an ear-shredding high singing of devouring blue flames.
Blinded and deafened, drow fell to their knees or staggered blindly until they struck stone and slid down it, to roll around clutching their heads. Above their moans, the conflagration in the cavern slowly faded, and all light and tumult with it, leaving behind only darkness.
And the strewn dead, to show that there had once been something here to fight for-or against.
A lone blue flame burned in midair, moving slightly, almost as if it were peering this way and that to make sure the task was done.
Then, almost impudently, it winked out.
Manshoon frantically raced around the cellar, snatching up a wand here and an orb there. He couldn’t be without that, or those, or the-
The glows of his scrying spheres all winked out at once.
A moment later, all the magics bundled in his arms went off together, destroying his forearms and much of his face in a single roaring instant.
He staggered back blindly, wracked in agony, fighting to see anything through his helpless tears.
“Ye couldn’t resist,” Elminster said disgustedly from nearby. “Ye’ve never been able to resist.”
Manshoon managed a curse. Something stole through his body. A tingling, a magic that … that left his limbs frozen, unable to obey him.
He could still think and speak, but …
“Thy undeath gives me an easy hold over thee,” El told him grimly. “So I can begin to avenge just a few of those ye’ve slain, the lives ye’ve blighted.”
“Oh?” Manshoon spat defiantly. “So who made you the righter of wrongs?”
“Mystra. Yet I don’t right all wrongs. Even after a thousand years, I haven’t time. So I do what is needful about some, a little of what I can regarding others, and forgive the rest.”
“Forgive?” Manshoon managed a sneer. “As priests do?”
“As all of us do, or should. If ye can’t forgive a wrong, ye become its prisoner-or rather, shackled to thy own hatred, thy own thirst for revenge. I’ve grown weary of imprisonment, so I do a lot of forgiving.”
“So why not forgive me?”
“I should. Ye’re crowing-to-thyself crazed, after all, and less able to withstand it than I am-and too much of a deluded fool to see how a hidden one is manipulating thee.”
“What?”
“Nay, I’m not going to tell thee. Let that be the little worm that gnaws at ye, as you perish. Let that be my revenge.”
“Revenge!” Manshoon spat, trying to see the potions he’d hidden among Sraunter’s useless concoctions and dyes and acids, on the shelves yonder, through eyes that wouldn’t stop streaming. “What would you know of revenge, meddler? You’ve always had a goddess-and your fellow Mystra slaves-to guide you and guard you and do it all for you.”
“Aye,” El agreed gently. “And one of them was you.”
“Pah! I pretended to serve, to get the magic I wanted!”