“Such as what, precisely, Renstameir? Who or what is so thundering likely to destroy Cormyr overnight, may I ask?”
“You may, Lady Rowanmantle. Please do. Anything to keep Harflame goading you into being the old cows and battle-axes he so fondly likes to describe you as. Yet to keep matters from devolving down a dozen-some side lanes of distractions, name-calling, and riding favorite hobbyhorses, let me set before you these: the Great Rain has swollen the Sea of Fallen Stars so greatly as to restore its shores to something akin to what our grandsires remember, which means our own shores are flooding and may soon be sunken for good; priests of more faiths than I can keep track of are fighting among themselves over this or that detail of their gods, and this strife is widespread and becoming worse, so that we may yet have a score or more holy wars raging across all the lands; and it seems every third or fourth home or farm in every kingdom houses an ambitious person who thinks they are the Chosen of this or that god, and must go out into the world with fire and sword and claim the recognition of their deity by doing awful and great things that all too often seem to involve much bloodshed. Including killing others who claim to be Chosen. Something that may yet have the gods angered enough to do even more awful things to all of us.”
Lord Haelrood sank into a chair with more sighing satisfaction than grace, and added, “I could go on, at length, but I need a drink. While all of you try to deny or dismiss everything I’ve just said so you can hurry back to arguing if Lady Such-and-Such is a trollop because she showed some knee through a slit in her gown two revels ago, or if Lord So-and-So’s piles are larger and more painful than Lord Howsoever’s. Pah. Can you not see, my lords and ladies? Toril around us is sinking into wild disaster-‘cataclysm’ is not too strong a word-and you care not, so long as the good food and better wine keeps coming. Well, the vineyards and herds and farm fields that provide such things may soon be laid waste, and then you will have to notice. Whereupon no doubt you’ll start squabbling about which of your old rivals is really to blame, rather than all this rumor from afar about Chosen and Great Rains and disasters.”
“Rains of frogs, forty nights of torrential downpours of blood, monsters coupling with other monsters to spawn as yet unheard-of stranger monsters, taxes going down, and-gasp! — nobles telling the truth,” Lord Harflame recited to his goblet mockingly. “Whatever next?”
Haelrood turned on him. “So you mock, and think yourself oh-so-superior, and do nothing. Steward of the realm that you are, that we all are, we lords and ladies. Beware frightened commoners with pitchforks, Harflame. When they get angry and scared enough to go looking for something to stick their forks into, your ample behind will be right there in view-and that’s when they’ll remember they don’t think much of the sneering old goat attached to it. I hope you can run faster than you can get up out of a chair here, after you’ve been guzzling firewine all night.”
“I do not,” Harflame replied coldly, “guzzle firewine. A common beverage. I guzzle Taerluthran.” He held up his goblet, smirked, and added, “As I’m doing now.”
Lady Wyrmwood surprised them all then by shooting to her feet, goblet in hand.
“Drink while you can, lords,” she toasted the room grimly. “For war may yet come again to these very streets, and by then many of us may be a little too dead to drink.”
Mirt had expected derisive jeers and laughter to greet these words, but instead a silence fell. And stretched, deepening, as lords and ladies exchanged glances and grew both pale and grim.
Well, well. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be too late for Cormyr after all.
The deep blue-green forest around Myth Drannor had suddenly become a din of ground-shaking cacophony.
Catapult loads were crashing down on all sides now-huge boulders, heaps of fresh corpses, the trunks of felled trees, and the occasional smoking mass of firewood that the city’s mythal had quenched in midflight-and more than one group of sentries were dashed flat before Storm and her Cormyrean companions could reach them.
“What’s that?” Amarune shouted suddenly from behind Storm, and the bard whirled around in time to see the air to the southwest go from faint blue to blood orange, in a swirling midair stain that spread as if some unseen titan had splashed something orange from the southwest toward the center of Myth Drannor.
As they stared-it actually looked quite pretty, if one set aside all fear of what it probably meant-another and smaller part of the sky, off to the south beyond the roiling amber radiance, abruptly flared apple green.
“Magic, isn’t it?” Arclath hazarded.
Storm nodded, looking grim. “Wizards-arcanists, rather-among the besiegers are hurling spells at the mythal,” she explained. “Not doing much damage that I can see, but of course we must add the word ‘yet’ here, if we cleave to honesty.”
“Look,” Rune hissed insistently, pointing. In the distance, through the trees, the amber radiance flashed and winked back reflections from metal-metal on the move, and a lot of it. The invading army was surging forward.
“The elf lines must have been overwhelmed,” Amarune concluded gloomily.
Even as Arclath nodded and turned to Storm to ask her what they should do now, the high, fluting calls of silver trumpets rang out from the tallest trees and spires at the heart of Myth Drannor.
The call telling the defenders to rally to the breach, and fight to hold the foe back.
Storm sighed, turned around with a wave that bade Arclath and Amarune to come with her, and answered that call.
CHAPTER 11
"Yes, oblivion. A trifle boastful,” The cold voice of Larloch added conversationally, “but such seems to be the style these days.”
The archlich laughed, mirth that was almost immediately drowned out by a mighty roar.
Alustriel and Laeral screamed, and-
Suddenly the tumult and the cavern in which it had been raging were both gone, and Elminster found himself whirling silently through an endless blue void, tumbling and plunging down, down, down … to a brief flare of silver fire that transfixed him in utter spasming, gasping agony.
That faded as abruptly as it had come, leaving him panting, pain free and whole, but staggeringly weak, standing on an unfamiliar cold and dusty stone floor.
A brown floor, belonging to a cavernous, high-vaulted hall of brown stone. The very air around El as he swayed was ale brown and eddying, stale and tainted with the unmistakable reek of mildew.
Elminster blinked. He was facing a tall and slender figure in black robes. It towered head and shoulders above him.
He stared up at it. Into fell, old, and knowing eyes like two black, bottomless pools, set deep in a long, slender skull. For an instant, El was reminded of a bare, staring ox skull.
Then those dark eyes sharpened, and it was more like being impaled on two dagger points.
“Be welcome,” said a dry voice from behind Elminster, “in the house of Larloch, the Shadow King.”
El didn’t turn to regard whoever had spoken-one of the Shadow King’s liches, no doubt, serving him as herald or steward-but kept his gaze fixed on the eyes of the legendary Larloch.
Who stood confident and casual, flanked by a black staff twice as tall as Elminster, floating upright at the archlich’s shoulder. It flared out from base to top, and was studded all along its length with the yellowing skulls of all sorts of creatures, from horned devils and demons down to small serpents.