The mind of Great Reader Albaeron Thalion, once of Athkatla, a calligrapher and artist who’d become a scribe and then heard the whispered summons of Oghma one night, in a dream drenched in moonlight and words written in moonfire crawling across empty air, a calling to Candlekeep on its rocky height overlooking the endless waves …
Thalion was aware of him now, as a softly stealing shadow in his own mind, and alarm welled up despite knowing who the intruder was and why he was here, warm red sharp-edged apprehension, rising …
Distantly, El felt his hair stand on end as more ward energy than he’d ever been able to tap on his own leaked into him. He stepped into and through that warm scarlet wash of apprehension, moving boldly deeper into the monk’s mind. Only to find himself swimming among strands of darkening emotion that circled alongside him like gigantic sharks, wary and menacing and closing in.
Sharks Elminster needed to banish, to relax Albaeron Thalion enough to win trust enough to gain the secrets he sought without the winning of each one becoming a bruising battle that darkened the monk’s mind a little more with each yielding …
For each monk must be set at ease, or at least given new confidence, so their mind would share what they knew of the Weave, and the Weave energies they controlled, rather than fighting to deny and deceive and keep that knowledge secret.
Gently, now …
Calm and smiling confidence to the fore …
El projected reassurance, envisaging it as a lantern coming softly to life, a small and brass-barred hand lantern like the one that had comforted Thalion as a child in his small bedchamber, a room the graying Great Reader still sadly missed, yearned to see again, the little bed and the stuccoed walls curving to a smooth arching cavelike ceiling close overheard, the precious street map of Athkatla on the wall with the important buildings drawn so clearly, prettier than they were in life …
El pushed the lantern ahead in Thalion’s mind and drifted gently in its wake, going deeper now, past more recent memories and the excitement of discoveries in pages brittle with age, the revelations of discerning what was meant when two sages’ screeds disagreed yet intersected, and on into the secrets the Great Reader had been thrilled to learn. Where certain tomes were hidden, and wands and scepters too, passwords that opened spell-locked doors, and (ah, here) the ways of taking hold of the wards of Candlekeep, and changing a paltry few of their settings … all that had been shown to Thalion. The Great Reader visualized the handles of the wards as a harness, a coach harness from the wealthier streets of Amn, that could be grasped here and here and here, thus, and altered by doing this … El made that alteration with Thalion, shadowy hands cupping the Great Reader’s own imaginary one, and radiating thanks with the lantern light ere drifting on.
A thread of power loosed from the wards by Thalion rippled with him, and he passed on into the second chamber, the next monk’s mind, where the Endless Chant of Alaundo rose around Elminster and enfolded him in its insistent recitations, the deeper male voices dominating-the voices the Chanter, whose mind he’d entered, remembered from his first days in the keep, when he strode at the rear of the long procession, repeating more prophecies than were uttered these days. The current chant, quieter thanks to fewer voices and shorter with the fulfilled or false foretellings being lost, kept its own tireless refrain, looping around the older chant.
Of course this would be how the Chanter defended his mind against intrusion. El joined the older chant first and then the current one, moving with them and then drifting to one side of their relentless flow so as to move forward, deeper into the monk’s mind, rather than boring through them and doing damage, but the ribbon of ward energy trailing El seemed to melt everything it touched in Nabeirion the Chanter’s mind, and awakened bright flares of crimson anger that boiled up swiftly to tower like a great fist.
El darted at the base of the rage before any hammer blow could fall, and plunged into it, ricocheting and swirling down through a maze of razor-sharp flashing thoughts, sparks whirling up around him and traveling with him like a great billowing cloak of winking lights, every mote of it failing but not before being replaced by two or more tiny dancing stars. Light that was reflected warmly by thoughts ahead, thoughts El swooped at, though his invading shadow felt like it was being stabbed by thousands upon swift thousands of pins and needles, and burned feverish hot all over, yet as chill as ice down his back, a coldness that gnawed at the back of his neck and started to flood up his scalp and down his jaw.
Nabeirion the Chanter was angry indeed, because he took such pride in being a master of the Weave. To relinquish or share that was to lessen his special status-to lessen him. Or so he firmly believed, and was using the might of the Weave against this intruder-for only the flow of the Weave could deliver fire and ice at once in the same spot.
And only one who had worked so long and so closely with the Weave could survive that conjunction. But for how long?
El hastened on, worried that he might be overwhelmed before he could unleash the ward energies in this second mind-only to stumble upon the Chanter’s memories of being shown the wards by a Keeper now dead, a blind monk, in the Chanter’s memory, who could no longer read a word or recognize a face or banner, but who saw the wards like shifting, flowing golden lace in his dreams … something the Chanter himself was now getting his own fleeting glimpses of, mere echoes …
The beginnings of attunement. El seized on those memories and made them his own, for the Chanter had been shown much, more than El himself had ever guessed or been told or felt through the Weave.
Ah, there was a threefold lock, devised to foil Netherese arcanists and Thayan zulkirs and all those who habitually created their own spells-the Imaskari, for example-alike. A sigil had to be traced in the mind, not in the air or on stone, then a word written in the mind, then a second sigil traced-and then the first one redrawn, something just not done in any of the human traditions. Dwarves did that, but then dwarves murmured over runes and passed fire over runes and sprinkled blood or tears over runes-they did nothing without scratching runes first. Writing just the word, in the right place in the keep when someone else had half unlocked that place, allowed you to change a setting or even add a spell effect to the existing wards, but all three were needed to substantially alter the wards, shift their boundaries, or bring them down.
And now he, Elminster, had this control. He commanded the means of releasing great amounts of the ward flow without the Chanter’s assistance, or that of any other monk for that matter.
Yet he was not the sort to gloat or exult. That was for younger or more crazed-wits mages. El allowed himself a thin smile-and restricted himself to a deft, minor unleashing, gliding along that released power out of the Chanter’s mind and traveling with it into the mind of another Great Reader, this one younger and full of himself, and so dark with resentment at the invasion into his mind.
Great. Think of young and crazed-wits, and behold! Faerûn obligingly presents such a one-so much for thin smiles! El fought his way through the dark thunder of resentment, and used what he’d learned from the Chanter to wrest ward energy from what this younger mind controlled without even asking for permission. Less friendly, but there was no welcome here at all, so it was best to save time, and just take and move on …
On into the fourth mind, which presented as a vault of darkness with real resistance, a stubborn and opposed will that thrust at his advancing shadow and the ward energies with a moving wall of darkness, rolling forward like one of the great storm-driven waves El had often seen racing at the Sword Coast, trying to halt El and shove him back into the unfriendliness of the mind behind him.