CHAPTER 14
The most high looked as impressive as ever. So calm and casual he was frightening. Behind him, the cavernous audience chamber looked as nigh empty as usual. Huge expanses of empty marble, around …
The great throne, of course, flanked by that bare metal table and the tammaneth rod, floating in its corner, its black spheres as empty and dark as always.
Gwelt had never seen anything on the table, nor any radiances of risen magic in the rod’s spheres.
But then, he’d only been in the room a handful of times, and always when preoccupied by matters that frightened him and ensnared his attention far more than mere furniture.
He was deeply preoccupied right now. With trying to keep his own temper-and life-and yet make the High Prince of Thultanthar see that what had been done and decided thus far amounted to … sheer folly.
Why by the untasted delights of Shar were such things always left to him?
“Most High,” Gwelt heard himself saying carefully, “it is with the utmost respect that I say this, but say it I must, however unwelcome. You must be told of it, for the good of the city, and for our best hope of success and victory! We are on the wrong road!”
“Convince me, arcanist,” Telamont Tanthul said coldly. “Persuade me how I and all the senior arcanists and she whom we all serve are mistaken, while just you are correct. It is in your own interest, I must warn you, to persuade me both well and swiftly.”
“Forgive me, Most High, but I decry not the goals the Divine Mistress of the Night desires us to achieve, but the means-and only the means-by which we are attempting to reach them. Specifically, this siege of Myth Drannor.”
“Be more specific, Gwelt.”
“We seek the might of its mythal. As I see it, no host of unwashed mercenaries can master the Art to achieve this, so they must be mere distraction, occupying the elves so that those who can drain the mythal’s power can work unhampered. Yet the siege itself will inevitably destroy much of the magic that is-yes? — our only reward for winning the city. After all, who but elves would want a good handful of old, poorly repaired buildings plus rather fewer new ones, in the heart of a deep and overgrown forest? It is so remote as to have no great strategic value, and hurling it down or capturing it is far less impressive to others than, say, the taking of Candlekeep or Athkatla would be. Why-”
Sudden black light flashed in the empty air to their left, and Gwelt’s argument faltered. Black light? He turned in time to see a star of leaping rays that faded and dwindled as swiftly as they had appeared, to leave behind something floating upright in midair.
Something grisly. A dead, scorched man in what was left of the cassock of a lowly monk, his head lolling on a broken neck. The blackened head had lost all its hair, but the face was still clear enough.
It was Relvrak, a Shadovar arcanist of no small accomplishment, who had been Gwelt’s tutor for a time, and was still his friend.
Until now. Relvrak’s eyes were melted, as if by a fire that had raged within his skull. Even as Gwelt stared up at the ruined shell of his friend, one of those eyes slid out of its socket and began a slow slide down the blackened face, like the most bulbous of tears.
“Where was-?” Gwelt gasped.
“Candlekeep,” came Telamont’s calm reply.
“But-but-surely that’s impossible! Do not the wards there prevent translocation magics from …”
Gwelt ran out of words, awed at the implication.
Telamont nodded expressionlessly. “Exactly. The wards must be gone.” He turned to look at the great black rod floating in its corner, and saw that its globes remained empty and dark.
He added coldly, “And their might has not flowed into my hands.”
He turned back to Gwelt. “Begone now. I have work to do. You can rant later, when I’ve time to pretend to care about it. Go.”
“But-”
“Go.”
Gwelt took one look at Telamont’s face, then hastily bowed low and backed away. By the time he was passing out through the audience chamber doors, he was almost running.
The baelnorn did not bother to glow. There was no one to impress or frighten away from that which he guarded.
The passage around him was as deep and dark as ever, the air stale and undisturbed. Which was good.
The baelnorn was content, not bored. He had so much to contemplate, so many matters to weigh and speculate upon. When an intruder did come-and they always did come, in the end-he hoped to plumb their knowledge and memories of what the world now was, to compare his conjured possibilities of what might befall with what had actually occurred, so he could contemplate anew. Such thinking he greatly enjoyed, and had lacked time enough to indulge in, back in the busy, crowded, emotionally ruled days of his life.
Deep in these oldest crypts of Myth Drannor, there was no converse that was not with other baelnorns, and talk among baelnorns was rare and tended to be dry, for they shared the same ignorance of what had happened since the last interment in the halls they guarded.
Which had been long ago, even as tireless baelnorn judged passing time. So far as he knew-as everyone alive in Myth Drannor at the time of Aumarthra’s passing had known-House Iluanmaurrel was extinct. There would be no new arrivals to come and rest behind the double doors sculpted with the two-headed dove whose wings were maple leaves, no new-
The baelnorn of House Iluanmaurrel faltered in his thoughts and flared a bright blue, startled as he had never been startled before.
The sealed double doors he had been sadly contemplating had started to open.
Dust swirled as the seals broke and crumbled. The doors were opening from within, one faster than the other, which meant they were being moved by unseen hands, rather than a spell.
Bewilderment giving way to rage, the baelnorn swooped toward the widening gap between the two doors, and darted between them, ready to-
Come to an abrupt and strangling halt, as bony hands that could somehow grasp the incorporeal undead as if they bore solid flesh took him by the throat. And tightened ruthlessly.
He did not know the owner of those hands, smiling into his fading face as he was throttled and drained, but Larloch gave the baelnorn of House Iluanmaurrel an almost merry smile and announced, “I’m discovering I quite like the taste of elven magic. Elegant craftings. Most elegant.”
There was a horribly long groan from overhead, a groan that sank into a swift series of sharp cracks like the lashes of lightning strikes.
Elminster didn’t waste time looking up, at a ceiling that had just shattered and would be starting to fall-in great chunks the size of wagons, by the sounds of things. He just rushed at Laeral and Alustriel with his arms spread wide to sweep them into his grasp-and rushed them out of the room, running hard.
They slammed through the doorway just in time. Behind them, the domed ceiling of the chamber crashed down with a mighty thunder that jarred teeth and shook the walls all around. The floor sprang up beneath their hurrying feet so hard and fast that they had fallen and bounced before they could even draw a breath.
The thunderous echoes died away swiftly, leaving them lying in a panting heap among eddying dust and gravel.
Elminster cleared his throat, and rolled off Alustriel’s pleasantly soft chest. “ ’Tis not often,” he growled, “that I must needs beg ye two, but now is very much one of those times. I beg ye to forgive my foolheadedness. I’ve been roundly duped. Luse-Laer-ye were right, and I was wrong. So wrong.”
“Heh,” Laeral coughed, rolling over. “Have I waited a long time to hear that. Yet I’ll not gloat, Old Mage, but merely ask: So, what now? Wrong, duped, and how to mend it? Just so we know if we must fight you to the death again to stop you, or not, what will you seek to do now?”