“Thank the gods I’m not noble!”
“Ah, but you are now.” Lord Arclath Delcastle set the book aside and rose to go to his lady and embrace her. The look he gave her, once they were in each other’s arms, was more grim than grave. “And if there’s someone in this room who must learn patience to keep the world from being shattered, probably many times in the years ahead of us, it’s you, Rune. Haven’t you noticed that it’s one of Elminster’s best weapons?”
“No. I guess all the kingdom-shattering spell-hurling he does distracted me.”
“Misdirection,” Arclath replied, with the faintest ghost of a smile, “is another of his best weapons. That and his sense of humor.”
Rune gave him a dark look, and warned, “Don’t you say one word, Lord Delcastle, about how I’m related to him, and have inherited this or that. Just don’t.”
“All right, I won’t.” Arclath smoothly disengaged her clasping arms, returned to the table, and said, “There’s an interesting recipe here for turtle soup-”
And being noble, he watched anyone standing near out of the corner of his eye, and so was ready to duck aside as she hurled a handy onion at him.
The great black eye floating in the sky above the flying city blinked. It and its dark rays and the rift they had appeared through were all gone in an instant, and bright sun banished the temporary gloom that had fallen on the battlements.
Sunlight that lit the High Prince of Thultanthar like a torch as he turned to Aglarel in sudden haste.
“Go,” he ordered, “and fetch my herald. Don’t hurry.”
His most loyal son bowed and backed away, but was taken aback and didn’t try to hide it. “Your herald? Who-?”
“The arcanist Gwelt,” Telamont snapped. “Go.”
Aglarel turned away, cloak swirling. “Since when have you had a herald?” he muttered, as he hastened away.
The Most High shrugged. “I’ve always needed one,” he replied, knowing his magic would take that quiet reply to his son’s ears.
Then he strode down a stair and along a passage, passed through a door and spell-sealed it behind him with the wave of a hand, and hurried to his innermost spellchamber.
He sealed its doors too, warding himself within a room that was colder and darker than it should be.
When he turned around from the doors, she was waiting for him.
There’d been a secret door in the wall of the passage just outside the doors of the second crypt they’d plundered. The time-worn stone steps beyond had come up inside a hollow tree-or rather, the crumbling stump of a long-dead and fallen shadowtop, the roofless room inside its ring as large around as a good-sized turret.
Vattick worked a disguising spell on himself without slowing that left him looking like an elf high mage, and his brother and the lone surviving arcanist hastened to follow suit. Vattick seemed to know the way onward unerringly. He went to a cleft in the stump, stepping through it into a drift of dead leaves as if walking along a passage he took every day.
Mattick and the arcanist kept close behind him, as they strode past armed elves rushing here and there through the trees, the drifting smoke of a fire, and the screams and clangor of battle that wasn’t far off at all.
They strode along like men bent on business, who had every right to be there, ignoring all elves and walking with brisk purpose. Soon enough they ducked between two old and mighty duskwoods and down into a passage so old its ceiling had collapsed, leaving it as a deep trench in the forest, open to the sky-yet shielded by the thick forest canopy high overhead, and here and there by the small trunks of fallen saplings and the living nets of forest creepers.
Vattick led the way as sure-footedly as if the rotten-leaf-strewn ditch was very familiar, and soon enough it curved to the right and angled down underground into darkness. Dirt-and-root walls soon gave way to stone every bit as ancient as the underways they’d been traversing from crypt to crypt earlier.
Ahead, something ghostly and deep blue glided into their path, to bar their way.
Vattick never slowed, even when all three elf high mage disguises melted from them to the accompaniment of a hiss of disgust from the guardian ahead.
“So, what family bones do you guard?” he asked it cheerfully.
“Human, you intrude upon the resting place of House Alavalae,” the baelnorn replied coldly. “Halt, and go back, or face mortal peril.”
“Indeed,” Vattick smiled-and let fly with the same spell he’d used on the last guardian. Not at the doors of a crypt, this time, but at the baelnorn itself, two talon-headed serpents of emerald force that the guardian countered almost casually, with some sort of barrier that held the prince’s spell at bay in front of it, writhing and clawing and spitting emerald fury in all directions.
Vattick waved to his twin as if he was directing him to a seat at a feast table-and Mattick strode forward with a smile whose malice would have done credit to any ruthless wolf, and unleashed some of the magic he’d drained from the crypts of Myth Drannor.
His ravening magical fire snarled around in a great arc to stab at the undead guardian from behind.
It backed away hastily to avoid being caught between two destroying spells at once-but the doors it was bound to guard were all too near, robbing it of space enough to flee into.
Its blue glow seemed to catch fire, going red and emerald green and then boiling up inky black-until it managed some sort of more powerful warding, and forced the princes’ contemptuously hurled magics back.
That was when the arcanist dared to step forward and add his spell to the fray, a careful casting that shattered the warding, consuming itself in doing so.
The spells the twin princes had cast crashed in on the guardian from either side-and it winked out of visibility, letting the spells crash together and roil angrily in midair.
When they were spent, the last force rolling away from their meeting to strike the walls and rebound, like a wave striking a rocky shore, the guardian faded back into visibility-much closer to the three Shadovar than it had been before.
Mattick spat a curse and Vattick ducked hastily aside as he worked a spell, but the baelnorn had guarded this spot for centuries, and had made some preparations. It spread hands that pulsed with blue fire-and flat, sharp-edged stones burst free of the walls all around and whirled at the human trio like whirling blades.
Scores of stones, a volley that Mattick and Vattick flung themselves to the floor to try to survive, arms cradling their heads.
The arcanist wasn’t swift enough in joining them. He staggered, his skull shattered and his arms and ribs breaking with sickening thuds under the barrage of piercing stone … and then he fell over backward, his throat crushed and his head lolling limply.
The stones flashed through the air with unabated force, ricocheting off one another and the walls amid deafening krrracks and sprays of small shards as one after another broke apart. They flashed through the baelnorn without doing it any harm, but the two groaning, crawling princes of Thultanthar weren’t so lucky.
Vattick finally managed to cast something that flung all the stones at the ceiling, then sent them racing at the floor, and then back at the ceiling again. At each thunderous meeting of hurtling stone with immoveable floor or ceiling, more shatterings spat clouds of curling dust and sprays of pebble-like shards everywhere.
And then, at last, it was done, and Mattick and Vattick surged painfully to their feet, teeth clenched, and advanced on the baelnorn.
Who gave them a serene smile, and worked the same magic again.
This time, Mattick-who’d half suspected such a tactic, for all his snarling rage-had enough warning to work a strong ward shield. Vattick’s went up more slowly, but protected him against the worst whirling shards-and when the second stone storm died away, he did something that caught the baelnorn by surprise.