She was dying, and her mind was weakening, and they both knew it. The frightened and furious Glormorglulla dared to hope, and anticipate, and even to gloat.
Whereupon she let it feel her full rage, and the silver fire that had started to spill from her weakening constraints.
Fire the beholder sought greedily to take from her, for was it not the fabled all-consuming power that humbled all magics? Would not an eye tyrant wielding silver fire be able to conquer all, and rule every last tree and river of Faerûn it desired?
Dove smiled bleakly into its great eye, and gave it what it wanted. Silver fire, unleashed and raging.
Rushing through the mind she was locked to, boiling and melting remorselessly, destroying so swiftly it barely had time to know true terror.
An awful reek rose around her as the malevolent beholder’s brains fried.
Until Glormorglulla could think no more.
One by one, the small orbs at the ends of its writhing eyestalks burst, popping out gooey matter and then weeping a dark ichor. Then the great eye darkened and shriveled, until it looked like the largest raisin Dove had ever seen.
About then, her mind-hold failed. She was going fast.
Dully, she watched the husk of the great eye tyrant drift aimlessly away.
Well, she’d taken down one prince. Those elf elders would have to deal with his surviving brother.
“Florin,” Dove gasped with her last breath, still draped over the sword that had slain her, tongues of silver fire blazing out between her lips. “I’m coming. Coming at last.”
Magnificence and a dream restored in the heart of the forest, the City of Song-but the song was faint and faltering now.
It had all come down to this bitter end, here in this fiery blue cleft amid a last paltry handful of spired buildings. So fair and so doomed.
“Females first,” the coronal ordered the elf knights around her briskly. “Young and old together-pair them if you can, but waste no time trying to do so.”
Blue fire lit her face in flash after flash; the pulsing blue glow of the portal was reflecting back off the knights’ armor, wherever it wasn’t covered with gore.
“Of course,” the eldest knight agreed, and spun away to see it done.
“You, you, and you,” the coronal said, pointing at other knights, “with me!” And she started to run, down along the ragged and lengthening line of children and elders, to take a stand at its end, in case the last line of defenders-pitifully few they were too-was overwhelmed.
She got there just in time. “Mages!” she called over her shoulder, and pointed at the surging besiegers, as they overbore two elves-several spears and glaives thrusting through each-and poured forward.
The coronal strode to meet them, and the knights with her grimaced and rushed to get in front of her, to shield her with their lives.
They were still a few strides apart from the foremost mercenaries when the elf line broke in another place. With a ragged roar of triumph, the Shadovar-hired mercenaries charged, heading around the coronal and her handful so they could fall upon the largely undefended line of children and elders.
The coronal turned and rushed to intercept them. “Old lives for young!” she cried to the loyal elves running with her. “Win a future for our younglings with our own blood!”
As she chose the highest ground, to stop and make her stand, Ilsevele Miritar saw that she’d been shouting to only six Tel’Quess-and the grinning and eager foe closing on them were beyond counting.
Yet the slope between her and the human hireswords was suddenly shrouded in blue-green mist. A spell, obviously, but not one she recognized. Nothing the handful of high mages here could cast, of that she was sure.
The mercenaries boiled up the hill-but out of the ground in front of their boots, up through the coiling mists, rose a line of baelnorn.
Tall and gaunt and terrible, eyes aglow and withered bodies clutching long curved swords and scepters that shone with risen magic.
“Dove hath called, and we answer,” the tallest of them announced, and raised her scepter.
The line of blue-white fire smashed a dozen mercenaries as if a stone had been dashed into a heap of raw eggs. Torn bodies flew through the air, and the screaming began. Then other scepters spat, and the slaughter really began.
Sapphire-blue hair swirled, dark eyes blazed, and the lone petite elf slashed with a sword that was not there, a bloody edge of sharp force sweeping through the air and cleaving flesh, bone, armor and blade alike.
It cut a bloody swath through shouting, shrieking mercenaries-and then she was gone, darting like a hummingbird across the glade to thrust and slice anew.
This time she swooped and stabbed among arcanists, haughty and bewildered shades of Tultanthar who, until a moment ago, had been relaxing in the secure knowledge that they were far in the rear of the besieging army, on the winning side, with not a foe who could reach them anywhere near.
“Who the-?” one arcanist shouted, watching the diminutive figure dart away again through the trees.
“Blast it down, whatever it is!” snarled another. “Quickly, or-”
He’d meant to say before this unlooked-for solo attacker was out of range and lost to them in the endless trees of the deep forest, but before he could frame the words, she was back, and he saw what he was facing.
A small and shapely female elf, brows and hair of sapphire, clingingly clad in high soft leather boots and a leather harness of indigo hue. Whose hands seemed empty, yet sliced as if she swung a weightless, invisible sword four times as long as her slender arm, and whose eyes were ablaze with anger.
She looked … splendid, he had to concede. Her beauty was the last thing he saw, before his own blood blinded him, cloven skull and nose cut open and much of his face torn bloodily off in the wake of her slash.
Her unseen blade claimed the throat of the arcanist standing beside him, and several fingers from the next Thultanthan beyond, and then she was gone again into the trees, swooping and darting.
Not that he could see her, choking on his own blood and going down. He bounced as he hit the ground, and the pain was enough to jolt him to his senses for long enough to hear the oldest arcanist in the glade shout, “The Srinshee! It’s their undead ruler, or whatever she is! Every arcanist still standing, to me! To me now!”
That bellow ended in a rough, wordless scream that cut off abruptly.
It was replaced by something loud and booming and teeth-jarringly deep-the roar of a large and angry dragon.
It, too, ended with brutal suddenness, rising into a yip of startled pain.
The Srinshee didn’t unleash herself often, but right now was one of those rare times.
Prince Mattick Tanthul was two ridges away, slowing warily as he saw more and more high mages and baelnorn between himself and those elf children. They were no longer easy kills.
He turned and sought higher ground, the natural refuge of the close-clustered trunks of soaring shadowtops where he could catch his breath and take a good look around.
He was still a few panting breaths from reaching them when he saw a thousand-some mercenaries coming out of the trees in a huge flood of armored humans, heading for that last beleaguered cluster of elves.
Well, it should be a short slaughter, but an entertaining one.
And then he saw something cleaving a furrow through all those hireswords, something too small to be easily seen, yet as devastating as a swooping dragon. He blinked at all the screaming and the reeling, falling dead. Was it a spell? If so, from where, and what magic could do this-and cast by whom?
He certainly couldn’t wreak that sort of havoc with just one spell. Yet perhaps it was a succession of identical magics, cast along the same path, and-