Power that stretched out like so many soft and unseen tentacles to nestle among the enchantments that knit together the stones of the flying city of Thultanthar, and held it aloft, and controlled the moisture that reached it, and governed the temperature within and around its buildings. Making those contacts into bindings, knitting them into the very fabric of all those thousandfold enchantments; turning them into so many hooks for him to pull on.
Then, tentatively at first, and then insistently, Elminster set about pulling the floating city of Thultanthar down out of the sky.
Alustriel and Laeral, their faces almost touching his, stared at him in dawning awe, feeling what he was doing through their link with him.
Then, each of them accepted what must be, and bolstered him with their will.
And silently, through the clouds, the great floating city started to descend.
Arclath looked up at the great dark bulk of the Netherese city, floating so large overhead. It was blotting out most of the sun, and it was getting larger.
“It’s definitely getting lower,” he reported, and then added inevitably, “Are you sure it was wise to come here?”
“Wise?” His lady’s eyes flashed. “Of course it wasn’t wise, Lord Delcastle!”
Arclath winced. Uh-oh. And me without a shield.
“It was, however,” Rune snapped, “the right thing to do! And the gods take all wisdom and prudence if riding under their banner means a life of renouncing or shirking what is right!”
And perhaps, just perhaps, a life of longer duration.
Arclath was careful to think that, but say no word nor hint of it. If he was going to get killed or maimed this day, let it not be by the lady he loved.
Who was now tugging at his arm and pointing. “There! Elves, more than a dozen of them!”
“With what looks to be several thousand mercenary warriors trying to slaughter them,” Arclath pointed out.
“Yes, those elves!” Rune said fiercely. “We go to reinforce them!”
“Of course we do,” Lord Delcastle replied. Lifting his chin, he hefted his sword and started running, his beloved right beside him.
The flows of power were thunderously obvious, and Larloch looked along them at their commander.
And saw what Elminster was doing.
The archlich smirked, smiled broadly, then burst into laughter. “You amuse me with your strivings, petty meddler!” he told the Old Mage. “Destroy all the architecture you want! Soon you shall have a new master, and your dances will be to my command-you and every last archmage and hedge wizard, from one end of this world to the other!”
“Oooh,” Elminster replied mildly. “Won’t that be nice?”
The lights of Larloch’s eyes blazed up. “Man, do you mock me?”
“Archlich, I mock everyone. Myself, most of all. It’s how I guard my heart against the flailing lashings of life. And you?”
The archlich regarded him in still silence for an uncomfortably long time. And then sighed and said, “You do understand. I need such as you. I have all too few friends.”
Elminster looked steadily back along the flows, into Larloch’s distant face.
“Me too,” he said.
The doors of the audience chamber were barred and spell-sealed, and one man sat alone on that high seat.
All around him, things of beauty and power summoned from all over Thultanthar floated in the air, drifting in slow orbits around the throne. Staves, rods, scepters, crowns, rings, keys, wands, pairs of boots, and many smaller, odder things, from tiny pouch coffers to ornate lamp statuettes, hundreds of them were slowly circling the throne.
And as they drifted on their unhurried journeys, they darkened and crumbled as their magic was drained from them, and the vivid and crackling blue-white auras surrounding the slumping items and becoming bright lines of force that stabbed at the arms of the throne. And as those arms shone an ominous blue beneath the clenched fingers of the man seated on the throne, and stray bolts and tendrils of unleashed force snarled up his arms, item after item became drifting black ashes … that then tumbled into powder, and in time became finer dust.
The Most High of Thultanthar sat on his throne like a statue; stone faced, his eyes closed, patiently brooding. Letting the magic build within him.
When all the circling items were gone, Telamont Tanthul opened his eyes. They had become two blue-white stars.
He crooked a finger, and the air before him came alive with the bright and moving hues of a scrying scene that filled the room from wall to wall, reflecting off the polished marble.
The air above a vast green forest was filled with crisscrossing, shifting, racing lines of bright force that formed an impossibly complex and ever changing weaving-the Weave, made visible, and beneath it …
A panorama of a few desperate elves in shining armor, battling to protect the flickering blue upright oval of a portal on a terrace between two tall, fair, slender-towered buildings. All around them were their foes, human mercenaries in motley armor who pressed inexorably forward over their own dead, a dozen of them to replace each of their fellows who fell, a score to drag aside the limp dead to keep them from becoming walls the elves could defend.
Myth Drannor had all but fallen-and now this.
“No!” Telamont Tanthul spat suddenly, bringing one hand down on the arm of the throne in a fist. “Never, lich! No Tanthul shall serve the likes of you!”
He sprang to his feet and flung his arms wide, exulting in the power now surging through him. “I shall destroy you, dead wizard!”
The doors of the room boomed open, and magic howled through them, summoned from all over the city.
Draining wards and craftings that should not be drained, but … there comes a time for strong measures, and it was here.
The High Prince of Thultanthar laughed wildly as more and more power flooded into him.
The shadow of the descending city loomed larger and larger above the dwindling section of central Myth Drannor the elves still commanded, blotting out the sunlight.
Storm saw something flying like a vengeful arrow. It plunged into the mercenaries waiting to get at her and the rest of the surviving elves, opening a great furrow through the startled warriors. It was an elf whose sapphire-blue hair trailed behind her like a comet as she flashed through mercenaries, slicing as she went.
All the way to Storm, where she hissed, “Get all the Tel’Quess out of here! Now!”
And she was gone, racing away through clanging steel and more reeling, falling warriors.
Storm felled four foes with as many vicious slashes, then turned and sprinted to the coronal.
“Get them out!” she screamed. “Every last one of your people! Now!”
And she lunged forward to strike down the mercenaries hacking at the coronal and at Fflar beside her, to give them both time to think. They looked at her, then up at Thultanthar darkening the sky-and started shouting orders, directing a fighting withdrawal through the portal.
Storm whirled away from them, thrust an elbow into the thrumming magic that outlined the portal, and called on the Weave.
It flung her through the forest in the direction she desired, over the heads of the mercenaries, to land in a corpse-strewn courtyard that the elves had yielded a day ago. Where a spell had just sent lightning lashing through the rearmost mercenaries.
Storm ran for its source.
Amarune Whitewave, with Lord Arclath Delcastle standing like a bodyguard in front of her, sword ready. They both gaped at her.