“Well met!” she greeted them, still sprinting hard. “You two are as blithely disobedient as I expected you to be. What? Why the astonishment? Haven’t you ever seen a Chosen of Mystra who’s been bathing all day in blood before?”
“Storm!” Rune’s stare was anxious. “Where are you headed?”
“This way, and I need you both with me! Come!”
Some of the rearmost mercenaries were turning now, and running toward them.
Amarune and Arclath glanced at them, then back at Storm. Who spread her arms and gathered them in. “Come on!”
More of the besiegers were running now, and the sky was growing dimmer overhead, the floating city lower and nearer.
“Where’re we headed?” Rune gasped. “A portal?”
“No!” Storm panted. “No magic! Want to be far away from all magic, when-”
The flash of blinding, deep blue light from behind them came with a shock wave that lifted every last running being-not to mention shrubs and sapling-and flung them onward.
“Noooo!” everyone heard two voices shout, out of different directions in the empty air: Telamont Tanthul and the archlich Larloch, united in dismay.
Yes, another voice replied fiercely, out of the heart of the light. I, the Srinshee, have made my choice, so that my people shall live. In a Realms not bound to tyrants of darkness. So whenever you smile into the fresh winds of freedom, remember me.
In a dark corner of the exclusive upper room in the Memories of Queen Fee, the most fashionable and expensive club of the clubs that overlooked the great Promenade in Suzail, a tall and darkly handsome man suddenly stood bolt upright. His surge upset goblets and tallglasses in profusion, not to mention a side table bristling with expensively filled decanters. Nobles exclaimed in exasperated irritation.
“Dolt!”
“What’s got into you? Have a care, man!”
“Such a waste! Sirrah, I’m talking to you!”
Manshoon ignored them all. His eyes were wide, not seeing the room around him, but struggling to far scry an elf city far away across a mountain range-and failing. His magic was failing him.
“Something’s happening,” he snapped, still struggling. “Great power-”
As everyone stared, he cried out in pain, blue light flashed from his eyes in actual spurts of flame, and he collapsed across the table.
Mirt deftly whisked his own drink safely out of the way, regarded the senseless man almost in his lap, and muttered, “Never liked wizards. Damned excitable idiots. Swords now, and sly tongues … with them, I know where I stand.”
There were suddenly armed and uniformed men in the room, peering around, hands on sword hilts. A Purple Dragon patrol.
Noble lords of Cormyr looked up from their drinks to regard the Dragons sourly. “Even here?” one of them rumbled. “Aren’t there murders you could be solving? Thieves to catch?”
“We got a report that the wanted wizard called Manshoon was here,” the leader of the patrol snapped.
“A man claiming to be Manshoon, aye,” another noble replied, pointing at the senseless man draped across the table. “Me, I think he was just trying to get out of paying for his drinks.”
The Dragon officer looked at Mirt, who growled, “I’ll cover his owing. And stand all of you yer favorite slake too. Now go put yer love of country to better use.”
Out of the blue light, a face swam. The Srinshee.
She blew Elminster a kiss and said tenderly into his mind Farewell, old friend.
Then the face exploded into a racing blue flame that stabbed across the air between them and coursed into El, imparting such raging power that it lifted him a few feet into the air-sitting on nothing, Alustriel and Laeral clinging to him and elevated with him-and made every hair on his body stand out stiffly, his eyes become spitting blue flames.
Alustriel and Laeral were flung away from him, shocked and numbed, and landed hard. They stared at him, aghast, as he rose, standing on nothing, now about the height of a tall man off the ground, trembling. Small blue flames spurted from his stiffly spread fingertips.
The Old Mage hung in the air, helpless, as all of the Srinshee’s magical might and life-force flooded through him-and through the linking flows of power, to stab into Larloch.
Whose shrieks, as he burned, clawed the ears of everyone in Myth Drannor and Thultanthar.
It took a long time for those screams to dwindle as the archlich was whirled away, his hold on power lost.
The mythal collapsed into Elminster, and exploded out of him in all directions, flooding the Weave nearby with its energy.
The air shone brightly, and sang, loud and bright.
As the city of Thultanthar crushed elven spires as if they were made of sand and came inexorably down, down atop Myth Drannor.
The Most High of Thultanthar looked around wildly. The city was heading for the ground, faster and faster, the very stones around and beneath him groaning deep and awful with the strain-and there was nothing, nothing he could do to stop it.
He’d flung all of his gathered power to tug against the downward pull, in utter vain, then turned it to trying to twist what few spells he could see in the minds of nearby Thultanthans-for there was no time at all to craft a new magic-into a severing force, to slice free of that pull … and failed.
His city was doomed.
Telamont snarled a heartfelt curse, and gathered all his newfound power to flee-but the empty air in front of his throne fell away like a curtain, to reveal a bearded and weathered face staring at him with eyes that held no shred of mercy.
Force flooded out of those eyes in a torrent, slamming Telamont Tanthul back on his throne and pinning him there.
They gazed at each other, High Prince and Old Mage, while the tyrant of Thultanthar tried a dozen swift spells of escape or destruction, and Elminster casually shattered them all in the instant of their forming, one after another. Until Telamont Tanthul ran out of ideas and relevant magic. As he racked his wits desperately, trying to think of how to escape, Elminster said flatly, “Enough, Tanthul. Ye’ve misused thine Art for centuries, and grown more arrogant rather than wiser. The Realms are far better off without ye. Reap now the reward that should have been thine long, long ago.”
And the almighty crash that came then shattered bones and toppled walls and pillars, even before the Most High of Thultanthar was flung up at the ceiling and his upthrust throne pinned him there and then drove him through it, in broken pulped pieces that leaked magic in all directions.
The floating city and hapless Myth Drannor beneath it smashed and ground together and were both destroyed, ancient elven magics exploding here, there, and everywhere amid the roiling field of tumbling stone.
And Telamont Tanthul died, already in bodily agony, shrieking in terror as his mind broke like a toppled wineglass. Elminster Aumar held the shade’s cracking and disintegrating body on his cracking and disintegrating throne throughout, and the Shadovar’s mind clamped tightly with his own, to make very sure.
So it was that he tasted Telamont’s destruction, and very nearly shared it.
Lost in tears, reeling, mentally exposed and exhausted, Elminster swam in and out of consciousness … and lay helpless beneath the coming of the Mistress of the Night.
Shar raged, vast and dark and terrible in the sky above the broken cities, glaring down out of her own nightfall at the floating, slumped Elminster, her darkness rolling down, down, reaching out with great dark tentacles …
That vanished in a flood of silver light, a sloping wall of silver fire like an impossibly tall tidal wave, sweeping up into the sky and growing a face.