The tingling was as if a storm of sparks had plunged into her, stabbing at her eyeballs and racing up her nose and down her throat. She screamed, or tried to, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. Could only plunge on, sightless, her whole world a blinding cloud of raging sparks that shook her body until her very teeth rattled. Her fingernails felt as if they were coming out, her innards groaned, her tongue undulated involuntarily-
She was through, and reeling in dank darkness, standing on a floor of smooth old stone that seemed to yaw and pitch under her, refusing to stay still.
A strong hand caught hold of her arm, just below the shoulder, and steadied her.
“Easy, now,” Storm reproved. “Most of us learn wards and attune ourselves to them, instead of trying to rush through them like a bull at rutting time.”
“But,” Rune gasped, “you just vanished, and left me there, all alone! Wasn’t I supposed to follow? If I’m to stand with you and in time take over from you, how can I-?”
“Ye speak level-headed truth, as usual, lass,” Elminster said glumly, from somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. “Yet we’re all too late. The Shadovar lying in wait had no inkling-this time-that we can rebuff more than one spell. Or that while Thultanthar hid on the Plane of Shadow, this plane’s lesser wielders of the Art might just have built wards stronger than overconfident young arcanists can spin or anticipate. If he hadn’t thought to amuse himself by shattering Dathlue’s marker …”
“So his own spell came right back at him,” Amarune interpreted, “and-what? He hurt himself?”
“His magic shattered her casket, and its shards, caught within the wards, had nowhere to go, and so raged around inside it. Shattering some of his limbs, by the looks of all this blood. He took himself back to wherever he came from just before I could get to him and finish him.”
“Finish him?” Storm shook her head. “El, don’t fool yourself. We were fortunate. If they’d been a little more patient, and let us step into the tomb before attacking us-or just resisted the urge to hurl spells first, and stuck daggers into us instead …”
Elminster waved a hand, and a dim radiance kindled all over the walls of what Rune could now rather blearily see was a small stone room with a round dais at its heart. A dais now strewn with stone rubble and yellow-brown shards that might have been very old bone. More rubble lay scattered across the floor beyond it.
The Old Mage’s face, as he gazed at Storm and Amarune, was grim.
“Ye’re right, as usual,” he admitted. “We were lucky to prevail.”
He looked down at the ruin of the casket. “Dove used to camp here, when harsh winter weather caught her in these parts …,” he murmured, as if to himself. “Where is she now, I wonder?”
Amarune gave him a sidelong look. “Dove?”
In reply, he lifted his chin and said firmly, “We can skulk about mending the Weave here and there no longer. We’re hiding from no one. Time is, as they say, running out.”
“Running out before what?” Rune asked.
El regarded her thoughtfully, and she burst out, “No, don’t stand there deciding what to tell me and what to keep secret. I can’t give what feeble aid I’m capable of if I don’t know what’s going on! Damn all the gods, Elminster, hear me: every last woodcutter and farmer and cook across all of Faerûn deserves to know what’s going on!”
Elminster kept on looking at her expressionlessly for what seemed a very long time, and then smiled a wide, fond smile, shook his head at her in seeming admiration, and growled, “Ye humble me, lass. Ye do. Well, then, the short of it is this: the agents of Shar are proceeding boldly to carry out the wishes of the Dark Goddess.”
His face changed, and he raised his arms, closed his eyes, and added, “A moment, please.” Then he muttered something fluid that sounded Elvish, but that included not a single word Rune had ever heard before.
The tingling rose within her again.
“What’re you-?”
“He’s twisting the wards,” Storm murmured in Amarune’s ear, “just as he did back at Ralaskoun’s tomb. To hide the three of us from anyone magically watching and listening from afar.”
“So this little council will be ours, and ours alone,” El added.
“ ‘Council’?” Rune asked wryly. “Is that what centuries-old archmages call the moments when they grandly decree what will be done, and everyone else listens?”
Storm chuckled. “I’ve no doubt you’ll make a great successor, Amarune Lyone Armala Whitewave, if …”
“If you can keep me alive long enough?”
The Bard of Shadowdale winced. “You’ve less learning to do than I’d thought.”
“If ye’ve stopped trying to be clever and tart-tongued for a moment or two,” El said to Amarune, sounding more amused than severe, “hear my decree. We must leave off this Weave work for now, and turn all of our efforts to stopping the agents of Shar.”
“And if we fail?”
“If Shar succeeds before the Sundering of Toril and Abeir is complete, she will forever be the goddess of magic, her name written in the renewed Tablets of Fate, and darkness and shadow shall spread across Faerûn and hold sway forever.”
“Enslaving all intelligent beings, and pitting them against each other for her amusement,” Storm added quietly.
“For her sustenance,” Elminster corrected. “She feeds on pain and loss, on the keeping and sharing of secrets, and on what is forgotten when rememberers are slain without passing on what they know. Despair and oblivion and what she calls the Cycle of Night. Life will become an endless intrigue of cabals battling each other for survival and dominance, inspired and commanded by a goddess who wants them all to fail and fall. The Endless Night, as the Mad Bard of Netheril called it when Shar whispered it to him, more than an age ago.”
Amarune shuddered, despite herself. “All right,” she told the two Chosen of Mystra, “you’ve succeeded in frightening me. Again. So rather than wallowing in despair or grimly assuring each other that we must not fail, or the world is doomed, tell me something useful. Such as: in light of all that, what do we do now?”
“I,” Elminster told her without a moment’s hesitation, “must go to Candlekeep. Alone.”
“Why?” she asked bluntly, in such perfect mimicry of his tone that Storm grew a wide grin.
“If there is a key to rebuilding the Weave-something that would swiftly restore most of the great tapestry of interwoven forces, at a stroke-it lies hidden in Candlekeep’s library, or survives nowhere at all. I must find it.”
“How do you know such a power, or process, or whatever it is, exists at all?”
“Mystra herself once whispered as much to me. And told me the explanations were hidden-well hidden-in Candlekeep, and that I was not to seek nor concern myself with them, unless doing so became crucial to preserving everything she stood for. And she is the Weave, so …”
“So, it’s time,” Amarune agreed. “You know, leaping about bare-skinned while busily hurling bottles at brawling nobles in the Dragonriders’ was so much easier …”
“Ye are far from the first to voice such sentiments,” the Old Mage told her dryly. “Though not all that many of Mystra’s Chosen have been mask dancers. Khelben and I lacked the figure for it, to be sure.”
“You at least got to wear a mask,” Storm told Rune. “Laeral and I never did.”
“Laeral and-? This I have to hear!”
“Later,” Storm told her firmly. “Save the world first, remember? I rather suspect, if the Shadovar are after wards-and they sure look to be-they’ll head for Candlekeep sooner or later.”
Elminster nodded. “And if anyone can aid in holding the great wards of the keep against them …”
Rune rolled her eyes. “No lack of confidence in this particular tomb, is there?”