Elminster chuckled. “Blood of my blood, say rather that it’s a task I’d not want to saddle anyone else with. While I’m, ah, sporting amongst the monks, both of ye must go to Myth Drannor, to aid the elves in withstanding the siege.”
“Agreed,” Storm said simply. They both looked to Amarune.
Who shrugged her assent, because she knew not what else to do. If she ran into a Sharran who wasn’t a priest or a shade, she probably wouldn’t even recognize them, and so could be surrounded by foes at any time and not even know it. And how would she even go about deciding where and how to fight the Dark Goddess and all her servants?
“What if-?” she began, but fell silent, startled, as Storm put two swift fingers across her lips.
The radiance in the room had abruptly died, leaving them in darkness, but a moment later a damp wilderland breeze blew around their ankles, bringing with it the faint light of day from outside.
Someone from afar had snuffed out the wards. Again.
El reached out a hand and pulled Rune down to her knees. He and Storm crouched on either side of her, both of them suddenly crones again.
“Are you doing this, so you need not answer me?” Rune whispered to him, exasperated.
Elminster shook his head, looking grimmer.
And frightened. Again.
The smell of the sea was strong here, amid these dark and ancient rocks that rose like the prow of a great ship above the endless thunder of the waves. The rocks crowned by the gigantic and many-towered monastery of forbidding stone. Candlekeep was called a fortress in blunt truth. Grim and crude compared to floating Thultanthar, but impressive enough when towering high above him, as it was now. It would have been disconcerting to stand in this place when the earth still shook often, as it had all spring and most of the summer. Something Shar had wrought, he’d heard. But then, one heard a lot of wildness at times like these. Like Yder sending warriors to defend the Hall of Shadows!
Thinking of which …
Give yourself to the shadows.
Maerandor smiled, and did that. One moment he was a dark-clad man, and the next he was roiling shadows, shifting and drawing away into the darkness of the clefts and hollows in the rocks all along the unseen barrier.
The ancient wards of Candlekeep were legendary and many layered, peerless in power. Not living things like mythals, but accretions of layers upon layers of spells, some of them knit to others, and some of them embroideries and extensions of simple, mighty magics hoary with age and as enduring as mountains.
Here, prickling his cheek with their nearness, they pulsed with power. Throbbed with the deep currents of spreading heat thrown off by sullen magma through miles of rock, with the tug of the tides, with the fury of the waves crashing on the shore it crowned, with the warmth of the sun on its towers and the rocks around it … and with the slow, ponderous might of the turning world.
A might that was lessening, just now, thanks to the Mistress of the Night. Though the wards remained a shell very few besieging armies of mages could hope to shatter-and not more than a handful of archmages.
However, he was not here to make war on the wards from outside.
He was here to creep through them, a shadow amongst shadows, making use of the very spaces that kept one spell from flooding into the next and bringing them all crashing down in an uncontrollable torrent of raw, wild spellfire. How could a brick wall keep out a man who could pass through mortar?
Oh, there were a few spells within the wards that made war on shadow magic, but they had been worked by wizards dwelling in a world that did not know mortals could become shades-and had become shades-and what such shadowed folk could now do.
Wherefore he could make his way through the wards and live. Though it would be a slow and agonizing process and would deliver him inside the walls naked and shorn of any active spells.
Maerandor sighed, gave himself to the wards, and let the pain claim him.
Only his will would hold him together through what followed.
But then, without a will greater than the best forged steel, no Art adept of Thultanthar lasted long enough to claim the title of arcanist, let alone to become a shade.
Nor yet the personal agent of the Most High of the city.
Maerandor smiled again. By the time he was finished forming it, that smile was all that was left of him.
The rabbit stew would be good-Storm had a way with sauces-but the wind was like icy daggers slicing at them, as it whistled between the rocks. Here in this rocky wilderland the gods alone knew exactly where, somewhere near the eastern border of Cormyr, well up in the backlands away from the coast.
Amarune shivered one more time, and shook her head in exasperation. She was about done with hiding her aggravation.
“Well if this mysterious spy is watching us from who knows where, surely they can see me-as I’ve not gone around disguised for one moment-and figure out in a short instant that I’ve ditched two old crones somewhere. Crones they probably already know are-were-you and Elminster.”
Storm nodded. “Yes.”
“So why are we just marching along as ourselves now? What was the point of all that, four months of Weave work in tombs and old ruins and standing stones and that old mill and the broken bridge and-and all the other places I’ve forgotten already?”
Storm stirred the pot, and told it serenely, “The point was to keep anyone spying on us as confused as you’ve been. So they’d watch to see what we were up to, figuring all the Weave work was a cover for something else, rather than attacking us. So we went on strengthening the Weave unhampered. Until these last few days.”
“And El, is he strolling across the lands, pipe in mouth, wearing his usual old robes?”
“No. He’s still in disguise. Many guises.”
Rune crooked an eyebrow. “So he matters, and we don’t?”
Storm nodded. “Precisely. Until there’s a Mystra again, he matters more than any other mortal alive in the world.” She grinned. “A role he’s used to, I’m afraid.”
“Is that why he’s so insufferable, so often?”
Storm chuckled, gave Rune a twinkling smile, and murmured, “I’ve met worse. Most old wizards are far worse.” She sipped at a ladleful of stew, nodded her approval, and announced, “It’s ready. Your cup?”
Rune held out her battered belt mug. “So we’ll be walking all the way to Myth Drannor as the Bard of Shadowdale and her sidekick, the lowly mask dancer from Suzail? It’s early in Marpenoth, yes, but snow could come any day.”
“Unlikely this year, but yes, it could. And yes, we’ll be walking, unless you’d prefer a disguise. Yet we are the decoys, and I must warn you that my magic isn’t much. My disguises run more to costumes and smudged faces and mimicry than magic.”
“No, I’ve no particular trouble being myself,” Rune informed her dryly. “Seeing as myself has a good chance of persuading a certain Lord Delcastle to accompany me. If you can spare the time for us to detour and visit him.”
Storm gave Rune a wide grin along with her full and steaming mug. “We can indeed, and he’ll be right welcome. His sword will come in useful, his arms will make you happier, and I wouldn’t mind a bath and a good bed in Suzail for a night, before we all troop off to die.”
Rune stopped with the too-hot mug close enough to her lips to sip from, and asked quietly, “You mean that, don’t you?”
Storm sighed. “I hope not. But yes, I fear I do.”
In a dark and deserted wardrobe chamber in Candlekeep, full of winter cloaks, high boots upturned on angled racks, scarves hanging on pegs, and shelves upon shelves of caps and gloves, a deeper darkness drifted oh, so slowly, coalescing into a pool of shadow. A pool that rose to stand like a man, shook itself, peered cautiously around the room to make sure it was empty of monks, and then coughed.