The Temptation of Elminster tes-3 Read online

  The Temptation of Elminster

  ( The Elminster series - 3 )

  Ed Greenwood

  Ed Greenwood

  The Temptation of Elminster

  Prologue

  There is a time in the unfolding history of the mighty Old Mage of Shadowdale that some sages call "the years when Elminster lay dead." I wasn't there to see any corpse, so I prefer to call them "the Silent Years." I've been vilified and derided as the worst sort of fantasizing idiot for that stance, but my critics and I agree on one thing: whatever Elminster did during those years, all we know of it is…nothing at all.

  Antarn the Sage, from The High History of Faerunian Archmages Mighty published circa The Year of the Staff

  The sword flashed down to deal death. The roszel bush made no defense beyond emitting a solid sort of thunking noise as tempered steel sliced through it. Thorny boughs fell away with dry cracklings, a booted foot slipped, and there was a heavy crash, followed, as three adventurers caught their breath in unison, by a tense silence.

  "Amandarn?" one of them asked when she could hold her tongue no more, her voice sharp with apprehension. "Amandarn?"

  The name echoed back to her from the walls of the ruin…walls that seemed somehow watchful … and waiting.

  The three waded forward through loose rubble, weapons ready, eyes darting this way and that for the telltale dark ribbon of a snake.

  "Amandarn?" came the cry again, lower and more tremulous. A trap could be anywhere, or a lurking beast, and…”

  "Gods curse these stones and thorns … and crazed Netherese builders, too!" a voice more exasperated than pain-wracked snarled from somewhere ahead, somewhere slightly muffled, where the ground gave way into darkness.

  "To say nothing of even crazier thieves!" the woman who'd called so anxiously boomed out a reply, her voice loud and warm with relief.

  "Wealth redistributors, Nuressa, if you please," Amandarn replied in aggrieved tones, as stones shifted and rattled around his clawing hands. "The term 'thief is such a vulgar, career-limiting word."

  "Like the word 'idiot'?" a third voice asked gruffly. "Or 'hero'?" Its gruffness lay like a mock growl atop tones of liquid velvet.

  "Iyriklaunavan," Nuressa said severely, "we've had this talk already, haven't we? Insults and provocative comments are for when we're lazing by a fire, safe at home, not in the middle of some deadly sorcerer's tomb with unknown Netherese spells and guardian ghosts bristling all around us."

  "I thought I heard something odd," a deep, raw fourth voice added with a chuckle. "Ghosts bristle far more noisily than they did in my father's day, I must say."

  "Hmmph," Nuressa replied tartly, reaching one long, bronzed and muscled arm down into the gloom to haul the still struggling Amandarn to his feet. The point of the gigantic war sword in her other hand didn't waver or droop for an instant. "Over-clever dwarves, I've heard," she added as she more or less plucked the wealth redistributor into the air like a rather slim pack-sack, "die just as easily."

  "Where do you hear these things?" Iyriklaunavan asked, in light, sardonic tones of mock envy. "I must go drinking there."

  "Iyrik," Nuressa growled warningly, as she set the thief down.

  "Say," Amandarn commented excitedly, waving one black-gloved hand for silence. "That has a ring to it! We could call ourselves … The Over-clever Dwarf!"

  "We could," Nuressa said witheringly, grounding her sword and crossing her forearms on its quillons. It was obvious anything lurking in this crypt…or mausoleum, or whatever it was yawning dark and menacingly just ahead of them…wasn't asleep or unwarned anymore. The need for haste was past and the chance for stealth gone forever. The brawny warrior woman squinted up at the sun judging how much of the day was left. She was hot in her armor … really hot, for the first time since before last harvest.

  It was an unexpectedly warm day in Mirtul, the Year of the Missing Blade, and the four adventurers scrambling in the sea of broken, stony rubble were sweating under their shared coating of thick dust.

  The shortest, stoutest one chuckled merrily and said in his raw, broken trumpet of a voice, "I can hardly elude my born duty to be the dwarf…so that leaves it to ye three to be 'over-clever.' Even with the triple muster, I'm not before-all-the-gods sure you've wits enough…"

  "That'll do," the elf standing beside him said, his tones as gruff as any dwarf could manage. "It's not a name I'm in overmuch favor of, anyway. I don't want a joke name. How can we feel proud…"

  "Strut around, you mean," the dwarf murmured.

  "…wearing a jest we're sure to become heartily sick of after a month, at most. Why not something exotic, something …" He waved his hand as if willing inspiration to burst forth. A moment later, obligingly, it did. "Something like the Steel Rose."

  There was a moment of considering silence, which Iyriklaunavan could count as something of a victory, before Folossan chuckled again and asked, "You want me to forge some flowers for us to wear? Belt buckles? Codpieces?"

  Amandarn stopped rubbing his bruises long enough to ask witheringly, "Do you have to make a joke of everything, Lossum? I like that name."

  The woman who towered over them all in her blackened armor said slowly, "But I don't know that I do, Sir Thief. I was called something similar when I was a slave, thanks to the whippings my disobedience brought me. A 'steel rose' is a welt raised by a steel-barbed whip." The merry dwarf shrugged. "That makes it a bad name for a brace of bold and menacing adventurers?" he asked.

  Amandarn snorted at that description. Nuressa's mouth tightened into a thin line that the others had learned to respect. "A slaver who makes steel roses is deemed careless with a whip or unable to control his temper. Such a welt lowers the value of a slave. Good slavers have other ways of causing pain without leaving marks. So you'll be saying we're careless and unable to control ourselves."

  "Seems even more fitting, then, to me," the dwarf told the nearest stone pillar, then jumped back with a strangled oath as it cracked across and a great shard of stone tumbled down at him, crashing through a sudden flurry of tensely raised weapons.

  Dust swirled in the silence, but nothing else moved. After what seemed like a long time, Nuressa lowered her blade and muttered, "We've wasted quite enough time on one more silly argument about what to call ourselves. Let it be spoken of later. Amandarn, you were finding us a safe way into yon …"

  "Waiting tomb," Folossan murmured smoothly, grinning sheepishly under the sudden weight of the three dark, annoyed glares.

  In near silence the thief moved forward, hands spread for balance, his soft-soled boots gripping the loose stones. Perhaps a dozen strides ahead lay a dark and gaping opening in the side of a broken-spired bulk of stone that had once been the heart of a mighty palace but now stood like a forlorn and forgotten cottage amid leaning pillars and heaps of fern-girt rubble.

  Iyriklaunavan took a few steps forward to better watch Amandarn's slow and careful advance. As the slim, almost child-sized thief came to a halt just outside the ruined walls to peer warily ahead, the maroon-robed elf whispered, "I have a bad feeling about this…."

  Folossan waved a dismissive hand and said, "You have a bad feeling about everything, O gruffest of elves."

  Nuressa jostled both of them into silence as Amandarn suddenly broke his immobility, gliding forward and out of sight.

  They waited. And waited. Iyriklaunavan cleared his throat as quietly as he could, but the sound in his throat still seemed startlingly loud even to him. An eerie, waiting stillness seemed to hang over the ruins. A bird crossed the distant sky without calling, the beats of its wings seeming to measure a time that had grown too long.

  Something had happened to Amandarn.
>
  A very quiet doom? They'd heard nothing.. and as the tense breaths of time dragged on, heard more of it.

  Nuressa found herself walking slowly toward the hole where Amandarn had gone, her boots crunching on the shifting stones where the thief had walked with no more noise than a falling leaf. She shrugged and hefted the war sword in her hands. Skulking was for others.

  She was almost in under the shadow of the walls when something moved in the waiting darkness ahead of her. Nuressa swept her blade up and back, ready to cut down viciously, but the face grinning at her out of the gloom belonged to Amandarn.

  "I knew you were annoyed with me," the thief said, eyeing her raised steel, "but I'm quite short enough already, thank you."

  He jerked his thumb at the darkness behind him. "It's a tomb, all right," he said, "old and crawling with runes. They probably say something along the lines of 'Zurmapyxapetyl, a mage of Netheril, sleeps here,' but reading Old High Netherese, or whatever it's properly called, is more Iyrik's skill than mine."

  "Any guardians?" Nuressa asked, not taking her eyes off the darkness beyond Amandarn for an instant.

  "None that I saw, but a glowblade's pretty dim. …"

  "Safe to throw in a torch?"

  The thief shrugged. "Should be. Everything's made of stone."

  Wordlessly Nuressa extended an open, gauntleted hand behind her. After a few scrambling minutes, Folossan put a lit torch into it. The warrior looked at him, dipped her jaw in wordless thanks, and threw.

  Flames whup-whup-whuppedinto the darkness. The torchlight guttered when it landed, then recovered and danced brightly once more. Nuressa stepped forward to fill the opening with her body, barring the way, and asked simply, "Traps?"

  "None near the entrance," Amandarn replied, "and this place doesn't feel like we'll find any. Yet … I don't like those runes. You can hide anything in runes."

  "True enough," the dwarf agreed in a low voice. "Are you satisfied, Nessa? Are you going to stand aside and let us in or play at being a closed door until nightfall?"

  The armored woman gave him a withering look, then silently stood aside and gestured grandly at him to proceed.

  Folossan put his head down and scuttled past, not quite daring to whoop. The normally gloomy-looking Iyriklaunavan was hard on his heels, trotting forward with fluid grace and maroon robes held high to avoid tripping. It would not do to tumble and fall helplessly into a tomb where just about any sort of snake or other foe might be lurking.

  Amandarn wasn't far behind. In exasperated silence Nuressa watched them storm past and shook her head. Did they think this was some sort of pleasure outing?

  She followed more cautiously, looking for doors that might be shut to imprison them, traps Amandarn might have missed, even some sort of lurking foes, hitherto unnoticed….

  "Gods on their glittering thrones!" Folossan gasped, somewhere ahead. He made of the curse a slow, measured bricklaying of awe, building a wall of utter astonishment that seemed to echo around the dark tomb chamber for just an instant before something swallowed it.

  Nuressa shouldered her way out of the sunlight, war sword ready. Trust them to cry no warning to tell her what peril awaited.

  The chamber was high and dusty and dark, the torch dying a slow, sullen death at its heart. There was a space that bore some sort of circular design in the floor tiles, framed by four smooth, dark stone pillars that soared from the pave to the lofty, unseen ceiling.

  Away beyond those ever feebler flames rose dark steps crowned by what could only be the casket of someone great and important…or a true giant, so large was the massive black stone, blotched with deep emerald green, its curves aglitter with golden runes that flashed in time with the pulsing, fading light of the torch. Two empty braziers taller than she was flanked this dais, and over it hung the dusty-shrouded ends of what looked like a curtain of mail but could, under the dust, be almost anything that would drape like fabric, hanging motionless from the distant, scarcely seen ceiling.

  It was not the tomb that the gruff elf mage, the awed dwarf, and the boyish thief were staring at. It was something else, rather nearer than that, and above them. Nuressa shot a hard glance up at it, then all around the tomb chamber, seeking some other entrance or waiting peril. None offered itself to the tip of her gleaming blade, so she grounded it and joined in the general staring.

  High above them, starting perhaps fifty feet up in the air, hung what might be a scarecrow, and might have once been a man. Two worn bootheels they could see, standing on emptiness, and above that a man-sized bulk of gray dust so thick it looked like fur, joined to the ceiling and walls by lazy, dusty arcs of cobwebs that must be as thick as ropes.

  "That was a man, once, I think," Iyriklaunavan murmured, voicing what they were all thinking.

  "Aye, so, but what's holding him up there?" Folossan asked. "Surely not those webs … but I can see naught else."

  "So it's magic," Nuressa said reluctantly, and they all nodded in slow and solemn agreement.

  "Someone who died in a trap or spell duel," Amandarn said quietly, "or a guardian, who's been waiting all these years, undead or asleep, for the likes of us to intrude?"

  "We can't afford to gamble," the elf told him gruffly. "He could well be a mage, and he's above us, where none can hide from him. Stand back, all."

  The adventuring band that had no name moved in four different directions, each member taking his own path backward across the ever more dimly lit room. Folossan was fumbling in his voluminous shoulder bags for another torch as Iyriklaunavan raised his hands to cup empty air, murmured something, then spread his hands apart.

  Between those hands something shivered and glimmered for a tumbling instant before it flashed, so bright as to sear the watching eye, and leaped through the dark emptiness like a sizzling blade. The spell clove air and all as it smote whatever hung so high above, bringing down a heavy rain of choking dust.

  Clods of gray fur fell like snow melting from high branches, pattering down on all sides as the four adventurers coughed and wiped at their eyes and noses, shaking their heads and staggering back.

  Something flickered nearby, in several places. Struggling to clear the dust from watering eyes and see, the four adventurers could not help but notice two things through the swirling dust: the booted feet above were still exactly where they had been, and the flickerings were pulsing radiances playing rapidly up and down the four stone pillars.

  "He moves!" Iyriklaunavan shouted suddenly, pointing upward. "He moves! I'll…"

  The rest of his words were lost in a sudden grinding, rumbling noise that shook the floor tiles under their boots. The light dancing down the pillars suddenly flashed into brightness, gleaming back from four tensely raised weapons. Stone facings on all of the pillars slid down into the floor, leaving behind openings that stretched the height of the pillars.

  Something filled those openings, dimly seen as the radiances died away, leaving only the ruby embers of the torch on the floor. Folossan dived for that torch, blowing hard on it and coughing in the swirling dust with each breath he took. He thrust a fresh torch against the old one and blew on where they met.

  The others were peering suspiciously at what filled the floor-to-ceiling channels in the pillars. It was something pale and glistening that writhed in the channels like maggots crawling over a corpse. Pearly white here, dun-hued there, like rice glistening under a clear sauce but expanding outward, as if flexing and stretching after a long confinement.

  The new torch flared, and in the newly leaping light Nuressa saw enough to be certain. "Lossum…get out of there!" she shouted. "All of you! Back…out of this place…now!"

  She had distinctly seen pale flesh peel and wrinkle back to unhood a green-gray eye … and there was another, and a third. These were forests of eyestalks.

  And the only creatures she knew of that had many eyes on stalks were beholders, the deadly eye tyrants of legend. The others knew the same tales and were sprinting through the settling dust toward he
r now, all thoughts of tomb plunder and laden sacks of treasure forgotten.

  Behind the hurrying adventurers, as Nuressa watched, eyes winked and came to life and began to focus.

  "Hurry!" she bellowed, drawing in enough dust to make her next words a croak. "Hurry … or die!"

  A glow suddenly encircled one eye, then another… and burst into beams of golden light that stabbed out through the dust, parting it like smoke, to scorch the heels of hurrying Folossan and the wall beside Iyriklaunavan. Amandarn darted past Nuressa, stinking of fear, and the warrior woman pressed herself against the wall so as not to block the passage of her other two desperately hurrying companions. The elf then the dwarf clattered past, cursing in continuous babblings, but Nuressa kept her eyes on the pillars. Four columns of awake and alert eyes were peering her way now, radiances growing around many of them.

  "Gods," she gasped, in utter terror. Oh let them be fixed here, unable to follow….

  A ruby beam of light from one eye stabbed at Nuressa and she ducked away, sparks erupting along the edge of her war sword. Sudden heat seared her palm. As a dozen golden beams lanced through the dust at her, she threw the blade over her head, back behind her out of the chamber. She wheeled in the same motion to flee headlong after it, diving for safety as something burst near her left ear with a sound like rolling thunder. Stones began to fall in a hard and heavy rain.

  It feels odd, to stand on air, neither solid like stone, nor the slight yielding of turf under one's boots. In dry and dusty darkness … where by Mystra's sweet kisses was he?

  Memory flowed around him like a river, cloaking him against madness for so long that it would not answer his bidding now. There was a tingling in his limbs. Great power had struck him, forcefully, only moments ago. A spell must have been hurled his way … so a foe must be near.

  His eyes, so long dry and frozen in place, would not turn in their sockets, so he had to turn his head. His neck proved to be stiff and set in its pose, so he turned his shoulders, wheeling his whole body, as the walls drifted slowly past, and dust fell away from him in wisps and ropes and huge clods.