Bury Elminster Deep (Elminster Book 7) Read online

  SAGE OF SHADOWDALE

  Elminster: The Making of a Mage

  Elminster in Myth Drannor

  The Temptation of Elminster

  Elminster in Hell

  Elminster’s Daughter

  The Annotated Eliminster

  Elminster Ascending

  Elminster Must Die

  Bury Elminster Deep

  Elminster Enraged

  (August 2012)

  SHANDRIL’S SAGA

  Book I

  Spellfire

  Book II

  Crown of Fire

  Book III

  Hand of Fire

  THE KNIGHTS OF MYTH DRANNOR

  Book I

  Swords of Eveningstar

  Book II

  Swords of Dragonfire

  Book III

  The Sword Never Sleeps

  ALSO BY ED GREENWOOD

  The City of Splendors: A Waterdeep Novel

  (with Elaine Cunningham)

  The Best of the Realms, Book II

  The Stories of Ed Greenwood

  Edited by Susan J. Morris

  Sage of Shadowdale

  BURY ELMINSTER DEEP

  ©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. FORGOTTEN REALMS, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, D&D, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by Kekai Kotaki

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-5931-0

  620-31727000-001-EN

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greenwood, Ed.

  Bury Elminster deep / Ed Greenwood.

  p. cm. – (Sage of Shadowdale; 3)

  1. Forgotten realms (Imaginary place)–Fiction. 2. Elminster

  (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 3. Wizards–Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.G759B87 2011

  813′.54--dc22

  2011015517

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  Visit our web site at www.wizards.com

  v3.1

  Res tam malae sunt quam putas,

  et inimici re vera te persequuntur

  For Abby Glicksohn-Coté, because in my world

  even long-ago promises get kept.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Kneeling to a Goddess

  Chapter Two: The Word of a Nobleman

  Chapter Three: I Have a Little Plan

  Chapter Four: Dark Villainy Again

  Chapter Five: Traitors, Traitors Everywhere

  Chapter Six: Stormbreak

  Chapter Seven: Let It Begin

  Chapter Eight: Untidy Arrivals

  Chapter Nine: In Stately Conclave Met

  Chapter Ten: I Foresaw All This

  Chapter Eleven: Blood on the Whirlwind

  Chapter Twelve: Going Too Far

  Chapter Thirteen: Soon After Whenever

  Chapter Fourteen: Sunderings and Wild Chases

  Chapter Fifteen: The Happy Reign of Chaos

  Chapter Sixteen: Friend and Foe

  Chapter Seventeen: A City Cursed

  Chapter Eighteen: I Go Now to Hunt

  Chapter Nineteen: Fearing Worse, I Fled

  Chapter Twenty: Fearful for Good Reason

  Chapter Twenty-one: Hiding and Seeking

  Chapter Twenty-two: Disputes and Recriminations

  Chapter Twenty-three: Swords Come Out

  Chapter Twenty-four: Battles Inside and Out

  Chapter Twenty-five: Rescues and Captures

  Chapter Twenty-six: Lies, Chains, and Kisses

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Bedchambers Invaded

  Chapter Twenty-eight: A Lady of Ghosts

  Chapter Twenty-nine: A Different Night

  Chapter Thirty: Murdering Lord Helderstone

  Chapter Thirty-one: The Dangerous Work of Luring Ghosts

  Chapter Thirty-two: Old Games and Older Secrets

  Chapter Thirty-three: When the Blue Flame Dances

  Chapter Thirty-four: Rather Noisy Battles

  Chapter Thirty-five: Battle and Burial

  Epilogue

  Welcome to Faerûn, a land of magic and intrigue, brutal violence and divine compassion, where gods have ascended and died, and mighty heroes have risen to fight terrifying monsters. Here, millennia of warfare and conquest have shaped dozens of unique cultures, raised and leveled shining kingdoms and tyrannical empires alike, and left long forgotten, horror-infested ruins in their wake.

  A LAND OF MAGIC

  When the goddess of magic was murdered, a magical plague of blue fire—the Spellplague—swept across the face of Faerûn, killing some, mutilating many, and imbuing a rare few with amazing supernatural abilities. The Spellplague forever changed the nature of magic itself, and seeded the land with hidden wonders and bloodcurdling monstrosities.

  A LAND OF DARKNESS

  The threats Faerûn faces are legion. Armies of undead mass in Thay under the brilliant but mad lich king Szass Tam. Treacherous dark elves plot in the Underdark in the service of their cruel and fickle goddess, Lolth. The Abolethic Sovereignty, a terrifying hive of inhuman slave masters, floats above the Sea of Fallen Stars, spreading chaos and destruction. And the Empire of Netheril, armed with magic of unimaginable power, prowls Faerûn in flying fortresses, sowing discord to their own incalculable ends.

  A LAND OF HEROES

  But Faerûn is not without hope. Heroes have emerged to fight the growing tide of darkness. Battle-scarred rangers bring their notched blades to bear against marauding hordes of orcs. Lowly street rats match wits with demons for the fate of cities. Inscrutable tiefling warlocks unite with fierce elf warriors to rain fire and steel upon monstrous enemies. And valiant servants of merciful gods forever struggle against the darkness.

  A LAND OF

  UNTOLD ADVENTURE

  PROLOGUE

  Sometimes, Lord Arclath Delcastle thought he was going mad.

  Right now, for instance.

  He’d risen out of a very pleasant dream of lazing abed with his beloved Amarune, which had turned suddenly into a nightmare of thunderous voices in his head, a scrambling of frightened clawing and clutching, and a rising dread. Hurled into fearful wakefulness, he grabbed for his sword.

  Only to find the rafters of a simple King’s Forest royal cabin above him, his Amarune hastening out into the night—and Storm Silverhand throwing herself on top of him, seeking to hold him down.

  And managing that very effectively.

  Grunt and heave though he might, he couldn’t reach the waiting, just-beyond-his-fingertips pommel of his sword …

  Storm’s long, silver hair was alive, its tresses like the monstrous vines of half-remembered nursery tales, lengthening and winding to bind him fast. Thos
e gods-cursed strands shone like armor in the dancing glow of the brazier. Moreover, her warm and sweet lips were glued firmly to his, keeping his cries and curses to muffled mumblings.

  No matter how he bucked and strained, her long limbs kept him down. She was stronger than he was—stronger than a smith he’d once wrestled! Not to mention sleek and shapely and pressed against him …

  Arousing him, all gods blast it, despite his anger and worry.

  Arclath shook his head, managing to free his mouth from hers at last. “Dragon take all!” he gasped. “Will you not let me go?”

  “No,” Storm replied firmly, her voice low and regretful. “Not while you’re this upset. You’ll go rushing off into the night and get lost or hurt. And if you do find Rune, you’ll interrupt something needful. Something very important. Something wonderful.”

  Was that … awe in her voice?

  Arclath swallowed, trying to think through his panting rage, to fight down his anger and frustration.

  “Let …,” he gasped, “let me up. I’m … I can’t spend much longer tussling with you in this bed. ’Tisn’t seemly, as … older nobles say.”

  “Aye,” Storm said in a dry voice, running one finger along his thigh—past the part of him that was stirring uncomfortably. “I’ve noticed.”

  She raised herself on one elbow. “If I let you go, have I your word you’ll not depart this cabin, Lord Delcastle?”

  Arclath crooked an eyebrow. “You really think you can hold me?”

  Storm descended in a lunge that brought one of her hands around his throat. Her grip was like iron.

  “Yes,” she replied calmly. “Yes, I do.”

  She was giving him just enough space to breathe. Arclath used it to swallow, sigh, and tell her, “You have my word. Just as long as you tell me where Rune went, and what’s going on!”

  Storm grinned. “The eternal demands of the young. I can answer your first. She’s gone somewhere near in the forest, taking Elminster to an … unexpected meeting. As for your second question, your guess, Lord Delcastle, is as good as mine. They should return soon, though, and you can be sure I’ll demand answers from them just as strenuously as you.”

  Arclath nodded. “Your terms are accepted. Upon my word as a Delcastle.”

  “That’s well spoken, lord,” she replied, in precisely the indulgent tones he’d heard matriarchs of Cormyr’s haughtiest noble Houses use.

  Ah, but she was one, now, wasn’t she? Marchioness Immerdusk, and a few more titles since …

  Huh. A matriarch less like his mother he couldn’t imagine.

  His words were obviously what she’d been waiting for, so she released him.

  “Someone,” Arclath said slowly, as he sat up and rubbed his throat, “was speaking in our minds when I awoke. Someone of great power.”

  “Yes,” Storm replied calmly, handing him his sword and settling herself in a comfortable sitting position beside him. Her long, silver tresses curled almost demurely around her. Watching Gods, but she was beautiful.

  Arclath forced himself to think of Rune, alone in the night.

  No, not alone. She had Elminster with her, riding her mind.

  He grimaced, his irritation flaring. Storm hadn’t handed him the answer he was seeking. He gave her a glare.

  And found her half smiling at him, a knowing twinkle in her eyes. She looked like someone bursting with a happy inner secret.

  “Well,” he snapped, “who was it?”

  “Such manners, Lord Delcastle,” she reproved him. Then she laughed like a little girl and said, “It certainly seems to be a goddess many have long thought dead. Mystra, the Greatest of All. The One. Our Lady of Magic.”

  Arclath stared at her, his mouth falling open.

  Was she mad? Or mistaken?

  And if not, what doom would this bring down on Cormyr, and all the world besides?

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  KNEELING TO A GODDESS

  As he directed Amarune’s borrowed body to pad cautiously through a pale white labyrinth of moonlit trees, Elminster felt himself trembling.

  This almost had to be a trap, after all this time—yet, nay, nay, it was her, his Mystra! It was!

  He could feel her! He knew that feeling, could never forget the touch of her mind on his … this was Mystra, the vivid blue mists of power swirling around the edges of his mind …

  A sharp stick underfoot hurt his—Rune’s—bare feet, and El sank to all fours to crawl like a beast. He tingled with eager haste and had to remind himself to look for what peril that might be aprowl in the King’s Forest.

  Halting on a tree-cloaked ridge in the rolling, deepening woods north of the cabin, one hand raised like a questing cat’s paw, he listened hard.

  He heard distant stirrings of brush to the northeast, probably well across the Way of the Dragon, then silence. Broken by a brief, faint hooting even farther westward.

  Still and silent, Amarune’s dancer’s body poised like a statue, El waited.

  Long enough for even a lazy hunter to become impatient he held still, but nothing else moved that he could hear. And the sleekly muscled body he was occupying had far better hearing than what he’d grown used to in recent centuries.

  Some of his excitement washed into her sleeping mind, at rest in one dim corner of the brain he steered. Amarune rose slowly toward wakefulness, her dreams growing restless, as she tasted his eagerness.

  Ye’re as giddy as a lass fleeing her first kiss, El reproached himself, as he crawled on down a ferny slope of wet dead leaves toward a dark bank of old, leaning trees. Steady, Sage of Shadowdale. Where’s that world-weary yawning that ye do so well?

  Part of him smirked, but through the lacy curtain of his mirth, El fought to quell ever-wilder excitement as he reached the bottom of the slope.

  Only to lose his breath under a thrilling onslaught of fresh nerves as he felt the nearness of Mystra. Right ahead of him.

  A weighty taste in the air came from the silent gloom behind a rising old tree that smelled of bear.

  He didn’t even have time for a hint of fear before he saw a dark wall of fur that must be that beast shambling away along the line of trees, afire with Mystra’s power just as his own mind was.

  Blue fire deepened in his brain, bringing certainty. The goddess of all magic was riding the bear’s mind just as he was riding Amarune’s.

  Before El knew it, the moonlit trees were behind him, and he was crawling into bear-smelling darkness, over muddy, loose stones in a musky earthen den tapestried in descending roots and floored with gnawed old bones green with mold. As he crawled on, the ground dropped down into a stony cavern tall enough to stand in, aglow with Mystra’s fire.

  Where two great, keen eyes he’d not seen for long centuries suddenly opened in the air in front of him.

  Stealing away his breath again.

  Elminster gazed into them, dumbstruck. Floating orbs of silver-blue fire regarded him with love and an excitement to match his own. Eyes he’d feared he’d never see again.

  Amarune’s body lacked the feel for the Art that his aching old frame had possessed, but strain though he might, he could sense nothing false about what loomed before him. This was Mystra, though the heat in his mind remained a whispering echo of her full power.

  Yet Our Lady of Mystery could easily hold back, cloaking her divine might to seem less than she was, and often—usually—did so. The eyes of deepening silver-blue fire were linked by softly coursing threads of the same radiance, lines like lightnings too gentle to crackle or spit, to … things strewn among rocks on the cavern floor.

  A gauntlet with gems inset in the knuckles, a wand, a ring, other small items still hidden among the stones.

  “Some blood of my mortal self spilled on these trifles of Art in the time before I became Mystra,” came the warm whisper of the goddess, both in his head and filling the cavern as if she were awakening in purring languor right beside his ear. “When you came nigh, El, the nearness of your mind alert
ed me. I am … preoccupied much, now.”

  “Ye collected these things when ye were Midnight?” El blurted, trembling in a sudden chaos of wanting to know so much, yet not knowing what he dared ask. Her love—or at least fondness—was in his head and all around him, But something was subtly different in it, a distance that had not been there once, or rather one that had grown since Midnight had ascended to replace the Mystra his far younger self had first touched and tasted. Gone was the Mystra whose mind would long ago have merged with his to let them converse wordlessly, thoughts flashing.

  Something was rising in him, something urgent. Before he quite knew what it was, he felt a flash of confusion and wonder, alarm strangled by awe. Amarune Aumar had awakened.

  “I did,” the Lady of Magic replied as if nothing had happened, though fond regard washed out of her bright silver-blue fire into Amarune, causing a mental turmoil of astonished pleasure tinged with bewilderment. “The bear keeps them safe here, and I see through his eyes and guide him. It is good you came to me, El; I have many unfinished tasks for you.”

  “L-lady?” Rune dared to blurt, then. “Who are you?”

  “I,” the fire behind the eyes replied, as tenderly as any gently drawn sword, “am Mystra. I am magic.”

  That last word became a thunderclap that raced away into unseen distances, only to return a rolling echo of deep, teeth-chattering force that made small stones fall and patter in the bear’s den, and the living roots groan and murmur all around them.

  I am the fire in all things. That whisper came soft and calm, uttered only in the depths of their shared mind.