The Temptation of Elminster Read online

  THE TEMPTATION OF ELMINSTER

  ©1998, TSR, Inc.

  ©2003 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, D&D, Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. Other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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

  Cover art by Todd Lockwood

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-62384

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-5971-6

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  v3.1

  Novels by Ed Greenwood

  The Elminster Series

  Elminster: The Making of a Mage

  Elminster in Myth Drannor

  The Temptation of Elminster

  Elminster in Hell

  Elminster’s Daughter

  The Cormyr Saga

  Cormyr: A Novel (with Jeff Grubb)

  Death of the Dragon (with Troy Denning)

  The Shandril Saga

  Spellfire

  Crown of Fire

  Hand of Fire

  The Shadow of the Avatar Trilogy

  Shadows of Doom

  Cloak of Shadows

  All Shadows Fled

  Stormlight

  Silverfall: Stories of the Seven Sisters

  To

  Steve & Jenny Helleiner

  Great friends, good people,

  champions of gaming

  and the gamers who play.

  Let all your triumphs together

  not be in Another World.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by This Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I: The Lady Of Shadows

  One: A Fire at Midnight

  Two: Doom Rides a Dapple Gray

  Three: A Feast in Felmorel

  Four: Stag Horns and Shadows

  Five: One Morning at Moonshorn

  Six: At the Riven Stone

  Seven: Deadly Spells Forbear Thee

  Eight: The Sundered Throne

  Nine: Glad Days in Galadorna

  Ten: To Taste Dark Fire

  Book Two: Sunrise on a Dark Road

  Eleven: Moonrise, Frostfire, and Doom

  Twelve: The Empty Throne

  Thirteen: Kindness Scorches Stone

  Fourteen: The Elminster Hunt

  Fifteen: A Dark Flame Rising

  Sixteen: If Magic Should Fail

  Seventeen: A Fine Day for Travel

  Eighteen: No Shortage of Victims

  Nineteen: More Blood than Thunder

  Twenty: Never Have so Many Owed so Much

  Epilogue

  The realm of Galadorna lay east of Delthuntle. Its capital, Nethrar, survives as present-day Nethra.

  The events of Part I span about five years, beginning in the Year of the Missing Blade (759 DR).

  The events of Part II span sixteen or seventeen days in the Year of the Awakening Wyrm (767 DR).

  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

  Faerûnian 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 packsack, “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-whupped into 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-shroude
d 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.