The Temptation of Elminster Page 3

  Most of those mages had been torn apart already or left to stumble around with eyes and tongues plucked out, for the fiends to tease at leisure later. When the rest of us are dead, Ardelnar thought grimly as he tripped over a fallen statuette, hopped a few awkward steps to keep his footing, and found himself stumbling through the shattered, overgrown remnants of a garden fountain.

  Oh, they’d found treasure. His belt pouch was bulging right now with a generous double handful of gems—sapphires and a few rubies—torn from the chest of a mummified elf corpse as its preservative magics faded with a few last glows and sighs. There’d even been a lone erinyes in that crypt; they’d slain her—it—with confidence. With her wings hacked off in a shower of bloody feathers, she’d not lasted long against the blades of a dozen adventurers, for all her hissing and spitting. Ardelnar could still see the spurt of blood from a mouth beautiful enough to kiss, and her blood smoking as it ran along her dusky limbs.

  Not long after that, the jaws of the trap had closed, with gloating fiends strolling out of every ruin, glade, and thicket on all sides. The adventurers had broken and fled in all directions to the tune of cold, cruel laughter … and the slaughter had begun.

  Back in the here and now, he was seeing the erinyes again. Four of them swooping past, gliding low. Ardelnar ducked involuntarily, but found himself ignored as they banked off to his right, giggling like temple-maids—nude, beautiful, and deadly. They’d have passed for dusky-skinned women of the Tashalar without those great gray-feathered wings. They were after the mage he’d been hoping would get them both out of this fiend-haunted ruin. Klargathan Srior was a tall, spade-bearded southerner who seemed the most capable of all the mages, as well as the most arrogant.

  All that hauteur was gone now, as the mage ran wearily along on Ardelnar’s right, hairy legs stained with blood where he’d gashed himself while slicing off his own robes so he could flee faster. Gold earrings bobbed amid rivers of sweat, and a steady stream of mumbled curses marked the mage’s flight for his life. The erinyes glided in, veering apart to come at Klargathan from different directions, razor-sharp daggers in their hands. Sport was in their laughter and their cruel eyes, not outright murder.

  Gasping, the mage stopped and took his stand. “Priest!” he bellowed, as a baton from his belt grew of its own accord into a staff. “Aid me, for the love of Tempus!”

  Ardelnar almost ran on, leaving the man’s death to buy himself a few more breaths of flight, but he stood no chance in this deep and endless wood without Klargathan’s spells, and they both knew it. They also both knew that this cold realization carried more weight than the command to serve in the name of the Foehammer. The shame of that was like a cold worm crawling in Ardelnar’s heart. Not that there was time to brood or fashion denials.

  He swallowed in mid-stride, then almost fell as he wheeled around without slowing and ran to the mage, stumbling over bones half-glimpsed amid the forest plants, old bones—human bones. He had a momentary glimpse of a skull rolling away from his foot, jawless and unable to grin.

  Klargathan was whirling his staff over his head with desperate energy, trying to smash aside the gliding erinyes without having one of them slash open his face or pluck the weapon from his hands. They were circling him like sharks, reaching out with their blades to cut at his clothing. One shoulder was already bared—and wet with blood from the dagger cut that had left it so.

  Through the desperate chaos of thudding staff and flapping wings, the mage’s eyes caught those of the priest. “I need …” the southerner gasped, “some time!”

  Ardelnar nodded to show he understood and plucked off his own helm to smash at one wing of an erinyes. She flapped aside and he brought his warhammer up from his belt into her beautiful face, hard. Blood sprayed and the fiend squalled. Then she was past them, flying blindly into a tumble along the ground and into a waiting tree, while her three companions descended on Ardelnar in a shrieking, clawing cloud. He jammed the helm over the face of one and ducked under her gliding body so close that her breasts grazed his shoulder, using her as cover against the blades of the others. They struck at both her and the priest, not caring who they cut open, and as Ardelnar ducked away and rolled to his feet to avoid being caught between those last two screaming, spitting she-fiends, he heard Klargathan stammering out an incantation, ignoring the gurgling erinyes who plowed into the ground beside him, her side slashed open and black, smoking blood fountaining forth.

  The last two she-fiends soared up into the air to gain height enough to dive back down on this unexpectedly tough pair of humans, and Ardelnar snatched a quick glance back at the overgrown, ruined towers of Myth Drannor. More fiends were coming. Barbazu and barb-covered hamatula, far too many to outfight or outrun, loped along with tails lashing and blood-hunger in their faces. This fern-covered ground would be his grave.

  “Tempus, let this last battle be to your glory!” he cried aloud, holding up his bloodied hammer. “Make me worthy of your service, swift in my striking, alert in my fighting, agile and deft!”

  One of the erinyes tapped his hammer aside with her dagger, and leaned in to snicker as she swooped past his ear, “My, my—anything else?”

  Her voice was low, and lush, full of lusty promise. Its mockery enraged Ardelnar more than anything else ever had in all his life. He bounded after her, almost leaving himself open to easy slaughter at the hands of the other erinyes, but instead she became the first victim of Klargathan’s spell.

  Black, slimy coils of what looked like a giant serpent or eel erupted from the ferns not far away, spiraling upward with incredible speed. Now they seemed more like taproots, or the boughs of a tree sprouting from nothing to full vigor in mere seconds.

  One bough encircled the throat of the erinyes as she turned leisurely to slice at Ardelnar, and another looped about her ankle. The force of her frantic wing beats swung her around to where the black tree was already entwined around both of the previously grounded erinyes. Their bodies were visibly shriveling, sucked dry of blood and innards with the same unnerving speed as everything else this spell-tree did.

  Still trying to fly, the snared she-fiend crashed into a tangle of thickening trunks. Her head was driven off, dangling to one side, and thereafter she moved no more.

  “By the Lord of Battles, what a spell!” Ardelnar gasped, watching tendrils swarm over the body of the erinyes with that same lightning speed. More were waving in the air above them, encircling the fourth she-fiend. Despite her frightened, wildly slashing struggles, the tendrils caught at her wings, pulled, and slowly dragged her down. The priest of Tempus laughed and waved his hammer at the mage in salute.

  Klargathan gave him a lopsided grin. “It won’t be enough,” he said sadly, “and I haven’t another like that. We’re going to die for the sake of a few gems and elven gewgaws.”

  The running fiends were almost upon them now. Ardelnar turned to flee, but the southerner shook his head. “I’m not running,” he said. “At least my tree keeps them from taking us from the rear.”

  A sudden hope lit his features and he added, “Have you any sapphires?”

  Ardelnar tore open his pouch and emptied it into the mage’s hand. “There must be a dozen there,” he said eagerly, no longer caring a whit when Klargathan raked through them and dumped everything that wasn’t a sapphire onto the ground.

  The southerner swept one arm around the priest and hugged him fiercely. “We’re still going to die here,” he said, bestowing a firm kiss on the startled priest’s lips, “but at least we’ll turn a few fiends to smoking bones around us.” He grinned at Ardelnar’s expression, and added, “The kiss is for my wife; tell Tempus to deliver it to her for me, if you’ve time left for another prayer. Hold them off again, please.”

  He crouched down without another word, and Ardelnar hefted his warhammer in one hand and unhooked his small belt-mace to hold ready in the other, taking a stance in front of the mage as ever-thickening black tendrils curled around and over them like a cupping han
d.

  The tree shivered under the blows of many barbazu blades even as it grew, and gargoyle-like spinagons, folding their wings and barbed tails flat, scuttled in along the tunnel-like opening in its branches to face the priest, who found fresh happiness—no, satisfaction—welling through him. He was going to die here, but die well. Let it befall so.

  “Thank you, Tempus,” he said, blowing Klargathan’s kiss to the air for the god of war to take on. “Let this my last worship please thee.”

  His warhammer swept up and crashed down. Spinagon claws raked his arm, and he smashed them aside with his mace, being driven back by the sheer force of five charging fiends. “Hurry, mage!” he snarled, struggling to keep from being buried under clawing limbs.

  “I have,” Klargathan replied calmly, nudging Ardelnar with one knee as he hurled a sapphire down the tunnel of tendrils, and the world exploded in lightning.

  From one gem to another held in the mage’s cupped hand the lightning bolts blazed, crackling and rebounding in arcs that raced back and forth rather than striking once. Though every hair on both their bodies stood on end, neither the mage nor the priest took harm from the spell.

  The biting, clawing fiend wrapped around Ardelnar was protected from the lightning, too, but Klargathan stepped forward and thrust a silver-bladed dagger hilt-deep into one of its eyes, then pulled it out and drove it into the other. It collapsed, slithering down Ardelnar’s legs as the two adventurers watched fiends—even one of the tall barb-covered, point-headed hamatulas, its bristling shoulders shedding tendrils with every spasm—dance in the thrall of the lightning. Flesh darkened and eyes sizzled as the bolts flashed back and forth.

  Then, as abruptly as it had erupted, the spell ended, leaving Klargathan shaking his hand and blowing on his smoking palm. “Good, large gems,” he said with a tight grin, “and we’ve more to use yet.”

  “Do we run?” Ardelnar asked, eyeing a pair of erinyes who glared down at him as they swept past overhead, “or bide here?”

  The next group of winged she-fiends was struggling under the weight of a broken-off elven statue larger than any of them. They let it go with deft precision. Good Myth Drannan stone crashed through tangled tree limbs, its fall numbing both men despite their dives for safety. They scrambled up to find the falling statuary had left an opening to the sky that spinagons were already circling, aloft, massing to dive into.

  The southerner shrugged. “It’s death either way,” he said. “Moving gives both sides more fun, but tarrying here wins us more time, and we can shed more of their blood before we go down. Not quite the way I’d planned to dance in the ruins of Myth Drannor, but it’ll have to do.”

  Ardelnar’s answering laughter was a little wild. “Let’s move,” he suggested. “I don’t want to wind up half crushed under a stone block, with them tormenting my extremities while I die slowly.”

  Klargathan grinned and clapped the priest on the shoulder. “So be it!” he said and shoved, hard. As the startled Ardelnar crashed headfirst into black tendrils that at least didn’t claw at him, half a dozen spinagons slammed down into the space where he’d been standing, their cruel forks stabbing deep into the suddenly vacated ground, too deep to tear free in haste.

  “Run!” the mage shouted, pointing up the tunnel. Ardelnar obeyed, steadying himself with his mace against the trampled ground as he stumbled over a forest root, then rushing headlong away from the conjured tree. Behind him raced the mage, a sapphire clenched in his hand and his head cocked to look back as he ran.

  When the outstretched claws of the hard-flying, foremost pursuing spinagon were almost touching him, Klargathan held up the gem and said one soft word. Lightning erupted from it right down the fiend’s throat. Its struggling gray gargoyle body burst apart in the roar of bolts lashing into it from both in front and behind—for the mage had left another gem on the ground by the fallen statue, where the fiends had swooped down. As the dark, blood-wet tatters fell away behind the rushing men, Ardelnar saw the rest of the spinagons tumbling and shuddering in the grip of those snarling bolts. He followed the mage around a huge duskwood tree, onto a game trail that led more or less in the direction they wanted to go: away from the ruins, in any direction, downright swiftly.

  Ardelnar saw the mage toss down another gem as they sprinted on, dodging around standing trees and leaping over fallen ones, out among the barbazu now, in the deep and endless forest now reclaiming the riven city of Myth Drannor.

  In the distance they saw another fleeing adventurer cut down. Then a barbed tail swept down out of dark branches overhead to send Klargathan sprawling, and the two men were too busy for any more sightseeing.

  The first lash of the cornugon’s whip snapped the warhammer from Ardelnar’s numbed fingers, and the second laid his shoulder open to the bone, clear through the pauldron and mail shirt that should have protected it. The priest tumbled helplessly away, thrashing in his agony. This was a good thing. It took him well clear of the first howling bolt of lightning.

  The bolt crashed into the huge, scale-covered cornugon and toppled it, roaring, right into the pit-of-spikes trap on the trail that it had been guarding. Impaled, it roared more desperately, its cry high and sharp, until a bleeding Klargathan leaped in on top of it, and drove his silver-bladed dagger into another pair of fiend eyes. Those sightless orbs wept streams of smoke as the mage scrambled back out of the thrashing tangle of shuddering bat-wings, long claws, and flailing tail in the pit, and shook the moaning Ardelnar to his feet.

  “We’d better run beside the trail, not on it,” Klargathan gasped. “I don’t suppose you brought any healing-quaffs along? You need one about now.”

  “My thanks for confirming what a mess I must be,” the priest grunted, reeling. “I’m afraid I wasn’t the one carrying the potions, but if you’ll guard me for a few breaths …”

  The mage’s baton became a staff again, and he stood guard, watching his last fading lightning bolts snap back and forth along the now empty trail as Ardelnar healed himself.

  As they stumbled on, the priest felt weak and sick. Ahead, a steep hill rose, forcing them to run around it or try to climb its tree-girt slopes and somehow stay ahead of fiends who could fly. It was no surprise when Klargathan headed around the hill, panting raggedly now. Ardelnar followed, wondering just how long they’d be able to outrun half the vacationing occupants of the Lower Planes.

  They came out into a clearing caused by the crashing fall of a shadowtop tree, and Ardelnar had his answer. Unfortunately, it was a very final one.

  Klargathan went down under the claws of half a dozen pouncing cornugons. He hurled a handful of gems into the air with his last breath and died in the wild hail of lightning bolts that followed, sending his slayers tumbling away in all directions. The priest saw that, and managed one last, exultant shout. As fiend-talons burst through his chest and his own hot blood welled up to choke him, Ardelnar was briefly glad he’d healed himself before this final fray. It seemed somehow … tidy.

  His last prayer to Mystra had been answered by a silence as deafening as all the previous ones. A year passed since he’d awakened in a tomb full of malevolent eyes with no words from the goddess Elminster so loved. He’d wept, on his knees, before wearily wrapping his cloak around himself and seeking despondent, lonely slumber out under a sky of rushing, tattered clouds, on a deserted hill out in the rolling wilderlands. He was dozing when the sign had come to him. Unbidden, a scene had swum into his drowsy mind, of him standing on a hilltop he knew … and did not know.

  It was Halidae’s Height, a forest-covered hilltop south and a little west of Myth Drannor that he’d stood on a time or two before, usually with a laughing elf lass on his arm and a warm, star-filled night stretching out before them. In the scene that had come to him there were no elf maidens. Moreover, something had toppled more than one tree on the Height and lit fires here and there, marring it from what he remembered.

  He knew he’d journey thence without delay, come morning. He had to know wh
at Mystra desired him to do—and this at least was something. For the thousandth time El lamented Mystra’s silence and wondered what he’d done to earn it. Surely not getting caught in a trap for a few generations because he’d followed her dictates to seek out ever more magic, in old places and hidden ones.

  Yet he retained his powers, some even more vigorous than before—so there must be a Mystra, with her own powers intact and the governance of magic still in her hands. Why was she silent, keeping her face hidden from him?

  And just who was he to question what she might do, or not do?

  A man, challenging the gods as other men did—and with about as much success. El fell asleep thinking of stars moving about in the heavens as part of a gigantic chess game played among the gods. The last thing he remembered was seeing the sudden, tremulous trail of a shooting star—probably a real one, not a dream’s whim—dying, off to the east.

  Halidae’s Height was as scarred as the vision had shown him. He teleported in to stand beside a duskwood tree that didn’t seem to have changed one whit between his memory and the vision. A gentle breeze was blowing, and he was alone on the hilltop. Elminster had barely glanced over its ravaged slope and started to swing his gaze toward Myth Drannor, knowing, by now, the sadness he’d see, when the breeze brought cries to his ears. Shouts of battle.

  He sprang to the edge of the Height, where in happier days one could look out and down over the city. Tiny figures were leaping and dying in the thinned-out forest below. Humans and—fiends, monsters from the Lower Planes—were running about, the humans fleeing. Winged she-fiends were swooping here and there. Lightning bolts suddenly stabbed out in all directions from one knot of creatures, in a deadly star of death that sent fiends staggering and screaming. Other devils were slaying humans down there, disemboweling one last adventurer as he watched. Just in case any of the fleeing men escaped, a door in the air—a magical gate—had opened at the foot of the Height, and a steady stream of fiends was pouring forth from it.