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  “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.

  Maerandor shook his head again, irked with himself. Though he was far from solid yet, his phantom jaws ached from the smile he’d been foolish enough to shape ere roiling into shadow.

  Idiot. A small thing, yet small things could get one killed, even in Candlekeep.

  Hmmph.

  Especially in Candlekeep.

  He stood stock-still at the end of a line of cloaks, his back to a wall, and listened hard. But there were no sounds of anyone nearby. He could smell old, worn leather, but no trace of mildew, and that confirmed he was inside the wards, which fought and killed molds and mildews. It was why the monks went outside their fortress to dine in the open fields below when they wanted to enjoy cheese.

  That was just one of many, many mundane details he knew about the monastery, thanks to years of Shadovar spying—and, of course, what the minds of captives had yielded up less than willingly. Right now, however, he had to use what he knew of the monks themselves. The senior monks.

  He had to find and murder the right monk.

  Klaeleth or Norldrin would be best. Chethil would do, or Guldor or Aumdras. Cooks and warders, men of learning and years, who were respected but did not command, who saw to their own duties and walked their own ways in the vast old fortress. Monks who knew how to momentarily open a way through the wards without damaging them or alerting others that such a breach had been made.

  A cook would be best, being as Maerandor of Thultanthar was hungry. Worming through the wards was exhausting work.

  A dark and silent shadow in the darkness no normal man’s eyes could penetrate, Maerandor drifted to the door, and through the gap beneath it.

  It was time to be a-murdering.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the Halls of the Endless Chant

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WISER NOT TO USE ONE OF THE OLD GATES, but the Great Shield was up, and the gates of Candlekeep were firmly shut to the outside world in these times of war and tumult, no matter how valuable the tomes that supplicants waved under the noses of the monks who guarded the way in. Moreover, this latest doom coming down on Faerûn wouldn’t wait forever; Abeir and Toril were more or less apart already, even if most mortals knew nothing of such matters but wild rumors.

  And, no less importantly, his feet hurt.

  “Besides,” Elminster muttered to himself darkly, “ye gave up on being wise centuries ago. About the time ye decided to do something about the magelords, back in Athalantar.”

  Athalantar, the vanished kingdom he was the last prince of. Not that anyone beyond sages and a handful of elves remembered more than its name, these days.

  For that matter, he doubted very much anyone still alive—beyond, again, a handful of elves—remembered the gate he intended to use, which lacked side posts these days, or even a marker. One merely stepped between these two leaning boulders—in a crouch, if ye were human sized—after hooking around yon first stone in just the one direction—so—and murmuring “Amalaeroth” in the right intonation, at the right moment.

  Which was … now.

  Here on this brisk morning of the ninth of Marpenoth, in the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant. The year 1487 in Dalereckoning. Not a bad day, if one didn’t mind chill winds, but winter—real winter—would be coming soon.

  So, behold, one step took ye from the hills near Elturel past shut and guarded doors and warily watchful monks, to the tunnels that riddled the root rocks beneath Candlekeep, well down beneath the silent, endless thunder of the wards.

  Where it was dark rather than sunlit and breezy, startlingly so after the open air, but his nose told him he was in the right place. Elminster stood in an ale-hued gloom lit faintly and fitfully by palely glowing fungi, the soft and flowing sluglike growths that fed on the, ah, aromatic cesspool outflows.

  Aye, he wasn’t in the undoubtedly warded and dragon-guarded warrens that descended into the Underdark, but a far smaller, parallel webwork of passages, old cellars, and cesspools, carefully kept separate from the caverns that linked with the Realms Below. Three gates opened up into the monastery above—gates that even the most senior monks who led Candlekeep today knew nothing of. Their predecessors had known how to keep secrets, and spirit away written references, as well as any Chosen of Mystra.

  So El doubted he’d meet with many traffic jams on this particular way up into the great fortress of learning. Wading through chest-deep sewage was never a popular pastime.

  He pulled off his boots, moved the flask of oil from his belt into one of his boots to keep it upright and handy, and started disrobing, stuffing everything he took off into the deepest crevice he could find.

  He would miss those boots. Comfortable boots were always hard to come by. Usually it took years of trudging in discomfort, aches and blisters and worse, to break them in. But most of the monks wore soft leather slippers that gave no cushion at all against the cold, hard stone …

  Bah. Give thought to such luxuries later, after the rapturous fun of the moment. He began working oil into his hair, his beard, everywhere—nostrils and eyelashes last.

  The oil would help the sewage slide off him more easily, afterward. There was a side sump that carried the water down from the baths, which joined the main cesspool outflow in the cavern with the large stripe of quartz down its walls. It should serve as a shower …

  Carefully he lowered himself in, and started wading.

  Back in the brown stuff again …

  Mystra forfend, but the monks were spicing their fare more highly. And eating more cabbage too.

  Clear proof of their diligent guardianship. Less food was arriving from outside, forcing them to rely more on their larders and what they grew themselves—and for some reason known only to the gods, cabbages thrived atop crumbling stone towers, hereabouts. It would be interesting to learn why they’d raised the Great Shield.

  His progress was slow, foul work. Two caverns in, he felt the wards crackling and thrumming in front of him, thickening to prevent a living intruder so imbued with magic—the workings of his hectic centuries—from passing through them.

  He’d added to these wards himself a time or two, and knew how they interacted with the Weave. That was the key to slipping through them; making himself so “of the Weave” that the wards would take him for it, and not for an old, naked man trudging through the cess …

  El set about losing himself in the Weave, his body becoming more smoke and shadows than solid, sewage falling away from what it could no longer cling to. As a silent, patient cloud, he advanced, crossing another cavern before he felt the silent thunder of the wards behind him rather than around him, and let himself—slowly again, a gradual and patient shifting—slip back into solidity before someone or something might detect his use of magic.

  It was a cavern later when his cautious feet struck something hard and solid, under the turgid brown flow, where there should have been nothing. Something El thought he knew, and had even been expecting, before he’d gingerly felt i
t up and down enough to identify it.

  The body of a man, extra clothes knotted to his arms and legs and neck that had been wrapped around sizeable stones.

  A corpse weighted down with stones to keep it submerged and hidden. Almost certainly a murdered monk. Well, well …

  Two caverns later, he encountered another. Then another.

  These two were in shallower sewage than the first, and El took the trouble to drag them to where he could haul their heads out and wipe at them to see if he recognized them.

  He did. Two monks whose faces he knew. The name of one—a man from the far, far South beyond Faerûn who had coal-black skin, and who’d always spoken sparingly—he couldn’t recall, but the other was a freckled, red-bearded onetime trader from Tharsult.

  “Dalkur,” Elminster muttered aloud, as the name rose out of his overcrowded memory. “Wrote a beautiful hand, as swift as some folk breathe.”

  He let both bodies slip back down under the reeking brown current, and waded onward thoughtfully.

  Oh, monks died and their brethren in Candlekeep didn’t trouble to let the wider world know. They kept to themselves as a matter of course. A great many folk in Faerûn had no idea there were women among the monks, although there had always been, simply because the Avowed of Candlekeep hadn’t bothered to let the world think any differently. Aye, monks could die and the world not be told about it.

  Yet the penitent dead weren’t buried by being weighed down and hidden in sewage, and for years he’d had his own spies among the monks, and so had the Harpers, the Lords’ Alliance, and half a dozen less savory cabals and alliances … and if there’d been many losses among the Avowed of Candlekeep, some word of it would have leaked out.

  Nor had any of the bodies been there all that long. Moving excrement that mixed with air as this flow did was far from a preservative.

  No, these monks had been murdered and then impersonated, or he was a shade of Thultanthar. So others were as interested in what was inside Candlekeep as he was.

  “Well,” he muttered to himself, “this makes matters slightly easier. Undoubtedly I won’t be the only impersonator. ’Twill be interesting when I run into my double.”

  Dalkur would do. Close enough in height and build … aye.

  El found the bathwater sluice and tarried there, letting its chill waters thoroughly rinse away what he’d been wading through, as he concentrated on calling up every last memory he could of the freckled monk’s voice and manner and looks.

  Andannas Dalkur, once of Tharsult, before that from Secomber.

  From once-mighty Athalantar …

  This changed matters, to be sure. Repairing the Weave in a hurry was still of utmost importance, and the secrets Khelben had hidden about how to do that were here if they survived anywhere, but it now seemed he had numerous competitors in the hunt for those secrets, and dealing with them must come first. So, add a few more steps to this most crucial of missions—and in that, why should it be any different than most of his tasks? There were always more steps to everything than ye thought there’d be, at the beginning. El chuckled and scrubbed his scalp with his fingers, trying to get the last of the sewer stench off himself. His freckled, bony-jointed, sunken-chested new self.

  He failed, of course. It’d be the baths for him, once he stole a robe from the spare stores nigh the stables. And a good roll in mule dung in one of the stalls that hadn’t been mucked out yet, to cover one stink with another. Then the baths.

  And then it would be time for the new false Andannas Dalkur to find the older false Andannas Dalkur in the halls of Candlekeep.

  If that other impersonator didn’t find him first.

  Ah, Norun Chethil. The cook among the cooks of the Avowed, and foraging alone in the deepest back pantries. Ideal.

  Maerandor waited until the cook—a stout man, like most who tasted as they went—was bent over and rummaging through cobwebs at the back of a shelf in search of the oldest jars of preserves—oysters in spiced oil, as it happened—because they should be used first.

  “Come out of there, you skulking rat of a jar,” Chethil grunted, smooth crockery spinning under his stubby fingertips. “Hah! Got you!”

  That sounded like too good a cue to waste. Maerandor silently solidified right behind the monk. And pounced.

  The moment his fingers closed on Chethil’s throat and head, the Shadovar put all the weight of his body and the speed of his bound into one swift, ruthless wrenching.

  The cook’s neck broke with a soft, sickening splintering, the man’s arms writhing wildly enough that Maerandor had to fling out a hasty foot to kick one jar of oysters back onto the shelf before it could fall and shatter.

  Then Chethil went limp. His slayer held him in a grip like unyielding steel, keeping the dying man immobile and alive for as long as possible.

  It took but a moment to awaken the right magic and invade the dimming, helpless mind. The wards, reveal all you know of them …

  Ah, much indeed. The wards, tell more! The kitchens had their own doors through the wards, which were opened when it was both safe and needful to use such swift alternatives to traders’ wagons coming up the Way of the Lion to the gates. That wasn’t often.

  Tell more! Ah, and these gates were there and there and there, opened thus and so and with these safeguards …

  Chethil’s next culinary work would begin three chants from now, after visits to the cellars that held onions and leeks and peppers, then up to the tower where the greenleaf was flourishing in the window boxes.

  Yes, let’s have where all the cellars and pantries are, and what they all hold. Aha, yes. There were no keys to lock any of the deep back pantries, but few of the monks knew their ins and outs, and only a handful ever went to them. Unless Chethil took longer than three chants to appear in the kitchens, no one would come down seeking him. The apples many monks liked to sneak for themselves were a good five levels above.

  Chethil’s undercooks were the monks Rethele and Shinthrynne, merry young women Chethil was fond of and whose jests and lively converse the stout cook heartily enjoyed—even if dusky-skinned Shinthrynne was from the hot jungles where they had strange ideas about fiery seasonings, whereas Rethele was from upcountry Impiltur and thought dry thistles made fine salads. They’d both be in the kitchen right now, making sauces and dicing marrows … and they knew what he’d gone to fetch. So he must depart the pantry with three jars of oysters.

  What did Chethil know of the rest of Candlekeep?

  Huh. Just about all of it, though no monk alive had been in all the turrets of the main keep. Some of the turrets had been walled off for centuries. Chethil had lived much of his life within Candlekeep’s walls, and had walked the well-worn route of the chant for the first score or so of those years.

  The cook’s mind was darkening fast, his anger and fear mere dull echoes, his formerly frantic thoughts a slowing, drifting chaos as he slipped away.

  Maerandor bore down, seeking what he needed to feign the man himself. Favored sayings, habits, hues, hobbies, Norun’s own preferred food.

  Ah, that caused a last flare in the fading mind. Chethil himself detested ale and smoked meats, and loved strong cordials and the marinated lizard dishes once popular in Var the Golden … back when it had still been Var the Golden.

  Back when … back when … the last life faded in a flickering, and all of Norun Chethil became a “back when.”

  Maerandor lowered the stout body. Good. He’d plundered more than enough from the monk to fool others that he was Chethil. Once his body was an exact match for the cook’s, of course.

  He stripped the monk with unhurried care, so as not to damage the man’s robes. A simple apron, the usual clout, a truss—so Chethil was sensitive about his growing girth—and the usual soft leather slippers. A leather-bound chapbook on a neck thong, for the taking of notes. Cookery notes only, it seemed.

  Maerandor worked several spells to change his body into an exact copy of the dead monk. That was the secret to a supe
rior disguise—layers of spells, not just one.

  Then he dragged the corpse to a closet that Chethil had known had once been a long-dead predecessor’s private wine cellar, stuffed it inside, and latched the door.

  Time to call on what he’d just learned about opening a door in the wards. With the same patient calm, he did what Chethil would have done to open the wards, enabling himself to emerge momentarily among the purple-black northslope rocks of the ridge Candlekeep rose from, and retrieve the thorn-and-wax-sealed metal coffer Maerandor of Thultanthar had brought with him and hidden there.

  After returning to the deep back pantry, he used Chethil’s belt knife to slit the seal, slicing aside the thorns the worms found poisonous, and opened the coffer. Inside were two flesh-devouring worms of the sort that consumed vermin in Thultanthar. Both as long as his forearm, glistening black, and plump, their segments rippled with hunger. Opening the closet he’d stuffed the dead monk into, Maerandor poured the worms onto the corpse’s chest and firmly closed the door.

  Shut in for long enough, they’d not just strip the skeleton bare, they’d gnaw the monk’s bones to powder, too.

  All very tidy. Now, three jars of oysters and a detour to a particular cellar to collect the wine he knew Rethele and Shinthrynne liked to sip when the ovens grew hot and the sweat started to stream.

  The fewer monks left, the less resistance. And the Most High wanted no magic wasted and lost in fighting when it came time to drain the wards of this place for Thultanthar. So, his own task was to eliminate any who might fight against that draining. And Maerandor had a reputation to maintain. He did swift, efficient work.

  All of which meant it was high time to bring about Candlekeep’s downfall.

  Elminster hadn’t visited Candlekeep often, and had never stayed long. There’d always been so many pressing tasks to do, things he couldn’t neglect or delay. Yet many times he’d wanted to tarry in this most lore-filled of monasteries, drawn to the rooms and rooms full of grimoires and spellbooks and histories and every other sort of book he’d not had the time to sit and really enjoy. Even with twelve centuries to find time enough in.