Ed Greenwood: Elminster Enraged

The spell that struck him made everything seem to hush, so it was in an eerie peace that Mirt noticed that everything-shouting men pointing at him, rearing horses, swords being swung-was happening slowly. Very slowly.

Then his gaze was caught and held by the dark, level eyes of a man riding with the Halfhap patrol, who had to be a war wizard. The young, severe-looking man who’d enspelled him.

“Listen to me,” Mirt tried to call to him. “I need you to … to …”

The silent, slowing world went away, except for those severe and disapproving eyes. The mouth beneath them wasn’t smiling, not at all …

“You have a visitor, saer,” the Purple Dragon murmured, unlocking Mirt’s manacles. “He’s been searched thoroughly, but beware-some of these nobles have poison hidden away in right sly places.”

“Nobles?” Mirt asked, with a frown. He remembered many stern questions, stern and then dumbfounded Purple Dragon faces ringing him as they heard his answers, and Halfhap abruptly erupting in a flood of shouting, hurrying men. It seemed Durncaskyn would be getting the help he needed, at full gallop.

Then he’d been chained to the wall in a cell for “later questioning,” his tales of the king and Lady Glathra and Rensharra seeming to strain credulity more than a bit too much.

When the spell that made the world seem faint and far away wore off, he intended to get himself out, somehow. He’d been chained with his wrists well away from his belt, so the little lockpicks there and in his boots might as well have been back in Waterdeep … but unless they were going to spoon-feed him, they’d have to unshackle him some time.

The cell door opened again, and the same Purple Dragon looked in and then turned and announced expressionlessly over his shoulder, “I’ll be down the passage, beyond where I can hear anything less than a shout. With your four bodyguards, lord.” He turned his head again and gave Mirt a distinct but stonefaced wink.

Ah, nobles . Specifically, his visitor was the one who’d deprived him of his coach on the road. Striding into the cell looking spitting angry, too.

“Coach thief!” Mirt roared at him.

The noble’s eyes bulged, he went from red to dark crimson, and cords stood out in his neck. All in the instant before he whirled around and caught hold of the departing guard’s elbow. “Introduce me to the prisoner,” he snapped.

The Dragon looked startled. “Uh, ah … lord, this man calls himself Mirt, Lord of Waterdeep. Mirt, this is Lord Austrus Flambrant, uh, head of House Flambrant of, ah, Cormyr.” He fled.

“Horse thief,” Lord Flambrant snarled, not even waiting for the cell door to close, “what have you done with Lady Dawningdown?”

“Put her out of her coach for urgent Crown business,” Mirt snapped. “Why did you poke yer long nose into things and try to stop me, anyhail?”

“What? How dare you-”

The last of Lord Flambrant’s temper fled, and he went for Mirt, raining a flurry of blows into the paunch and hastily raised forearms of the prisoner who promptly sat back down on the bench. Launching a kick up between Flambrant’s legs that parted noble from codpiece and sent the lord’s head into a swift and hard greeting with the low stone ceiling, Mirt deftly brought his knee up as the stricken noble descended. It managed a satisfactorily solid meeting with His Lordship’s chin-and if Flambrant hadn’t been senseless before, he certainly was now.

Collecting Flambrant’s purse for travel expenses and his dagger for troubles ahead, Mirt clapped the unconscious, blood-drooling noble into the manacles and strode out and down the passage.

Only four bodyguards? Huh. He could be on a horse fast enough to catch up with the relief force, and get back to Immerford as soon as they did. If this was the competence of Cormyr’s nobles and soldiery, he trusted no one but himself with guarding Rensharra.

“This is … exhausting work,” Gulkanun said grimly. “Even when you’re doing it all.”

The drow gave him a nod that was both angry and weary, as they headed for the next cell.

Elminster, Gulkanun, Arclath, and Amarune had searched Irlingstar from dungeon to battlements. Unless someone was buried alive in the great collapsed heap of rubble where the south tower had been, no one was hiding anywhere inside the castle who wasn’t already accounted for. Then the mind-touching had begun. The kitchen staff first, then the castle staff, then all of the guards. No murderous slayer.

Which left only the noble prisoners. Who had been resecured in separate cells, warded away from each other by invisible walls of magic that brought silence, so the painstaking mind-touching could continue without interruption or delay. The nobles were willful, unpleasant men, even when they weren’t confined and angry-and now they were also deeply afraid. They resisted the touch of a drow furiously, even a shapely female drow who purred flirtatiously at them as she approached … and El had found it necessary to take a few bruises from some of them before she could get into their minds and render them docile.

She was uncovering a lot of unsavory things-including not a few murders-but finding no unseen slayer. Seven men hadn’t been the murderer they sought, so far, and she wasn’t sure how many more hostile minds she could wade through, before-

She and Gulkanun parted the wards, to deal with the eighth noble. Who lay sprawled face down on the floor in a spreading pool of fresh blood.

“Oh, naed,” El breathed. “To the next one! Hurry!”

They were too late. The tenth and eleventh lordlings, too, were dead.

“At this rate, Foril won’t be needing this prison any longer,” Elminster snapped. “ ’Tis time to try something else.”

“What sort of something else?” Arclath asked. For safety, he and Rune were staying with El and Gulkanun as they worked.

El frowned. “A spell I dimly recall, intended for another purpose entirely, that might locate and highlight the killer’s magic as it manifests, but before anyone else gets slain.”

“If you’re fast and lucky,” Rune murmured.

El shrugged. “ That goes for almost everything in my life. Weapons, everyone.”

She enspelled the blades they were carrying. “These should all now serve to parry the air blade we saw at work. Gulkanun, be ready to shield me; I’ll cast the tracing spell now.”

The war wizard nodded grimly, flexed his fingers, and stepped back to the wall, to watch Elminster narrowly from there. El backed to the wall beside her to begin casting. Arclath and Amarune stood back to back on El’s far side, trying to peer at everyone intently.

As El gestured and started to speak her incantation, the air in front of her promptly thickened into a blade-but struck at Gulkanun first. The war wizard shouted, his ready spell flashing into a bright parry.

Arclath ducked around Elminster in a lunge, the tip of his sword encountering that thickness of the air, just for an instant, but otherwise slicing or spitting nothing at all.

Then something icy slid into his shoulder, and Rune cried his name and started hacking desperately at the empty air there.

Arclath spun around and thrust out, parrying the unseen edge for another fleeting moment. Then they were hard at it, panting and whirling, desperately fighting something they could barely see-until a soft and golden glow rushed from Elminster’s hands, making the forceblade darting through the air shine forth clearly. They saw something else in the spreading golden radiance, too: the blade’s wielder, behind it, a ghostly figure that was clear enough for them all to identify him.

“Mreldrake!” Elminster and Arclath snarled in unison.