Ed Greenwood: Elminster Enraged

The wizard rolled over, dragging the dissolving drow torso over as a shield, and worked a swift spell. Then he stood up to face the dragon.

“Oh, that was boldly done,” Alorglauvenemaus said mockingly, and he spewed a great cloud of acid right at Gulkanun.

Another rift closed, and of course more monsters slain. At last.

The Simbul stared at deep gashes in her left shoulder as she drifted away from her latest battlefield, exhausted and reeling. The blueflame items in her hands flickered dully, almost spent.

“I am becoming blueflame,” she mumbled. “Mystra, it hurts, and the madness is coming back … I can feel it …”

Not long now, loyal daughter , came Mystra’s firm reply. Not long until you can rest forever .

The cloud of acid struck something unseen in front of Elminster, and boiled away. Good. The shielding he’d just cast was broad and high, and protected Arclath, Rune, and most of the Irlingstar folk still on the road.

The nobles who’d ducked down into the ditches were not so fortunate. Even before El stepped back to heal Amarune with a burst of silver fire, many acid-melted Cormyrean lordlings screamed, gurgled, and died.

Gulkanun had retreated to the back of his mind, no longer despairing. El sent him a reassuring rush of warmth and gratitude, then turned and worked the mightiest battle spell he could swiftly hurl.

Before it could take wing, the great black dragon was struck. By his shielding spell first, its edge of force thinned like Mreldrake’s blade. It sliced deeply, almost severing one great wing, even as Elminster’s whirling spheres of flame slammed into the rest of Alorglauvenemaus.

Writhing on the road, its lashing tail and wings churning up dust, the scorched dragon screamed in pain.

The sound was almost deafening, and in its growing agony the dragon rolled over and over, like a wounded man down in a fight and trying to get clear, its tail and intact wing flailing the road and ditches alike.

Elminster raised his arms-Gulkanun’s arms-to hurl another spell at the dragon.

And the air above Alorglauvenemaus winked, four bright stars appearing out of nowhere, stars that flashed and then were gone-leaving behind four rotting, mold-covered beholders of monstrous size.

Hanging menacingly in midair, their eyestalks and tentacles writhing, they stared down at the wizard standing in the road.

"M anshoon ,” El muttered angrily, and he worked a spell that should maim at least four death tyrants before they could spread apart to fly at him from all sides.

He was halfway through that magic when another two crossbow quarrels came humming out of the trees.

He swayed aside and one missed-but the other crashed into him, spoiled the spell, and hurled him down on his back on the road, winded and in pain.

He could taste blood, and in the sky above the beholders were floating menacingly forward.

Behind them, the dragon was fleeing, lurching along the road like a gigantic wounded dog in an anxious hurry to be elsewhere, its tongue hanging out as it panted.

“Enough of this,” El snarled, fighting the pain. “Rune, Arclath-clasp your hands firmly around some part of me. And let any noble who wants to do the same.”

Arclath Delcastle was neither dull nor slow-witted. “Where are you taking us?”

“The royal gardens in Suzail,” El gasped.

“I dem- requested this audience,” Lady Dawningdown said sharply, “because I now have rather more than the usual number of complaints. Your Majesty will appreciate-”

King Foril Obarskyr, who walked at her side as they wended their way along some of the shadier paths of the royal gardens, nodded politely. He’d become very good at politely appreciating nobles’ bitter complaints, long before his first meeting with Lady Jalassra Dawningdown-and that meeting had been happier decades ago.

Lady Glathra and the lord warder walked a pace behind them, and several watchful veteran highknights were farther ahead.

“-that a lady of breeding and station, such as myself, who has reached the golden age I now enjoy, no longer takes pleasure in the jolting of a saddle, and prefers to travel in the relative comfort of a coach! I hope you’ll agree that any Cormyrean who can afford such a conveyance should have the perfect right to-”

The highknights shouted as they were bowled over by the sudden appearance, amid a bright blue flash of magic, of more than a dozen ragged bodies, tumbling out of nowhere atop them.

The lord warder cast a swift shielding, and Lady Glathra dragged out her two most puissant wands and yelled for the rearguard of highknights and war wizards to get themselves over here, right now .

“The king is under attack!” someone bellowed from across the gardens, and knights and Purple Dragons started converging from everywhere, swords out and running hard.

The sudden scramble and fray would have ended in real bloodshed if strong forcecages and shielding spells hadn’t come into being around the new arrivals.

As it was, hurrying highknights unceremoniously bowled Lady Dawningdown over. Whereupon some ill-smelling and disheveled young lordlings, in haste to loudly complain to the king about the murderers he was letting loose into his prisons to just dispose of anyone he desired dead, trampled the toppled lady face first into a freshly manured flower bed. Whereupon Lady Dawningdown discovered she had just acquired something to really complain about.

When it all got sorted out, the complaining prisoners were hustled away by most of the Purple Dragons. Many of the wizards of war and highknights, with Lord Warder Vainrence, conducted King Foril to safety elsewhere.

Leaving Lady Glathra to glean some detailed sense of what had happened at Irlingstar, so as to deliver a proper report to the king.

“Consider yourself under arrest,” she began, giving Gulkanun a glare and keeping both of her wands leveled at him. “We will decide on the future of your career in service to the Crown later. For now, I require-”

“Oh, for the sake of the Dragon Throne !” Amarune snarled in utter exasperation, plunging into a somersault that became an extended double-leg kick at the back of the war wizard’s head.

Glathra went down like a felled sapling.

Leaving Arclath, Amarune, and Elminster all gazing wearily at each other.

“My place,” Arclath suggested. “I want a feast, a bed, and most of all a bath .”

They all fervently agreed-even Gulkanun, inside the mind he was sharing with Elminster.

In a corner of the royal gardens, Lord Wenderwood reached a decision and abruptly stood up.

He’d been sitting on a bench under a sculpted felsul tree, patiently awaiting his turn to talk to the king on that day’s garden stroll.

The guard who’d been escorting Lord Wenderwood had gone running to old Foril the moment the war wizard bitch had shouted for help, and hadn’t yet returned. The guard was starting to, though, trudging back to inform his noble charge that royal audiences were unexpectedly over for the day.

So much Lord Wenderwood, with his monocle or without, could already see for himself. In truth, there was nothing at all wrong with his eyesight, and he’d readily recognized Lord Delcastle, a number of other young lords who’d recently been shut up in Irlingstar-and the flash of a translocation spell.

His master would very much want to hear about this. Accordingly, Lord Wenderwood turned his back on the approaching guard, who was still two intervening flower beds away.

It was the work of but a moment to unleash the eyeball beholderkin from inside the breast of the best Wenderwood formal jerkin, to send it back to Lord Manshoon.