Эд Гринвуд - Crown of Fire

They all looked at him, and then Tessaril nodded and rushed out. Mirt drew his sword and slashed at the air. The blade gleamed in the light.

Narm’s reddened eyes followed it, and the young mage clenched his jaw. “What’s your plan?”

The Old Wolf grinned at him but said nothing. Then Mirt’s smile turned rather grim as he brought out the notched and battered axe that had been Delg’s. He hefted it in his other hand. “Where’re those potions?” he bellowed.

Tessaril ran in, hair streaming behind her in her haste. “Here,” she gasped, thrusting two steel vials into his hand. Mirt jammed them into his belt, sighed heavily, and gestured at Narm. “Guard him here, lass.”

Tessaril nodded, and came forward to kiss him. “Guard yourself, Old Wolf,” she said, eyes bright. “I’d like to see you—alive—again.”

Mirt laughed, accepted her quick peck on his grizzled cheek, and said, “Ye will, lass. Ye will.

“If I’ve got to die,” he roared at them all, “I’d like to have a kiss to remember, at the last. Pray to Tymora for me!”

Torm spread his arms pleadingly. “Kiss me, Old Wolf,” he trilled in mocking imitation of a swooning maiden. “Oh, kiss me! ”

Mirt glared at him and backhanded his almost empty goblet off the table. It sailed into Torm’s face. The thief was still sputtering when the old merchant bowed to them all, murmured something, and vanished.

Narm looked around the room and said grimly, “Can everyone here cast a teleport spell except me?”

Storm gathered him into her arms. “That was no teleport, Narm. Do you remember the gem Shandril found in Tethgard—the rogue stone?”

Narm nodded, frowning, tears still bright on his cheeks. “Delg and Mirt knew something about it that they weren’t telling.”

“Undoubtedly,” Storm said dryly. “Mirt put it there for her to find. It was prepared by Khelben the Blackstaff and linked to a spell that many a thief has used down the years, which lets one who speaks the right words teleport to wherever the stone is, long after the spell is cast Mirt’s at Shandril’s side right now.”

Narm looked at her and asked very softly, “And why not me?”

“You’d be killed, idiot,” Torm told him, “unless you’ve learned a god’s ransom of spells since I saw you last. Those Zhentarim’d blast you to ash before you could draw breath to cast your first spell.”

Narm stared at him.

“Blunt,” Storm told the young mage gently, “but true.”

“Besides, you can’t follow her until I memorize another teleport spell,” Tessaril said, “and I’m reluctant to do that.”

“Why not?” Narm almost screamed.

Tessaril turned her back. “I won’t send you to certain death,” she said, voice trembling.

“You sent Shan! ”

“I—couldn’t stop her, Narm. I can stop you.”

Narm stared at her back, fresh tears on his face. “Let me be with Shan!” he cried in anguish. “ Please! ”

Sadly, Tessaril shook her head and turned to meet his gaze with dark eyes that held tears of their own. “Shandril and Mirt can both withstand far more than you can, Narm. You’d wind up a hostage in Fzoul’s hands, one he could use to compel Shandril to surrender. Then spellfire would be his, after all.”

Narm’s eyes blazed. Abruptly he whirled away from her gaze to stamp the length of the chamber and back again. “I should be there!” he protested and turned away again.

“Gods look down damnation,” he cursed. Then he pivoted slowly to face the Lord of Eveningstar again. “There’s another reason, isn’t there?” he asked softly, almost whispering.

Tessaril nodded. “Shandril may fall under Fzoul’s control, or be twisted by Zhentarim magic—or spellfire itself—once she uses it in unbridled anger rather than to defend. If she becomes something akin to a Zhentarim, we must try to control her power by using you as hostage to her good behavior.” She turned away, sighed, and said to the wall, “As Manshoon would have.”

Mirt saw swirling mists for a moment, and then his boots struck something hard. Flagstones. He staggered, and waved his weapons out of habit. They struck nothing.

He stood in a courtyard somewhere in the Citadel of the Raven—he could see raven banners flapping overhead. There were folk screaming and running through the courtyard nearby, and the ground suddenly heaved underneath him. Mirt crouched to keep his balance. He watched in amazement as flagstones rippled and heaved, as if a giant wave were passing underneath them.

All around him soldiers were fleeing, running away from a lone figure standing not far away, near the gates of a tall tower. Shandril, of course; the spell on the gem was set to deliver him about twenty paces from her. Mirt’s eyes widened as he saw what she was fighting: a ring of beholders.

Ye gods! Couldn’t the lass just have a nice, comfortable fight with half-a-dozen evil archmages? Or a dragon or two? Liches, now—aye, liches were good, even mind flayers ….

The Old Wolf was running toward her by then, boots skidding on the broken flagstones of the courtyard. What use he’d be to her, the gods alone knew; he could barely see the lass now, outlined in a white halo of fire. Streamers of spellfire lashed out from it—and beholders died, or reeled back in a shower of sparks, blackened and burning.

The beholders drifted above her like angry dragons, baffled. They were used to foiling the magic of foes with the large eyes in their bodies—but spellfire tore through their anti-magic fields as if nothing were there. They had magic of their own that lashed out from the snakelike eyestalks writhing atop their bodies. But spellfire drained away or boiled into nothingness the rays from their eyes, and it stabbed out at them in return. When their own disintegrating gazes were not brought to bear quickly enough, spellfire lashed through their defenses, and they died.

The Old Wolf’s ears were ringing by the time he got close to her; the din of shrieking, air-ripping, crashing magic was incredible. A particularly violent spellblast shook the courtyard and threw him to his knees—and that saved his life. A beholder that would have crushed him with its fall crashed down in front of him instead, body blazing. Mirt got a good whiff of the reek of burning beholder, and was violently, uncontrollably sick. As he raised his head, the eye tyrant’s body plates shattered from the heat within, and their darkened shards bounced past him.

Mages of the Zhentarim saw Mirt, a lone man in the midst of that field of ruin and magical chaos, but they could not have done anything to aid or attack him, even if they’d known who he was: a whirling spellstorm had begun to form over the courtyard, created by the struggle between magic and spellfire. Mages who tried to cast spells screamed, their minds burned to cinders—or they watched in horror as their magic went wild, creating misshapen flowers or rains of frogs or worse.

Spell-lightning arced repeatedly from the gathering storm cloud to the tallest spires of the citadel around, humming and crackling. Men plunged to their deaths from those heights, cooked alive, or fell into piles of bone and ash where they stood. And still the battle raged on.

Such a mighty outpouring of wild magic had to go somewhere—and it did:

Far to the west of the citadel, near the Border Forest, a great meadow of red-petaled flowers quivered, bowed slowly in a spreading ripple that washed from one end of the scarlet field to the other, and then straightened again. One after another, the flowers all quietly turned blue.

In the woods near the shaking citadel, along the foot of the Dragonspine Mountains, a small tree tore itself up bodily, scattering soil in all directions, and shot up into the sky. The branches of the trees around it splintered and crackled and were utterly destroyed by its passage. A startled satyr who looked up through the newly created clearing saw the tree heading west high in the air, tumbling and spinning as it went.