Bury Elminster Deep

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Buildings shuddered near the palace. Folk were flung off their feet on the Promenade. A wagon sideswiped an inn amid screaming horses and splintering wood; slates and tiles whirled down from roofs in a deadly rain; stones and windows and whole balconies fell from up high to crash to the cobbles in a ragged, ongoing thunder… and one wing of the palace sagged with a deep and terrible groan, settling lower into the earth amid blinding plumes of rising dust.

Manshoon sat back in his chair and allowed himself a gloating smile. He couldn’t look away from the scrying eye that was showing him the aftermath of the explosion.

“They’ll think twice before hurling spells at the next beholder they see,” he purred. “A hesitation that will doom them as surely as if they blasted it with all they have. Ah, this is good sport.”

Chuckling, the Uncrowned Incipient Emperor of Cormyr and Beyond sprang up and strode to another scrying eye to peer at certain nobles who were arguing in a gathering that they believed was private.

“No hint of the blueflame ghost reappearing yet,” Manshoon murmured to himself, “but then its minder knows full well that the wizards of war-not to mention far more formidable mages-are hunting him.”

“Storm, it’s us,” Amarune hissed, snatching off the raffish old sailor’s hat. “See?”

“Ah, but which ‘us’? Surely that fashion disaster in old petticoats with you isn’t the lord and heir of a high noble House?”

Arclath chuckled. “Surely it is! Now open that door, or I’ll start taking my clothes off to prove it.”

“Don’t tempt me, Arclath Delcastle,” Storm warned him. “You may mean that as a threat, but it sounds more like an enticement to me!” Yet, she threw back the great bolts that held the old warehouse loft door closed, and ushered the two arrivals in. “Welcome to the humble abode of Heljack Thornadarr, Sembian trader.”

“Good to be here!” Arclath said cheerfully. “Like the disguises?”

Mirt looked up from a bowl Elminster was peering into, eyed them, and said gruffly, “Well, as a way of telling everyone ye pass in this city that ye’re idiot highnoses trying to play at being lowly dockworkers, they’re splendid, aye!”

“Hush, old goat,” Rune told him fondly, “we didn’t have time to find better in the Delcastle gardeners’ barn. We have urgent news.”

Mirt’s jaw dropped.

Then he looked at Arclath and acquired an expression of disapproval. “Ye didn’t! Already? Barely had her home a night or three, an’ ye’re thrusting-if that’s not too indelicate a word-the next generation of Delcastles out into the world! Ye might have married the lass, first!”

Rune and Arclath stared back at him, blinking.

“No, no, no, no, it’s not that news!” Arclath burst out hurriedly. “I mean, that news hasn’t happened yet! I mean-”

“Oh, this lord is very suave,” Elminster told Storm, hooking a thumb in Arclath’s direction. “Debonair, too. Keep a watch over this one. He’s smooth.”

“If all you jesters will leave off for a moment,” Rune bellowed, winning their instant silence and attention-which she rewarded with a bright, sheepish grin-“Arclath and I have something important to pass on to you about blueflame ghosts. That we just learned from his moth-from the Lady Marantine Delcastle.” She peered at the bowl Mirt had his hands in, and her voice changed. “What are you doing?”

“Learning to cook,” Mirt replied with dignity, lifting a wet and glistening handful up for display. “Behold-entrails of goat, gutted lampreys, and shucked oysters. All raw but doused in herbal oils an’ seven-some spices. As they do it in coastal Rashemen, I’m told.”

He waved in the direction of Elminster, who nodded and told Amarune a little absently, “I’m using a spell right now. And watching him learn to cook.”

“Arclath,” Storm suggested, swinging the massive squared timber that served as a door-bar back into place in its cradles amid a snarling rattle of rusty swivel-chain, “why don’t you tell us the news, before these two old rage drakes badger your poor lass into attacking them?”

“Right,” Arclath replied firmly, drawing himself up and frowning at Elminster and Mirt. His pose might have been more impressive without the pink, purple, and vomit-green petticoats. “What do you know about the Imprisoners?”

The room went quiet again, and this time the silence seemed to hold a slight tension.

“Lad,” Elminster replied quietly, “I know a lot of things. I even remember some of them. Moreover, regarding a rare few, I recall what I dare not tell others, and what will happen if I do. Ye may be young and have years to spend listening, but I’m not. So, please don’t take it amiss if I ask ye to instead tell me what ye’ve heard about the Imprisoners. Hmm?”

Arclath looked at Amarune. Who repeated, word for word and in a superb imitation of the Lady Marantine’s voice that made Arclath’s jaw drop and Mirt grin openly, what Arclath’s mother had said.

Elminster nodded. “She spoke truth. Every word. I was there.”

“What?” Arclath snapped. “So why didn’t you-”

The Sage of Shadowdale shrugged. “Mystra told me-”

“And me,” Storm put in.

“-to leave the Imprisoners be. They were necessary, she said, though she never told us why. They did a lot of ‘imprisoning,’ though I don’t think what we’re calling ‘blueflame ghosts’ were anywhere near all the results of that. I can’t tell ye much more, I’m afraid; Our Lady had me working on other matters.”

Arclath regained his temper with a visible effort. “So which of her Chosen, if it’s not blasphemous to ask, were working on the Imprisoners?”

“Alassra,” El sighed.

“The Simbul, legend calls her, or the Witch-Queen of Aglarond,” Storm added gently. “One of my sisters. Who is…”

“Dead?” Rune ventured.

“Insane. Brain-burned,” El said bleakly. “I’ve thought of how to restore her mind-a dangerous way, by no means certain-but it requires a blueflame item.”

“That will be consumed, with its prisoner and all, in that restoration,” Storm added.

“Mind ye choose the right prisoner to destroy,” Mirt growled, wagging a cook’s cleaver in her direction. “That’s why I made sure my hand axe vanished, before those two idiot lordlings could find some wizard who knew a way to force me back into it.”

“Here I sit, mad and alone,” the high, tuneless voice sang, sounding like a wistful little girl. Then its owner sighed and slumped, to circle her feet in the cold water.

Again. For about the seventy-six-millionth time.

Dabbling in the pool at the heart of the cave that was her prison.

The pool she was chained in, by the chain that was her only constant companion. Her friend.

“My friend,” she laughed, high and long and wildly, but stopped when the sound of the echoes started to sound like jeering.

Jeering meant Red Wizards, and she slew Red Wizards when she met them.

As she stirred the waters, the massive chain rising and falling with every movement of her shackled ankle, she remembered magic, dreamed of magic… and as she did, spell-glows blossomed out of the darkness around her, and rose and fell like questing tongues of flame, lighting up the wet and glistening fissured rock walls of the cave around the pool.

“I am,” she announced to no one suddenly and cheerfully, “Alassra Silverhand, once Queen of Aglarond, better known to bards, sages, and just plain folk whispering fright-tales around fires late at night as the mad Witch-Queen who slew armies of Red Wizards. I prefer to call myself The Simbul. It’s shorter. Pleased to meet you. And if you happen to be a disguised Red Wizard, prepare to die.”

She stood up and struck a pose. Then she tossed her silver hair-as wild and unruly a mane as ever; right now, it looked more like a shrub than a head of human hair-and conjured up a mirror.

A reflective oval of silver as tall as she was, floating upright in midair.

Peering into it, she regarded herself critically. She was naked and besmirched with dirt, yet still shapely. Bony around midriff and hips-the sides of her pelvis stuck up in two sharp humps-but lush and womanly everywhere else, and with those long, long arms and legs that drove men wild.

Hmmph. Had driven men wild. None came to see her now, through all the wards. Once, long ago, one or two had won through, mages with swordsmen, hoping to find great magic.

“Well, so they did,” she said aloud, petulantly. “They found me!”

Yet then, of course, they’d made demands, cast spells on her pool, threatened and laid hands on her, assaulted her.

That had been fun. And when she’d grown tired of hurling them around the cave with spells, battered and broken, she’d eaten them.

Foolish, that. They were gone now, and she had no one to talk to. No one but herself, and she was too mad to comfort herself or convince herself of anything.

Elminster.

That was who she needed.

El, her El, back again. Here. Now, with his arms around her.

“Elminster?” she called into the darkness, listening to his name echo into great distances and then come back again.

“El, are you ever coming back for me?”

Arclath and Amarune looked at each other and discovered just how pale and wide-eyed they both were. How frightened.

They put their arms around each other, because it was more comfortable that way.

They had heard tales of Elminster since their childhood, and of Fallen Mystra who, before the Coming of the Blue Fire, had been Queen of All Magic, the goddess who somehow was the Weave, though bards disagreed about that. They had heard about the Seven Sisters and the Chosen of Mystra who walked the world doing magic and undoing magic, riding dragons and sundering mountains and… and…

They knew what they were hearing now was true, yet…

Oh, the woman across the room had to be older than her young body made her appear. Her eyes and manner marked her as almost thirty summers, perhaps, rather than her shapely twenty, and wiser than many rangers, to boot.

The younger-looking man yonder had worn a far older, bearded body when they’d first encountered him. One touch of his old, dark, and vast mind-that they’d both hosted and seen even more of-would tell anyone that he was far older than he appeared to be.

Yet, it was still rather staggering to hear Storm and Elminster calmly confirming they were, or had been, Chosen of Mystra. A little daunting, too, to hear that they seemed to think they still were.

Fallen from power yet serving a goddess the realms thought was gone, but whom they still talked to and worked for.

It was also more than a little sobering to hear fat, wheezing old Mirt telling the tale of how he was enspelled and forced into a blueflame item in Waterdeep almost a century ago. Against his will but by a foe desperate to avoid being slain by Mirt, one in so much of a hurry to avoid that fate that he laid no spells of compulsion on Mirt-so the Waterdhavian had emerged from a handaxe a few days back, here in Suzail, controlled by no one.

“So who are these Imprisoners?” Amarune asked at last, sinking down on the stool beside Mirt to sample the fat man’s seafood, er, concoction, and finding it surprisingly good. “Are they still alive?”

El shrugged. “With wizards, one can never tell.”

“Heh,” Mirt agreed. “Too true.”

He turned and hurled the carving knife he was holding the length of the kitchen, to neatly split a melon on the end counter, and added, “Which is why I prefer to rely on more primitive means of coercion and decision making, unwashed lout that I am.”

Amarune and Arclath couldn’t keep themselves from grinning.

Until Elminster’s head snapped up, his eyes flaring with a brief white light. He shook himself like a drenched dog ridding itself of water and announced, “My spell worked. Lord Huntingdown’s under attack. Someone’s out by day, now, hunting noble lords who can command blueflame ghosts.”

“So what do we do?” Rune asked, scrambling to her feet.

“Watch,” Elminster replied. “No more. Unless the ghost master everyone’s seeking is found. Then we’ll watch the great battle that will ensue, awaiting our best chance to rush in. I’ll conjure up a scrying eye.”

“While noble after noble of Cormyr gets butchered?” Arclath snapped. “In case you haven’t noticed, Old Mage, I’m a noble of Cormyr. And even with all our faults, Cormyr needs us. I am not going to let the realm discover that the hard way, when most of us are dead and our lands have gone lawless, given over to brigands and warring greedy merchants eyeing lordships.”

“So, ye want to run to Huntingdown Hall right now and carve up random folk?” El asked mildly. “And this well help whom, exactly? And how?”

“Pah!” Arclath snarled. “Always the clever words, always the-”

“Being exactly right,” Amarune interrupted crisply. “Listen to the man, love!”

Arclath stopped midsnarl to stare at her, a bright grin growing across his face.

“What?” she demanded, frowning.

“You called me ‘love,’ ” he murmured.

Mirt rolled his eyes, as El and Storm grinned.

“So, while these two younglings bill and coo for a bit,” the Waterdhavian rumbled, “tell me if I have all this straight: The Simbul can tell ye much more about these Imprisoners if she’s sane. But to get her that way, ye need to work magic on her, wherever she’s hidden, that will drink some gewgaw or other that’s the prison of a blueflame ghost. Presumably this gewgaw ye’re searching for, that someone in Suzail is hiding.”

“Ye have it straight,” El confirmed. “More than that, if I’m to recruit the war wizards to serve Mystra-as she has bidden me to do-I need The Simbul at my side. No one mage can slay and defeat them.”

Mirt spread his hands. “Then what’re we waiting for?”

“Some way of finding the hidden blueflame item,” Storm explained. “If the various hunts for it go on, the nobles may do that finding for us. Killing many of their fellows in their search. Hence Lord Delcastle’s objection.”

“That I have not withdrawn,” Arclath put in, from where he and Amarune stood in each other’s arms.

“So, instead of waiting until another dozen nobles are dead-and the wizards of war, Manshoon, and anyone else lurking near who’s interested have had another dozen chances to swoop in and seize the blueflame item, we try to lure the ghost master into using his ghost again on ground of our choosing, so as to lay hands on the item,” El announced. “The Blue Flame must dance.”

“Because using mask dancers as lures works so well,” Storm sighed.

“This will be different,” El said sharply. “None of us will be on that stage.”

“An illusion, sent from afar? They’ll see through it in an instant,” Storm told him.

“Not an illusion,” the Sage of Shadowdale replied and pointed at Amarune. “She will be the Blue Flame.”

“What?” Arclath roared, breaking free of his beloved’s embrace to confront Elminster.

“Easy, young lion,” the wizard replied, “easy! She’ll be dancing on the floor of an empty room somewhere, for me-and before ye get all huffily defensive of her virtue, lordling, know that I intend to have ye standing there as her bodyguard, never fear! My magic will make her image, mirroring her movements and wreathed in blue flames, of course, seem to dance on the stage of whatever club we’d most like to see destroyed.”

“Destroyed?”

“Aye. When the war wizards, Manshoon, the nobles’ various pet wizards, and our ghost master all converge on it to snap at our lure, that club won’t last long.” Arclath nodded, then grew a wry smile. “I know a suitable place. Let’s do it.”

Word spread across Suzail like the howling winds of a shorestorm gale. She who was known as the Blue Flame was going to dance-a performance not to be missed.

No one knew quite where word of this had first come from, but everyone agreed on the where and the when.

It was to happen on the eve of the Festival of Handras, Suzail’s annual late-Mirtul reception for the senior caravan traders of the Sword Coast, when it was customary for such far traders and wagonmasters to present “fresh wonders from the Sword Coast” in dockside warehouses, where free food and drink were served to all who came to gaze on the latest goods, curios, and exotic fashions.

And the dance would take place at The Bold Blazon, an exclusive club catering to certain jaded young nobles and socially ambitious folk those nobles liked to drink, trade, and sleep with.

As it happened, the Blazon was not one of Lord Arclath Delcastle’s haunts, because the nobles who liked to frequent it included several of his longtime foes and rivals, such as Maerclorn Wintersun-the younger heir Lord Wintersun, not the patriarch-and Kathkote Dawntard.

In vain the proprietor of the Blazon, a greedy, shave-pated, many-earring-adorned snob by the name of Daerendygho Vrabrant, protested that he’d arranged no such performance for Handras Eve or any other night, had never even met the Blue Flame, and did not desire to host such “epicene diversions” at the Blazon.

Besieged with demands from half Suzail to rent stage-side tables, atop the clamorings of all his usual patrons, he hurriedly hired extra security-only to discover that dozens of nobles were outbidding him to buy the “first loyalty” of his security force to obey them first, rather than him. In other words, to let those nobles into the Blazon at will, and allow them to bring along extra friends and their own wine, weapons, and anything else they might desire.

Despairing and seeing both ruin and the palace dungeons in his nightmares, Vrabrant went to the wizards of war in secret and entreated their help in providing “unseen security.”

Not that Elminster or any of his companions knew about that entreaty until later-though Arclath slowly came to suspect the Sage of Shadowdale had anticipated it.

“Count me out,” Vainrence said with a grin, slurring the words.

The eyes of Ganrahast and Glathra met above the lord warder, and it was Glathra who said gently, “We didn’t expect you to leap up out of this bed and do anything about it, Rence. We just wanted you to know the particular disaster we were wading into, this time.”

“After all, once you asked about it,” the royal magician added, “we had to admit that, yes, all Suzail is talking about it, for you to hear about it in here.”

“So who is this Blue Flame?”

“No one knows,” Ganrahast replied.

“But,” Glathra added with wicked glee, “I suspect Elminster is behind it, that it’s an attempt to flush out the mysterious noble who commands that blueflame ghost-and it’s highly likely the Blazon will suffer greatly in the trouble that’s bound to erupt.”

“Including the trouble we will undoubtedly cause, after your scrying turns up something we absolutely must rush in to deal with?” Ganrahast asked dryly.

She widened her eyes into an innocence that fooled no one at all.

“Undoubtedly,” she said solemnly.