Spellstorm (42 page)

Then they searched every other room on the ground floor of Oldspires, without finding
any hint of the Serpent Queen.

It seemed as if Shaaan had simply … vanished.

“There are a
lot
of cellars in this mansion,” Mirt had growled at last. “And wardrobes, and decaying
attics. Hells, she could even be out on the rooftops, just waiting until dark. Or
curled up behind a tapestry or behind furniture, like a sleeping snake.”

“Not
like
a sleeping snake,” Myrmeen sighed. “She
is
a sleeping snake.”

T
HE MISMATCHED TRIO
was moving cautiously closer to her, down what had been the busiest passage in Oldspires—back
when there were enough living people in the mansion to make any part of it “busy.”
They walked warily, with weapons ready, stepping around the sprawled bodies of fallen
warriors. Of which there were many.

“Could she have come to some agreement with the liches, and gone through the gate?”
That was the warlike kitchen wench, all frowning alertness and raised blades.

“Would
you
risk dealing with liches?” That was the wheezing man with the paunch and the floppy
wrecks of old boots. One of them almost trod on Shaaan, but she kept motionless.

“Hmm. Good point, good point.” The kitchen woman again. The wizard Elminster, walking
behind them, said not a word, but looked amused as they passed her by.

The three walked on in silence for a bit, and when they spoke again, far down the
passage, their voices were barely audible.

Shaaan smiled to herself as all the sounds of the trio hunting her died away into
the gloomy distance.

That fat man could lurch along with surprising speed when he wanted to.

One more thing to remember.

For a little while, at least; if things went well, he’d not be alive much longer.

She lay still, listening patiently, until she was sure they were several rooms away
and unlikely to return. Her attempt to animate another dead warrior had failed utterly,
but the chaos her casting had caused should have eliminated that helpful ghost Elminster
kept talking with, for at least a day or so.

So there would be no lurking spy to see one of the sprawled and dead warriors in the
passages clamber carefully upright, so as to make as little sound as possible, and
walk warily northward, closer and closer to the rooms of Malchor and Manshoon.

Pinning her hair up and rubbing a little pitch from a cold firehearth onto her chin
before pulling the helm down over her head had ensured that she looked enough like
an unshaven male warrior to escape notice among so many sprawled corpses. The hardest
part had been finding a dead man close to her in size and build, followed by getting
the armor off him.

Since then, it had simply been a matter of patience, and she had plenty of that. Just
like the liches she’d seen waiting so patiently for someone to come within reach.
She’d almost made that mistake, their gate had lured her so strongly, but … she had
wary mistrust of attractive things to spare, too.

Right now, she went right on being patient. Whenever anyone was near, she lowered
herself quietly to her knees, then delicately arranged herself in a lifeless sprawl
and played dead. When she was as certain as she could be that no one was near, she’d
rise once more and sneak northward, toward the man she sought.

Oh, she despised him, all right. His string of failures, his self-absorption, his
towering arrogance … but he was almost certainly the most powerful wizard of those
left. After herself, of course. Malchor seemed a gentle old man used to getting his
way, who loved acting mysterious, and who—like Elminster—was far less than his reputation.
Aye, trading on what legend made of you had taken both of them far, but cut no ice
with her.

She who knew what
real
might at magic was.

Under her borrowed warrior’s gauntlets, she wore metal fingertip sheaths tipped with
a wide array of deadly venoms, in case of rejection or betrayal.

The man she sought would be an utter fool not to ally with her, given what the situation
here at Oldspires had become … but then, most men were utter fools.

And a few swift strides past the grand staircase—her lip curled; “grand” only in the
dreams of one sad and lonely old noble—and around a great dead hulk of a monster that
looked impressively disgusting in death, and had probably seemed much, much worse
when it had been alive.

And she was at the door she sought.

She knocked very softly, trying not just to avoid rousing Malchor, but to make her
knocking sound feminine. After all these years, Manshoon still looked as if flirtatious
blandishments worked on him.

“And who might it be, who knocks without?” his voice came through the door, sounding
amused.

“A woman of the Art, who comes alone. On matters personal.”

There. If
that
didn’t do it …

It did.

The door opened about a hand width, revealing the unsmiling but somehow clearly pleased
Zhentarim lord—or at least, a hand width-wide head-to-toe slice of him—inside the
room beyond. Regarding her with interest but a total lack of surprise.

“Hail, Serpent Queen,” Manshoon greeted her. “I wondered when you’d come seeking my
aid. With only three days left of spellstorm.”

Arrogant bastard. Well, she had poisons that could ravage vampires; he could die like
all the rest.

“I, too, can count the passing days. May I come in?”

“Why?”

“To speak with you.”

“About?”

Shaaan didn’t bother to sigh. She’d half expected him to be this tiresome.

“An alliance. The two of us against everyone else inside this house—and the forces
of Cormyr that surround it, on guard against the likes of us.”

Manshoon half smiled. “An attractive notion, I’ll grant, yet I fail to muster the
barest beginnings of the trust I would need to feel to seriously entertain such a
crazed notion. So, ‘Serpent Queen,’ my answer is: no.”

The door started to close.

And Shaaan gave him a half smile of her own and let fly with the spell she had held
ready.

Hoping against hope that this time, this time, it would go off without a hitch.

It did.

The door exploded inward and Manshoon with it, lost in a blast that sent the entire
front wall of his room hurtling out through his windows and into the surrounding spellstorm.

“A fool to the last,” Shaaan decreed triumphantly, listening to the shouts of those
watching from afar—and no doubt hurrying now, to try to get a better view. O-ho, they’d
built a rickety scaffolding of hastily felled Halaunt trees to try to see over the
restless fogs, and it was now starting to sway under the weight of too many peering,
climbing, imperiously shouting men … how
sweet
.

Yet even in the bright heart of her triumph, Shaaan was far too old and experienced
a spellhurler to turn her back and stroll away until the roiling dust of her spell
had cleared and she could be sure Manshoon of the Zhentarim was either lost in the
mind-devouring fog, or pieces of him were to be seen bloodily decorating his bedchamber.

She did, however, sidestep toward the wall where the Chamber of the Founder met the
grand staircase, so she was partially sheltered behind dead spider-scorpion monster.
Purely out of defensive habit.

Which turned out to be prudent indeed, a moment later, when a flood of forked and
spitting lightning bolts came racing at her out of the drifting cloud of debris underneath
the now-gone windows.

And staggered her, despite the constant mantle emanating from her gorget. Which had
been patchy to wavering to nonexistent all the time she’d been in Oldspires, and was
sadly failing now.

Manshoon’s spells were obviously working, too.

Her acid bolts were best saved until the cloud whirled up by her initial blast was
gone, revealing him, so she gave him a reversion of gravity, to whirl him up into
an ungentle meeting with the ceiling.

And it failed, flooding the room instead with a glorious butterfly-blue radiance and
the sound of a singing trumpet.

Shaaan sighed. If it came to battle, she’d hoped to be swift and relatively quiet,
so as to avoid having Elminster and his two bumbling
jesters of servants trying to harass her backside, but this damned chaos of unreliable
magic …

Abruptly her blue glow was gone, swept away by a sudden driving rain, water pounding
straight down from … nowhere at all. The floor under her feet shuddered briefly, as
if she’d been standing on a raft that a small wave had passed under, and then the
rain ended, as swiftly as it had begun, leaving a drenched and darkly handsome vampire
glaring at her across scorched and tumbled wreckage.

Manshoon’s second spell had gone awry, too.

She shrugged, and fed him acid.

Or tried to.

Her racing bolts formed and faded at about the same time as they started to move,
filling the air with a sharp and unfamiliar smell that made Shaaan think of kitchen
fires involving things never meant to be cooked.

She stepped into the doorway leading to the grand staircase and rubbed at her gorget,
hoping its mantle would do better than last time. Her limbs were still tingling and
spasming.

A flash and a snarled curse, followed by a soundless blow that smote at her ears and
rolled away through the mansion, marked the failure of his next spell.

Hmm. Perhaps a more personal magic, of less power …

She worked one of her oldest, simplest spells. She always kept several of her own
version of vipergout ready, and if it worked now …

It did! The nine little vipers plunged out of her mouth in an eager flood and went
racing at her foe, wriggling in an utter frenzy.

Go, my pets, and give the mighty Manshoon nine little problems. Nine deadly distractions
to dog him while we fight. And if magic was going to be this faulty here and now,
’twas time to join their wriggling ranks, get close, and use her venoms.

And if the Zhent tried to take sneering refuge in the thought that a vampire could
shrug off many poisons, destruction would greet him all the sooner. Under the caps
on the sheaths she wore on the smallest fingers of both her hands were venoms that
dissolved flesh.

And she’d never heard of a flourishing skeletal vampire.

She hastened. The faster she reached him, the fewer spell hurlings she’d have to risk.

He tried once more, bathing her momentarily in ale-brown murk that rang with weird
clanging echoes and smelled strongly of mint, and then she scrambled over the fallen
litter of what was left of his bed, her armor shrieking briefly on its forceful way
through jagged ends of wood and metal, and strode right at him.

His body wavered for a moment, as he sought to become a mist and then a bat, then
lapsed back into cursing, glaring solidity, drawing a dagger and backing into an area
of clear floor where he could move swiftly.

There he awaited her, vipers undulating over the surrounding debris as they converged.

“You would have been wiser to accept my offer,” Shaaan told him as she came for him,
“but then, wise judgments have never been your strong suit, have they? And now, as
they say, it’s too late.”

Her vipers slithered down into Manshoon’s little chosen battleground, and reared up
around him menacingly.

Shaaan gave him her nastiest, softest smile, raised her hands to try a spell that
should tear him apart in agony, and added, “Much, much too late.”

He flung the dagger at her face, hard and accurately.

She caught it with casual ease, and tossed it away over her shoulder.

“I was catching and throwing knives while I danced naked on tavern tables long, long
before you were born. Care to try again?”

Manshoon stared at her for a moment, then shook his head.

“Well, then,” she asked, “care to die? Again?”

And she strode toward him, not bothering with the spell. Let this be personal, and
let it be
now
.

M
ANSHOON CALMLY WENT TO ONE KNEE FOR A MOMENT AND DREW
another dagger from the back of one boot, then rose to meet her charge.

The vipers struck at him, reared up, and tried again, heedless of his tramplings,
until they could move no more. He stamped once or twice, but otherwise paid them no
heed, trusting in the protection of his tall boots as he kept his attention on Shaaan.

Seeing a splintered table leg lying on the littered floor, he snatched it up to serve
him as a club, more to fend off than to hit. He knew better than to let her get within
arm’s reach. Her plate armor left only her head vulnerable to his dagger, and she
was a walking arsenal of venoms and other poisons. He was more or less immune to many
poisons, thanks to long and patient years of dosing himself with ever-larger amounts,
and she’d had more years and more expertise in poisons to more than do the same. So
almost certainly she had no fear of her own poisons.