Spellstorm (44 page)

One last door snatched open, and she was panting her way along a cluttered room to
the back of the gate, clawing at the straps that held the plate of armor covering
the back of her right leg as she went. No need to get it off; if it hung free and
she could get a hand in to touch the garter …

There! Done, and she was close enough. She stopped, fought down her swift breathing,
put one hand to the garter and pointed with the other at the gate, and cast the spell.

“
Anathroaz ilzurviss faezlar
”—then the zigzag gesture as she visualized the flames of the gate sliding down her
arms and into her, and then—“
Varathos omdreth houlooond
!”

And it was done. The garter was crumbling to dust under her fingertips as she fumbled
for the straps that would buckle the plate closed again, doubting she’d have the time—

She didn’t.

There was Manshoon, stepping warily through the archway that faced the gate. He saw
her in the gloom beyond it instantly.

That might have had something to do with the ruby-red bolt of searing-through-everything
force she sent at him, well under the gate, at ankle level.

“One might call it,” she murmured aloud, pleased at the visible flow of cold blue
flames down to join the bolt and augment it, “the first step in the de-feet of Manshoon.”

Bathed in ruby-hued flickerings, her target sprang hastily back, smoke rising from
his boots, and he tried to retreat back through the archway. He disappeared out through
it with a stumbling fall backward and a shout of pain.

Faint cold laughter erupted from the gate. The liches were watching.

Blue-white speeding bolts raced into the cellar from where Manshoon had disappeared.

Shaaan curled her lip. Really?
This
was the best the mighty lord of the Zhentarim could manage?

He must be even more feeble in wits and might of the Art than she’d thought.

She put a hand to her gorget and called on the energies of the gate to augment her
mantle, so the arriving bolts would feed her protective power rather than harm her.

And damned if the man didn’t peek around the edge of the archway to see the results
of his attack, like any eager novice! She lashed him with a raking claw of force,
talons that should—

That did nothing. She wasn’t the only one with a mantle.

Manshoon stepped back into the archway and spread his arms dramatically, like a priest
in full supplication behind an altar, casting a spell Shaaan didn’t recognize.

And then, beyond Manshoon frowning and then spitting out a curse, nothing happened.

Ah, this unreliable magic was truly a curse.

Unless, that is, you had your own source of power to ground your spells and make them
happen as they were intended to. Shaaan smiled smugly and let fly once more.

By his involuntary screams, the stabbing lightnings encaging him hurt a lot.

So much for your puny mantle, Manshoon the Manyfaced. Now let’s see a little more
of your tears, hmm?

Shaaan raked him with fire, then stabbed at him with conjured halberds. This was fun,
and almost too easy; the man was so pitiful, it was like tormenting a helpless pet.

And then another man—Malchor Harpell—appeared behind the writhing Manshoon, frowned
at Shaaan, and let fly at her with what was obviously a prepared spell.

A spell that set the liches to muttering as it roared past the gate and came at her,
snarling as it rushed closer, its circular maw spinning, a great concentric spiral
of countless whirling fangs.

This
was trouble.

Shaaan dragged all the energy she could out of the gate, so that it flickered and
bobbed—great hissing consternation from the liches—and flung it up like a shield,
messy and roiling, no time for elegance or even to brace and buttress it to do a
proper
job, what with—

Malchor’s spell tore through it and flung ravening spellfire in all directions, searing
through the very walls and ceiling in an instant. In a dozen small places were rents
that shouldn’t cause a collapse in the old mansion, and—

And what was she doing thinking of all-the-godsbedamned Cormyrean countryside
architecture
when some of that fire was inevitably going to come lashing through her?

It did.

Ohhhh, the
pain
!

Shaaan screamed, long and loud and raw, as her mantle collapsed and she crashed through
stacked coffers and chests and old, canvas-wrapped tapestries or some such, the fires
clawing at her melting scales and flesh and simply devouring the stored things she
was falling through. Yet even as ravening fire ravaged her, the fires of the gate
were rushing in to fill and
soothe and restore, and she just had to endure a few interminably long moments of
sheer gasping agony before she was clambering her way out of half-melted debris, more
or less whole—though there wasn’t much left of her armor, and what there was dangled
in twisted, bubbled, half-melted grotesquerie—to face Malchor and Manshoon with snarling
defiance.

Whereupon she was amused to see them both finish hastily casting spells that should
have destroyed her utterly before she could recover … and watch their spells fail
miserably. One evoked a plume of drifting beige smoke, and the other, a brief sound
as of tinkling miniature bells, and then nothing at all.

They tried again, both of them weaving spells with great urgency and precision, as
Shaaan calmly removed the most hampering pieces of armor and casually conjured herself
a new defensive ward, drawing on the power of the gate to craft a floating shield.

Malchor’s spell failed, but Manshoon’s came racing at her, a great shadowy dragon’s
head with jaws agape to bite and rend.

She intercepted it calmly with the shield, but Manshoon smilingly did something deft
and sudden with his dragon head that collapsed the shield to one side while the head
burst past it and at her.

Shaaan was forced to claw energy out of the gate in unseemly haste to keep the dragon
head from biting down on her, and it flickered and darkened momentarily, so sudden
and severe was her draining.

Whereupon angry words were exchanged within the gate, in a tongue unfamiliar to her—and
the gate erupted in a dozen snakelike columns of purple-black fire that doubled back
around the gate to quest for her, wavering back and forth as they came not out of
any lack of control, but in a deliberate attempt to fill the cellar so that there
would be no avoiding them.

And wherever they touched the stacked crates stored in the cellar, those crates melted
away as if licked by a volcano—literally vaporized, leaving only momentary plumes
of greasy black smoke behind.

Shaaan swiftly called on the energies of the gate to empower a defensive web that
would gather in and ensnare those snakes of dark flame reaching for her, so she could
hurl them all back at the gate that had spawned them. And if they should happen to
bathe her two opponents in this ludicrous spell duel in flooding fire, reducing them
to charred bones or less, what would really be the loss?

Nothing she’d mourn in the slightest. A notoriously crazed and eccentric family of
wizards would lose their patriarch and most sober-minded member—a loss risked daily
by every family that dabbled in the Art—and the creator and longtime head of one of
the nastier organizations to infest Faerûn would be swept away, one more time, to
either make Manshoon extinct at last, or give way to yet another in the long, long
line of echoes of Manshoon the Manyfaced.

That second loss might well make her a hero to many.

Not that she was feeling heroic at this particular moment, with flaming purple-black
death reaching for her, and the foes she was standing against unable to successfully
shape spells to send against her …

Working coolly, with not an instant to waste, she shifted the web with her mind to
intercept column after racing column of flame, as they bored through the air closer
and closer—

More crates melted away. She had to get every last reaching snake of flame, or her
body would suffer the same immolation as those crates … just five left now, and she
was having to back away to win herself time to snare them. Yet retreat carefully,
for the way back through the stacked storage was neither wide nor straight …

Four left, three—but each of this last trio seemed to have a mind of its own, seeking
her at different speeds and in different directions.

And although it felt
wrong
, seemed almost suicidal to do so, the best thing to do was to move right into their
midst, bringing her web with her, so the reaching snakes of flame rolled into its
curving clutches before they had time to veer too far apart.

And while she still had room and time enough to haul on the web and use it like a
giant sling to
fling
the snakes of flame back at their source.

Like … so.

Last three snared, she sprinted forward three steps and planted her feet, then swung
her entire body in a mighty curving throw, and—

Purple-black flames roared at the gate itself and struck it, exploding like waves
crashing ashore against a great prow of natural rock, spewing great washes of purple-black
flame everywhere. Malchor and Manshoon were leaping for their lives, and the gate
itself was shuddering, its deep blue glow flaring bright white and immediately dying
away to black dimness, then flaring white again …

Purple-black flames spattered against walls and ceilings and melted them, while amid
the spreading destruction, the air shuddered and shrieked
and thundered, tearing apart in great rents of spewing radiation that promptly closed
again, only to reopen anew. The gate groaned and started to lean, as if it was going
to topple and crash, but furious voices hissed spells from within it, and deep blue
flames sprouted out of empty air to race madly over its surface in all directions,
richocheting and rebounding, and—

“Embraces of Mystra, woman, what have ye
done
?” Elminster snarled from behind Shaaan, and she whirled around in time to see him
spread his arms wide, hands like two claws cupping empty air—and along those arms
the air glowed blue-white, hundreds of rushing, shifting, racing strands becoming
visible in the air that elsewhere looked dark and empty—and then he slowly brought
his hands together, to point at the gate.

And roiling, melting-all purple-black flames came rebounding from all sides to curve
in the air like mighty ocean waves, curling down and around to race along the line
of Elminster’s pointing fingers, right at the dark and featureless backside of the
gate.

It swallowed them as if they didn’t exist, more and more flames simply vanishing into
that silent and serene black oval of utter darkness whose blue-glowing edge flared
briefly, gouting out tendrils of blue flame, and then—

Burned out, in a sudden black and lopsided collapse into darkness, angry voices cut
off as if by a knife.

The gate was no more, and the cellar was suddenly empty of blue glows and purple-black
flames and all other manifestations of magic. The spells being angrily hurled by Manshoon
and Malchor shivered into nothingness.

“How did you
do
that?” Shaaan asked, more protestingly than expecting a useful answer to her question.

“Weavemaster,” El said tersely, jerking his thumb in the direction of his own chest.
“Ye let out enough wild energy to furnish me with ample power to shut down and destroy
an operating gate. Liches or no liches.”

“What happened to them?”

“They just had a door slammed on their noses. They won’t forget that, Shaaan Serpent
Queen. Ye might want to learn how to run. And hide.”

“Oh,” Shaaan blurted out, taken aback for a moment.

And then she recovered herself and her mounting anger, and snarled, “So you’ve meddled
again, and this time in my affairs once more. Well, I’ll just—”

But the spell she flung at him did nothing at all. She cast it, and … nothing happened.
From the other end of the cellar, Manshoon laughed.

At her, damn him.

She turned to give him a furious glare and hurl a spell his way that would be far
more than a stinging slap, and—

Again, nothing happened. She was down two of her strongest spells with nothing at
all to show for it.

Cast and … gone.

“Boo,” a pain-racked and feeble voice whispered in her ear, startling Shaaan more
thoroughly than she’d been taken aback in a long time.

She backed up so suddenly she almost fell. There was no one there. It must be that
damned
ghost princess.

“I
will
destroy you all,” Shaaan hissed at Elminster, and the inevitable fat man and sleek
woman peering from well behind him, and the invisible Alusair.

“Some other day, perhaps,” Elminster told her. “And perhaps not.” He took a step toward
her. “Perhaps,” he added, as severely as a child’s disapproving tutor, “ ’tis high
time ye learned to create and help and aid, Shaaan Surbraor, rather than destroy.”

Shaaan hissed wordless hatred at him this time, retreating still farther. How did
he know her surname?
No one
still alive knew that name!

“Mystra knows it,” Elminster told her quietly, “wherefore, now, so do I.”

He’s reading my
thoughts
? Shaaan had suffered quite enough. She turned and fled into the darkness.

But not far. Into the next cellar, where she could peer back through a hole newly
burned by lich-flames hurled by her web, and see and hear what happened in the cellar
she’d just left.

What happened was that Manshoon turned on his heel and fled back up the grand staircase,
leaving the Harpell mage standing alone.

Malchor gave Elminster a weary look, then turned and headed for the staircase Manshoon
had just vanished up, not hurrying. To Shaaan, he looked like a man who felt that
the trip back to his room was a long trudge indeed.

After that, Elminster asked the empty air, “Luse, how bad is it?”