Spellstorm (17 page)

At that moment, he lurched sideways as the floor rippled briefly under his feet, the walls shook with a nigh-soundless shuddering that sent spice
vials toppling from racks and hanging pots clanging together, a staggering Mirt to ring the stockpot off the lip of the nearest countertop, and … the rocking faded as swiftly as it had come.

Myrmeen looked at Elminster. “
What
was
that
?”

He gave her a grim look. “Someone inside this house has tried a powerful spell. And it has failed.”

“Well,” Mirt growled, putting the stockpot in the sink in front of him and reaching for the handle of the pump, “we knew it was only a matter of time before—”

Something smote the far wall of the kitchen like a towering titan’s fist, sending Myrmeen flying with a hissed curse. She rebounded off Mirt and slammed into Elminster just as the lamps all died, plunging the room into utter darkness.

Luse
, Elminster thought,
give us some light, hey
?

He felt no mind receiving his thoughts, and said the same words aloud, more loudly and sharply than he usually spoke.

Silence. Darkness. Myrmeen warm in his arms, turning herself around firmly and disengaging his grasp.

“So, was that another strong spell?” she asked him briskly. “It came from this direction, whereas the first …”

“Erupted from back that way. Aye, it was a spell, and mightier than the first. In fact, I believe it came close to achieving its usual effect.”

A moment later, absently, he added, “Interesting.”

“I
NTERESTING
,”
THE
S
AGE
of Shadowdale commented, in the blind darkness.

A moment later, Myrmeen felt their hips bump together briefly as he strode past her in the total darkness. Then she heard the rattle of a door handle, followed by the thud of a body slamming into a door, a grunt of effort that rose into a snarl of strain, and—the faint groan of wood that’s been under stress now snatched away. Then silence, followed by just a hint of hard breathing.

“Elminster,” she inquired, “
what
are you doing?”

“Trying to open the door into the entry hall,” he replied a trifle testily, “and failing.”

She heard him turn and stride toward her, and got out of the way in time.

Straight across the kitchen he went, the sounds of his progress briefly drowned out by the clatter of Mirt pawing open a cupboard door and growling, “Got the lanterns, but damned if that second one didn’t suck all our fires right out! Flames, coals, the lot!”

“Striker mounted on the inside of that door you’re holding,” Myrmeen told him crisply. “Flint’s hanging beside it, on a cord.”

“Aye, lass, but I can’t see where I want the spark to go, now, can I?”

Mirt had Elminster right beaten in testiness, to be sure.

Myrmeen was still smiling wryly about that to herself when a terrific crash announced that Elminster had tripped over the fetch-down stool and gone flying, the stool tumbling, too.

She waited for what promised to be an impressive explosion of profanity, but instead got the emphatic words, “That’s enough. That’s
quite
enough.”

An eerie glow kindled in the darkness, a blue-white pulsing that was small and faint but growing swiftly in both brightness and extent—as she heard El growl, deep in his throat. It was a growl of pain.

“Elminster Aumar,” she asked the darkness in exasperation, “what’re you playing at?”

“Getting ye and yon Lord of Waterdeep light enough to get some lanterns lit,” came the reply—from the heart of the glow, which she saw now was Elminster’s body, glowing fitfully from within, as if many small lanterns were moving around under his skin.

“I thought you couldn’t cast spells here,” she said warily. “Or did those two spells going off change things?”

“I’m
not
casting a spell,” Elminster snarled. “I’m calling on the Weave to glow, inside myself.”

“Sounds like it’s agonizing.”

“It
is
,” he gasped. “The Weave is twisted, here inside Oldspires, so doing this is … painful in the extreme. Get those farruking
lanterns
lit!”

Myrmeen scrambled to the cupboard where Mirt was fumbling—just in time for his bark of triumph as a lantern wick flared into flame. El let himself go dark again with a grateful gasp, and lay there, sprawled on the stone floor, as she got two additional lanterns alight.

“Whither now?” she asked, proffering one.

Elminster rolled over and up to his feet with several grunts of discomfort before he took it, thanked her, and commanded, “Come with me!”

He led the way out through the widest door, into the now-deserted feast hall—where the fires were all out, amid a strong reek of drifting smoke, and darkness reigned—and then around the corner into the Copper Receiving Room, its burnished copper ornamentations flashing back splendid reflections in the lanternlight.

El strode straight through it and out into the entry hall, where the darkness continued unabated. Aside from their glimmering lanterns, all was dark and silent.

“What happened?” Mirt demanded roughly. “All this utter gloom, I mean.”

El waved the question away and strode along the wall toward the door he hadn’t been able to open from the kitchen side.

And then he stopped abruptly, holding his lantern high. Myrmeen was at his side in an instant, adding the light of her lantern to his.

One of the spells that had rocked the kitchen had done something after all.

The Sage of Shadowdale hadn’t been able to open the door from the other side because a huge sideboard had appeared out of nowhere to stand on this side of it—across it, right against the wall, where the door had to open into.

And jammed—crushed—between sideboard and wall was the body of a woman, collapsed over the top of the sideboard amid a spreading pool of blood, her slender arms flung wide.

“Y
USENDRE OF
N
IMBRAL
,” Mirt growled, and looked at El. “Her doing, d’you think? Her own spell, gone wrong?”

Elminster shook his head. “See the wisps like smoke rising from her? That was a magical binding. She got plucked from wherever she was standing—within eyeshot of whoever did this—and teleported with the sideboard.”

“It,” Myrmeen Lhal pointed out, “looks like one of the sideboards from yonder.”

She waved across the entry hall with her lantern, at the door that led into the Red Receiving Room, where they’d first slaked the thirsts of the arriving archmages.

El led the general rush to that door, and flung it wide.

To discover the room dark, deserted—and missing a sideboard.

“Now what?” Mirt growled. “Once they discover that their spells work, the damned archmages will blast each other until there’s no Oldspires left!”

Myrmeen caught at Elminster’s arm, and waved her lantern back the way they’d come. “Could Yusendre be shamming? She—”

“She’s bloody pulp from the chest on down,” Mirt growled. “If that’s a deception, it’s a damned effective one. She’s
dead
.”

“Two, now,” Myrmeen sighed. “Not good.”

“Not good, indeed,” Elminster agreed. “Come.”

He hastened to the bedchambers the guests had been installed in. Where they checked door after door.

Locked, every one, and no one answered their hailings—with one exception. When Mirt sought to peer in through the keyhole of Maraunth Torr’s room, a needle-thin stiletto promptly thrust out of the keyhole.

“That could have been my eye!” the Lord of Waterdeep growled.

“And the brain behind it,” El agreed cheerfully. “Yet it wasn’t. Well, there’s not much we can—”

“Just leave them all shut up in their rooms until morning,” Alusair whispered then, materializing right in front of him.

El swallowed a sigh. “Where have you
been
?”

“Recovering,” she hissed back. “That second spell did its work right
through
me—and it only worked at all because the first spell tore through all the Weave chaos, melting a short-lived hole for the second magic to flourish in. If that’s the right word.” She shuddered. “This place is … not comfortable for the likes of me. Energies leak from the gates constantly.”

“Huh,” Mirt commented, “that’s nothing.
Lives
seem to leak out of bodies around here if you turn your back for more than a moment.”

“ ’Tis a common affliction, it seems, wherever I go,” Elminster observed.

“That,” the ghost princess said tartly, before anyone else could, “is one more thing that utterly fails to surprise me.”

CHAPTER 9

Behold the Best Preening Idiot

S
O IS IT TRUE
,” M
IRT GROWLED
, “
THAT YE
C
HOSEN DON
’
T NEED
to sleep?”

Elminster nodded gravely. “We can renew ourselves through the Weave. Er, if we know how. So, yes, Luse and I can stand watch all night, while ye snore and Myrmeen—ah, Myrmeen …”

“Purrs,” Myrmeen supplied crisply. “Practice that courtly diplomacy, El. I’ve a feeling you’re going to need it.”

The ghost of the princess smiled and waved a silent salute to her for those words.

El nodded, but Mirt was busy stifling a yawn. “I’m too old for staying up with sun and moon, a-slaving away without a break in the kitchen, and waiting table for wizards who’re on edge and just waiting to take offense at the slightest trifle. I need my sleep.”

“We’ll sleep here in the kitchen,” she told the two men firmly. “Its doors can all be barred from within, I’ve noticed. Which should tell you something about Lord Halaunt.”

“About the lord Halaunts in the dim past, and the time when Oldspires was just this southeast corner, ye mean,” El pointed out. “But aye, if we close and bar the door that links the Copper Receiving Room to the feast hall, and bar the kitchen doors from within—not trusting that sideboard to stay where it is—we can bide safe until morning. Oh, and bolt the doors of the stairs down into the undercellars.”

“Stairs? Isn’t there just the one ’twixt the butlery and the south servery?” Myrmeen asked him, feeling something smooth and hard and reassuring under her hand. It was the hilt of her shortsword, riding in its scabbard at her hip; her hand must have gone to it out of long habit.

“There’s a secret stair at the end of the plate and cutlery storage,” El informed her.

“A plate and cutlery storage?” Myrmeen asked him rather wearily. “And just where might that be?”

El grinned wryly. “Hidden behind sliding panels, in the wall between the servery and the passage that leads to the larder.”

“Well, of
course
a hidden cupboard would have its own secret stair, so the forks and spoons can go visiting of nights,” she agreed sarcastically. “How remiss of me not to think of it.”

“Could happen to anyone,” Elminster replied airily. “Now, if ye’ll go with me and fetch some more chamberpots from the unused bedchambers, so ye need not share a pot with hairily uncouth males such as the Lord of Waterdeep here and myself—worry not, we
shall
share the darvorr … There’s a storeroom for such, but ’tis in the ruinous upstairs, and I’d rather not chance the floors.”

“Dropping in on the head of, say, Maraunth Torr right now would not end well, no,” Mirt agreed. “So if Mreen and I get some soups and stews going, and get these smallfowl onto spits, you can tend them the night through?”

“Of course. I expected to have such duties. To ready meals for the morrow without a night shift would require … magic.”

“Ha ha,” Alusair said politely. “What about what’s left of Yusendre?”

Mirt chuckled. “Aye, that’s going to stain something terrible.”

“I
meant
,” the spectral princess told him severely, “that when we can risk magic here again, spells can be used to learn things from the dead—but not if whoever slew her has spirited away the remains. I doubt even Elminster can interrogate a bloodstain.”

“Not sober, no,” Mirt agreed, “but—”

The room rocked soundlessly a third time, and they all exchanged sour looks.