Spellstorm (42 page)

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
.

CHAPTER 20

The Snake Sleepeth Not

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.

Which meant that every last edge, point, and surface of her, from head to toe, could be coated in venom.

And she was smiling her soft smile that promised death and walking right at him, one arm half-raised, ready to intercept his improvised club.

He briefly entertained the notion of flailing at her with all his strength, to shatter that arm and batter her to the ground where he could crack her skull and then every bone he could reach, to leave her lying helpless and dying, but not dead so any deadly contingencies on her wouldn’t trigger.

Let her pant in agony for a day or more, in a truly slow and miserable demise. He felt no pity at all for poisoners.

Yet all this was mere fantasy. What was really happening was a deadly dance of leaping, turning, and swift shuffling, so he was always facing her and always fending her off, while she constantly tried to get past his guard and claw him with the metal tips that adorned all her fingers. He tried to use his strength to drive her back into rubble, where her footing would be perilous, but he was facing a woman as tall and long of arm and agile as himself, and she knew exactly what he was trying to do and merely danced back out of reach, plucked up a surviving viper, flung it at his face, and charged in after, time after time.

And one of these times, Manshoon reflected, shaking the ichor of the latest serpent off his hand, he wouldn’t be swift or deft enough, and would get bitten before his razor-sharp dagger severed the viper’s head in midair.

And always the woman who called herself the Serpent Queen smiled at him, the smile that held no love nor mirth nor friendly favor, as she danced and ducked and lunged like the best swordsmen, trying to do just one thing.

Get close enough to embrace him.

Ironic, that, considering how many women who’d embraced him and yielded themselves to him out of fear, that now the crown was on the other head, and it was he who—

Damn!

His backswing with the club dipped
just
too low, and she sprang high and came down backside first on it, sitting it toward the floor, her weight too much for his arm. Which meant she sprang off it and right into him, face-first and lips reaching—

He twisted around in desperate haste and let go the club so he could stagger free, pivoting on his heel, trying to—

Failing. She clawed at him, and when he drove his dagger up at her fingers as viciously as he could, she clutched at it, risking severed fingers, long enough to fold it in between their bodies, so she could lunge, her bosom to his chest, collarbone to collarbone with his dagger trapped between them, and—

There was a jab at the base of his neck, fleeting but painful, and she shoved him away and backflipped, crashing through the ruined skeleton of his bed to wind up half the room away, laughing in triumph.

“And so you’re stung, and can count on four hands
—four hands
—the breaths you have left to live, unless you beg me! Beg me well enough, proud Lord of the Zhentarim, to give you the antidote—that only I have devised, so I am the
only
source. You’ll have to kneel to me at last!”

And with a wild peal of laughter, she turned and sprinted … and was gone, leaving Manshoon standing alone, staring after her, and clutching at his neck where sticky blood was welling out.

The point of his dagger was red with it, and must have made the wound in his neck. Yet could he risk the chance that his blood was flowing only because of that? She’d been close enough to kiss him, had been kept from doing so purely by his own desperate twisting and fending, but … he had to admit he hadn’t been able to defend all of himself, all over.

He couldn’t risk it.

The last viper reared up to strike—and he took great satisfaction in booting it across the room, to thump into the wall. Where he pinned it in place with his dagger, snarling out heartfelt curses, then jerked his dagger free and ran after the Serpent Queen.

He knew where she’d be headed.

S
HAAAN LAUGHED LOUD
and long as she plunged down the stairs into waiting darkness, the full-throated bellows of mirth that men indulged in all the time, and so few women allowed themselves.

And why not gloat? She was the Serpent Queen, and had styled herself thus so ruthlessly and regally down the centuries that some obeyed her out of respect for the title, not out of terror.

But terror was best. Terror was always best.

It even worked on Manshoons, and the founder of the Zhentarim was as worldlywise and long-lived—if you counted all of his various selves—as herself, not to mention far more accomplished than the Harpers and their ilk gave him credit for. They dwelled on his defeats and failures, not all that he’d built and ruled.

And for all that, he was doomed. She’d only managed to nick him with his own drawn dagger—and been sliced by it herself, in the doing. Yet her ruse had worked; that little gloat she’d done had duped him, and
now he would be following her, running after Shaaan as she raced down to the cellars, would
have
to pursue …

Down to that gate, of course. Elminster and the rest of them must have arrived in Oldspires through it, and cloaked it somehow from her. Until their cloaking spell had faded and then failed, as unreliable as all other magic in the heart of the spellstorm.

Of course they’d tried to hide it from her.

She knew how to use it. Not stepping through it to reach its other end; any fool could do that, and many such wayfarers even did it by accident, blundering forward, not knowing where they were going or even that any translocation was involved.

No, she knew how to call on a gate’s power to power her own spells.

Which meant that here in Oldspires with magic unreliable and ringed by the out-and-out ravening chaos of a spellstorm, the gate was the key to everything.

She’d explored ancient gates a time or seven before, down her years, and successfully wrested energy from them before. Given an open gate, and the right spells—spells she’d readied while in hiding down in the cellars—she could drain energies from the gate to steady her spells. In the chaos of wild magic prevailing inside Oldspires—where, after all, some spells had worked, sometimes—her spells, and hers alone, should be reliable.

Racing down the grand staircase into the waiting gloom, she looked up and back.

And there was Manshoon, face white with fury, racing after her.

And behind and above the Zhent, the figure of—Malchor Harpell, staring down at them both, his expression grim.

As he reluctantly set foot on the stairs and followed.

Shaaan laughed again, loud and long, scaring up echoes.

Come, fools! Come to your deaths!

The more, the merrier.

E
LMINSTER SWUNG ONE
more cellar door shut, turned away from it, and told Mirt and Myrmeen, “Enough. For now, at least, we’ve spent quite enough time searching for the Serpent Queen. I suspect we’ll find her
soon enough—when she
wants
to be found. I’d rather turn to dealing with something of wider importance than personal survival and victory here inside this mansion.”

“He’s going to say something grand,” Mirt told Myrmeen.

“Yes,” she replied, “and it’ll be something quite likely to get us killed.”

The Sage of Shadowdale gave them a rather weary smile, and said, “I’m going back to the gate the liches have opened, to have a go at closing it.”

“That’ll
definitely
get us killed,” Mirt told Myrmeen. “He’s trying to make up for not managing to do it last time.”

“If ye two jesters are quite finished,” El told them, “I don’t plan to imperil ye—both of ye can watch from the doorway as I come at it from behind.”

“Right,” Myrmeen replied, “we’re with you, El. Yet we would both appreciate knowing why, in this house full of murderous wizards and with the busy poisoner among them on the loose and in hiding, you feel the need to go after this gate, that wasn’t even part of our discussions beforehand or even well after arriving here, and do so
now
. Why can’t it wait until our murderer is caught, or has run out of mages to kill?”

Elminster nodded. “Fair enough. I don’t want to tackle the gate, with the Art so unreliable and the Weave in such turmoil from the leakages of all the gates. Larloch’s liches outnumber me and, for all I know, work very well together despite their master not mindriding and guiding them. I gamble much, if I try. It’s not a wise chance to take, and I lack the foolish overconfidence in my own abilities that will let me charge serenely ahead, taking on that many liches. Yet if I can close the gate, it cuts off an escape route for Shaaan that’s also a way in for more monsters or armies or whomever and whatever else the liches want to send. Moreover, the gate is a source of magical power she might use to try to anchor her spells, to make them powerful and, crucially,
reliable
in this spell-chaos we stand in.”

“So this has become about the needs of the moment, the here and now, after all,” Myrmeen pointed out.

“Nay,” El told her grimly. “Beneath our fates and the task Mystra gave me to try to do here, this meeting of mages that was supposed to nudge them toward eventual accord and instead led to so many deaths, the gate is part of something wider and deeper.”