Spellstorm (45 page)

As El asked her calmly, “So, Lady Tabra … ye slew Skouloun, then Yusendre, and finally Calathlarra. So tell me now: why do ye want to destroy Malchor and Manshoon?”

The look in Tabra’s mismatched eyes could have set parchment ablaze.

“With power comes responsibility,” she replied flatly, “and that goes for power in the Art as much as it does for crowns and thrones and grand titles. You should know that, Elminster Aumar, better than almost all mortals! You should stand with me on this! You threw down the Most High, who’d so overreached himself and who treated those not of his city like cattle—and it was you who made sure all of us were penned in here in Oldspires together. Wasn’t this why? So you could purge our battered old world of one lot of foul villains of wizardry? I burn to exterminate Thultanthans, for they are a blight on the rest of us foolhardy, power-hungry tyrants who despoil whatever they seek to rule. Is that judgment of them not truth?”

Elminster nodded grimly. “I fear so.”

“You
know
so. So help me slay these two—or stand aside and let me kill them.”

“Lass, lass, neither of these two are or were of Thultanthar. Nor did they ally themselves with the Shadovar.”

“So? Knowing what the Thultanthans were up to and turning your back and ignoring them is as bad as aiding them!” Tabra spat. “Wherefore Malchor Harpell is as guilty as Manshoon—and the Zhent actually helped the Shadovar, several times, soon after their floating city first reappeared.”

“Elminster naturally wants to know the why,” Mirt growled, “and so do I—but not before I know the how. The ‘how’ is what I lived through, here in Oldspires. Tell me the how.”

“Skouloun was not just a sanctimonious waste of wind who presumed to judge others while being deceitful himself—presumably because he thought himself ‘special,’ ” Tabra said with sudden venom. “He wanted coin,
lots
of coin. So for pay, he’d betrayed several wizards who happened to have magic the Shadovar wanted. Their magic, when they returned to Faerûn, wasn’t nearly as superior to the Art in use across the Heartlands as they like to portray matters. They grabbed whatever they saw and feared, or destroyed its wielders, as swiftly as they could, so the worst threats to them were gone before full word of their return and power had spread.”

“So ye slew him,” El prompted her, “by scratching him with the nail of thy smallest finger on thy—left?—hand.”

“Left,” Tabra confirmed, her voice calm again, lifting that finger so they could see that it had been clipped to a point. “Sarbrathrael. Works quickly, is pale yellow rather than darker and so not as apt to be noticed on my finger, and few know how to make the antidote.”

Myrmeen nodded. “So why Yusendre?”

“And how Yusendre?” Mirt rumbled.

“The two Elders worked together, though Skouloun lorded it over Yusendre, and she was sick of it. She’d soon have defied him—and if he’d been foolish enough to hurl spells, then the death of Skouloun wouldn’t have been a needful task for me or anyone else.”

Tabra sighed. “Yet she was as guilty as he in working the arcanists against the rest of us. Translocation spells are my specialty, and it was easy to let Yusendre ‘see’ me hide something in the sideboard. What I hid was one of my watchful eyes; I didn’t even bother to watch through it, just cast the teleport when I felt the eye blink open—which meant someone had opened the drawer containing it.

“Teleporting a thing, and a person or two touching it, is a spell I perfected long ago, but casting it here almost killed me. To keep the magic from twisting awry, I had to feed some of my life force into it. It dragged more than I intended to give, and that was why I took to my bed. I’m still weak.”

“And Maraunth Torr? Shaaan killed him, yes?” Mirt asked.

Tabra looked up at him. “Someone did. Not me.”

“Shaaan slew him, aye,” Elminster confirmed, “but not before he slew Alastra. He died trying to kill Shaaan.”

“If attacked, we may all slay while defending ourselves,” Mirt said, “but are all archmages cheerful murderers?”

El shrugged. “I suspect Torr enjoyed slaying, but took lives in cold calculation, for sufficient benefit—eliminating rivals around him here so he could seek their magic, wealth, and lands for himself, once he was out of Oldspires.”

“So who got to him?” Mirt asked. “When we found him dead? I was certainly fooled.”

“He was an expert poisoner,” Elminster replied. “Recall the spices and oils missing from the kitchen? Mix them in just the right measure and drink the result, and ye, too, can slip into unbreathing senselessness and feign death. By then, he knew we were storing the slain in the cold cellar—not carving anyone open to investigate, or burning the bodies. And given the spellstorm and the bedrock beneath the cellars here, there’d be no burials. So he stole a key to that cellar—”

“The missing ring of keys from the butlery,” Myrmeen murmured.

“Indeed. He let himself in; ye may note that the door to that cellar can be unlocked from within and without—which leaves me pondering Halaunt tastes in trysts, or perhaps the chill venues they prefer for secret negotiations—then hid the key in the cellar, probably under one of the corpses already there, let himself out, got to where he wanted us to find him, and dosed himself. I found the flask later; he simply put it in a drawer of one of the linen sideboards in the passage.”

“So we find him dead, and lug him down to the cellar, and then?”

“The effects don’t last all that long. The moment he revived, Maraunth departed the cellar, taking Skouloun’s corpse along so we wouldn’t simply take the disappearance of his body as a revival on his part. He stashed Skouloun’s corpse in that wardrobe on the upper floor where we later
found it, and went into hiding, moving around Oldspires to avoid our searches.”

Myrmeen nodded, then stopped doing that and shook her head. “You make Torr’s ploy clear enough, but I still can’t keep all the deaths straight.”

El chuckled. “Small blame to ye for that. Right, then: Tabra’s first victim was Skouloun. Tabra slew Yusendre. Then Alastra fell to Maraunth Torr. Tabra then killed Calathlarra—when Calathlarra tried to kill her.”

He looked at Tabra for confirmation, and received a weary nod.

“Thereafter,” the Sage of Shadowdale added, “Maraunth Torr tried to kill Shaaan, but was destroyed by her instead. And just now, Malchor and Manshoon, realizing their strength, daggers, and numbers might prevail against Shaaan where their spells could not, overcame their mutual mistrust and burst in on her while she was busy trying to burn heads so the dead could not as easily be magically questioned—the least powerful deadspeech, cast by hedge wizards or most of the wizards of war stationed in their cordon around us, right now, requires an intact head to speak. They destroyed her, but were themselves laid low by her poison.”

“Well,” Mirt wheezed, “I’m glad we have crazed old archmages around to keep all of this sort of nonsense straight, so the rest of us can just get on with living our simple lives.”

“A
NYTHING?
” G
LATHRA SNAPPED
.

Tarnmark Lionmantle shook his head. “As strong as ever. How long do these spellstorms usually last?”

The Lady Barcantle wagged a finger at him. “Not something you should be thinking of. Your expectations will color what you observe, and we can’t have that.”

“ ‘We’?”

“
Cormyr
can’t have that,” she snapped. “The kingdom we all serve, remember?”

“I had not,” he told her gently, “forgotten.”

Glathra’s head snapped back as if he’d slapped her, and her face flooded a rich crimson. Uh-oh. He’d forgotten how touchy she was, about the
lineages of nobles, and the highborn considering themselves superior to lowborn like her. Here it came …

“Just you remember, Lord Most-High-And-Mighty Lionmantle,” she snapped, “that nobles may have long memories and be good at feuding and holding grudges and trusting in foolish pride to carry them through life, but the yeomen of Cormyr, the farmers and crafters and common folk who do all the work in the realm (remember
them
?), they grumble at the sinister yoke and scrutiny of the wizards of war, yet trust in having us detested wizards around to deal with all of the nonsense, so they can just get on daily —unstalked by fearsome monsters, untransfixed with elven arrows, and undevoured by great dragons—with living their simple lives.”

“I’ll not forget,” Tarn told her even more gently.

“See that you don’t,” she said curtly, turned on her heel, and stalked off.

Alone again in the scrying room, Tarnmark allowed himself a long and gusty sigh.

Before wondering aloud, “I wonder just what sort of battle-hardened hero—or half-wit—would dare to sleep with such a dragon as Glathra Barcantle?”

Someone chuckled, right behind him.

His heart almost froze, his indrawn breath caught halfway down his windpipe, and he whirled around, trying to think of apologies to stammer.

To find himself staring at Vangerdahast. Former Court Wizard and Royal Magician of Cormyr, a power behind the Dragon Throne that nobles had hated, but feared even more. The Dragon Tyrant, he was still called, in unguarded moments, when old tales passed down by dead fathers and grandsires and uncles were retold in many a high house and country mansion.

Vangey was smirking. “In truth,” he told Lionmantle, “I know not the answer to your question. I know who she fancies, though. The question is, how great is your daring, scion of the Lionmantles—and are you battle-hardened hero, or half-wit?”

T
EARS WERE RUNNING
down Tabra’s face now, but she wasn’t sobbing.

She looked up at Elminster, face forlorn.

“So you know it all, now. What are you going to do to me?”

El gave her a smile. “Clip thy nails round again, give ye a good meal, and let ye go free,” he replied. “Mystra’s task for me is not to dispense justice, but to mark what befell among all of ye. Which turned out to be watching as all of ye sought to enact rough justice on each other.”

He pointed at her, and added sternly, “Just ye leave Malchor Harpell be, henceforth; anyone who kept order among the Harpells back in their wild days is a force for good and for order, who should be left to go on being both in these current times of chaos. Have I thy vow on this?”

Tabra lifted her chin. “In the name of Mystra, Lady of All Mysteries, and may she strip all the Art from me if I break this promise: I will do nothing to harm Malchor Harpell, nor aid another to do so, by action or silence or standing by when I could have acted.”

“Good,” Elminster replied. “Accepted. There’s a meal ready, and if ye’ll now excuse me, I have a spindle to toss out into a spellstorm. Which should quell it right away.”

“M
YSTRA
,” E
LMINSTER MURMURED
, “ye command, and ’tis done.”

And he threw the spindle high and far.

It winked once, flashing white radiance in midair that caught the eyes of the war wizards and Purple Dragons on the other side of the roiling fog, and then plunged down into the spellstorm and was gone.

Its descent was like pulling the plug on a wash-sink drain. The fog plunged after it, racing down out of sight as if plummeting underground, pulling the vast spellstorm in and in until the higher-than-a-man mists were shoulder-high, then waist-high, then mere wisps, and then … gone. A full three days early.