Not that the man who was Wanlorn, but who'd walked longer under the name of Elminster, cared over much about being thought a fool. It was a little late for that he thought wryly, considering the road he'd chosen in life...with his stealthy departure from Castle Felmorel not all that many steps behind him. Mystra was forging him into a weapon, or at least a tool.. and in all the forging he'd seen, those rains of hammer blows looked to be a little hard on the weapon.
And who was it long ago who'd said, "The task forges the worker"?
It would be so much easier to just do as he pleased. using magic for personal gain and having no care for the consequences or the fates of others. He could have happily ruled the land of his birth, mouthing-as more than one mage he'd met with did...the occasion al empty prayer to a goddess of magic who meant nothing to him.
There was that one thing his choice had given him: long life. Long enough to outlive every last friend and neighbor of his youth, every colleague of his early adventure and magical workings and revelry in Myth Drannor.
And every friend and lover, one after another, of that wondrous city, too.
Elminster's lips twisted in bitterness as remembered faces and laughter and caresses rushed past his mind's regard, one after gods-be-cursed another ... and the plans with them, the dreams excitedly discussed and well intended, that blow and dwindle away like morning mist in bright sunlight and come to nothing in the end.
So much had come to nothing in the end… .
Like the village in front of him, it seemed. Roofs fallen in and overgrown gardens and paths greeted him, with here and there a blackened chimney stabbing up at the sky like a dark and battered dagger to mark where a cottage had stood before fire came, or a vine-choked hump that was once a fieldstone wall or hedgerow between fields. Something that might have been a wolf or may have been another sort of large-jawed hunting beast slunk out of one ruined house as Elminster approached. Otherwise the village of Hammershaws seemed utterly deserted. Was this what Lord Esbre had meant by the Lady of Shadows seeking to 'enforce her will" on these lands? Was every such place ahead of him going to be deserted?
What had happened to all the folk who dwelt here?
A few strides later brought him a grim answer. Something dull and yellow-gray cracked under his boots. Not a stone after all, but a piece of skull... well, several pieces, now. He turned his head and walked grimly on.
Another stride, another cracking sound, a long bone, this time. And another, a fourth ... he was walking on the dead. Human bones, gnawed and scattered, were strewn everywhere in Hammershaws. What he'd thought was a collapsed railing on a little log bridge across the meandering creek was actually a tangle of skeletons, their arms dangling down almost to the water. El peered, saw at least eight skulls, sighed, and trudged on, looking this way and that among leaning carts and yard-gates fast vanishing under the bramble and creeping tallgrass that had already reclaimed the yards beyond them.
None but the dead dwelt in Hammershaws now. El poked into one cottage, just to see if anything of interest survived, and was rewarded with a brief glimpse of a slumped human skeleton on a stone chair. The supple mottled coils of an awakened snake glided between the bones as the serpent spiraled up to coil at the top of the chair. It was seeking height to better strike at this overbold intruder. As its hiss rose loud in that ravaged room, Elminster decided not to stay and learn the quality of the serpent's range and aim.
The road beyond Hammershaws looked as overgrown as the village. A lone vulture circled high in the sky, watching the human intruder traverse a fading way across the rolling lands to Drinden.
A mill and busy market town, was Drinden, if the memories of still-vigorous old men could be trusted. Yet this once bustling hamlet proved now to be another ruin, as deserted as the first village had been. El stood at its central crossroads and looked grimly up at a sky that had slowly gone gray with tattered, smoke-like storm clouds. Then he shrugged and walked on. So long as one's paper and components stay dry, what matter a little rain?
Yet no rain came as El took the northwestern way, up a steep slope that skirted a stunted wood that had once been an orchard. The sky started to turn milky-white, but the land remained deserted.
He'd been told the Lady of Shadows rode or walked the land in the company of dark knights he'd do well to fear, with their ready blades and eager treacheries and vicious disregard for surrenders or agreements. Yet as he walked on into the heart of the domain of the Lady of Shadows, he seemed utterly alone in a deserted realm. No hoofbeats or trumpets sounded, and no hooves came thundering down into the road bearing folk to challenge one man walking along with a saddlebag slung over his shoulder.
It was growing late and the skies had just cleared to reveal a glorious sunset like melted coins glimmering In an amber sky as Elminster reached the valley that held the town of Tresset's Ringyl, once and perhaps still home to the Lady of Shadows. He found that it, too, was a deserted, beast-roamed ruin.
Forty or more buildings, at his first glance from the heights, still stood amid the trees that in the end would tear them all apart. Sitting amidst the clustered ruins were the crumbling walls of a castle whose soaring battlements probably afforded something winged and dangerous with a lair. El peered at it as the amber sky became a ruby sea, and the stars began to show overhead.
The long-dead Tresset had been a very successful brigand who'd tried his hand at ruling and built a slender-spired castle...the Ringyl...here to anchor his tiny realm. Tressardon had fallen within days of his death.
Elminster's lips twisted wryly. 'Twould be an act of supremely arrogant self-importance to try to read lesson or message for himself out of such local history. Moreover, from here at least he could see no spiderweb gate like the one in his dream set into the walls of the ruined castle. It could take days to explore all of what was left of the town...assuming, of course, that nothing lived here that would want to eat him or drive him away sooner than that...and nothing he could see but the Ringyl itself stood tall or grand enough to possibly incorporate the gate in his dream. Or at least, he reminded himself with a sigh, so it looked from here.
He'd time for just one foray before true nightfall, by which time it'd probably be most prudent to be elsewhere ... perhaps on one of those grassy hilltops in the distance, beyond the shattered and overgrown town. A wise man would be setting up camp thereon right now, not scrambling down a slope of loose stones...and mm human bones...for a quick peer around before full night came down. But then Elminster Aumar had no intention of becoming a wise man for some centuries yet.... The shadows were already long and purple by the time Elminster reached the valley floor. Thigh-high grass cloaked what had once been the main road through the town, and El waded calmly into it. Dark, gaping houses stood like graying giants' skulls on either side as he walked quietly forward, sweeping the grass side to side with a staff he'd cut earlier to discourage snakes from striking and to uncover any obstacles before his feet or shins made their own, more painful discoveries.
Night was coming down fast as Elminster walked through the heart of deserted Ringyl. A tense, heavy silence seemed to live at its heart, a hanging, waiting stillness that swallowed echoes like heavy fog. El tapped on a stone experimentally but firmly with his staff. He could hear the grating thud of each strike, but no answering echo came from the walls now close around. Twice he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he whirled he was facing nothing but trees and crumbling stone walls.
Something watchful dwelt or lurked here, he was sure. Twilight was stealing into the gaps between the roofless buildings now, and into the tangles where trees, vines, and thorn bushes all grew thickly entwined. El moved along more briskly, looking only for walls lofty enough to hold the spiderweb gates of his dream. He found nothing so tall… except the Ringyl itself.
Gnawed bones, most brown and brittle enough to crack and crumble underfoot, were strewn in plenty along the grass-choked street. Human bones, of course. They grew in abundance to form almost a carpet in front of the riven walls of the castle. Cautiously Elminster forged ahead, turning over bones with his staff and sending more than one rock viper into a swift, ribbonlike retreat. Darkness was closing down around him now, but he had to look through one of these gaps In the wall, to see if ...
Whatever had torn entire sections of wall as thick as a cottage and as tall as twenty men was still inside, waiting.
Well, perhaps one need not be quite so dramatic. El smiled thinly. It's a weakness of archmages to think the fate of Toril rests in their palm or on their every movement and pronouncement. A spiderweb-shaped gate would be sufficient unto his present needs.
He was looking into a chapel or at least a high-ceilinged hall, its vaulted ceiling intact and painted to look like many trees with gilded fruit on their branches though strips of that limning were hanging down in tongues of ruin. All this stood over a once polished floor in which wavy bands of malachite were interwoven between bands of quartz or marble...a floor now mantled in dust, fallen stone rubble, birds' nests and the tiny bones of their perished makers, and less identifiable debris.
It was very dark in the hall. El thought it prudent not to conjure any light, but he could hardly miss seeing the huge oval of black stone facing him in the far wall. Sparkling white quartz had been set into that wall to form a circle of many stars...fourteen or a dozen irregularly shaped twinklings, none of them the long-spindled star of Mystra...and in the center of that circle a carving as broad as Elminster's outstretched arms stood out from the wall: a sculpted pair of feminine lips.
They were closed, slightly curved in a secret smile, and El had a gnawing feeling that he'd seen them, or something very like them, before. Perhaps this was a speaking mouth, an enchanted oracle that could tell him more...if he could unlock its words at all, or understand a message not meant for him. Perhaps it was something less friendly than that.
Well, such investigations could wait until the full light of morning. It was time, and past time, to leave Tresset's Ringyl and its watchful shadows. El backed out of the gaping ruin, saw nothing lunging at him out of the darkness, and with more haste than dignity headed for the hills.
The heights on the far side of the Ringyl weren't yet touched by moonlight, but the glittering stars cast enough light to make their grassy flanks seem to glow. El looked back several times on his determined march up out of the town, but nothing seemed to stir or follow him, and the many eyes that peered at him out of the darkness were no larger than those of rats.
Perhaps he would have time to win some sort of slumber, after all. The hilltop he chose was small and bare of all but the ever-present long grass. He walked it in a smallish ring, then opened his pack, took out a cloth scrip full of daggers that glowed a brief, vivid stormy blue when unwrapped...radiance that promptly seemed to leak out of them, dripping and dancing to the ground...and retraced his steps around the ring. He drove a dagger hilt-deep into the soil at intervals and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like an old and rather bawdy dance rhyme. When the ring was complete, the Athalantan turned back along it and drove a second ring of daggers in, angling each of these additional blades into the turf on the inside of the ring, so that its blade touched the vertical steel of an already-buried dagger. He held out his hand, palm downward and fingers spread, said a single, soft word over them, wrapped his cloak around himself, and went to bed.
"What, pray tell, are you reading?" The balding, bearded mage set aside a goblet whose contents frothed and bubbled, looked up unhurriedly over his spectacles, elevated one eyebrow at a fashionably slow pace, and replied, "A play ... of sorts."
The younger wizard standing over him...more splendidly dressed and still possessing some of his own hair...blinked. "A 'play,' Baerast? And 'of sorts'? Not an obscure spellbook or one of Nabraether's meaty grimoires?"
Tabarast of the Three Sung Curses peered up over his spectacles again, more severely this time. "Let there be no impediment to your dawning understanding, dearest Droon," he said. "I am currently immersed in a play, to whit 'The Stormy Knight, Or, The Brazen Butcherer.' A work of some energy."
"And more spilled blood," Beldrune of the Bent Finger replied, sweeping aside an untidy stack of books that had almost buried a high-backed chair and planting himself firmly in it before it even had time to wheeze at its sudden freedom. The crash of tomes that followed was impressive in both room-shaking solidity and in the amount of dust it raised. It almost drowned out the two smaller thunderings that followed, the first occasioned by the clearance of the footstool of its own tower of tomes by means of a hearty two-footed kick, and the second caused by the collapse of both back legs of the old chair.
As Beldrune abruptly settled lower amid scattered literature, Tabarast laid a dust-warding hand over the open top of his goblet and asked through the roiling cloud of dancing motes, "Are you quite finished? I begin to weary of this nuisance."
Beldrune made a sound that some folk would have deemed rude and others might judge impressive and by way of elaborating on this reply uttered the words, "My dear fellow, is this...this burgeoning panoply of literary chaos my achievement? I think not. There's not a chair or table left on this entire floor that isn't guarding its own ever-growing fortress of magical knowledge at your behest, and..."
Tabarast made a sound like a serpent's skull being crushed under an eager boot heel. "My behest? Do you now deny the parcenary of this disarray around us? I can confute any claims to the contrary, if you've a day or two to spare."
"Meaning my wits are that slow, or words so slow and laborious to come to your lips that...atch, never mind. I came not to bandy bright phrases all evening but to banish a little lonely befuddlement by talking a while."
"A prolusion I've heard before," Tabarast observed dryly. "Have a drink."
He pulled on the lever that made the familiar cabinet rise from the floorboards to stand between then and listened to Beldrune pounce on its contents from the far side with an absence of continued speech that meant young Droon must be very thirsty.
"All right.. . have two," he amended his offer.
The sounds of swallowing continued. Tabarast opened his mouth to say something, remembered that a certain topic was by mutual agreement forbidden, and shut it again. Then another thought came to him.
"Have you ever read 'The Stormy Knight?'" he asked the cabinet, judging Beldrune's head to be inside it.
The younger wizard raised his head from clinkings and uncorkings and gurglings, looking hurt. "Have I not?" he asked, then cleared his throat and recited,
What knight is that
who yonder comes riding
bright-arrayed in armor of gold