"Beautiful, is it not?" Dasumia purred, turning from surveying the tower. A green glint that El had long ago learned presaged danger was dancing in her eyes. She slid forward onto her elbows, cradling her chin in her hands, and regarded the tower with an almost satisfied air.
"Lady, it is," Elminster said carefully.
A teasing eye rolled up to stare into his own orbs. Ye gods, trouble indeed, Mystra defend.
His Lady Master pointed at the tower and said, "A wizard named Holivanter dwells there. A merry fellow, he taught the beasts he summoned to build it all sorts of comical songs and chants. He keeps talking frogs, and even gave a few of them wings with which to fly."
The carpet banked smoothly around the tower on its second orbit of the spire. The tower rose like a fairytale needle from neat, green walled gardens. Ruby-hued lamps glimmered in several of its windows, but it seemed otherwise tranquil, almost deserted.
"The house of Holivanter … pretty, isn't it?"
"Indeed, Lady," El agreed and meant it.
"Slay him," Dasumia snapped.
El blinked at her. She nodded, and pointed down at the slim tower with an imperious hand.
El frowned. "Lady, I..."
Little flames seemed to flicker in Dasumia's eyes as she locked her gaze with his. One elegant eyebrow lifted.
"A friend of yours?"
"I know him not," El replied truthfully. There was no way he could send a warning, or a defense, or healing, the man was doomed. Why betray himself in futility?
Dasumia shrugged, drew forth a dark, smooth rod from a sheath on her hip, and extended it with languid grace. Something caused the air to curdle in a line, racing down, down .. .
… And the upper half of Holivanter's tower burst apart with a roar, spraying the sky with wreckage. Smaller purple, amber, and blue-green blasts followed as various scorched magics within the tower exploded in their turns. El stared at the conflagration as its echoes rolled back from nearby hills, and debris hurtled at them. Blackened fingers spun past the carpet, trailing flame. Holivanter was dead.
Dasumia rolled back onto one hip and propped herself up with one arm, the other toying with the rod. "So tell me," she told the sky, in silken-soft tones that made Elminster stiffen warily, "just why you disobeyed me. Does killing mages come hard to you?"
Fear stirred cold fingers within him. "It seems … unnecessary," El replied, choosing his words very carefully. "Does not Mystra say the use of magic should be encouraged, not jealously guarded or hampered?"
Ah, Mystra. Her word had led him here, to serve this beguiling evil. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be a Chosen of Mystra, but in his dreams, El often knelt and prayed, or repeated her decrees and advice, fearing it would entirely slip away from him if he did not. Sometimes he feared that the Lady Dasumia was stealing his memories with creeping magic or walling them away behind mists of forgetfulness, to make him entirely her creature. Whatever the cause, it was getting harder, as the months passed, to remember anything of his life before the Riven Stone… .
Dasumia laughed lightly. "Ah, I see. The priests of the Lady of Magic say such things, yes, to keep us from slaying thieves who steal scrolls ... or disobedient apprentices. Yet I pay them little attention. Every mage who can rival me lessens my power. Why should I help such potential foes rise to challenge me? What gain I from that?"
She leaned forward to tap Elminster's knee with the rod. He tried not to look at the little green lights winking into life around it and wandering up and down its length almost lazily. "I've seen you on your knees to Mystra, of nights," she told him. "You pray and plead with her, yes, but tell me: how much does she talk to you?"
"Never, these days," El admitted, his voice as low and as small as the despair he felt. All he had to cling to were his small treacheries, and if she ever discovered those...
Dasumia smiled triumphantly. "There you are-alone, left to fend for yourself. If there is a Mystra who takes any interest in mortal mages, she watches while the strong help themselves, over the bodies of the weak. Never forget that, Elminster."
Her voice became more brisk. "I trust your labors haven't faltered in my absence," she commented, sitting up...and raising the rod to point at his face like a ready sword. "How many whole skeletons are ready?"
"Thirty-six," Elminster replied. She lifted that eyebrow again, obviously impressed, and leaned forward to peer into his eyes, dragging his gaze to meet hers by the sheer power of her presence. El tried not to wince or lean away. In some ways, the Lady Dasumia was as, as...well, awesome at close quarters and as irresistibly forceful in her presence...as Holy Lady Mystra Herself. How, a small voice in the back of his mind asked, could that possibly be?
"You have been hard at work," she said softly. Td thought you'd spend some time trying to get into my books and a little more poking around my tower before you got out the shovels. You please me."
El inclined his head, trying to keep satisfaction-and relief...from his face and voice. She must not have discovered his rescue work, then.
With his spells, her most obedient apprentice had healed a servant and whisked him to a land distant, laden with supplies and white with fear. She'd taken the man to her bed but tired of him as the Year of Mistmaidens began, and one morning she had turned him into a giant worm and left him impaled on one of the rusting spits behind the stables to die in slow, twisting agony. El had left the transformed body of a man who'd died of a fever in the servant's place. Restless and reckless meddling, perhaps. Doom-seeking lunacy, that, too. Yet he had to do such things, some how, working small kindnesses to make up for her large, bold evils.
It hadn't been his first small treachery against her cruelty ... but there was always the chance that it would be his last. "My honesty has always outstripped my ambition," he said gravely.
Her mockery returned. "A pretty speech, indeed," she said. "I can almost believe you follow Mystra's dictates to the letter."
She stretched like a large cat and used the rod over one shoulder to scratch her back, putting it within easy reach of Elminster. "You must have far more patience than I do," she admitted, her eyes very dark and steady upon him. "I could never serve such an arbitrary goddess."
"Is it permitted to ask whom ye do serve, Lady Master?" El asked, extending his hands in a mute offering to accept the enchanted rod.
She poked at her back once more, smiled, and put the rod into his hands. Two of the rings she wore blinked as she did so.
Dasumia smiled. "A little higher ... ah, yessss." Her smile broadened as El carefully used the rod to scratch the indicated spot, but she kept her eyes fixed on his hands, and the rings that had winked a moment ago now flickered with a constant flame of readiness.
"It's no secret," she said casually. "I serve the Lord Bane. His gift to me was the dark fire that slays intruders and keeps more cautious mages at bay. Did you know there's some fool of an elf who tests my wards with a new spell every tenday? He's been at it for three seasons now, as regular as the calendar, almost as long as you've been with me." She smiled again. "Perhaps he wants your position. Should I order you to duel him?"
El spreads his hands and said, "If it's your wish, Lady. I'd as soon not slay anyone unnecessarily."
Dasumia stared at him in thoughtful silence for quite a long time as the carpet rushed on away from the smoking stump of the tower and the dying day, and finally murmuring, "And deprive me of the entertainment elven futility brings me? No fear."
She rose up on her knees in a single smooth motion, plucked the rod out of El's hand, resheathed it, and in the same continuous movement reached out with both hands to take hold of his shoulders. Her slender fingertips rested lightly upon him, yet Elminster suddenly felt that if he tried to move out of their grasp, he'd find them to be claws of unyielding iron. In three years, this was the closest contact between them.
He held still as his Lady Master brought her fare close to his, their noses almost touching, and said, "Don't move or speak." Her breath was like hot mist on Elminster's cheeks and chin, and her eyes, very dark and very large, seemed to be staring right into the back of his head and seeing every last secret he kept there.
She leaned a little way forward, just for a moment, and their lips met. An imperious tongue parted his own lips-and something that burned and yet was icy raced into his mouth, roaring down his throat and coiling up his nose.
Agony...burning, shuddering, get-away-from-it agony! El sneezed, again and again, clawing at fabric in a desperate attempt to keep from falling, knowing his whole body was shuddering. He was convulsing and sprawling on the carpet, sobbing when he could find breath enough ... and he was as helpless as a child,
Yellow mists cavorted and flowed before his eyes, the darkening sky overhead kept leaping and turning, and he was thrashing against claws that held him with painful, immovable force.
For what seemed an eternity he coughed and struggled against the yellow haze, drenched with sweat, until utter exhaustion left him able to spasm no more, and he could only lie moaning as the lessening surges of pain ebbed and clawed their ways through him.
He was Elminster. He was as weak as a dried, rolled-up leaf blown in the wind. He was...lying on his back on the flying carpet, and the only thing that had kept him from falling off it in his throes was the iron grip of the sorceress he served, the Lady Dasumia.
Her hands loosened on him, now. One left his bruised bicep...in which it had been sunk inches deep, like an anchor of iron throughout his thrashings...to trail across his brow, thrusting oceans of sweat away.
She bent over him in the gathering gloom of falling night, as the breezes of the lofty sky slid over them both, and said softly, "You have tasted the dark fire. Be warned, if ever you betray me, it shall surely slay you. As long as you worship Mystra more than you revere me, Bane's breath shall be agony to you. Three apprentices, down the years, have kissed me unbidden, none lived to boast of it."
Elminster stared up at her, unable to speak, agony still ruling him. She looked into his eyes, her own orbs two dark fires, and smiled slowly. "Your loyalty, however, outstrips theirs. You shall duel my worst foe for me and best him...when you are ready. You'll have to learn to kill first, though, swiftly and without reckoning the cost. He'll not give you much time for reflection."
At last El found the strength to speak. His voice was thick-tongued and halting, but it was speech nonetheless. "Lady, who is this foe?"
"A wizard Chosen by Mystra as her personal servant," the Lady Dasumia replied, looking away toward the last traces of the setting sun. Beneath them, the carpet started to descend. "He left my side to do so and though he could not follow the narrow path the Lady of Magic set for him and is now called the Rebel Chosen, he's not returned to me. Hah! Mystra must be unable to concede that anyone could turn from blind worship of her."
Her eyes were burning as she turned back to meet Elminster's gaze, and added in tones once more light and casual, "Nadrathen is his name. You shall slay him for me."