As El moved, the pew curved in the air to follow, Dasumia's smile broadening with anticipatory glee at the coming impact. The end that would strike Elminster was a splayed mass of jagged wooden splinters, most of them as long as a man was tall.
Dasumia took three swift steps sideways to get a better look at the situation...and that was all El needed. He rolled over a roof vault, wheezing like some great aerial whale, and in its lee called on his spell. Two whips rose from the aisle like eager, awakened snakes, to pounce on the Queen of Galadorna.
As the pew struck the ceiling with a crash that sent him bouncing off the ceiling tiles amid showers of dust, El had a brief glimpse of Dasumia's startled face as bloodied black leather whipped around one wrist and jerked down, throwing her onto her back. She struck her head on the floor and cried out in pain...and that was all the time the two whips needed. The wrist that had dragged her down was bound fast to her ankle, the other whip did the same on her other side, and one whip slapped its handle across her eyes, blinding her with tears, while the other thrust its handle into her open mouth, effectively gagging her.
Most of the pew broke away and showered the temple below with shards of wood as the gigantic missile cartwheeled away from the roof vault. Ilbryn Starym didn't even have time to flee as the rest of the pew plunged into the pew right in front of where he was sitting, sending riven wood in all directions and hurling him helplessly into the air, tumbling head over heels in the midst of his own conjured ball of magical flames to strike the back wall of the temple with a crash. He slid slowly and brokenly down that wall, his screams fading.
Abruptly El found himself plummeting to the ground. He grinned savagely, this must mean Dasumia was either falling unconscious or abandoning her spell in favor of something desperate. He sent the whips an urgent command to thrust their captive aloft, so he could give her the same sort of fall if she overcame him, or his own landing was too ... hard.
Gods! El knew bones had shattered, even before he rolled over like some sort of agonized elephant and tried to scramble to his feet. Scrambling didn't work, but he did get upright by throwing his great bulk to one side, then trying to climb it with his clumsy legs. He got himself turned around in time to see his whips suddenly swinging empty, their captive gone from their entangling midst.
A moment later, a cold, cold pain slid into his side and out again, and he knew where she'd gone. He didn't bother to try to turn and face her, just to see a sword dripping with his own blood and to give her a better target to stab at, but concentrated on ignoring the pain and calling up another spell. The blade slid into him once more, but El knew his great bulk kept him safe from her slitting his throat...she couldn't reach it without so much climbing that he'd be able to simply topple over onto her to win this fight forever. He threw himself backward and heard her startled curse and the clangor of a dropped sword bouncing on stone. Now he did start to turn, heaving himself around. If the blade was close enough, he could throw himself on it and bury it.
He met Dasumia's startled eyes...and she brought one hand to her mouth, glanced down at the sword lying so close to him...and vanished, just moments before El completed his spell.
It was a blood magic incantation. El threw back his head and shrieked at the pain. As the magic healed his wounds, it felt like fire raging through his gigantic body... fire that flared, raged, then swiftly faded as the healing neared completion. It could also teleport him to wherever his freshly shed blood might be...on the floor beneath him, on the sword mere feet away ... and on the hands of the queen, wherever she might be!
The spell flashed, the temple around him twisted, and he was suddenly behind the altar, where a crouching Dasumia was looking up at him in startled surprise. He reached out to clutch at her should she try to flee, and threw himself off-balance so as to fall on her. Dasumia back flipped again, her heels grazing the floating Black Hand of Bane...and El crashed down inches away from her frantically rolling form. He grabbed at her, but couldn't reach, and was still huffing and wallowing and trying to pivot his great bulk around so that his bloated and deformed arm could reach her when she fetched up against the back wall of the temple and cast another spell, favoring him with a catlike smile of triumph.
Something flashed. El turned his head in time to see one of the floating helmed horrors flow and twist, breaking apart into a whirling sphere of jagged metal shards-shards that came out of their dance in a stream that leaped right at him.
El threw one ponderous arm up in front of his eyes and throat, and with the other grabbed blindly, felt Dasumia's struggling form, closed his grasp mercilessly, and hauled her like a rag doll back up in front of him as a shield.
As searing shards cut into him in three places or more, El heard Dasumia gasp, a sound that was cut off sharply. When he lowered his shielding arm, he saw that she was biting her lip, blood trailing down her chin and eyes closed in her contorted face. Jagged shards had transfixed her in a dozen places, and she was shuddering. The blue-white motes of magic leaking from her might be contingencies... or might be something else. As he watched, a shard drooped, dangled, then broke off and fell, visibly smaller. Another seemed to be melting into her, and another...gods!
The sudden pain made Elminster drop his foe. Her ravaged body fell onto his great bulk...and the real pain began. A burning... smoke was rising from where she lay sprawled on his mounded flesh, and she was slowly sinking.
Acid! She'd turned her blood to acid, and it was eating away at him and at the shards. Well, the watching gods knew he'd spare flesh in plenty to lose, but he had to get clear of her. He snatched at her, threw her as hard as he could at the floating Hand of Bane, and had the satisfaction of seeing her strike it limply and stick for a moment before her own weight peeled her free, to fall from view behind the altar. Wisps of smoke curled up from the hand as a little left-behind acid ate at it, too.
El sat back grimly and sighed. Unconscious she might be, but he lacked the strength to crush her. Perhaps if he pushed her into the pit and shouldered those two loose pews into it on top of her...
Nay, he could not be so cruel. And so, when she awakened, Elminster Aumar would die. He was almost out of spells and still trapped in this grotesquely enlarged form, probably unable to fit through the passages that had brought him here. He could do little more to stop the evil Lady Master whom Mystra had sent him to serve. Her magic overmatched his, as his outstripped that of a novice. She would make a magnificent and able servant of Mystra, a better Chosen than he, if she were only biddable enough to obey anyone.
He shut his eyes against the banner of Bane and called up a mental image of the blue-white star of Mystra. "Lady of Mysteries," he said aloud, his voice echoing in the now-silent temple, "one who has been thy servant cries to ye in his need. I have failed thee, and failed in my service to the one called Dasumia, but see in her strength that could well serve thee in my place. Succor this Dasumia, I pray, and..."
Sudden, searing cold shocked him into an inarticulate cry. He could feel himself trembling uncontrollably as magic stronger than he'd ever felt before surged through him. Numbly he waited for whatever killing strike Dasumia would deal him, but it did not come. Instead, a warmth gently grew within the ice, and he felt himself relaxing, even as a strange crawling sensation swept over him. He was healed, he was growing smaller and lighter and himself again, and a face that he could barely see through flooding tears was bending over him.
Then he heard a voice speaking to him tenderly, a voice that belonged to the Queen of Galadorna but no longer held the cold cruelty of Dasumia. "So you pass the test, Elminster Aumar, and remain the first and dearest of my Chosen...even if your brains are too addled to recognize when a ritual of Bane is being perverted, bringing pleasure to his altar instead of pain, and shedding the blood of someone willing." A fond and musical laugh followed, then the words, "I am proud, this night."
Gentle arms enfolded him, and Elminster cried out in wonder as he felt himself lifted up, in a soaring flight that should have smashed them both into the ceiling but did not, reaching high and clear into the stars instead.
The roof of the House of the Unicorn burst apart, towers toppling, as a column of silver fire roared up into the night. As men on the battlements screamed and cursed, something chill and chiming that had been coiled hungrily around a spire close by their heads fled in a misty parabola, to drift away low over the streets of Netnrar, cowering in the night.
Silver fire danced on dark water, throwing feeble reflections onto purple-bordered tapestries of deepest black. High on those tapestries, in purple thread, were worked their sole adornments: cruel, somehow feminine smiles.
The inky waters of the scrying font rippled, and the scene of silver fire soaring up out of a castle was gone.
Someone close above the water said excitedly, "You saw? I know how we can use this."
"Tell me!" a cold voice snapped, sharp with excitement, then in lower tones, in another direction, said more calmly, "Cancel the Evenflame service. We'll be busy...and undisturbed, mark you, Sister Night...until further notice."
And so it was that Galadorna lost its queen and its court mage in the same night, less than a tenday before the armies of Laothkund rolled down from the tree-girt hills to set Nethrar ablaze, and shatter the Unicorn Kingdom forever.
Book Two: Sunrise On A Dark Road
Eleven: Moonrise, Frostfire, And Doom
Adventurers are best used to slay monsters. Sooner or later, they become your worst monsters, and you have to hire new ones to do the obvious thing.
Ralderick Hallowshaw, Jester
from To Rule A Realm, From Turret To Midden
published circa The Year of the Bloodbird
"Seems peaceful enough, don't it?" the warrior rumbled, looking around from the height of his saddle at the forest of hiexel, blueleaf, and gnarled old phandar trees that flanked both sides of the road. Birds called in the distant depths of its shade gloom, and small furry things scuttled here and there among the dead leaves that carpeted its mossy stumps and mushroom-studded dead falls. Golden shafts of sunlight stabbed down into the forest here and there, lighting little clearings where shrubs fought each other for the light, and the moss-draped creepers were fewer.
"Don't say such foolhead things, Arvas," one of his companions growled. "They sound all too much like the sort of cues ambushing brigands like to follow. That sentence of yours sounds like something that should end with an arrow taking you in the throat...or the chunk of road your charger's standing on rising up to be revealed as the head of some awakened titan or other."
"I'll take the 'or other,' you merry-faced killjoy," Arvas grunted. "I just meant I don't see claw-sharpening marks on trees, bloodstains … that sort of thing... which should make you even more cheerful."
"You can be sure the High Duke didn't hire us to block the Starmantle road while we argue about things I'd rather other ears didn't hear about," a deeper voice said sharply. "Arvas, Faldast...stow it!"
"Paeregur," Arvas said in weary tones, "have you looked up and down this road recently? Do you see anyone...anyone...but us? Block the road from what, may I ask? Since the deaths began, travel seems to have just about stopped along here. Possibly about the same time you got this funny idea into your head that you're somehow entitled to give the rest of us orders! Was it that new armor, the heavy helm pressing hard on your brains? Or was it the new thrusting codpiece with the..."
"Arvas, enough.!" said someone else, in exasperation. "Gods, it's like having a babbling drunk riding with us.'
"Rolian," his halfling comrade said, from somewhere below the level of the humans' belts, "it is having a babbling drunk riding with us!"
There was a general roar of laughter...even echoed, albeit sarcastically, by Arvas himself...and the Frostfire Banner urged their mounts into a trot. They all wanted to find a good defensible place to camp before dark, or have time to get back to Starmantle if no such site offered itself, and it wouldn't be all that many hours, now, before the shadows grew long and the sun bright and low.
High Duke Horostos styled himself lord over the rich farmlands west of Starmantle, along a forested cliff of a coast that offered few harbors (and no good ones). As realms went, it was a quiet and safe land, plagued by the usual owlbears and stirges from time to time, the odd band of brigands, thieving peddlers, small problems that a few armsmen and foresters with good bows could handle.
Lately, it seemed, at about the time the worst winter snows ended and folk considered the useful part of the Year of the Awakening Wyrm to have begun, the High Duchy of Langalos had somehow acquired a big problem.
Something that left no tracks, but killed at will...passing merchants, woodcutters, farmers, livestock, and alert war bands of the Duke's best armsmen alike. Even a high-ranking priest of Tempus, traveling with a large mounted and well-armed bodyguard, had gone missing somewhere along the wooded road west of Starmantle, and was thought to have fallen afoul of the mysterious slayer. Could this be the "Awakening Wyrm" of the prophecies?
Perhaps, but hired griffon-riders flying over the area had found no sign of large caves, scorched or broken trees or any other marks of large beasts ... or any sign of brigands or their encampments, for that matter. Nor had the few foresters who still dared to venture anywhere near the trees seen anything...and one by one, these were disappearing too. Their reports told of a land that seemed barren of any beast so large as a fox or hare, the game trails were grown over with ferns.
So the High Duke had reluctantly opened his coffers while he still had subjects to tax and refill them and had hired the classic solution: a band of adventurers... in this case, hireswords who'd been thrown out of service to wealthy Tethyrians for a variety of reasons, and gathered as the Frostfire Banner to seek their fortunes in more easterly lands, where their past indiscretions would be less well known.
The money offered by Horostos was both good and needed. The Banner were ten in all, and numbered among their ranks a pair apiece of mages and warrior-priests, yet they went warily. This was unfamiliar country to them...but death knows all lands, intimately and often.
So it was that cocked but unloaded crossbows hung across several saddles, though it was bad for the strings, and no one rode carelessly. The forest stayed lovely...and deserted.
"No stags," Arvas grunted once, and his companions, nodding their replies, realized how silent they'd fallen. Waiting for the blow to fall.