Azuth smiled at that, and added, "Moreover, you are not to have any deliberate contact with your own pet project, the Harpers, until Mystra advises you otherwise. They must learn to work and think for themselves, not forever looking over their shoulders for praise and guidance from Elminster."
It was Elminster's turn to smile ruefully. "Hard lessons in independent achievements and self-reliance for us all, eh?" he ventured.
"Precisely," the Lord of Spells agreed. "As for me, I shall be learning to guide and minister to the mages of all Toril without Mystra to call upon, for a time."
"She's...'going away'?" El's tone made it clear that he didn't believe a goddess truly could withdraw from contact with her world, her worshipers, and her work.
Azuth's smile deepened. "An inevitable task confronts her," he said, "that she dare not put off longer: contingencies that must be determined and ordered, for the good and stability of the Weave. Neither of us may hear from her or see any manifestation of her presence or powers for some time to come."
" 'Dare not'? Does Mystra serve the commands of something higher, or do ye speak of what the Weave requires?"
"The Weave by its very nature places constant demands on those attuned to it and who truly care for it ... and the nature of all life and stability on this world it dominates. It is a delight and a craft...and something of a game...to anticipate the needs of the Weave, to address those needs, and to make the Weave something greater than it was when you found it."
T don't believe ye quite revealed the nature of the Lady's 'inevitable task,' or whom...if anything...she answers to and obeys," Elminster said with a smile of his own.
Azuth's own smile broadened. "No, I don't believe I did," he replied softly, merriment dancing in his eyes as he raised his goblet to his lips.
Elminster found himself sinking gently and being brought upright, to stand on the stony ground once more with a landing as soft as a feather landing on velvet. Once, long ago, in Hastarl, the young thief Elminster had spent several minutes watching a scrap of pigeon-down floating down onto a cushion, ever so slowly… and he still judged those minutes well spent.
Azuth was standing, too, bare feet treading an inch or so of air. It seemed their converse was at an end. Though he hadn't even looked at the raging fiends, they were suddenly tumbling away in all directions, wreathed in white flames, their bodies dwindling in struggling silence as they went. The siege of the Height, it seemed, was at an end.
The High One didn't seem to step forward, but he was suddenly nearer to Elminster. "We may not respond, but call upon us. Look to see us not, but have faith. We do see you."
He reached out a hand, wonderingly, Elminster extended his own.
The god's hand felt like a man's . .. warm and solid, gripping firmly.
A moment later, Elminster roared...or tried to, the breath had been shocked right out of his lungs. Silver fire was surging through him, laced with a peculiarly vivid deep blue streak that must be Azuth's own essence or signature. El saw it clearly as jets of flame burst forth from his own nose, mouth, and ears.
It was surging through him, burning everything it found, wrenching him in spasms of utter agony as organs were consumed, blood blazed away, and skin popped as the flesh beneath boiled away … through swimming eyes, Elminster saw Azuth become an upright spindle of flame...a spindle that seemed somehow to watch him closely as it swooped nearer and murmured (despite its lack of any mouth El could see), "The fire cleanses and heals. Awaken stronger, most precious of men."
The spindle whirled nearer, touching the nimbus of magical fire around Elminster, fed by the silver jets still erupting from him...and the world suddenly leaped aloft with a silver-throated roar, whirling Elminster up into ecstasy and ragged ruin, torn apart into dark droplets spewed into a looping river of gold ... gold too bright to look upon, outshining the sun.
The last Prince of Athalantar lay sprawled on the stones, senseless, with silver fires raging around him and two goblets floating nearby, a cruising spindle of flame between them. The flames touched the goblet Elminster had held, and it jumped a little and vanished into the conflagration, spewing forth fat golden sparks some moments later.
Then the spindle of flame touched the flames raging around Elminster. They rushed into it, and the reinforced, towering Azuth-flames collapsed with a roar that shook all Halidae's Height, washing over Elminster...who convulsed, but did not awaken...then gathered themselves. With sinuous grace and suddenly leisurely speed, the flames rose into a column and flowed up over the edge of Azuth's floating goblet into the steaming wine there. Length after length of roaring flame followed behind, vanishing into the liquid.
In the end, all that was left was that goblet, wisps of wine rising off its brimful contents like smoke whipped by a breeze.
It was the first thing Elminster saw...and drank... the next morning.
The goblet vanished into the air during his last swallow, leaving nothing behind. Elminster smiled at where it had been, got up, and left the Height with a lighter heart and a body that felt new and young again. He stopped at the first still pool of water he came across to peer down to look at his reflection and be sure that it was his. It was, hawk nose and all. He grimaced at his reflection, and it made the face it was supposed to make back at him. Thank Mystra.
Two: Doom Rides A Dapple Gray
And in the days when Mystra revealed herself not, and magic was left to grow as this mage or that saw best or could accomplish, the Chosen called Elminster was left alone in the world...that the world might teach him humility, and more things besides.
Antarn the Sage
from The High History of
Faerunian Archmages Mighty
published circa The Year of the Staff
When chill ruled mornings, mists lay heavy among the trees. Few folk of the Starn ever ventured this far into Howling Ghost Wood, so the pickings were plentiful...and Immeira had never seen any howling ghosts. Her sack was already half-full of nuts, berries, and alphran leaves. Soon the moontouch blooms would sprout in handfuls among the trees, followed by fiddle-heads and butter cones ... and to think some folk...even some Starneir...claimed that only a hunter who could bring down a stag a tenday could live off the woods.
Immeira rubbed an itch on her cheek thoughtfully, and looked back to where the trees thinned. Over the fields beyond them, down in the vale where Gar's Road crossed the Larrauden, stood Buckralam's Starn.
"Forty cottages full of nosy old women who weave cloaks all day while their sheep wander untended," the bard Talost had once described it. Longtime Starneir were still angry over those words and could be counted on to provide a few new and even more colorfully twisted misfortunes the gods could...and should...visit on the over-critical bard, forthwith. As far as Immeira could tell, Talost had got it about right, but she had already learned, and learned well, that truth wasn't necessarily highly prized around the Starn.
Her father had disappeared while adventuring. He was part of a proper chartered adventuring band who called themselves Taver's Talons after the brawling, always guffawing old warrior Taver who led them with the sun shining back off his bald pate. In Immeira's memory Taver still sat his saddle, bright and bluff, but folk said he was bones and dust these eight years gone. None could tell his bones from those of the next six...her father among them...who'd fallen to the dragon's jaws that day.
The Starn had talked of Taver's Talons for eight winters now, and some of them swore the Talons were fiends in human form, hiding here to better corrupt the women of passing caravans and spread their dark seed over all Faerun. Others were just as insistent that the Talons had been bandits all along, just lurking hereabouts until they could learn all about Starneir and the forest trails so as to found a bandit realm back in the real woods, not so far off. Some called this kingdom Talontar...to others it was Darkride...but no one knew just where its borders started or who dwelt there or why they'd never come down on the Starn with ready bows and hungry knives in the years since the Talons had fallen or stolen away or committed whatever great crime kept them now in hiding.
Yes, truth was something a wagging tongue or two could change overnight in the Starn. The only exception to that, so far as Immeira could see, was the truth that lurked in the sharp and ready blades of the Iron Fox and his men.
They'd come out of the east on Gar's Road some six springs ago. A handful of hardened mercenaries with cold steel in their hands and a world-weary, merciless set to their colder eyes. The leader was a tall, fat man whose helm peaked with an iron fox head, even his men called him only "the Iron Fox." He rode into the courtyard of the little Shrine of the Sheaf, ordered the feeble old priest Rarendon out into the spring snows at sword point, and taken the place as his home.
Henceforth, he told the silent villagers at the Trough and Plough that evening, services to Chauntea would be held out in the open fields, as was proper. Former keeps were better suited to the purpose they'd been built for: housing men of action such as he and his men, who henceforth would dwell in the Starn and defend it, to the betterment of all.
A little after highsun the next day, a crudely lettered scroll of laws was tacked upon the door of the Trough, It was distressingly short, proclaiming the Iron Fox the sole judge, lawmaker, and authority in Fox's Starn. That very night, a few who'd dared disagree with specific laws, or disapprove of the entire affair, were left sprawled in their blood on the road or on their own steps...or simply disappeared. A few of the best-looking young Starneir ladies were taken from their homes to Fox Tower and installed in scanty gowns there, a cart of stonemasons arrived a tenday later to rebuild it into a fortress, and talk about the hidden evil of the Starn's only heroes, Taver's Talons, began.
Kindly, confused old Rarendon was taken into the old stables behind the mill, where the dwarven millwright allowed orphans of the Starn...including Immeira...to live. In the month that followed, several able-bodied farmers whose lands lay close about Fox Tower died right after planting was done, when their farmhouses mysteriously caught fire by night, their doors were propped shut from outside, and their windows overlooked by hitherto undetected brigands equipped with crossbows of the same sort used by the Fox's men. Two gossipy old Starneir women and blind old Adreim the Carver were flogged in the Market for minor transgressions against the laws. The folk of the Starn started to get used to ever-present patrols of hard-eyed swordsmen, the seizure of not quite half of all the harvests they brought in, and living in fear.
They made their silent, feeble protests. "Fox's Starn" remained Buckralam's Starn in the mouths of one and all, and the Fox's men seemed to ride about in a perpetually silent, nearly deserted valley. Wherever they went, children and goodwives melted away into the woods, leaving toys discarded and pots unwatched, whilst the farmers of the Starn were always in the farthest, muddiest back hollows of their fields, too hard at work to even look up when a plate-armored shadow fell across them.
Like many girls of the Starn on the budding verge of womanhood, Immeira became another sort of shadow...one that lurked in drab old men's clothes and kept to the woods by day, sleeping in barn lofts and on low roofs by night. They'd seen into the eyes of their gowned older sisters, seen their scars and manacles too, and had no desire to join a dance of warmth, good food and ready drink that cost them their freedom and handed them brutality, servility, and pain. Immeira had a figure to equal many of the Fox's "playpretties" now and took care to wear bulky old leather vests and shapeless tunics, keep her hair wild and unkempt...and keep herself hidden in forest gloom or night dark. Even more than the sullen boys of the valley, the she-shadows of the Starn dreamed of the Talons riding up the road someday soon, with bright, bared swords at the ready, to carve the Iron Fox into flight.
Once or twice a tenday Immeira stole through the pheasant-haunted eastern ridges of Howling Ghost Wood to where the Gar's Road topped Hurtle Tor and descended into the Realm of the Iron Fox. The Fox's cruel warriors kept a patrol there to keep watch over who came to the Starn and to exact a toll from peddlers and wagon trains too weary or undermanned to refuse to pay.
Sometimes Immeira kept them occupied by making animal crashings in the underbrush and stealing any crossbow quarrels they were foolish enough to loose into the trees, but more often she simply hunkered down in silence and watched the antics on the road. Word must be getting around the lands beyond the valley. Fewer and fewer peddlers were taking Gar's Road. The Starn hadn't seen anything that could be called a caravan since the season after the coming of the Iron Fox.
This morning there had been a rime of ice along the banks of the Larrauden and frost had touched white sparkles onto many a fallen leaf. Immeira had to keep rubbing her bare fingertips to keep warm, knowing her lips must be blue, but the damp of the slow-warming day kept her footsteps in the forest near-silent, so she was thankful. Once she'd startled a hare into full crashing flight through the trees, but for the most part she moved through the mists like a drifting shadow, dipping gentle fingers to pluck up what food she needed. A little hollow she'd used before afforded her a dirt couch from which to watch the Foxling road patrol with ease. Propped up against a mossy bank with the comforting weight of the tree limb she kept ready there, in case she ever needed a club, ready in her hands, she'd even begun to doze when it happened.
There was a sudden stir among the six black-armored men, a jingling of mail that marked swords sliding out and their owners hurrying back into the roadside trees, to crouch ready while fellow Foxlings swung into their saddles to block the road.
Someone was coming...someone they expected to have either trouble or a bit of fun with. Immeira rubbed her eyes and sat up with quickening interest.
A moment later, a lone man on a dapple gray horse topped the rise, a long sword swaying at his hip as his mount walked unhurriedly down into the valley. He was young and somehow both gentle and hard of face, with a hawklike nose, and black hair pulled back into a shoulder tail. He saw the waiting men, swords and all, but neither hesitated nor checked his mount. Unconcernedly it plodded onward with its rider empty-handed and almost jaunty, humming a tune Immeira did not know.
"Halt!" one of the Foxlings barked. "You stand upon the very threshold of the Realm of the Iron Fox!"
"Wherefore I must...what?" the newcomer inquired with a raised eyebrow, reaching to take up a rolled cloak from his saddle. "Abandon hope? Yield up some toll? Join the local nunnery?"
"Show a lot less smart-jaws first!" the Foxling snarled. "Oh, you'll pay a toll, too...after you're done begging our forgiveness ... and mewling over the loss of your sword hand."