"The horses ran free," she said in irritated tones. "I scryed them to be sure the humans weren't with them, cloaked in magic, but-nothing!"
"I know that," the man said, growing wings. "We'd best take to the skies and look again. Trails can't just end like that. They must have flown away on something!"
"What's that, over there?" one of the wolves asked, growing a human mouth and arm to speak and point with.
"Maybe they're riding it!" said another, and there was a general flurry of feathers into falcon shape. The Malaugrym leapt into the sky, heading north to where the distant, sinuous shape was flying.
It was unfortunate for some of the younger, weaker kin that the flying beast they'd seen was a wyvern, and a hungry one at that.
But these were dark days in Faerun, and every shadow held danger.
13
Blackstaff Tower, Waterdeep, Kythorn 19
It was a dull morning outside the windows of Black-staff Tower. Storm clouds hung purple and heavy over Mount Waterdeep, and pearly gray sea mists rolled in under them from the harbor. The clop of hooves echoed up from the street below, but the usual cries, rumbles, and other incessant noises of the City of Splendors were muffled. It sounded as if the city were half-asleep.
It was always quiet inside Blackstaff Tower, the velvety, waiting quiet of shielding magic that robbed footfalls of their echoes and shouts of their resonance, and gave to everything a heavy, unbroken hush. Many an apprentice had fallen asleep while studying in the tower, and many an experiment had ended explosively without disturbing the occupants of neighboring chambers.
Laeral hoped this wouldn't be one of those experiments. With Khelben away in Elturel, sitting in spell-court over a long and entangled dispute between two feuding archmages, Blackstaff Tower felt empty, like a throne without its king. Laeral was acutely aware that no one but she was on hand to repair things if her two senior apprentices really botched their work.
Tath was overly shy and almost as overly nervous, but his painstaking check-things-and-check-them-again safety precautions had probably prevented a dozen minor disasters thus far. Baerista, on the other hand, was the impulsive, even reckless, let's-try-it sort. Her occasional flashes of brilliance were the stuff of which real advances in Art were wrought. For the first time in decades, Laeral thought that apprentices might craft something of true worth in the tower, advancing what was known to all workers with magic, and not merely go over well-known ground one more laborious time.
Wherefore the Lady Mage of Waterdeep was quite willing to work late at their sides, the night through if need be-and she just had.
Laeral stifled a yawn as she saw the morning sun climb past the windows, and turned to peer again at the flickering, shadowy edges of the shields Baerista had devised and Tath was struggling to control.
A strange, leaping… well, growth of sparks and bubbling spinsmoke was clawing and rebounding around a small sphere of swirling green-gold radiance in the open end of the laboratory, the limits of the wild magic area Laeral had called into being. Normally, Khelben forbade such evocations anywhere in the city, let alone in the tower, but Art is not advanced without making exceptions. Laeral had swallowed once or twice and gone ahead with it.
Now her apprentices, who'd not long ago been safely in the realm of excitedly discussing the possible, probable, and theoretical, were elbow deep in a very real, very dangerous, and possibly runaway experiment. Having created the wild magic field, Laeral could do nothing to control it. Had she not been one of Mystra's Chosen, but merely a mortal archmage of mighty powers, she would have stood no chance of reliably and safely banishing it. She stood watching silently, awaiting the disaster that might all too easily come.
Soon, perhaps, for the wild magic was tirelessly trying to spread, and Baerista, teeth bared in a fierce grin of concentration, was trying to keep it enveloped in the shields she'd raised, without letting it get free or having the shields collapse. Tath was trying to keep Baerista's struggles to direct the lively shield-stuff here and there from tearing the shields asunder, and was just barely holding his own.
The shield was an amorphous area in which bolts of magical force endlessly and chaotically whirled about, something like the blade barrier used by certain priests, wherein blades of all sorts whirl and flash about. The unique feature of the shield was the tight turns and collisions of the bolts along its edges, which caused a humming, crackling energy discharge that seemed to repel the chaos of wild magic. Laeral wasn't sure just how this worked, and she knew as well as any of the gods that neither Baerista or Tath had more than hazy theories to explain it, either.
But that wasn't stopping the shield from working, after a fashion. "Steady!.. Steady…" Baerista was snapping, sweat standing out on her forehead as she stared at the shield, stretching it by redirecting individual forcebolts. She'd almost completed the englobement now, shaping the shield into a sphere that lacked only a small area of coverage to be complete, but Laeral had more than a hunch that the wild magic would explosively resist being completely surrounded, or the shield itself would collapse through ever-increasing instability.
As if to confirm her fears, the hum of the shield began to climb in pitch, rising steadily into a scream. Tath blinked away sweat and hissed, "Slow down, Baera!" It was the first time he'd dared speak so, and betrayed just how nervous he was about the shield's survival. His arms were trembling as he conjured spell-hooks and murmured wardings, struggling to hold the flashing webwork of bolts together.
Not good. Laeral looked to the ceiling to be sure the vent hatch to the roof was unlatched, so any explosion could roar skyward and not burst out sideways to hurl fragments of Blackstaff Tower into nearby buildings. Satisfied, she glanced again at the windows and murmured the word that brought plates of stone and of metal sliding across them, walling out the world. It was crucial that nothing disturb them now.
A closet door swung noiselessly open somewhere in the cellars far beneath Blackstaff Tower, causing an alarm to flash. Ushard of Athkatla frowned at it in annoyance and passed a hand over the sphere, causing it to wink out. Elminster or one of the more restless wizards of the Alliance come visiting again, no doubt. He muttered a word and looked at the scrying stone in time to see Rylard of Neverwinter cross the chamber, waving merrily at Ushard, and vanish toward the stairs, followed by a pair of patrician, gray-bearded master mages of that city whom Ushard hadn't been introduced to. They nodded impassively in his direction and followed.
Well, if they'd come to talk to Khelben, they were going to be right out of luck. Too tiggarty bad, and all that. Ushard shrugged and turned back to the forty-third volume of Pelmurt's diaries. In the long and yawn-inducing account of the eighth magefair, Ushard was sure crafty old Pelmurt had hidden some clue as to just how he had opened The Door Obler Had Forgotten and got into The Lost Library of Funderdelve, where Eltaran Earthshaker and six other powerful mages of Netheril had stored their spells.
But where was the clue? Was it in the catalog of names given as winners of the illusion-Grafting contest, in which six names appeared, but only four prizes had been awarded? Or was it in the description of the victory feast that followed, with its wealth of attention to smells, colors, and shapes of the food served?
Hmmm. "Blurturt," Ushard said rudely, uttering the ancient Sword Coast obscenity with crisp gusto, and drummed his fingers on the desk top. It was here on these few pages somewhere, he just knew it, but going from a certain inner feeling to finding and opening that fabled door was a journey that mages had failed to make long before Ushard had seen the route.