Maerandor shook his head again, irked with himself. Though he was far from solid yet, his phantom jaws ached from the smile he’d been foolish enough to shape ere roiling into shadow.
Idiot. A small thing, yet small things could get one killed, even in Candlekeep.
Hmmph.
Especially in Candlekeep.
He stood stock-still at the end of a line of cloaks, his back to a wall, and listened hard. But there were no sounds of anyone nearby. He could smell old, worn leather, but no trace of mildew, and that confirmed he was inside the wards, which fought and killed molds and mildews. It was why the monks went outside their fortress to dine in the open fields below when they wanted to enjoy cheese.
That was just one of many, many mundane details he knew about the monastery, thanks to years of Shadovar spying-and, of course, what the minds of captives had yielded up less than willingly. Right now, however, he had to use what he knew of the monks themselves. The senior monks.
He had to find and murder the right monk.
Klaeleth or Norldrin would be best. Chethil would do, or Guldor or Aumdras. Cooks and warders, men of learning and years, who were respected but did not command, who saw to their own duties and walked their own ways in the vast old fortress. Monks who knew how to momentarily open a way through the wards without damaging them or alerting others that such a breach had been made.
A cook would be best, being as Maerandor of Thultanthar was hungry. Worming through the wards was exhausting work.
A dark and silent shadow in the darkness no normal man’s eyes could penetrate, Maerandor drifted to the door, and through the gap beneath it.
It was time to be a-murdering.
CHAPTER 4
It might have been wiser not to use one of the old gates, but the Great Shield was up, and the gates of Candlekeep were firmly shut to the outside world in these times of war and tumult, no matter how valuable the tomes that supplicants waved under the noses of the monks who guarded the way in. Moreover, this latest doom coming down on Faerûn wouldn’t wait forever; Abeir and Toril were more or less apart already, even if most mortals knew nothing of such matters but wild rumors.
And, no less importantly, his feet hurt.
“Besides,” Elminster muttered to himself darkly, “ye gave up on being wise centuries ago. About the time ye decided to do something about the magelords, back in Athalantar.”
Athalantar, the vanished kingdom he was the last prince of. Not that anyone beyond sages and a handful of elves remembered more than its name, these days.
For that matter, he doubted very much anyone still alive-beyond, again, a handful of elves-remembered the gate he intended to use, which lacked side posts these days, or even a marker. One merely stepped between these two leaning boulders-in a crouch, if ye were human sized-after hooking around yon first stone in just the one direction-so-and murmuring “Amalaeroth” in the right intonation, at the right moment.
Which was … now.
Here on this brisk morning of the ninth of Marpenoth, in the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant. The year 1487 in Dalereckoning. Not a bad day, if one didn’t mind chill winds, but winter-real winter-would be coming soon.
So, behold, one step took ye from the hills near Elturel past shut and guarded doors and warily watchful monks, to the tunnels that riddled the root rocks beneath Candlekeep, well down beneath the silent, endless thunder of the wards.
Where it was dark rather than sunlit and breezy, startlingly so after the open air, but his nose told him he was in the right place. Elminster stood in an ale-hued gloom lit faintly and fitfully by palely glowing fungi, the soft and flowing sluglike growths that fed on the, ah, aromatic cesspool outflows.
Aye, he wasn’t in the undoubtedly warded and dragon-guarded warrens that descended into the Underdark, but a far smaller, parallel webwork of passages, old cellars, and cesspools, carefully kept separate from the caverns that linked with the Realms Below. Three gates opened up into the monastery above-gates that even the most senior monks who led Candlekeep today knew nothing of. Their predecessors had known how to keep secrets, and spirit away written references, as well as any Chosen of Mystra.
So El doubted he’d meet with many traffic jams on this particular way up into the great fortress of learning. Wading through chest-deep sewage was never a popular pastime.
He pulled off his boots, moved the flask of oil from his belt into one of his boots to keep it upright and handy, and started disrobing, stuffing everything he took off into the deepest crevice he could find.
He would miss those boots. Comfortable boots were always hard to come by. Usually it took years of trudging in discomfort, aches and blisters and worse, to break them in. But most of the monks wore soft leather slippers that gave no cushion at all against the cold, hard stone …
Bah. Give thought to such luxuries later, after the rapturous fun of the moment. He began working oil into his hair, his beard, everywhere-nostrils and eyelashes last.
The oil would help the sewage slide off him more easily, afterward. There was a side sump that carried the water down from the baths, which joined the main cesspool outflow in the cavern with the large stripe of quartz down its walls. It should serve as a shower …
Carefully he lowered himself in, and started wading.
Back in the brown stuff again …
Mystra forfend, but the monks were spicing their fare more highly. And eating more cabbage too.
Clear proof of their diligent guardianship. Less food was arriving from outside, forcing them to rely more on their larders and what they grew themselves-and for some reason known only to the gods, cabbages thrived atop crumbling stone towers, hereabouts. It would be interesting to learn why they’d raised the Great Shield.
His progress was slow, foul work. Two caverns in, he felt the wards crackling and thrumming in front of him, thickening to prevent a living intruder so imbued with magic-the workings of his hectic centuries-from passing through them.
He’d added to these wards himself a time or two, and knew how they interacted with the Weave. That was the key to slipping through them; making himself so “of the Weave” that the wards would take him for it, and not for an old, naked man trudging through the cess …
El set about losing himself in the Weave, his body becoming more smoke and shadows than solid, sewage falling away from what it could no longer cling to. As a silent, patient cloud, he advanced, crossing another cavern before he felt the silent thunder of the wards behind him rather than around him, and let himself-slowly again, a gradual and patient shifting-slip back into solidity before someone or something might detect his use of magic.
It was a cavern later when his cautious feet struck something hard and solid, under the turgid brown flow, where there should have been nothing. Something El thought he knew, and had even been expecting, before he’d gingerly felt it up and down enough to identify it.
The body of a man, extra clothes knotted to his arms and legs and neck that had been wrapped around sizeable stones.
A corpse weighted down with stones to keep it submerged and hidden. Almost certainly a murdered monk. Well, well …
Two caverns later, he encountered another. Then another.
These two were in shallower sewage than the first, and El took the trouble to drag them to where he could haul their heads out and wipe at them to see if he recognized them.
He did. Two monks whose faces he knew. The name of one-a man from the far, far South beyond Faerûn who had coal-black skin, and who’d always spoken sparingly-he couldn’t recall, but the other was a freckled, red-bearded onetime trader from Tharsult.