Bad things happened to mages who so much as spoke to Alshinree outside the Sword or who tried to coerce or pester her within its walls, so they contented themselves with booking rooms at the inn so often that some of them could be considered to have been living there. Even if a certain human mage…one Elminster, formerly Court Mage of Galadorna, before the fall of that realm…had not taken a room at the Sword, it held the best gathering of folk in Westgate who might just have seen him hereabouts or heard something of his deeds and current doings.
The hard looks thrown his way by every guard and many merchants he'd passed suddenly hit home, Ilbryn blinked, looked all around, and found that he was galloping his startled mount down the street, its hooves slipping and sliding on the cobbles. He reined in and settled the horse into a careful walk thereafter. The bright, sparkling spell-animated sign of the Stars and Sword loomed ahead, and the champion of Starym honor steered his mount through the bustling folk to… he hoped…some answers, or even the man he sought.
As he gathered the reins together in one hand to free the other for the bellpull that would summon hostelers to see to his horse, Ilbryn discovered that something he carried in a belt-pouch had found its way into his hand, and was now clenched there: a scrap of red cloth that had been part of the mantle of office of the Court Mage of Galadorna. Elminster's mantle.
The elf looked down at it, and although his hand remained rock steady, his handsome face slowly slipped into a stony, brooding mask. His eyes held such glittering menace that both hostelers recoiled and had to be coaxed back.
As he swung himself down from the saddle and reached for the handle of the Sword's finely carved front door, Ilbryn Starym smiled softly.
And as one of the hostelers put it, "That were worse than 'is glaring!"
Still smiling, Ilbryn put one hand…the one flickering with the risen radiance of a ready, deadly spell-behind his back, and with the other opened the door and went in.
The hostelers lingered, half-expecting to hear a terrific crash, or smoke, or even bodies hurled out through the windows … but their hoped-for entertainment never came.
Twelve: The Empty Throne
It must bother most wizards a lot that for all their spells, they can't seize immortality. Many try to become gods, but few succeed. For this, let us all be very thankful.
Far to the east of Westgate, even as a smiling elf slipped into an inn expecting trouble, a mist drifted through an old, deep forest.
It was a mist that sparkled and chimed as it went, moving purposefully through the trees. Sometimes it rose up into an almost humanoid, striding form, bulking tall, thick and strong, at other times it moved like an ever-leaping, undulating snake. No birds called in the shade around it, and nothing rustled in the dead leaves underfoot. Only its own whirling breezes stirred the creepers and tatters of hanging moss it wound its way through, silence ruled the forest it traversed.
This was no wonder, earlier chiming hungers had left not a creature alive in that part of the forest to witness its haste. The chiming mist had left the graveyard of the Frostfire Banner far behind, moving for miles along the deserted road to a place where most eyes would have missed the sapling-studded, overgrown remnants of a lane turning off into the woods.
The mist drifted along the dips and turns of that road, passing like eager smoke across crumbling stone bridges that took the road across rivulets, to the deep green place where the road ended … and the ruins began.
The lines of gigantic old trees flanking the overgrown road gave way to a litter of creeper-shrouded, sagging wagons and coaches. Beyond lay thickets, at their hearts overgrown mounds that had once been stables and cottages. Beyond the thickets rose shadow-tops so tall that their gloom choked away thickets and lay in endless shadow over the rotting ruin of a drawbridge across a deep, muddy cleft that had once been a moat… and the stone pillars or teeth within the moat, that had once been the stout buttresses of mostly fallen walls. Walls that had once frowned down on Faerun from a great height, formed a massive keep.
The long-fallen fortress was more forest and tumbled stone, now, than a building. The mist moved purposefully through the tangle of leaning trees and creepers that grew in its inner spaces, as if it knew what chambers could be found where. As it went, the walls became taller. Here and there ceilings or roofing had survived, though all of the archways gaped open and doorless, and there were no signs that anyone…or anything…dwelt within.
The mist came to a gently chiming halt in a chamber that had once been large and grand indeed. Gaps in its walls showed the forest just outside, but there was still a ceiling, and even furniture. A rotting-canopied bed larger than many stable stalls, stood with ornate gilded bedposts and cloth of gold glinting among the green mildew-fur of its bedding. Close by stood a lounge, canted over where one leg had broken, and beyond that several stools were enthusiastically growing mushrooms. A little way farther on, across the cracked marble floor, a peeling, man-high oval mirror stood beside a sagging row of wardrobes. Water was dripping down onto what had once been a grand table in another part of the room…and beyond it, in the darkest, best-roofed rear of the chamber, stood a ring-shaped parapet. Within the knee-high circular wall was only deeper darkness.. and when the mist began to move, it headed straight for this well.
As it approached, sudden flashes of light occurred in the air above the parapet.
The mist hesitated, rose a little higher, and ventured closer to the well.
The radiance reached for it, brightening, and was echoed by similar glows that crawled snakelike along the stone walls and the surrounding floor, outlining hitherto-invisible runes and symbols.
The mist danced for a moment among these flame-like tongues of silent light…then swooped, in a plunge that took it right down into the well. Elaborate traceries of magic flashed and flared into visibility for a moment as the mist arrowed past, seeming to lash and claw at it, but when it had disappeared down the well, these fading remnants of guardian spells lapsed into quiescence once more.
The shaft was a good distance across and fell straight down, a long and lightless way. It ended in a floor of uneven, natural stone…one end of a vast and dark natural cavern.
The mist moved into this velvet void with the confidence of someone who moves through utter darkness to a familiar spot. It chimed softly as its own faint radiance revealed something in the emptiness ahead: a tall, empty stone seat, facing it as it approached.
The mist stopped before it reached the man-sized throne, and hovered above a semicircle of large, complex runes that were graven into the floor in front of the throne. If the throne had been the center seat of a barge, facing ahead, the runes formed the rounded prow of the barge.
The mist seemed to linger for a time in thought, then the breeze of its movements suddenly quickened into a brisk whirlwind, spiraling around and around as it sparkled and chimed. As it swept up to violent speed, dust rose and whirled with it, pebbles rolled at its bidding, and the whirlwind rose into a horned, shifting column.
Arms it grew, and absorbed again, then humps or moving lumps that might have been heads or might have been other things, before it flashed once, then grew very dim.