Every day his visit to the underpantry disappointed him.
Every day he grimly climbed back up into the cold and lonely kitchens, boiled himself some beans and cut a little more green mold off the huge wheel of cheese under the marble hood before he climbed the stairs to the big window, to study anew the spell he'd miscast. Every day he grew a little more despairing.
It had almost gotten to the point where, given the right goad, he'd use his medallion to fly away from this place. He could find some distant realm where no one would know his face, seek work there as a scribe, and try to forget that he'd ever been an Archmage and summoned monsters from other worlds.
Aye, for the ghost of an excuse he'd…
Something shattered in the next room, it seemed a dozen bells rang amid the musical clatter of glass. Tenthar was up and through the door in an instant, peering…ah!
The spelltale he'd laid upon the elven tree-gate in the Tangletrees.. someone had just used it to travel south to the woods near Starmantle. That was it. He was sick of hiding and doing nothing.
"The elves are on the move," Tenthar Taerhamoos told the glass shards at his feet grandly. "I must be there…at least I'll be able to learn as much about this chaos of spells as they do." He cut himself a large wedge of cheese with his dagger, wrapped it up in an old blanket with his traveling spellbook, and thrust the bundle into a battered old shoulder bag. Settling the blade back in its sheath, Tenthar called up the flickering power of his medallion, and cast a spell he'd had ready for a long time.
"Farewell, old stones," he told his Tower, casting what might be his last look around at it. "I'll return… if I can."
A moment later, the floor where he'd stood was empty. A moment after that, another spelltale shattered in the room where no one was left to hear.
All too often, an archmage's life is like that.
Excitement burned within her, leaping to the back of the throat she no longer had in a way it hadn't for years. Gently, Saeraede. Lose nothing now out of haste., you're centuries past trembling like a maid, or should be.
Like a wisp of dark smoke in the darkness, Saeraede flew up a thin crevice at the back of the cavern, back to the main room above.
She'd prepared this spell long ago, and he'd disturbed none of her preparations. In a trice it was done, gray smoke flowing out to settle like old stone over the top of the shaft. Its veil would seem like a raised stone floor to anyone on the surface, the well mouth completely concealed…and her quarry would be trapped beneath its web just as surely as if it was solid stone.
Saeraede gave herself a bare breath of time to gloat before plunging back down through the cold dark stone. Now to let myself be freed by my savior prince… and bring him willingly to the slow slaughter.
She plunged through the cavern like an arrow coming to earth, Elminster frowned and looked up, feeling some magical disturbance…but could sense nothing, and after a long, suspicious time of probing into the dusty darkness, he resumed his cautious advance. That was more than time enough for Saeraede to steal up into one of the runes through the cracked stone beneath, causing it to glow faintly.
Elminster stopped in front of it and stared at the unfamiliar curves and crossings. He didn't recognize any of these sigils. They looked both complex and old, and that of course suggested lost Netheril… or any of a score of its echoes, the fleeting realms that had followed its fall, with their self-styled sorcerer-kings, if any of the rotting old histories he'd read down the years had it right.
Only this one was glowing. El stared at it intently. "Sentience slumbreth here," he murmured, "but whose?"
Only silence answered him. The last prince of Athalantar acquired the ghost of a smile, sighed, and cast an unbinding.
The quiet echoes of his incantation were still rolling back to him from the walls all around when a ghostly head and shoulders erupted from the pale starry glow of the rune.
The eyes were dark and melting flecks in a head whose long and shapely neck yearned up from shoulders of striking beauty. Long hair flowed down over lush breasts, but it seemed his unbinding could free no more of this apparition from the grip of the now pulsing rune.
"Free me!" The voice was a tattered whisper, sighing from a lonely afar. "Oh, if the kindness and mercy of the gods mean anything to you, let me be freer
"Who are ye?" El asked quietly, taking a pace back and kneeling to look more closely into the ghostly face, "and what are these runes?"
Ghostly lips seemed to tremble and gasp. When her voice soared out once more, it held the high, singing note of one who has triumphed over pain. "I am Saeraede … Saeraede Lyonora. I am bound here, so long I know not how many years have passed."
At the last few words, she seemed to grow dimmer and sank back into the rune as far as her shoulders.
"Who bound ye here?" Elminster asked, casting a quick look at the empty, watchful darkness all around. Aye, that was it, he could not shake the feeling that he was being watched … and not merely by the dark and spectral eyes floating near his feet.
"I was bound by the one who made these runes," the whispering shade told him. "Mine is the will and essence that empowers them, as the seasons pass."
"Why were ye bound?" El asked quietly, staring into eyes that seemed to hold tiny stars in their depths, as they melted pleadingly into his.
Her answer, when it came, was a sigh so soft that he barely heard it. Yet it came clearly: "Karsus was cruel."
The eyebrows of the last prince of Athalantar flew up. He knew that name. The Proudest Mage of All, who in his mad folly had dared to try to seize the power of godhood and suffered everlasting doom.
The name Karsus meant peril to any mage of sense. Elminster's eyes narrowed, and he stepped back and forthwith murmured a spell. Bound spirit, undead, wizardly shade or living woman, he would know truth when she spoke it…and falsehood. Of course, this Saeraede was likely to have been a sorceress of some accomplishment, perhaps an apprentice or rival of Karsus, for her to have been chosen for such a binding. She would know he'd just cast a truthtell.
Their eyes met in shared knowledge, and Elminster shrugged. She would answer as truthfully as she could, concealing only by her brevity. Like dueling swordsmen, they'd have to weigh each other's words and fence carefully. He cast a spell he should have used before entering the shaft, calling up a mantle of protection around himself, and stepped forward again.
Unseen beyond the faint shimmer of his mantle, fresh fury flared in eyes watching from the deep darkness at the back of the cavern.
"What will or must ye do, if freed?" El asked the head.
"Live again," she gasped. "Oh, man, free me!"
"What will freeing ye do to the runes?"
"Awaken them once each," the ghostly head moaned, 'and they'll then be exhausted."
"What powers have the awakened runes?"
They call up images of Karsus, who instructs all who view them in ways of magic. Karsus meant them for the education of his clone, hidden here."
"What became of it?" El asked sharply, hurrying to hear her answer as the truthtell ran out.
Dark, star-shot eyes stared steadfastly into his. 'When awareness returned to me after my binding…a long time had passed, I think…I found it headless and wizened on the throne. I know not how it came to be that way."
His spell had failed before the second word had left those phantom lips, but somehow El believed her.
"Saeraede, how do I free ye?" he asked.
"If you have a spellquench or another unbinding, cast it upon me … not on the rune, but on me."
"And if I lack such magics?"