Spellstorm (43 page)

“The liches,” Mirt said suddenly.

“The liches,” El confirmed. “Freed from Larloch’s yoke, they can now meddle and dabble, just as I and countless cabals of wizards—right up to
the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards—do. Reflect on this gate standing open. Even if guarded by the war wizards and Purple Dragons now surrounding this house, it gives Larloch’s liches the ready means to become active behind the scenes in the politics of Cormyr. They know precisely how their master worked for so long, because they were his agents, the enacting part of that work. What if they decide to slowly and subtly subvert the minds of many nobles? They would be in no hurry, and don’t want to rule openly; their way would be to have fronts, duped hands and minds willing to do their bidding, whatever it is.”

Myrmeen shivered. “Knowing that, I could never feel safe in my own land again.”

“Aye, indeed,” El agreed, sounding almost satisfied. “Now, as I recall, the gate is this way …”

T
HE GLOW OF
the gate was as bright as ever. Shaaan smiled and hurried the other way, into the first pitch-dark cellar of the chain of rooms she could use to work her way around behind it. Why give the liches the opportunity to know who she was, and lash out at her?

She had to cast her draining spell before Manshoon found her missing from in front of the gate, and either tried to treat with the liches himself, or headed elsewhere to search for her.

And if she cast it properly, and this gate wasn’t markedly different from the others she’d experimented with, she’d be able to draw on its energies over quite a distance—certainly from every nook and cranny of Oldspires. Which meant it was worth sacrificing one of her small magical baubles—the garter that enabled teleportation, perhaps—to steady her casting of the draining spell. After all, she dared not try to use the garter’s powers in this chaos of the Art, or to try to go from within the spellstorm to somewhere beyond it, so …

One last door snatched open, and she was panting her way along a cluttered room to the back of the gate, clawing at the straps that held the plate of armor covering the back of her right leg as she went. No need to get it off; if it hung free and she could get a hand in to touch the garter …

There! Done, and she was close enough. She stopped, fought down her swift breathing, put one hand to the garter and pointed with the other at the gate, and cast the spell.

“
Anathroaz ilzurviss faezlar
”—then the zigzag gesture as she visualized the flames of the gate sliding down her arms and into her, and then—“
Varathos omdreth houlooond
!”

And it was done. The garter was crumbling to dust under her fingertips as she fumbled for the straps that would buckle the plate closed again, doubting she’d have the time—

She didn’t.

There was Manshoon, stepping warily through the archway that faced the gate. He saw her in the gloom beyond it instantly.

That might have had something to do with the ruby-red bolt of searing-through-everything force she sent at him, well under the gate, at ankle level.

“One might call it,” she murmured aloud, pleased at the visible flow of cold blue flames down to join the bolt and augment it, “the first step in the de-feet of Manshoon.”

Bathed in ruby-hued flickerings, her target sprang hastily back, smoke rising from his boots, and he tried to retreat back through the archway. He disappeared out through it with a stumbling fall backward and a shout of pain.

Faint cold laughter erupted from the gate. The liches were watching.

Blue-white speeding bolts raced into the cellar from where Manshoon had disappeared.

Shaaan curled her lip. Really?
This
was the best the mighty lord of the Zhentarim could manage?

He must be even more feeble in wits and might of the Art than she’d thought.

She put a hand to her gorget and called on the energies of the gate to augment her mantle, so the arriving bolts would feed her protective power rather than harm her.

And damned if the man didn’t peek around the edge of the archway to see the results of his attack, like any eager novice! She lashed him with a raking claw of force, talons that should—

That did nothing. She wasn’t the only one with a mantle.

Manshoon stepped back into the archway and spread his arms dramatically, like a priest in full supplication behind an altar, casting a spell Shaaan didn’t recognize.

And then, beyond Manshoon frowning and then spitting out a curse, nothing happened.

Ah, this unreliable magic was truly a curse.

Unless, that is, you had your own source of power to ground your spells and make them happen as they were intended to. Shaaan smiled smugly and let fly once more.

By his involuntary screams, the stabbing lightnings encaging him hurt a lot.

So much for your puny mantle, Manshoon the Manyfaced. Now let’s see a little more of your tears, hmm?

Shaaan raked him with fire, then stabbed at him with conjured halberds. This was fun, and almost too easy; the man was so pitiful, it was like tormenting a helpless pet.

And then another man—Malchor Harpell—appeared behind the writhing Manshoon, frowned at Shaaan, and let fly at her with what was obviously a prepared spell.

A spell that set the liches to muttering as it roared past the gate and came at her, snarling as it rushed closer, its circular maw spinning, a great concentric spiral of countless whirling fangs.

This
was trouble.

Shaaan dragged all the energy she could out of the gate, so that it flickered and bobbed—great hissing consternation from the liches—and flung it up like a shield, messy and roiling, no time for elegance or even to brace and buttress it to do a
proper
job, what with—

Malchor’s spell tore through it and flung ravening spellfire in all directions, searing through the very walls and ceiling in an instant. In a dozen small places were rents that shouldn’t cause a collapse in the old mansion, and—

And what was she doing thinking of all-the-godsbedamned Cormyrean countryside
architecture
when some of that fire was inevitably going to come lashing through her?

It did.

Ohhhh, the
pain
!

Shaaan screamed, long and loud and raw, as her mantle collapsed and she crashed through stacked coffers and chests and old, canvas-wrapped tapestries or some such, the fires clawing at her melting scales and flesh and simply devouring the stored things she was falling through. Yet even as ravening fire ravaged her, the fires of the gate were rushing in to fill and
soothe and restore, and she just had to endure a few interminably long moments of sheer gasping agony before she was clambering her way out of half-melted debris, more or less whole—though there wasn’t much left of her armor, and what there was dangled in twisted, bubbled, half-melted grotesquerie—to face Malchor and Manshoon with snarling defiance.

Whereupon she was amused to see them both finish hastily casting spells that should have destroyed her utterly before she could recover … and watch their spells fail miserably. One evoked a plume of drifting beige smoke, and the other, a brief sound as of tinkling miniature bells, and then nothing at all.

They tried again, both of them weaving spells with great urgency and precision, as Shaaan calmly removed the most hampering pieces of armor and casually conjured herself a new defensive ward, drawing on the power of the gate to craft a floating shield.

Malchor’s spell failed, but Manshoon’s came racing at her, a great shadowy dragon’s head with jaws agape to bite and rend.

She intercepted it calmly with the shield, but Manshoon smilingly did something deft and sudden with his dragon head that collapsed the shield to one side while the head burst past it and at her.

Shaaan was forced to claw energy out of the gate in unseemly haste to keep the dragon head from biting down on her, and it flickered and darkened momentarily, so sudden and severe was her draining.

Whereupon angry words were exchanged within the gate, in a tongue unfamiliar to her—and the gate erupted in a dozen snakelike columns of purple-black fire that doubled back around the gate to quest for her, wavering back and forth as they came not out of any lack of control, but in a deliberate attempt to fill the cellar so that there would be no avoiding them.

And wherever they touched the stacked crates stored in the cellar, those crates melted away as if licked by a volcano—literally vaporized, leaving only momentary plumes of greasy black smoke behind.

Shaaan swiftly called on the energies of the gate to empower a defensive web that would gather in and ensnare those snakes of dark flame reaching for her, so she could hurl them all back at the gate that had spawned them. And if they should happen to bathe her two opponents in this ludicrous spell duel in flooding fire, reducing them to charred bones or less, what would really be the loss?

Nothing she’d mourn in the slightest. A notoriously crazed and eccentric family of wizards would lose their patriarch and most sober-minded member—a loss risked daily by every family that dabbled in the Art—and the creator and longtime head of one of the nastier organizations to infest Faerûn would be swept away, one more time, to either make Manshoon extinct at last, or give way to yet another in the long, long line of echoes of Manshoon the Manyfaced.

That second loss might well make her a hero to many.

Not that she was feeling heroic at this particular moment, with flaming purple-black death reaching for her, and the foes she was standing against unable to successfully shape spells to send against her …

Working coolly, with not an instant to waste, she shifted the web with her mind to intercept column after racing column of flame, as they bored through the air closer and closer—

More crates melted away. She had to get every last reaching snake of flame, or her body would suffer the same immolation as those crates … just five left now, and she was having to back away to win herself time to snare them. Yet retreat carefully, for the way back through the stacked storage was neither wide nor straight …

Four left, three—but each of this last trio seemed to have a mind of its own, seeking her at different speeds and in different directions.

And although it felt
wrong
, seemed almost suicidal to do so, the best thing to do was to move right into their midst, bringing her web with her, so the reaching snakes of flame rolled into its curving clutches before they had time to veer too far apart.

And while she still had room and time enough to haul on the web and use it like a giant sling to
fling
the snakes of flame back at their source.

Like … so.

Last three snared, she sprinted forward three steps and planted her feet, then swung her entire body in a mighty curving throw, and—

Purple-black flames roared at the gate itself and struck it, exploding like waves crashing ashore against a great prow of natural rock, spewing great washes of purple-black flame everywhere. Malchor and Manshoon were leaping for their lives, and the gate itself was shuddering, its deep blue glow flaring bright white and immediately dying away to black dimness, then flaring white again …

Purple-black flames spattered against walls and ceilings and melted them, while amid the spreading destruction, the air shuddered and shrieked
and thundered, tearing apart in great rents of spewing radiation that promptly closed again, only to reopen anew. The gate groaned and started to lean, as if it was going to topple and crash, but furious voices hissed spells from within it, and deep blue flames sprouted out of empty air to race madly over its surface in all directions, richocheting and rebounding, and—

“Embraces of Mystra, woman, what have ye
done
?” Elminster snarled from behind Shaaan, and she whirled around in time to see him spread his arms wide, hands like two claws cupping empty air—and along those arms the air glowed blue-white, hundreds of rushing, shifting, racing strands becoming visible in the air that elsewhere looked dark and empty—and then he slowly brought his hands together, to point at the gate.

And roiling, melting-all purple-black flames came rebounding from all sides to curve in the air like mighty ocean waves, curling down and around to race along the line of Elminster’s pointing fingers, right at the dark and featureless backside of the gate.

It swallowed them as if they didn’t exist, more and more flames simply vanishing into that silent and serene black oval of utter darkness whose blue-glowing edge flared briefly, gouting out tendrils of blue flame, and then—

Burned out, in a sudden black and lopsided collapse into darkness, angry voices cut off as if by a knife.

The gate was no more, and the cellar was suddenly empty of blue glows and purple-black flames and all other manifestations of magic. The spells being angrily hurled by Manshoon and Malchor shivered into nothingness.

“How did you
do
that?” Shaaan asked, more protestingly than expecting a useful answer to her question.

“Weavemaster,” El said tersely, jerking his thumb in the direction of his own chest. “Ye let out enough wild energy to furnish me with ample power to shut down and destroy an operating gate. Liches or no liches.”