Spellstorm (43 page)

Which meant that every last edge, point, and surface of her, from head to toe, could
be coated in venom.

And she was smiling her soft smile that promised death and walking right at him, one
arm half-raised, ready to intercept his improvised club.

He briefly entertained the notion of flailing at her with all his strength, to shatter
that arm and batter her to the ground where he could crack her skull and then every
bone he could reach, to leave her lying helpless and dying, but not dead so any deadly
contingencies on her wouldn’t trigger.

Let her pant in agony for a day or more, in a truly slow and miserable demise. He
felt no pity at all for poisoners.

Yet all this was mere fantasy. What was really happening was a deadly dance of leaping,
turning, and swift shuffling, so he was always facing her and always fending her off,
while she constantly tried to get past his guard and claw him with the metal tips
that adorned all her fingers. He tried to use his strength to drive her back into
rubble, where her footing would be perilous, but he was facing a woman as tall and
long of arm and agile as himself, and she knew exactly what he was trying to do and
merely danced back out of reach, plucked up a surviving viper, flung it at his face,
and charged in after, time after time.

And one of these times, Manshoon reflected, shaking the ichor of the latest serpent
off his hand, he wouldn’t be swift or deft enough, and would get bitten before his
razor-sharp dagger severed the viper’s head in midair.

And always the woman who called herself the Serpent Queen smiled at him, the smile
that held no love nor mirth nor friendly favor, as she danced and ducked and lunged
like the best swordsmen, trying to do just one thing.

Get close enough to embrace him.

Ironic, that, considering how many women who’d embraced him and yielded themselves
to him out of fear, that now the crown was on the other head, and it was he who—

Damn!

His backswing with the club dipped
just
too low, and she sprang high and came down backside first on it, sitting it toward
the floor, her weight too much for his arm. Which meant she sprang off it and right
into him, face-first and lips reaching—

He twisted around in desperate haste and let go the club so he could stagger free,
pivoting on his heel, trying to—

Failing. She clawed at him, and when he drove his dagger up at her fingers as viciously
as he could, she clutched at it, risking severed fingers, long enough to fold it in
between their bodies, so she could lunge, her bosom to his chest, collarbone to collarbone
with his dagger trapped between them, and—

There was a jab at the base of his neck, fleeting but painful, and she shoved him
away and backflipped, crashing through the ruined skeleton of his bed to wind up half
the room away, laughing in triumph.

“And so you’re stung, and can count on four hands
—four hands
—the breaths you have left to live, unless you beg me! Beg me well enough, proud Lord
of the Zhentarim, to give you the antidote—that only I have devised, so I am the
only
source. You’ll have to kneel to me at last!”

And with a wild peal of laughter, she turned and sprinted … and was gone, leaving
Manshoon standing alone, staring after her, and clutching at his neck where sticky
blood was welling out.

The point of his dagger was red with it, and must have made the wound in his neck.
Yet could he risk the chance that his blood was flowing only because of that? She’d
been close enough to kiss him, had been kept from doing so purely by his own desperate
twisting and fending, but … he had to admit he hadn’t been able to defend all of himself,
all over.

He couldn’t risk it.

The last viper reared up to strike—and he took great satisfaction in booting it across
the room, to thump into the wall. Where he pinned it in place with his dagger, snarling
out heartfelt curses, then jerked his dagger free and ran after the Serpent Queen.

He knew where she’d be headed.

S
HAAAN LAUGHED LOUD
and long as she plunged down the stairs into waiting darkness, the full-throated
bellows of mirth that men indulged in all the time, and so few women allowed themselves.

And why not gloat? She was the Serpent Queen, and had styled herself thus so ruthlessly
and regally down the centuries that some obeyed her out of respect for the title,
not out of terror.

But terror was best. Terror was always best.

It even worked on Manshoons, and the founder of the Zhentarim was as worldlywise and
long-lived—if you counted all of his various selves—as herself, not to mention far
more accomplished than the Harpers and their ilk gave him credit for. They dwelled
on his defeats and failures, not all that he’d built and ruled.

And for all that, he was doomed. She’d only managed to nick him with his own drawn
dagger—and been sliced by it herself, in the doing. Yet her ruse had worked; that
little gloat she’d done had duped him, and
now he would be following her, running after Shaaan as she raced down to the cellars,
would
have
to pursue …

Down to that gate, of course. Elminster and the rest of them must have arrived in
Oldspires through it, and cloaked it somehow from her. Until their cloaking spell
had faded and then failed, as unreliable as all other magic in the heart of the spellstorm.

Of course they’d tried to hide it from her.

She knew how to use it. Not stepping through it to reach its other end; any fool could
do that, and many such wayfarers even did it by accident, blundering forward, not
knowing where they were going or even that any translocation was involved.

No, she knew how to call on a gate’s power to power her own spells.

Which meant that here in Oldspires with magic unreliable and ringed by the out-and-out
ravening chaos of a spellstorm, the gate was the key to everything.

She’d explored ancient gates a time or seven before, down her years, and successfully
wrested energy from them before. Given an open gate, and the right spells—spells she’d
readied while in hiding down in the cellars—she could drain energies from the gate
to steady her spells. In the chaos of wild magic prevailing inside Oldspires—where,
after all, some spells had worked, sometimes—her spells, and hers alone, should be
reliable.

Racing down the grand staircase into the waiting gloom, she looked up and back.

And there was Manshoon, face white with fury, racing after her.

And behind and above the Zhent, the figure of—Malchor Harpell, staring down at them
both, his expression grim.

As he reluctantly set foot on the stairs and followed.

Shaaan laughed again, loud and long, scaring up echoes.

Come, fools! Come to your deaths!

The more, the merrier.

E
LMINSTER SWUNG ONE
more cellar door shut, turned away from it, and told Mirt and Myrmeen, “Enough. For
now, at least, we’ve spent quite enough time searching for the Serpent Queen. I suspect
we’ll find her
soon enough—when she
wants
to be found. I’d rather turn to dealing with something of wider importance than personal
survival and victory here inside this mansion.”

“He’s going to say something grand,” Mirt told Myrmeen.

“Yes,” she replied, “and it’ll be something quite likely to get us killed.”

The Sage of Shadowdale gave them a rather weary smile, and said, “I’m going back to
the gate the liches have opened, to have a go at closing it.”

“That’ll
definitely
get us killed,” Mirt told Myrmeen. “He’s trying to make up for not managing to do
it last time.”

“If ye two jesters are quite finished,” El told them, “I don’t plan to imperil ye—both
of ye can watch from the doorway as I come at it from behind.”

“Right,” Myrmeen replied, “we’re with you, El. Yet we would both appreciate knowing
why, in this house full of murderous wizards and with the busy poisoner among them
on the loose and in hiding, you feel the need to go after this gate, that wasn’t even
part of our discussions beforehand or even well after arriving here, and do so
now
. Why can’t it wait until our murderer is caught, or has run out of mages to kill?”

Elminster nodded. “Fair enough. I don’t want to tackle the gate, with the Art so unreliable
and the Weave in such turmoil from the leakages of all the gates. Larloch’s liches
outnumber me and, for all I know, work very well together despite their master not
mindriding and guiding them. I gamble much, if I try. It’s not a wise chance to take,
and I lack the foolish overconfidence in my own abilities that will let me charge
serenely ahead, taking on that many liches. Yet if I can close the gate, it cuts off
an escape route for Shaaan that’s also a way in for more monsters or armies or whomever
and whatever else the liches want to send. Moreover, the gate is a source of magical
power she might use to try to anchor her spells, to make them powerful and, crucially,
reliable
in this spell-chaos we stand in.”

“So this has become about the needs of the moment, the here and now, after all,” Myrmeen
pointed out.

“Nay,” El told her grimly. “Beneath our fates and the task Mystra gave me to try to
do here, this meeting of mages that was supposed to nudge them toward eventual accord
and instead led to so many deaths, the gate is part of something wider and deeper.”

“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 …