The man's head was turned with slow, terrible, unseen force, until he hung helplessly staring into the old man's eyes. "So you are a magelord, Maulygh ... of long service, I see, and you fancy yourself too cunning to appear openly ambitious. Yet you desire to rule over all and await any chance to smite down these others, and take the throne for yourself. And you have plans; your reign would not be gentle."
The Magister waved a hand in dismissal, and the crystal links around the wizard's neck burst apart in tinkling shards. Maulygh's headless body jerked once and then hung limp and dripping. The shortened chain glided on to the next man.
"Only a merchant, eh? Othyl Naerimmin, a panderer, smug¬gler, and dealer in scents and beer." The quavering voice seemed almost hopeful, but when it came again, it was a low, bitter tone of disappointment. "You arrange poisonings." The coil of the chain burst again, leaving another hanging body behind.
Someone wailed in terror, almost drowning out the frantic mutterings of several spellcastings. The Magister ignored it all as he watched the chain wind its deadly way on through the air. One man—a fat merchant, gasping and staring in horror, was spared. He floated gently down to the floor, fell when the magic released him, and then scrambled up, whimpering, and fled from the hall.
The next man was another mage, who spat defiance and went to his death raging. When he was headless, pulses of purple ra¬diance flared around the body. The Magister studied them. "An interesting web of contingencies—don't you think, Hawklyn?"
The mage royal spat a word that echoed and rolled around the hall, and there was a sudden burst of flame. Elminster shrank back into the corner and hid his face, feeling a sudden wash of heat. Then it was gone, and amid the creaking of cooling stone and the rush of tortured air, they heard the old man sigh.
"Fireballs ... always fireballs. Can't the young cast anything else?"
The Magister stood unharmed on empty air, watching the chain—much shortened now, its surface cracked and blackened from fire—move to the next man. He proved to be dead already, of fright or self-spell or a stray glass shard, and the chain drifted on.
Twice more it burst, and then another merchant was spared. He fled sobbing, leaving only the mage royal of Athalantar hang¬ing alive before the Magister. Hawklyn looked right and left at the headless things in the air around him and snarled in fear.
"I must confess that killing you will bring me satisfaction," the old man said. "Yet I'd be more pleased still if you renounced all claims to this realm here and now and agreed to serve Mystra under my direction."
Hawklyn cursed, and with trembling hands tried to shape one last spell. The Magister listened politely and then shook his head, ignoring the shadowy taloned beast that appeared in the air before him.
Its cruel claws passed right through the old man, and then faded away as the last links of the Chain of Binding burst. Blood spattered on the stone floor far below.
Leaving the corpses hanging in grisly array, the Magister turned to regard the youth crouched watching in the surviving corner of the balcony. There was a dangerous glint in his eyes as they met Elminster's awed gaze. "Are you a magelord, boy, or a servant of this house?"
"Neither." Tearing his gaze free with an effort, Elminster leapt from the balcony, landing hard on the blood-spattered stones below. The old man's eyes narrowed, and he lifted a fin¬ger. A wall of flames sprang up in a ring around the thief, who spun around, the sharpened stub of an old war-sword suddenly in his hand.
Fear lent Elminster anger; his voice trembled with both as he faced the old man standing on air above him. "Can ye not see I'm no wild-spells wizard? Are ye no better than these cruel mages who rule Athalantar?" He waved his blade at the roaring flames around him. "Or are all who wield magic so twisted by its power that they become tyrants who delight in maiming, destroying, and spreading fear among honest folk?"
"Are you not—with these?" the Magister asked, spreading his hand to indicate the bodies hanging silently around him.
"With them?" Elminster spat. "I fight them whenever I dare—and hope one day to destroy them all so men can walk Athalantar free and happy again!" His face twisted at a sudden thought. "I sound a bit like a high minstrel, don't I?" he added, more quietly.
The Magister regarded him thoughtfully. "That's not a bad way to think," he said quietly, "if you survive the dangers of talking the same way." A sudden smile lit his face, and Elminster found himself smiling back.
Unseen by them both, down the hall, a pair of eyes appeared amid swirling points of light, in the flames flickering around the canted wreckage of the collapsed feast-table. They watched the boy and the floating mage, and looked thoughtful.
"Can ye really see all that men are, and think?" Elminster asked, awkwardly blurting out the question.
"No," the Magister replied simply. His old brown eyes looked down into unflinching blue-gray ones as he made the crackling wall of flames die away to nothing.
Elminster looked once to see what had befallen, but made no move to flee. Standing on the rubble-strewn, blood-spattered floor, he looked back up at the old wizard. "Are ye going to blast me or let me go?"
"I have no interest in destroying honest folk—and very little at all in the affairs of those who have no magic. I see you have mage-sight, lad ... why don't you try your hand at sorcery?"
Elminster gave him a dark look. His voice was scornful as he said, "I've no interest in such things, or in becoming the sort of man who wields magic. Whenever I look upon mages, I see snakes who use their spells to make folk fear them—like a whip to drive others to obey. Hard, arrogant men who can take a life, or—" he raised hard eyes to look at the destruction all around; the eyes watching from the flames shrank down to avoid no¬tice—"destroy a hall in a few breaths, and not care what they've done, so long as their whims are satisfied. Leave me out of the ranks of wizards, lord."
Then, staring up at the old man's calm face, Elminster knew sudden fear. His words had been harsh, and the Magister was a mage like any other. The mild old eyes, though, seemed to hold ... approval?
"Those who don't love hurling power make the best mages," the Magister replied. His eyes seemed suddenly to bore deep into Elminster's soul like seeking, darting things, and sadness was in his voice again as he added, "And those who live by stealing al¬most always rob themselves of their own lives, in the end."
"The taking gives me no pleasure," Elminster retorted. "I do it to have enough to eat—and to strike against the magelords where and when I can."
The Magister nodded. "That's why ye might listen," he said. "I'd not have wasted my breath otherwise."
Elminster stared up at him thoughtfully—and then stiffened as he heard the sudden, approaching thunder of running, booted feet echoing in the passages nearby. That sound could mean only one thing: armsmen of Athalantar.
"Save thyself!" he snapped, without stopping to think what a ridiculous warning that was to the mightiest archmage in all the world, and darted toward the nearest archway that did not ring with footfalls.
He was still three running strides short of it when men with halberds and crossbows burst into the room, but the puffing merchant with them stabbed a finger up at the floating mage and bellowed, "There!"
By the time the volley of quarrels and hastily conjured flames had torn through suddenly empty air, both the running boy and the eyes in the licking flames that played about the ruin of Hav¬ilyn's once-grand table had vanished. A breath later, the floating corpses suddenly fell from the air, striking the stone floor with wet, heavy thuds. White-faced armsmen drew back, calling aloud on Tempus to defend them and Tyche to aid them.
Elminster took one door out of the kitchen, found himself in a dead-end cluster of pantries, and raced frantically back to the kitchen's other, smaller door, offering his own quieter prayer to Tyche that it not be another pantry—when he heard Havilyn's furious voice snarl, "Find that boy! He's no part of my house-hold!"
Cursing aloud, Elminster snatched open the door. Yes, this was the way the terrified cooks had fled. He took the stairs two at time until at a bend in the stair several halberds crashed down together in front of him, striking sparks. Snarling arms-men struggled to tear them free of the stair-rails and wrestle them around to stab downward—but El had already seen a third armsman lumbering along the passage above with a ready cross¬bow. He leapt back down the stairs in a single bound, landed hard on his haunches, and sprang sideways into an evil-smelling alcove.
A breath later, a crossbow quarrel cracked off the wall nearby and rattled down into the kitchens. A second quarrel followed, speeding deep into the throat of the foremost armsman racing up the stairs.
Elminster didn't spare the time to watch the man gurgle and fall; he was looking around the dark alcove for the scullery door. There! Wrenching it open, he skidded across the noisome room, through a maze of sloped boards where meat was washed and buckets where food scraps were thrown, hoping the house was old enough to have ... yes!
El seized the pull-ring and hauled up the trapdoor of the refuse-pit. He could hear the waters of the Run rushing past in the darkness below as he slid feetfirst down to join them.
The drop was farther than he'd thought it would be, and the waters numbingly cold. El's heels struck a mucky bottom for a moment, and he twisted to one side to come up off to one side of the door above.
Trying to ignore the unseen slimy lumps floating in the water with him, he came up gasping for breath, in time to hear a quar¬rel crack off the hatch somewhere above and behind him, fol¬lowed by the shout, "The sewers! He's gone below!"
Elminster swam with the rushing river, trying not to make noise. He didn't trust the avid armsmen not to come down after him or lower torches and try their archery along the river tun¬nel. The chill of the waters crept into him as they carried him around a corner and away.
It seemed the first chance he'd had in a long while to collect his wits. The mage royal and at least three other magelords had been swept away in a single night—but the hand of Elminster had done nothing to them. He hadn't even a bite of supper or a spare coin from the house to show for his efforts.
"Elminster gives thee thanks, Tyche," he murmured into the rushing darkness. He'd managed to hang on to his head in that chamber of death; he supposed that was something . . . some¬thing even mighty wizards hadn't managed! Prudence stifled the whoop of exultation that suddenly rose within him—but it warmed him as he was swept out of the darkness into the blue, lamplit dimness of evening beneath the docks. He turned his head to look up at the dark spires of Athalgard and grinned his defiance at them.
The feeling lasted until he'd clambered out of the water onto a disused dock and started the cold, dripping walk home. If he'd been Farl, he'd have taken his knowledge of who'd died in that chamber to swoop down on a hand's-worth of houses this very night and seize riches their owners would never claim before rel¬atives or lesser vultures knew man or treasure was missing, and be safely gone into the night.
"But I'm not Farl," Elminster told the night, "and not even all that good a thief—what I am is a good runner."
To prove it, he outran the armsman who came around a cor¬ner just then, halberd in hand, who with a startled shout recog¬nized the youth he'd almost spitted in a stairway in Havilyn's house not twenty breaths ago. Their pounding pursuit took them along a winding street lined with the walled gardens of the wealthy. As they ran under overhanging trees, a dark shadow reached down from one of them and struck the armsmen hard and accurately in the face with a cobblestone.
The man pitched to the cobbles with a clatter, and Farl dropped lightly down into the road, calling, "Eladar!"
Elminster turned at the top of the road and looked back. His friend stood with hands on hips, shaking his head.
"Can't leave you alone for an evening, I see," Farl said as El puffed his way back down the street.
As he came up, his friend was kneeling on the guard's neck, expertly feeling for purses, spare daggers, medallions, and other items of interest. "Something important's happened," Farl said, not looking up. "Havilyn came running in, all out of breath, and said something to Fentarn—and we were all ordered out of the house, and the armsmen after us to be sure we were turned out into the street—while the lot of them ran somewhere—ran, El, I tell you ... I didn't know any high-and-mighty merchants re¬membered how to run...."
"I was where the important thing happened," Elminster said quietly. "That's why this one was chasing me."
Farl looked up at him, eyes alight. "Tell," was all he said.
"Later," Elminster replied. "Let me describe the dead first, and once ye've named them, we can visit whichever unsuspect¬ing incipient houses of grief bid fair to have the heaviest loot lying around for the taking."
Farl grinned fiercely. "Suppose we do just that, O prince of thieves." In his excitement and the effort of lifting the guard's body, he did not see Elminster stiffen at the word 'prince.'
*****
"We're fair out of room in there," Farl said in satisfaction when they were safely away from the boarded-up shop where their takings were cached. "Now let's go somewhere where we can talk and not be seen."
"The burial ground again?"
"Fair enough—once we make sure it's free of lovers."
They did so, and Elminster told Farl the tale. His friend shook his head at El's description of the Magister. "I thought he was just a legend," he protested.
"Nay," El said quietly, "he was frightening—ah, but it was magnificent, the way he ignored their best spells, and calmly judged each and struck them down. The power!"
Farl cast a sidelong glance at his friend. Elminster was staring up at the moon, eyes bright. "To have that much power, someday," he murmured, "and never have to run from an armsman again!"
