Elminster in Hell

He held his hands over them for a moment before turning the thumb-keys on their locks and throwing them wide. Long-unused wood squealed and stuck momentarily. Dust curled up from the sill into the wizard's face. Vangerdahast sneezed like a bull bellowing in a thunderstorm. The sage and scribe joined the Master of the War

Wizards at the sill. They looked down over a sheer drop of a hundred feet at the cobbled courtyard below and saw the faces of startled guards in the lantern light, gazing back up at them.

Vangerdahast let the sentinels get a good look at his face, watering eyes and all, but said nothing. These shutters hadn't been opened for some time. Anything entering or leaving by way of them would have been reported. He nodded sourly. He hadn't expected to see blood below or anything of interest hanging from the turret roof above, and his expectations were met.

The Royal Magician drew his stout body back into the room and turned, rocking slightly like a heavily laden cart dragged around a tight corner. "Is there anything," he snapped at Sardyl, "different about the room since your earlier look? Anything at all... the smallest detail or impression."

The shapely Crownsilver turned with more grace than the portly wizard. She wrinkled her nose as well as her brow when she frowned. "The rug... it seems different, somehow... more worn." She shrugged and added, "Yet how can that be?"

Neither man replied. Vangerdahast was already bending over the rug suspiciously, gathering its weave in his hand and plucking it up to glare at the solid stones of the floor beneath. Alaphondar knelt and almost angrily poked and prodded at hitherto-hidden flagstones, seeking a seam that would part or something that would shift.

After some fruitless time he sighed, straightened his back, and looked at Vangerdahast. "Well, O master of weaves?"

The Royal Magician did not bother to smile at the weak joke. "As an Obarskyr prince once said of a far grander gift than this," he said grimly, "it's just a rug. There must be forty or more like this around the palace. Woven in Wheloon eighty years back or so. Bought in bulk, in 1306, when the Lion Tower was built and all the furniture moved about. Proper chaos that was, too."

Feeling the stares of his two companions, Vangerdahast gave them both a glare and added, "Yes, I was here in 1306. The weather was fine that year, and the five before it, too, as I recall. I'll thank you to direct your disbelief elsewhere, and spare me any comments about wizards' dotage."

Sardyl sighed. "Secret passages?"

Her master gave her a weary look. "You've been reading too many fantasy books, my dear." Alaphondar, who'd been about to ask the same thing, shut his mouth with an audible snap.

The Royal Magician gave the sage a withering glance and waved his hand at the chamber around. "Look you: The stones are solid, with nothing to raise or lower them, floor or ceiling-and there's no room in the walls for secret doors or passages. The curve you see is because the walls here are the same walls that form the outside of the tower." One of his hands went to a belt-pouch, hesitated with visible reluctance, and then dipped within.

There was a small glass sphere in the wizard's fingers when he raised his hand again. He murmured a word over it. Sudden light winked and moved within its depths.

"Stored magic?" Alaphondar asked, leaning forward for a better look.

Vangerdahast nodded. "These hold but one spell-and it's a spell that works only once in a particular place. Once I've called this forth, another spell of the same sort will never manifest successfully in this room."

"And it's a... ?"

The Royal Magician left the sage's question hanging unanswered in the air as he went to the windows, closed and latched the shutters, and put his back to them. "In a moment," he a

As he spoke, the glass sphere flashed with a vivid golden flame and shattered, tiny shards tumbling musically through his fingers.

A moment later, the air in the middle of the room shimmered, seemed lojlow for a moment, and suddenly grew misty. Gray wisps coiled, lengthened, and became- very suddenly-sharp and distinct. They were looking at a woman, or rather at the faint, flickering image of a woman's upper torso, die rest of her lost in the mists. She looked determined, even eager, as she raised slender bare arms and moved her fingers in the most graceful casting Sardyl had ever seen. Suddenly, she was gone, leaving two fading motes of starry light.

It was a long moment before she realized the woman hadn't been wearing anything but rings and a necklace. It was another before she heard Vangerdahast swallow in a way he rarely did.

Sardyl knew what that sound meant and turned in time to see grief in Vangerdahast's softened face. The Royal Magician looked like just what he was: an old man struggling not to cry. That was all she saw before his face hardened.

He looked up at her with what could only be called a defiant glare.

Wordlessly she put a comforting hand on his arm-something Alaphondar would never have dared to do-and asked her question with her eyes.

"Amedahast," he replied gruffly. "High Magess of Cormyr, into the reign of Draxius. This was her “by-herself” chamber, long ago. No one's used translocational magic here since her time-not really a surprise, that, given the wards."

The wizard strode a few paces to the wall, peered at the map, and touched a tiny monogram in one corner of it. “Aye, here's her mark. She drew this... more than seven hundred summers ago."

Alaphondar looked around the room once more, and shook his head. No, it really was too small to hide anything from them. "If your missing Bolifar were in this room," he said carefully, "and didn't just go back down the stairs after you left him, perhaps he left by way of the window, in wraithform."

Vangerdahast shook his head. "No holes in those shutters, and no gaps for air to slide through. Saw you the dust when I opened them? No. Something darker happened here, I can feel it."

His scribe was nodding. She could feel it, too, as strong as when she'd been here before. There was something about this room. A watched feeling...

Alaphondar shrugged irritably, and said, "I'm for the bed. I've seen your nothing and have far too much to do tomorrow to stand here yawning any longer. The gods give you good slumber-though for the life of me, you don't deserve it."

As the sage turned and left, the wizard and his scribe looked at each other. In unspoken accord, they frowned and turned to prowl the room again, searching for what must be there.

With a sudden growl of impatience at his own failing wits, Vangerdahast cast a magic-seeking, advanced on the map and the lamp, and sighed sourly. He leaned back against the wall. The map held its complex weave of old spells, and the lamp, flame and all, was bereft of enchantment. The rug also bore only the magics of long ago.

Bolifar Geldert, it seemed, had simply vanished from this room. Simply and impossibly. "Impossible," in Vangerclahast's experience, always meant magic.

The sage's desire for bed seems wiser than before," he said quietly. "Come, lass. Let's spell-lock this room and go. There'll be plenty of time to search fruitlessly on the morrow."

Sardyl nodded and said nothing, but then she usually did.

You don't seem to feature in this yet, mage. You will he teaching vangekdahast about magic before this is done, won't you? Or is a little of this necessary?