Wheeling around, he found her still lying at ease on the altar, whole and healed now, her body quite bare. She laughed aloud, and El gritted his teeth against the rage now boiling up in his throat and with iron control worked his next magic with precision. Lady Master or no, he was going to bring that huge, hovering black hand of stone crashing down on the altar. He was...

The Hand resisted him utterly. Dasumia's laughter rose into real mirth as he snarled and strained to move it. He could feel the linkage, he could insinuate his will into its flows, to grasp at the magic...and it ignored him, remaining as rigid as an iron bar despite his best efforts to budge it. He was...he could ... he could not

As the Queen of Galadorna hooted at him, El abandoned the spell with a snarl and worked another magic, hiding his gestures from her, down below the back of the pew in front of him.

When he was ready, a seeming eternity later, he stood up and hurled his magic through her cruel laughter...not at the deadly, beautiful woman on the altar, or at the altar itself, a stone block that positively throbbed with ebbing and flowing magic he could not hope to overmaster. The floor beneath one end of it, however....

Flagstones heaved, buckled, and shattered into shards, their cracks louder than those the whip had made. The floor rippled like a wave of stone, sending slivers of stone clattering against the back wall of the temple, and suddenly subsided, opening a huge pit. There must be cellars down there his magic could shove the earth and stone into, to clear a space so swiftly.

Dasumia sprang calmly off the altar to land on her feet, facing him. She smiled approvingly, saluted him, then turned to watch as the altar block shivered, teetered, and tipped over, sliding into the chasm with a thunderous crash.

"Shattered … how destructive of you," Dasumia observed merrily. "Care to destroy anything else?"

In grim, wordless answer Elminster snatched a stall-plate from the end of his pew and broke it across his knee, cracking the hand of Bane. Dying enchantments spat black sparks. He cast its wooden shards onto the floor and reached for the next plate.

Dasumia laughed. "So, has it come to a duel between us two at last, brave Elminster? Are you ready to dare me at last?"

"No," Elminster almost whispered. "Have ye forgotten what I told ye, when first we met at the Riven Stone? I serve Mystra first… and then Dasumia .. . then Galadorna. Tell me: who does Dasumia serve first?"

Dasumia laughed again. "Choices have prices," she said almost merrily. "Prepare to pay yours."

Her hands rose in a simple gesture, and almost immediately Elminster felt a tightness in his throat, a choking feeling that grew steadily worse. His legs and hips seemed to shift under him, his clothes began to feel tight... then more than tight.

El struggled to rise, and saw that his fingers were becoming stubby, bloated things, like mismatched, mottled sausages. So was the rest of him. Clothing began to split and disintegrate then, with tearing sounds like whip strikes.

The shredded remnants of the mantle of Court Mage of Galadorna fell away in tatters as El wallowed about, trying to rise on legs that kept changing in length and thickness. Dasumia was howling with laughter as he fell over to one side or another, growing steadily larger until he was pressed tight against the pew in front of his own in a grip that grew steadily more viselike. He was as fat as two cart barrels now, and still growing. He tried to spin the gestures of another spell with fingers that dangled and wobbled and were as long as his forearm...a forearm that was now as broad as his chest had been, before it, too, had started growing....

Then his own spell took hold, and the tightness was suddenly gone as the pews in front of him, behind him, and under him all tore free of the floor, trailing dust as they rose...and tumbling him onto the floor, a grotesque mass of sliding, many-folded flesh that lay on its back, panting. El heaved and struggled, gasping for breath, and managed to get over onto one side, facing his foe.

The moment he could see her, three pews flashed through the air at her under his grim bidding, like gigantic lances. Dasumia ducked, rolled, then back flipped, turned as she landed, and in the same motion flexed her magnificent legs and sprang. All three pews missed, crashing into the floating black hand with a splintering fury that shook the room. One of the fingers broke off the hand, leaking magical radiances as it went.

Dasumia hissed something fast and harsh...and almost instantly El found himself rising into the air. Up and up he rose, uncontrollably, trying to see what was where around the temple as he went. Was she going to lift him and drop him, or...?

El caught sight of something lying in the aisle and got an idea. He worked the spell he needed in furious haste, knowing that a bruising impact with the cob-webbed stone ceiling was coming up fast.

He finished the spell just in time to throw one arm up in front of his face and turn his nose aside before slamming hard into the ceiling...sending startled bats screeching away in a wild flapping of wings...and finding that her magic was still pressing on him, pinning him against the dank stone.

He scrabbled with his arms and elbows, trying to roll over so he could see Dasumia...and not dark, dirty stone an inch from his eyelashes. He needed to be able to see, to work the spell he'd cast.

Grunting and gasping, he managed to roll his ponderous bulk over in time to see a tightly smiling Dasumia magically raise one of the shattered pews he'd hurled at her into the air...and send it right back at him.

Larger and larger it loomed as El scrambled along the ceiling trying to get out of its way, using his great bulk to catch and kick at vault ribs that would have been ten feet or more out of his reach if he'd been his proper size ... El tried to concentrate on his own spell, down below, and ignore the oncoming pew.

He never saw the slim, dark-robed figure that stood up in the back pew to take calm, careful aim at him, fix his position in mind, then begin to cast its own deadly spell.

As El moved, the pew curved in the air to follow, Dasumia's smile broadening with anticipatory glee at the coming impact. The end that would strike Elminster was a splayed mass of jagged wooden splinters, most of them as long as a man was tall.

Dasumia took three swift steps sideways to get a better look at the situation...and that was all El needed. He rolled over a roof vault, wheezing like some great aerial whale, and in its lee called on his spell. Two whips rose from the aisle like eager, awakened snakes, to pounce on the Queen of Galadorna.

As the pew struck the ceiling with a crash that sent him bouncing off the ceiling tiles amid showers of dust, El had a brief glimpse of Dasumia's startled face as bloodied black leather whipped around one wrist and jerked down, throwing her onto her back. She struck her head on the floor and cried out in pain...and that was all the time the two whips needed. The wrist that had dragged her down was bound fast to her ankle, the other whip did the same on her other side, and one whip slapped its handle across her eyes, blinding her with tears, while the other thrust its handle into her open mouth, effectively gagging her.

Most of the pew broke away and showered the temple below with shards of wood as the gigantic missile cartwheeled away from the roof vault. Ilbryn Starym didn't even have time to flee as the rest of the pew plunged into the pew right in front of where he was sitting, sending riven wood in all directions and hurling him helplessly into the air, tumbling head over heels in the midst of his own conjured ball of magical flames to strike the back wall of the temple with a crash. He slid slowly and brokenly down that wall, his screams fading.