Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [42]
"Oh?" Itharr asked curtly, as his blade cut a line of shrieking sparks from the invisible shield protecting the sorceress. "He's reduced to hiring madwomen now, is he?"
She howled at him like a dog in fury. "Blasphemy!" she spat when she found control enough to form words. Shaking in anger, she threw up her hands to smite the hard-faced ranger with magic-and then her face changed, one of her hands flew to her mouth, and she went pale.
Her face contorted in frantic fear, and her hands flashed in the gestures Belkram knew would unleash a lightning bolt. Snarling against the pain he expected to come, he kept hacking at the unseen barrier that protected her, and suddenly realized it was giving way. Instead of ringing off something rock hard and unyielding, his blade was going a little way into something that rushed past it like floodwater, resisting but allowing the steel's passage.
And then he realized no lightning had come to snatch breath and life away from him.
"Look!" Itharr said. "Her eyes!"
All three of them peered past their hacking blades. The weird purple glow had faded away, and the green eyes behind it looked very young and very frightened as Sharantyr's blade broke through the fading shield at last and slid into the woman's breast with silken ease and speed.
The sorceress went down, blood bubbling from her mouth in a last, soundless scream, her mouth moving to shape words that would never be heard. The disjunction swept away the last of her shield as it had robbed her of spells, and with shield and spells went a cloaking wall of shadows, revealing to the rangers a snarling, hooting group of hobgoblins racing toward them across a few paces of open grass.
" 'Ware!" Belkram shouted unnecessarily, and then battle was joined, the skirling clangor of steel on steel drowning out all coherent speech. The hobgoblins were reckless, snarling hackers of the sort skilled warriors disparagingly called "meat-choppers," but they were big and coming in fast, and there were a lot of them. If one Harper caught his blade against a hostile weapon, the slashing steel of the next foe could well be into his ribs before he could recover. Wherefore the three ducked, dodged, and dove as they never had before, swords and daggers together weaving a deadly wall of darting death that took down their hulking attackers with a stab in the eye here and a thrust through the ear or throat there, never slowing to parry and hack at chests or flanks.
Shar got a single glimpse of a tall black figure running easily at the fore when the charge began. Then the being thinned suddenly, like a wisp of smoke, and the hobgoblins thundered past and crashed into the three rangers without their dark companion.
That seemed like an eternity ago now, as she twisted and strained and set her teeth against the numbing force of the hacking blows raining down on her deflecting blade. Shar's lungs were burning with the effort of meeting those strikes, and sweat was running down her wrists and dripping from the end of her nose as she danced, leapt frantically out of reach of a roundhouse slash-which sank deep into the side of another hobgoblin, she noted with glee-and found herself spinning through the heart of the gathered hobgoblins.
A startled face loomed up at her, and she slashed just beneath it, opening a throat with her whistling steel as she launched herself in the other direction, hoping to stay ahead of any direct pursuit. Rounding to the left, she found herself behind an unwitting foe and hamstrung him with a ruthless slash along the backs of his knees. With a grunt of surprise, the next hobgoblin turned his head from trying to gut Belkram, and Shar drove her dagger hilt deep into one staring eye.
It lodged against the bone as she overbalanced, and she brought her sword up to protect her back as she jerked her arm back and forth wildly to haul her fang free.
It came away at last, but by then hobgoblins were swinging at her from three sides. Shar flung herself down flat on her back, and