Crown of Fire - Ed Greenwood [48]
The three stared up at the translucent lady as she smiled and drifted slowly nearer. Long hair swirled about her bare shoulders and breast and but for the white pallor and translucence of her form, she might have been still a living woman. Below her breasts, however, bare ribs curved from a spine that dwindled away into wisps of glowing radiance. `Well met, friends of the son of my blood. Be welcome here, in what is left of my home." Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, and her eyes were kind. She looked around at the crumbling ruins and shook her head. "It was once so grand-and now, so little is left."
Then she turned and smiled at Mirt. "For once, you've missed the best accommodation." She pointed.
"There's a door, the other side of that pile of stone. Behind it, several rooms are still intact-and safe from falling in on you, I believe."
Mirt bowed. "My thanks, Lady." He turned to the others. "Lady Duskreene ruled in this castle before there was a realm of Cormyr, very long ago. She's now a watchghost-one of the few ghosts who do not always mean swift death to the living."
"Here," Duskreene added, "you sleep under my protection. Relax, and feel safe." She glanced at Mirt, and mischief danced in her eyes. "And please bear with my kin -when he gets no sleep he's apt to be as grouchy as a bear."
"'Gets no sleep,' Lady?" Narm's eyes were wide with wonder as he looked at her. He'd never seen a ghost before-and this gentle, dignified, half-beautiful and halfskeletal woman was nothing like the spectral monsters whispered of in ghost stories.
The lady who had laughed and loved a thousand years before he was born looked into his eyes sadly.
"I'm very lonely here-and on the too-rare occasions when Mirt comes to call, he tells me what has befallen in the lands around since last we talked. I take a morbid interest, I'm afraid, in what the remote descendants of those I knew as friends-and rivals, and foes-are doing, and what contemporaries of mine still walk the world today."
"Such as… Elminster?" Shandril asked on a hunch, inclining her head to one side.
It was an interesting sight, seeing a watch-ghost blush. "Yes," she said, eyes far away, seeing things long ago. "He was much younger then. Yes," she said again, and laughed, "such as Elminster, indeed."
"Tell me more," Delg said eagerly. "I've got to hear this…
"How quaint," murmured one who watched from the darkness of the trees, concealed by layer upon layer of cloaking magics. It listened and spied all through the watch-ghost's long talk with Mirt, and through her silent vigil over the sleeping foursome, in the hours before dawn. All the while, it took care to keep out of her sight.
There was very little in Tethgard that night that Iliph Thraun did not see and hear.
"The trick to finding your way back out of deep woods, look ye," said Mirt to Narm, "is to glance back behind yerself often on the way in. Then ye know what to look for."
"What if you must be leaving by a different way?" Delg asked sourly, almost challengingly.
Mirt froze, and then turned and blinked at the dwarf. His face looked as if he had just been spoken to by a stone, or he'd just seen a bird smoking a pipe. He blinked again and said mildly, "Well, then ye ask the elf who guided ye in to show ye the way out, of course." And with a merry twinkle in his eye he strode on through the deepest stands of Hullack Forest in his relentless, rolling, brush-crashing way.
Delg snorted more than once as he followed. Mirt had urged them up in the chill dawn, bidding a hasty farewell to the wraithlike Duskreene. Without ceremony, he'd led them in a steady tramp through the trees. The going proved agonizing to Narm and Delg; limbs that had stiffened overnight cramped and groaned at the joints.
Mirt kept them moving along with a steady stream of jests and barbed digs directed at lazy dwarves and effete young mages.