Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [110]
“S-sister—,” she managed, in one last struggling entreaty.
Storm plunged grimly back into the pool and reached for her sister as Alassra started to slip under, babbling in earnest.
That hadn’t lasted long.
Mystra damn it all.
Storm tugged her feebly thrashing sister—who was starting to bark like a dog—up out of the water, rolling her far enough away from it that only a determined crawl—and Alassra was beyond doing anything in a manner that might be termed “determined”—could get her back to a swift drowning before Storm returned.
Then she crawled back to her cloak and the manacles, water running from her soaked breeches and boots in floods that thoroughly drenched the sloping stone beneath her knees.
Storm shackled her sister to the wall ring, wrists crossed and hands behind head. That put most of her back in the water again—but unless something tore Alassra’s arms from their sockets, the short length of the manacles would keep her face clear of the surface.
Giving Storm time enough to gather plenty of wood for a large fire and rocks to warm around it, to get herself and her sister dry.
Drenched and dripping, jerkin in hand to bundle twigs in, she lowered her head and trudged grimly back out through the ward again.
She hadn’t expected the cloak to win Alassra’s sanity back for long—its enchantments were relatively feeble, after all—but it had lasted a much shorter time than she’d expected.
Which was, as they said, bad. Storm hadn’t brought all that many enchanted gewgaws with her.
Huh. El had better liberate a lot of magic from the royal palace or the nobles of Cormyr coming to council, if he ever wanted to see his beloved sane again.
Once Lass was over the initial frenzy, the rage that always accompanied her slide back into idiocy—and who wouldn’t scream and fight, knowing they were sinking back into that?—she’d be fine. A survivor who’d fight like a tiger to cling to life. The ankle-chain didn’t keep her from the water; it kept her from walking out of the cave, absorbing the ward as she went.
Even chained a long way from it, she was unwittingly reaching out and leeching its power, draining it ever-so-slowly to keep herself alive. Water, she had, and food she needed not, as long as she had magic to drink from afar …
Yet if ever Lass got out to wander the vast forest that surrounded the Dales and cloaked most of the land between Sembia and the Moonsea, she’d be just one more clever prowling beast awaiting fearful foresters’ arrows. And the jaws and claws of larger, stronger prowling beasts.
Those were watchmens’ manacles, recent Cormyrean forgework stolen from down in the Dale. They neither had nor needed keys, and locked or opened by sliding complex catches on both shackles at once, something that could be done easily except by anyone wearing them, the cuffs being rigid. Unless they were put on a shapeshifter, or someone who had tentacles, that is …
Well, Lass had always hated malaugrym and doppelgangers and anything with tentacles; she was hardly likely to work any magic that could give her such features, even if she did somehow regain sanity enough to work any magic at all.
Those thoughts took Storm back out through the torments of the field—she really noticed, then, how much feebler they had become—into the forest where full night had fallen, bringing a darkness that would be deep indeed until the clouds thinned and let the moon shine down.
Which made the tiny, leaping orange glows over to her right all the more noticeable. She couldn’t see the fire, only the light it was throwing up onto the leaves of overhanging trees; a campfire in one of the hollows on the edge of Shadowdale, where travelers who lacked coin for inns or wanted not to be seen down in the dale often spent nights.
They might be merely passing through, or they could be trouble. Which meant she could not ignore them.
As silently as she knew how—which was very slowly, in this poor light—Storm crept closer to