Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [44]
That Dragon had gone down before the alarm could be raised. No doubt the man was lying paralyzed on the floor, not far from the gong he’d been running to reach.
So sad—but then, life was a series of such sadnesses. The trick was making sure every one of them was suffered by someone else.
Thirsty was no ordinary stirge, the well-known vermin that sucked blood from cattle until sated. Rather, it liked the tastes of many victims—and was even now winging to another one.
One of Marlin’s hirelings died on a Purple Dragon blade thanks to being startled at the sight of Thirsty flapping past, and the guards had already hacked down two more sellswords—but those hirelings hadn’t been idle, either. The smartly uniformed patrol had been reduced to a trio of frightened, surrounded men, beset by too many swords to stop.
The Dragons fought desperately, sending one of Marlin’s sellswords staggering away cursing weakly, then slashing out the throat of another. Yet with the numbers they faced and the veteran skills of those seeking to slaughter them, their fates were never in doubt.
The last Dragon died spewing blood with two swords through his body.
Leaving two of Marlin’s hireswords still standing and a third on his knees gasping out blood, his face twisted in pain.
As Thirsty flapped back to its master almost lazily, the two able-bodied sellswords looked to their patron for orders.
Marlin pointed at their wounded fellow. “Kill him,” he said curtly.
They gave him expressionless looks for a moment, realizing their own fates if they got hurt, then did his bidding, turning again from the corpse to learn his will.
“The sacks we brought along,” Marlin told them promptly as he caught up the chalice from the floor where its death-struck recoverer had carefully placed it. “Retrieve them. Behead all of the dead, and collect the heads in the sacks; they’re coming with us.”
That earned him another pair of expressionless looks.
Marlin sighed. “So there’s nothing left that can possibly have seen us or wag tongues about that, when the war wizards come prying with their spells and asking their foolish questions.”
Chalice safely in the crook of his elbow, Marlin then applied himself to close scrutiny of his maps. By the time his two hirelings joined him with their dripping sacks, he was ready to lead them confidently away from the Chamber of the Wyrms Ascending, through a secret passage in its walls behind the rearing dragon statue.
Gods above, but the Obarskyrs had loved secret passages.
“This is heading deeper into the palace,” one of the sellswords muttered, as Marlin waved them to move ahead of him. It was a safe bet that the chalice would earn them more, sold illicitly, than any sack of heads. Unless that sack had, say, the king’s head in it.
“So it is,” he snapped. “Rest assured that I know exactly what I’m doing—and what you’re thinking, too, come to that.”
After climbing a precipitous flight of steps right after departing the Wyrms Ascending, the passage ran straight and narrow for what seemed a very long way, obviously inside the thickness of a wall. It climbed and then descended once, presumably to hop over a connecting door, and then, for no apparent reason, took an angled bend to the left.
“Stop,” Marlin murmured. Just as his most expensive map showed, part of the angled section of wall could be slid aside to reveal an older, damper stone passage. He took care to put that panel carefully back into place after they’d stepped through it, then cautioned his two men to keep as silent as possible.
Keeping quiet was, after all, only prudent when trying to sneak out of a palace.
This new hidden way had a lower ceiling than the previous ones they’d used, arches built of crude, massive stone blocks. Its walls were rougher, too, and it smelled old.
According to his map and the tales that had come with it, the passage linked the royal palace with the deepest winecellar of the Old