Elminster Must Die_ The Sage of Shadowdale - Ed Greenwood [95]
Ignoring Delcastle, Windstag sneered at the palace messenger. “And who are you to call on the Crown for aid? Jumped-up commonborn lout! When our day comes, we’ll not have to put up with the likes of you! We’ll just order you beheaded and sit and sip wine and watch from the farruking palace windows as you scream and wet yourselves and die!”
“Since when,” Arclath Delcastle inquired icily, “did your drunken lawlessness have anything at all to do with anyone’s rank or birth? Windstag, you’re a bully and a coward, and—”
With a wordless roar of rage, Broryn Windstag went for Delcastle, six bodyguards at his side. Almost casually one of them tripped Delnor, and he hit the floor hard, gurgling out a vain plea. Arclath Delcastle cursed as he ducked, darted, and slashed as swiftly as any mask dancer, buying himself room to spring up onto the stage.
“That was a palace messenger, you fool,” he spat at Windstag. “You’d better start for the docks right now, before—”
“Before what?” Kathkote Dawntard sneered. “You think a noble lord will face the slightest punishment for felling some palace lackey who dared to offer us violence? Without every noble in all Cormyr rising to rid themselves of all courtiers—and any Obarskyr foolish enough to stand up for such dross, too?”
“Not that we should leave any noble witnesses to this little unpleasantness,” Windstag snarled. “Kill him!”
He was pointing at Delcastle.
“Carve him apart, so there won’t be enough left for even the keenest war wizard to enspell and interrogate, then snatch the dancer and bring her. Search those rooms back there, and haul out all the other dancers, too! I find I’ve a hunger for more than dancing!”
There was a general shout of mirth as everyone joined in his bawled laughter, and men with drawn swords rushed the stage.
Across which Lord Arclath Delcastle raced and spun and sprang and hacked like a wild thing, seeking to just stay alive.
One man reeled back, blinded by a blood-spurting cut across the forehead; another clutched at his punched throat and crashed to his knees, choking; and a third staggered back and fell heavily off the stage, clawing at where Delcastle’s slender sword had burst through his shoulder.
But by then Delcastle battled a vicious storm of steel, beset on all sides by men made wild by drink and wilder by bloodlust and eagerness to impress their noble masters.
“A rescue!” he shouted, parrying desperately. “Anyone! A rescue!”
A man in front of him shrieked and fell, his toes pinned to the floor by a dagger that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Then the man beside him toppled, his eyes bulging in astonished pain, as something very hard struck him in the back of the head.
By the time that man fell, Delcastle’s attackers were turning to see who his ally was—the person the beset lordling was already grinning at as he went right on fencing for his life.
It was the mask dancer—who wore only sparkles, sweat, and copious spatters of blood—none of it her own. She’d tossed aside her mask, her hair swirling free, and there was a blood-drenched, dripping sword in one of her hands and a clean dagger clutched pommel-foremost in the other.
She faced them, panting—and promptly sliced the face of a bodyguard who’d foolishly lowered his sword to leer at her.
“Kill her!” Windstag roared drunkenly. “I can rut with her corpse!”
Heads turned as his men stared at him in disbelief, even in the midst of furiously clanging steel.
“W-well,” the nude dancer hissed at him, “now that we all know how certain noble lords prefer to spend their dallying time …”
“Get her! Get her! Get her!” an enraged Windstag bellowed loudly enough to make the roofbeams echo. “Kill them both! Kill them all!”
He sprang onto the stage, his bodyguards hastening to follow. Windstag and his men came up from behind the men fighting Arclath Delcastle and crashed into them, shoving them helplessly forward in sprawling chaos.
For just a moment, through a gap in all the onrushing bodies, Lord Delcastle caught sight of Delnor’s senseless, staring face.
Then it was gone behind