Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [113]
"You just want the bed warmed," his lady said fondly, joining him inside.
"Me? Sole surviving apprentice of Marimmar the Magnificent?" Narm protested in mock innocence.
"You," Shandril confirmed, taking the stool beside the bed where she could face the door and sitting down carefully on a rough piece of armor she'd found. She'd have to trust in its discomfort to keep her awake. By the gods, lives sometimes clung to such small, simple things., The stars were beautiful overhead, the night clear and cold. Good; its bite should help to keep her awake.
*******
Sharantyr trudged along the Trade Way alone, walking as quietly as she could. The caravan had probably made Triel by nightfall. She'd catch up to them in another day. Of course, that just might be too late.
The Knight of Myth Drannor was still entertaining that heartening thought when something dimmed the stars above. She blinked, knuckled her eyes to clear the weariness that must be clouding her vision, then stepped back in sudden alarm.
Something like a great net of shadows was settling silently over her! Sharantyr sprinted out from under it and veered toward the nearest tree, snatching out her blade as she ran. That tree was in a ditch, and as her boots slithered downslope, she risked a look back. It was flying after her, right enough!
Heedless of what might be waiting, the ranger burst through a tangle of small, thorny branches and ducked around the trunk of her chosen tree, crouching low and then stabbing up with her blade as the stars dimmed around her.
No smell, no sound – she was cleaving nothing. A nothing that tingled and thickened around her, roiling around… her backpack, bulging with the three glowing blades!
Sharantyr slipped out of its straps, swung it off her shoulders, and in the same sweeping movement flung it back toward the road, into the starshine. It bounced to a halt, the… presence with it.
Yes, the cloud was thickening around those three hilts. Some sort of blade-phantom slain by the blades long ago? Or a creature bound to them by magic, that departed to hunt but must return?
She peered at it as she came out from behind the tree, one hand on Lhaeo's gems and the other holding her sword ready. The shadow-thing looked vaguely manlike, or rather like a grotesquely huge cloak that coalesced into a shadowy smudge of a head, above quite solid-seeming shoulders and hands … hands that were busy at the lacings of her pack.
She slashed through those arms, and her blade slowed as if ploughing through wet mud, but aside from the shadowy head turning briefly toward her with a decidedly malevolent movement that turned into a brief lean forward, as if it had detected something of interest, there was no reaction. The arms continued their work, uncut and apparently unaffected. Sharantyr circled quickly around the shadow-thing, struck by a sudden thought, and drew back her sword, holding out Lhaeo's bag in front of her instead.
The shadowy head lifted sharply, turning to follow her hand as she circled. The ranger's eyes narrowed, and she sprang back.
As the wraith turned once more to her pack, tugging out a sword so its bright glow flooded the night, Sharantyr carefully loosened the strings of her precious bag and felt inside for the stones she needed: the two sharp ones.
She let them prick her fingers, to make sure, carefully drew them forth, and closed the bag. The shadow-wraith had laid its hands on two swords, and their glows had promptly died, their radiance roiling briefly up its arms. Those shadow-arms grew darker and more substantial as the glows faded – and it was already tugging forth the third and last blade.
Sharantyr drew in a deep breath, strode forward until she held a gem on either side of that shadowy head and shoulders, and said carefully, "Varouth."
A whirlwind of tiny spitting lightning bolts erupted from the gem in her left hand and streaked to the gem in her right, racing through the shadow-wraith.
Lightning whirled around that second gem and snarled back, brighter and