Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [114]
The shadow-wraith sat bolt upright and trembled, growing darker and more solid with alarming speed as the lightnings raced through it again, back and forth, so swiftly now that they formed a continuous, crackling line of gnawing, spitting energies.
"Yes!" a faint, echoing voice seemed to whisper from all around her. "Yesssss!"
The figure rose slowly in height, and Sharantyr rose with it, until she was standing upright with her arms raised, behind a dark, cloaked figure that trembled in time to her lightnings, shuddering and growing steadily more solid.
It started to groan, in a deep, seemingly male voice, then shuddered and convulsed, hunching its arms in.
It seemed held upright by her lightning when it would rather have shrunk down and nursed pain. The groans rose into sobbing cries, babbled words that might have been curses or frantic incantations. They became screams, wild high shrieks that echoed back from the stars.
Sharantyr held her two gems firmly, sudden sweat drenching her, and the wraith rose in a crackling cloud of racing lightnings before her, shouting, "No!
Too much! Too much!"
Heat beat at her face. The wraith howled and turned its ghost of a face toward her, wild-eyed, but its shape was collapsing back into a thing of rushing, swirling darkness. Sprays of lightning raced within it, whirling inside the shadow-bulk that flung out frantic arms or branches in all directions, stabbing at the night in agony as it started to whirl and tumble and spin, brightness glowing inside its gloom. A fireball with dark, ragged edges tore free of her resonating field of magic and raced blindly away across the sky, howling in mad pain.
Sharantyr held out her two gems for a long time as their lightning died to a faint, crackling blue thread, and let her gasps return to calmness. The shadowthing did not come back, but the night-chill returned.
"Well," she told the stars at last, quelling the magic of the gems before they were entirely exhausted,
"live another night in Faerun, see another mystery.
Build a shining collection. Now, I wonder if the gods answer them for us, when we die?"
The stars overhead ventured no opinion. Sharantyr smiled, unsurprised, as she stowed the gems, reclaimed her pack – the blades were crumbling already, and she tossed their hilts into the ditch – and resumed her walk.
*******
Narm sprang up from his stool and sniffed. There it was again.
Smoke, very close by… woodsmoke. There was a hiss and crackle, like the sound he'd made dousing their embers. Someone had sloshed water on flames, to put them out – but quietly, with no shouts nor running feet… and very nearby.
The smell was strong now, and his view of the stars out the front of the wagon increasingly hazy. Water to quench flame, or to make more smoke!
Narm shook Shandril awake, muting her sleepy question with a firm hand. "Fire," he murmured in her ear. "Our wagon, I think, and set by someone waiting outside."
Shan took his hand away and murmured back,
"We're being smoked out?"
Narm nodded, and she purred, "Crouch low by the entrance. Do nothing until I shout your name or someone comes inside."
Narm nodded again and did as he was bid. In his wake, Shandril went flat to the floor, hoping no one outside was planning to crawl around and thrust a blade up through the floorboards.
The wood was hot. No blades would come from beneath. There must be a fire there. Very soon, the floor would burst into open flame with a roar, and consume them and the wagon together, unless…
Shandril felt around for the drain – the finger-sized hole in all of Voldovan's wagons, covered by a swivel-plate of metal, that was there to let water and spilled cargo out. There! She eased the plate open a trifle, ignoring the pain – and a tiny tongue of flame rose up into her face. Shandril called up her spellfire, opened her mouth, and sucked it in.
It was hot, scratchy going down her throat, and inclined to tickle her nose… but it went in without setting her to choking, or searing her as it should have done.
Shandril spread herself out flat and willed