Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [125]
Guards snapped orders, were defied, and replied with sword-thrusts.
"Go!" Beldimarr shouted, shoving Arauntar back toward Voldovan's wagon. "Look!"
Arauntar spun around and saw, cursed bitterly, and put his head down and ran.
A dozen swordsmen were whirling around Voldovan's wagon like a dark storm, fencing with each other and the snarling, already wounded caravan master. Whenever they had a moment free from fending off hostile steel, they plunged their blades hilt-deep in the cloth sides of the wagon, thrusting hard at whoever might be within. Arauntar heard at least one startled scream from Shandril and a wild shouting that was probably Narm trying to cast a spell – and finding to his horror that nothing happened.
As the Harper ran, faster and harder than he'd ever sprinted in his life before, he clearly heard the young mage's next words: “’Tis here, Shan! In here with us! Some sort of dark – thing!"
"My knife does nothing to it," Shandril gasped, as Arauntar pounded nearer and Voldovan sank back on his perch with a sob of pain, bleeding in two places and with eager swordsmen pressing in for the kill. One of them – gods blast him! – was a guard just hired in Triel!
The Harper arrived hacking a neck here, a face there and had those men down or reeling back in two swift, panting moments.
"Try flame on it!" Shandril was crying, inside the wagon.
"The lantern!"
Narm's reply was a roar of pain, mingled with Shandril's scream. A moment later, they reeled out onto the perch. A moment after that, Arauntar saw why.
Someone had got hold of a long lance – a horse lance, cargo from one of the wagons – and thrust it through the back of Voldovan's wagon. The slashed, flapping-down back of Narm's clothing and the bloody bared skin beneath told clearly enough where it had scored.
Arauntar went for that man with a roar, hoping to distract him from cutting his own door through the wagon-back and clambering up inside. The moment the Harper was gone from the front of the wagon, someone hurled a blade out of the night and hit Voldovan in the face with it. The startled caravan master fell off the perch, leaving the way clear to the young couple inside.
Three swordsmen surged forward as one, with an eager roar, and from out of the night, hair streaming behind her, came a woman none of them had ever seen before. A long, slender sword gleamed in one of her hands and there was a dagger in the other. She crashed into them from one side, driving them together into a confused tangle of steel by the sheer fury of her charge.
"For Myth Drannor!" Sharantyr cried. "For Shadowdale!" Her blade clanged, crashed, and sang again. A man groaned and fell over dying. Shandril peered out of the wagon in wonder, calling,
"Sharantyr?"
One of the other swordsmen howled in glee and hurled his dagger at the spellfire-wench. Narm sprang desperately in front of his lady and smashed the weapon aside with his arm. It clanged away off the wagon, and he winced and sank down, Shandril clutching him and drawing him back inside.
By then, Sharantyr had sworded another swordsman, leaving only the one who'd thrown his knife. He eyed her, took a pace back, raised his blade warningly, and acquired a sudden look of wild pain.
A moment later he came crashing at her, running right onto her blade and hurling her aside.
The swordsman smashed into the perch like a Waterdhavian street-puppet, loose-limbed and dangling, and fell aside, already dead. Behind him stood the two mages who'd driven him forward, the talons of a huge spell-spun claw floating in the air before them. Sharantyr tugged at her sword, trying to fend off the deadly thing, but even as she snarled and hauled it free of the dead man, a darkness fell upon the claw and it faded. The two wizards stepped back in alarm.
The crash and skirl of swords from the rear of the wagon told of Arauntar's battle with the men who'd been attacking there. As if avoiding that fray, Narm and Shandril came again to the wagon-mouth