Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [34]
"I'm not trying to slay you," he added, "yet. I'm trying to stop you doing to me what happened to Storstil."
Shandril kept very still. "I," she said, more calmly than she felt, "can call up a very powerful fire-magic that I can't quite control. I can't tell you much more than that, because I don't know much more than that.
I'm on my way to Waterdeep to try to find out. The Zhentarim and some other folk are after me because they want this magic, but so far as I know, none of them know I'm here, along on this caravan. I don't want to use any magic that I don't have to, in case someone recognizes it and thereby learns that I'm here – and I certainly haven't used any of my fire on that wagon or on Storstil or anyone else since I made that deal with Orthil in the Tankard in front of all of you."
Thorst frowned. "That makes me suspicious, too," he said. "Why did he settle for the paltry passage fee you offered?"
"If I answered that," Shandril said, "I'd be guessing.
You'd best ask Orthil himself." She looked up at the sky, and added innocently, "Perhaps he was overwhelmed by my beauty."
Thorst snorted, and gave her an unlovely grin. "I like you, Lady Mysterious. At least you don't shriek or come the high-and-mighty indignance, like most of the wenches who buy passage with us." He turned the little crossbow away from her, carefully unloaded its dart, and added, "Right, then. Just don't be sending any scorching my way."
"You have my promise on that, Thorst," the unlikely looking guard replied formally, startling the drover into peering up at her again.
"I hope we make this camping place Voldovan's so frantic to reach, in time," she added, as the wagon crashed over a particularly violent array of bumps and potholes.
"Lady," he agreed from beside her feet, "so do I!"
*******
Blue radiance whirled and flashed around her.
Sharantyr calmly crouched, and stepped forward with blade raised and ready, all in one smooth motion.
Then the blue light was gone, and the paler light of normal day was around her. The woman in leathers whom Torm was pleased to call "our lady ranger" was standing in wild, trampled grass on an unfamiliar hilltop.
A height crowded with tall, dark standing stones.
She swiftly drew close to one and froze to listen and peer intently, letting a long time pass as she made sure of her surroundings.
Then Sharantyr glided softly forward to where she could look around her sheltering stone, and froze again, only her eyes moving. This shadow, and that… no. Nothing.
Thankfully – unless someone or something was managing to keep very quiet and still amid this faintest ghost of a breeze – the hilltop seemed free of lurking folk or beasts. Save for one, of course: one Knight of Myth Drannor, her blade in her hand and a tiny carved skull still clutched in her fingertips.
Sharantyr stowed the carving in a belt-pouch, but kept her war-steel ready as she looked about, studying the ground now, for tracks. This might be Tsarn Tombs, if she was nigh Scornubel… or then again, it might be some place she'd never heard of, north of that lawless caravan city.
Probably Tsarn, though; it seemed right. On all sides rose wilderland hills beyond number, those to the north – she always knew when she was looking north – crowned by trees. Mountains rose in the far distance, most to the northeast but a few peaks even farther off to the northwest. A wagon road ran close by her hilltop, on the west, running slightly west of north to east of south. A river, probably the Chionthar, glimmered back sunlight in the distant northwest, beyond the road.
Small rocks and pebbles underfoot had been scuffed by boots recently. There was much trampling in the grass around the larger stones, some of it fresh, and … she peered about at old, broken tombs that lay open in the tall grass, and smiled thinly at the painted message borne by one tall, leaning marker stone: "Beware: The Dead Walk."
They do, indeed, all too often