Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [48]
The passage floor was cold, damp, and hard, and she wallowed on it for far too long, fighting for breath and kicking frantically. His boot-heel helped her, crashing into her behind with bruising force as he tried to turn.
The impediment shook his ponderous balance, and the armored giant windmilled with his arms, caught his axe on the doorframe and so avoided falling. He managed to get himself turned around in time to greet one of the stones of Sharantyr's hard-swung maiden with his nose.
He bellowed with pain as his nose broke – probably for the fourteenth or fifteenth time, by the looks of it – and blood streamed forth. The other stone temporarily blinded him and sent him hopping and howling in pain, clutching at his broken browbone and bruised eye and cheek. The axe clattered to the floor, and Sharantyr booted it as hard as she could, sending it skittering only a few feet. Dazedly the guard tried to reclaim it, snatching twice at flagstones close to it. His second attempt brought his bull-thick neck within easy reach of Sharantyr's cord.
She garroted him in a single, catlike pounce and held on grimly through the frantic struggles that followed.
Thrice he battered her against the passage walls, trying to dislodge this creature clinging to his head and clawing at his eyes as he gulped and choked and sobbed for air that he could not get… ere he crashed to the flagstones and left her to stagger clear of him, wincing.
She'd loosed her cord the moment he'd started to fall, and he lived still. Sharantyr's own gasps for breath almost drowned out a faint gasp from behind one of the closed doors – but she heard it, looped her cord about its handle in a trice, and hauled it open.
A slender figure was whirling away from her to flee down a passage beyond; Sharantyr threw her stonemaiden at his ankles and plunged after him.
Thus she was in just the right spot, when his running feet faltered and he fell, to punch the lurking spy in the face, grab his head in both hands, and bang it repeatedly on the passage floor.
The man wore three daggers strapped to him, and at least one of them was smeared with something Sharantyr didn't like the looks of. She claimed them all, sheaths and straps, and was pleased to learn that they had black wooden hilts and leather-wrapped grips, so the magic on her wouldn't force her to just drop them the moment she drew them.
Wearing her newfound armory on her forearms and inside her left boot, the Knight of Myth Drannor trotted down the passage the spy had been in. She was unsurprised to find that it turned the same way as the visible one the armored giant had been guarding, and ended in a door with a spyhole in it.
The room beyond was large and cavernous and almost empty. In one corner stood two lamps, flanking a large old wooden desk heaped with parchments and ledgers. A mountain of a man sat behind it, peering and writing. His eyes were pale, thoughtful things, sunk deep like those of a hound above jowls that would have served many a Dales laborer as a meal.
Sharantyr watched him for a moment, then shifted to look through the spyhole in other directions. A lot of the room – along the wall nearest to her – she couldn't see, but the rest of it seemed empty, so she reached out and calmly opened the door.
The man looked up and quickly acquired a sharp look of surprise. "Who," he said, reaching even more swiftly for something behind his stacks of papers,
"are you?"
"Why, Belgon, I'm deeply disappointed that you recognize me not! Tessaril Winter, Lady Lord of Eveningstar, at your service."
The Master of the Shadows scowled. "You're not Tessaril," he snapped, raising the bowgun in his hand until she could see it clearly. It was aimed right at her face. "Try for the truth again."
"Tessaril sent me, so I thought