Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [88]
Shandril's ears rang. Narm was shouting something, but she couldn't tell what.
She shook her head, still seeing nothing but brightness as the ready-wagon landed with a boneshaking crash, bounced, bounced again to the sounds of things breaking, and rocked to a halt on its side.
Every last loose thing inside the wagon crashed teeth-numbingly down to its own resting-place, Narm and Shandril included.
Resting places that would last only until the next spell-blast. Bursts of magic and shouts were still raging outside as Shandril blinked her way back to seeing things… she hoped. She shifted gingerly amid the heap of tumbled and broken gear and couldn't help but moan in pain. Were her left shoulder and right thigh shattered or did they just feel that way?
From somewhere lower down Narm hissed, "Shan, are you all right? Keep low-voiced, and lie still!"
"Lying still," Shandril gasped into the blurred, darkening world around her, "is something I could probably master about now. I… I think nothing's broken." She moved her arm with some difficulty, shifting several coils of rope that were lying atop it, and started to laboriously walk her fingers down her own flank, toward her thigh.
Halfway there her fingertips encountered something wet and sticky. The smell told her it was her own blood even before she found the tangle of torn garment and ruined skin beneath. She hissed in pain, set her teeth, and called up spellfire.
Amid its tingling she felt other places on her body that were wet and somehow… cold, even as the spellfire rose to warm the rest of her.
Narm groaned, deep in his throat, and she asked swiftly, "Are you hurt?"
"Ughh. My bruises have bruises of their own, as Torm once said," he muttered, "but nothing bad. Lie quiet!' "'She died quietly'? Is that what you want to carve on my headstone?" Shandril gasped in amused protest, as spellfire washed through her, soothing and healing.
"Nay, I was hoping your remembrance would be something more like, 'Beloved of the gods, she saw two centuries, and her twenty children gave her seven-score grandchildren, who in turn – "' "Twenty children? Narm, you rutting boar!"
"A man can hope," came the reply, in a voice of morose self-pity, Shandril snorted. "If it's to be Candlekeep platitudes, here's an appropriate one: 'Keep your hopes to a size you can carry. Are we finished lying still and silent yet?"
A spell-blast outside promptly rocked the wagon, and something inside with them broke and collapsed into small, clattering fragments. "Nay," Narm replied brightly, "I think not."
A thump outside was followed by a creaking of torn wood, and then a rough voice said, "This was the spellfire-wench's wagon. Quick, now!"
A dark form shouldered forward, scraping leatherclad shoulders on the side of the wagon now serving as a ceiling. It was followed by another, who spoke again in that rough voice. "D'ye see her?"
The man in leathers leaned forward, looming over the tangle of ropes where Shandril lay. Reflected daylight gleamed along the edge of a long, cruelly curved dagger. The man plucked aside the shattered ribs of a keg – and stared right into the eyes of the maid from Highmoon.
"Aww," Shandril complained, blinding him with a short gout of spellfire, "and I was lying so quietly, too!"
The man staggered back with a roar and fell over as Narm hamstrung him neatly from below.
"Why, you little vixen!” the rough-voiced man snarled, raising hands upon which rings flashed with awakened magic. "I'll – "
"You'll die, that's what you'll do!" another voice said calmly from just outside the wagon. A burst of green flames outlined the rough-voiced man in sudden, convulsed agony. Burning, he fell forward on his face without a sound, revealing to Shandril a sudden scorched vista of daylight where wagon-timbers had melted away before those green flames.
A man in robes was standing outside, his hand still raised from