Shadows of Doom - Ed Greenwood [19]
Elminster rose, smiled at her, and extended a hand for the rabbits. "You may need a free arm to swing a sword," he said impatiently. Dangling the rabbits before his eyes, he asked, "Dare we have fire?"
Sharantyr shrugged. "There'll be others about, no doubt."
"The orcs ye met?"
"They'll bother no folk again," was the calm reply. Elminster looked at her slim, strong shoulders expressionlessly and followed her down into a wooded gully.
"Magic gone for a day, and already I'm being ordered about by women," he said gruffly. Sharantyr cast a look back over her shoulder, and he winked. Shaking her head, she hastened on through a thicket of small trees whose branches caught at them both.
Elminster grumbled and flailed along in her wake. Sharantyr's blade reached back from time to time to hold aside the worst of the barbed branches.
They came out into a little open space that faced the setting sun. Below them the land fell away into a smooth-sloped hollow. It had once been a farm-Elminster could see the line of a ruined fence-but youngish trees now grew in its fields. The gaping, vine-cloaked ruins of a timber-and-stone house and barn rose on a far slope. Sharantyr nodded at them with her chin and said, "Come on. Let's get off this height. We can be seen for miles."
"Can't an old man even enjoy the sunset?" Elminster grumbled, trotting obediently after her.
"That depends on whether or not you want to live to see another sunset after this one," Sharantyr replied in low, wry tones. Elminster remembered a gesture from very long ago and made it in her general direction.
Sharantyr only grinned and said fondly, "Now, you know I'm too young to know what that means," and led him down a twisting, overgrown trail that took them by stones across a little brook, and up again to the waiting, gloomy ruins ahead.
Sharantyr looked at him in the gathering darkness. "Best move and speak quietly from now on. Can you cook?"
"If ye light the fire," Elminster replied, glancing at the rabbits again.
Sharantyr said only, "Wood," in reply and was gone again.
* * * * *
In the twilight, two Harpers stood over four dead men. "Not long gone," Itharr said, "and this one died by a dagger."
"Lawless men," Belkram agreed, on his knees beside another body. "And not robbed of the few coins they carried, either." He frowned. "We've found no other trace of him, and Storm did say he collected trouble as roaming cats find fleas."
Itharr grunted. "By the looks of this-if it was him- we're being sent to guard a marauding tiger, not a feeble old man."
"What think you? Is this a false trail?"
Itharr shrugged. "It's all we've found. It must be his doing, or he and another. There was a lot of running about here, and he may have someone else with him."
Belkram shrugged. "In these woods, we'll lose any trail in the dark, unless he plans to mark his passage with brigands' bodies every hundred paces or so."
They chuckled together. "That'd take a lot of brigands," Itharr replied. "We'd best drag these a good way off, to keep wolves and such from the tracks we'll want to find tomorrow."
Belkram nodded, and they worked swiftly, dragging the bodies all in the same direction, toward and then around thick stands of trees, to a spot where it was unlikely any survivors of the fray had headed. When the bodies had been removed, the two Harpers retired to the dale again, camping near ruined Castle Grimstead, behind the new temples that had been raised west of the river.
"We could be under Storm's roof this night," Belkram said softly after a time. Itharr looked at him and said nothing but grinned very slowly. After a moment, Belkram matched the expression.
A good walk away, in the dark woods, wolves wore similar grins as they came warily to four sprawled bodies and began to feed.
* * * * *
The fire was long out. Sharantyr and Elminster lay shoulder to shoulder in the darkness, wrapped in their cloaks, awake but unspeaking. Around them, the