Shadows of Doom - Ed Greenwood [93]
Sharantyr probed carefully, tracing the outlines of the grating. Then she sheathed her blade, took a deep breath, crouched, and sprang up high, hands outstretched.
One hand smashed into a sack, scrabbled, and found a grip around a bar. The other smashed hard and painfully into metal. She gritted her teeth and hung by one hand for what seemed a long time, nursing throbbing fingers and shaking them in hopes nothing was broken.
Then she reached up, got a grip on the grating with her hurt hand, and started tugging and bouncing up and down. Her hand throbbed with every move, but the grating shifted slightly, lifting with her movements. She continued, as hard as she could, but the rice bags above held the grating down, and at last she had to admit defeat.
Sharantyr dropped again, drew her blade, and attacked the rice above her, stabbing again and again as hissing rice ran down into her hair, her bodice, and even through sliced and torn spots in her leathers.
She went on stabbing and jabbing until she could feel no weight on the grating above, then carefully worked the empty bags aside with her sword through the grate.
It was dark and cool in the chamber above. Very faint light filtered down to her. Sharantyr leapt up again.
This time the grating shifted as she struck it. She let go, dropped, and instantly sprang up again, striking the grating on an angle. As it lifted, she kicked the air hard and arched her body. The grating slid sideways with her clinging to it. The lady ranger twisted and arched her body again, and before the bars could fall back into place, she got the toe of one boot up through the opening.
The grating came down hard on her boot. Sharantyr grunted, heaved, twisted, and rolled all at once. She found herself sprawled atop more sacks of rice, still entangled with the grating, in what seemed to be a large and dark storage cellar.
Shar laid the grating carefully back in place, found the sacks she'd emptied, and covered it with them. Then she climbed over a great many sacks-some, by the sound, held dried beans-into a narrow trail among the sacks, crates, and barrels that crammed the room.
If this place was barred or locked from the outside, she was not going to be pleased. Sharantyr drew her blade again, held it carefully upright close to her breast, and went cautiously eastward, for the trail seemed to widen in that direction, and the faint light grew slightly stronger.
Her way ended in an old, stout wooden door. She pushed at it and then pulled, but it had no handle on this side. She felt around the door, found its edges, and carefully slipped her dagger up one of them.
As she expected, the blade struck a catch or hasp. If it was locked or pegged down, she was in trouble. But if it could be lifted by driving the blade upward-Yes! The door swung open, and Sharantyr reached for the hasp with racing fingers to quell any noise of its falling.
Done. The room beyond was also unlit, but light reached long fingers into it from a torch in a wall bracket beyond a door or wooden gate that was more gaps and knotholes than wood. Sharantyr drifted up to it, put away her dagger, reached nimble fingers through to lift the peg that held it shut, and peeked out into the corridor.
Two bored-looking men were seated not six paces away, sorting potatoes on a long table covered with what looked like a very old tapestry. They worked in silence, and when one of them suddenly spoke, his voice seemed very loud.
"If you'd just kept your jaw still when he asked about the wenches instead of tryin' sly stuff, he wouldna found us out, an'-" The voice held the exasperation of a renewed grievance.
"Shut up," the other man said in a tired voice. "Be glad ye're down here carving dirt-balls instead of up there, sweating in your armor and being carved up by the idiot merchants and farmhands that some crazed-wits has stirred up. They're still attacking the castle!"
He tossed a potato lazily over his shoulder. Sharantyr swallowed,