Spellfire - Ed Greenwood [106]
Malark commanded simply, banishing his darkness again.
The mage raised his arms and his fingers flowed and grew, then branched and branched anew. In the space of a breath or two, Malark's upper body looked like a large bush. A mouth opened high on one of the branches and said, "Come! And stay behind me."
Together they crept through the night to the back of the stables.
"The dogs sleep," Arkuel whispered.
"Yes, but the stable master does not," Malark hissed back, and withdrew slightly, becoming himself again and muttering the phrases of a spell while Arkuel and Suld stood guard, swords drawn. Malark rejoined them and eyed the blades with contempt. "Put those away," he muttered angrily. "We're not carving roasts."
"The stable master, then?" Arkuel asked, as his blade slid back into its sheath. Somewhere off in the hills to the north, a wolf howled.
"He has something to watch, over by the well,"
Malark said. "Dancing lights. Come, now-quickly and quietly, to the wall." He strode across the inn yard, his underlings at his heels.
At the base of the wall, the archmage's body shifted shape again, rising into a long pole with broad rungs; it gripped the windowsill of their rented room with human hands. The pole sprouted two eyes on stalks that peered back across the inn yard. The stable master stood, axe in hand, watched the bobbing lights suspiciously.
"Hurry" commanded a mouth that appeared on the cross brace Arkuel was reaching for. He flinched back and almost fell from the ladder.
"Don't do that," he pleaded, catching himself.
"Move!" the ladder responded coldly. "You too, Suld. Our luck can't hold all night." But they all reached the chamber and closed the shutters without incident.
Malark wondered, as he erected a wall of force between himself and his underlings, just what would go wrong when the time came. Everything had gone smoothly, yet he could feel in his bones that the secret of spellfire was not fated to come within the grasp of the followers.
Such hunches had given him sleepless nights before, but this time he fell asleep before he could fret. Soon he was falling endlessly through gray and purple shifting mists, falling toward something he could not quite see that glowed red and fiery below.
"Horsecobbles," he said to it severely, but the scene did not go away, and he. went on falling until he reached morning.
"I would speak with the cook," the traveler said. "I eat only certain meats and must know how they are prepared. If you have no objection-?"
"None," Gorstag rumbled. "Through there, on the left. Korvan's the name."
"My thanks," the dusky-skinned merchant said, rising. "It is good, indeed, to find a house where food is deemed important." He strode off, leaving Gorstag staring after him in bemusement. After a moment, the innkeeper caught Lureene's eye and nodded at the kitchens, pointing with his eyes. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and straightened from a table where a fat Sembian merchant was staring at her low-laced bodice. Turning with her hand on her hip in a way that made Gorstag snort with amusement, and the eyes of every man at the Sembian's table involuntarily follow her, she glided toward the kitchen.
The stranger was suddenly at Korvan's elbow.
"What news have you for the followers?" a silky voice said in Korvan's ear. The cook froze. He then turned from a pan of mushrooms sizzling in bacon fat and reached for the bowl of chopped onions, his long cook's knife still in one hand. He nodded briefly as his eyes met the merchant's.
"Well met," he muttered, as he turned back to the pan and dumped the onions in, tossing them lightly with his knife. "Little news, but important. A herder saw a girl who used to work for me here, a little nothing named Shandril who ran off a few tendays back, in the Thunder Peaks with the Knights of Myth Drannor and Elminster of Shadowdale. She had just wielded spellfire, and burned 'a dragon or something;' Rauglothgor the Undying, I fear. This man said he heard The Shadowsil's name mentioned, and that there were gold pieces