The City of Splendors_ A Waterdeep Novel - Ed Greenwood [47]
The Old Wolf shook the lass once, vigorously, then thumped her on the back hard enough to make her limbs bounce and flail like a rag doll's.
"This'll clear your pipes!" he announced heartily, watching hot mussels, gravy, and half-chewed bread shoot past his boots. Before she could even begin to sob for breath, he threw her up into the air, caught her waist in both hands, and spun her upright like a wheel.
She was taller and more gangly than Asper, and Mirt got an unintentional elbow in his face for his pains, but in another moment she was coughing and crying all over her desk, with Mirt resting one hand on her flank to keep her standing.
It took her some time to recover her breath, and Mirt passed it by reading her book-it was a heaving-bosoms affair, by Sharess!-aloud.
"'The bruising strength of his grip made her gasp, and even as she twisted furiously away, cursing her silks for their lack of handy daggers, she knew she'd been dangerously-possibly fatally-wrong about him.'
'"A moment later, her fingers found what they'd been straining for… and a moment after that, he knew it too.'"
Mirt chuckled. "Ho-ho, but this is ripe stuff!" He thumbed a few pages, ate the discarded end of her bun with lip-smacking enjoyment, then glanced at still-heaving shoulders and asked, "Are ye all right yet, lass?"
"M-my… my…" She was still fighting for breath and turning to face him slowly, hands far from her belt dagger-or the one strapped to her ankle that Mirt's rough medicine had just revealed.
"Wand? 'Tis under my boot-and staying there, until ye settle down."
"Who are you?"
Mirt grinned at what he could see of the tear-streaked face through all the hair. "Call me Elminster-and get me Laeral straightaway, aye?"
Large, dark eyes goggled at him as frantic fingers dragged hair out of the way, then the still-raw voice that went with them managed to stammer, "The L-Lady Laeral is, uh, elsewhere at the moment."
"Then," Mirt growled grandly, "I suppose Old Windbag-Khelben, to ye-will have to do."
A strange expression crossed the guard-prentice's face as mirth rose to join anger and embarrassment. Abruptly she gasped, "Stay here!" and rushed out of the room, looking even more like she was struggling not to laugh.
Mirt waited for her to look back and then disappear around the first bend of the ascending stair. Then he set off after her. He knew where she was almost certainly heading.
A short but wheezing journey later, they arrived more or less together at a certain door, where the guard-prentice gave Mirt an angry, helpless glare, and whispered something to its latch, almost as if she was kissing it.
The door clicked and moved a little, as if a lock had been released, and the apprentice quickly stepped forward, whirling to slam it shut again-and discovered that the fat stranger had somehow crossed three paces of passage and got not just his foot, but an entire leg through the door in her wake, and there was just no way she was going to be able to get it closed.
The rest of Mirt followed his bold leg into the chamber, favoring her with a fond grin. "Shouldn't ye be getting back to your post?"
The mage drew herself up to say something really blistering-and someone else said an oath for her, a long and heartfelt string of obscenities that owed so much to spell-inferences and references to wizards long dead that its heat was quite lost in its own bewildering grandeur.
"I love ye, too," Mirt replied affably, as the Lord Mage of Waterdeep came toward them like a thundercloud, with the chaos of collapsing spells singing and lashing across the vast chamber behind him like wildly whipping mooring ropes flung by a storm-ropes that glowed and spat showers of sparks and flung lightnings, that is.
So large was that room that it should not have been able to fit inside the neighborhood, let alone the slender girth of Blackstaff