The Dragon's Doom - Ed Greenwood [139]
He never finished that question. They came to a high, many-balconied gallery where guards should have been looking down on other guards standing beside desks where scribes and Clerks of the Royal Person mounted a last line of defense against uninvited visitors trying to burst in and "just see the King for a moment." The hurrying Overdukes of Aglirta found no scribes or clerks, and no torches blazing along the dark balcony above-but instead literally ran right into a frightened ring of guards.
The armsmen whirled around with shouts of alarm, swords flashing. Craer and Hawkril parried, yelling, "Turn your blades! Overdukes of Aglirta command you!"
Then they saw what the guards had been menacing, and gasped: "Horns of the Lady!" in ragged unison.
The guards were clustered warily around a snarling, already wounded beast; the massed points of their glittering blades had been keeping it against the passage wall. The monster was a chaos of talons, scaly serpentine arms, tusks and fur, an undulating thing with the head of a boar and the build of a bull-and it was wearing torn scraps of armor that looked as if, before being torn or burst apart, it had been a match for what the guards were wearing.
The monster roared and charged. As the guards shouted in fear and leveled their blades against it, Hawkril ran to meet it, swinging his war-sword in a great slash that caught in those snarling jaws and drove the beast back to cower against the wall once more.
Talons clawed the air as the beast drooled blood and growled, but it made no move to rush forward again, now that the unbroken ring of steel had returned.
Blackgult eyed the dangling, clanging fragments of metal it wore and asked, "This was one of your fellows, hey? How did he-?"
A guard shook his head. 'Just groaned and hunkered down-and then started to… change. He screamed a lot, but we didn't want to… I mean…"
"Plague," Tshamarra said grimly. "Embra, can you-?"
"If Craer gets himself well away from me, perhaps. Every plague-healing's just a little different from those before," Embra replied sourly, peering at the wounded beast. "Three Above, hasn't Aglirta suffered enough?"
One of the guards staring at her started to tremble so violently that his fellows turned to look-whereupon foam burst from his mouth, his eyes started to weep blood, and he burst into a wild, lilting scream and swung his blade wildly-nay, blindly-in all directions.
As his fellow guards drew back from their newly stricken fellow and the beast saw room to move and started to growl its way forward again, something hissed down amongst them. It was swiftly followed by more somethings: strangely thick arrows tipped with gaping fangs!
"Serpent-arrows!" Hawkril bellowed, chopping at them with his war-sword as Craer cursed and dodged ahead, seeking to get under the place where the deadly hail of snakes was coming from-yon balcony!
"Three spit!" Tshamarra raged, ducking behind a screaming guard whose face had sprouted a snake. "Is there no end to this?"
Beside her, Embra sobbed out her own curse as she tore away a snake that had bitten her arm, and flung it as far as she could, reeling. Her arm was burning already, and she just hoped Craer was far enough away…
Crouching over her glowing Stone as more snakes rained down around her, striking many of the guards, Embra called on it to purge her of poison. It flared up in a brilliance so bright and sudden that she knew the other Dwaer was too close-even before its power shocked into her from behind, meeting the healing magic within her, and left her writhing, blinded, and gasping for breath on the floor.
"Em!" Hawkril roared, as if from a great distance-though she knew somehow that he was standing over her, shielding her with his own body. "Lady mine, are you well?"
"Now that," she snarled through her tears, shuddering, "was a stupid question." A fresh wave of pain made her whimper