The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [116]
The silent man watched and listened to screams and bloody deaths as the sun climbed the sky. Wizards certainly seemed to know many nasty ways to slay… but sword swingers were always happy to repay the damage when magic ran out or they could catch a mage alone or unguarded. Well, let them slay tirelessly and with enthusiasm, doing Luthtuth's work for him.
The servant creatures summoned by mages, in particular, he'd be happy to see others destroy for him. Bodyguards and even veteran armaragors he could handle, but the procurer some knew as Luthtuth and others called Velvetfoot had no love for magic, and even less for the creatures it could call, and those who wielded it. So he lay still, fire smoldering within him, and watched vicious confusion reign below, spell-battles erupt and be resolved, and men die by the dozens. The dying, wounded, and those who merely blundered off alone would be his prey once darkness came again.
"An agile, lurking strangler who likes to strike from above," a patron had once described him. Luthtuth had smiled then, and he smiled now, his body wound about with a shifting armor of trip-cords, strangle-wires, and climbing lines that would come into their own once darkness fell. If he should be attacked before then, his weapons would be the few enspelled "smoke eggs" he carried, the sack of daggers he could throw with deadly accuracy, and his wits.
His current patron was a masked and secretive mage who claimed to be from far Renshoun. His task was to seek and bring back to the Masked One the four stones called the Dwaerindim, for "if used together in certain rituals, they'll serve to awaken, free, and call forth the Serpent in the Shadows, age-old foe of the Sleeping King."
This aim bothered Luthtuth not a whit; mages are always chasing some unattainable, crazed thing beyond their powers. So long as they pay first, and in full, let them destroy themselves in all sorts of spectacular and clever ways, and leave Darsar that much safer for all the rest of the not-quite-so-clever folk to enjoy.
His own clever plan was to gain this Stone, hire someone to make a replica of it and someone else to deliver that replica, and take advantage of the resulting fury of his employer to call in some known foes of the wizard to settle old scores. Luthtuth would hide and watch, just as he was doing now; if the opportunity presented itself, he'd ransack the Masked One's lair; if not, he'd merely slip away… one Worldstone richer.
A leaning stone tower off to their left suddenly burst into rock shards with a roar. "By the Three, but there seem to be a lot of wizards on the loose today," Sarasper muttered.
"Am I not enough for you?" Embra Silvertree whispered teasingly, as the Four crouched together under a tilted slab of stone.
"Now there's a line to quote back at her, once she's Queen Embra of the Vale," Craer muttered to the other two men. Then he pointed ahead. "Could that be the top of your domed library, Old and Wise?"
Sarasper squinted. "It could be, Small and Annoying. Let's get closer, shall we?"
Closer proved to be a tangle of bushes, the stone rubble of a fallen building, and a little open space between that and a series of crumbling half-walls, with the circular domed building rising almost untouched beyond. Craer slipped calmly from one wall to the next, until he saw a door in the library wall. He turned his head. "There 'tis, m-"
"Down!" Embra cried, and he fell on his face without hesitation. Something sizzled past low overhead, and the procurer rolled sideways until he was behind what was left of a stout stone wall.
"Who's trying to kill us now?" he asked the armaragor behind him calmly.
Hawkril was lying on his side behind another partial wall, and spread empty hands. "I know not. Some mage or other-looks young, and has scepters-long