The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [127]
Something struck her, hard-something smooth and solid-and she crashed along it until she came to rest, half through something… it was such a relief to just slip away…
Craer sprang up, kicked a gleaming helm squarely between the eyes, and had time for a glance up and across the dome as his opponent staggered back. Embra was half sitting, half sagging among the carvings along the ornate balcony rail, a trickle of blood falling from her open mouth. She was moving slowly, her head lolling…
"She's alive!" the procurer howled. "She lives!"
Hawkril's answer was a roar of approval, and his blade shrieked it protest as he drove in half through a breastplate. There was a muffled cry from within the helm, armored shoulders shook, and Hawkril moved with the reeling warrior, driving his sword in low under the man's arm-into a second warrior, who'd been trying to reach past the first. There was a roar of pain.
Hawkril twisted his sword, clinging to it with both hands to keep custody of it as one warrior flailed about in agony, and the other backed away. With a wet wrenching, the second armsman tore free of the steel that had thrust into the chainmail at his crotch, and staggered away, hunched over and groaning.
Craer parried a vicious sword cut, but its force drove the procurer to his knees. His Ornentarn attacker bounded forward to stand over Craer, so as to hack him to the floor. Sarasper snatched a handful of moldering mushrooms from the nearest shelf and hurled it into the man's face, up under the helm. The shuddering sneeze was immediate. The old healer gritted his teeth, tried to ignore a second armsman trying to reach past the first with his sword-and drove his dagger firmly up under the edge of the sneezing man's helm, jabbing again… and again…
There was a sudden flash of light from behind him, and the healer spun around. "Hawkril?" he cried in wild, rising fear, trying to peer into blinding white-starred smoke. "Hawk?"
"I live," the armaragor growled. "Guard thyself!"
The healer spun around again, raising his dagger in a frantic parry-and the warrior lumbering past him ignored it and its wielder in his haste to get at Hawkril.
The hulking armaragor grinned, beckoned the Ornentarn with a wave of one large hand, and brought his blade up. Whereupon the world exploded again behind him.
A mage was flung helplessly out of that tumult, his flailing body sweeping the legs of an Ornentarn warrior out from under him. They crashed into a bookshelf together with bone-shattering force, and it shuddered, swayed, and started to topple.
Beyond the blast, shelves were crashing down, ponderous and inexorable, rolling thunders rising from their ruin. The ceiling above the shelves was shuddering as dust and stone blocks rained down together, crashing and rolling.
"Silvertree!" a coldly triumphant voice called, from the far side of the echoing chaos-and in the wake of that war cry something bright stabbed out, a lance of light that lasted for but a breath and then was gone. Its brilliance faded more slowly in the eyes of those who'd seen it. Where it struck, an Ornentarn warrior crashed onto his face, smoke rising from his armor.
Bats were flying wildly everywhere, and the mage who stood where they clustered thickest turned to face this new threat. He said one cold word as he traced a symbol in the air before him-and the smoke rolled away, as if swept by an unseen hand, to lay bare a scene of splintered and twisted devastation.
Shelves lay like so much storm-felled timber, with broken bodies of fighting-men draped here and there among the broken spars. Beyond the ruin stood two mages, smiling slightly as they stared at the mage among his bats… and the second wizard, struggling to his feet barely a sword's reach in front of a narrow-eyed Hawkril.
"Silvertree?" the mage of bats sneered. "You look far too young even to be allowed to launder mage robes in that dark barony."
The older of