The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [28]
"Our shared need for your secure lair is becoming quite pressing," Embra snarled at her two companions in a sarcastic parody of noble courtesy. "I don't carry the wherewithal to spell-battle half Aglirta when I take to bed, you know!"
Hawkril grunted in alarm, not the sound she'd been expecting, and she spun around to see the brawny armaragor stepping hastily back from something that had begun to arise from the stones they'd clambered over. Something ghostly that glowed a sickly green and was taking a vaguely manlike shape, looming up and over them… this must be the work of Markoun. He always did prefer impressing folk to actually getting a task done.
Wearily, Embra destroyed the thickening shape with a wash of conjured fire. The brief flare of her flames evoked shouts from the pursuing soldiers, who began to sprint toward them.
Winded again, the Lady Silvertree stared at them and shook her head. "Your turn to save me," she muttered grimly to Hawkril. His wordless reply was the spreading of his large, empty, and helpless hands in a shrug.
Craer darted out of the night at the hulking armaragor, slapped his arm, and hissed, "Take her up, and to flooting with her dignity! Hurry-this way, and through yon arch!"
"That must be a sorceress!" Delvin gasped excitedly, as fire burst into brief life up on the slope.
"Hist!" Helgrym whispered fiercely, thrusting Delvin down until his chin touched ditch water. "D'you want them to hear us? I'd rather live!"
He broke off his rebuke to gape in openmouthed astonishment at what he saw next. In unconscious unison the two bards rose from their knees to get a better view. The Silvertree soldiers were jostling and clanking into a charge, another green glowing figure was rising into view a little way down the slope-and out of the moonlit sky past that eerie, building light swooped something bat-winged and black-scaled, with two heads and long, rending claws. It led the chase after the sorceress and her two companions, who were busily vanishing through an archway in a crumbling stone wall atop a hill.
"By the Three," Helgrym hissed in awe, "they're heading for the haunted catacombs!"
"The Silent House?" Delvin gulped. "They say a longfangs lairs there!"
He gulped again when Helgrym nodded and said slowly, "You know what we must do."
"Yes," Delvin whispered, even more slowly. "We must see what passes, to sing of it later."
They drew in deep breaths, looked around at the dark trees of Aglirta as if saying farewell, and moved in reluctant unison, watching the flying thing, the ghost shape, and the hurrying armaragors all plunge through the arch into the walled burial ground of the Silent House. Resting place of sixteen Barons Silvertree and perhaps more, ran the ballad, and no less a minstrel than the Master Harper himself, Inderos Stormharp, had once told Delvin that it clove to the truth. One didn't have to be a veteran bard to know about the man-eating longfangs that lurked inside. Enough folk had been eaten, or disappeared trying to find tomb treasures buried with dead Silvertree nobility, to convince the most skeptical that something that dined on human flesh dwelled within.
The moss-girt stones were slippery but the way all too short. They reached the shattered archway in a matter of moments.
"Is this how bards get killed?" Delvin murmured, pausing beside the crumbling stone wall. His voice was not quite steady.
"Yes," Helgrym replied, in a bleak, weary whisper. "Yes, it is."
Together they stepped through the arch into the haunted darkness.
The foreyard of the Silent House had once been a park studded with small formal gardens and later a place where bastard family offspring, much-loved servants, and better-loved horses and hounds were buried by a long line of Lords Silvertree. For years, now, the tirelessly creeping forest had held sway, and within the crumbling