The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [30]
"Here! Hurry!" Craer called from ahead, and Embra let her unwilling steed turn toward the voice. The procurer was standing before the dark and gaping doorway of a mansion-size tomb. In the moonlight, it looked like the empty, staring eyesocket of a gigantic, half-buried skull.
"The Silent House," Embra spat at him through clenched teeth. "This is your 'safe' lair?"
Craer nodded, urgently beckoning her to enter.
"You before me," she replied curtly. "A longfangs lairs here, and I haven't the magic left to blast it down. Show it your blade, and let's hope it flees. I'm tired; my control over Tall-and-Mighty here is starting to slip."
Craer gave her a look of mingled surprise, alarm, and warning before he darted into the darkness, knife drawn.
Embra slipped out of Hawkril's reach before the enraged, violently trembling armaragor could charge forward and smash her against the doorposts. Freed of her weight and much of her control, he raced forward the instant she was away from him. Well, he wasn't alone in carrying a load of fury through the forest this night. Her choice had been made, the slender chance taken… only death awaited if she faltered now.
She made herself turn despite the soldiers hastening toward her. Glaring at them, Embra Silvertree told the moonlight softly, "I know you can hear me, Father. Know this: I have had my fill of being used. Henceforth, watch for me-and fear my coming."
She ducked through the doorway as soldiers came clanking up to it
Embra remembered the large, lofty chamber beyond the threshold. Its own fading enchantments lit it whenever there was movement within, and by their feeble glow she saw the vaulted stone ceiling still thick and furry with hanging cobwebs, the two rows of statues still standing as she'd first seen them so long ago, from within the shielding spell woven by old Gadaster Mulkyn. Armaragors of stone a head taller than living men, they stood in watchful ranks, their cold, sculpted eyes seeming somehow always upon you, wherever you might move or stand…
Hawkril was standing in the center of the room, struggling against her magic. She drove him before her with a hot flare of her anger, seizing the last few moments of the spell to lash him like a herder goading a thickheaded beast, and danced after him. Shouts from behind Embra, as she neared the open archway in the far wall, told just how close the soldiers had come. Had her father's orders been different, she knew, knives and swords would be kissing her shoulders even now.
As her foot touched the threshold, she spun around with an anguished shout. The spell seemed to crack out of her this time, leaving a ringing headache in its wake, and Embra staggered and almost fell. Clinging to cold, unfeeling stone for support, she watched the ceiling of the chamber fall almost lazily onto the foremost rushing soldiers in a rain of tumbling stone that went on and on until the room, statues and all, was completely filled with fallen stone.
"Great laughter of the Three," she said sourly, in the ringing, dusty aftermath of that tumult, "now we're walled in with it: a hungry longfangs and me without a spell even to light a candle."
As the words left her, sparks struck off the wall by her hand with a furious snap, and tinder cupped in a hand glowed, crackled, and caught. As it flared around a wick, Embra saw the coldly furious face of Hawkril glaring at her above its rising light. His dark, blazing eyes held hers like two dagger points as he deftly snapped open a folding candle-lamp from his belt, and used the wick to light it.
His hands were steady as he shuttered the lamp against breezes and returned his flint to a belt pouch, but his voice was like a sword being drawn when he said, "You used your magic on me as if I were a mule-or a slave under the lash. I don't recall that being part of our bargain."
"You dropped me," Embra snarled, "and there was no time-"