The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [35]
"Gone in getting us here," Embra told him, and turned her head to glare at Craer. "My clothes?" she reminded him.
The procurer held out boots and a bundle to her and then held up the sack they'd come from in front of her, as a screen. It hid almost nothing, and she gave him a sour look as she sat up and started to draw on the wet breeches. They watched her shiver, and Hawkril suddenly rose and strode to the candle lamp. Setting it down close beside her, he stepped away to sit down against the wall with his sword across his knees, keeping his eyes always on the man who'd been a monster not so long ago… not long enough ago.
"So we've an old man with magic enough to take the shapes of three beasts, perhaps more," the armaragor rumbled. "He hides in his most fearsome form and eats folk raw when they come calling… why?"
"He's a healer," Embra said suddenly, the tunic in her hands momentarily forgotten as she whirled around to look at the old man hunched against the wall.
Sarasper stiffened but did not look at the half-naked sorceress. His nod was so brief that they almost missed it. "Secrets, it seems," he told the ceiling above him with a sigh, "never last quite long enough."
"He can heal wounds?" Hawkril asked. "With magic? That drives a man to eat human flesh for years?"
"Traditionally," Embra told her tunic flatly, as she shrugged it into place and tugged at its wet sleeves, "barons have kept healers as chained slaves, to heal on command. As the healing flows through such a one's body, it ages and wears out the flesh. A healer without the freedom to limit the use of his powers will probably die young, bent and broken like an old man."
Silence fell. The three companions stared at the figure hunched against the wall.
"You were afraid of being captured by Baron Silvertree," Hawkril said to him, but received no reply.
"And rightly so," Embra added into the silence, pulling on her boots. She kicked at the flagstones to settle her feet inside them, then got up.
Sarasper lifted his head to watch her walk toward him, but they could read no thoughts on his tired face.
"You hid behind the traps in the catacombs whenever my father's forces-or adventurers, seeking tomb coins-came calling, and you hunted outside these walls only at night… and only as a longfangs," she said slowly, reasoning aloud. Her thoughts brought her to a halt a few paces away from the old man.
Sarasper nodded again. "I've grown very tired of raw meat," he told her, something that might almost have been pleading in his rough voice. He raised an eyebrow in what might have been a challenge and then looked away again.
"Then stop hiding," Craer said with sudden urgency, almost pleading, "and live again! Once we rode together for Blackgult-remember, Sarasper? Now, we need healing; Hawk and the Lady both. She was as much the baron's prisoner as any chained healer. Will you aid us… please?"
For a long and silent time the old man looked at them out of his sunken eyes, his face expressionless. Then he said heavily, "I will. But there will be a price."
***
Delvin of the Many Harps and Helgrym Castlecloaks had retreated behind a row of tombs to decide what to do next. They could hear the groans of a few Silvertree soldiers, but the doorway into the Silent House seemed entirely blocked with a massive flow of loose stone. "It's probably filled the room inside that doorway," Helgrym judged grimly, "if so much has been spilled outside. I've walked all around this place in younger years-from a distance, I'll grant-and I don't remember any other way in. It seems not so much for a ballad, after all."
"Just turn around and go, you mean? After risking our necks creeping up here?" Delvin protested, with the disappointment of youth fresh from the victory of excitement over fear and unwilling to soon taste empty-handed defeat.
"Know you a wiser course ahead for us?" Helgrym asked, "or…"
Something large and dark swooped out of the night and snapped Delvin's