The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [105]
The roar of rage that drowned out his last words carried the howling guards and guests forward in a hacking, stabbing wave that closed over the serpent in a red fury.
Arching necks rose desperately out of the slaughter, and more than one man screamed as he was broken in tightening jaws, or flung high and far to a sobbing landing… but when the tumult died wearily away, long breaths later, the floor of the Flagon was awash in thick purple gore, and a shimmering bulk lay sprawled and dead amid too many motionless men.
Tapmaster Nortreen stared around the room, on the verge of tears. All the ruin, and yet he lived, and they'd slain the beast, and… the battle went on. There was shouting and swordplay down one passage, and three of his guards looked at their reeling master and then trotted away to that fray together.
Nortreen Jhalanvyluk sat heavily down on a bench that creaked alarmingly under his weight, and sobbed as if his heart was broken.
The two men in dark leathers bundled their burden swiftly down the serving-stairs and along the back passage, passing kitchen doorways where frightened lasses huddled in wide-eyed fear over pots where the early stews were being born. Some of them screamed at the sight of what could only be a corpse wrapped in the bed-blanket, and others toppled silently to the floor.
The capturers paid the cooks no attention. Their pay was waiting beyond the east door of the Flagon, just ahead. When a certain crazed sorceress was delivered to a lout who happened to have coins to spend, their work would be done-and it would be back to bed, all the richer, to rise late in the bright day and smile at the strange whims of the Three.
Weldrin rose from behind the barrels, smiling anxiously. "You've got her?"
Vandur quelled a momentary urge to snap that no, they'd brought him the mistress of the Flagon instead, and merely nodded and whipped the bed-blanket away, leaving Embra Silvertree's white, openmouthed face to stare sightlessly up at the moon.
The warrior gave her bared body a long look and let out a deep breath, almost slumping in relief. Then he looked up at the two dark and silent figures and said gratefully, "Glory to you! I have your fee ready here, and-"
The door banged open, and someone large and loud stormed out, double chins quivering. "You dare!" Margathe bellowed, furiously raining slaps and cuffs on the heads and shoulders of all three men. "You dare to-to come in here, craven and corrupt panderers all, to peddle your naked pleasure-sluts around a respectable inn?"
The astonished capturers staggered under their beating, whirling to confront its source, and received another torrent of words spat into their faces: "And you plunge into this, this barefaced outrage without the slightest shred of a proper business arrangement with the proprietors!"
Vandur and Kethgan exchanged disgusted looks, and their daggers swept up in moon-glittering unison to gut this raging pudding of a woman.
The capturers' daggers were swift-but the arms that swept out of the darkness to sweep each man off his feet, dragging him back from the mistress of the Flagon and breaking his neck in one brutal movement, were even swifter.
Margathe Jhalanvyluk stared up into faces that were not faces, looked from one smooth mask of flesh to the other… and with only the briefest and faintest of peeping sounds, fainted.
Faceless heads turned together. Weldrin was backing away from them, his face white to the lips. A childhood nightmare had come to life before his eyes, and-
His screams started even before they laid their hands on him, and had become an endless, sobbing wail by the time they'd marched him around the inn to the window they thought was his, and hurled him bodily up into the air, as if their arms were as strong as catapults, to crash through its opening and vanish from view, leaving shutters banging