The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [131]
Embra smiled at him. "You won me my freedom that night, and kept me alive after, through all that my father's Dark Three could hurl at us." She drew on the open-faced helm he'd insisted she wear and took a few experimental steps, looking to left and right… before turning, hands on hips, to stare back at them.
"When this is all done," she said softly, "the two of you can have every last one of those gowns."
"And you'll go naked?" Craer asked hopefully, knowing he was safely out of reach of an armored slap.
"Gentlesirs," the Lady of Jewels asked the armaragor and the longfangs sweetly, "is the survival of a certain small and overly sly sneak thief from among our number absolutely imperative? Or, if so, is it permitted that he suffer some, ah, light battle damage?"
"Yes to the latter!" an unfamiliar voice snarled from the darkness at the end of the passage-as a crossbow clacked.
A moment later, its quarrel cracked off a wall and shivered into fragments on its way to the floor. Craer was already there, rolling forward from table to table with the merry words, "Well, I don't know what sort of a fashion figure I'd quite present, sporting light battle damage and wearing an endless succession of gowns made for a shapely lady near twice my height. Black silks, now…"
" 'Ware, Longfingers!" Hawkril snapped, as he clapped a helm over his head and lumbered forward, warsword grating out. "There're more of them!"
"Not any… more," Embra said slowly, wincing, as the longfangs clinging to the ceiling wrenched a last head from its shoulders, a crossbow firing wildly back down the passage outside the armory, and their attackers were reduced to a bloody heap of sprawled arms and legs and staring heads.
Hawkril came to a stop and waved his blade at the longfangs. "Swiftly done," he grunted, before he knelt by the bodies and peered at faces and gear. "Adelnans," he added a moment later, opening the front of a tunic. "A warband. Chosen by a baron's own hand, I'd say."
Craer's last roll brought him to a halt on his knees beside the armaragor. He nodded. "And I'd say you'd be right." He peered into the darkness down the passage out of habit, and seeing no further foe, added, "Dwaer seem to be very popular in the Vale just now."
"Gods," Embra said, joining them, "how do armaragors wear all of this? I'm drenched!"
Hawk and Craer looked up at her, and the procurer murmured, "And so the brave heroes advanced to glory, slaying all who came up against them in their clever trap in the House that had been the palace of the Silvertrees in ages past, and yea, all the most dastardly of Aglirta went up against them in battle, and much blood was spilled-and all this time the Lady Embra, let it be cried from the battlements, was hot! Nay, sweaty!"
Embra put her gauntleted hands around the procurer's neck and asked, "Did I say 'light' battle damage? I fear I was mistaken.…"
A red-furred leg slapped her shoulder hard enough to send her staggering back to a crashing sit-down on the stone floor. Hawk brought his blade up in front of his face as he rolled one way, and Craer dove face-first into the corpses-so the shimmering spray of bone shards clawed only the longfangs, as it scuttled forward along the ceiling with claws extended and head ducked low.
Roaring in pain, it launched itself at the source of the ravening bone magic.
The Serpent-priest standing in the darkness below made the fatal mistake of thinking something so large and heavy couldn't possibly spring far enough to reach him. He was still hissing his next spell when a furry fore-limb tore his jaw off and dashed his body to the floor-where the rest of the longfangs crashed down on top of him, crushing him like a ripe fruit.
The priest had not ventured into the Silent House alone. An underpriestess, or his lover, or both, was stumbling back in her robes, white-faced and retching in fear, and a handcount of hard-faced hired warriors were backing away uncertainly, guessing they'd get paid no more and wondering