The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [154]
Sarasper gave her a lopsided smile. "You didn't take very good care of it, did you?"
His eyes flickered closed before she could give him a rude answer, and the statuette flared with spell-light. Embra devoted herself to retrieving another.
It took six Silvertree knickknacks, with lightnings lashing the room behind them and Craer hurling weak gibe after lame jest at the wizard, before Sarasper said, "That's better. I'll live now." He lifted bloody fingers that glowed slightly and put them to her mouth; Embra kissed them, fresh tears suddenly flooding forth from her, as the tingling that brought relief flowed slowly through her.
"Hmmph. You didn't take good care of yourself, either," Sarasper muttered. His hands moved down her body, pushing and probing-and when they came to another pouch, he tore it open and plucked out whatever Silvertree enchantment lay within.
Embra gasped and shuddered as the healing went on, purging pain in cooling waves of relief. Sarasper smiled as she writhed atop him. "Not long now, lass," he growled, straining to reach his fingertips down to her shattered leg. "Not long."
Atop him, Embra suddenly stiffened and arched herself almost upright. Sarasper clutched at her shoulders to keep her from falling into a flailing that might do her worse damage, and snapped, "What, lass?"
Embra fell back into his embrace, shivering. "The Dwaer are here!" she hissed, staring into his eyes with hope and fear warring in her own. "More than one of them, very close!"
"You're sure?" the healer asked hoarsely.
"Certain." Embra nodded, shivering again. "I can feel them; it's unmistakable."
Then she put her arms around Sarasper and flung herself sideways, rolling both of them down into a hollow in the rubble.
"What the sargh!" the old healer snarled. "Lass, are you crazed! Th-"
"That's a Stream-of-Stones," Embra told him tersely, as they lay nose-to-nose amid still-rolling rubble. She jerked her head back towards a distant Ressheven, who was chanting a swift but curiously flat-toned incantation. "I just hope he misses."
The words ended, there was a moment of tense silence-and then flagstones tore themselves up from the floor somewhere in the room and roared through the air, thudding and rattling hard on something. A moment later, Hawkril and his table cartwheeled helplessly past in the heart of a pelting cloud of rocks-stones that struck like deafening thunder against the pillar Hawkril had been flung into, earlier, as the tumbling cloud howled on past.
Embra heaved herself up again for a pain-wracked moment before her arm gave way beneath her and brought her crashing down atop a wincing Sarasper-but it was time enough to see Hawkril strike the end wall of the chamber, one arm outflung to grasp at nothing, amid enough stones to build a wall. The crash shook the room, and in its wake something happened to the pillar that the stones had grazed: it grew the outlines of a hitherto-hidden door that shuddered a few inches open.
The sorceress had no time to see more, and she wallowed frantically atop the old healer, trying to turn herself as she rose again so as to get a quick glimpse of the pillar once more-in case something was bursting out through that door-as she spun around to see what Ressheven was up to.
The leader of the Swords of Sirlptar was gesturing his way grandly through the final moments of a Salanger's Thrust. Embra groaned aloud and clenched her teeth in anticipation of the bone-shattering agony to come, as-
The incantation abruptly ended, incomplete, with a wet glut sound. Craer's hurled dagger sprouted in Ressheven's mouth, and the wizard's eyes just had time to widen in surprise before a second dagger plunged home to the hilt in his right eye.
Craer always liked to throw his daggers in pairs.
No Thrust to suffer through, then, and unless a bard was stupid enough to return, no possible foes left to harm the beleaguered Band of Four.
Which was a good thing, Embra thought, as she shouted her