The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [97]
"Yes, yes, my treasure," Nortreen said wearily, finding his feet-and the old war-axe on the wall-at more or less the same time. "I'm going. Bide you here, an-"
"Ohhh, no!" she snarled in scandalized horror. "Oh, no! I'm not lying here in the dark, alone and unguarded, waiting for some outlaw to burst in and assault my charms! How dare you expose me to such danger! How dare you leave me in such peril! How dare you waste my talents, when I could rouse all the kitchen girls-and send them to wake the guards!"
Nortreen gave her a look as he hopped awkwardly, pulling on his boots. Slippers be damned-if he was going to go out and get killed, he wouldn't break his ankles and slip onto his backside a dozen times while he was at it! "You'd trust our kitchen lasses with the guards?" Perhaps he could distract her from the thunderous catalogue of his own faults by raising the possibility of someone else's scandal.
Margathe gave him an even colder look. "You think I haven't trained our girls to know better? You think I don't watch over them, to be sure such doings don't befall under our roof? Norr, you wrong me! You wrong me deeply!"
Claws of the Dark One, the tapmaster told himself silently, his inward voice searing in its bitterness, but someday I just might. I just might.
A moment later he was stumping out into the dark passage, axe in hand. When Margathe upbraided him for not taking a lamp, he growled, "I left it for you, good wife," and roused himself into the lumbering equivalent of a charge, forward into the night. Anything to take himself out of reach of Margathe's tongue.
Her reply was a seething snarl. Nortreen Jhalanvyluk winced. Right now, he would assuredly not want to be one of the Flagon's kitchen girls.
Not even at his own weight in gold coins each year.
Not unless roast Margathe was the first dish on the morrow's table.
Steel sang and bit, and another bright wedge of the bladesman's sword flew into the air and tumbled to the floor, winking in the dim lamplight. The man moaned with fear as Hawkril slashed even harder on the return swing-and the man's blade bent visibly in his desperate parry.
His elbows had already driven his fellow bladesman crashing into the far stair-rail, and kept him there, wincing and crouching in a series of ineffectual lunges that just wouldn't reach up the stairs to the armaragor.
"Take him down, curse you!" Weldrin snarled from behind them both, shoving at Murgin's backside. To the Dark One with his stupid little play-lunges! Oh, his men were good sword-swingers, far better than most, but this armaragor was fast, very fast-and somehow they couldn't get past the wall of steel he wove with that huge sword. No one should be able to lift a blade that size, let alone swing it about as if it were a needle! And the sorceress didn't help, either, showing her flesh mockingly at every third or fourth blow, taunting them with the chance that she might hurl fire down their throats, as she'd served Uirgurr.
Jalard cried out in fear as his blade broke right off at midpoint, the shards flying into his face. Weldrin slapped his own sword into Jalard's hand and snarled, "Hold your ground!" even as the hulking armaragor above them hacked his way a few steps down.
Weldrin stared at his two frantic bladesmen, winced as their foe's next swing almost beheaded Jalard-and wheeled around, bounding down the stairs with Hawkril's deep laughter stabbing after him.
"Weldrin!" Murgin sobbed, fear winning out over anger, "come back! You bastard! You utter reeking bastard!"
He'd have to see to it that those two didn't survive this night's battles, Weldrin thought grimly as he raced down a dark passage, his heart pounding in his ears. They'd never trust him again.
He almost fell in the darkness as his boots found a step down in the passage-or rather, for one sickening moment, found no floor beneath them. The landing hurt, and Weldrin groaned as he thought grimly that he probably wouldn't have to see to the deaths of Jalard and Murgin. That armored giant on the stairs was all too likely to attend to it