Spellstorm (39 page)

“One woman? Alone?” one of them asked in disbelief.

“
Not
alone,” Mirt rumbled, stepping away from the wall to confront the onrushing hireswords.

“Hah! Large enough target, to be sure!
Look
at that belly!” another of the warriors laughed, just before steel met steel.

Except that Myrmeen ducked and flung herself away from the wall at a diagonal, sweeping wide and low with her sword, reaping armored ankles. The center warrior fell with a crash, his yell more startlement than pain, and a moment later a rolling Mirt took the feet out from under the easternmost hiresword.

Which left just the one closest to the near wall, who’d been running to meet and hack down Myrmeen. His overhead hack at her was mighty, but too slow and too late; his steel rang off the floor behind her boot, and bit in just enough to catch and force him into a running stumble as he tugged it free.

Which meant that before he could recover, he was staggering past Elminster, who gave him a manic grin and the polite greeting of
“Well met,” before snatching off the warrior’s helm with one hand and driving home the pommel of his dagger into the side of the man’s jaw with the other. Teeth flew, and the man went down, flopping to the floor like a wet fish.

El strolled to the other two hireswords, but Myrmeen had served them the same way, and was now surveying the senseless bodies. “
That
one,” she decided, and started unbuckling the man’s belt.

Mirt watched. “Lass, what’re you—oh.”

A mighty tug had freed the belt and spun the limp and lolling man half over on his side. Myrmeen looped his own belt around his throat, and ordered Mirt, “Bring that one over, back-to-back. We’ll put the third on top of them.” In a trice the three unconscious hireswords were belted together at the throat, and Myrmeen was unknotting and tugging free the loose peacestrings on their scabbards. El and Mirt stepped back and stood guard as she tied their thumbs together and then their smallest fingers together behind their backs, then removed their boots and did the same to their big toes—after hauling the leg armor and leather breeches off the largest one. The breeches were
just
large enough to go over three heads at once, and Myrmeen collected daggers and swords and then stood back in satisfaction.

“Nicely done,” Mirt told her.

“Swiftly done,” El added.

“You’d
better
be fast,” the unseen ghost princess commented, “if you’re going to do
that
to all of them. Though there may not be that many left, come to think of it—these three fled not because two of their fellows plunged down into the cellars rather precipitiously, but because all the others died from poison, right before their eyes. Most of them not prettily.”

Myrmeen looked at where Alusair’s voice had come from, and then at where she knew the door of Shaaan’s bedchamber was—or had been. “So there’s no longer any reason to go there?”

“None.”

Myrmeen turned to Mirt and El. “So if the princess scouts ahead for us, do we head for the kitchen again? That braerwing was nice, but I didn’t get much, and it seems like a long time ago.”

Mirt grinned. “Running and fighting’s hungry work.” His stomach rumbled, right on cue.

“We do head for the kitchen,” El agreed. “Torr’s warriors have to be dealt with
some
time.”

“Let’s rout them,” Mirt suggested. “I haven’t had a good rout in years and years!”

“Let’s rout them,” Myrmeen put in, “because we have no way of knowing if private armies belonging to any of our other guests will show up, and when. I’d like to clear the decks, so to speak, and get morningfeast—or highsunfeast, or evenfeast, or dark-of-the-moon snack, or whatever it turns out to be—done.
I
save the world better on a full stomach.”

“You too?”

“Luse?”

“On my way. So if those two that fell into the cellars are fine, and Shaaan’s slain no more, there are thirty-six left.”

“Manageable, manageable,” Mirt rumbled, “between the three of us.”

“ ’Tis the thought of food that does it,” Myrmeen teased. “Suddenly you can hew your way through hosts.”

“Well, if they stand between me and a goodly feast, yes,” Mirt replied, starting down the passage.

They had almost reached the door where the passage gave into the entry hall when it swung open and a dozen of Torr’s hireswords started through it.

“Halt,” Elminster barked, “in the name of Maraunth Torr!”

Warriors blinked at him, mouths falling open and drawn swords wavering.

“It’s a trick,” the oldest among them snapped. “
That’s
not the master!”

“You sure?” another asked, frowning. “He changes shape, y’know—uses spells and all to do it. I seen him.”

“Of
course
I’m sure! Doesn’t sound like him, doesn’t act like him—”

“Oh, for Mystra’s sake,” Mirt growled, striding into their midst and grabbing one warrior off his feet to use as a shield as he thrust his sword up into the throat of another. “Let’s be
about
it!”

And as the dying man staggered backward into his fellows, blood spurting, Mirt swung the struggling man he had in a chokehold around in a great kicking arc, jostling one hiresword into the next. Curses and shoving erupted everywhere—and Myrmeen darted in to stab and slash at faces and throats in the armored crowd.

Elminster dodged to come in behind her, lunging like a swordsman at warriors who’d started after her but promptly stumbled over their dying, falling fellows. The hireswords were all still hemmed in at the doorway, which could take three slender, disciplined servants walking
abreast but only two large and armored men carrying weapons, and he meant to keep things that way.

“More will be coming up fast behind these,” the voice of Alusair warned. “You made enough noise and tumult that all of them in the entry and feast halls heard you. They’re all setting aside what they were eating and scrambling to get into the battle. ’Ware thrown axes.”

Mirt was tired of whirling around the weight of his choking captive and let go of the man, putting his hip into the falling back and depositing the shouting man against the thighs of three of his fellows; they all went down in a heap. Giving Mirt time to turn and put the entire weight of his body behind a backhanded slash that drove two men helplessly into Elminster’s reach.

Myrmeen was a whirlwind of deft stabs, in under chins and through helm slits, but as Torr’s warriors slowly sorted themselves out and the fallen gave them room to ply their steel, the fray became a frantic ringing clangor of slash and parry—and she was the one who panted, “Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“A little late for that
now
, lass!” Mirt bellowed from beside her, as hireswords pressed in at him from several sides and he struck aside their reaching blades with his own sword and one he’d snatched up from the fallen. “Besides, that one over
there
—see?—has a book shoved down his breastplate, and I’m mightily curious to see what it is.” He was looking at a dead hiresword atop a heap of fallen fellows, whose slit throat was bleeding down and away from the half-exposed tome.

“
Better Swordplay for the Masses
?” Elminster suggested, striking aside a blade with one of his swords and running its owner through the throat with his second, just-snatched-up sword. “Some of these jacks could use such a read.”

“If,” Myrmeen called to him, “they know how to read.” She added a heartfelt “
Hah!
” as she broke her sword free of a warrior’s blade-binding, shoved with all her weight and forced him back a step—and used his off-balance moment to feed him a dagger right up through his jaw.

Mirt ran up a heap of the dead to leap feetfirst down into the side of a warrior already struggling for footing, and the man crashed into two men trying to get past, which slammed them all against the wall, where Mirt cut them all new red grins and then whirled to face other nearby hireswords and give them a triumphant, teeth-bared bellow.

And suddenly what was left of Torr’s army was running, fleeing back the way they’d come with fearfully hissed curses and in an untidy stumbling thunder of boots, leaving their dead—a
lot
of dead—behind them.

“Only twelve left now,” Alusair reported, “assuming Shaaan has taken care of the two who fell through the floor of her bedchamber, but hasn’t harmed any others.”

“Ah,” Elminster responded, pointing with a sword that was running dark red with the blood of others, “but she has. Look yonder.”

The high-ceilinged and gloomy entry hall had a three-servant-wide door in the center of its western wall. That part of the west wall between door and the corner where it gave into the Copper Receiving Room was cloaked in a dusty, faded, gray-cobweb-shrouded old tapestry of impressive size—that was now stirring, as two former warriors of Torr, now helmless and wearing only a few plates of their armor, here and there, so their sweat-stained and supple underleathers were revealed, came slithering out from underneath the moldering edge of the tapestry, and undulated across the floor.

Their faces were gray with death, the eyes milky-white and filmed over, and they wore no boots or weapons—but metal finger sheaths had been fitted to their fingertips to give them talons, and they were dragging themselves along by means of them. Those curved metal points, everyone knew, would be coated with venom.

“Busy little murderess, isn’t she?” Myrmeen murmured. “I won’t particularly enjoy dismembering them, but if it’s that or die horribly …”

“Let’s just close the door on them, and leave them in here for now,” Mirt suggested.

“The entry hall links the kitchen and the Halaunt family apartments with the rest of the ground floor,” Elminster pointed out. “So unless you want to go down into the cellars or up into the open air every time you want to traipse from cook hearth to guest bedchambers … or break holes through walls—between the Green Audience Chamber and the Blue Chamber, for instance—we must deal with these. And forcing them outside just sends their menace out into the arms of Purple Dragons and war wizards who won’t be expecting them, and perhaps out into all Cormyr, beyond …”

“All right,
all right
, my civic duty beckons,” Mirt growled. “So, the plan?” He hefted his sword in one hand and a hand axe he’d selected from the arsenal of the fallen in the other.

“How about we close the door on them
for now
,” Myrmeen suggested, “until we concoct a plan?”

“Fair enough,” Elminster agreed, and the door was closed. “Luse?”

“Yes?”

“Could ye check on Manshoon again for us, and then try to find Shaaan and what she’s up to?”

“Of course. I go.”

Myrmeen bent and plucked out the book Mirt had noticed earlier, from the body of the hiresword who would no longer be needing it.

She opened it, flipped a few pages, and snorted. “Poetry,” she said dismissively.

“Verse need not be bad, lass,” Elminster reproved her. “The best incantations are elegant poetry.”

Myrmeen looked up at him, her expression severe. “This is not elegant poetry,” she informed him, then cleared her throat, lifted her chin like a dowager duchess, and declaimed grandly, “It was indeed a dark and stormy night, in which there were many dark and stormy knights.” Then her voice returned to its norm, as she added in disgust, “Gods, who writes this chamberpot-wipe drivel?”

El chuckled. “There are worlds full of scribes, lass. Remember, whate’er the result, they put pen to paper out of love. There are saner ways to make a living.”

“Oh, like playing adventurer?” Mirt grunted. “Or trying to be a wizard, in a place where magic can’t be trusted?”

“Lord of Waterdeep,” Elminster said gently, “ye would do well to remember this always: magic can never be trusted.”

CHAPTER 19

Hunting the Sleeping Snake

R
IGHT, LASS
, I’
M READY
. O
PEN THE DOOR
.”

Myrmeen obliged, and Mirt threw one hand axe through it at the envenomed undead in the room beyond, leaning low into his throw and raising one leg like a dancer posing in a tavern. Then he hurled another.

The undead reeled, unbalanced by the force of the whirling axes. Severed fingers flew, and half-severed digits bounced and dangled. Mirt lurched sideways, picked up the next pair of salvaged warriors’ axes, and threw them. More fingers flew.

Then the undead he’d maimed was shouldered aside by its fellow envenomed, sliding into view from one side of the doorway to move through it. Myrmeen slammed the door into it, hard, then sprang free and ran to snatch up axes of her own from the long line she and Mirt had arranged. He was already burying two hand axes in this new target, pinning one arm to the undead warrior’s thigh with one of his throws.

Myrmeen’s throws weren’t as hard as Mirt’s, but they lopped off poisoned fingers with precision, metal talon sheaths and all.

By the time the undead were too close to throw more axes at them, they were down to a few dangling fingers each, so Mirt and Myrmeen dismembered them with relative ease.

“Well, that was easier than I’d thought ’twould be,” Mirt growled, looking down at a litter of severed fingers and a still-rolling head. Both of Shaaan’s envenomed undead lay strewn across the floor of the entry hall in grisly pieces.

“You’re the only one who’s found gauntlets that fit, so stop gloating and scoop them into this coffer for me,” Myrmeen snapped. “We still have to fight our way into the kitchens, clean up whatever we find there, hope the Serpent Queen hasn’t poisoned everything, and get cooking. I’m getting ravenous.”

Mirt smiled, bent down, then scooped up and held out a handful of fingers. “Magically invigorated meat fingers cloaked in mystery sauce?”

“Your sense of humor needs work, Old Wolf, really it does. Just put them in the damned coffer, before I decide a better use for this is hurling it at your head.”

“My, my, the lady bites!”

“No, we don’t know each other that well, yet.”