“Sewage on their shoes,” Jarlaxle noted.
“Vermin in their blood,” the assassin spat. He got up from his seat and took a step out from the table. “Let us begone,” he said to Jarlaxle, loudly enough for the closest of the dozen ratmen who had entered the tavern to hear.
Entreri took a step toward the door, and a second, aware that all eyes were upon him and his flamboyant companion, who was just then rising from his seat. Entreri took a third step, then … he leaped to the side, driving his dagger into the heart of the closest ratman before it could begin to draw its sword.
“Murderers!” someone yelled, but Entreri hardly heard, leaping forward and drawing forth Charon’s Claw.
Metal rang out loudly as he brutally parried the swinging sword of the next closest wererat, hitting the blade so hard that he sent it flying out wide. A quick reversal sent Entreri’s sword slashing out to catch the ratman across the face, and it fell back, clutching its torn eyes.
Entreri had no time to pursue, for all the place was in motion then. A trio of ratmen, swords slashing the air before them, were closing fast. He waved Charon’s Claw, creating a wall of ash, and leaped to the side, rolling under a table. The ratmen reacted, turning to pursue, but by the time they had their bearings, Entreri came up hard, bringing the table with him, launching it into their faces. Now he cut down low, taking a pair out at the knees, the fine blade cleanly severing one leg and nearly a second.
Ratmen bore down on him, but a rain of daggers came whipping past the assassin, driving them back.
Entreri waved his sword wildly, making a long and wavy vision-blocking wall. He managed a glance back at his companion to see Jarlaxle’s arm furiously pumping, sending dagger after dagger soaring at an enemy. One group of ratmen, though, hoisted a table, as had Entreri, and used it as a shield. Several daggers thumped into it, catching fast. Bolstered by the impromptu shield, the group charged hard at the drow.
Too occupied suddenly with more enemies of his own, including a couple of townsfolk, Entreri turned his attention back to his own situation. He brought his sword up parallel to the floor, intercepting the blade of one villager and lifting it high. Entreri started to tilt the blade point up, the expected parry, which would bring the man’s sword out wide. As the farmer pushed back against the block, Entreri fooled him by bringing up the hilt instead, turning the blade down and forcing the man’s sword across his body. Faster than the man could react with any backhand move, Entreri snapped his hand, his weapon’s skull-capped pommel, into the man’s face, laying him low.
Back across came Charon’s Claw, a mighty cut to intercept the sword of another, a ratman, and to slide through the parry and take the tip from another farmer’s pitchfork. The assassin followed powerfully, stepping into his two foes, his sword working hard and furiously against the ratman’s blade, driving it back, back, and to the side, forcing openings.
The jeweled dagger worked fast as well, with Entreri making circular motions over the broken pitchfork shaft, turning it one way and another and keeping the inexperienced farmer stumbling forward and off his balance. He would have been an easy kill, but Entreri had other ideas.
“Do you not understand the nature of your new allies?” he cried at the man, and as he spoke, he worked his sword even harder, slapping the blade against the wererat’s sword to bat it slightly out of angle, and slapping the flat of the blade against the wererat’s head. He didn’t want to kill the creature, just to tempt the anger out of it. Again and again, the assassin’s sword slapped at the wererat, bruising, taunting, stinging.
Entreri noted the creature’s twitch and knew what was coming.
He drove the wererat back with a sudden but shortened stab, and went fully at the farmer, looping his dagger over and around the pitchfork, forcing it down at an angle. He went in one step toward the farmer, drove the wooden shaft down farther, forcing the man at an awkward angle that had him leaning on the assassin. Entreri broke away suddenly.
The farmer stumbled forward helplessly and Entreri had him in a lock, looping his sword arm around the man and turning him as he came on so that he was then facing the twitching, changing wererat.
The man gave a slight gasp, thinking his life was at its end, but caught fully in Entreri’s grasp, a dagger at his back but not plunging in, he calmed enough to take in the spectacle.
His scream at the horrid transformation, as the wererat’s face broke apart, twisted and wrenched, reforming into the head of a giant rodent, rent the air and brought all attention to the sight.
Entreri shoved the farmer toward the wrenching, changing ratman. To his satisfaction, he saw the farmer drive the broken pitchfork shaft through the beast’s gut.
Entreri spun away with many more enemies still to fight. The farmers were standing perplexed, not knowing which side to take. The assassin knew enough about the shape-changers to understand that he had started a chain reaction here, that the enraged and excited wererats would look upon their transformed kin and likewise revert to their more primal form.
He took a moment to glance Jarlaxle’s way then and saw the drow up in the air, levitating and turning circles, daggers flying from his pumping arm. Following their paths, Entreri saw one wererat, and another, stumble backward under the assault. A farmer grabbed at his calf, a blade deeply embedded there.
Jarlaxle purposely hadn’t killed the human, Entreri noted, though he surely could have.
Entreri winced suddenly as a barrage of missiles soared back up at Jarlaxle, but the drow anticipated it and let go his levitation, dropping lightly and gracefully to the floor. He drew out two daggers as a host of opponents rushed in at him, grabbing them from hidden scabbards on his belt and not his enchanted bracer in a cross-armed maneuver. As he brought his arms back to their respective sides, Jarlaxle snapped his wrists and muttered something under his breath. The daggers elongated into fine, gleaming swords.
The drow planted his feet wide and exploded into motion, his arms pumping, his swords cutting fast circles, over and under, at his sides, chopping the air with popping, whipping sounds. He brought one across his chest, then the next, spinning them wildly, then went up high with one, turning his hand to put the blade over his head and parallel with the floor.
Entreri’s expression soured. He had expected better of his drow companion. He had seen this fighting style many times, particularly among the pirates who frequented the seas off Calimport. It was called “swashbuckling,” a deceptive, and deceptively easy, fighting technique that was more show than substance. The swashbuckler relied on the hesitance and fear of his opponents to afford him opportunities for better strikes. While often effective against weaker opponents, Entreri found the style ridiculous against any of true talent. He had killed several swashbucklers in his day—two in one fight when they had inadvertently tied each other up with their whirling blades—and had never found them to be particularly challenging.
The group of wererats coming in at Jarlaxle at that moment apparently didn’t have much respect for the technique either. They quickly rushed around the drow, forming a box, and came in at him alternately, forcing him to turn, turn, and turn some more.
Jarlaxle was more than up to the task, keeping his spinning swords in perfect harmony as he countered every testing thrust or charge.
“They will tire him,” Entreri whispered under his breath as he worked away from his newest opponents. He was trying to pick a path that would bring him to his drow friend that he might get Jarlaxle out of his predicament. He glanced back at the drow then, hoping he might get there in time, but honestly wondering if the disappointing Jarlaxle was still worth the trouble.
He gasped, first in confusion, and then in admiration.
Jarlaxle did a sudden back flip, twisting as he somersaulted so that he landed facing the opponent who had been at his back. The wererat stumbled away, hit twice by shortened stabs—shortened because Jarlaxle had other targets in mind.
The drow rolled around, falling into a crouch, and exp
loded out of it with a devastating double thrust at the wererat opposite. The creature leaped back, throwing its hips behind it and slapping its blade down in a desperate parry.
Before he could even think about it, Entreri cried out, thinking his friend doomed, for one sword-wielding wererat charged from Jarlaxle’s direct left, another from behind and to the right, leaving the drow no room to skitter away.
“They reveal themselves,” Kimmuriel said with a laugh. He, Rai-guy, and Berg’inyon watched the action through a dimensional portal that in effect put them in the thick of the fighting.
Berg’inyon thought the spectacle of the changing wererats equally amusing. He leaped forward, then, catching one farmer who was inadvertently stumbling through the portal, stabbing the man once in the side, and shoving him back through and to the tavern floor.
More forms rushed by, more cries came in at them, with Kimmuriel and Berg’inyon watching attentively and Rai-guy behind them, his eyes closed as he prepared his spells—a process that was taking the drow wizard longer because of the continuing, eager call of the imprisoned Crystal Shard.
Gord Abrix flashed by the door.
“Catch him!” Kimmuriel cried, and the agile Berg’inyon leaped through the doorway, grabbed Gord Abrix in a debilitating lock, and dived back through with the wererat in tow. He kept Gord Abrix held firmly out of the way, the wererat crying protests at Kimmuriel.
But the drow psionicist wasn’t listening, for he was focused fully on his wizard companion. His timing in closing the door had to be perfect.
Jarlaxle didn’t even try to get out of there, and Entreri realized, he had expected the attacks all along, had baited them.
Down low, his left leg far in front of his right, both arms and blades fully extended before him, Jarlaxle somehow managed to reverse his grip, and in a sudden and perfectly balanced momentum shift, the drow came back up straight. His left arm and blade stabbed out to the left. The sword in his right hand was flipped over in his hand so that when Jarlaxle turned his fist down, the tip was facing behind him, cocking straight back.
Both charging wererats halted suddenly, their chests ripped open by the perfect stabs.
Jarlaxle retracted the blades, put them back into their respective spins, and turned left, the whirling blades drawing lines of bright blood all over the wounded wererat there, and completing the turn, slashing the wererat behind him repeatedly and finishing with a powerful crossing backhand maneuver that took the creature’s head from its shoulders.
Thus disintegrating Entreri’s ideas about the weakness of the swashbuckling technique.
The drow rushed past into the path of the first wererat he had struck, his spinning swords intercepting his opponent’s, and bringing it into the spin with them. In a moment, all three blades were in the air, turning circles, and only two of them, Jarlaxle’s, were still being held. The third was kept aloft by the slapping and sliding of the other two.
Jarlaxle hooked the hilt of that sword with the blade of one of his own, angled it out to the side and launched it into the chest of another attacker, knocking him back and to the floor.
He went ahead suddenly and brutally, blades whirling with perfect precision, to take the wererat’s arm, then drop the other arm limply to its side with a well-placed blow to the collarbone, then slash its face, then its throat.
Up came Jarlaxle’s foot, planting against the staggered wererat’s chest, and he kicked out, knocking the creature to its back and running over it.
Entreri had meant to get to Jarlaxle’s side, but instead, the drow came rushing up to Entreri’s side, uttering a command under his breath that retracted one of his swords to dagger size. He quickly slid the weapon back to its sheath, and with his free hand grabbed Entreri by the shoulder and pulled him along.
The puzzled assassin glanced at his companion. More wererats were piling into the tavern, through the windows, through the door, but those remaining farmers were falling back now, moving into purely defensive positions. Though more than a dozen wererats remained, Entreri did not believe that he and this amazingly skilled drow warrior would have any trouble at all tearing them apart.
Furthermore and even more puzzling, Jarlaxle had their run angled for the closest wall. While putting a solid barrier at their backs might be effective in some cases against so many opponents, Entreri thought this ridiculous, given Jarlaxle’s flamboyant, room-requiring style.
Jarlaxle let go of Entreri then and reached up to the top of his huge hat.
From somewhere unseen in the strange hat, he brought forth a black disk made of some fabric Entreri did not know and sent it spinning at the wall. It elongated as it went, turning flat side to the wooden wall, then it hit … and stuck.
And it was no longer a disk of fabric, but rather a hole—a real hole—in the wall.
Jarlaxle pushed Entreri through, dived through right behind him, and paused only long enough to pull the magical hole out behind him, leaving the wall solid once more.
“Run!” the dark elf cried, sprinting away, with Entreri right on his heels.
Before Entreri could even ask what the drow knew that he did not, the building exploded into a huge and consuming fireball that took the tavern, took all of those wererats still scrambling about the entrances and exits, and took the horses, including Entreri’s and Jarlaxle’s, tethered anywhere near to the place.
The pair went flying to the ground but got right back up, running full speed out of the village and back into the shadows of the surrounding hills and woodlands.
They didn’t even speak for many, many minutes, just ran on, until Jarlaxle finally pulled up behind one bluff and fell against the grassy hill, huffing and puffing.
“I had grown fond of my mount,” he said. “A pity.”
“I did not see the spellcaster,” Entreri remarked.
“He was not in the room,” Jarlaxle explained, “not physically, at least.”
“Then how did you sense him?” Entreri started to ask, but he paused and considered the logic that had led Jarlaxle to his saving conclusion. “Because Kimmuriel and Rai-guy would never take the chance that Gord Abrix and his cronies would get the Crystal Shard,” he reasoned. “Nor would they ever expect the wretched wererats ever to be able to take the thing from us in the first place.”
“I have already explained to you that it is a common tactic for the two,” Jarlaxle reminded. “They send their fodder in to engage their enemies, and Kimmuriel opens a window through which Rai-guy throws his potent magic.”
Entreri looked back in the direction of the village, at the plume of black smoke drifting into the air. “Well thought,” he congratulated. “You saved us both.”
“Well, you at least,” Jarlaxle replied, and Entreri looked back at him curiously, to see the drow waggling the fingers of one hand against his cheek, showing off a reddish-gold ring that Entreri had not noticed before.
“It was just a fireball,” Jarlaxle said with a grin.
Entreri nodded and returned that grin, wondering if there was anything, anything at all, that Jarlaxle was not prepared for.
CHAPTER
BALANCING PRUDENCE AND DESIRE
20
Gord Abrix gasped and fell over as the small globe of fire soared past him, through the doorway, and into the tavern. As soon as it went through, Kimmuriel dropped the dimensional door. Gord Abrix had seen fireballs cast before and could well imagine the devastation back in the tavern. He knew he had just lost nearly a score of his loyal wererat soldiers.
He came up unsteadily, glancing around at his three dark elf companions, unsure, as he always seemed to be with this group, of what they might do next.
“You and your soldiers performed admirably,” Rai-guy remarked.
“You killed them,” Gord Abrix dared to say, though certainly not in any accusatory tone.
“A necessary sacrifice,” Rai-guy replied. “You did not believe that they would have any chance of defeating Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle, did you?”
Kimmuriel opened the dimensional door then, showing the devastated tavern, charred bodies laying all about and not a creature stirring. The drow’s lip curled up in a wicked smile as he surveyed the grisly scene, and a shudder coursed Gord Abrix’s spine as he realized the fate he had only barely escaped.
Berg’inyon Baenre went through the door, into what remained of the tavern room, which was more outdoors than indoors now, and returned a moment later.
“A couple of wererats still stir but barely,” the drow warrior informed his companions.
“What of our friends?” Rai-guy asked.
Berg’inyon shrugged. “I saw neither Jarlaxle nor Entreri,” he explained. “They could be among the wreckage or could be burned beyond immediate recognition.”
Rai-guy considered it for a moment, and motioned for Berg’inyon and Gord Abrix to go back to the tavern and snoop around.
“What of my soldiers?” the wererat asked.
“If they can be saved, pull them back through,” Rai-guy replied. “Lady Lolth will grant me the power to healing them … should I choose to do so.”
Gord Abrix started for the dimensional doorway, and paused and glanced back curiously at the obscure and dangerous drow, not sure how to sort through the wizard-cleric’s words.
“Do you believe our prey are still in there?” Kimmuriel asked Rai-guy, using the drow tongue to exclude the wererat leader.
Berg’inyon answered from the doorway. “They are not,” he said with confidence, though it was obvious he hadn’t found the time yet to scour the ruins. “It would take more than a diversion and a simple wizard’s spell to bring down that pair.”
Servant of the Shard: The Sellswords Page 28