Hand of Fire

by Ed Greenwood

  “Ah,” Torm said impishly, “but just how far d’you think you’re going to get without this?” He opened his hand, and the ranger saw the little ivory skull gleaming in it.

  Sharantyr sighed, made a grab for it that he easily fended off—and as he twisted away, chuckling, brought her booted left foot up hard into his crotch with all the force she could put behind it.

  His codpiece was armored and would leave a bruise on her shin that might take a month to stop aching, but the thief of the Knights was smaller and lighter than the lady ranger, and her kick launched him into the air with a startled whistle of pain and escaping breath that took him into senselessness with nary another sound—save for the meaty thud of his body falling with full, limp force into the waiting arms of Rathan Thentraver, Stalwart of Tymora. The priest winced, cradled Torm as gently as one might hold a babe, and lowered him deftly to the floor.

  “Had he not been armored, lass,” he said gravely, “that would have been far less than kind. As ’tis—well, one can’t deny he hath reaped a harvest his own hand hath most enthusiastically sown. The cup will have cut his thighs. He’ll be stiff and sore for some days, and then—I fear, as should we all—himself again.” He tossed her something small and smooth: the ivory skull.

  Sharantyr caught it and told Rathan, “I wish, just for once, he’d let someone else’s will prevail. When he awakens, tell him I’m sorry for doing this … but this matters much to me: not just the doing of it, but undertaking it by myself. The days and months and years pass, and I wither in his shadow.”

  The priest nodded. “I understand just what you mean,” he said, “and will tell him. Tymora and all the other benevolent gods watch over thee, Sharantyr—and come back safe to us.”

  The lady ranger put the skull into her belt pouch, adjusted the slender long sword that rode on her hip, and looked up at him with a sigh, then a rueful grin.

  “Well,” she replied, “I suppose there’s always a first time.”

  “Better?” Narm asked, as he tightened the ropes around her arms again.

  “Much,” Shandril said, and kissed his cheek as he bent past her. Narm gave her a grin—it made Thaerla of Chauntea’s face wrinkle up like a benevolent toad—and said, “I’m not sure how you’re going to like sitting there watching me eat and drink when you can’t have anything.”

  Shandril stiffened. “I’d forgotten that,” she said slowly. “Narm, I’ve got to eat. I—won’t they bring food up to us, here?”

  “I’ll go see.”

  “No, we’ll go see. I’m not parting from you, not even for a moment. This is Scornubel—anything can happen.”

  Thaerla of Chauntea’s smile was decidely wry this time. “Try that last sentence of yours again, and put the word ‘Highmoon’ in place of ‘Scornubel.’ Then try it with ‘Shadowdale.’ ‘Waterdeep’ has a nice ring to it, too.”

  “Hush! That’s not funny!” The penitent priestess wriggled her arms, testing the ropes around her and added in a smaller voice, “True, though. I’m not happy to say it, but … ’tis true.”

  The Sun was a good inn and a popular one. In Scornubel, that meant it was something of a fortress, uneasily cloaked in small touches of luxury. Room doors in the Sun came with their own lock-props, to be set by patrons on the inside when being intruded upon was not highly desirable. Narm shot the bolt, lifted the prop aside, and indicated the door with a flourish. “Penitents first?”

  Cautiously Shandril pulled on the door-ring, and even more cautiously peered out. The passage beyond was empty.

  It ended in a short flight of steps leading down onto a landing that overlooked the forehall of the inn—a landing that sported a lounge seat for the use of patrons, and two smaller, harder seats flanking the passage. On one sat a uniformed servant, and the other was occupied by a hard-faced, openly armed guard. Thaerla of Chauntea exchanged a few polite words with the servant and towed her silent penitent back to their room.

  “That was simple enough,” Narm said, going straight to the window to test its frame of iron bars—old and rusty, but solid. “I’d rather stay right here until late morning on the morrow, and go seeking the Tankard and our caravan-master then.”

  A short, choked-off scream came in the window, and he gestured ruefully in its direction. “The local sights seem—well, a trifle too exciting.”

  “I hate this place,” Shandril said softly. “A whole city full of folk being brutal to each other, cheating and threatening and coercing …”

  Narm shrugged. “So we get away from here as soon as Orthil Voldovan will take us—and go straight to Waterdeep, another den of harmony, fresh air, and public safety.”

  “Stop it,” his lady whispered fiercely. “I’m serious, Narm. What if someone drugs or poisons our food? ’Twouldn’t surprise me!”

  Thaerla of Chauntea raised one chubby but triumphant finger. “Ah, there I can be of some service. Jhessail taught me a very rare spell that reveals taints and poisons to a mage—as purple glows.”

  “And if you cast it, there goes your disguise, just as my spellfire shattered mine,” Shandril muttered into his ear. “Leaving us for all the world to see in the heart of this—this city of thieves, slavers, and brigands!”

  Narm sighed. “So what would you have me do? Let you faint of hunger?”

  “Narm,” Shandril said in a low whisper, “I don’t know. I haven’t known ‘the wise thing to do’ since I first left Highmoon … and I don’t seem to be getting any better at it. I—”

  There was a sharp rapping at the door. Narm clapped a hand over Shandril’s mouth for a moment and slid aside the little window shutter, asking in Thaerla of Chauntea’s sniffiest voice, “Yes? You disturb us at prayer for a good reason?”

  “You ordered evenfeast for two,” a flat, unimpressed voice replied, “and I’ve brought it. Still interested?”

  “Ah, now. That’s different,” Thaerla replied, unbolting the door again.

  A hard-eyed guard entered, a loaded hand crossbow aimed at the ceiling and his other hand hovering above the hilt of his blade. Behind him came two chambermen in the maroon-and-gold uniform of the inn, bearing steaming dome-covered platters on their shoulders, followed by another guard. The foremost guard pulled on a carved knob on the wall beside the door that Narm had thought was mere decorative molding atop a pillar—and the whole affair came out of the wall as a table on edge. Expertly he kicked it up and open, and stood back to let the servants set down their platters.

  As they did so, the other guard came into the room, drew the door closed, and leveled another hand crossbow at Shandril—as the first guard brought his crossbow down to menace Narm, and the two chambermen lifted the domes away from their platters to reveal small plates of roast boar on skewers—and cocked hand crossbows of their own. With swift deftness they removed wooden safety catches, laid darts into tracks, ready to fire, and pointed their weapons at the two priestesses.

  “W-what is the meaning of this?” Thaerla of Chauntea quavered in outrage.

  “It means,” the first guard said pleasantly, “you’re both going to get down on your faces on the floor in front of us, with no hurlings of spellfire or anything else—or we’ll see if someone can wield spellfire with two crossbow darts in her throat. Or eyes, perhaps.”

  “Down!” one of the chambermen snarled, gesturing with his crossbow. “On the floor now!”

  “Which one of them is the spellfire wench, do you think?” the other guard muttered. “We could kill the other one and—”

  Slowly the hooded, penitent priestess wavered uncertainly to her knees, and then down. After a swift glance at her, Thaerla followed, murmuring, “ChaunteadeliverusChaunteasaveus

  Chaunteakeepandpreserveusyourfaithfulservants—”

  “Silence! She’s a god, so she’s heard you. Now, enough!” the second guard snarled, stepping forward to aim his crossbow at Shandril’s hooded head from only a few feet away. One of the chambermen did the same. The other two thrust their bows almost into Thaerla�
��s face, and the priestess ended her supplication with a sort of peeping sound and sank floorward.

  The spellfire came without warning, roaring forth with enough fury to snatch all four men off their feet and drive them, shattered to pulp, into the wall behind them—in the scant instants before that wall disappeared, and startled faces gaped at Shandril from the room beyond.

  The owners of those faces promptly screamed, clawed aside their prop and bolts, and fled. Shandril rose with her face white and set but her eyes dark and terrible with rage. From the window came a burst of fire and flame that flung iron bars like kindling into the room, to crash and bounce and roll. Shandril caught a glimpse of two faces outside, glaring in at her with expressions that were less than friendly—and as they aimed wands in through the roiling smoke and crumbling hole that had been the window, she gave them spellfire, blasting much of that wall away.

  “S-shan, easy,” Narm hissed, still on his knees. “This building might come down on us if y—”

  “So get us out of here,” she said in a voice that trembled with rage. “Right now I just want to lash out at anyone in this Nine Hells of a city!”

  Narm snatched up their packs and snatched the door open—to stare into the hard-eyed faces of a dozen or more warriors. He barely slammed it again before a crossbow cracked. The quarrel slammed through the closing gap and shivered its way across the room, and Narm was hurled back, the door banging open, under the fury of hard-charging warriors.

  Shandril Shessair was waiting for them, spellfire leaking from her eyes and nose as she glared. “Leave me alone!” she howled, slaying them with roaring gouts of flame that seared the passage outside and left small fires raging in its wake. “Just—”

  There were angry shouts from the inn stairs, and the thunder of running feet. Figures moved in the next room whose wall Shandril had breached, dark-robed figures who’d obviously come in through its window, and were now waving spells as fast as their fingers could fly.

  Shandril hurled spellfire at them—but her searing flames clawed along something that wrestled with it and withstood it, something that looked like black fire. Open-mouthed, Narm watched jet-black flames rage and snarl in the face of white-hot spellfire. Then a wizard moaned, reeled, and collapsed—as if exhausted or drained, not struck by anything Shandril had sent—and the black flames sank back.

  “Shan!” Narm cried, “we have to get out of here! The wall behind us—blast it!”

  His raging wife turned with her hair swirling around her like so many eager, licking flames, and the wall obligingly darkened, melted away, and was gone—but her flames were faltering, now, and in the darkened room beyond were more hard-faced warriors in dark battle armor, with drawn swords and glaives in their hands.

  A cascade of lightnings crashed down around them, and Shandril drank them in eagerly, turning with renewed vigor to face the wizards, trying to draw them into hurling more spells—ere she fed a slaying sheet of spellfire at head-level out into the passage and spun around to give the same to the warriors now surging forward to try to clamber through the hole she’d burned into their room.

  The boar-like stench of cooked man-flesh was rising around them now, and Narm was crouching at Shandril’s feet with their packs in his hands, trying not to hamper her as she turned and spat fire again and again—brief, careful gouts now, trying to preserve what she had left. The passage was afire; there was no going out that way—and the longer she was forced to fight, the less likely stepping into either of the other rooms, wizards and fresh hostile warriors or none, would give them any easy route to escape. That left—

  “The window!” Narm snapped. “Someone’s climbing in the window!”

  Shandril wheeled around, smoking hands raised to slay once more—only to stop, her eyes caught by a gleaming silver harp badge.

  The man holding it was a smiling, dark-haired figure in leathers, wearing a sly expression on his handsome face that reminded her of Torm of the Knights of Myth Drannor. He gave them an airy wave, and called, “These accommodations seem a little—crowded. I generally provide free guidance to visitors to this fair city. Is there anywhere else you’d prefer to be, about now?”

  “I can think of several,” Shandril replied, hurling a tongue of spellfire at a wizard in the next room who’d fumbled out a dagger and was raising it to throw, “but none of them are in Scornubel. Do you—harp alone?”

  “Most of the time,” the black-haired man replied, giving the two priestesses of Chauntea a crooked smile. “I am Marlel, and I believe I already know both of your names—your real names. I can take you to—’ware behind you, in the passage!”

  Shandril whirled, blasted, and watched the body of a warrior who’d been carrying a full-sized crossbow along the burning hallway toward them dance headless back into the flames, to fall and be lost, his bow firing harmlessly down the passage. There was a thud and a groan in the distance—hmm, not so harmlessly, after all.

  “My thanks,” Shandril told the Harper crisply. “Now, can you take us to, say, The Stormy Tankard, on Hethbridle Street?”

  “Of course,” Marlel told them with a smile. “If you can hold onto a rope, the window awaits.”

  Shandril gave Narm a shove in the Harper’s direction, and after two quick glances into the room of the warriors—where no one moved—and the passage—burning too merrily, now, to fear any arrivals that way—turned to face the wizards once more. One of them was just finishing a spell of hurled fists. Shandril gave him a cold smile and awaited it, spellfire racing up and down her widespread arms—and the wizard promptly fled.

  Marlel leaned out the window almost lazily, flung a knife, and there was a short, strangled gurgling sound, followed by the heavy thud of a body ending its fall.

  Shandril’s body jerked under the first few blows of the mage’s spell, and then her spellfire rose bright around her and she sighed almost in rapture as she drank in the magic.

  The small fires on her body died away, and she smiled and strode to Marlel, who gave her his crooked smile, indicating the window with a flourish.

  “Just a moment,” Narm said, and cast his poison-detecting spell on the platters that still steamed on the table inside the shattered door.

  The roast boar brought for them promptly glowed bright purple.

  4

  OTHER LIVES, OTHER DREAMS

  An inn is like a very small and poorly lit realm: It holds arrogant nobles, those who think they rule or believe they’re important, the downtrodden who do the real work, and the outlaws and dark-knives whose work is preying on others. The problem is the constant stream of arrivals and departures that robs ye of the time ye need to learn which guest belongs to which group. So ye end up having to be constantly wary of them all. Just as in larger realms.

  Blorgar Hanthaver of Myratma

  Doors Open To All: Forty Winters An Innkeeper

  Year of the Striking Falcon

  If The Sun Over Scornubel laid claim to the mantle of “a superior inn of service and distinction,” The Stormy Tankard made no such pretensions. It was the sort of place where no one had ever cleaned anything since it was built, and rooms were small, dark bunk-holes boasting furnishings that were sparse, mismatched, and either battered or outright broken. This squalor was enlivened by the sounds of unclasped and uncloaked revelry from adjacent chambers—all such rental-quarters being situated up narrow, creaking stairs above a smoke-filled, ever-noisy den of drink and brawling and harsh-voiced chatter. There was nothing unpopular about the Tankard’s taproom—it was crowded with folk of half a dozen races, who by their looks and garb hailed from a score of lands or more.

  Night was falling over Scornubel like a dark cloak spread across a red, starlit sky as Marlel led Narm and Shandril—still in their robes, but fat she-priestesses no longer—in through a side door of the Tankard.

  “Wait your turn,” a cold voice greeted them sourly, out of the darkness.

  “Aye,” another voice agreed. “Just stand still and keep shut an�
� wait.”

  “Fair evening to you, Tulasker,” Marlel said merrily. “As it happens, we’re not in the market just now—make way, please, so I can get to Pharaulee and book a room.”

  “Ho, ho, the Dark Blade of Doom has chosen already, has he?” Shrewd eyes peered at Shandril and Narm in the gloom, and Tulasker added with an unlovely laugh, “Strange tastes for you, Marlel!”

  “Not half so strange as what you’ll be tasting if you don’t roll aside, old blade,” Marlel replied lightly.

  “Ho ho! And what if I don’t?”

  “Then, Tulasker, I’m afraid you’ll learn firsthand how I came by my rather grand professional title. It will be one of those sharp, painful, and rather final lessons, too.”

  “Aye, aye, impress us all,” Tulasker muttered disparagingly, as he slowly shuffled aside.

  At the far end of the gloomy room, a sharp-featured woman wearing rather too much face paint and rather too little of anything else ducked out from behind a curtain and snapped, “Next!”

  “Fraea,” the cold-voiced man said quickly.

  “Four gold,” the woman said promptly, holding out her hand.

  “Four?”

  “Dispute with me, Nalvor, and it’ll be five,” was the swift reply. “Four, or be off with you!”

  Marlel led his two priestess-robed companions in the other direction, down a dark and narrow passage, to a doorway where a tall, bald mountain of flesh with tusks and large ears—a half-orc, whose face and chest were covered with old, wandering sword scars—stood with arms folded and a spike-handled axe gripped in each heavy hand, blocking the way.