Spellstorm

by Ed Greenwood

  “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

  RIGHT, LASS, I’M READY. OPEN 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.”

  Mirt winced. “El?”

  The long-bearded wizard’s face was suddenly severe, his expression’s falsity betrayed by twinkling eyes. “Don’t look to me for protection or support, old friend. Ye dug the pit, and ye leaped into it—and I’m not now inclined to rush past thee and lie down to serve as a mattress to soothe thy landing.”

  “But you’re so good at that! You’ve done it so often, for so many others before me!”

  “They were prettier,” Elminster told the moneylender, “and less massive, too.”

  “Coffer,” Myrmeen reminded patiently, holding it up. Mirt carefully stowed all the fingers he could find within it, then looked at the larger remnants still adorning the floor. “And these?”

  “There’s a large crock in the larders that should serve,” she replied, “but we’ve got to reoccupy all those rooms first, and that’ll probably involve fighting the last few Torr men. Being as they haven’t tried to fight their way past us, and out of Oldspires.”

  Mirt shook his head. “What a crazed way to build a house. All this space, room upon room like the high house of one of the richest and most powerful Waterdhavian families—and only one door to the outside. Just the one.” He shook his head. “Is this, ah, usual among the country architecture of Cormyrean nobility?”

  “You mean, are they all this mad?” Myrmeen’s voice was wry. “They are, but no, this is not the norm. Homes do burn down in Cormyr like everywhere else, so most people prefer to have more than one way out. I’ve visited many country mansions where every last ground-floor room in some wings had its own outside door. Keeps the servants right busy digging away snowdrifts all winter long.”

  Mirt nodded. “And how is it there happened to be a handy coffer sitting on yon table? You didn’t just dump out the ashes of past Halaunts, did you?”

  “No, I dumped out some pipeleaf that had moldered to near powder decades ago. It seems this Lord Halaunt didn’t smoke, but earlier Halaunts did. Now, are we done here? I want to get back into that kitchen!”

  “Fight our way back into that kitchen,” Elminster warned. “Two Torr men have been watching us from the door on the far side of the Copper Receiving Room from the first swing ye took at their Shaaan-animated fellows.”

  “So do we march right over and have at them?” Mirt asked. “Or try the kitchen door right here in yonder wall?”

  “This one here,” Myrmeen decided. “Otherwise we don’t know how many of them could burst out and come around to shove their blades up our backsides.” However, she looked to Elminster for his approval.

  He nodded and smiled. “With magic chancy, thy preferences rule, for ye have the blade skills, and are the swiftest and most agile of we three.”

  “Oh,” Myrmeen teased, “thank you, saer, said she!” Then she whispered, “Ready?”

  When they both nodded, she strolled over to where she could slide the coffer full of fingers down out of sight behind a carved stone umbrella stand in the shape of a wood nymph clad only in strategically placed grapes and the entwining-her-limbs vine they were growing on.

  And then took two swift sidesteps, and hauled open the kitchen door.

  It swung in well-oiled ease, neither locked nor barred, and the charging Mirt got a glimpse of three startled warrior’s faces, two of them dropping their jaws and the third yammering, “They’re over here! Two of the three the master ordered us to behead!”

  Then the Torr warriors wasted precious time grabbing their helms and jamming them on their heads—by which time the lumbering Mirt, who could move quite fast once he’d wheezed his way up to top speed, had crashed through the doorway, stepped on a greasy roasting pan amid the ankle-deep litter of ransacked cookware, ladles, and the like that now covered the kitchen floor, and slid right up to them.

  He did not even try to slow down.

  With a kkrraaAAAsh that shook the last few pieces of crockery out of the cupboards to plummet and smash, the moneylender cannoned right into the nearest warrior, and betrayed his background as a back-alley brawler by planting a balled fist in the man’s throat so hard that he broke that neck—not that a man with an utterly crushed windpipe can breathe long enough to worry about such things—and drove its owner back into his fellow behind him. Who in turn stumbled back into the third warrior.

  Leaving the stumbling second warrior busy windmilling his arms and fighting just to keep hold of his sword—which meant he couldn’t hope to stop Mirt’s sword from opening his throat, in a swing so wide and free that the moneylender managed to strike the third warrior’s sword right out of his hand on the backswing.

  So Mirt’s free hand didn’t have to contend with a sword slicing at it, and could reach out, grab hold of the underedge of the third warrior’s helm where it ran along down below the man’s jaw, twist head and helm around so hard and abruptly that the man preserved his neck only by sacrificing all balance and turning on his heels—and then ram that head into the sharp edge of a cupboard, where it ended at the door frame of the wide door opening into the feast hall.

  Where there were other Torr warriors, five—no, six—of them, presumably including those who’d been watching through the Copper Receiving Room, but possibly not, gaping at Mirt and bringing hand axes up to hurl his way.

  They were distracted by a furious, high-pitched shriek from behind Mirt that if truth be told distracted him and Elminster almost into slipping and falling.

  “You did this to my kitchen? You barbarians! You utter alley-rat pigs! How dare you stand there in armor and purport to be human! Yeeeeeaarrrgh!”

  And in a raging fury Myrmeen vaulted the falling body of that third warrior, now slumping floorward with a cupboard-edge-shaped deep furrow all down the back of his helm, and landed in the midst of the feast hall at a dead run, the swords in her hands whirling.

  Gleaming plate armor is admirable protection in battle, but if it lacks a gorget, or mail coif, to protect the throat, and a visor to defend the face, it isn’t much use when worn by someone not swift enough to parry attacks at those vulnerable spots.

  Wherefore two of the six hireswords were gurgling and dying before a third managed a desperate parry only by dropping his hand axe and wrapping both hands around the hilt of his sword.

  By which time the fourth, fifth, and sixth Torr warriors saw Mirt lumbering their way with bloodthirsty glee flaming on his face and Elminster laughing in the throes of the same bright-eyed emotion—and took to their heels and ran.

  Out through the Copper Receiving Room with Myrmeen felling their unfortunate comrade and racing after them.

  They were halfway across the entry hall when a dreadful voice out of empty air right in front of the foremost warrior’s nose whispered, “You run to you
r doom! The Halaunts shall tear your bones out of your running body!”

  It wasn’t the most frightening thing Alusair might have said, but she was in haste and improvising. Luckily for her, the running hiresword was already terrified.

  He skidded on his heels, screamed, and flung up his hands—losing his axe in the direction of the ceiling but somehow managing to keep hold of his sword—and his fellow warrior, sprinting right behind him, ran into him with a solid metallic crash, and they went down together, skidding on … lumps of severed body that had been left on the hall floor. They both screamed again, in the instant before the third and last Torr warrior trampled them hard, lost his footing doing so, and fell hard on his behind.

  And Myrmeen Lhal, still seething in rage and racing even faster than any of the fleeing hireswords had been able to manage, caught up to them and hacked and hewed, snarling as she slew.

  When she was done, and standing panting and looking around wild-eyed for more targets, Mirt said from behind her, “If you go on like this, I’m very much afraid we’re going to need more than just that one crock.”

  MYRMEEN WAS STILL spitting mad, so Mirt and El hastily set about picking up smashed bowls and the litter of pans and forks and ladles from the floor, and tossed it all out into the entry hall to be dealt with later.

  “The dead warriors can guard it,” the moneylender muttered. “Watching gods above, but she’s furious!”

  “Ye think?” El muttered, taking hold of a dead man’s foot and starting to tug. “Give her some time to simmer down, and we’ll reintroduce her to the concept of pickles and preserved fruit.”

  “Oh, no,” Mirt replied. “Not me. You can do that, and I’ll stand well back and watch her make you wear it.”

  Although it would probably take days to go through everything, thus far nothing had been poisoned, so far as they could tell, but all the cooking fires were out, and everything readily edible had been eaten.

  “And what they couldn’t eat, they spilled and trampled underfoot,” Elminster sighed, heading for the butlery, where the mops were kept.