In three bounds Narm was around the corner, heart in his mouth. His wife knelt on the stones. Shandril shook her head, waving him feebly away. She was being thoroughly and wretchedly sick. “The smell,” she gasped. “Gods, how vile!”
“Vile, indeed,” said a new voice from beyond her. “Were I younger and less—’hem—stout of stomach, I’d be doing that too. Which should serve ye as a warning, girl, not to be hurling flames about at just everything that moves. Ye’ll burn up something ye value, one o’ these days. Phew! Come away, come away, all of ye—that thing smells as if it did nothing but roll in dung and eat dead things.”
“Who,” Delg and Narm demanded together, “are you?”
The stout, dark figure beyond Shandril drew something from its belt—a dagger whose blade glowed with blue fire in the night. Narm stepped quickly in front of Shandril, raising his own dagger, but the man shook his head and brandished the glowing blade to serve as a light.
Its radiance shone down on him, illuminating the grizzled, scarred, and yet somehow good-natured face of a burly man clad in flopping, food-stained leather armor. Fierce brows and mustaches gleamed gray-white on his large and weather-stained face. Huge swash-boots flapped beneath an ample paunch as he stepped forward, handed the glowing dagger to Narm—who juggled it gingerly—then swept around the young mage and grandly offered his hand to Shandril to help her rise.
Warily she avoided it, coming to her feet in a crouch, facing him. “Yes,” she said, fire winking in her eyes, “who are you, sir?”
The battered, leonine face wagged sadly from side to side. “An’ here I thought I was famous at last, over at least the lands of all the North. Ah, well.”
He drew back from Shandril, plucked his dagger deftly from Narm’s grasp, and struck a heroic pose, holding the dagger forth as though it were a great battle-sword. “I am Mirt, called the Moneylender, of Waterdeep. Men once called me—’hem—Mirt the Merciless. Some folk call me the Old Wolf.”
Delg eyed the stout man sourly. “I am Delg, of the dwarves.” It was a gentle dwarven insult, implying that the speaker did not trust the one he addressed enough to furnish his last name.
Mirt bowed in reply, and made a quick, complex sign with one hand.
Delg’s eyes widened. “So,” he said with new respect, “you have known others of my race as friends, before. Well met, stout one. What brings you here—to the depths of this forest, and alone?”
“Well met, short one,” Mirt replied easily. “I like to pick mushrooms this time of year, and Hullack Forest seemed a nice enough place—quiet an’ all, until spellfire started roaring about all over the place, and—well, ne’er mind. Come back to my camp, all of ye, and we can swap stories for a bit. Until dawn, say …”
“A moment,” Narm said quietly. “Delg’s question is a fair one, sir. Before we follow you into gods know what, tell us how you come to be here. We are—suspicious folk, these days. Everyone and everything in Faerûn seems eager to kill us.”
“Ye, too?” Mirt replied mildly, raising his brows. “’Tis a plague, it seems. They’re always trying to kill me, too.”
Narm waited. A breath of silence passed, and Shandril quite deliberately climbed up a ragged edge of stone wall to stand above them. She glanced quickly all around, and then stood facing the man who called himself Mirt, one hand raised. Fire licked along her fingers for a moment.
The stout man watched her, nodded as if in acknowledgment of power, and then turned back to the young mage and smiled winningly. “Well, Narm Tamaraith, ye’re right.”
Narm frowned. How did this man know his name?
He opened his mouth to ask just that, but the stout man waved him to silence, saying, “Aye, it’s rude of me not to congratulate ye on your wise marriage to Shandril Shessair right off, and set ye three at ease.”
Mirt smiled up at Shandril and added, “The bride is as beautiful as I’ve been told, and no mistake. Well met, all of ye.” He bowed again, various daggers and scabbards about his belt jangling and ringing, and smoothed his mustaches with broad, hairy fingers.
“I’ve awaited ye here, in these long-desolate ruins of Tethgard—there’s a tale I’ll have to tell ye some time—because a friend told me ye’d be along, soon, and probably in need of aid. When young folk go blundering about the countryside …”
Delg rolled his eyes. “All right,” he broke in, “we may as well be finding your camp. I can see there’re some good tales to be heard. You wouldn’t know a certain mage called Elminster, would you?”
“Or a lady named Storm?” Shandril asked softly.
Mirt chuckled and stepped forward to hand her lightly down from her rocky height. “As it happens, both those names belong to friends of mine,” he rumbled. “Convenient, aye?” He passed his dagger to Narm again. “Here, lad—ye hold the light; then perhaps ye can stop looking so suspiciously at me, like I’m aching to put it in yer lady’s breast the moment yer back is turned. There is something I was given to show ye ….”
He pulled off a worn leather gauntlet. They saw a brass ring around one of the man’s fingers and a fine chain encircling his thick, hairy wrist. Something small gleamed as it dangled from the chain: a silver harp. Then it all vanished again beneath the dirty leather; its owner winked and turned with a rolling gait to lead the way past a pile of tumbled stones and into the night.
“You know we have enemies?” Shandril asked him. “Some, I must tell you, are powerful indeed. Their magic—”
Mirt chuckled. “Aye, aye, make me tremble in my boots, girl. Ye’ve run into those Zhentarim snakes, as do all in the North sooner or later, and some of the crazed-wits that every land in Faerûn is home to; the Cult of the Dragon, in yer case. Worry not. The worst they can do is kill ye.” He shrugged. “Besides, their arts cannot spy on us or find us while ye stay close to me. I’ve magic of my own—a little—that I got from a grateful mage long, long ago. It cloaks me, she said, from scrying and probings of the mind, and suchlike. So we can all sing songs and have too much to drink well into the morning.”
“Stout one,” Delg murmured, “if you keep on like this, it will be morning.”
Mirt rolled his eyes in silent reply and waved at them to accompany him. They followed the stout, wheezing old adventurer down into a little gully in the rocks, where several dark doorways opened out of crumbling walls—the cellars of now-vanished buildings. Mirt shambled toward one opening.
Shandril yawned, stumbled, and almost fell. Narm rushed to hold her up and found her swaying with weariness, almost asleep on her feet.
Mirt wheezed up close to them, peered into Shandril’s sleepy face, and sighed. “The problem with ladies, lad,” he remarked to Narm, “is that they take all the fun out o’ things. After, that is, they’ve put most of the fun into things, I grant.”
He lurched on into the darkness. “Mind yer step, now. The best adventures begin when yer boots step proper and sure along some path or other to glory ….”
When Shandril opened her heavy, sleep-encrusted eyes again, the light told her that it was late afternoon. She sat up with a start, fearing that something had gone very wrong. They should have been up and away from here at the first light of morning. Narm’s cloak fell from her; underneath it, she wore only her breeches.
Narm smiled reassuringly at her from nearby, where he sat in the arch of an old, ruined stone window, his spellbook on his lap.
“What happened?” she demanded to know, pulling on her boots and getting up. Where was her tunic?
“You needed sleep—sleep you didn’t get enough of, after all your fire-hurling. So we let you sleep. Delg’s been fishing most of the day in some pools at the other end of the ruins.”
Shandril strode to him. “Fishing?”