There was another silence before he whispered, "Lady, what are you?"
As if his words had been a cue, the sentinel with the sword stepped back into the passage, said curtly, "Come,".and whirled back into his side-passage again.
"Lead on, guide," the soft voice said gently in Besmer's ear, and the trembling thief reluctantly stepped into the side-passage.
They'd gone barely six paces before a sword thrust through Sharantyr again. She regarded the sentinel with — a raised eyebrow, and he put out his other hand to snatch the cords of her stonemaiden and snapped, "From here on, you go to see the Master alone. Leave me your sword-and your dagger, and every other weapon you have."
Sharantyr's strength held the cords immobile despite his strong tug, keeping the suddenly gargling Besmer alive. She looked straight into the sentinel's stony face and said in exact mimicry of his flat tones, "Let go of my cords-or die."
For a long moment they stared at each other, strength straining against strength and the thief staggering and clawing for air, trying desperately to turn around. Sharantyr raised one eyebrow, and the sentinel let go of the stone-maiden, stepped back a pace, and growled, "Surrender your weapons now!"
"I hired this man as a guide," Sharantyr told him calmly, taking her cord from around Besmer's neck and dropping a handful of coins into his hand. Out of habit the thief looked down at them, and she said to him, "I hope those few coins will suffice. If I need a guide again in Scornubel, I know what alley to expect you in."
Besmer stared at her, clenched his hand around the small mound of gold coins that filled his palm-then turned and ran, rubbing at his throat.
The sentinel repeated his demand, and Sharantyr turned back to him, lifted her eyebrow again, and said, "You seem slow to grasp the fact that I take no orders from you or from the Master. To borrow again the phrasing you seem to love so much, stand aside-or die."
The man's face tightened, and he lunged like a trained sword-master, thrusting his blade-through her harmlessly, as before.
Almost lazily Sharantyr swung the stonemaiden. The sentinel's hand darted up to prevent the cords from being looped around his neck, and both stones struck his head from behind, one on either side.
Limply he sagged to the floor of the passage. Sharantyr sprang over him and walked on.
The passage took a sharp bend, where rusty blades thrust out of the wall to transfix her. She walked through them unscathed, shaking her head, and found herself locking gazes with another man, this one a grim, armored giant. He was more than a head taller than she was, though she overtopped many a man, and almost filled the small, square room the passage emptied into. The passage almost filled one wall of the giant's room, and the other three walls were similarly dominated by doors-all of rusting scraps of salvaged armor, nailed to wood beneath. The two to either side were closed, but the one straight ahead, beyond the giant, stood invitingly open, onto a passage that turned right to lamplight in the distance.
This hulking guard wore an open-faced helm. What Sharantyr could see of his face was a grotesque, fleshy mask of crisscrossing scars.
She smiled at him and said grandly, "You may introduce me: the Lady Tessaril Winter, here to see the Master of the Shadows."
The response was a slow, sneering introduction of a steel war-axe from behind the giant's back. Sharantyr eyed its wooden haft as he hefted it to the accompaniment of a deep, sinister chuckle, decided she didn't want to have bones broken at every blow, and strode nonchalantly into the room, fluffing out her hair like an exasperated courtier. He frowned at her in puzzlement, then swept his axe up and back for a slaughterhouse swing. Sharantyr launched herself at the floor between and behind his legs in a desperate dive that carried her between his tree trunk legs.
The passage floor was cold, damp, and hard, and she wallowed on it for far too long, fighting for breath and kicking frantically. His boot-heel helped her, crashing into. her behind with bruising force as he tried to turn.
The impediment shook his ponderous balance, and the armored giant windmilled with his arms, caught his axe on the doorframe and so avoided falling. He managed to get himself turned around in time to greet one of the stones of Sharantyr's hard-swung maiden with his nose.
He bellowed with pain as his nose broke-probably for the fourteenth or fifteenth time, by the looks of it-and blood streamed forth. The other stone temporarily blinded him and sent him hopping and howling in pain, clutching at his broken browbone and bruised eye and cheek. The axe clattered to the floor, and Sharantyr booted it as hard as she could, sending it skittering only a few feet. Dazedly the guard tried to reclaim it, snatching twice at flagstones close to it. His second attempt brought his bull-thick neck within easy reach of Sharantyr's cord.
She garroted him in a single, catlike pounce and held on grimly through the frantic struggles that followed. Thrice he battered her against the passage walls, trying to dislodge this creature clinging to his head and clawing at his eyes as he gulped and choked and sobbed for air that he could not get… ere he crashed to the flagstones and left her to stagger clear of him, wincing.
She'd loosed her cord the moment he'd started to fall, and he lived still. Sharantyr's own gasps for breath almost drowned out a faint gasp from behind one of the closed doors-but she heard it, looped her cord about its handle in a trice, and hauled it open.
A slender figure was whirling away from her to flee down a passage beyond; Sharantyr threw her stonemaiden at his ankles and plunged after him. Thus she was in just the right spot, when his running feet faltered and he fell, to punch the lurking spy in the face, grab his head in both hands, and bang it repeatedly on the passage floor.
The man wore three daggers strapped to him, and at least one of them was smeared with something Sharantyr didn't like the looks of. She claimed them all, sheaths and straps, and was pleased to learn that they had black wooden hilts and leather-wrapped grips, so the magic on her wouldn't force her to just drop them the moment she drew them.
Wearing her newfound armory on her forearms and inside her left boot, the Knight of Myth Drannor trotted down the passage the spy had been in. She was unsurprised to find that it turned the same way as the visible one the armored giant had been guarding, and ended in a door with a spyhole in it.
The room beyond was large and cavernous and almost empty. In one corner stood two lamps, flanking a large old wooden desk heaped with parchments and ledgers. A mountain of a man sat behind it, peering and writing. His eyes were pale, thoughtful things, sunk deep like those of a hound above jowls that would have served many a Dales laborer as a meal.
Sharantyr watched him for a moment, then shifted to look through the spyhole in other directions. A lot of the room- along the wall nearest to her-she couldn't see, but the rest of it seemed empty, so she reached out and calmly opened the door.
The man looked up and quickly acquired a sharp look of surprise. "Who," he said, reaching even more swiftly for something behind his stacks of papers, "are you?"
"Why, Belgon, I'm deeply disappointed that you recognize me not! Tessaril Winter, Lady Lord of Eveningstar, at your service."
The Master of the Shadows scowled. "You're not Tessaril," he snapped, raising the bowgun in his hand until she could — see it clearly. It was aimed right at her face. "Try for the truth again."
"Tessaril sent me, so I thought using her name might get me to you with minimal bloodshed," the lady ranger replied. "It's worked-more or less-thus far." She glanced about the room, seeing two other doors besides the open one next to the one she was standing in, but no other immediate menaces, and added, "I'd like that tradition to continue, if possible, between us. I've no quarrel with you, Master of the Shadows-though if you fire that toy of yours, things may change on that score rather swiftly."