"You just want the bed warmed," his lady said fondly, joining him inside.
"Me? Sole surviving apprentice of Marimmar the Magnificent?" Narm protested in mock innocence.
"You," Shandril confirmed, taking the stool beside the bed where she could face the door and sitting down carefully on a rough piece of armor she'd found. She'd have to trust in its discomfort to keep her awake. By the gods, lives sometimes clung to such small, simple things.,
The stars were beautiful overhead, the night clear and cold. Good; its bite should help to keep her awake.
Sharantyr trudged along the Trade Way alone, walking as quietly as she could. The caravan had probably made Triel by nightfall. She'd catch up to them in another day. Of course, that just might be too late.
The Knight of Myth Drannor was still entertaining that heartening thought when something dimmed the stars above. She blinked, knuckled her eyes to clear the weariness that must be clouding her vision, then stepped back in sudden alarm.
Something like a great net of shadows was settling silently over her! Sharantyr sprinted out from under it and veered toward the nearest tree, snatching out her blade as she ran. That tree was in a ditch, and as her boots slithered downslope, she risked a look back. It was flying after her, right enough!
Heedless of what might be waiting, the ranger burst through a tangle of small, thorny branches and ducked around the trunk of her chosen tree, crouching low and then stabbing up with her blade as the stars dimmed around her.
No smell, no sound-she was cleaving nothing. A nothing that tingled and thickened around her, roiling around… her backpack, bulging with the three glowing blades!
Sharantyr slipped out of its straps, swung it off her shoulders, and in the same sweeping movement flung it back toward the road, into the starshine. It bounced to a halt, the… presence with it.
Yes, the cloud was thickening around those three hilts. Some sort of blade-phantom slain by the blades long ago? Or a creature bound to them by magic, that departed to hunt but must return?
She peered at it as she came out from behind the tree, one hand on Lhaeo's gems and the other holding her sword ready. The shadow-thing looked vaguely manlike, or rather like a grotesquely huge cloak that coalesced into a shadowy smudge of a head, above quite solid-seeming shoulders and hands… hands that were busy at the lacings of her pack.
She slashed through those arms, and her blade slowed as if ploughing through wet mud, but aside from the shadowy head turning briefly toward her with a decidedly malevolent movement that turned into a brief lean forward, as if it had detected something of interest, there was no reaction. The arms continued their work, uncut and apparently unaffected. Sharantyr circled quickly around the shadow-thing, struck by a sudden thought, and drew back her sword, holding out Lhaeo's bag in front of her instead.
The shadowy head lifted sharply, turning to follow her hand as she circled. The ranger's eyes narrowed, and she sprang back.
As the wraith turned once more to her pack, tugging out a sword so its bright glow flooded the night, Sharantyr carefully loosened the strings of her precious bag and felt inside for the stones she needed: the two sharp ones.
She let them prick her fingers, to make sure, carefully drew them forth, and closed the bag. The shadow-wraith had laid its hands on two swords, and their glows had promptly died, their radiance roiling briefly up its arms. Those shadow-arms grew darker and more substantial as the glows faded-and it was already tugging forth the third and last blade.
Sharantyr drew in a deep breath, strode forward until she held a gem on either side of that shadowy head and shoulders, and said carefully, "Varouth."
A whirlwind of tiny spitting lightning bolts erupted from the gem in her left hand and streaked to the gem in her right, racing through the shadow-wraith. Lightning whirled around that second gem and snarled back, brighter and stronger.
The shadow-wraith sat bolt upright and trembled, growing darker and more solid with alarming speed as the lightnings raced through it again, back and forth, so swiftly now that they formed a continuous, crackling line of gnawing, spitting energies.
"Yes!" a faint, echoing voice seemed to whisper from all around her. "Yesssss!"
The figure rose slowly in height, and Sharantyr rose with it, until she was standing upright with her arms raised, behind a dark, cloaked figure that trembled in time to her lightnings, shuddering and growing steadily more solid.
It started to groan, in a deep, seemingly male voice, then shuddered and convulsed, hunching its arms in. It seemed held upright by her lightning when it would rather have shrunk down and nursed pain. The groans rose into sobbing cries, babbled words that might have been curses or frantic incantations. They became screams, wild high shrieks that echoed back from the stars.
Sharantyr held her two gems firmly, sudden sweat drenching her, and the wraith rose in a crackling cloud of racing lightnings before her, shouting, "No! Too much! Too much!"
Heat beat at her face. The wraith howled and turned its ghost of a face toward her, wild-eyed, but its shape was collapsing back into a thing of rushing, swirling darkness. Sprays of lightning raced within it, whirling inside the shadow-bulk that flung out frantic arms or branches in all directions, stabbing at the night in agony as it started to whirl and tumble and spin, brightness glowing inside its gloom. A fireball with dark, ragged edges tore free of her resonating field of magic and raced blindly away across the sky, howling in mad pain.
Sharantyr held out her two gems for a long time as their lightning died to a faint, crackling blue thread, and let her gasps return to calmness. The shadow-thing did not come back, but the night-chill returned.
"Well," she told the stars at last, quelling the magic of the gems before they were entirely exhausted, "live another night in Faerun, see another mystery. Build a shining collection. Now, I wonder if the gods answer them for us, when we die?"
The stars overhead ventured no opinion. Sharantyr smiled, unsurprised, as she stowed the gems, reclaimed her pack-the blades were crumbling already, and she tossed their hilts into the ditch-and resumed her walk.
Narm sprang up from his stool and sniffed. There it was again.
Smoke, very close by… woodsmoke. There was a hiss and crackle, like the sound he'd made dousing their embers. Someone had sloshed water on flames, to put them out-but quietly, with no shouts nor running feet… and very nearby.
The smell was strong now, and his view of the stars out the front of the wagon increasingly hazy. Water to quench flame, or to make more smoke!
Narm shook Shandril awake, muting her sleepy question with a firm hand. "Fire," he murmured in her ear. "Our wagon, I think, and set by someone waiting outside."
Shan took his hand away and murmured back, "We're being smoked out?"
Narm nodded, and she purred, "Crouch low by the entrance. Do nothing until I shout your name or someone comes inside."
Narm nodded again and did as he was bid. In his wake, Shandril went flat to the floor, hoping no one outside was planning to crawl around and thrust a blade up through the floorboards.
The wood was hot. No blades would come from beneath. There must be a fire there. Very soon, the floor would burst into open flame with a roar, and consume them and the wagon together, unless…
Shandril felt around for the drain-the finger-sized hole in all of Voldovan's wagons, covered by a swivel-plate of metal, that was there to let water and spilled cargo out. There! She eased the plate open a trifle, ignoring the pain-and a tiny tongue of flame rose up into her face. Shandril called up her spellfire, opened her mouth, and sucked it in.
It was hot, scratchy going down her throat, and inclined to tickle her nose… but it went in without setting her to choking, or searing her as it should have done.