His cold-numbed fingers closed on air. Shouting for help, Artus plummeted.
He didn't fall far, though. Azoun, his legs wrapped tightly around a branch, grabbed for the boy as he went past. Fortunately, the prince stopped Artus's fall. Unfortunately, he did it by snagging the cloak, which fluttered behind the boy like a sparrow's broken wing.
Artus jerked to a stop. Choking, he tried to get a foothold or handhold on the tree. Any sizeable branches were well out of his reach, so all he managed to do was set himself swinging back and forth. The clasp cut into his throat, and the tree's smaller branches battered his face. When at last Artus got a firm grip on the cloak, he gasped in a ragged breath and looked down at the site of his almost-doom.
The tree had barely landed before the assassins were swarming around it. They nosed at the glowing blue gem, which lay nearby, but it held little interest for them. The groundlings were, after all, dwarves at heart. Though mutated, they shared that stout people's disdain of unfamiliar magic.
The Zhentarim agents wasted little time on the search. As soon as they were convinced the prince had not fallen with that particular oak, they set to work undermining the next. It wasn't long before shudders began to ripple up the tree holding Artus and the prince.
His face red, his arms quivering at the strain of holding his neck out of the fur-collared noose, the boy looked up at Azoun. "Let me go," he croaked.
Ignoring the plea, the prince began to reel in the cloak like a net. Artus writhed, trying to break free. "I can . . . save us," the boy cried.
Azoun grimaced. "Don't be foolish," he snapped. "You can't-"
Another shudder wracked the oak as the groundlings cut away a major root. The prince braced himself, waiting for the trembling to pass. At the same time, Artus twisted sharply, jerking the cloak from Azoun's fingers.
The boy fell, spinning violently in the air. The momentum was enough to send him toward a heavy branch. He grabbed it just long enough to slow his fall, then dropped again, rebounding off limbs closer and closer to the ground. He hit the hillside on his feet and was running before the assassins could react.
As Artus dashed away from the tree, one of the groundlings broke off from the excavation and followed. It tried to keep up with the runner, but he leaped onto the trunks of fallen oaks and scurried into the thick branches of toppled firs. With footfalls muffled by the fresh blanket of needles, he was almost imperceptible to the hunter's keen senses of hearing and touch. Artus might have eluded the creature completely, had it not been for the cloak he wore. Even tearing through the frozen earth, the groundling could smell the prince's scent.
And that was just what Artus was counting on.
A deep groan warned the boy that the tree sheltering Azoun was ready to fall. He turned back just as it started to lean. But instead of avoiding the tree, the boy ran straight toward it.
The oak fell slowly at first, and Artus could see the prince scrambling for a vantage from which he could leap clear when he got close enough to the ground. The boy wanted to shout to him, tell him not to jump just yet, but he knew the prince wouldn't be able to hear him. Even if he did, he probably wouldn't listen, just like the Shadowhawk….
Those bitter thoughts kept Artus's mind off what he was doing, which was a blessing of sorts. The chance the plan would fail was great, the chance it would succeed terribly slim. Nevertheless, Artus ran right into the path of the falling oak, the assassin bearing down on him.
As the track of churning earth touched his boot heels, Artus shrugged the heavy cloak from his shoulders and dived forward. The groundling, certain its victim had fallen, burst up and grabbed the prince's cloak-just beneath the tree trunk as it hit the ground. Like a mallet wielded by a storm giant, the oak drove the unfortunate dwarf-thing back into the dirt, shattering its skull and most of its bones.
That part of the plan worked perfectly. The rest did not.
Artus rolled away from the tree's impact and landed next to the softly glowing magical gem. The boy dared for an instant to hope he'd won. Then a thick branch dropped onto his leg. Artus managed to heave the wood aside, but it left his knee throbbing. Teeth clenched in pain, he sprawled on the soft bed of pine needles and clutched the blue gem in trembling fingers.
The prince fared no better. As he leaped from the oak, he was battered by its limbs. The tree flung him toward the ground in an awkward tumble, and his mail shirt prevented him from righting himself. Azoun hit the hillside shoulder-first and slid into the furrow left in a groundling's wake. Though he landed only a horse's length from Artus, the prince might as well have been a hundred leagues away, for all the help he'd be against the last assassin.
Azoun pushed himself to his knees and dazedly looked around. The makeshift bandage had been torn from his head, and blood ran freely down his face. He spotted Artus and managed to crawl to the wounded boy. "Save yourself," he murmured, then spiraled down into unconsciousness.
Warily the remaining groundling surfaced a dozen yards from Artus and Azoun, squinting toward them with its slit-like red eyes. "Now you are done, princeling," it screeched and tunneled into the ground.
The assassin surfaced again, near the spot where it had scented Azoun. All it found was the blue glow of the force globe, since the magic masked the prince from detection. The groundling cried out in frustration and, for the first time, a little fear. The Zhentarim sorcerers who had dispatched the assassins from the bowels of Darkhold never brooked failure. Even if it survived this encounter with the prince and his able young protector, the groundling would find itself facing endless punishment in that foul keep's dungeons, tortures like the smiling screws or the gruesome kiss of the carrion worms.
To even the groundling's limited intellect, this proved incentive enough for an original thought to emerge.
"You cannot run," the assassin shrilled in sudden realization. "I've won!"
"We can hide in the globe," Artus said as bravely as he could, though pain and fright made his voice crack pitiably. "You've lost. Sooner or later, the royal wizards will come looking for the prince. Until then, we'll be safe in here."
The last was pure bluff, but it set the groundling digging around the magical globe. Dirt and stones rained down on the shell, the clatter underscored by the assassin's unearthly wailing. Then, all at once, the creature ceased its frightening tantrum and sidled up to the globe. It glared at the magical bubble, the pale light nearly blinding it, and said, "They'll find a corpse here just the same. I have the one who was with you, boy." The groundling paused and licked its snout with a long black tongue. "I'll leave his bare bones around you like a picket fence if you keep my prize from me."
"But the guild rules-"
"Mean nothing if I lose the prince," the groundling snapped. "So they take away my guild badge for killing the wrong man. So what?"
Artus's shoulders slumped. There was really no choice if the assassin threatened his father. Besides, what was Azoun to him?
"A trade, then," the boy called. "I'll hand over Prince Azoun, but you've got to bring the other man back here."
"What about the magic wall?" the groundling shrieked. "You'll take the other and hide him there with you and never give me the prince!"
"And you'll just kill me as soon as you have Azoun!" Artus snapped.
There was an uncomfortable pause as the boy and the dwarf-thing considered their rather limited options. It was Artus who finally suggested a plan. In it, there was just the slightest chance he and the Shadowhawk would survive this nightmarish ordeal-and maybe even rescue the prince, too.
"I'm a thief, so we're brothers in trade, right?" Artus began tentatively. In truth the groundling did rather remind Artus of his brother Oric. "So we should be able to make a fair bargain. If, uh, I promise to put the magic gem away and not use it until you have the prince, the trade should be easy. Is that all right with you? I mean, once you have Azoun, you've got no reason to harm us, so we can all get what we want out of this."