Helgore reared up and took a long, careful look at her, seeking to capture in memory her build, her hair, and the precise hue and shaping of her boots, gauntlets, and armor. Its plates overlapped here and there, and were especially graceful here and over here-and he needed all of this, every last detail, tamped down in his remembrances so as to be able to shift his snake shape into an exact likeness of her when he reached the bottom of that hole.
Or even earlier, if the way down should prove to be a damaging plunge for a snake but climbable by a slender, armored elf.
He slithered on, his advance scaring small, scuttling things amid the leaves into relocating elsewhere. A good thing; their presence argued against elves waiting in concealment nearby to pounce on a snake as long as any three of them.
He reached the ragged edge of the pit, where a part of old Myth Drannor had collapsed under spells and furiously battling elves and men, to reveal older chambers and passages below. Most folk thought of dwarves, when it came to delving beneath the earth, but elves had hollowed out chambers aplenty here, and shaped and rearranged living roots as carefully as any exacting palace gardener, so as to build their city as much beneath and in the living earth as above, within trees and atop their interwoven branches.
He could see enough to be certain this wasn’t just one large underground chamber whose ceiling had fallen in. No, there were streets of chambers down there, leading off into buried darkness. Yes, what he sought would be somewhere down there.
Even better, the way down looked to be straightforward, and was. Roots trailed down into the gloom like half a dozen cables, and a serpent could coil around them and proceed along them with slithering ease.
So he did that, and when down on a floor of moss-girt earth, with not a flagstone in sight, Helgore sought a corner of a room he’d seen from above, that would be sheltered from most spying gazes from both the forest above and from surrounding underground areas, and became the likeness of that elf knight.
Rising up slender and shapely, with armor that made no sound as it moved because it was part of him.
Helgore flung up his arms and twirled around on his toes like a dancer, to settle into the feel of this new body and how it balanced and moved.
Better and better. His vision was his own again, and this body had a catlike grace he favored.
He headed off down the largest of the underground passages, seeking archways surmounted by House sigils, the traditional entrances to the burial crypts of high elf Houses.
Shouts and the clang of swords came faintly to him from behind and above, from the opening where the forest had fallen in, but down here it was strangely quiet and deserted, with no sign of mercenaries or defenders.
Helgore walked a long way in the lilting, silent gait of his new shape, along a tunnel-like, curved-walled passage that gently wended to the left and was festooned by an intricate web of exposed roots.
He halted in an instant when he saw movement ahead-but not quickly enough.
The elf who came toward him was tall, imperious, and wearing a high-collared robe. No baelnorn, but a male of still-vigorous years, whose eyes and hands glowed with risen magic. He seemed to be alone.
“Embruara of Duemethyl, what brings you here?”
That challenge was far from friendly, but Helgore shaped his lips into a tremulous smile.
Get close, and then …
Rune shook her head in silent wonder at the sheer beauty before her.
Storm had led them through a gate behind a tapestry in the back room of a toy shop in an unfashionable part of Suzail. One step past that hanging-a faded working of blue unicorns sporting with satyrs in a wooded glade-she’d been plunged into the familiar sensation of gently falling through an endless void of warm royal blue.
Yet her next step had been here, somewhere far enough from the capital of Cormyr that the damp sea air was gone and a cool mountain breeze was in its place. A somewhere that looked out over an endless forest, as the moon rose bright and clear, bathing everything in silver.
Under Selûne’s silvery light, beneath a sky studded with twinkling stars, the land below seemed so tranquil.
“As pretty as the kiss of a princess,” Arclath murmured, from behind her. “And as misleading as the honeyed tongue of a dock trader.”
“That, Lord Delcastle,” Storm agreed gently, “has been said a time or two before. In my hearing, by folk standing right here, arriving when the weather is fair. Sometimes, the winds howling over this height would freeze your heart and set your teeth to chattering before you could wax so lyrical. I’m afraid it’s more than a fair walk from here to Myth Drannor. The mythal keeps closer ways closed.”
“Where are we, exactly?” Arclath asked, looking back over his shoulder and seeing the distant many-spired rock wall of the Thunder Peaks rising to the stars.
“Right here,” Storm teased, and then added, “This is Downdragon Tor. Named for the dying fall of a red dragon onto this height, after a midair death struggle between two such wyrms, one summer when I was young.”
“Four years back, or five?” Arclath replied swiftly.
“Oh, you are a sly gallant, sirrah,” Storm reproved him fondly. “Don’t make me regret dragging you from your hearth and wine, now.”
“So ‘sly gallant’ means base flatterer?” Amarune asked her lover archly.
Lord Arclath Delcastle shrugged. “The words used pale before what is heard and understood, as always, ladies. Pillory me not, I but speak fond foolishness to the two greatest ladies it’s ever been my honor to escort anywhere.”
Storm and Rune looked at each other. “Base flatterer,” they agreed in crisp unison.
Arclath sighed. “Outnumbered and vanquished,” he declaimed mournfully. “Lead on, Lady Bard. As impressive as the view may be, I doubt a desire to tarry here is what moved you to drag me from idle luxury into sword-ready danger. ‘A fray that will probably mean your death’ was how you described it, as I recall.”
“Yet you rose, buckled on your blade, ate a handwheel of cheese in two bites while you dragged on your boots, and came with us,” Storm reminded him.
“ ’Twas the ‘us’ that carried me into whatever imprudence you might have commanded, not the spice of danger,” Arclath replied. “Speaking of which, lead on, Lady of the Harp.”
Storm smiled. “Now there’s a nice name I’ve not been called before.” She looked at Rune. “You chose a well-spoken one.”
Amarune smiled. “I chose the best. Or rather, he chose me. Rather persistently, as I recall.”
Arclath winced. “Shall we revisit my style, or lack of it, later?”
Storm was already heading down a narrow, winding path that clung to the weathered rock walls of the tor. In the steepest spots along it, steps had been carved out of the solid rock. They followed her down into a wild wood of rock creeper vines, old and jagged rocks, and struggling felsul and quarr trees.
“Where are we heading? Within Myth Drannor, I mean?”
“Dlabraddath, first.” Catching sight of Rune’s puzzled look, Storm explained, “The part of the city that was open to all races in elder days. Since the city was rebuilt, it’s been where commoners of low coin dwell, sell, and buy, keeping shops for wealthier folk to flock to. So its defenders won’t just be elves, and we run a lower risk of being lightning bolted on sight by the nearest high mages.”
Arclath winced. “I’d forgotten their fervent dislike of the likes of us.”
The woodland path they followed cut around a towering stand of duskwoods and out into the open where a small fire-lightning, probably, and no more than two seasons ago-had cleared a slope down to ashes and blackened spars that were the tusklike remnants of trees.
They traversed that slope, and others beyond, then nine or more rolling, wooded hills, to emerge at last on a height where Storm stopped and flung out an arm.