“Who are you, and what’s your business? Here in the tomb of a wizard dead these three centuries?”
Rune straightened slowly to face the man, brushing her hair back from her face. Her two companions kept right on with their cleaning, bent over in their respective dark corners of Ralaskoun’s crypt. Leaving this to her.
“Tennarra,” she replied, giving the name she usually used when dealing with strangers. “I am, as you can see, cleaning.”
The old face was unfamiliar, adorned with old scars, and more unfriendly than ever. “Aye, girl, but why? Most folk leave wizards’ tombs well alone. Are you a tomb robber? Or one of those who seek to raise the dead?”
Rune gave him a frown back. “Neither. I work to cleanse tombs and bless them, so the dead won’t rise and walk as liches.”
The old man nodded. “Wizards itch to walk, aye. But they don’t need help. Come out of there.”
He wore homespun, and over it a leather jack that had once been part of some modest warrior’s war harness. A belt knife and a short sword rode at his belt. He was burly, and had hands as hard as his face, but no gauntlets, and nothing drawn and ready.
“Come away now,” he snapped, stalking closer. Rune could hear other footfalls in the forest now, to her left and right.
So could her two bent-over companions; she could tell from momentary pauses as they turned their heads to listen.
Rune sighed and drew back into the crypt. Away from its mouth, where she could be rushed from either flank or easily shot down with arrows. Into the damp, musty darkness of the unlit stone room with its plain, high stone-block casket, like the altars in many a way shrine.
“I said come out of there!” the old man snarled, drawing his sword.
Amarune backed along the casket, moving to her left. “The wizard Ralaskoun never married, and died childless. He can have no kin. So by what right do you tell me what to do and not to do, old man? Who are you?”
The old man ignored her question, advancing on her slowly. He’d taken but three slow, menacing steps when five men waving swords suddenly burst into view, three rushing out of the trees and bushes behind him to charge straight at Rune, and one coming around either front corner of the crypt to race along its walls right at her.
“How many?” one snapped at the old man, as he sprinted past.
“Her and two feeble old women behind her, inside,” the old man called, as the first swordsman reached Amarune-and hacked at her face viciously.
She sprang back, flicking her trowel full of twigs and old dirt into his face, and swept out her dagger. Trowel and dagger were feeble defenses against a broadsword, but-daggers came whirling past her ears out of the crypt behind her like darting wasps, and the swordsman thrusting ruthlessly at her was suddenly shrieking and clutching at his face.
Which meant he left his throat unprotected.
Amarune rushed forward to cut it open, but another dagger flashed past her arm from behind her and got there first.
Gurgling and spurting gore, the hilt jutting from under his chin, the swordsman sagged back into another rushing up right behind him, into a brief, stumbling collision. More swordsmen were heading the other way, rushing around the massive stone casket in the other direction-to promptly crash to their knees, gurgling and clutching their throats, though the flying daggers had come nowhere near them.
The foremost swordsman had fallen; Rune watched the second go down with the swarm of daggers stabbing at his head from all directions.
Beyond them, the old man had planted his sword point down in the trampled ferns, and was raising his hands to work magic.
Rune drew back her trowel for a throw, but he, too, was suddenly clutching at his throat and struggling to breathe, his eyes and then cheeks bulging as his face slowly went purple-and he toppled like a felled tree.
Silence fell. Rune trotted swiftly around the wizard’s casket to make sure all of their assailants were down. They were-and by the time she’d returned to the mouth of the tomb with the crone who’d been working on that side of the crypt, the other crone was standing in it, head lowered in concentration and hands spread.
They stopped and waited. It wasn’t long before the first crone’s head rose, eyes opened, and hands fell. “No one with a thinking mind near. Hold silence, though.”
She turned to look at the other crone. They met each other’s eyes, nodded, and lifted their arms in smooth unison like two tavern dancers embracing phantom lovers on a stage, both shaping empty air as if caressing it. Then they murmured wordless whispers of concentration and effort … and the forest in front of the tomb seemed to fade away beneath sudden, swift-spreading mist.
Mist that was neither damp nor clinging, but tinged with a luminous blue radiance. Mist that made Amarune’s hair stand on end all over her body. Including up her nose.
Fighting down the urge to sneeze, she asked, “I recognized the war-daggers spell, but El, what did you do to them?”
“A very old and ruthless spell. Expands the tongue swiftly, and chokes its victim. Doesn’t work on most mages these days, as the incantations they speak linger just enough to guard their tongues against such meddling. Everyone else, though …”
That crone had straightened to become a white-bearded, beak-nosed old man, gaunt and sharp eyed. The other became a tall, shapely woman with long, flowing silver hair that moved restlessly around her shoulders as if stirred by many breezes, or as if each tress had a snakelike mind of its own.
The man was Elminster, the ancient and infamous Sage of Shadowdale, and the woman was Storm Silverhand, the legendary hearth mother of the Harpers. Archmage and harpist, both fabled Chosen of Mystra. Traveling companions many a novice mage would not have dared to even approach.
Nor tarry within half a realm of.
Rune smiled a trifle bitterly. For her part, she hardly dared step out of their sight, for fear some fell foe watching them from afar would pounce on her and rend her with claws or spells or magic before she could draw breath to scream.
She’d been helping them as an unskilled laborer helps master crafters, handing them what they needed, cleaning up in their wake, and doing grunt work. Dirty dishes, for instance. She’d seen a lot of those, these past three tendays, as they trudged the backlands, from tomb to tomb and ruin to ruin, from overgrown and forgotten altar to hilltop way cairn. A young woman and two feeble old crones, ostensibly cleansing and blessing old graves to prevent undead from arising from the earth-but in truth, rebuilding the Weave.
It was like a vast and invisible web or intricate tapestry, its strands torn and snarled, whipping restlessly in the shifting winds and in need of anchoring.
Which was what they were doing: crafting new strands of force to bind the Weave to the few wards that had survived the ravages of the Spellplague, and repairing others that could be salvaged until they could serve as anchors. This tomb was one of a handful of unscathed wardings. Mystra or no Mystra, war or fresh spellstorms or wrathful Chosen or not, a stronger Weave meant a stronger world in the time ahead.
This mist now hiding the forest was no ground fog born of dampness nor weather magic, but something El and Storm had just spun from the wards of Ralaskoun’s tomb to hide them from anyone magically spying from afar.
“Come back into the shadows,” Storm bade Amarune. “We must take a look at our enthusiastic would-be murderers.”
“Brigands?”
El shrugged. “Those three, perhaps. But the old man who confronted ye, and this last of the sword swingers, here …”
He spread his hands in a way Rune knew was calling on the Weave to dispel all enchantments, stripping away disguises as well as protections and contingencies.