He emerged into a scene of complete chaos. All around him men struggled to their feet and groped for weapons, shouting to each other. More than a few simply stared in astonishment as he appeared from their captain's tent, an elflord in golden mail whose sword whirled about in a dizzying weave of bright steel.
Only three steps in front of him a scar-faced swordsman with rotten teeth glared at Daried in dull fury. "What in the Nine screaming Hells is going on here?" he roared, sweeping a curved tulwar from his belt.
"The elf tried to kill Lord Sarthos!" someone cried.
The scarred swordsman grunted and threw himself forward. But Daried barked out another spell and shrouded himself in a brilliant aura of blue flame. He reached out to take the scarred man with a thrust to the throat. Like a zephyr of white steel and deadly magic, he danced across the clearing. Lost in the bladesong he hardly knew what he was doing. He slipped into the space between eyeblinks, sharpening his perceptions until it seemed that raindrops sank slowly through the night and lightning-swift swordstrokes were languid and slow.
He cut the legs out from another man and turned to find a war-hound bounding at him. He crouched and readied himself to let the animal have his forearm instead of his throat, but the animal shied away from the magical flame wreathing his body. It growled savagely, filling the night with its barking, but it dared not come any closer. A mercenary nearby was not so lucky. He managed to land a shallow cut across Daried's shoulderblade, but Daried's flame-aura returned the blow with searing heat. Wrapped in blue flame, the man stumbled screaming into the night.
This might work after all, Daried thought. Then the captain-Lord Sarthos, he guessed-came out of his tent. Snarling his own dire invocation, Sarthos threw out his hand and scoured Daried with a bolt of crawling black power. Even in his trance Daried cried out in pain as his side sizzled and smoked, and the strength drained away from his limbs. He stumbled into the path of a grizzled old sergeant with a poleaxe, who nearly took his arm with a powerful overhead chop, and a small wiry man with a pair of curved daggers got close enough to slash him badly across the midsection before the flame-shield drove him back, blinded and screaming.
I have to deal with the wizard, he decided. With the right spell the mercenary lord might immobilize or cripple Daried outright, and he would be cut down in a heartbeat.
Fighting through his exhaustion, Daried threw himself toward the enemy lord. He thrust at the wizard's midsection, but the man easily beat his blade aside with his own.
"Don't use your swords, lads!" Sarthos called to his men. "The elfs guarded by a fire-shield. You'll need spears or arrows for this work."
Stepping back from Daried, the mercenary lord snatched a wand from his belt and riddled Daried within the armor over his heart. Daried stumbled and went to one knee, his bladesinger's trance finally broken by the pain and fatigue. Only his fire-shield served to protect him, and as he looked up, he saw a half-dozen mercenaries approaching with long spears to transfix him where he kneeled.
I underestimated them, he realized. I thought my skill and magic would be enough.
He looked back to the Chondathan lord, who watched him with his teeth bared in a bloodthirsty grin. "You're not as good as you thought, are you?" Sarthos sneered. He gestured to the spearmen.
An arrow flashed in the firelight and struck the pock-faced lord on the right side of his chest, spinning him to the ground. Then another one took a spearman approaching Daried in the eye, dropping the warrior like a puppet with its strings cut. A third arrow lodged in the small of the sergeant's back, driving him to the ground with a strangled cry.
"Archers!" shouted one of the men. "Archers!"
"She shoots as well as she said," Daried murmured in surprise.
He glanced at Lord Sarthos, who sat up on one elbow, grimly wrestling with the arrow in his chest as blood streamed from his wound. The man's breastplate had taken much of the blow, but he gasped with pain and paid no attention to the bladesinger. Other men thrashed into the woods, seeking to flush out their attackers and get out of the firelight.
The Morvaeril moonblade was only fifteen feet away. But it would cost him his life to try for it. With a snarl of frustration, Daried wove a spell of darkness over the camp, plunging the clearing into utter blackness. Then, allowing his fire-shield to gutter out, he staggered to his feet and groped his way out of the mercenaries' camp.
The ill effects of the mercenary lord's black ray seemed to wear off with time. By the time Daried reached a good spot half a mile north of the Chondathan camp, he no longer shook with complete exhaustion. His wounds troubled him, of course, but in a few moments of work he bound the worst of them and decided that he could fight again if he had to. Moving a few yards off the trail, he settled in to wait and watch, wrapped up in his gray-green cloak with little more than his eyes showing in the darkness.
The thunderstorm slowly moved off, leaving the forest dripping wet but noticeably cooler in its wake. It was past midnight, and the moon was sinking quickly toward the west. Another elf might have replayed the skirmish in the camp in his head while he waited, but Daried was not given to regret or wishful thinking. What was done was done; there was no point in wishing otherwise. He would not underestimate his adversaries again.
He more than half-expected the whole band of human sellswords to come crashing down the path at any time, but to his surprise, they did not pursue him. Perhaps they thought there were more elf archers roaming around in the night. With the failing moonlight and the overcast skies, he found it dark indeed under the trees. To human eyes it was likely pitch-black, and even the most bloodthirsty mercenary would think twice about blundering around blindly in the dark.
An hour passed before he began to worry about Nilsa.
At first, he told himself that she was simply circling away from the trail, swinging wide of the camp so as to throw off pursuit. That could easily turn a ten-minute trot into the work of a long, slow hour. But as one hour stretched toward two, he found it harder to remain patient. Did she simply become lost in the darkness? he wondered. Her woodcraft seemed better than that, but in the confusion of the fight at the camp, who knew? Or had she fallen into the hands of the mercenaries? If that was the case… Daried sincerely hoped that she'd forced them to kill her instead of taking her captive. He had an idea of what men such as the Chondathans were capable of, and death would have been preferable.
He was wrestling with the question of whether to head back to the camp when she finally appeared, picking her way down the trail. Every few steps she paused and spent three heartbeats listening and peering into the woods.
When she drew closer he stood and called softly, "Here, Nilsa."
The girl started. "You scared me half to death, elf," she muttered. She hurried off the trail and joined him in the shadows.
"Where have you been? What happened?" he demanded.
"I was going to ask you the same thing. You were supposed to run off the whole camp. That was your plan, I seem to recall."
"I did not expect to meet with a competent wizard. Things would have gone differently otherwise."
"If you say so." She snorted softly in the darkness. "After you cast that darkness spell, I tried to lay low and wait out the Chondathans. But they turned loose their hounds, and I realized I couldn't stay hidden for long. So I shot the two dogs that were left, and evaded the men by circling way to the south before doubling back in this direction."
Daried stared at her in the shadows. He knew more than one skilled elf warrior who wouldn't have had the nerve to he still that close to so many enemies, or the cold calculation to kill the hounds in order to stymie pursuit.