Swords of Dragonfire

The cellars end here,” Jhessail said, running one slender hand along a dark, damp stone wall. “So unless you know a way to blast through solid stone…”

“This is it,” Florin agreed. “We fight and die right here.” Abruptly he put an arm around her, swept her against his chest, and kissed her cheek.

Startled, Jhessail looked up at him, heart quickening. She lifted her face to offer her lips for a real kiss, but he gave her a fond smile instead, let go of her, and murmured, “Come. Our holynoses need our aid. They’re hurt worse than I’d thought.”

Frowning, Jhessail did as he bade, silently turning to join Islif in binding torn strips of Doust’s formerly grand tunic around the worst wounds Zhentish blades had dealt Semoor and Doust.

The two priests lay pale-faced and silent on the floor, staring up at the dark ceiling. Above them, Islif dripped blood on their chests from a wound of her own, but shook Florin’s hand off impatiently when he reached for her. She’d stripped off her armor-coat so as to be able to move quietly, and her under-leathers were dark with welling blood.

“We,” Doust husked, from beneath their working hands, “are a mess.”

“A valiant mess,” Semoor corrected him, faintly.

“ Next time,” Islif said grimly, “we go not chasing cellar routes so swiftly as to leave our healing potions up in our rooms.”

“Next time, she says.” Doust coughed, closing his eyes and shuddering as Islif’s probing fingers found a broken rib in the gore all down his side. “Is Pennae still alive, d’you think?”

“That lass could steal the gods’ undergarb right off their loins and get away clean,” Islif said. “Worry not a whit about her.”

Then she lifted her head sharply, listened, and hissed, “Not a sound! Someone’s coming!”

The Knights were lying or kneeling in the dimness behind and below the golden heap of Dragonfire treasure with its ring of guardian swords, where the cellar floor fell away in two broad, descending steps, to end in a dark and mildew-reeking recess.

They fell tensely silent, hands stealing to weapons, as a lot of someones stealthily approached the heaped treasure from the other side. Someones that brought their own steady, unwavering light with them.

There were gasps of wonder, and muttered oaths of awe.

“Touch nothing, ” a man snapped, speaking with absolute authority, his cold voice startlingly loud and near. “This treasure’s mere illusion-all of it-but the swords are real enough, and they fly and slay more surely than our best spells.”

Jhessail was on her knees crouched over Doust, right at one end of the heap, and now risked silently moving her head to the side just far enough to let one eye peer past the glowing riches.

She found herself staring at a sphere of light, hovering above Zhentilar warriors in gleaming black plate armor with swords and axes in their hands. There were too many of them for her to count, crowded together gaping at the Dragonfire treasure, and three robed men stood among them. Wizards. Zhentarim wizards.

“Just illusion,” the oldest mage agreed. “We’ve searched and scoured this place a dozen times since I was posted here. There’s nothing-”

The young wizard beside him stiffened, something like a wisp of smoke encircling his head. Then the smoke was gone — into him-and he calmly drew his dagger, turned, and drove it hilt-deep into the oldest wizard’s nearest eye.

Everyone shouted, the murderous young mage crumpled as that smoke arrowed out of his eyes-leaving them dark and staring pits-and the old wizard shrieked as he started to topple.

Three blades thrust deep into the young mage before he hit the floor. The smoke raced right at the last mage, who batted at it vainly, shouting out words of warding that seemed to echo and roll away across vast distances, despite the stone walls and dark ceiling of the cellar. Zhentilar lifted their blades in a ring to menace him-and Jhessail bit her lip to keep from gasping aloud as she saw a lone warrior appear in the doorway behind the Zhents, lurching forward like some sort of monster.

He was purple-skinned, bloated, and wept spumes of dripping foam from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He had a wand in his hand.

It flashed, blasting Zhents into tumbling ruin before they could even shout. The warrior aimed the wand and triggered it again, smiling crookedly beneath unseeing, foaming eyes as more Zhents died.

Duthgurl Lathalance hated to miss a good fray.

Pennae rolled the body of the war wizard off her as she tugged the end of Yassandra’s belt free. It was hung so heavily with interesting and useful-looking pouches, keys, and magical-looking tools suspended on thongs that she’d have no way of carrying all this plunder if she didn’t bring along the belt that held them too.

It took but a moment to buckle that slender leather loosely around her hips, turn to give the ornrion a warning glare across the heaped bodies-he lay motionless, still feigning death-and then creep across the chamber, to see where all the Zhents had gone.

Her fellow Knights were somewhere beyond that doorway, and they’d need the help of all the Watching Gods to handle three Zhentarim, to say nothing of a small army of Zhentilar warriors From the other side of the doorway, men shouted in sudden, angry alarm, swords clanged, and there was a loud whoosh that sounded like magic. Someone screamed.

Pennae snatched up a fallen dagger from the floor and started to run. If she could hurl it at a Zhentarim wizard from behind, and mayhap stop him from crisping Florin with a spell She stopped in the doorway, stared open-mouthed in astonishment at what she saw, and then hurled herself back and aside, out of the way.

It was too late for a hurled dagger to save anyone.

The ring of Zhentilar staggered back from the last wizard standing as a battlestrike blossomed from his fingers, its many glowing missiles leaping like darts to plunge sickeningly into their vitals.

Several of them turned to join the rush at the purple-skinned man with the wand, but others struggled forward again, determined to hack down the mage who’d commanded them mere moments ago.

He fed them another battlestrike, the searing magic missiles sending them reeling helplessly once more-but a hurled axe bit deep into the wizard’s head and sent him staggering.

The Zhentilar who’d flung it sprang after it, pouncing viciously on the mage and bearing him to the floor, where the Zhentilar slit his commander’s throat ere sawing at his neck. He didn’t stop until the mage’s head rolled free.

Over that Zhentilar’s head the purple-skinned man’s wand flashed repeatedly, spitting death at Zhent after Zhent as they charged desperately at it, the Dragonfire glow flaring to gloriously blinding brightness whenever wandfire touched it.

Zhent after Zhent toppled, but the wand-blasts suddenly waned into more feeble strikes, and a Zhentilar sword managed to reach and bite into the wand.

It burst in a small star of brief sparks, and the singing shriek of that sword exploding into shards.

Shards that butchered the Zhentilar who’d wielded it, the lacerated body tumbling apart in bloody cantels, and diced Lathalance’s arm to the elbow.

Zhentilar roared in triumph and leaped forward, slashing and thrusting at the undefended purple warrior.

Seemingly heedless of pain, as blade after blade sliced into him, that lone warrior doggedly drew his sword and started to stab and hack them right back.

Jhessail winced more than once as the ruthless butchery unfolded. The purple-skinned warrior seemed heedless of his own doom, and dealt much death before he was overwhelmed, and swarming Zhentilar hewed his rotting body apart.

A wisp of smoke curled up from it like a rearing serpent, and out of long habit the Zhentilar drew back, for in the Black Brotherhood magic was not to be trifled with.

A second wisp arose from the remains of the beheaded Zhentarim commander, rearing up in like manner.

The two serpentine plumes of smoke seem to regard each other for a long moment, as if in converse-and then, as one, they turned and raced through the doorway, to arrow up the cellar stairs together.

With a ragged roar, the surviving Zhentilar charged after them.

As the last Zhentilar warrior-there were a dozen left, no more-pounded back up the cellar stairs, Pennae rose from among the old barrels and crates, darted along the wall, and slipped through the doorway, keeping low and moving fast.

Despite knowing what she’d find, the Zhent bodies were piled and strewn in such profusion that she almost overbalanced skidding to an abrupt halt. Beyond the heaped corpses the Dragonfire treasure glowed in unaltered splendor.

Pennae gave it a wry smile. Deceptive and deadly, like so much else in Faerun.

Then she picked her way carefully past all the dead men, keeping to the walls and wending her way as quietly as possible, until she could round the far end of the treasure and see A sword, leaping at her face!

“Hold hard, there!” she hissed, springing back.

Islif gave her a level look from the other end of the sword. “Next time, warn me. We still have ears, you know.”

“Yes,” Pennae hissed, “but we’re not the only ones still alive down here, even now! That cursed ornrion from Arabel is here! Alone, I think.”

“Spew of the gods!” Florin growled. “He does love us, doesn’t he?”

Pennae nodded sourly, and then peered more closely at all of the Knights. “Will our holynoses live, d’you think?”

Islif shrugged. “If we could reach our healing potions, I’d feel a lot happier answering that.”

Pennae regarded her fellow Knight expressionlessly for a moment, and then tugged open her leathers to reveal her dethma of soft, well-worn leather. Her fingers sought something beneath the swell of her breasts, and tugged it forth: a gleaming steel vial, cork-stoppered and wax-sealed, with the shining sun symbol graven on it. One of the healing potions they’d gained from Whisper’s hoard. She held it out to Islif.

Who frowned. “Where did you…?”

“ I don’t go into battle without essentials,” Pennae murmured.

Islif regarded her for a moment in silence, and then said, “Thank you.”

Pennae shrugged. Then she looked along at the Knights again, nodded slowly, and asked, “Florin? If Jhess and Islif are enough to tend and guard the stricken, care to join me in trying to find a way up out of these cellars?”

Florin looked at Jhessail, and then at Islif, collected two slow nods, and said, “Yes.” He hefted his sword. “I take it things have quieted down out there, in the rest of the cellars?”

Pennae grinned mirthlessly. “You could say that.”

In the seemingly deserted common room of the Oldcoats Inn, Old Ghost and Horaundoon floated lazily in the shadows of the rail at the top of the cellar stairs, waiting for their next prey.

Not that they had long to tarry idle. Eleven wild-eyed Zhentilar warriors charged up the stairs, waving swords and axes and thinking of nothing more than getting away from whatever strangeness had just slain so many of their fellows-and three rather capable Zhentarim wizards to boot.

Old Ghost and Horaundoon slid into the foremost pair of Zhents as they gained the top step, made them smile at each other in grim satisfaction, and then compelled them to turn and strike at their fellows.

Amid shouts of fear and anger, battle broke out on the stairs. Zhentilar frantically hewed fellow Zhentilar, to avoid being penned into the cellars, and Old Ghost and Horaundoon darted into one warrior after another whenever anyone shouted for calm and “down swords!” Three Zhents died before the fray boiled up into the common room and across it, chairs and tables suffering greatly.

In the midst of all the shouting, screaming, and clashings of steel on steel, Ondal Maelrin and one of his maids came dashing down the stairs from the floors above, their arms full of steel vials, and raced across the common room, dodging furiously fighting Zhentilar.

“Our potions!” Pennae hissed, from her cautious vantage point partway up the cellar stair. “That thieving boar-pizzle of an innkeeper is stealing our potions!” She sprang up the stair, drawing her sword to keep company with the dagger in her other hand. Florin frowned, flourished his own sword, and charged up the steps after her.

Pennae went around and-with the aid of a handy table and a deft leap-over the black-armored Zhentilar, but Florin found himself under attack almost immediately. He struck his attacker’s blade aside, kicked an inn chair up into the man’s face, followed it with a hard punch to the cods that drove all the breath out of the man and lifted him back to a hard seat-first arrival on an inn table, and then struck the man’s neck with a deft backslash. Then he was past, outrunning another Zhentilar to follow Pennae through a doorway on the far side of the common room into a room hung with tapestries, that held the shimmering blue fire of a magical portal.

In front of which the hastening innkeeper and maid had just come to an abrupt halt because someone was stepping through it, toward them.

Someone female, wounded, and alone, whose limp was unfamiliar to the Knights, but whose face was not.

Laspeera of the war wizards looked bleakly at Maelrin and the maid, and then past them at Florin and Pennae. Her face was as white as bone.

The coach rattled through the streets of Halfhap like a whirlwind. Its white-faced, shaking coachman whipped his galloping horses to go ever faster, despite merchants and shoppers diving and stumbling back out of the way, and the shouts and screams that soon had Purple Dragon patrols bellowing and waving at the coachman to stop.

The whip came down again, the trembling coachman now weeping in fear, as the coach smashed its way along the front of a fresh greens shop, baskets splintering and produce flying-and its burly proprietor made a furious grab for the hand-bars, to swing himself aboard.

The hard-faced man riding beside the coachman snatched a wand from his belt and coolly blasted the shopkeeper’s red face to flying shards of bloody bone. Then he served two Purple Dragons, who were clawing at the bridles of the horses, the same way.

As their bodies tumbled under the racing hooves of the horses, the hard-faced man stood up, aimed carefully, and immolated the rest of the Purple Dragon patrol, one by one-as the coach raced on, heading for the Oldcoats Inn.

Inside the speeding coach, Zhentarim were being slammed from side to side, crashing into each other bruisingly.

The eldest wizard watched one of his younger fellows bite his own tongue-the third one to do so-and shook his head wearily. He had long since hooked one arm around a wall-rack to keep himself in one place, and was repeatedly using his feet to kick those about to slam into him away. As the curses and moans around him reached deafening heights, he snarled, “Oh, get down on the floor, all of you! Why the Brotherhood tolerates dolts such as you I don’t know!”

The potion had been divided carefully between Doust and Semoor, who had both promptly gone to sleep, but gained color, looking more like living men lying on their backs and less like sprawled corpses. Jhessail had stopped frowning down at them and was now studying the glowing Dragonfire treasure and murmuring tentative incantations.

Islif watched her darkly, sword drawn, and murmured only one thing: “Just don’t set those swords to striking at us.”

Now, as Jhessail sat back with a weary sigh, shaking her head, Islif caught sight of movement on the far side of the glow, and fell into a crouch, sword drawn back to strike.

There came the sound of a lantern being unhooded, and then its light, moving slowly to where they could see it, well back out of sword-reach.

The lantern was lowered until they could see the grim face of Dauntless above it.

“Truce,” he greeted the Knights. “I come in peace.”

“Well,” Islif replied warily, lowering her sword a trifle, “I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

Laspeera took two slow steps forward-and toppled like a felled tree, falling right on her face.

The innkeeper juggled vials for a moment so as to draw his dagger, hefted it flashing in his hand to turn it for stabbing, and bent down to slay this unexpected guest.

Then Ondal Maelrin made a wet, surprised sound as Pennae’s dagger opened his throat from behind. He kept right on bending, down into his own face-first meeting with the floor.

Vials bounced and rolled as the maid threw up her hands and started to scream. Florin snatched one up and forced it into Laspeera with brutal haste, rolling her over and away from the innkeeper’s spreading blood.

Pennae backhanded the maid across the face, ending her screams but sending her running wildly and clumsily to a tapestry, and through it and a banging door beyond. As the thief-Knight started scooping up potions, Laspeera started to cough and shudder under Florin’s hands-and the pulsing blue portal flared brightly as more men in leathers, with swords and daggers in their hands, stepped through it.

“Gods, guts, and garters,” Pennae cursed, “is there no end to them?”

Florin lowered Laspeera’s head gently to the floor and sprang to meet these new foes-who were already trotting forward with unpleasant grins on their faces and swords reaching for the Knights. Six-no, seven… eight of them.

Pennae kicked the empty potion vial under the boots of the foremost bullyblade, who started to slip and flail his arms-and weapons-wildly, almost striking the man right behind him, who arched back and away with a curse. So when Pennae sprang at them both and then ducked down to strike their ankles in a swift and hard roll, they both toppled helplessly, entangling a third bullyblade and causing him to fall too. The fourth and fifth onrushing men crashed right into their fellows, with loud and startled curses, as Florin stabbed downed men as swiftly as he knew how, slashing those trying to scramble away across the foreheads to try to blind them with their own blood.

A breath later he was forced to leave off killing to deal with the sixth and seventh bullyblades, who’d rushed around the tangle to come charging at him from either side. The ranger ran at the one on his left, using his longer reach in a vicious slash that struck the man’s parrying blade and spun him half-around-to where he tripped over a crawling Laspeera, and toppled helplessly into bouncing and rolling potion vials, as Florin launched himself back at the seventh man.

The man knew how to use his blades, and almost slew Florin thrice in the first few frantic instants of sword-strife. The ranger was only dimly aware of Pennae stabbing the eighth bullyblade in the stomach and then turning to slice open the throat of the only entangled man Florin hadn’t dealt with, who’d struggled half-upright from under the bodies of his fellows. Then Pennae hurled her dagger at Florin’s foe. It struck the man’s neck hilt-first and bounced away without doing damage, but startled the man into an awkward sidestep. He turned his ankle, staggered-and ended that stagger staring and spitting blood, impaled on the point of Florin’s sword.

Laspeera finished downing her second potion. Wiping her mouth, she looked up at the two Knights and murmured, “The queen chose well. You Knights are capable indeed. In a sword-brawl, at least.”

The portal flared again, and Pennae groaned, “Oh, no! ”

Laspeera lifted her hands to cast a spell-and then let them fall again as more men came crowding through the portal. More bullyblades-foes beyond counting!

Laspeera hastily started snatching up potions, and Florin sprang to join her.

“To the cellars!” he gasped, waving at the common room. “Stairs down-behind desk!”

Laspeera nodded and sprang up, moving as if completely healed and re-invigorated. She proved able to run almost as swiftly as Pennae, and so was in the lead as the three burst back out into the Oldcoats common room, with bullyblades hard on their heels, shouting for their blood and waving swords and daggers galore.

Wisps of smoke sped to meet those bullyblades, and two in the lead suddenly spun around and stabbed those just behind them. Amid screams and startled shouts, the running men stumbled over the falling bodies and crashed to the floor.

The few black-armored Zhentilar still alive in the common room turned to gape at these new foes and then moved grimly to engage them-as Laspeera and the Knights plunged down the cellar stairs.

Bullyblades roared defiance and sprang to meet the Zhentilar, who sneered and hacked at them, in a great crashing and clanging of war-steel.

A clangor that was echoed by a larger, louder crash that made the combatants blink and turn in suddenly bright, flooding daylight.

The front doors of the inn had just been blasted off their hinges and were tumbling across the room, shattering tables and then running bullyblades alike.

Outside, the astonished Zhentilar could see a wrecked coach on its side, with wheels still spinning and struggling horses shrieking.

Striding past it and up the inn steps into the room, through the huge hole where the doors had been, were nine Zhentarim mages. They were smiling cruelly, their hands already shaping spells.