"I was wondering if it would be best to return to the dale, or go looking for a Harper cache. There's one not too far from here."
"What?" Belkram asked innocently. "When we're having so much fun?"
His companions answered this observation with various rude sounds.
"We can't count on any more unexpected rescues, from the Simbul or anyone else," Elminster warned. "Certain Harpers have been told to watch out for us and aid us if need be, but most of 'em hereabouts are fast swords and little more."
"We need a little more," Sharantyr agreed softly, and shivered suddenly. "I did not think any of us would live to see these stars again," she added as they looked at her.
"You need not!" a voice spat, and from around the nearest tumbled wall came a woman in dark robes, running hard, her face contorted in hatred. A fey purple glow, tinged with black, blazed out of her furious eyes, and she held high a black dagger.
"For the glory of Bane-die, Cursed One!"
She flung the dagger as she came, and Shar couldn't draw her sword in time to strike it aside. It wobbled-a bad throw-but struck Elminster's cheek hilt first before spinning away into the night.
Behind another nearby wall, a tall black stone that stood by itself bent forward a little to peer at the fray with eyes that grew very bright. Then the stone hissed a soft word, and smiled a crooked smile.
As the dagger left it, Elminster's cheek fell slack, looking suddenly lifeless. The glow around the pipe in his breast pocket faded, and the three rangers in their burnt leathers, blades drawn to face the running woman, looked back in sudden alarm.
"A disjunction!" Belkram snarled, who had seen such things before.
"Gods spit on all!" Itharr added angrily, and strode forward to meet their attacker. Elminster backed away from them, looking horrified.
Behind the wall, the stone smiled wolfishly and grew an arm that gestured almost lazily behind him. "Perast aum izeebuldree," he said conversationally, and Brammur, Randal Morn, Thaern, and all the men with them froze together, blades raised, in poses of cautious stealth.
"Thank you," the stone told them courteously as it melted into the shape of a man whose left arm ended in a sword blade instead of a hand. He peered at the motionless men for a moment to be sure he'd got them all, nodded in satisfaction, and dug his right hand into a pouch at his belt.
From the other side of the wall came the ring of steel and a scream of rage. "Some sort of magic shields this place!" a man's voice shouted.
"Aye," the man who had been a stone agreed pleasantly. "So it does." Bringing forth a handful of pebbles, he cast them in a wide fan onto the ground and muttered something else.
With terrifying speed, the stones began to grow. The dark forms rising from them had burly arms, tusked mouths, and were… hobgoblins!
"Come," he said simply, and jogged around the corner of the wall. Howling, the hobgoblins poured after him, jerking out brutal weapons and jostling each other to be first at the kill.
Spheres of vividly glowing air-of all colors, from a rather glorious ruby red to a putrid green-were drifting around them now, expanding from Elminster's person and various minor enchantments worn or carried by his three companions. The disjunction was working all too well.
The woman who'd hurled the dagger struck a pose just beyond the Harpers' blades and laughed in triumph. "When Elminster lies slain," she cried, eyes shining, "remember that it was I, Arashta Tharbrow, who struck his magic from him-for the greater glory of Bane, whose foremost servant I am!"
"Oh?" Itharr asked curtly, as his blade cut a line of shrieking sparks from the invisible shield protecting the sorceress. "He's reduced to hiring madwomen now, is he?"
She howled at him like a dog in fury. "Blasphemy!" she spat when she found control enough to form words. Shaking in anger, she threw up her hands to smite the hard-faced ranger with magic-and then her face changed, one of her hands flew to her mouth, and she went pale.
Her face contorted in frantic fear, and her hands flashed in the gestures Belkram knew would unleash a lightning bolt. Snarling against the pain he expected to come, he kept hacking at the unseen barrier that protected her, and suddenly realized it was giving way. Instead of ringing off something rock hard and unyielding, his blade was going a little way into something that rushed past it like floodwater, resisting but allowing the steel's passage.
And then he realized no lightning had come to snatch breath and life away from him.
"Look!" Itharr said. "Her eyes!"
All three of them peered past their hacking blades. The weird purple glow had faded away, and the green eyes behind it looked very young and very frightened as Sharantyr's blade broke through the fading shield at last and slid into the woman's breast with silken ease and speed.
The sorceress went down, blood bubbling from her mouth in a last, soundless scream, her mouth moving to shape words that would never be heard. The disjunction swept away the last of her shield as it had robbed her of spells, and with shield and spells went a cloaking wall of shadows, revealing to the rangers a snarling, hooting group of hobgoblins racing toward them across a few paces of open grass.
" 'Ware!" Belkram shouted unnecessarily, and then battle was joined, the skirling clangor of steel on steel drowning out all coherent speech. The hobgoblins were reckless, snarling hackers of the sort skilled warriors disparagingly called "meat-choppers," but they were big and coming in fast, and there were a lot of them. If one Harper caught his blade against a hostile weapon, the slashing steel of the next foe could well be into his ribs before he could recover. Wherefore the three ducked, dodged, and dove as they never had before, swords and daggers together weaving a deadly wall of darting death that took down their hulking attackers with a stab in the eye here and a thrust through the ear or throat there, never slowing to parry and hack at chests or flanks.
Shar got a single glimpse of a tall black figure running easily at the fore when the charge began. Then the being thinned suddenly, like a wisp of smoke, and the hobgoblins thundered past and crashed into the three rangers without their dark companion.
That seemed like an eternity ago now, as she twisted and strained and set her teeth against the numbing force of the hacking blows raining down on her deflecting blade. Shar's lungs were burning with the effort of meeting those strikes, and sweat was running down her wrists and dripping from the end of her nose as she danced, leapt frantically out of reach of a roundhouse slash-which sank deep into the side of another hobgoblin, she noted with glee-and found herself spinning through the heart of the gathered hobgoblins.
A startled face loomed up at her, and she slashed just beneath it, opening a throat with her whistling steel as she launched herself in the other direction, hoping to stay ahead of any direct pursuit. Rounding to the left, she found herself behind an unwitting foe and hamstrung him with a ruthless slash along the backs of his knees. With a grunt of surprise, the next hobgoblin turned his head from trying to gut Belkram, and Shar drove her dagger hilt deep into one staring eye.
It lodged against the bone as she overbalanced, and she brought her sword up to protect her back as she jerked her arm back and forth wildly to haul her fang free.
It came away at last, but by then hobgoblins were swinging at her from three sides. Shar flung herself down flat on her back, and as their blades crashed into each other overhead, kicked out hard against a massive hobgoblin foot and got the momentum she needed to roll away.
She rolled right into Belkram, who leapt high to allow her passage under him. Sharantyr came to her feet in time to see a snarling Itharr take a slash along his ribs as he leaned to drive his sword into the tusked mouth of his assailant. The sword continued upward, pushing the hobgoblin's helm off on the top of its head. Itharr let go of the blade at once and tore the hobgoblin's own black-bladed scimitar from its failing fingers, bringing it back immediately in a swing that took two fingers off the sword hand of the next hobgoblin.