This time the grating shifted as she struck it. She let go, dropped, and instantly sprang up again, striking the grating on an angle. As it lifted, she kicked the air hard and arched her body. The grating slid sideways with her clinging to it. The lady ranger twisted and arched her body again, and before the bars could fall back into place, she got the toe of one boot up through the opening.
The grating came down hard on her boot. Sharantyr grunted, heaved, twisted, and rolled all at once. She found herself sprawled atop more sacks of rice, still entangled with the grating, in what seemed to be a large and dark storage cellar.
Shar laid the grating carefully back in place, found the sacks she'd emptied, and covered it with them. Then she climbed over a great many sacks-some, by the sound, held dried beans-into a narrow trail among the sacks, crates, and barrels that crammed the room.
If this place was barred or locked from the outside, she was not going to be pleased. Sharantyr drew her blade again, held it carefully upright close to her breast, and went cautiously eastward, for the trail seemed to widen in that direction, and the faint light grew slightly stronger.
Her way ended in an old, stout wooden door. She pushed at it and then pulled, but it had no handle on this side. She felt around the door, found its edges, and carefully slipped her dagger up one of them.
As she expected, the blade struck a catch or hasp. If it was locked or pegged down, she was in trouble. But if it could be lifted by driving the blade upward-Yes! The door swung open, and Sharantyr reached for the hasp with racing fingers to quell any noise of its falling.
Done. The room beyond was also unlit, but light reached long fingers into it from a torch in a wall bracket beyond a door or wooden gate that was more gaps and knotholes than wood. Sharantyr drifted up to it, put away her dagger, reached nimble fingers through to lift the peg that held it shut, and peeked out into the corridor.
Two bored-looking men were seated not six paces away, sorting potatoes on a long table covered with what looked like a very old tapestry. They worked in silence, and when one of them suddenly spoke, his voice seemed very loud.
"If you'd just kept your jaw still when he asked about the wenches instead of tryin' sly stuff, he wouldna found us out, an'-" The voice held the exasperation of a renewed grievance.
"Shut up," the other man said in a tired voice. "Be glad ye're down here carving dirt-balls instead of up there, sweating in your armor and being carved up by the idiot merchants and farmhands that some crazed-wits has stirred up. They're still attacking the castle!"
He tossed a potato lazily over his shoulder. Sharantyr swallowed, reached up-There! — and snatched it silently out of the air. She set it down very carefully at her feet and took another silent step forward.
"Ye should have heard His Awfulness," the man went on, "when I went up to the kitchens. Fairly frothing, he was. He'd just finished telling the council that he was lord now-so there! — cool as ye please, when some wench in leathers comes tumbling down the stairs and nearly runs him through with a sword. He was screaming and scrabbling on the floor, they say, and had to 'port away, to escape. As it was, this gal carved up his entire bodyguard and some of us, too!"
"What?" the other man gasped. "All by herself? She took out Dannath?"
"And Uthren, and Balagh. Oh, aye, this must have been some play-pretty, in truth! I'd like to see her, let me tell ye! In the dark, and her alone, if ye catch my warmest thought…"
"May the gods," said Sharantyr conversationally into his ear, "grant thy every wish."
As he spun around to face her, she drove her knee up hard. The man could not find breath to scream. He simply bent double, eyes staring at her in disbelief as he collapsed. Sharantyr was already stepping past him to drive her sword into the other man's throat.
He gurgled and went down. She spun back to the first, caught his throat in a strangling grip to quell any outcry, and said softly, "Now that you've seen me, Zhent butcher, I'm afraid I'm going to have to turn down your 'warmest thought.' Here, have a potato." She plucked a smallish potato from the table, rammed it into his mouth, and held it there as her blade went into his stomach.
The body bucked under her, and Sharantyr felt sick. If he cried out she might die, so she held him down, vomited all over him violently, and then picked up her sword again. She held her aching ribs for a moment and leaned against the wall to clear her head before moving on.
The corridor ended in steps leading up into a passage heavy with the smell of stew. Her stomach lurched again.
Sharantyr shook her head and stepped boldly into the hall. She strode down it, past open doors and people chopping wood and bustling about stoking cookfires. One sad-faced, gray-haired woman caught sight of her, but Sharantyr raised a finger to her lips and went on. No alarm was raised behind her.
The passage ran east and upward. Sharantyr went up with it and was almost relieved to enter a room full of sprawled Wolves, half out of their armor, with a gaming board on a table in their midst and bloodied weapons leaning against the walls.
She tore into them, slashing and stabbing like a maniac. Startled men cursed, scrambled to reach weapons, writhed in agony-and died. Covered in their blood, Sharantyr went on. Gods grant that after this day she would never have to kill again.
But it is the nature of men, she thought savagely, remembering Elminster's dry voice at a campfire long ago, to forget promises, to break agreements-and to kill.
"Gods curse and damn all Zhent Wolves!" she roared, close to tears. Her outcry brought running, booted feet and their Zhentilar owners with them, many blades raised against her.
With a wild cry, Sharantyr charged in among them, whirling and leaping, her blade dancing and singing around her. She was no equal to Storm, or even Florin or Dove of the Knights, but they were not here and she was, and there were evil men to be struck down so that a dale might live again, and Elminster find a peaceful refuge for a day or three, and-It suddenly seemed to Sharantyr that she'd been fighting for a very long time, perhaps years, without a break, and that the blood spattering her now would never wash off. She began to cry as she fought.
They say in Zhentil Keep that women who weep with swords in their hands are widows of the slain. If a Zhentilar rides into a place where the hand of Zhentil Keep's armies has been felt before, and women weep and run for swords at the sight of the black-helmed warriors, he will take special care to slay those women, for they will not rest, it is said, until they have avenged their husbands or died trying, to join them in the Realm of the Fallen.
Wolves drew back from her in horror as old tales they'd heard as boys, scoffed at as youths, and forgotten as men came alive before their eyes. They stumbled back, faces white, as the woman in slashed and tattered leathers leapt and darted among them, dealing swift, endless darkness with a battered blade.
"Die, damn you!" she wept, and gave them death.
"How did she get in?" one man raged, parrying with all his might.
"What boots it?" another yelled back. "Run! Run, if you would live! Ru-uuughh!" Sharantyr's long blade found his throat from behind, and his run ended there in a dying plunge to the stone floor.
In the end they all broke and ran, those who could move at all, leaving her panting and blood-drenched, alone with the dead. Sharantyr cried and cried, kneeling among death, until she could cry no more.
She rose, white-faced in the torchlight, and thought of Stormcloak. He was the real foe, he and his mages. He must die.
18
As Sharantyr's sobs died away, Lord Angruin Stormcloak, striding importantly from his chambers to the great hall, heard their last echoes and frowned. What was a woman doing in this part of the castle? Had one of the men-? He sighed and had drawn breath to curse their waywardness when his eyes fell on men running toward him, terrified, blades drawn.