“How-?” he blurted involuntarily.
“Magic,” Storm purred in his ear. “Pray silence, Arclath. Not for all that much longer, but for now. Please.”
Her unseen hand captured his, and a thigh that, by what was belted around it, almost certainly belonged to his Rune brushed against his. Storm led them both by the hand down a little slope, into the blinding heart of the thickest smoke.
Arclath could see nothing of their surroundings then, not even what must have been a large, gnarled old tree trunk as he brushed-scraped-past it. The world around them was lost to view, entirely hidden in smoke.
Storm stopped suddenly. Her arms proved as strong and immobile as iron bars, abruptly halting Arclath and Amarune as they started to walk obliviously on.
“Down,” she murmured nigh their ears. “Sit down, then lie down, trying not to lose hold of my hand.”
I couldn’t if I wanted to, Arclath thought ruefully, doing as she’d commanded and saying nothing. She is so much stronger than I am, this Lady Bard, I can scarce believe it. She looks in good trim, yes, thewed as well as buxom, but I do believe that if she ran to meet a galloping horse, and they crashed together, it would not be the horse that raced on unchecked. Ye gods, she has a grip like thick forged steel.
He couldn’t see Rune, but knew she’d laid herself down on the ground on the far side of Storm, just as he’d now done.
Abruptly, that iron grip relaxed and his hand had its freedom back, but he could feel what seemed to be a dry lapping wave flowing over his chest and arms, tracing the shape of his torso. Soft and yet firm, a manyfold caress at once reassuring and yet at the same time clearly bidding him, without a word being spoken, to remain still.
Storm’s hair, those long silver tresses that moved like so many serpents with minds of their own.
Their owner was murmuring something soft and low, strange words that bore the hum of power. An incantation.
As it came to an end Arclath felt suddenly rigid, hard and cold and somehow at the same time detached from himself, distant from the smoke-muffled din of battle. He couldn’t move, not a muscle, even his breathing came with a struggle, through a tightening chest and throat.
And now, he was tight all over.
Helpless. Immobile on this battlefield sharp with the stink of charcoal, of trees gone half to ash and brush scorched away into windblown cinders.
Storm’s hair was gone, her reassuring touch absent too … and now the very ground beneath him had left him.
He rose into the air, ascending smoothly. Straight up, if the eddying and swirling smoke around him could be trusted.
And then he was rising no longer, but sliding forward through the air, horizontal and feet first, scudding along rigid through thinning smoke … yet into air that was somehow thicker, heavier and yet alive. His heart thudded and the air all over his body jutted out on end as a tingling within him grew and grew and … he was briefly aware of a soundless burst and a roiling of impossibly bright blueness, a spray that washed over him like water yet left no wetness upon him that he lanced through as lights flared and pulsed silently around him and then were gone in his wake.
The air thinned, and the thrilling, tingling vitality left him-left behind in that place in his wake where the air had been thicker and heavier. Suddenly Arclath knew what had happened. The mythal. He’d just flown through the magical walls of Myth Drannor without harm.
Not alone, of course. Storm had done it and was with him, and somehow he could feel Rune beyond her, the three of them arrowing on in unison.
Over flashing swords and struggling men and elves, and what was briefly a grisly carpet of the sprawled and bloody dead below, ere they all raced into a dark, riven shell of stone, and slowed as abruptly as if an unseen giant’s hand had barred their way and started to drag them down.
Down they sank, through what had been a magnificent upswept tower before boulders the size of warehouses had been hurled into it, to crash against and then through its walls. What was left of the tower was a mere shell, broken open to the sky and all down one flank.
They sank past a collapsed floor hanging in tatters, and amid the wreckage he saw more bodies, many so battered and smeared that they were more bloody splatterings on the old stones than corpses. Beyond that was another floor that no longer existed and sweeping stairs, which lay shattered and dangling in splintered claws, ending in nothingness. Then they sank past a mirror, in which Arclath saw not a silver-haired bard flanked by two younger humans, but three ballista shafts, the great sleek iron war lances fired like giant arrows by wagon-sized ballistae.
Then they passed into deeper darkness, as a great stone floor rose to meet them, and the jagged roots of the tower walls hid the forest battlefield from view.
And they were human again, stumbling as their feet met shattered flagstones and abundant strewn stone rubble atop that floor.
Storm’s strong arms steadied them, and Arclath couldn’t keep himself silent any longer. “Ballista shafts? You fired us into Myth Drannor disguised as ballista shafts?”
“Flew us, actually,” the Bard of Shadowdale murmured. “Yes. And through the mythal-the Mythal-yes. Some centuries back Elminster showed me how to pass through it without visible display or taking harm. So …”
She raised a warning finger to her lips and tilted her head warningly in the direction of the stairs leading up out of the dimness around them. Down them had come a clinking sound. They listened to it in silence, and when no sounds of someone moving closer came, Storm leaned close to Arclath and Rune and added a quieter whisper. “Welcome to the besieged remnants of Myth Drannor. Specifically, to the ruins of an old watchtower recently shattered by the besiegers, in the part of the city where all races mixed: Dlabraddath.”
Arclath and Amarune gave each other reassuring glances that became an embrace. Lord Delcastle wasn’t just reassured to see his ladylove’s face and know she was unharmed, he was reassured to find Storm’s conjured darkness gone, so he could see Rune at all.
“And now?” Rune asked Storm, from the sheltering warmth of Arclath’s arms.
The ageless bard smiled rather impishly. “Now we try to slip out of here into the city proper. Which probably won’t be all that easy.”
Arclath gave her a wry half grin. “Why do I know you’re right about that?”
“Possibly because you’ve learned the trifling beginnings of a sense of how the world works during your years thus far, Lord Delcastle,” she replied, as haughtily as any dowager duchess of Cormyr.
Arclath grinned at her. “You’ve never stopped being a marchioness of the Forest Kingdom, have you?”
Storm smiled back at him. “I’ve never felt the need to stop. It comes in useful. Briefly and every century or so.”
Rune sighed. “If you two ornaments of belted nobility are quite finished being arch …” She indicated the stairs with an elaborate flourish that would have done the most flamboyant servant proud.
Storm chuckled as she strolled to the worn stone steps. “Lady Delcastle, you’re a fellow belted ornament now.”
“Don’t remind me. Bad enough that I seem to be some sort of echo of Elminster.”
Storm snorted. “I’ve heard similar sentiments a time or two before, from others.”
“And what befell those others?” Arclath asked.
“They’re dead. Of passing years, not some sort of curse or inevitable lurking doom. Now belt up, I pray you. This is a battlefield, remember?”
And with that, Storm led the way up the rubble-choked stairs, her silver tresses holding swords and daggers at the ready and swirling out to probe the walls, steps, and ceiling ahead.