The air around her smelled of sharp spices she couldn’t name that were probably drifting from the seedpods they’d been disturbing. There was nothing stealthy about their crashing progress, but their surroundings certainly seemed remote and overgrown, and, well, forlorn.
Storm came out into a small glade floored in thick moss, beneath the shade of some gnarled hurthar trees. Ahead, the soft green carpet underfoot ended and bare rock thrust up from the earth into a tumbled cliff of sorts, rising out of sight. Before them, as Rune and El joined the bard, in a cleft between two thrusting tongues of ancient rock, stood a head-high mound of stone so overgrown with clinging creepers-and, yes, more thorns-that Amarune could barely make out that the mound was a cairn whose upper reaches were worked and finished in smooth blocks that supported something tall, thin, and carved from a single block of stone. A statuette of some standing figure? No … a harp!
A high-prowed hand harp, of the sort successful bards and elves played, and few others could afford.
“What is this place?” Rune asked. “Some safehold sacred to the Harpers?”
El and Storm both gave her wry half smiles.
“In a way, ’tis indeed,” Elminster replied. “This is the tomb of the Lady Steel, one of the founders of the Harpers. Too long ago.” He sighed, shaking his head at the overgrown harp, then added briskly, “ ’Tis warded; we should be able to hide here.”
Rune peered around. “Here? Under these trees, in the open? If it rains, we’re going to get drenched. And I’ll bet that cliff will become one giant waterfall.” She looked down at the soft, thick moss under her boots. “Takes a lot of damp to keep moss this lush.”
“So it does,” Storm agreed serenely, “but we won’t be out here, under the stars, soaked in the night mist. When Dath died, we didn’t just leave her lying on the ground for wolves to tear apart, you know.” She plucked some creepers aside to lay bare more of the carved stone harp, and murmured, “Dathlue Mistwinter. You’d have liked her.”
Amarune murmured wistfully, “I’m beginning to mourn the loss of so many people I was born too late to meet. Truly.” She collected the gazes of both of her older companions, and added firmly, “But that doesn’t mean I want to meet their ghosts. Echoes of the fallen beyond counting are caught in the Weave, aren’t they?”
Elminster merely nodded. Then he lifted one hand to her in a silent beckoning, and led the way around the overgrown cairn to the cliff behind.
Where Rune found herself looking at many deep clefts in the old and weathered rock, none of which looked larger than her arm or deeper than the length of her body, even if she could somehow sink through solid stone and lie flat.
“Is this more Dale humor?” she asked lightly, and quoted the old jest: “ ‘Pray, my lord, what see you? For I see only rocks and trees. Look again, for there is more. I see it not, Lord, what is it? Trees and rocks, of course. Trees and rocks.’ ”
El smiled thinly. “I remember the lady minstrel who first said that, and set highborn and backwoods folk alike to laughing. But as it happens, those words are pertinent. Look again. Hard. Right there.”
Amarune followed the line of his pointing finger-and gazed at the rocks he was indicating.
They were just solid stone. Yet …
Hard, he’d said, so she stared at them hard. For an uncomfortably long time.
Whereupon they seemed to ripple, subtly.
Ripple …
“You have the Gift,” Storm explained softly. “You can see what most cannot. Some of these rocks are the wards playing at being solid stone, and most are truly stone. To someone who commands no Art, all of them will feel the same.”
Then Storm stiffened, and murmured warningly, “El.”
The old archmage nodded calmly and strolled to where he could put a hand on Rune’s and Storm’s elbows from behind.
“I’d noticed too,” he muttered. Amarune felt magic flood silently through her from Elminster’s touch, leaving her tingling all over. She felt the prickling in her nostrils that meant every hair on her body was trying to stand on end.
Then the world in front of her exploded in a blinding flash, and something smote her so hard she flew through the air, crashing through branches in a raging hail of shredded leaves and splintered twigs that whirled her into a nest of groaning, swaying boughs high in the tangled meeting of two hurthars.
Men were screaming-raw, throat-stripping, keening howls of agony. Through a blur of tears she saw mens’ arms clawing empty air in pain, their helpless bodies dancing in spasms outlined against an angry, roiling glow of risen magic. Two of those dark silhouettes abruptly vanished-and from somewhere near at hand she heard Elminster snarl a short and angry incantation and felt him pull at the Weave, with the same sort of beckoning gesture he’d made to her.
And suddenly those two men were back where they’d been standing before, looking startled.
No, terrified.
“Minor arcanists of Thultanthar,” Elminster identified them, more weariness than anger in his voice.
Behind the two he’d dragged back from wherever they’d teleported to, the other men who’d been hiding behind the wards of the tomb collapsed silently to the ground, dropping weapons and looking very dead.
“And the swordswingers who run with them, like browbeaten dogs,” El added, shaking his head.
One of the arcanists hissed something, deft fingers weaving a pattern in the air that Storm sliced to ribbons along with several of the man’s fingertips, her sword so swift that the man never saw it. The tip of his tongue exploded in blood as she cut it on her backswing.
Then she and the man she’d just wounded were flung aside like two rag dolls, as magic erupted from deeper in the unseen tomb and smashed into them-a tongue of devouring force that sheared a path of destruction through the trees. It would have stabbed at Rune, caught in the tangle of still-swaying boughs, had it not struck the harp cairn and rebounded from it back into the tomb-evoking a startled curse, and the brief clacking thunder of many tumbling stones.
“That ward, I spun when I was stronger than I am now,” El muttered in satisfaction, striding to the other arcanist and lifting his knee into the man’s crotch.
The Shadovar cried out in startled pain and fell into a crouch, clutching himself-and El swarmed all over him, dagger out. The air around them flared as a frantic spell rebounded from Elminster back onto its caster, leaving the arcanist sobbing and staggering. He went down in abrupt silence when the old archmage slammed the pommel of his dagger down on the back of the man’s neck, leaping into the air to add force to the blow.
“Ye think me foolish enough to go about with a mantle spell that reflects only one attack?” he asked the crumpled heap contemptuously, turning to walk right into the seemingly solid rock that masked the tomb.
The cliff silently swallowed him.
Rune discovered she’d been biting her lip and holding her breath. She let it out gustily and hastened to clamber down out of the trees, wincing at the pain in her battered limbs. Oh, there’d be bruises! Happy dancing hobgoblins, every damned time she went anywhere with these two, she got battered about as if she was a-
Storm came limping out of the tattered trees, sword in hand and blood on her cheek. Exasperation flared on her face when she saw Rune hastening to the ground alone.
“He went in there, didn’t he? Ever since Alassra … thinks he’s invincible …”
And in a whirl of long silver tresses, the Bard of Shadowdale plunged into the fissured cliff face, and was gone.
Leaving Amarune to peer wildly at the rocks and trees all around her, this way and then that, seeking any foes. Hearing and seeing nothing, she cautiously went to the cliff, at exactly the same spot she’d seen Storm step through it, and … just kept walking.