Spellstorm (40 page)

Mirt winced. “El?”

The long-bearded wizard’s face was suddenly severe, his expression’s falsity betrayed by twinkling eyes. “Don’t look to me for protection or support, old friend. Ye dug the pit, and ye leaped into it—and I’m not now inclined to rush past thee and lie down to serve as a mattress to soothe thy landing.”

“But you’re so good at that! You’ve done it so often, for so many others before me!”

“They were prettier,” Elminster told the moneylender, “and less massive, too.”

“Coffer,” Myrmeen reminded patiently, holding it up. Mirt carefully stowed all the fingers he could find within it, then looked at the larger remnants still adorning the floor. “And these?”

“There’s a large crock in the larders that should serve,” she replied, “but we’ve got to reoccupy all those rooms first, and that’ll probably involve fighting the last few Torr men. Being as they haven’t tried to fight their way past us, and out of Oldspires.”

Mirt shook his head. “What a crazed way to build a house. All this space, room upon room like the high house of one of the richest and most powerful Waterdhavian families—and only one door to the outside. Just the one.” He shook his head. “Is this, ah,
usual
among the country architecture of Cormyrean nobility?”

“You mean, are they all this mad?” Myrmeen’s voice was wry. “They are, but no, this is not the norm. Homes do burn down in Cormyr like everywhere else, so most people prefer to have more than one way out.
I’ve visited many country mansions where every last ground-floor room in some wings had its own outside door. Keeps the servants right busy digging away snowdrifts all winter long.”

Mirt nodded. “And how is it there happened to be a handy coffer sitting on yon table? You didn’t just dump out the ashes of past Halaunts, did you?”

“No, I dumped out some pipeleaf that had moldered to near powder decades ago. It seems this Lord Halaunt didn’t smoke, but earlier Halaunts did. Now, are we done here? I want to get back into that kitchen!”

“Fight our way back into that kitchen,” Elminster warned. “Two Torr men have been watching us from the door on the far side of the Copper Receiving Room from the first swing ye took at their Shaaan-animated fellows.”

“So do we march right over and have at them?” Mirt asked. “Or try the kitchen door right here in yonder wall?”

“This one here,” Myrmeen decided. “Otherwise we don’t know how many of them could burst out and come around to shove their blades up our backsides.” However, she looked to Elminster for his approval.

He nodded and smiled. “With magic chancy, thy preferences rule, for ye have the blade skills, and are the swiftest and most agile of we three.”

“Oh,” Myrmeen teased, “
thank
you, saer, said she!” Then she whispered, “Ready?”

When they both nodded, she strolled over to where she could slide the coffer full of fingers down out of sight behind a carved stone umbrella stand in the shape of a wood nymph clad only in strategically placed grapes and the entwining-her-limbs vine they were growing on.

And then took two swift sidesteps, and hauled open the kitchen door.

It swung in well-oiled ease, neither locked nor barred, and the charging Mirt got a glimpse of three startled warrior’s faces, two of them dropping their jaws and the third yammering, “They’re over here! Two of the three the master ordered us to behead!”

Then the Torr warriors wasted precious time grabbing their helms and jamming them on their heads—by which time the lumbering Mirt, who could move quite fast once he’d wheezed his way up to top speed, had crashed through the doorway, stepped on a greasy roasting pan amid the ankle-deep litter of ransacked cookware, ladles, and the like that now covered the kitchen floor, and slid right up to them.

He did not even try to slow down.

With a
kkrraaAAAsh
that shook the last few pieces of crockery out of the cupboards to plummet and smash, the moneylender cannoned right into the nearest warrior, and betrayed his background as a back-alley brawler by planting a balled fist in the man’s throat so hard that he broke that neck—not that a man with an utterly crushed windpipe can breathe long enough to worry about such things—and drove its owner back into his fellow behind him. Who in turn stumbled back into the third warrior.

Leaving the stumbling second warrior busy windmilling his arms and fighting just to keep hold of his sword—which meant he couldn’t hope to stop Mirt’s sword from opening his throat, in a swing so wide and free that the moneylender managed to strike the third warrior’s sword right out of his hand on the backswing.

So Mirt’s free hand didn’t have to contend with a sword slicing at it, and could reach out, grab hold of the underedge of the third warrior’s helm where it ran along down below the man’s jaw, twist head and helm around so hard and abruptly that the man preserved his neck only by sacrificing all balance and turning on his heels—and then ram that head into the sharp edge of a cupboard, where it ended at the door frame of the wide door opening into the feast hall.

Where there were other Torr warriors, five—no, six—of them, presumably including those who’d been watching through the Copper Receiving Room, but possibly not, gaping at Mirt and bringing hand axes up to hurl his way.

They were distracted by a furious, high-pitched shriek from behind Mirt that if truth be told distracted him and Elminster almost into slipping and falling.

“You did
this
to my
kitchen
? You barbarians! You utter alley-rat
pigs
! How
dare
you stand there in armor and purport to be
human
!
Yeeeeeaarrrgh
!”

And in a raging fury Myrmeen vaulted the falling body of that third warrior, now slumping floorward with a cupboard-edge-shaped deep furrow all down the back of his helm, and landed in the midst of the feast hall at a dead run, the swords in her hands whirling.

Gleaming plate armor is admirable protection in battle, but if it lacks a gorget, or mail coif, to protect the throat, and a visor to defend the face, it isn’t much use when worn by someone not swift enough to parry attacks at those vulnerable spots.

Wherefore two of the six hireswords were gurgling and dying before a third managed a desperate parry only by dropping his hand axe and wrapping both hands around the hilt of his sword.

By which time the fourth, fifth, and sixth Torr warriors saw Mirt lumbering their way with bloodthirsty glee flaming on his face and Elminster laughing in the throes of the same bright-eyed emotion—and took to their heels and
ran
.

Out through the Copper Receiving Room with Myrmeen felling their unfortunate comrade and racing after them.

They were halfway across the entry hall when a dreadful voice out of empty air right in front of the foremost warrior’s nose whispered, “You run to your
doom
! The Halaunts shall tear your bones out of your running body!”

It wasn’t the most frightening thing Alusair might have said, but she was in haste and improvising. Luckily for her, the running hiresword was already terrified.

He skidded on his heels, screamed, and flung up his hands—losing his axe in the direction of the ceiling but somehow managing to keep hold of his sword—and his fellow warrior, sprinting right behind him, ran into him with a solid metallic crash, and they went down together, skidding on … lumps of severed body that had been left on the hall floor. They both screamed again, in the instant before the third and last Torr warrior trampled them hard, lost his footing doing so, and fell hard on his behind.

And Myrmeen Lhal, still seething in rage and racing even faster than any of the fleeing hireswords had been able to manage, caught up to them and hacked and hewed, snarling as she slew.

When she was done, and standing panting and looking around wild-eyed for more targets, Mirt said from behind her, “If you go on like this, I’m very much afraid we’re going to need more than just that one crock.”

M
YRMEEN WAS STILL
spitting mad, so Mirt and El hastily set about picking up smashed bowls and the litter of pans and forks and ladles from the floor, and tossed it all out into the entry hall to be dealt with later.

“The dead warriors can guard it,” the moneylender muttered. “Watching gods above, but she’s furious!”

“Ye think?” El muttered, taking hold of a dead man’s foot and starting to tug. “Give her some time to simmer down, and we’ll reintroduce her to the concept of pickles and preserved fruit.”

“
Oh
, no,” Mirt replied. “Not me. You can do that, and I’ll stand well back and watch her make you wear it.”

Although it would probably take days to go through everything, thus far nothing had been poisoned, so far as they could tell, but all the cooking fires were out, and everything readily edible had been eaten.

“And what they couldn’t eat, they spilled and trampled underfoot,” Elminster sighed, heading for the butlery, where the mops were kept.

“As I observed earlier,” Myrmeen said in a surprisingly calm voice, suddenly looming up over them, “
charming
discipline. So we have no food.”

“Well,” Mirt rumbled, “not here. There are cellars full beneath us, because Torr’s warriors just haven’t had time enough to spoil or carry all of it off. Not without magic—and if Shaaan could hurl around
that
sort of magic, she wouldn’t need to be cutting the fingernails of the dead to points and tipping them with poison.”

Myrmeen shook her head in slow and silent exasperation, and looked at Elminster. “I have a new appreciation for you, Sage of Shadowdale. These madwits matters drive me wild, and you’ve put up with them for
centuries
. I cannot
believe
you aren’t babbling, screeching mad!”

Elminster smiled. “Are ye sure I’m not?”

Into the little silence that followed those words, Mirt coughed and said, “So we’d best be waving our swords and walking all wary down to the cellars now, eh? There are sacks in the south servery we can use to carry the food back.”

“Aye, let’s do that,” El agreed. “But as before, no splitting up. We go together, ready for trouble.”

“Lots of spices are missing,” Mirt put in, and then added with a frown, “and the cleaning oils, too! Y’know, the ones you rub into the cutting boards or the countertops after they’ve been stained or you’ve had to scrape them. What in the Hell’s kindling blazes would hireswords—or Serpent Queens, for that matter—want with such things?”

Myrmeen’s frown was deeper. “You know, come to think of it, I think the oils went missing earlier. I’d thought you’d moved them, and forgot to ask you where …”

“Right, so our little armed foray will be like going to market,” El concluded. “Food, spices, and cleaning oils. We have to eat—and more
importantly, drink—for three more days before the spellstorm passes. Three days of dodging poison. So we must stock up wisely—and let us be about it.”

So they set out. The food mess diminished swiftly as they got farther from the kitchen, but the bodies, fallen weapons, and blood were strewn in profusion everywhere. Thankfully, Torr’s hireswords hadn’t smashed or carried off all the servants’ hand lanterns, so three full ones were swiftly found and lit.

“They keep a messy battlefield, these mercenaries,” Myrmeen remarked, as they left the plate and cutlery storeroom behind, and she led the way down the spiral stair.

“Careful, Mreen,” El murmured. “Shaaan could very easily have left one of her envenomed at the bottom, to rake ye as ye slide open the panel.”

Myrmeen nodded and descended more warily.

“Adventurers explore dungeons and battle monsters,” Mirt commented, lurching after her. “
We
mount expeditions down to larders to get food.”

“It’ll sound better in the ballads,” Myrmeen promised. “If I write them, that is.”

“Better start now,” the moneylender told her. “We may be too busy dying later.”

“N
OT A SIGN
of her,” Mirt mused aloud, as he forked the last sausage up out of the sizzling oil. “Wonder where she’s hiding?”

Shaaan might have done any number of things down in the cellars, but none had left much of a trace. So Mirt, Myrmeen, and Elminster had cautiously retrieved their sack of antidotes from the foot of the staircase that was so uncomfortably near the gate, and a goodly amount of food from the larder cellars, and lugged it back to the kitchens.