caught her in its lair or on the exposed mountainside, clambering down to greater cover and safety.
So take nothing from its hoard at all, the better not to be traced. Retrieve only what she’d brought from the riven drow citadel, and get
The great flapping bulk of the dragon was growing larger, though it was probably still distant enough to be over the Wyvernwater.
El gave the chest a sudden twist with her mind, followed by a strong soaring, then a plunge.
The dragon whirled. Evidently it had lost its grasp on the chest. El made the distant gem container plunge again in the air. In hot pursuit, the dwindling speck of the pursuing dragon descended. Smiling, El made the chest zig and zag, soar and plunge, turning it again and again in screamingly tight curves. After all, even ancient black dragons deserve a good wingstretch …
Directing those aerial acrobatics all the while, she rushed through the cavern and out, then began the careful climb down the mountainside.
“I should have done a
Well, so she had. Perhaps she’d been succumbing to her own essential nature. Or perhaps she’d just been trying to stay alive, as more selfish, reckless, and evil beings galore lashed out at her or at folk and places she loved and was moved-or sworn-to defend. Hrast them all …
By the obvious scars on the rocks around and below, the dragon had repeatedly clawed away foliage and the most easily climbed spurs of rock, to make its lair as inaccessible as possible to anything that couldn’t fly.
However, it was easier-if one had nerves of battle steel-to descend than come up from below. All you needed was the strength, agility-and resolve-enough to jump to the next mountainside over, in the right spot where a long ago storm or perhaps dragon battle had toppled a peak into a shower of great boulders that had tumbled down between the two heights to wedge between them, in a rugged, misshapen natural bridge.
El found what she judged to be the best spot, then leaped. After all, there
She hoped.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Elminster landed hard, skidding helplessly on loose scree, and crashed into a boulder.
The pain was wincingly intense. Drow ribs, it seemed, were no stronger than human ones.
She clung there, her teeth clenched, embracing the agony that pulsed at her every breath, until her arms and legs had stopped shaking.
El sent warmth to surround and soothe that forlorn mind voice, then forced herself to climb down from the boulder and work her way into the stone-choked cleft. Off the open face of the mountainside and away from a returning dragon’s eyes, and not a moment too soon …
She lost herself in the slow, careful, and seemingly endless work of finding the next handhold and the next, deciding where to let go and fall, and where to rest and use the tiniest jet of silver fire to heal broken and bleeding fingers or restore shattered feet and ribs-and once, after an unexpected slip, most of the bones in her new body.
And then the endless climb was almost done, with no dragon plunging out of the sky to spew acid or bite or slash with cruel claws, and Cormyr was no longer a great green carpet spread out before her, but individual trees thrusting into the sky nearby, forming a closer horizon.
El paused in a crouch on the last ledge above the ground. She was about five man-heights up from the scrub and dead trees that descended to the ditch, and the lower three of those five weren’t rough mountain rock, but rather a flaring slope of loose earth and gravel, washed down the peak by many a storm and scored with countless channels carved by rushing water that had fled and was gone. She could see shadows under the closest trees, the ones that stood hard by the winding ribbon of Orondstars Road. Those shadows lay on the sometimes sun-dappled, usually gloomy forest floor of the very easternmost edge of Hullack Forest. The vast woodland that would probably be her bedchamber during the night ahead, as she slept within whatever spell-spun defenses she could mount. It would be best to get as far from the dragon’s lair as she could, being as all dragons could smell or sense magic to some small, oft-unreliable degree. And she’d better start without more delay, and-
There. Right there. She could drink from that spring and then just step in under the leaves and-
Hold, what’s
Out of the very spot under the trees she’d chosen, a man stumbled into view, exhausted and drenched with sweat. He clutched a dagger, blood streaming down his arm to drip from his knuckles and fingertips. He was about done in, staggering along on sheer determination. Hunter’s garb, light leather but very well made, almost a uniform-
A ring on the middle finger of either hand! A war wizard!
El spun around, lowered herself until she hung from her fingertips from the ledge, and let go, twisting in the air.
She landed in a half-turn on the slope, skidded, caught a foot in unyielding stone and ended up rolling head over heels, to a muddy halt in the ditch, crushing some nettles along the way, to look up and see the war wizard-
Sobbing his last, his dagger falling from his failing hand, as three blades ran him through from as many directions.
Too late, hrast it! Too often too late!
El hissed out rising fury, fists clenching. A fourth man came running out of the forest gloom, his sword drawn back to deliver a vicious chop to the throat of the Crown mage who was already vomiting blood, dying on his feet, only held up by the swords still through his body.
Why, gods, is that so frequent a fate for those who try to work good, or stand for order? El thrust out a hand and sent them lightning, her anger making it snarl rather than just crackle down her fingertips. Her long, eye- searing bolt sprang across the ditch and the road and the second ditch beyond, flashing brightly into the gloom, where it struck the men and their swords and split to race among them, roiling and ricocheting as they shouted and convulsed, caught in its brief bright coils.
The war wizard slumped, his head lolling, scarcely touched by the lightning at all … already dead. His four attackers staggered and screamed and danced, their arms and legs spasming involuntarily, their hair standing on end, and their eyes and mouths wide with pain. Then something flashed forth from the war wizard’s chest, bursting open the leather of his jerkin. Something bright, that spat many lightnings. A death-lightning amulet!
