Some jagged shards of wood fell from the torn ceiling, and a startled bowman fired a quarrel at their noise. It flashed past Pennae and down the room, thudding hard into an unseen wall… a wall of thick, damp wood, by the sound of that strike.
Heavy boots suddenly thudded across the ceiling overhead, moving in a hurry, and came charging down the cellar stairs.
Suddenly all the crossbowmen were firing.
Crossbow quarrels came leaping up out of the darkness as Dauntless and his Dragons plunged down the stairs; the ornrion scarcely had time to curse and fling up one armored forearm to shield his face before the swordcaptain beside him blurted out a sudden, wet snarl and fell over backward, a quarrel in his face.
Thrumming viciously, quarrels slammed into Dauntless, twice-thrice-if they’d been longbows, he’d be full of arrows already and likely dead. Another of his Dragons grunted, behind him; staggered but not transfixed by a striking quarrel.
“Down!” Dauntless roared, “ In the name of the King! ”
These foes would have to be taken down before they could reload and fire again; if there were more with loaded crossbows ready, it’d be just too bad for an ornrion called Dauntless.
Wherefore he flung himself recklessly down into the darkness, caring nothing for footing or dignity, sword reaching out. The crossbowmen would have to crank their windlasses like madmen to recock their crossbows, a noisy task that took time no matter how strong and fast they were, and then slap quarrels into firing-channels.
They knew they hadn’t time enough, and flung down their crossbows to claw out daggers and short swords, even as the ornrion hurled himself off the stair to crash bodily into two of them and bear them to the cellar floor, bouncing hard.
“Murderers!” he roared. “In the name of the king, Azoun the Purple Dragon, I-urrkk!”
The punch across his throat temporarily silenced Dauntless, but the man who dealt it started dying an instant later, when the ornrion drove a dagger into his eye with brutal ruthlessness and rolled hard to his left, fully onto the second crossbowman he’d borne to the floor. By then, the other crossbowmen were coming for him with swords and daggers drawn. His Dragons rushed past to meet him.
“Aye,” a crossbowman snarled, “that’s just what we’ve been doing: murdering war wizards! And we should have no trouble at all with a few Purple Dragons!”
Then blade was clanging on blade, and the hollowness of that boast was swiftly apparent. The crossbowmen were fast and mean-but the Dragons were veterans of many an Arabellan alley-brawl, trained to work together in battle. They were bigger, stronger, and far more heavily armored. One Dragon grunted in disgusted pain as a sword slid through the leathers covering the joint above his left forearm, but that slight wound was the only harm the three soldiers suffered before the crossbowmen broke and ran, leaving four of their fellows dead.
Dauntless pounded after them, barking a command over his shoulder that left the wounded Dragon tarrying to slice all the bowstrings he could see. The ornrion caught another crossbowman before the staggering man could get out of the room with the stair, hewing him down from behind and trampling him without slowing.
The crossbowmen fled right at-and through — an apparently solid stretch of dark, cobwebbed stone wall. Dauntless plunged after them, right on their heels and hacking the air wildly on all sides to try to foil any slayers waiting for him.
There was a moment of tingling darkness as he passed through the illusory magic that cloaked the unseen doorway, and then he was in a lamplit room where startled crossbowmen fought desperately against other, hard- faced men with better swords and daggers, who’d been… yes, plundering the bodies of dead war wizards!
“You dare? ” Dauntless bellowed, smashing his way right through a hapless crossbowman to get at the nearest of these new foes.
“Ha!” that man laughed, striking aside the ornrion’s sword with the ease of a veteran swordsman. “Of course we dare! We dare anything for the glory of the Brotherhood! Zhentarim triumphant! ”
One of the crossbowmen kicked the man’s feet out from under him and stabbed him brutally as he toppled. Dauntless rewarded the slayer with a slash that half-severed his head and left it lolling as the dying man let out a wet, burbling squeal and collapsed atop the Zhent he’d just slain.
Dauntless ducked under the wild slash of a halberd-what sort of fool tried to swing such a weapon, in cramped chambers like these? — as Zhents and the crossbowmen-and whom did they serve, hey? — enthusiastically killed each other all around him. He saw one of his Dragons lay open the halberd-wielder’s throat with a mighty, off-balance slash, and snarled, “Try to take one of the idiots who used the crossbows on us alive! I need some answers!”
“Commanded,” First Sword Brauthen Haernhar growled in the usual Purple Dragon acknowledgment that an order had been heard and understood. He kicked a Zhent hard enough in the cods to lift the man off his feet, into a helpless plunge forward onto the Dragon’s waiting blade.
The crossbowmen were all dead now, killed with swift ease by Zhents who were obviously disciplined, well- trained warriors. They must be Zhentilar at work here without their customary armor and spears, so as to avoid raising an alarm that would bring Baron Thomdor riding hard into Halfhap with several hundred mounted Dragons at his shoulders.
Which meant that whatever the fate of Lord Duskur Ebonhawk’s plundered riches or the Knights of Myth Drannor, and regardless of Lady Lord Lhal’s orders, Ornrion Taltar Dahauntul must survive this fray and get alive back to Arabel or to a moot with one of Baron Thomdor’s patrols, so the Warden of the Eastern Marches swiftly learned of these Zhents. If the Zhentarim were in Halfhap, then they were in Arabel, too, or soon planning to be… and if ever Arabel fell to the Black Brotherhood, all northeastern Cormyr would become a lawless battlefield of marauding monsters unleashed by Zhents, orc and goblin hireswords let loose on every steading and hamlet, and all A Zhent lunge came within a shrieking bladewidth of finding the gap in his armor-and Dauntless found himself forced to lean into that lunge, almost embracing the steel seeking to slay him, as he parried a teeth-jarringly hard cut to the side of his helm, and needed room to interpose his own sword or risk decapitation.
He managed to avoid both blades somehow, reeling back out of that tangle of swords in time to see First Sword Brauthen coughing his way to the floor with a sword in his guts, clawing at it vainly and desperately as the Zhent wielding it laughed in triumph.
He should turn and flee, alone now in this room of Zhentilar, but Brauthen deserved to be avenged-for what good is a glittering kingdom, if it lifts no finger to help or seek justice for every man who dies for it? — and he was damned before the gods if he’d turn away when it was so easy, with Brauthen grappling the Zhent’s blade, to spring to the side and slash open that laughing face as he did so.
So Dauntless killed that man, and the next, winning himself time to flee and turned-to discover the illusion of solid wall was in force on this side of the hidden doorway too!
He could not be sure where it was, and the blades reaching for him even now would give him no time for any sort of a search.
Then Swordcaptain Darasko Starmarlee, whom he’d left behind, wounded, to disable crossbows, burst suddenly through seemingly solid stone gaping in astonishment, with blade held high-but not high enough to properly parry the vicious swing from the Zhent who’d been charging to block off the ornrion’s escape.
Starmarlee’s jaw and throat exploded in gore, and the swordcaptain reeled helplessly forward, past Dauntless and under the knees of the Zhent leaping after him. Which left only Starmarlee’s slayer between Dauntless and the way out.
It was a matter of swift and burning satisfaction to butcher that Zhentilar and charge past him, still hot with rage, back out into Utter darkness. There must be doors in the common room above that could be swung down over the stairs, and that thrice-cursed innkeeper must have closed them!
Locked them, too, no doubt, dragged a weight atop them, and gone to fetch weapons with which to greet the face of an ornrion straining to heave things aside and gain freedom. Well, his belt axe was a puny thing, meant more for kindling and smashing locks and hasps than for fighting, but if he had to hew through doors-or the cellar ceiling, elsewhere-he would. After killing every last Zhentilar down here, of course.
Dauntless had already stepped aside along the wall, out of sheer warriors’ instinct, and turned to make ready to deal death to Zhentilar in the dark. Strike the first man down from one side, then get across to the other to await the second.
There! He thrust hard and low at the faint gleam in the darkness, and was rewarded by a snarl of pain and the heavy thud of a man falling precipitously to his knees. He drove his blade down into an unseen back, twisted it,
