There were gasps of wonder, and muttered oaths of awe.
“Touch nothing, ” a man snapped, speaking with absolute authority, his cold voice startlingly loud and near. “This treasure’s mere illusion-all of it-but the swords are real enough, and they fly and slay more surely than our best spells.”
Jhessail was on her knees crouched over Doust, right at one end of the heap, and now risked silently moving her head to the side just far enough to let one eye peer past the glowing riches.
She found herself staring at a sphere of light, hovering above Zhentilar warriors in gleaming black plate armor with swords and axes in their hands. There were too many of them for her to count, crowded together gaping at the Dragonfire treasure, and three robed men stood among them. Wizards. Zhentarim wizards.
“Just illusion,” the oldest mage agreed. “We’ve searched and scoured this place a dozen times since I was posted here. There’s nothing-”
The young wizard beside him stiffened, something like a wisp of smoke encircling his head. Then the smoke was gone — into him-and he calmly drew his dagger, turned, and drove it hilt-deep into the oldest wizard’s nearest eye.
Everyone shouted, the murderous young mage crumpled as that smoke arrowed out of his eyes-leaving them dark and staring pits-and the old wizard shrieked as he started to topple.
Three blades thrust deep into the young mage before he hit the floor. The smoke raced right at the last mage, who batted at it vainly, shouting out words of warding that seemed to echo and roll away across vast distances, despite the stone walls and dark ceiling of the cellar. Zhentilar lifted their blades in a ring to menace him-and Jhessail bit her lip to keep from gasping aloud as she saw a lone warrior appear in the doorway behind the Zhents, lurching forward like some sort of monster.
He was purple-skinned, bloated, and wept spumes of dripping foam from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He had a wand in his hand.
It flashed, blasting Zhents into tumbling ruin before they could even shout. The warrior aimed the wand and triggered it again, smiling crookedly beneath unseeing, foaming eyes as more Zhents died.
Duthgurl Lathalance hated to miss a good fray.
Pennae rolled the body of the war wizard off her as she tugged the end of Yassandra’s belt free. It was hung so heavily with interesting and useful-looking pouches, keys, and magical-looking tools suspended on thongs that she’d have no way of carrying all this plunder if she didn’t bring along the belt that held them too.
It took but a moment to buckle that slender leather loosely around her hips, turn to give the ornrion a warning glare across the heaped bodies-he lay motionless, still feigning death-and then creep across the chamber, to see where all the Zhents had gone.
Her fellow Knights were somewhere beyond that doorway, and they’d need the help of all the Watching Gods to handle three Zhentarim, to say nothing of a small army of Zhentilar warriors From the other side of the doorway, men shouted in sudden, angry alarm, swords clanged, and there was a loud whoosh that sounded like magic. Someone screamed.
Pennae snatched up a fallen dagger from the floor and started to run. If she could hurl it at a Zhentarim wizard from behind, and mayhap stop him from crisping Florin with a spell She stopped in the doorway, stared open-mouthed in astonishment at what she saw, and then hurled herself back and aside, out of the way.
It was too late for a hurled dagger to save anyone.
The ring of Zhentilar staggered back from the last wizard standing as a battlestrike blossomed from his fingers, its many glowing missiles leaping like darts to plunge sickeningly into their vitals.
Several of them turned to join the rush at the purple-skinned man with the wand, but others struggled forward again, determined to hack down the mage who’d commanded them mere moments ago.
He fed them another battlestrike, the searing magic missiles sending them reeling helplessly once more-but a hurled axe bit deep into the wizard’s head and sent him staggering.
The Zhentilar who’d flung it sprang after it, pouncing viciously on the mage and bearing him to the floor, where the Zhentilar slit his commander’s throat ere sawing at his neck. He didn’t stop until the mage’s head rolled free.
Over that Zhentilar’s head the purple-skinned man’s wand flashed repeatedly, spitting death at Zhent after Zhent as they charged desperately at it, the Dragonfire glow flaring to gloriously blinding brightness whenever wandfire touched it.
Zhent after Zhent toppled, but the wand-blasts suddenly waned into more feeble strikes, and a Zhentilar sword managed to reach and bite into the wand.
It burst in a small star of brief sparks, and the singing shriek of that sword exploding into shards.
Shards that butchered the Zhentilar who’d wielded it, the lacerated body tumbling apart in bloody cantels, and diced Lathalance’s arm to the elbow.
Zhentilar roared in triumph and leaped forward, slashing and thrusting at the undefended purple warrior.
Seemingly heedless of pain, as blade after blade sliced into him, that lone warrior doggedly drew his sword and started to stab and hack them right back.
Jhessail winced more than once as the ruthless butchery unfolded. The purple-skinned warrior seemed heedless of his own doom, and dealt much death before he was overwhelmed, and swarming Zhentilar hewed his rotting body apart.
A wisp of smoke curled up from it like a rearing serpent, and out of long habit the Zhentilar drew back, for in the Black Brotherhood magic was not to be trifled with.
A second wisp arose from the remains of the beheaded Zhentarim commander, rearing up in like manner.
The two serpentine plumes of smoke seem to regard each other for a long moment, as if in converse-and then, as one, they turned and raced through the doorway, to arrow up the cellar stairs together.
With a ragged roar, the surviving Zhentilar charged after them.
As the last Zhentilar warrior-there were a dozen left, no more-pounded back up the cellar stairs, Pennae rose from among the old barrels and crates, darted along the wall, and slipped through the doorway, keeping low and moving fast.
Despite knowing what she’d find, the Zhent bodies were piled and strewn in such profusion that she almost overbalanced skidding to an abrupt halt. Beyond the heaped corpses the Dragonfire treasure glowed in unaltered splendor.
Pennae gave it a wry smile. Deceptive and deadly, like so much else in Faerun.
Then she picked her way carefully past all the dead men, keeping to the walls and wending her way as quietly as possible, until she could round the far end of the treasure and see A sword, leaping at her face!
“Hold hard, there!” she hissed, springing back.
Islif gave her a level look from the other end of the sword. “Next time, warn me. We still have ears, you know.”
“Yes,” Pennae hissed, “but we’re not the only ones still alive down here, even now! That cursed ornrion from Arabel is here! Alone, I think.”
“Spew of the gods!” Florin growled. “He does love us, doesn’t he?”
Pennae nodded sourly, and then peered more closely at all of the Knights. “Will our holynoses live, d’you think?”
Islif shrugged. “If we could reach our healing potions, I’d feel a lot happier answering that.”
Pennae regarded her fellow Knight expressionlessly for a moment, and then tugged open her leathers to reveal her dethma of soft, well-worn leather. Her fingers sought something beneath the swell of her breasts, and tugged it forth: a gleaming steel vial, cork-stoppered and wax-sealed, with the shining sun symbol graven on it. One of the healing potions they’d gained from Whisper’s hoard. She held it out to Islif.
Who frowned. “Where did you…?”
“ I don’t go into battle without essentials,” Pennae murmured.
Islif regarded her for a moment in silence, and then said, “Thank you.”
Pennae shrugged. Then she looked along at the Knights again, nodded slowly, and asked, “Florin? If Jhess and Islif are enough to tend and guard the stricken, care to join me in trying to find a way up out of these cellars?”
Florin looked at Jhessail, and then at Islif, collected two slow nods, and said, “Yes.” He hefted his sword. “I
