with shields… ah!
She tore a shield from an unfeeling, limp arm, donned it, and hurried back to the fallen Sage of Shadowdale. Snatching up the wand, she held the shield ready and ran back around the corner.
She heard a shout, and the shield shuddered under a heavy blow. The head of a quarrel appeared beside her arm. Had she not been holding the shield well in front of her, it might have pierced her breast. Sharantyr snarled and dodged against the parapet, risking a lowered shield for an instant, to look.
At least one other crossbow was ready, but she'd have no time to worry about it. The three Wolves whose quarrels had just missed her had crouched down to winch their bows into readiness again. Interrupted, they were rising with drawn blades, perhaps two paces away. Sharantyr snarled and hissed the wand's command word again, staring at one Wolf under the edge of her shield.
This time the wand brought her pulsing, purplish light and an intense feeling of icy cold. No missiles of force appeared, and her opponents did not slow or seem to feel anything. Sharantyr slipped the wand into her shield hand and backed hastily away, snatching out her own sword.
They came at her in a rush. Sharantyr waited until they were between her and the ready bow she'd seen, then went to one knee, pretending to wobble and groaning in pain. The Wolves almost got in each other's way trying to be the first to carve her.
Sharantyr took the first blow on her shield and leapt up, moving forward against the body of its wielder. Hip to hip, she turned the Wolf to one side, driving him off-balance into one of his fellows while she parried the thrust of the other Wolf.
Then she spun away and was behind them all, tying up the blade she'd parried with her own. She forced it down and drove the edge of the shield into the Wolf's face as hard as she could. He fell, spitting blood, as she ducked low.
As she'd expected, a quarrel thrummed past her, low and well aimed, thirsty for her blood. Instead, it found the knee of the Wolf turning beyond her. He screamed and fell. Sharantyr fired the wand at the one who was left.
This time it launched a shower of sparks, but out of them a single magic missile coalesced, wavered, and streaked to its target.
The Zhentilar snarled in pain and came at her, thrusting viciously with his sword. The lady ranger struck his blade aside with her own, drove her hip hard into his armor-clad middle, and shoved him back against the parapet. Another crossbow bolt hissed past, close by. The Wolf straggled, hurling her back, and charged.
Sharantyr went suddenly to her knees again, bringing her shield up. It took his blade with a thunderous crash. She drove the shield up and kicked out under it as she rolled onto her shoulders.
The Wolf went over her, cursing helplessly. He had time for one throat-stripping shriek as he plunged headfirst into the forecourt below. Sharantyr let go her shield and rolled over. The Wolf who'd taken a bolt through the knee was crawling her way, face dark with pain, sword ready in his hand. She scrambled toward him, keeping low as she held off his lashing blade with her own, and reached his feet.
The wounded foot trailed uselessly; he kicked at her with the other. Sharantyr grimly laid hold of the trailing boot, twisted it, and set her teeth against his scream of agony. When the Wolf went limp, she dragged him up and pitched him over the battlements, looking wearily for the three surviving Wolves as she did so.
One was watching her, a loaded crossbow ready on a crenellation. Another had just started to climb down the rope. The third was holding the rope steady where it went over the wall.
The lady ranger fired the wand again. The man with the bow staggered back, clutching his shoulder, and cried out.
Sharantyr charged, sobbing, fear and anger slowly rising to choke her. Had these black-helmed bastards slain the man she'd gone through so much to protect, the one man Shadowdale needed in the face of Zhentarim evil? The legendary mage half the Realms feared and the rest whispered glad tales about?
'Mother Mystra,' she prayed aloud, 'aid him now, for I cannot!' Then she flung herself aside desperately as the injured man, face twisted with hatred and pain, aimed his bow and triggered it.
The bolt slammed into her left shoulder and hurled her back along the wall. Sharantyr screamed as the trip along the rough stones twisted the quarrel, its point grating along her bones. She should have worn the shield again. She should have-oh, gods, the pain!
Using her sword as a prop, Sharantyr dragged herself up. Her left arm burned and felt dripping wet all at once, and the world seemed to be slowly turning around her. She found her feet, somehow, and ran dizzily toward the man with the bow.
His face was grim and white, but he drew his blade and came to meet the woman in bloodstained leathers. Her eyes met his like two daggers, but she swayed, and her left arm hung limp, his quarrel standing out of her shoulder.
'Just what,' he snarled, 'brings you here, maid?' His blade leapt at her throat. Long hair parted at its passing.
'Death,' she said softly, parrying. Their blades met fingerwidths away from her throat. Steel snarled on steel, but her blade held and his was forced away. 'Yours.'
She triggered the wand still clutched in her nerveless left hand, whispering the word that awakened its greater power.
There was a burst of white light, and the warrior screamed. Sharantyr saw him reel back. A startled Wolf's face gaped at them both from outside the wall, at the head of the rope. She leapt forward with the last of her strength and brought her blade down on that tight-stretched cord.
Strands parted and flew, and frantic scramblings came from just below her. Then the rope was gone, and two throats were crying vainly to the passing air. Their songs of fear ended very suddenly in thudding sounds.
Sharantyr sank to her knees there by the turret door and looked about with dull eyes, fighting waves of pain. The Wolf she'd struck with the wand lay fallen beside her. She made sure of his death with her blade, then her gaze fell on his belt.
A metal vial shone there amid the blood. With sudden urgency she tugged it free, snarling. On hands and knees, she set off on the long crawl back along the battlements.
The vial bore a rune she knew. The magical drink it held would heal, if it could be trusted with magic going wild. Gods, but she needed it!
The old man needed it more, the man whose life was more important than any other in the Realms, the man she'd come here to protect.
Sharantyr crawled grimly back along the battlements, using her blade where life yet lurked amid her fallen foes, and tearing free six more vials as she went.
She was half blind from helpless tears of pain when she turned the corner, crawling feebly to where Elminster sat in his blood. 'Tymora,' she sobbed aloud, 'let me be in time.'
Then Tymora, or someone else listening with dark humor, rolled darkness over her like a great black cloak, and she sank into it and was gone.
'We've the gods to thank that they aren't still raining quarrels down on us!' an exhausted Itharr said, leaning wearily against a heap of corpses, notched and battered blade in hand.
'More likely we've Elminster to thank,' Belkram replied, looking back across the forecourt. Quarrels stood up from fallen, silent men, wooden doors and framing, and cracks in the flagstones like a thicket of leaning weeds. 'They left off rather suddenly, and there's been no rush from above.'
Itharr squinted up at what he could see of the battlements-not much from here. Then he shot another long look at the slit windows around the courtyard, expecting quarrels to leap out of them at any moment.
The two winded Harpers lay resting with half a dozen men of the dale, all who could still stand and swing a sword after the bloodbath desperate Wolves had made of the forecourt. Many dalefolk had crawled or been dragged away out of the keep. Those still able to fight had no good idea of how many Wolves were left in the castle. They agreed that no members of Longspear's council had been seen elsewhere in the dale. Most or all were probably within these walls.
There was also at least one mage of power, Hcarla Bellwind, as well as the hated Angruin Stormcloak, who'd hurled death in the marketplace and then fled. The dale-folk couldn't think of any place but here, his seat of power, that he could have gone when his magic took him away.
