25.
The presumptuous little princess had stormed off, no doubt to sulk.
Pfaugh. Let her sulk, then, I thought dourly, glowering into the fire. She may have me in her power, but she will not find my leash so easy to hold. At least I can do that much.
I had almost come to terms with my imprisonment, too, once my damnable nemesis had chosen to pretend that I did not exist and leave me be for several blessed, blissful days. So the girl wanted me to help her spoke the Zhentarim's wheels. Hah! Xanos was more than up to the challenge. I would prove as much, and perhaps, once I had done so, I would be able to pick up the scattered pieces into which the fall of Undrentide had thrown my life.
Perhaps…perhaps I might even gain something more of use. The Zhentarim were said to be sitting on vast reams of magical lore and research. There was no such thing as useless knowledge, and I stood to gain a great deal of it, if only I could pry wide a few Zhentarim jaws and get them to spill their secrets.
But then...then my little malefactor had remembered both my existence and my use to her, and had once again chosen to rub my face in the undeniable fact of my servitude. And, once again, I found myself seething in fury – a state which was made no more palatable by the fact that it was quite impotent fury.
And then – and then!- to add insult to injury to bloody screaming inconvenience, every single member of our escort appeared to be giving me a wide and wary berth. I had not even tried to intimidate them. Perhaps Guthran had had a word with them, and advised them not to provoke me. If I lived through this, that damnable woman was going to get a piece of my mind. She existed just to thwart me, I was convinced.
Just let me hear one 'greenskin' fall from anyone's lips, I fumed. The fire spat and crackled. Just one, and I will show them exactly what it means to-
Beyond the firelight, the night moved. I froze in mid-seethe.
My night vision was all but gone – and an act of profoundest idiocy it had been indeed, to sit so near the fire, where the light was bound to render me as night-blind as a human – but there was a certain sensation in the air, an insistent tension that tapdanced along my nerves like a nervous cat, caterwauling for my attention.
It was a very familiar sensation. I had encountered it many times in my life.
It meant that someone was about to try to kill me.
Slowly, I unfolded myself and stood, never taking my eyes from the far shadows.
Something flashed in the gloom. Metal, I thought. The head of a weapon, I thought. Nothing else quite raised my hackles in that particular way.
Then the night moved in, scuttling like a spider, and the alarms went up at last.
"Stingers!" someone shouted, and others took up the cry. "Stingers! Tymora's Tits, they're all around us!"
I paid the screaming no mind. My attention was already turned inward, unraveling the ties that bound my power.
It came at once, and all too eagerly. Heat surged through my veins, burning on the tip of my tongue and filling my head with the snap and snarl of fire.
Before me, the fire flared up hungrily, its tongues momentarily edged with green.
Been too long without usin' it, boy, a memory of Drogan's voice said critically. Power's bleedin' all over the place. Pull it back, now, and focus.
Easier said than done, old man, I snarled soundlessly, but obeyed, though holding the power back was like damming a river with a teaspoon. I obeyed, because only beasts let their instincts control them, and I would be no beast. It would prove far too many imbeciles right.
Steel flashed, the heads of halberds dipping and swooping to catch the madly tumbling D'Tarig. Legs, barbed and jointed like a spider's, scuttled across the sand. Flat-nosed, slit-eyed red faces, human-yet-not in a way which made even my face look personable by comparison, swivelled as their prey ducked and dodged. Poison-tipped tails waved in the air, poised to jab.
One of those faces turned to me – arrested, it seemed, by the prospect of such a large and juicy target.
I smiled. It was, I had no doubt, a vicious sort of smile. I was in a vicious sort of mood.
The stinger advanced, undeterred. Good. Let it come. I had a little surprise waiting for it.
I stood my ground. Hold it, my voice whispered, or Drogan's, or perhaps a bit of both, the disparate parts of my brain all jostled together by the boil and churn of power. Hold it.
The creature sidled forward, and then gathered its three hindmost pairs of legs beneath it as if to lunge.
There. Let go.
The fire reared up, green as envy and hot as sin.
The wood that fed it went white, and crumbled, reduced to ash in an instant. The fire burned on, sourceless and searing, kept alive by will alone.
Through the curtain of flame, I saw the stinger recoil.
Having second thoughts, are we? I grinned wickedly and lifted a hand. The heat was sucking the air from my lungs and blistering my skin. It was glorious. Hah! Let's give him something else to think about, shall we?
A wave of my hand sent the fire leaping forward joyfully, straight into the arms of the startled stinger.
The stinger did not seem to appreciate my gift very much, receiving it with much screaming and flailing. Ah, well. There was no accounting for taste.
With one last, high-pitched scream, the creature blackened and crumpled quite satisfyingly, collapsing in on itself like so much spent firewood.
I began to laugh. Stopped. Cocked my head. The muted hiss of shifting earth seemed to grate against my eardrums, altogether too loudly.
Something is behind me, I thought, except that I did not quite think the words. Not so clearly, nor coherently. Some bestial instinct did the thinking for me.
A faint ripple of air raised gooseflesh on my arm. Over there, my hindbrain whispered, and I spun, automatically calling up heat of an entirely different kind.
A hissing line of acid splattered across the chestplate of a startled stinger. It sunk in quickly, scoring a deep and bubbling groove in the thing's exoskeleton.
Bloody things scream like fishwives, I thought irrelevantly, and fired off another arrow of acid while the stinger was still reeling from the first. The second arrow went into the stinger's throat, effectively carving a hole in its jugular and cauterizing the wound in one go.
My second opponent went down with a gurgle. I sniffed disdainfully at its corpse, turned again to take stock of the situation-
-and saw my little Bedine charge being carried away by a hungry stinger, struggling frantically against the arm that was clamped around her waist.
I paused. A series of ruminations and calculations crept through my mind, ones such as, Sensible of them. There must be a good ten stone of meat on her, at least, and, Do nothing, let them take her, let fate solve your little predicament, and, Cyric's Balls, are they in for a hellish time of it-
And that was when she ruined my plans. Again.
Her struggling stilled. I had time enough to see a singularly mulish expression settle over her face before the guise of a panicked little mouse fell away…
…to reveal a furious little mongoose who balled her hand into a fist, gritted her teeth, and rammed her elbow backwards, where it met the stinger's flat nose and rendered it even flatter.
I thought I saw the stinger's eyes cross, just for an instant, in that brief moment after the girl had relieved its face of her elbow but before she had had the chance to wind up for the next hit.
Then the stinger screamed – a justifiable response, I thought, because I'd gotten that elbow lodged in my sternum at least once already and knew from experience just how damnably solid it was - and dropped her.
Being dropped from that height should have stunned her – it would have stunned a less hard-headed creature – but some lust-addled sheikh at some point in the girl's ancestry must have mistaken a stone golem for one of his sheep and thereafter introduced bones of solid stone in his progeny, because the drop did not seem to effect the girl at all. If anything, it only served to make her angrier.
She landed in a crouch, clawing for her sword, and then she was up and swinging...
...except that her blade screeched harmlessly across the stinger's shell, as useless as a butter knife against dwarf-forged steel.
This did not seem to deter her. She ducked under the stinger's swipe, keeping low and staying just within its halberd's reach-
-Nine Hells, I thought, before I could stop myself. She is using the height difference. I recognized the tactic. I had seen a few halflings fight that way when confronted with larger opponents. Clever ploy. Close the distance, rob your opponent of his superior reach, and you are almost guaranteed-
-well, in her case, she was guaranteed another futile strike and a desperate sideways dodge as the stinger hissed and lurched forward, the tip of its tail plunging into the sand she would have been had she been just a heartbeat slower.
What she needed, I decided, was a bludgeoning weapon to crack the stinger's exoskeleton, or a thrusting weapon – such as one of those spears she had appropriated from the dead asabi and still had slung quite uselessly across her back – to punch through the shell at one of its weak points. The single, curving edge of her scimitar was uniquely unsuited to her current task. I could have told her as much, had I had any wish to do so.
I hesitated.
Aye. Plucky little thing, isn't she? Drogan's voice insinuated itself innocently. But she still seems a mite outmatched. Why don't ye go help her, boy?
My lip curled into a snarl. Shut up, old man. Then I realized that I'd taken a half-step forward. When had I done that? More to the point, why had I done it? Plucky or not, the girl was my jailor, and my jailor could bloody well fend for herself.
I was losing my mind, that was the problem. It was inevitable, I supposed, given my family history and the shite the world had put me through so far. I did wish that I could have enjoyed a few more years of relative sanity before going completely stark raving ga-ga, though - or that I could at least have picked a better time for it. Idly, I wondered it the girl's curse would still bind a madman. That would have been entirely in keeping with my luck thus far, that I would be freed of her only when I was too far gone to lunacy to enjoy my freedom.
Then a shadow separated itself from the other shadows behind the stinger, and the flash of a hook-headed axe neatly resolved my dilemma for me.
It bit into the fine fault line between two adjoining plates of the stinger's carapace, there where the tail met the body. Then it was yanked back, hard, by a wiry yellow hand. A sharp crack resounded, and a chunk of shell lifted like a fingernail being torn from its bed, showing the raw flesh beneath. The open wound rapidly welled with blackish blood and greenish ichor. It looked deucedly uncomfortable.
Ishiko pulled her axe back and somersaulted out of the way as the stinger screamed and rounded on her, the author of its latest agony.
The Kara-Turan woman was obliged to bend nearly in half to avoid the stinger's clumsy, pain-wracked swipe at her neck. "Spears out!" she barked at the girl. Her voice was harsh, each syllable spat out as if her tongue would let go of them only grudgingly. Nevertheless, let go it did, and of more words than I had ever heard from her before this. "Stab him! Go for the belly!"
The girl froze, for a moment. I could not see her face, but her stance was as tense as a startled doe's, and she seemed to be staring at the stinger's ravaged back as if this was the first she had seen of it.
Then her shoulders stiffened against what must have been some small trickle of comprehension, and she seemed to unfreeze all at once.
Several quick steps carried her backwards, out of range of both tail and halberd, while at the same time her left hand caught the tossed hilt of her scimitar from her right and her newly-freed right hand reached back over her shoulder, her fingers closing on a spear.
A normal spear would likely have been too thick for a hand as small as hers to hold securely, but asabi were smaller than men, and their spears were made for commensurately shorter grips. I refused to believe that the girl had considered this when she had taken the things. That was altogether too intelligent a move for a deranged little dervish such as herself. I would not believe it.
I also refused to believe that it was she who dived for the nearest opening in the fray, knocked aside one spider-like leg with the flat of her scimitar, and drove the spear up and into the stinger's belly with the other hand before scrabbling away again, leaving the spear sticking out of the dying monster's side like a needle in a pincushion. That was altogether too effective a maneuver. What had she dragooned me into this farce for, if she was so competent in her own defense? Perhaps a doppelganger had assumed her form. Or perhaps I was hallucinating the whole thing. It was the only explanation that I thought I could swallow without immediately vomiting it up again in revulsion.
The silence, immediately after the last stinger fell, was deafening. D'Tarig stood around, weapons still in hand and eyes wide to catch any movement that might herald a second wave. Those stingers who were not quite dead thrashed, once or twice, each thump of their limbs against the sand quite loud in the sudden silence. Then they, too, went still.
In the silence, Ishiko stepped forward, as soundlessly as a cat. She placed one booted foot on the stinger's haunch and tugged at the embedded spear. It came free with a wet, sucking sound.
Then she stalked over to the Bedine girl. "Well struck," she said mildly, and held out the spear. Black ichor dripped down its haft.
The girl took the spear hesitantly. The mongoose was gone, replaced once again by the shy and tremulous mouse. "T-thank you," she stammered.
The Kara-Turan nodded curtly. "Clean it soon," she instructed. "Stuff's corrosive." Then she turned away, leaving the girl opening and closing her mouth like a landed fish.
Into the awkward gap stepped Schaern, who stumped up to the center of the camp, gave his cohorts a quick once-over, grunted, and discharged his crossbow into the ground. The bolt shot into the sand with a thunk. One or two D'Tarig – the callower ones, from the looks of things, though that mix of dwarven and human blood in them always made it dicey at best to tell their ages – jumped. "Well, what are you lot waiting around for?" he snapped. "Get those corpses piled where the vultures can get at 'em. Hop to it!"
His bellow seemed to jolt the rest of the camp into moving. D'Tarig dispersed to their tasks, and I eyed the nearest corpse. It was a pity that I knew no levitation spells.
Fortunately, I had a few resources available to me that were not available to most mages.
I stooped to grab a stinger by the hair. I tested its weight. Not bad. I did not think that carrying it would present a problem, and thank Gruumsh for small favors. Had I been born a pure-blooded human, chances were that my hours spent studying would have rendered me as frail as a reed.
When I straightened up again, my eyes fell, despite my better judgement, on the little Bedine princess.
I had fully expected her to turn her nose up - or possibly turn her tail - at the daunting task of hauling a corpse that must have outweighed her by a factor of three.
Instead, that bloody-minded, steely-limbed, unspeakably annoying little creature merely surveyed the body critically, wiped her spear in the sand, slung it across her back, and bent to grasp a dead stinger by one limp leg.
She hauled it off with only the briefest of backwards glances, an unfriendly flash of dark eyes that settled on me and then moved away again haughtily, as if I was not even worthy of that much of her attention.
She did not even ask for help. She did not even ask for help. I could have easily carried that for her, but had she even deigned to ask me, her oh-so valuable slave? Of course not! That would have been entirely too easy.
A growl rumbled in my throat. I stared after her balefully. Impudent little show-off, I thought, and stuck out a hand to stop a passing D'Tarig. He was hauling another corpse. That was good. "Give me that," I commanded.
He stared up at me, startled. "What-"
I was in no mood to wait for my request to filter its way through that chunk of rock he called a brain. "Oh, just get out of my way," I snapped, and muscled him aside to relieve him of his burden.
Feeling curiously ill-used, I dragged both stingers to their final destination. This was no challenge. This was no challenge at all. All I had to do was ignore the grinding sensation in my shoulders.
I glowered at the girl's back. She ignored me. I scowled even more deeply, and hoisted my burdens all the higher.
Impudent little show-off.