The Shattered Mask

by Richard Lee Byers

  “I imagine this is the fellow who attempted to gull you,” Thamalon said calmly.

  “I deserve most of the credit,” said the shadow, and Shamur jumped, because the spirit had spoken in an exact imitation of Lindrian’s labored, quavering voice.

  “I did gull her,” said the mage, ignoring his spectral attendant, “she just didn’t follow through.” He turned his head toward Shamur. The gloaming turned the mask’s eye holes into pits of shadow. She used his regard as an excuse to take a leery step backward. “It’s too bad you didn’t opt to murder him in his sleep, Lady Uskevren. Then he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk you out of it.”

  “I must compliment you on your skill at chicanery,” Thamalon said. “Ordinarily, Shamur is nobody’s fool.”

  “I suspect she enjoys thinking the worst of you,” the wizard said, “and that helped.”

  “Tricking us is one thing,” Shamur said. “But how did you and your men get out here in the woods?”

  “We tracked you,” the shadow said, “veiled in Master’s spells of concealment.”

  “You see, my lady,” said the wizard, “I made quite extensive plans for your husband’s destruction. In addition to manipulating you, I put a watch on Stormweather Towers, and when you two rode out alone, we followed. And thank goodness for that, because this way, everything works out. While you failed to kill Thamalon, you did lure him far away from his retainers, and I daresay that my associates and I won’t have a great deal of difficulty disposing of the both of you ourselves.”

  “Your bravos could have shot us down as we dueled,” Shamur said.

  “You mustn’t get your hopes up because of that,” the magician said. “I’m afraid that you too must die. It was just that I don’t believe in revealing myself to an enemy unnecessarily, even when I hold every advantage. Besides, it would have gratified my sense of irony had Thamalon, who has survived the attentions of so many ill-wishers, perished at the hands of his own wife.”

  “Who are you?” Thamalon asked.

  “Lord Uskevren,” the wizard said in mock distress, “you wound me. How could you forget—”

  As the mage spoke, Shamur took a second subtle step backward, positioning herself beside the broken lantern. Nimbly as a juggler, she suddenly tossed her broadsword from her right hand to her left and kicked the lamp up into the air. She grabbed it, pivoted, and hurled it at a crossbowman on the opposite side of the clearing from the mage.

  By the time the missile smashed the bravo in the face, she was sprinting after it, and Thamalon, who had, Mask be thanked, reacted instantly, was pounding along beside her. But the crossbows! She zigzagged to throw off the shooters’ aim, then dived to the ground when she heard the ragged, snapping chorus of the weapons discharging their bolts. Unscathed, she leaped back up, and another quarrel, loosed by a bravo who’d taken his time, thrummed past her temple, yanking at strands of her long, pale hair as it passed.

  She glanced at Thamalon and saw that, miraculously, he hadn’t been hit, either. Evidently, surprise and the darkness had spoiled their enemies’ aim. He gave her a nod, and they raced on.

  Though his brow was gashed and his nose, pulped, the rogue Shamur had struck with the lantern was still on his feet, and she was running straight at his leveled crossbow. She watched his trigger finger, praying that despite the darkness, she’d see it move. Then it did twitch, the weapon clacked and twanged, and she threw herself to the side.

  The quarrel grazed her arm. Snarling at the sudden sting, she charged the rogue, her sword extended to complete the ruin of his face.

  Eyes wide with alarm, he dropped the crossbow, scurried backward, and fumbled for the hilt of his falchion. Shamur would have reached him before he ever managed to draw it, except that two more bravos dashed in, one from either side, to intercept her and Thamalon. They too had abandoned their deadly but slow-loading crossbows in favor of their blades.

  Shamur knew without looking that other bullies were also running toward her. If she and Thamalon couldn’t break through these first three before the rest arrived, they’d be overwhelmed. She attacked ferociously, and her husband did the same.

  The first opponent to engage her was a wiry, black-bearded man with a gold ring in his lower lip and a short sword in either hand. She feinted a cut at his knee and whirled her broadsword at his head. He parried and held her weapon with the blade in his left hand, then stepped in and stabbed at her belly with the one in his right.

  Striking the flat of the short sword with her unarmed fist, she knocked the attack out of line, observing as she did that her opponent’s hands and throat were tattooed with rows of overlapping scales. She chopped his throat with the edge of her stiffened hand, then shoved him away.

  By that time, the man with the bloody face had his falchion in hand. She advanced on him, and he gave ground, evidently well aware that he only had to hold the Uskevren here for a few heartbeats until his comrades could dash up and take them from behind.

  She cut at his leading leg, and he parried. She tried to dart around him, but he jumped in front of her and nearly landed a whistling slash at her face. All the while, she could hear his friends’ footsteps thudding closer.

  Then Thamalon sprang from the darkness. He’d evidently bested the ruffian who’d engaged him, and now he rushed at Shamur’s opponent from the side. The bravo tried to turn and defend himself, but was a split second too slow. Thamalon’s bloody long sword plunged into his neck.

  The dead man started to fall, the Uskevren lord yanked his weapon free, and he and Shamur ran out of the clearing and toward the trees, into what had now become a black and freezing winter night.

  Garris Quinn, a fleshy, sallow rogue with a pair of kid gloves tucked foppishly through the band of his copotain hat, watched flabbergasted as the nobles disappeared into the woods with several of the men under his command in hot pursuit. His slack-jawed expression turned sheepish and wary when he turned to look at Master. “I guess they took the lads by surprise,” he said.

  “I guess they did,” said Bileworm, leering. Actually, he thought, Garris had no reason to be afraid. No matter how vexed Master was, he wouldn’t waste time chastising this lout and his underlings for their incompetence. Not while Shamur and Thamalon were running loose.

  And the familiar was right, for Master merely sighed and said, “Two of your fellows will stay near me to serve as my bodyguards. Someone must also return to the men we left with the horses and warn them to be on the lookout. Everyone else will help flush and kill our quarry. In an organized fashion, if you please.”

  Garris scurried off to see that the wizard’s orders were carried out. “Organized or not,” Bileworm said, “in the woods, in the night, our friends have at least a slim chance of escaping.”

  “That’s why I intend to arrange for reinforcements,” Master said, “reinforcements who see well in the dark, and will materialize ahead of Thamalon and Shamur and cut them off.”

  The wizard thrust the ferule of his staff into the frozen ground as easily as if it had been soft sand. Then, having freed both hands, he produced a tiny leather bag and a stub of candle from one of the hidden pockets in his cloak, held them high, and whispered an incantation.

  Another voice, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, hissed a response, and power crackled through the air. A blue flame flared upward from the candle wick, and violet light pulsed from the mouth of the sack. An instant later, bursts of soft purple radiance flickered off in the distance among the trees.

  Her heart pounding and the breath burning in her lungs, Shamur ran. In the clearing, dueling, her skirts hadn’t especially troubled her, but now they seemed to snag on every fallen branch or patch of brush.

  Even so, with her longer legs, she was keeping pace with Thamalon, and moving far more quietly as well. To her thief’s ears, his every stride seemed excruciatingly loud, and she feared they’d never shake their pursuers off their trail.

  Somewhere behind them, a voice cried out in pain. S
hamur suspected that one of the bravos had tripped or run into a low-hanging branch as he plunged headlong through the darkness. A mishap, she knew, that could just as easily have befallen her or Thamalon, with fatal consequences.

  At her back, other voices babbled, the sound receding as she fled. Perhaps the rogue who’d hurt himself had been at the head of the pack, and his accident had delayed everyone else. At any rate, she didn’t hear them thumping along at her heels anymore, and thanks to the tangle of branches overhead, patches of the ground beneath were free of snow, which ought to prevent the bullies from following her or Thamalon’s tracks. The two nobles changed direction one more time, and then she gestured to a hollow in the ground behind the broad trunk of an ancient oak. They crouched down in the depression to catch their breath.

  As soon as she stopped moving, the cold bit into her body, and she wistfully thought of her cloak left back in the glade. She felt as if she’d left most of her strength back there as well, squandered in the protracted duel.

  Bloody from the wounds she’d given him, panting and shivering at the same time, Thamalon didn’t seem to be in any better shape than she was, but he gave her a smile. “When I said I wished we could spend more time together,” he whispered, “this wasn’t precisely what I had in mind.”

  She grinned. “Shall we try for the horses?”

  He shook his head. “Our friend in the mask will be expecting us to do that.”

  “You’re right. Well, now that we’ve shaken them off our tails, they’ll have to spread out to hunt us. We could hunt them as well.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Master Moon’s blood on my blade, or that of his agents, either, but still, that strategy seems a little chancy.”

  She grimaced. “I suppose so. They have magic on their side, and if just one of them got off a shout, he could bring the whole band down on our heads. Besides, you don’t know how to creep up on someone silently.”

  “I’ll have you know,” he said indignantly, “that I’m a firstrate stalker. I mastered the art hunting small game around Storl Oak when I was a boy.”

  “If you say so,” Shamur said. “I suppose our best course is simply to put more distance between our pursuers and ourselves. Perhaps eventually work our way out of the woods and back to Rauthauvyr’s Road.”

  “Agreed.” He looked up at the stars floating above the canopy of bare branches, taking his bearings. “Let’s head northeast.”

  “All right.” They took a last cautious look about, then rose to their feet. At that moment, points of purple light winked at various points in the forest.

  “Oh, joy,” Shamur said, “the wizard has decided to use his spells on us.”

  “Be careful,” Thamalon replied. “Mystra only knows what sort of effect he’s conjured.”

  Go teach your grandmother to turn a spindle, she thought sourly. She’d been contending with hostile spellcasters before he was born.

  They skulked through the trees, and she had to concede that Thamalon could move fairly quietly when he wasn’t running flat out. Her teeth began to chatter, and she clenched her jaw to stop the noise.

  Soon she heard the wizard’s henchmen moving around her, bawling to one another, cursing, and crashing through the brush. Shamur smiled, for she wanted the bravos to make a commotion. That way, she’d know where they were.

  Unfortunately, something else was moving as stealthily as she was. So stealthily, in fact, that she had no warning of its presence until she and Thamalon crept right up to a lightning-blasted beech with a blackened crevice running down its trunk. Then she caught a foul stench, and heard a scratching sound. An ochre, six-legged rat the size of a dog exploded from the crack.

  Shamur swung her sword at the ugly thing, but it dodged the blade and rushed at her ankle, its huge, stained incisors poised to take her foot off. She kicked it away, and it squealed and scuttled at her again.

  She sidestepped, thrust, and this time caught it behind the shoulder, her point plunging all the way through its body to pin it to the ground. Convulsing, it screamed until Thamalon struck its head off.

  “It’s an osquip,” he said, “and not native to these woods.”

  “I know,” she said, “the magician summoned it, and thanks to its screeching, everyone knows where we are. Run!”

  They dashed on, and a stitch started throbbing in her side. Another osquip scuttled out from under a bush right in front of her, and she had to leap over it to avoid a collision. She whirled, swinging her broadsword, her aim a matter of pure instinct, and split the beast’s muzzle precisely between its beady eyes, dispatching it.

  Thamalon cursed. Shamur turned to see one of the ruffians emerge from the trees to their left. The rogue’s eyes widened as he beheld the fugitives. He was going to shout and pinpoint their location yet again, and there was no way she could get to him in time.

  Thamalon dropped the long sword, reached into his sleeve, whipped out a throwing knife, and hurled it, all in one smooth blur of motion. The rogue made a choking sound and collapsed with the weapon buried in his breast.

  “I … didn’t know you could throw knives,” Shamur wheezed, her side still aching fiercely.

  “I suppose you don’t approve of spouses keeping secrets from one another,” he replied, his labored breathing all but masking the sarcasm in his tone. He picked up his sword and lurched into motion. Biting back a groan, she stumbled after him.

  Violet light pulsed among the trees, and then again a minute later. Shamur had hoped their principal adversary was a wizard of modest talents, who could cast such a summoning only once, but plainly, that wasn’t the case. Evidently he could augment his forces repeatedly, until he had sufficient minions to comb every inch of the benighted woods and overwhelm anyone they found there. The odds against her and Thamalon were even longer than she’d first imagined.

  She hoped they’d traveled far enough from the spot where the osquip had squealed that they could stop running and resume skulking. The relentless, driving pace had become agonizing. She started to slow down, and then a bubble of purple phosphorescence appeared, swelled, and vanished directly in front of her. It left in its place a hulking lizard man, its scaly tail lashing and its forked tongue flickering from its jaws. The reptilian creature had a club studded with sharp bits of stone in one clawed hand and a crude wicker shield in the other.

  As one, Shamur and Thamalon rushed it, hoping to dispatch it before it could take any sort of action. But the lizard man hopped sideways, interposing the noblewoman’s body between her husband and itself, and caught her first attack on its shield. Hissing, it struck back, and she ducked the blow.

  Thamalon darted around the lizard man and cut at its back. Pivoting, its tail sweeping past Shamur’s feet, the creature roared and blocked the blow with its shield. As it struck at Thamalon, who avoided the blow by jumping back, Shamur cut at its midsection, plunging the broadsword deep into its flesh.

  The lizard man collapsed into a drift of dry, brown oak leaves, but Shamur could take no pleasure in the victory, for she knew that its bellowing and the crash of blades on the wicker shield had revealed their whereabouts yet again. She could hear the hunters calling to one another as they moved in from every side.

  She suspected that she and Thamalon would never escape. They might as well make a stand here, while they still had a bit of strength left, and see how many of their attackers they could slay before they were cut down in their turn. But that would be tantamount to giving up, and so she started to run instead.

  Thamalon grabbed her by the arm. “This way,” he said, pointing with the gory tip of his long sword to indicate a slightly different direction. She didn’t see why he thought his choice was any better, but it didn’t seem to be any worse, either, and there was scarcely time for discussion. So she nodded and let him lead the way.

  Another osquip, this one eight-legged, scuttled from the shadows. Thamalon cut at it, missed, his blade jarring on the frozen earth, and the huge rat darted at his leg. He s
natched his foot back, and then Shamur hacked her broadsword down into the creature’s spine. The osquip fell and lay screeching like a damned soul.

  As Shamur lifted her broadsword to administer the coup de grace, a crossbow bolt streaked out of the night, narrowly missed Thamalon, and crunched into the bole of an oak. There was no point in silencing the osquip if other foes were already close enough to snipe at them, so she and Thamalon simply fled, leaving the beast to writhe and shriek on the ground.

  “Just … a little … farther,” Thamalon gasped

  Shamur couldn’t imagine how he could find the breath to run and try to encourage her at the same time. She also had no idea what he was talking about, but after twenty more stumbling, excruciating strides, she found out.

  Suddenly, she and Thamalon plunged from the trees into a large clearing. Perhaps ancient enchantments prevented the surrounding woods from encroaching on the space, for at its center rose the dark shape of a small ruined fortress. Shamur realized that her husband had been heading in the castle’s direction all along, so they could take refuge inside if it turned out to be necessary.

  Sadly, it was necessary. Their enemies were closing in, and they were too spent to run much farther. The fortress was a better redoubt than she could have expected to find, even though its crumbling sandstone ramparts could do no more than delay the defenders’ inevitable annihilation, and that only if the fugitives could reach the interior alive.

  Thamalon led her toward a gate in the castle’s north wall. Crossbows clacked. The quarrels thrummed through the dark but missed their marks.

  Suddenly a pair of lizard men seemed to pounce from nowhere; exhausted as she was, dashing at breakneck speed, Shamur hadn’t noticed their approach. The one that attacked her bore no weapons, but it raked at her chest with claws sharp as any dagger. She recoiled, and the creature’s talons merely shredded her gown and tore away the silver and sapphire brooch Tamlin had given her on her birthday.