the best of my abilities," Nimor said. "With the god-dess's aid, I will scour our city's foes from our territory."
He offered another deep bow to the matron mothers, and quietly withdrew.
The forest sounds abruptly returned, signaling the end of the spell of silence. Wind sighed in the treetops, a small brook ran somewhere nearby, and tiny rustles and scuttling sounds whispered in the darkness as the small creatures of the woods - or larger ones who knew how to be stealthy - moved about nearby. Halisstra listened for a long time, hoping to hear some sort of positive evidence that the surface dwellers had gone or that her comrades battled on somewhere nearby, but no ringing swords or thunderous spells split the night. She heard nothing as convenient as an enemy conversation to help her decide if her foes had left, or were instead crouched silently outside the darkness, waiting for her to emerge. Halisstra could be quite patient when it suited her, and she was not unused to hard-ship and danger, but the sheer nervous tension of stretching out to iden-tify and categorize every tiny sound that came to her ears soon left beads of sweat trickling down her face.
If Quenthel and the others were nearby, I would hear it, she decided. The fight must have carried them far ahead by now.
Her heart pounded at the thought of being lost in the endless woods alone, a reviled enemy to any creature who walked the surface world.
Better to die trying to rejoin the others, Halisstra decided. At least I know where they're going, if I can manage to keep my course.
First, she needed to escape from the darkness that sheltered her. She did not choose to dismiss the magical gloom, deciding to leave it to con-tinue until it failed in an hour or two. There was a small chance that her enemies might be waiting quietly outside for the darkness to fail before moving in. Halisstra groped in her belt pouch and withdrew a slender ivory wand. She felt very carefully to determine if it was the wand she needed, and when she was convinced that she had the right one, she tapped it against her chest and whispered a word.
Though there was no way for her to verify it, sitting on the forest floor in the magical darkness, the wand's magic had made her invisible. She stood as quietly as she could, cringing at every soft rustle or clink of her mail, and began steadily moving away.
Halisstra broke out into the open night much sooner than she expected - it seemed she had been sitting no more than six or seven feet from the edge of the darkness. Confident in her invisibility, she stood up straight and looked around. The forest looked much as it had before, except there was no sign of her companions or the woodsmen and surface elves who had attacked them. The moon was rising, and its brilliant silver light flooded the forest floor. She set off in what she hoped was a westerly direction, moving as quickly and quietly as she could.
She soon came upon the scene of a furious battle, if she read the signs right. Several large, blackened circles in the forest still smoldered. In other places the bodies of perhaps half a dozen surface elves and green-garbed human warriors lay where they'd fallen, most bearing the marks of sword, mace, and talon. Of the drow, there was no sign.
Halisstra tried to remember what she'd seen of the pale elves and their human allies, deciding that there might have been as many as fifteen to twenty of the surface folk.
"Where are your comrades, I wonder?" she asked the fallen warriors before moving on.
Halisstra only managed another half mile through the moonlit forest before she stumbled into the ambush. One moment she was stealing along, quick and confident, eager to catch up to the rest of the company and the familiar perils of their association, the next she was surprised by the appear-ance of a surface elf wizard who simply stepped out of a tree and hurled a spell at her, barking words of arcane might as he gestured withhis hands.
"Quick!" he shouted. "We have her!"
Halisstra's invisibility failed at once, undone by the surface wizard, and from the foliage and tree trunks all around her a dozen of the pale elves and the green-clad humans abruptly appeared, weapons at the ready. They leaped at her, murder in their eyes, filling the forest with