Cloak of Shadows asota-2

by Ed Greenwood

  "I'd refrain from such talk if I were you," Itharr responded. "You may have started out more handsome than me, but I doubt Shar's going to be overly thrilled with a man whose back is growing a row of breasts, a moving row of breasts…"

  Belkram tried to twist around to look at his back, but couldn't. He shot a look at Shar. "Tell me he's bluffing," he demanded. The lady ranger could only shake her head sadly.

  "Why hasn't it affected you?" Itharr asked, frowning. As he did so, his eyes flickered a deep mauve and began to slide slowly toward red in hue. "Could it be linked to sex?" Then he added quickly, "No jokes, Belk."

  Belkram turned to him as the line along his back moved slowly up his neck and onto his scalp, lifting his hair in an odd-looking crest. "I wasn't planning any," he grunted, "but I think it's more likely the sword. Without the shadow weaving being done around it, it'd be standing in a little gap in the mists, a place these shadows don't care to go."

  "They're alive, aren't they?" Itharr murmured.

  "Yes," Shar agreed briskly, "and so are we." She strode away into the curling mists, raising the blade like a prow before her.

  "Well, for now, yes," Belkram agreed mildly. He and Itharr looked at each other, shrugged, and moved tentatively after her. A slithering sound made them both freeze, until Itharr realized it was coming from the tail he'd begun to grow, whispering along the stone behind him. They traded grimmer glances and went on.

  Elminster's Safehold, then the Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19

  "I really must give the Shadowmasters something to think about besides laying waste to Faerun," the Old Mage mused. And then he smiled suddenly and snapped his fingers.

  Obediently, in a place of ever-shifting shadows distant indeed from the room where Elminster sat, above the unbroken black marble floor of a vast chamber that was never empty, a severed head that looked very much like Elminster's own faded back into view from its stay in otherwhere, winked at a startled Malaugrym striding importantly across the Great Hall, and was gone.

  A breath later, in a passage where candles flickered and wavered but never went out, fed by always-circling shadows, Old Elminster's head suddenly appeared. Floating between two pillars, it politely said, "Boo!" to a pair of startled Malaugrym conspirators, spat lightnings that left one shapeshifter rolling about in agony and the other a smoking heap, and was gone again.

  In a chamber where several Malaugrym chanted and slithered, shifting shape in a ritual forbidden by Shadow-masters High for some centuries, a disembodied human head suddenly appeared, floating above the center of the sacred ring of flames, smiling down benevolently at the startled kin of Malaug.

  "A sign!" one of them said excitedly, pointing with a flipper. "A sign!"

  "What should we read in it?" another asked, almost suspiciously, as they all gaped at the smiling head.

  It winked. " 'Abandon hope,' perhaps?" it suggested, as the blood dripping from its underside became a stream of silver lances that spun and erupted around the chamber, ricocheting energetically among Malaugrym blood and screams. By the time a Shadowmaster had lifted shaking hands to ward death away, the head was gone again.

  " 'Twas Elminster," he mumbled grimly to the gape-mouthed corpse beside him. "He's back."

  Wisely, the corpse chose not to answer.

  15

  Tumult and Affright

  The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19

  Blue-black and sinuous the shadows coiled, rising thigh high around the three rangers as they moved warily down the hall. Soon the parting mists showed them an end wall, and in its center a door flanked by two spitting serpents of stone.

  Sharantyr eyed these gape-fanged sentinels warily as she approached, and thrust her sword carefully between them, probing back and forth, but there was no response. They seemed to be no more than lifeless stone ornaments.

  Which made a nice change.

  "Where shall we head for?" Sharantyr asked her companions softly, turning before the closed door. "Upward, or down? Head for large and grand rooms, or small and dark?" Two shrugs answered her, so she added, "Is there something we should be looking for?"

  "Food," Itharr said brightly. Shar gave him a look, but Belkram held up a hand to halt them while he bent for a moment and listened to the stone he bore. Then he looked up. "We will need water to drink, first, and food eventually," he said, "but I've been told we're not to put anything in our mouths that she hasn't touched-been immersed in, whatever-first. Try to avoid even touching Malaugrym; they know all about what's poisonous to us."

  "So no biting," Itharr commented, and added slyly, "Not like our last visit to Waterdeep."

  Even before Sharantyr could give him a disgustedly despairing look, he'd adopted graver tones, adding, "Which brings to mind why we've come. Do we attack everyone-everything-we meet? Do we avoid battle if we can, and try to scout about? Do we try to befriend someone, to learn all we can or to earn a place here?"

  "Perhaps next time," Belkram added in a small voice, addressing the unseen ceiling, "we could answer a few of these good questions before we leap into the heart of danger."

  Into the rueful little silence that followed, Itharr said, "I like that. 'Leap into the heart of danger.' Quite impressive. There's a ballad in that…"

  "Don't" both of his companions advised, in chorus. He spread teasingly apologetic hands in silence and then gestured at Shar, wordlessly bidding her speak.

  Sharantyr eyed both men, seeing several horns growing out of one side of Belkram's head, and small eyes that should not have been there blinking at her from a cavity in Itharr's shoulder. She closed her eyes on these sights for a moment and took a deep breath. Letting it out slowly, she looked at them both and said, "If we begin by fighting, we're sure to be slain as soon as we meet anyone too powerful, or a group. I don't even think we should be talking like this; they might be able to hear. Just act as arrogant as they did, back at the keep, but be casual… and mysterious."

  "When you don't know what you're doing," Belkram agreed solemnly, hefting his saddlebag, "that's not too hard."

  Sharantyr gave him a half-smile and a shrug in reply, and reached for the door. As her hand approached it, the door gave way silently, pivoting back into dim shadows beyond.

  Shar gave her companions a raised-eyebrows look of wary, impressed-despite-myself surprise and peered into the chamber beyond.

  It seemed empty of life, though it held shadows that flickered and clawed at each other in a fitful semblance of life. Blade first, Sharantyr advanced, looking this way and that, and saw that this smaller chamber had two doors to their right and one ahead. A massive metal fish bolted to the far wall spilled out light from its mouth, like a tap that flowed radiant air rather than water. They peered at it suspiciously and then advanced across the room. Something echoed in the mists, far ahead beyond the single door… a tapping sound. It came to their ears once but was not repeated.

  "They're here, all right," Itharr murmured, trying to ignore the eel-like thing his left arm had just become. "I don't know just where, but they're here."

  The other Harper looked at him and sighed. "Act like we belong here," Belkram suggested firmly, "not as if we're creeping around an enemy stronghold."

  Itharr looked innocent. "But what if we are creeping around an enemy stronghold?"

  Shar chuckled despite herself. The mist swallowed the sound as if it were hungry, and she stopped short and looked around once more. "I feel like I did in the Under-dark," she said softly, "creeping around, hoping I'd not be found…"

  The two Harpers exchanged glances. Belkram laid a kindly flipper on her shoulder and said, "Shield high, Shar. We're-"

  He broke off at the rather nauseated look she was giving her shoulder, or rather, at the part of him that was wiggling obscenely there, well on its way to changing into something else.

  Her look was so comical that both men chuckled-long, deep chuckles that built into shaking mirth. Sharantyr gave them both a hurt look.

  "Do you two giggling idiots min
d?" she asked indignantly.

  And the door in front of them swung open.

  They hadn't even time to look apprehensive before an apelike, shambling thing with the head of a handsome young man and one hand that ended in a cluster of tentacles moved through the door and headed past them, over toward one of the doors on the right. He gave them a cold glance and then stiffened, turned, and looked Sharantyr up and down.

  "Shapes of Faerunians? Are you practicing for a foray after this Elminster mortal, or just having"-his gaze traveled back and forth between them, and his grin acquired a few needlelike teeth-"a little fun?"

  Sharantyr gave him an easy shrug. "A little fun," she drawled in soft, lazily menacing tones. The Malaugrym seemed to hesitate, and she added pointedly, brushing one arm along Itharr's now-pustuled flank, "Private fun."

  The Malaugrym seemed about to say something more but merely nodded and went on. As the door opened, he looked back and was favored with a trio of faintly mocking, faintly challenging half-grins, just the look Belkram had seen on the lips of Elaith Craulnobur, the notorious elven adventurer, in a spell-scene shown to him by a Harper in Waterdeep. Itharr remembered that look from a lady brothel-keeper he'd arrested in Elturel, just before half her girls returned to their true doppleganger forms and she'd started to scream. And Sharantyr would always see the almost-smiles on the faces of drow bending over her, whips in their hands.

  Seeming satisfied with what he saw, the Shadow-master vanished through the door.

  "It almost seems as if we know what we're doing," Belkram commented, flexing his right arm, which was lengthening steadily into what looked like a gigantic crab claw.

  Itharr nodded. "Just behave as if you know what you're about and have every right to be doing it, and most folk will accept you." He looked critically at his own arms, one of which was a deep red in hue. "A fairly simple deception at heart," he observed. "I suppose that's why so many kings have managed it down the years."

  Elminster's Safehold, Kythorn 19

  Elminster paced back and forth in the bookshelf-lined Safehold, frowning and stroking his beard. From time to time he lifted his head to stare at one of the room's four doors, noting absently that Ao had shuffled through the spell-stored animated scenes he displayed as hangings on those doors, and put on display the most alluring of each. He gave one of them-a lady who had been dust for almost eight hundred summers-a half-smile as he banished her, shaking his head. "Distracting," he muttered, and returned to his pacing, striding up and down the room, face dark with thought.

  "This is ridiculous," he muttered after a time, coming to a halt by the table. "I must know."

  He waved a hand. The chamber darkened obediently except for a small point of whirling light above the table, which grew and grew until it became as large as his face… whereupon it spun a book out of itself and vanished with a satisfied sound.

  Elminster took the floating book and stepped on the floor tile that would whisk him at will onto the seat of his private privy. 'Twas time for some serious reading, before some bespectacled twit at Candlekeep noticed this tome was missing, and called on magic to trace it. Oh, he had his own copies of Alaundo's predictions, but the Commentaries of Iyrauthar, the book in his hands, was the only text to gather related records, rumors, legends, and testimonials about the Mad Sage's thunderings. Moreover, Candlekeep's copy had been annotated by First Reader Taltro some six hundred years ago, collecting even more useful lore on the Endless Chant and its various fulfillments-much of it errant nonsense, but one can't have everything.

  "Oho," he said softly, after a while. "Oh ho ho, indeed." He summoned his pipe with a crook of one finger and sent the book back to its rightful home with a wave of his other hand, rising up through the floor from jakes to study in slow, stately majesty. Tablets of Fate, my wrinkled old behind, he thought sourly. Did even the divine lack taste and inspiration these days?

  The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19

  The door through which the Malaugrym had come proved to open into a long gallery, with pillars and a railing on their right. The view over the railing looked down into a shadow-shrouded hall where various robed folk- Malaugrym, presumably, in largely human form-strode back and forth from door to door. A smell wafted up that could only be described as something fishlike being fried. They did not tarry to watch, for fear of attracting attention. At the end of the gallery, a door opened into a room dominated by a deep, echoing well. They dared not confer in that room, in case the well took their voices to unseen ears far away. So they chose one of the other three doors leading out of the room and found themselves in a little closetlike space lined with benches. A hole in the floor made them suspect this was a Malaugrym garderobe, and useless to them for the same reason as the well room. Retracing their steps, they chose a different door and entered a room with a stair descending in front of them, curving off to the right as it did so.

  "What did you make of that cooking smell?" Belkram murmured from at the head of the stairs. "My stomach just growled."

  "Is that what I heard?" Itharr asked, eyebrows dancing.

  "Belt up and stow it," Shar murmured with menacing softness. "The question is a good one." As if in agreement, her stomach turned over with an audible sound of protest.

  The look she gave them both just dared them to comment, but at that moment someone began to ascend the stairs. Itharr propelled his two companions downward with gentle pressures on their backs, muttering as he did so, "Well, to my nose it seemed like someone frying a gigantic oyster or mussel in herbed butter, and I can hardly wait to sink teeth into it. Seeing what it looks like, mind, stands not so high on my list of dreamy desires."

  The Malaugrym reached the large midstair landing a pace before they did and halted to watch them, his eyes glinting in suspicion.

  "Who are you?" he asked coldly. "What shapes are these?" And then his eyes fastened on the shadow-shrouded blade in Sharantyr's grip and he hissed and raised his hands in gestures that could mean only spell-casting.

  Elminster's Safehold, Kythorn 19

  Selune sailed serenely among the stars outside the window in the ceiling of the Safehold, and cast her cool light down on the table where, after many long hours, the Mage of Shadowdale still sat slumped in thought. Elminster stirred as the full glory of the moon cast ivory fire around him, and stroked one of the knots in the richly polished tabletop.

  His moving finger awakened an old magic, and a small crystal coffer was suddenly floating in front of his nose. It held a locket, a few exquisitely beautiful earrings-kings' tears at the end of sapphire spindles, keepsakes he'd given Lansharra and found again after her death-and a lock of blue-green glossy hair. His fingers took it up. This was all that was left, now, of Essaerae, once so young and beautiful in Myth Drannor.

  Mystra had forbidden him to use Art on this glossy remnant, he recalled, to try to bring her back. Sitting alone in the moonlight, Elminster turned the silken hair over and over in his hands, remembering dark and laughing eyes in that long-ago moongleam, and nights that stretched softly on forever… and he came to a sudden decision.

  "Overgod or no Overgod," Elminster murmured, "I must do as I see right, for the good of all Toril."

  He laid the hair gently-someone watching might have said reverently-back in the coffer and banished it again to its place of hiding. Then he reached out his foot to a certain floor tile and uttered a word that was all hissings and inbreaths. Under his boot a rune flashed into momentary brilliance, and the tile slid aside.

  The tentacles that emerged from the void below were long and delicate, and in their curled tips they held a box of polished, rainbow-hued abalone. Elminster took a circular silk-wrapped bundle from inside the box and thanked the tentacles gravely. They closed the lid and withdrew as softly as they had come.

  The silk was black and crumbling with age. From its folds Elminster drew forth a circlet of silver-blue metal that looked almost as decrepit. Setting the crumbling crown on his head, the Old Mage beckoned a crystal ball dow
n from its role as a bookend on a dusty shelf, to float over the table in front of him.

  Then he leaned forward and stared into the scrying crystal, and the crown on his brow began to wink with tiny moving lights. The same light danced in the old wizard's eyes as he whispered, "Midnight… Midnight… Ariel Manx… Mystra to be…"

  And where she slept under the cold light of Selune's watchful eye, Midnight whimpered in her sleep and twisted onto her side as a gruff voice softly whispered in her dreams and she began to see places, and folk, and things. A tablet swam into her view, and the voice told her, "A useless thing, this, but one of three such playing pieces in this game forced on all the gods."

  There was more, but the young sorceress had been very tired, and much of it whirled around old memories of ardent young men and older mages she'd seduced to gain their magic. The rest was lost to the sound of the gruff voice saying, "Bah!" more than once.

  In the end, she came sharply awake, sweating in terror, with the image of a yawning grave stark and bright in her mind. From it echoed that testy voice, saying, "Beware, lass. Gods who dare not pursue a tablet will not hesitate to use mortals who can, even such a one as… Midnight."

  The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19

  The Malaugrym was swift, and there was no telling what sort of spell he was weaving, so Belkram regretfully shot out his tail, wrapped it around the Shadowmaster's ankle, and pulled. An instant later, a flash of violet radiance washed over them all as the magic took hold, and the two Harpers found themselves swaying and dazed but in their true forms again, tails and horns and such gone.

  Their state made Sharantyr's cold reply to the Shadow-master's question about the shapes they wore an unintended irony. "Our own," she said crisply, tossing her saddlebag aside without taking her eyes from him.