All Shadows Fled - Ed Greenwood [108]
The crystal sphere flashed a sudden scarlet, and another of the skulls began to moan.
"Where, by the beard of Elminster, are we running to, anyway?" Belkram gasped as they topped a rise and headed down a fern-choked gully. "What makes one part of this old forest any safer than another?"
"Ask her," Itharr grunted as, side by side, they rounded a riven stump. He jerked his hand back at Sharantyr, who was watching their rear, ready blade in hand. "She's t-"
The rest of his words were lost in a sudden rush from the side of the gully, a plunging fury of flashing talons and dark hairy bulk and gleaming fangs.
Belkram was thrown off his feet to crash heavily through thorns and dead branches, and heard Sharantyr scream as she charged. He snatched at his blade as something large and dark and hairy clawed him… something that was crouched atop Itharr, raking its talons and surging forward to bite down at the ranger beneath it with a horrible wet crunching sound that made Belkram wince as his blade finally grated free of its scabbard. Too late.
All Too Much Magic
Tower of Mortoth , Sembia, Flamerule
30
The fire was so cold, so utterly… cold. Its chill made her limbs tremble, helplessly and endlessly, as it rushed through her and on around the web. Irendue gasped at its icy searing, feeling her teeth chatter uncontrollably as she stared at the all-too-familiar walls and ceiling of the privy chamber… and wished she could die.
The one called Bralatar had promised her death… after he and his companion were finished with her. She could still feel the cold slime of his tentacles slithering into her ear and out her nose, and the casual way in which he'd pointed out, as she gagged and wept, that simply expanding his tentacle at this moment would cause her head to explode like a rotten fruit, giving him his most favorite of meals… still-warm human.
Irendue swallowed, sick at the thought, and almost let her head sink back into the endless white fire. It would be so easy to just surrender…
Aye, surrender and die in slow, screaming agony while the two shapeshifting monsters gloated over her…
Irendue swallowed again, and looked beside her at the master, hanging slack-jawed and unseeing, virtually a skeleton, his hair falling out in clumps from a shriveled scalp. Mortoth had been vigorous and strong, brusque even, but when he took her to his bed, he'd shaken with passion long pent up… She looked again at his shriveled ruin and shuddered at what he'd become.
It was the first time she'd been free to see or think about anything without one of the shapeshifters ordering her about. The one called Bralatar had been careless in his haste, so confident of her trembling fear that he'd thrust her back into the web of fire and simply pushed at her face as he turned away. But her head had passed between two strands of the enchanted everfire, and so remained free.
His eagerness to be ahunting had let Irendue Nuen-tar, most favored but least powerful of the apprentices of Mortoth the Mighty, keep her wits, but she could take no advantage of that while she trembled in the grip of the spell. She was caught in some sort of gate that took the two monsters to and from their home. Even more chilling than the thoughts that her life- and that of the master and Turnold and Lareth-kept the gate open, that it sucked energy out of them to do its work, was the thought of how many more shapeshifters might dwell at the other end of that gate… free to spill into Faerun at any time, to take the shapes of kings and merchant princes and wizards alike, and ruthlessly rise to rule all.
And what if they disagreed, as men always seem to, and fell to war? They could change shapes like flitting leaves to suit their purposes. The men, so helpless by comparison, would fall in their thousands and stain all Toril dark crimson with their spilled blood… She had to get free.
So much depended on her. She simply must win free of this evil spell, but how?
Even now, one shapeshifter must be tiring of the hangings and statues and little carved things Mortoth had gathered in