All Shadows Fled - Ed Greenwood [32]
"And if there's an enemy wizard at the Roost?" Amglar asked quietly. "Will such a one be able to see you through it-and send any magic through you, to strike us here?"
"No," the spellmaster said. "In fact, it's unlikely that any wizard who meets my creature will escape alive."
"Cast your spell, then," Amglar ordered, his voice riding over a murmur of disbelief at the wizard's words from the officers. "The sooner we know, the sooner we can act."
"Stand back," the wizard said curtly. "All of you." He drew himself up and glared around at the black-armored men-and their sullen faces. "Let no man disturb my casting, on pain of death. Lord Manshoon's standing orders apply here as in the Keep."
By the time the last of those words left his mouth, Nentor Thuldoum stood alone in the center of an open space perhaps twelve paces across, ringed by a warily silent audience. He looked around at them and smiled. Good; the more who saw this, the better.
From the safe pouch at his belt, Thuldoum drew a small sphere of blown glass that held a veined, gelatinous mass trapped in its heart. He held it on his fingertips, and for the benefit of the assembled soldiers murmured an incantation that was far longer and more impressive than it needed to be.
Then he made a dramatic and totally unnecessary gesture, and blew the sphere gently out of his palm. It plunged to the hard-trodden earth in front of him and burst with a tiny singing sigh.
A drunken man's nightmare boiled up from where it had been, growing with frightening speed, rearing up until it was larger than a horse. Men gasped and backed away in gratifying alarm; the spellmaster smiled tightly at them and pointed west and a little south, into the trees. His creation gathered itself up and drifted obediently off across the road, soldiers scrambling to get out of its way.
It was a shapeless bulk of translucent gray-white jelly that swam and flowed constantly. Countless staring eyes and silently snapping mouths slid across its changing outer surface, appearing and disappearing with bewildering speed.
"A mouther!" one of the veteran armsmen gasped. The drifting thing did look like the deadly gibbering mouther of yore… though no gibberer had ever risen man-high off the ground and flown about at a wizard's bidding, so far as Thuldoum knew.
Then it was gone into the trees, and his world became a place of dark trunks and branches and shifting shadows, looming up before him, thick and tangled…
"Bring me a seat," he said, not breaking his vision from his creation, "and something safe to drink. Someone who knows traps and castles should stand by me, too-we'll both have questions to ask each other when my creature reaches the Roost."
* * * *
Galath's Roost, Mistledale, Flamerule
16
Galath's Roost had been blasted apart four centuries ago by mages who knew their business. Since that day, the small keep atop its stony height had been swallowed by the forest. Massive duskwoods and cedars rent what was left of its walls and yet held them up, their trunks cupping chambers that were open to the sky and walls that ran to nowhere. Their leaves all but hid the riven keep from view… but if one stood a little way off and in just the right spot, the faint flicker of a fire glimmered through the trees.
The room whence the fire came had one wall open to the night-but the two pilgrims who'd built the fire and now huddled around it had good and prudent reasons for not choosing any of the better-preserved rooms in the Roost. They were discussing that now.
"A good job, they did," the taller one said grudgingly.
"You're certain they left this room safe?" asked the other, clutching his expensive talisman of the god under his chin. The gilded image of Tyr's warhammer and scales shone back the firelight, serene and unchanging.
"All but that door," the first one replied, pointing.