All Shadows Fled - Ed Greenwood [33]
"Ah," said the other. "I'd best go water the gods' gardens out the way we came in, then." He sipped from a battered tin cup, making no move to get up, and added, "A good thing we found that cellar, or they'd have seen us, sure."
"That was no cellar," his tall, lean companion chuckled, scratching under his much-patched tunic. "That was the castle cesspit."
"What?" the shorter pilgrim said, staring down at his boots and then at his elbows and his cloak-but finding no foulness. "Is my nose as bad as all that, then?"
"After four hundred years," his companion told him kindly, "dung is just dust."
"Huh," the shorter pilgrim agreed, and launched into a dry chuckle that ended in a fit of coughing. "I guess the Realms're covered deep in old dung, then. Urrrgh. Aiiuh." These last two comments accompanied a grunting attempt to rise-an attempt that ended in a disgusted wave of one dirty hand, and a return to a more or less comfortable lounging position against a pile of moss-cloaked rubble.
In all the activity, neither devotee of Tyr noticed a dark, many-eyed bulk slithering silently out of the night, over the stones in the ruined end of the room. As they decided aloud that a prayer to the Lord of Justice might be prudent before they wandered off into the woods to relieve themselves, the thing of eyes and jaws crept unnoticed toward them.
"Tis your turn to begin the devotion," the shorter pilgrim mumbled.
"Do it be in truth, Jarald? Or've you just forgotten the words to the Call of the Just again?"
"I've not! I remember them well!" the shorter pilgrim said heatedly. "Will you plague me with the misdeed of one night down all the years to come?" Behind him, unseen in the flickering confusion where the firelight played on a broken end of stone wall, something that swam with many eyes and hungry mouths reared up, looming darker and larger, drifting tendrils of itself across the ceiling to hang above the two oblivious pilgrims.
"I don't rightly know," his taller companion said, with a slow grin. "How long did you plan to go on living?"
From the darkness above came a sudden swift movement…
The fire was dying down; he'd have to make this swift. The taller pilgrim cleared his throat, lurched forward from a seated position to his knees, and began. "Hear us, O Great Balance, as we hear thee! From our knees we cry to theeeee/"
His words ended in a surprised cry as he raised his eyes to the firelit ceiling-and found himself staring at an oozing, descending blob of jelly that swam with jaws and eyeballs! And all of those eyeballs were staring at him!
The horrid thing lunged at him, seven or more sets of fangs biting the air hungrily as they came. The pilgrim flung himself backward and to his feet, out of reach, and the thwarted reaching thing turned with fearsome speed and struck at the other pilgrim.
The shorter man was already on his feet, watching the monster with a surprisingly calm expression of curiosity on his face. He sidestepped the attacking tendril-and found a second questing arm reaching down, almost upon him. He was trapped between them. As they reached in, he shrugged and grimaced.
An instant later, the many-fanged mouths opened wide for their first savage strike-but the pilgrims were gone. Two clouds of dark, whirling globules stood for an instant where the men had been. And then the jaws bit down. On nothing.
The globules crashed to the floor in a red rain that spattered the stones and put the hissing fire out. Amid the sudden smoke of its dying, the floor ran with small puddles that moved together with purposeful speed.
The many-fanged monster peered suspiciously around the room and came slowly free of the ceiling to gather itself into a floating sphere of questing eyes and gnashing teeth. It echoed the dumbfounded astonishment of the distant Zhentarim who'd created it; he'd never seen anything of the like before. Was this a spell? Were the two pilgrims of Tyr doppelgangers who'd learned a new trick? Or… something else?
The floating monster glared