All Shadows Fled - Ed Greenwood [76]
Bralatar made an eel-thing of himself and wriggled through the grating, ignoring a few nips from another unseen moat dweller. The stone chute ahead of him was as slimy and noisome as he'd expected, but rose clear of the water straight away. He wormed up it hastily, becoming a snakelike ribbon as he went in case the wizard was thorough-or crazed-enough to have traps partway up a dung chute.
Behind him, Lorgyn splashed around for a breath or two more before he was clear of the water. Bralatar spared him no attention, but spiraled steadily up the shaft, sending feelers ahead to probe for traps. Somewhere above them, someone was cheerfully whistling a very old bawdy tune.
He found nothing, but as his most cautiously questing tentacle rose a trifle up out of the privy seat to peer into the dark chamber beyond, a calm, soulless female voice said: "Turn back," and a radiance began to grow around the top of the shaft. The whistling broke off abruptly.
"Hurry!" Bralatar snapped, placing suckers on the stone around him and heaving hard. He catapulted up out of the shaft like some sort of flying squid, and thumped to the floor; he'd not yet begun to grow when a second thump heralded Lorgyn's arrival.
"Now who can that be?" an annoyed voice came to their ears through the chamber door. It sounded very near, and approaching. The mage was almost upon them!
Lorgyn laid a tentacle on Bralatar's shoulder and hissed, "Distract him-those two women in the green tapestry room at the brothel; unclad, holding hands, and amazed at somehow ending up here…"
They shifted shapes with lightning speed, twisting, writhing, and arching like maddened things-and were done, linking their slim fingers together and adopting amazed and fearful expressions just as the door opened by itself, and a balding, beak-nosed man peered in at them over a leveled wand.
"By the Seven Mysteries, who are you?" he gasped.
"Please, sir," the blonde woman breathed, entreaty in her green eyes, "where are we? What place is this?"
The wizard dragged his eyes up from the ivory curves of her bare body, swallowed, and blinked.
"You're in my tower-the Tower of Mortoth," he said gruffly. "Er, that's me." He took a step into the room. "Perhaps you've heard of me?"
The taller of the two women parted her raven tresses to display a figure fully as spectacular as her companion's, and husked, "Nay, Lord… but pray, tell us about yourself. Pleasing great men is our business-and our pleasure."
And as Mortoth goggled at her in astonishment, two tentacles appeared over the shoulder of the blonde maid and shot out with terrifying speed. One grasped the wand, twisted, and snatched-and it flew from the stumbling wizard's bruised fingers.
"Rivals!" the wizard snarled as he caught his balance. Blue-white bolts of force were already streaking from his fingers in a hasty burst of magic missiles.
Those missiles curved home, and he saw the two intruders flinch, but one had grown fleshy wings, and the other had dropped into catlike form, and they sprang at him before he could do anything else.
The room crashed and spun for Mortoth as heavy bodies slammed into him and bowled him over. Suddenly flesh was enveloping him. He struggled, trying to spit out something that was probing into his mouth, and failing.
Lorgyn, his eyes like two copper coins, catching the sun, encased the wizard's head and hands in folds of flesh, invading his mouth with a firm tentacle to keep him from speaking spells, and leaving him only small nose-hole for breathing.
"Do you want the portal right here?" he asked.
Bralatar shrugged. "Why not? We know a way into this room, and I don't want to risk wandering around