Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [35]
Darting magic missiles and flickering, slow-drifting motes of light from some other spell were streaming around the clearing, around them all, like a swirling school of fish. Belkram shook his head as he sprinted toward Itharr.
A bolt flashed down to the ground in front of him, splitting a stone block twice his size with a crack that left his ears ringing. Belkram fell sideways, rolled, and found himself coming up face-to-face with a robed man who had long fangs, rich-looking robes, and flickering globes of radiance around both hands. The man's startled face twisted into a sneer, and he raised one hand threateningly-so Belkram thrust his blade through that mouth. A moment later he was hanging on through a squalling, bruising battering of blood and frantically shifting flesh. It melted away from his blade, ichor gushing out in all directions, and flowed around his legs, looking like the putty Belkram had once mixed to set glass in an Athkatlan window. Cold fear rose inside the Harper, and he stabbed down frantically with his blade, carving at the thick, unyielding, slowly tightening stuff.
The mutating flesh shuddered and spasmed suddenly, then undulated away from him in snakelike coils. Belkram snarled, snatched out his belt dagger, and went after it, slashing wildly with both his weapons.
He was still slashing and hewing ribbons of the stuff away in all directions when a bright swarm of magical bolts swam down into the clearing and raced at him.
Once, Belkram had taken a dagger through the palm of his hand. The attacking bolts felt like seven such daggers in swift succession. The pain smashed the breath out of him as the force of the striking magic missiles drove him back into an untidy heap on the ground. It was like being struck in the short ribs over and over again, Belkram thought, struggling to get his breath. Through swimming eyes he saw some of those glowing mages still standing on the air above the keep. Itharr… he'd been going to help Itharr…
* * * * *
Rage burned in Itharr Jathram all the time. Slow and buried deep, but there all the time, like coals glowing under turf for the night. Once in a while-not often, but eventually-that building rage rose and warmed and boiled up… and the burly, quiet Harper slew things.
He'd said as much to Storm, that first day at her farm, sitting on two stumps in the forest behind her house. "Lady," Itharr had told her softly, "you must know this. I'd not be the best citizen in a land at peace. From time to time, I find… I must kill."
Storm had merely nodded, sober eyed, and said as gently, "I can see it in you. Yet know this, Itharr. You are welcome in my house, now and to the end of your days."
And for that, Itharr would love her forever. Her face then, and her words, came back to him now as he stood struggling in a grip much stronger than his own and felt the white heat of his rage blinding him. Those jaws snapped just shy of his cheek once more, as he twisted his neck desperately aside and snarled his defiance. His arms-and the weapons he thought he still held, though numbness was creeping over him, and he could no longer be sure-were pinned to his sides in an ever-tighter rope of flowing flesh. These shapeshifters could kill merely by wrapping part of themselves around you and crushing!
He tried to throw himself sideways, but the Malaugrym held him, swaying like a tree in a high wind, and he knew he struggled in vain. "Tymora, aid me now," he hissed, ribs aching under the increasing pressure, and the shapeshifter laughed out loud. Eyes dark with fury, Itharr tried again to overbalance the thing and bring them both to the ground, but the Malaugrym held him upright with easy strength and tightened its grip still more.
He was fighting