Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [37]
"If we blast his body away from the knees up, will the feet keep walking?" one amused youngling asked, but another said, "No, no. Move what he seeks away just as he's about to grasp it, and keep moving it so it's always just ahead of him and he never gets it!"
"Don't toy with him!" an elder's voice roared out of empty air. Someone without magic, using the scrying portal's powers to speak through it. "Slay him now, or he'll win free somehow, and we'll have won nothing!"
The youngling who'd suggested blasting all but the Old Mage's feet turned to laugh at the voice, a sneer on his face. But then his form changed, his features holding a moment of shocked disbelief before they melted away into rubbery dun-purple nothingness and he fell away, tumbling helplessly toward the stones far below.
He was followed by another, and another. By now, the Malaugrym were looking puzzled and alarmed. "What-?" one barked intelligently.
"Mushrooms," another said, watching them smash into the ruins and shatter into pulpy looseness. "Giant mushrooms!"
"But who-?"
Bewildered, angry Shadowmaster mages stared all around, seeking a foe. More of them fell away, helpless to cast spells or fly in fungoid form, to die below, while others snarled, "Some sort of spell to enforce a single shape? Blasphemous! Who would devise such a thing?" and still others warned, "Get back! Away from this place! It must be some spell of the Foe. It can't have a large range!"
More mushrooms fell, and suddenly a Shadowmaster snarled, "You! You're doing it!" and launched a rain of spell-lances at another Malaugrym standing on air not far away. A frantically conjured spell-cloak didn't form in time, and the accused one tumbled backward, transfixed by at least three lances, to spin slowly through the air, lifeless.
Mushrooms continued to fall, and one of the other Malaugrym raised his hands and pointed at the lance hurler. "No, it's you!"
The attack was struck aside by a shielding spell, but on all sides terrified and furious shapeshifters lashed out at each other. Spells flashed and burst all across the sky in sudden boiling fury until a great voice roared out of thin air, echoing all around them. "Cease! Hear me, blood of Malaug!"
Sudden silence fell. All Malaugrym knew the voice of the Shadowmaster High. "Attend me!" the deep voice boomed on, as a few more Malaugrym melted into mushrooms and fell away.
A mighty magic boiled in the air, and the blood of Malaug were swept through the sky as leaves tumble in a gale, flung aside until they found themselves in two ragged groups of a dozen or more on either side of an open space where a lone figure floated, a young Malaugrym sorceress known to some as Dralarca.
"There is the traitor!" Dhalgrave thundered. "Destroy her! She's-"
Dralarca smiled and waved cheerily-and Dhalgrave's booming voice was gone in midword, cut off as if by a knife.
The Malaugrym stared at her, and one more of them dwindled into a mushroom and fell.
After a moment more of shocked silence, all of the mages standing on air spat out incantations at once, waving their arms like a forest of crawling spiders. The air seemed to shatter under the force of so many cleaving, blazing, bubbling, and roaring magics.
Blue-black and vivid purple flashes leapt from where they met, and an instant later all of the spells came flashing back at their casters in a gale of tortured air that flung Shadowmasters across the sky for miles.
When the stars could be seen again, and the last ruined tower of Irythkeep had stopped rocking, the false daylight Dhalgrave had conjured above the clearing remained. In it, the awed Shadowmasters could see the small figure of Dralarca standing calmly, waiting for them. She waved a casual hand, and the nearest Shadowmaster became a mushroom.
As the fungus fell to earth, Eldargh turned to Huerbara, whose teeth were chattering in fear as she clutched Taernil, and rumbled calmly, "Is your magic good enough to hurl antimagic