Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [74]
One wolf rose on its hind legs and then seemed to glow, gray furred and tall, rising into… a naked man. He peered around at the bright morning in Daggerdale and shrugged. The wolf next to him rose into the shape of a long-tressed woman and looked around in turn.
"The horses ran free," she said in irritated tones. "I scryed them to be sure the humans weren't with them, cloaked in magic, but-nothing!"
"I know that," the man said, growing wings. "We'd best take to the skies and look again. Trails can't just end like that. They must have flown away on something!"
"What's that, over there?" one of the wolves asked, growing a human mouth and arm to speak and point with.
"Maybe they're riding it!" said another, and there was a general flurry of feathers into falcon shape. The Malaugrym leapt into the sky, heading north to where the distant, sinuous shape was flying.
It was unfortunate for some of the younger, weaker kin that the flying beast they'd seen was a wyvern, and a hungry one at that.
But these were dark days in Faerun, and every shadow held danger.
13
Guests of the Blackstaff
Blackstaff Tower, Waterdeep, Kythorn 19
It was a dull morning outside the windows of Black-staff Tower. Storm clouds hung purple and heavy over Mount Waterdeep, and pearly gray sea mists rolled in under them from the harbor. The clop of hooves echoed up from the street below, but the usual cries, rumbles, and other incessant noises of the City of Splendors were muffled. It sounded as if the city were half-asleep.
It was always quiet inside Blackstaff Tower, the velvety, waiting quiet of shielding magic that robbed footfalls of their echoes and shouts of their resonance, and gave to everything a heavy, unbroken hush. Many an apprentice had fallen asleep while studying in the tower, and many an experiment had ended explosively without disturbing the occupants of neighboring chambers.
Laeral hoped this wouldn't be one of those experiments. With Khelben away in Elturel, sitting in spell-court over a long and entangled dispute between two feuding archmages, Blackstaff Tower felt empty, like a throne without its king. Laeral was acutely aware that no one but she was on hand to repair things if her two senior apprentices really botched their work.
Tath was overly shy and almost as overly nervous, but his painstaking check-things-and-check-them-again safety precautions had probably prevented a dozen minor disasters thus far. Baerista, on the other hand, was the impulsive, even reckless, let's-try-it sort. Her occasional flashes of brilliance were the stuff of which real advances in Art were wrought. For the first time in decades, Laeral thought that apprentices might craft something of true worth in the tower, advancing what was known to all workers with magic, and not merely go over well-known ground one more laborious time.
Wherefore the Lady Mage of Waterdeep was quite willing to work late at their sides, the night through if need be-and she just had.
Laeral stifled a yawn as she saw the morning sun climb past the windows, and turned to peer again at the flickering, shadowy edges of the shields Baerista had devised and Tath was struggling to control.
A strange, leaping… well, growth of sparks and bubbling spinsmoke was clawing and rebounding around a small sphere of swirling green-gold radiance in the open end of the laboratory, the limits of the wild magic area Laeral had called into being. Normally, Khelben forbade such evocations anywhere in the city, let alone in the tower, but Art is not advanced without making exceptions. Laeral had swallowed once or twice and gone ahead with it.
Now her apprentices, who'd not long ago been safely in the realm of excitedly discussing the possible, probable, and theoretical, were elbow deep in a very real, very dangerous,