Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [78]
The end of the room he was so grandly menacing contained a simple but large bed, with maroon bedding and a dark, polished wooden headboard. A pointed hat hung from a hook on one side of it, and something slim and silky hung from the corresponding hook on the other side. A single forcebolt crisped whatever it was before it could stir to strike, as the rush of Taernil's charge brought his feet into contact with the headboard.
He kicked at it and rebounded in a backward somersault to land catlike, facing the bed. Jarthree sloped her body into something ropelike to get out of his way and said dryly, "I'm sure the lady mage's best black silk stockings were very threatening…"
Taernil whirled to face her, hot death in his eyes. "Do you mock me?" he demanded.
Jarthree shrugged. "I'd call it only a lighthearted observation," she said easily, "but if you're so desperate to dominate me that you must press a challenge here in the heart of a hostile wizard's tower, perhaps I should leave." Her long-taloned hands went to her belt.
"No!" Taernil said quickly, too quickly. Jarthree's slow, catlike smile told him that she'd taken her measure of him and knew the real interest behind his seemingly casual glances at her. He grimaced and turned his head away, then straightened with a snarl to fix her coolly mocking gaze with his own hot stare.
"While we're here, with Milhvar judging what we do," he said heavily, "the only course prudence allows us is full cooperation. Do I have your agreement on this?"
"You do," Jarthree said simply, and the catlike smile was gone.
"Then let us be about it," he hissed, and his skin bulged out into plates as rugged as armor. As he strode to the door facing the foot of the bed, his form broadened until an umber hulk-with the long-fingered, nimble hands of an elven conjurer and fingertips to match those of the apprentice he'd strangled downstairs-laid hands on the ring in the center of that door and pulled.
The door swung out and up, revealing a swirling blue-ness beyond. The two Malaugrym stared at it, startled to see something so nearly the image of the shadows that swirled about the battlements of the castle they called home.
Neither of them saw the black staff on the floor under the bed-a twin of the one they'd passed on the stair- wink to life and vibrate in silent urgency, turning over once as it rose a few inches off the dusty floor to hang there, quivering.
* * * * *
Two rooms away, Laeral felt the staffs awakening as it sent a warning thrumming through her body. She glanced quickly around the room, seeking anything that should not be there. Intruders! By all the gods, why now? Then her lips twisted in a rueful smile. Of course, now, because of the fall of all the gods, no doubt.
She closed her eyes and whispered something that made a man half a world away stiffen and heed her. Khelben, she called silently. Oh, my love, where are you?
* * * * *
The two Malaugrym stared into the room before them. This bedchamber was larger than the one they were standing in, and its walls were half-hidden in blue-white mists that swirled amid darker shadows, like the shadows of home. Whoever had conjured up the shadows almost had to have seen Shadowhome, the demiplane ruled by the blood of Malaug.
"It's some sort of trap," Taernil snapped, eyes dark.
In those swirling mists anything could be concealed, but Jarthree suspected nothing more immediately menacing than hanging cylindrical wardrobes were prominent among them. The glossy, unbroken black rectangle of a door could just be seen across the room. Between that door and the one they were looking through, filling much of the room, was a huge circular bed floating three-feet or so off the fur-covered floor. On its silken sheets sprawled two smoky-gray furry things that raised heads to favor the intruders with unblinking, inscrutable stares. Cats.
Or worse, perhaps. A forcebolt lashed out from