Cloak of Shadows - Ed Greenwood [79]
Jarthree stifled her mirth before it became audible, which was a prudent thing. A reflective spell-shield.
Well, why not? As the awakened cats rose lazily and stretched, her eyes drifted up to the ceiling and she gasped in half-mocking admiration. "Oh, look at this," she breathed, reaching back with a tentacle to beckon at Taernil.
"What?" he growled, rolling his massively muscled form upright once more.
"Wouldn't you like to have that above your bed?" Jarthree asked him, pointing.
Taernil looked up and scowled. "No," he said shortly, staring at the circle of star-studded darkness. He knew little of Faerun's night sky and cared less, but he recognized the gleaming trail of Selune's Tears drifting off to one side, and knew what he was looking at. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
"Hhmmph," he said, stomping boldly through the doorway. "I'd rather have one that showed me what I directed it to, like Dhalgrave's scrying portal."
"Dhalgrave is no longer," Jarthree reminded him softly as he glared at the cats, stomped past the bed, and reached for the handle of the room's other door, a door that looked to be made of a single piece of smoothly polished obsidian.
Jarthree faded quickly and silently to one side, shifting her form to look like the blue-white swirling shadows, and took up her place among them.
She was coiling in almost perfect unison with the other shadows when Taernil flung the door wide and launched his most powerful spell into the room beyond. Nine arrow-straight, needle-thin ravening beams of fire leapt from his breast, sizzling across the room into the heart of the strange whirling magic that hung there. Three faces stared at him, two gaping in astonishment and the third grimly expectant.
And then things happened very quickly. The room seemed full of whirling forcebolts, darting and ricocheting in all directions, with something flashing and writhing in their midst. As Taernil's beams tore into the heart of this confusion, the two startled people were snatched back against the far wall as if yanked by tentacles, and the grim-faced woman stood serenely facing him, her hands rising out to either side as if tracing an invisible wall. She did not seem to see him, but rather was staring down his beams, trying to perceive their source. Some of them were striking her-she should be falling as flaming ash! Other beams were striking the whirling confusion of lights and roiling mists, and seemed to be turning into… other things.
Tumbling bones and mauve bubbles… boulders and single shoes, many-eyed sea jellies and sparkling, rain-dewed flowers…
As the beams began to fail, Taernil frowned in bewilderment and hurled another spell, a fireball that should scour that chamber and all within it, leaving him free to face Khelben Blackstaff, who must be in the room beyond. Behind him, he heard Jarthree gasp-a short indrawn breath of utter terror-even before his fireball twisted in the doorway, meeting that whirling chaos of shoes and bones and things, and spilled back toward him, expanding hungrily across the bedchamber.
The woman still stood facing him, her arms a barrier to the expanding wild magic-by the blood of Malaug, that's what it was! The magic was all around him now, blowing blue-white shadows away like wisps of smoke to tumble suddenly revealed cylindrical wardrobes to the floor, and grounding the bed with a thump. It whirled Jarthree and himself back into their true shapes, with the shimmering of Milhvar's cloak of spells suddenly gone from around them.
Taernil gulped, then shuddered uncontrollably as a firm hand stabbed through him, parting his flesh like melting butter, to grasp and crush his organs, one by one. "So now they're sending young Malaugrym to Blackstaff Tower, are they?" Khelben's voice was calm