The City of Splendors_ A Waterdeep Novel - Ed Greenwood [109]
Beldar clapped his swordhilt, but resisted the urge to whirl around. He was a dead man if they wanted him so, despite all the little Roaringhorn family magics he was wearing and no matter which direction he faced.
The inky darkness all around him seemed to shrink and dwindle, receding with the suddenness of powerful magic to reveal some sort of ancient, long-abandoned cellar, its walls furred with mold he'd been smelling for some time now, and its floor visibly damp.
For all Beldar cared, it could have been walled and roofed entirely with nude, imploringly beckoning noble lasses; he could only stare in mute terror at dozens-dozens!-of beholders. He did not need to turn to know they were floating all around him. A swarm of miniature eye tyrants drifted like lazy fish amid the larger dooms.
The largest beholder-kin was floating right in front of him. It had a gaping, skull-like socket where its central eye should have been and was surrounded by floating, slowly orbiting glowing gems, and what looked like ornate scepters that winked and glowed softly. Its great jaws, bristling with jagged fangs, were twisted into a grotesque parody of a smile.
Flanking this beholder mage was another horrific creature, of the sort sages called a "death kiss." Around its baleful red eye writhed not eyestalks but ten eyeless tentacles like taloned fingers that lazily opened long slit-like jaws from time to time.
Several of the surrounding beholders were smaller and had only six eyestalks each. Dandalus had said beholder eye-magics varied from one eye tyrant to another in nature as well as strength, and some eye tyrants weren't nearly as powerful as the fearsome reputation legend gave them, but standing alone gazing upon so many gently writhing eyestalks and so many malicious stares, Beldar Roaringhorn knew better.
The smallest one here can slay me at will.
"I come not to harm," he rasped, finding his mouth and throat suddenly dry, "but to warn and seek advice."
"Are you alone?" the beholder mage demanded, "Do you know spells?"
A sudden crushing force blossomed inside Beldar's head, leaving him gasping and numbed, barely able to think or move. He struggled, thick-tongued, to answer… and then, as suddenly as it had come, the awful invasion ended.
"You stagger under the weight of magics you know not how to use," the beholder hissed contemptuously. "Speak now, ere we slay you. You offer poor sport."
Beldar took a deep breath, reminding himself of the Dathran's prophecy, and said, "I come from the city of Waterdeep, where a man now dwells who seeks to 'improve' himself by grafting claws and tails and other body parts of wild beasts-monsters-to himself. He's done so successfully at least a tencount of times, winning new limbs and organs that live and thrive, obeying him as if they were his own. They now are his own."
"And this concerns us how?" the eye tyrant mage sneered, though the glows encircling it brightened and its surviving eyes flashed in evident excitement.
"This man keeps one of his eyes hidden behind a cloth patch," Beldar replied, "to keep other humans from seeing it's been replaced with… an eye from a beholder."
A hiss went up all around Beldar that was almost a roar, drool-wet and furious. Eyes flashed, eyestalks writhed like angry snakes, and a dozen beams and bolts of deadliness stabbed at the quaking human from all sides.
All of them vanished in amber glows that brightened until Beldar could see a soft aura all around him. His skin tingled painfully, and he bit back a moan of fear.
"Soil yourself not, human," the beholder mage said coldly. "That was but a simple truth-test. I'd not have believed your tale, else. You spoke truth and so live yet, but this blasphemer, this human who dares to butcher our kind, must die-swiftly and knowing one of us is his slayer!"
Eager babble filled the cellar in an instant-and ceased, knife-sudden, as amber radiance blazed anew about the beholder mage.
One of its eyestalks curled to tap thoughtfully at its fanged mouth in an oddly human gesture. "Dealing death to this blasphemer would