The Nether Scroll - Lynn Abbey [85]
And he'd be the biggest hero of all-
A high-pitched whistle disrupted Tiep's glorious daydream. The goblins who'd been shoving rocks abandoned their work. They rejoined the other slaves and they all bowed themselves low on the stone. Even the sword-swingers bowed low.
The pool got brighter. Tiep expected that whatever was going to happen would happen there. He wasn't looking at the chamber walls and couldn't see the walls to his immediate right and left. The tall man in a full-length dark cloak was several strides into the chamber before Tiep noticed him. He'd gone another stride before Tiep realized the tall man wasn't alone: one of the long-limbed swordswingers walked naked beside him.
The naked swordswinger didn't have a sword or the sense great Ao had given ants. It stumbled at every step and would have fallen if the tall man hadn't held it firmly by the upper arm. The pair approached the bright pool. The whistling got louder. Strange patterns flickered across the man's cloak. Writing, Tiep thought, spells.
The man had to be a wizard. Druhallen dressed like a shopkeeper, but Galimer would have worn a flashy cloak like that. Sememmon had been dressed like a merchant, too, that night when Tiep had tried to cut his purse strings. Dru and Sememmon were better at magic than Galimer was-especially Sememmon. Maybe the man in the flashy cloak wasn't as good as he thought he was. Maybe that was why his egg exploded and his monster had the blind staggers.
It would have fallen into the pool if the tall man hadn't reached left to grab-
Tymora have mercy!
Tiep's thoughts shattered. Man? Man? Had he thought the cloaked magician was a man? Tymora protect him, that thing was no man.
Tiep didn't know what race the cloaked figure had been born to, and didn't want to know. He called it a nightmare and begged his goddess to wake him up, but he wasn't asleep. Even after it had captured its stumbling slave and no longer faced the tunnel where he and Rozt'a were hiding, Tiep couldn't banish the horrific image from his mind's eye.
The nightmare magician's skin was a mottled purple in the pool's pale green light and stretched dried-corpse tight over its bones. Its head was too large and bulged behind, as if its brain had burst the back of its skull and then kept growing. Its eyes were a dull white with neither pupils nor irises. But it wasn't a nightmare because of its skin or its eyes or because its brain hung out of its head. The magician was a nightmare because it had four ropy tentacles hanging off its face.
The tentacles writhed and twitched. They caressed the bald head of the clumsy swordswinger. The other swordswingers pounded their chests while the crouching slaves rocked from side to side and the whistling grew so loud it was physically painful.
Tiep clapped his hands over his ears, which helped a little, and watched with open-jawed astonishment as the clumsy swordswinger folded its arms to its chest. It wove its mismatched fingers together, which might have been a of response to the tentacles caressing its head, but reminded Tiep of nothing so much as an insect about to feed-
The mantises!
The bug lady's messengers!
The metallic egg and Sheemzher's tale of the Beast Lord sacrificing his wife and a mantis and getting a demon in return.
Sheemzher's wife hadn't been exchanged for a demon, she'd been merged with a bug and transformed into one of the long-limbed swordswingers. The nightmare with worms on his face was the Beast Lord. Tiep imagined the look on Druhallen's face when he-the street rat with worse-than-no magic talent-told him how he'd figured out what was going on underneath Dekanter.
Then, like a cold breeze on a hot day, Tiep recalled that his foster father was trapped in the egg chamber. The breeze became a blizzard. If Tiep was right about the egg chamber and the egg, then that naked, just-hatched creature standing in front of the nightmare could be all that was left of Druhallen.
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