The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [36]
In one such room, made gloomier than the passages around by still-splendid dark paneling, something suddenly appeared in the air.
Something round and grinning, which floated eerily in the air as it spun around, seeking foes that were not there to make menace.
It was a severed human head, gray and moldy flesh cloaking a skull whose eyesockets harbored the gleam of fell, cold life. "Well, well," it said, into the empty darkness. "Not the welcome a minstrel would hare sung about… but fitting, for horror come home again.
Its jaw worked in soundless laughter for a moment or two as it turned once more to survey the chamber, found what it sought on a high shelf, and glided thither.
Just as he'd left them: the never-finished, restless enchanted scepters of the mad mage Ladazzur of Arlund. Completing them had been one more project a busy Spellmaster hadn't ever been able to find time for. Ah, well. They never would be finished now.
The floating head of Ingryl Ambelter hovered above the two chased silver scepters and hissed a word that seemed to crawl through unpronounce-ability and out again. Green fire awakened in the crystals within those silver sheaths, winking and pulsing, and ran in two lines of cold fire the length of Ladazzur's slender, unfulfilled dreams.
The ghostly lights of the skull's eyes seemed to glow more brightly as it murmured something over the scepters-and then opened its jaws to accept the sudden rush of rising green flame that roared up from darkening, crumbling silver.
Green fire wreathed a laughing skull, scorching the ceiling, as the scepters collapsed into ash. Then Ingryl spun away from the wall and descended to the height off the floor that his head would have been in life.
There he hung as green fire faded into pale wisps of mist or smoke that tumbled out of the skull, streaming down to the floor, to coil there and ascend once more. For a long, silent time they rose and fell, streaming back and forth in a writhing column that slowly dwindled, seeming to coalesce into solidity here and there.
Solidity that spread, shaping shoulders and elbows, until a last wash of mist died away and a ghostly body hung beneath the skull. It took its first tentative steps, toeless feet scraping dusty flagstones, its legs churning formlessness for an instant. The skull dipped and then rose again as the body beneath it rose taller and darker.
Wraithlike mists cloaked the skull in skin that hid nothing of the mold-ravaged grayness beneath, the bared patches of bone, and the cold lights where eyes should have been.
Ingryl's new body shuddered, tottered as thickening weight shifted within it, and drew its first breath. He used it to sigh, loud and long, recalling his real, ravaged body, lying twisted and crumpled in a dark river cave atop the tangle of rocks and rusting blades and the many enchanted things that had kept him alive when he should have died.
Broken, rotted, and without hands or feet, one blasted away and the rest eaten by the cray-crabs and blood-eels of the Silverflow. Without a head now, too… history. He'd find that cavern again for its magics, when needful, but for now he had to make this new, spell-spun body truly alive and whole. For that he'd need to devour his own flesh: a cantle carefully hidden, long ago, in a vial of enchanted elixir not far from here in the castle cellars. Then it would be time to visit his onetime tutor, and gain the vitality he needed.
It would not do to be found now, still stumbling and vulnerable. Ingryl fought down his eagerness and forced his weak, clumsy beginnings of a new body to move slowly and carefully. His first act was to lean against the walls, in a corner where two came together, and his second was to force his essence slowly out to every fingertip of the trembling, shuddering form, making it truly his. Doors were waiting ahead that would only open to the touch of Ingryl Ambelter. To say nothing of the traps…
There was a smeared scattering