Auvrarn Labraster swallowed, stood just where she'd indicated, and kept silent. Meira shuffled all around him with a little smile crooking the corners of her mouth. 'That's better,' she said. 'Now stand you just so.'
She continued her slow circling as her hands traced gestures in the air with surprising grace. She seemed almost to be dancing as her cracked lips shaped words that seemed both fluid and strangely angular, cruel and yet softly sliding, words that betimes rose to frame the name of the goddess Shar. When she was done, she stood with hands on hips and regarded Labraster. In her squint was a gleam of satisfaction.
'Aye, you'll do,” she said at last. 'Can you live without the rest of the little magics you have hidden on you now-and won't tell me about?'
'Surrender them, you mean?'
'Nay, have them still, but asleep, not working.'
Labraster hesitated, then sighed. 'If I have to,' he said, 'yes.'
She was as cold, cruel and deadly, this priestess, as the goddess she served. Shar, Mistress of the Night, the Lady of Loss, the Keeper of Secrets, the goddess revered by those who did cruelty to others, and worked dark magic, under cover of the night. She was evil with lips and hips, the night mists her cloak, her eyes always watching out of the darkness. Labraster shivered, and tried to put the feeling of being coldly watched-a feeling crawling coldly between his shoulders, nowhere near the old hermit in front of him-aside. He did not find it easy.
'Good,' Meira the Dark said crisply. 'Put this on your finger, and keep it there.' She picked up her own ring from where she'd set it on the stone and handed it to him.
Labraster turned it in his fingers as if trying to delay putting it on, then plunged it onto one of his fingers with almost frantic haste. As it altered its shape to fit the digit perfectly, Sylune felt a tingling and darkness descended around her. She drifted through brief chaos, then abruptly, was seeing out of Labraster's eyes once more, and hearing out of his ears again, but cut off from his mind, his touch, and smell. The surges of his thoughts and emotions were gone. She was riding alone again.
'What is it?' Labraster asked, holding up his finger curiously to examine the plain silvery band.
Meira chuckled. 'It carries its own tiny magic-dead zone, covering you and a little of what you touch-or hold. The best shield I know against prying archmages … or the Chosen servants of the goddess of magic.' She waved at the stone where the ring had lain, and said, 'Now sit here.'
When Labraster sat, she drifted up behind him and reached around to hand him something. It was a polished fragment of armor plate that served as a crude mirror. Labraster peered at it, at his new face. It was still fair to look at, but rather less commanding in looks. His hair was almost blue-black, eyes green now, nose a little crooked. He reached up to touch his own cheek. The feel of it matched what he saw. This was no illusion, but a reshaping.
'Who've you made me look like?' he demanded, turn shy;ing to face the priestess.
She was no longer there, and in that same instant Auvrarn Labraster felt a sudden, sharp pain in his neck. She'd bitten him! He whirled around the other way with an oath, flinging out his arm-
Again, she was no longer there. Labraster felt a gentle tug at his belt.
The priestess was kneeling in front of him, her eyes flashing up at him, bright and very green.
'What're you-?'
Her eyes fell to the belt buckle in her hands, and she murmured, 'Now for my payment.'
Auvrarn Labraster resisted a sudden urge to ram his knees together, smashing what was between them, then to kick out, hard, and send a bleeding bag of bones sail shy;ing away to a hard, bouncing landing.
The bag of bones that could slay him in an instant, or send him to sure doom whenever it chose to, flicked bright, knowing eyes up at him now in a sly taunting. She knew how he felt. Oh, she knew.
He watched her calmly unbuckle his belt and said levelly, 'I prefer to choose beforehand whether or not I must lose any body parts. In like manner, I like to have some say in any partners I may take in intimacies.'
Meira the Dark looked up, arching one bristling eye shy;brow. 'Do you now?'
She jerked open his breeches with a sudden, violent tug and added softly, 'I bit you, man. If I will it so, your every muscle will lock, holding you rigid. You will be unable to move … unable to prevent me from removing the ring and my disguising spell, binding you hand and foot, and transporting you thus onto Alustriel's dining table-or kitchen hearth spit.'
A certain paleness crept over Labraster's face. He made a helpless shooing motion with his hands before snarling, 'All right…'
Her hands were cool but wrinkled. Their warts brushed his flesh as she held onto him for support, sat back a little, and did something to her rags. They fell away from one bony shoulder, and he almost gagged at the smell that rolled forth. Meira looked up at him, her eyes flashing, and thrust her wrinkled self forward against him again, purring like a cat. He felt the hot lick of her tongue on his thigh, moving slowly inward, and gentle fingers probing. . before she made a sad little sigh and sat back, slapping him in a very tender place.
Green eyes glared up into his.
'But I …' Labraster growled, his voice stiff with dis shy;gust, his face scarlet.
Meira drew a little way back from him, on her knees, and sighed again. 'No one loves me for what I am,' she said sadly, staring down at her wrinkled hands. 'No one has ever loved me for what I am.'
She looked down at the ground in front of her, face hidden by her tangled hair, and Labraster sat silent, not daring to move or say anything. The priestess stirred, and he saw her clench one dirty hand. She rose to her feet, letting her rags fall to the ground in a little ring around her, looked expressionlessly at him for a moment, then turned and walked away.
Labraster stayed where he was. A gentle breeze slid past, ghosting down the hillside, but he moved no more than a stone statue, his eyes fixed on the ugly priestess as fear grew within him like a cold, uncoiling snake.
She stopped a few paces away and turned to face him in full filthy, sagging splendor, her eyes two green flames as they met his. Still holding his gaze, Meira raised her arms above her head, cleared her throat, then matter-of-factly, almost briskly, cast a spell.
Before his eyes she grew taller, her hair stirring rest shy;lessly around curving shoulders as she grew both more slender and more shapely. Long, long legs, a flat belly, and. . Labraster swallowed and bunked, hardly believing the beauty he saw. A spicy scent wafted from Meira as she strode forward. Labraster searched her with his eyes, feeling lust stirring within him, a rising warmth that checked for only a moment when his gaze rose far enough to find her green eyes unchanged in their knowing, and anger.
Meira glided up to him and wove slender fingers through his hair, guiding his head to her, 'Such a little thing Meira demands,' she murmured. 'Do you still know how to be tender, man? Show me …'
Slender fingers momentarily brushed against a tiny chip of stone amid curling hair, and as if through rippling water, Sylune saw the face of Auvrarn Labraster, tight with apprehension, shifting and sliding into the face he now wore, brighter somehow than it had seemed in the mirror. A cold, dark sentience was sliding over her, con shy;sidering that face, then Labraster's own again. . then seeming to place another face over it, so that one showed through the other. She knew this new face, and tried to keep herself calm and still as the dark sentience that could only be Meira quested past, comparing it with Labraster as he really was, and doubting that the Waterdhavian merchant was suitable to masquerade as the other man.
That other man was King Azoun IV of Cormyr.
The morning was cold, the pit-privy was filthy and swirling with biting flies, and the bowl of wash water both gray and icy. The priestess, moving naked around her smoking cooking fire, was her old, wrinkled self again. Auvrarn Labraster smelled her unwashed stink on his own limbs, and wrinkled his nose in distaste. Even his own transformed clothes itched and felt… wrong.
Without looking up she handed him a steaming, rather battered tankard as he approached. It smelled wonder shy;ful, but Labraster cradled it in his hands and sniffed sus shy;piciously. 'What might this be?'
'Soup,' she said sweetly.
'I can tell that,' he growled. 'What's in it?'
'Dead things,' she growled back, turning green eyes on him. They held a certain sparkle that made the merchant want to glance down at himself to make
She snickered. 'Ah, the great Auvrarn Labraster, scourge of the masked revels of Waterdeep.' She tossed her head and laughed again, lightly. 'Waterdhavians have such high standards, don't you think?'
Labraster shuddered, and brought the warm comfort of the tankard to his lips. 'If you're done mocking me,
