That cry ended abruptly. Pennae looked down at the sprawled, broken figure in smiling satisfaction.
Apprehension rose in her a moment later when she saw something dark and amorphous and leathery slither away from the man's face and flow away across the tocks, rippling and creeping.
Doust Sulwood darted into view, slithering down the scree slope from the ledge in some haste. He caught up to the eerie thing and battered it enthusiastically with his mace until it flapped wildly and stopped moving. Then he emptied an unlit lantern over it-and lit the dripping mess on fire.
Watching it sizzle wetly amid the flames, Pennae's smile returned.
'Want to see who you're killing?' Semoor called from what sounded like the safety of the ledge. Stlarning holynoses.
'Yes!' Dauntless bellowed back, seeing Florin staggeting gtimly back to join him. The Harper was struggling to stand somewhere farthet off-which left a lone otnrion of the Putple Dtagons, just now, to battle these mysterious men whose faces seemed to shift and even melt as they swung theit blades.
One of them was down, sliced open by the Harper earlier, and another was fighting an unsteady battle to stand up. He'd been caught in the same spell-blast that had flung Florin and the Harper over yonder.
Which still left two-two who were clearly visible as Semoor's spell banished night, crearing a sphere of bright sunlight.
Unfortunately, the two melt-faces were moving well apart so as ro come at Dauntless from sharply opposing sides at the same time. Their swords, daggers, and reeth all gleamed. They wore identical merciless smiles.
'Gah,' the Harper groaned from somewhere behind Dauntless. 'This light! It's like fighting on a stage in some Swotd Coast city theater!'
'We'll be… right with you,' Florin gasped, reeling, from even closer at hand.
'Worry not,' Dauntless called back over his shoulder. 'There are only two, after all.'
Florin lurched past him, swinging his sword for balance. One of the melting-faced men mistook the ranger's groggy state for clumsiness and went for an easy lunge to the vitals.
The man blinked as Florin was somehow-and quite suddenly- nowhere near the sword reaching for him. Rather, he was past the lunging man and aiming a cut at the back of an undefended knee on his way on to cross swords with the other melt-face.
That cut landed, and the knee's owner crashed to the ground, shoulders first. Winded, he was still struggling for breath when the sharpest knife Dauntless owned sliced through the shapeless thing on his face, which was rearing up like a snake-and slashed it right off his face.
Shorn of his nose, the man screamed. So did the shapeless thing on the ground beside him. Spurting gore and squalling, it had been severed into two pieces. Both of them reared up in energetic undulations, seeking to get away as swiftly as possible.
The Harper bent and deftly diced both into many small, wriggling fragments. 'These should be burned,' he said. 'I've never seen them before, but I think I know what they are. Hrasted if I can remember the name, though. They shapechange.'
'Ah,' Dauntless said as he cut the fallen man's throat. In the same movement he turned to menace the last of the melting-faced men. 'Useful to know. Can they change themselves into hard metal armor, or do swords still work on them?'
Florin was striking a series of ringing blows against the desperate parries of that last man, who was backing away as he saw that he now stood alone. His dazed and reeling fellow blade had just been slain by the Harper-who was now carefully butchering the hargaunt that he'd just sliced away from the dead face it was clinging to.
'Mercy!' the last melting-faced man ctied suddenly. 'I am Glays Tarnmantle and can offer twenty thousand golden lions of the realm in return for my life! I-'
The masklike, drooping thing on the man's face flowed with sudden urgency, streaming into his nose and mouth.
Glays struggled to shout something through its surging, but his nose was swelling up, stuffed full. His mouth was already distended into a grotesque, froglike shape, and as he shuddered and clawed at the shapeless thing, his face went slowly reddish-purple.
It was almost black by the time he staggered, then teeled, eyes bulging.
He fell headlong, crashing down to trampled forest turf. The sword clattered from his hand, and he lay still. The thing that had choked him flowed out onto the ground, dark and shapeless and menacing.
'Hooh,' Dalonder Ree said, eyeing the corpse. 'It seems something was in a real hurry to collect that gold. We should burn that something.'
'When we're done here,' Florin said, pointing.
A large-boned skeleton was striding out of the night at them. It plucked up a fallen sword, hefted it, and then swung it with a flourish, still walking their way.
Dauntless sighed. 'Some nights, you wonder what else the forest can spit up to entertain you.'
Hefting his own sword, he strode to meet the skeleton.
In the chamber of scrying, everyone looked like a ghost.
Ot so the saying went, established years ago by war wizards after their first experience of seeing the glow of over two dozen scrying spheres lighting all faces eerily from beneath.
As eerily ghostlike as any of them, Laspeera raised her eyes from some of those spheres to give her superior a rather grim look.
'So passes Lorbryn Deltalon,' she said. 'We have few enough left who are skilled at both Art and diplomacy and truly havens for our trust.'
'Tell me what I don't know, lass,' Vangerdahast said. 'Reduced to sending Dauntless with a few enspelled trinkets in his pouches. That's us.' He crooked an eyebrow at Laspeera's busy hands. 'What're you doing?'
'Avenging Deltalon, if I can. It's worth a few scrying spheres to try to harm Onsler Ruldroun. I taught him so much. All wasted…'
'He's probably fled beyond our reach,' the Royal Magician said. 'Yet it's worth doing anyhail. At the very least, it'll stop him using the glade. Let him try to sleep up a tree.'
Watching and listening to Laspeera's casting, Vangerdahast catefully began one of his own, deftly reaching his hands over and among hers with the familiarity of long practice at spell-weaving together.
When it was done, they both stepped back and thrust their wills at the other floating scrying spheres, seeking to force them away from the quartet that were flaring brightly and about to burst. They weren't fast enough to save them all.
In the tinkling, ear-ringing aftermath, both mages rolled over from where they ended up-on the floor and driven against a wall. They looked at each other. Their upflung arms had saved their faces and throats from deadly shards of crystal, but they were bleeding from the usual countless tiny nicks and slices, and their garments now looked as if a dozen assassins had hacked at them with tazot-sharp blades.
'Before you try to think of something clever to say about my new fashion look,' Laspeera said, as she struggled to her feet and held out a hand to haul him up, 'consider that you look worse. Much worse.'
' 'Tis the paunch and the body hair,' Vangerdahast said. 'So now for the rest of our evening's entertainment: the intrepid Dauntless faring into the forest.'
'As all the Nine Hells break loose,' Laspeera said. She murmured the cantrip that would rid her hair of a thousand tiny shards of crystal.
Vangerdahast murmured something more substantial, and his hands were suddenly full of stark black robes. With a flourish he held the uppermost garment out to Laspeera.
She took it with a smile and asked, 'Aren't you going to turn your back as I slip into this?'
'No,' Vangerdahast told her, shrugging off his own tatters. 'Why?'
He had always loved Laspeera's laugh.
The glade exploded.
Ruldroun didn't even have time to leap down out of the tree before its great trunks shattered above him, its boughs torn off and swept away in a crashing rain-and he was hurled along after them, his shielding buffeted, struck hard, slammed against other trees, and shattered.
