polished tabletop.
His moving finger awakened an old magic, and a small crystal coffer was suddenly floating in front of his nose. It held a locket, a few exquisitely beautiful earrings-kings' tears at the end of sapphire spindles, keepsakes he'd given Lansharra and found again after her death-and a lock of blue-green glossy hair. His fingers took it up. This was all that was left, now, of Essaerae, once so young and beautiful in Myth Drannor.
Mystra had forbidden him to use Art on this glossy remnant, he recalled, to try to bring her back. Sitting alone in the moonlight, Elminster turned the silken hair over and over in his hands, remembering dark and laughing eyes in that long-ago moongleam, and nights that stretched softly on forever… and he came to a sudden decision.
'Overgod or no Overgod,' Elminster murmured, 'I must do as I see right, for the good of all Toril.'
He laid the hair gently-someone watching might have said reverently-back in the coffer and banished it again to its place of hiding. Then he reached out his foot to a certain floor tile and uttered a word that was all hissings and inbreaths. Under his boot a rune flashed into momentary brilliance, and the tile slid aside.
The tentacles that emerged from the void below were long and delicate, and in their curled tips they held a box of polished, rainbow-hued abalone. Elminster took a circular silk-wrapped bundle from inside the box and thanked the tentacles gravely. They closed the lid and withdrew as softly as they had come.
The silk was black and crumbling with age. From its folds Elminster drew forth a circlet of silver-blue metal that looked almost as decrepit. Setting the crumbling crown on his head, the Old Mage beckoned a crystal ball down from its role as a bookend on a dusty shelf, to float over the table in front of him.
Then he leaned forward and stared into the scrying crystal, and the crown on his brow began to wink with tiny moving lights. The same light danced in the old wizard's eyes as he whispered, 'Midnight… Midnight… Ariel Manx… Mystra to be…'
And where she slept under the cold light of Selune's watchful eye, Midnight whimpered in her sleep and twisted onto her side as a gruff voice softly whispered in her dreams and she began to see places, and folk, and things. A tablet swam into her view, and the voice told her, 'A useless thing, this, but one of three such playing pieces in this game forced on all the gods.'
There was more, but the young sorceress had been very tired, and much of it whirled around old memories of ardent young men and older mages she'd seduced to gain their magic. The rest was lost to the sound of the gruff voice saying, 'Bah!' more than once.
In the end, she came sharply awake, sweating in terror, with the image of a yawning grave stark and bright in her mind. From it echoed that testy voice, saying, 'Beware, lass. Gods who dare not pursue a tablet will not hesitate to use mortals who can, even such a one as… Midnight.'
The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19
The Malaugrym was swift, and there was no telling what sort of spell he was weaving, so Belkram regretfully shot out his tail, wrapped it around the Shadowmaster's ankle, and pulled. An instant later, a flash of violet radiance washed over them all as the magic took hold, and the two Harpers found themselves swaying and dazed but in their true forms again, tails and horns and such gone.
Their state made Sharantyr's cold reply to the Shadow-master's question about the shapes they wore an unintended irony. 'Our own,' she said crisply, tossing her saddlebag aside without taking her eyes from him.
Suddenly released from Belkram's grip, the Malaugrym swayed but thrust out half a dozen sucker-covered tentacles to brace himself against the wall and steps. He snarled in anger, a snarl that became a lunge of snapping fangs as his neck lengthened with lightning speed. Sharantyr turned her face away from those gleaming fangs and struck at him frantically. The serpentine neck reared back, but once her blade had flashed past, the Malaugrym struck, plunging his teeth toward Sharantyr's breast.
Inches before the shapeshifter's fangs would have touched home, a Harper lunged to the rescue. Belkram's punch glanced off Sharantyr's forehead as it drove the Shadowmaster's head aside, and the lady Knight staggered back as the Harper and the Malaugrym struck the wall together.
The shapeshifter put a hand on Belkram's face to pin his head against the wall, and grew talons to put out his opponent's eyes, but Belkram sat down suddenly and vanished from under the shapeshifter's grasp just as Itharr's blade burst through the Malaugrym's body, sword tip spraying blood.
The Malaugrym merely sneered and stepped back, his flesh flowing away from around the blade to leave it bare. 'Mortals in our castle?' he hissed incredulously, and seemed almost gleeful as he added, 'There can be only one proper punishment for such effrontery!'
'Death, I suppose?' Belkram asked, launching himself from the landing in a kick that drove the feet out from under the Malaugrym.
The shapeshifter fell on the stone steps and rebounded, rising to keep Itharr's blade at bay with a flailing wall of saw-edged tentacles.
'Blinding, dismemberment-and other enjoyable diversions,' he replied pleasantly, pressing forward. His tentacles fenced with both Harpers, and behind the wall they wove, the Malaugrym raised his hands almost leisurely to cast another spell.
Sharantyr set her mouth in a grim line and sprang forward, her blade flashing. Where it touched a tentacle sent to intercept it, smoke rose and the shapeshifter grunted in astonished pain. The lady ranger dove through the hole she'd cut and found herself face to face with the furious Malaugrym as her blade whipped through his throat once, and then back across it again on her backswing.
Blood sprayed her, and the shocked Malaugrym staggered back, choking on his incantation, wisps of smoke curling up from his throat. 'Usss-' he hissed. 'Oorthhh…,' and he coughed weakly and shook his head, backing away.
'Do we dare let him go?' Belkram muttered, sword in hand.
Itharr shrugged. 'I don't think it pr-watch out!' The Malaugrym sank down swiftly into an octopuslike sprawl on the stairs, shooting out a small forest of tentacles that snatched at the ankles of all three rangers. Belkram fell helplessly and heavily, hacking at whatever he could reach, and found tentacles slapping over his mouth, striving to suffocate him.
Itharr went to one knee but caught hold of a stair post for balance, sawing at the tentacles wrapped around Belkram.
Sharantyr plunged into the heart of their foe, hacking and slashing. Although tentacles rose up all around her in an effort to snatch or twist the blade from her hands and bear her down, she kept hold of her weapon with both hands and cut glowing blue lines of death through ever-thicker smoke.
Where Belkram and Itharr cut the Malaugrym, its cuts flowed together again and healed, but the wounds made by Sharantyr's humming blade gaped open and smoked.
Other Malaugrym had come upon the struggle. One even descended the stairs past them all by the simple expedient of shifting its body up onto the rail for the few paces it needed to stay clear of the fray. Few of the observers seemed interested or tarried to watch, save one.
He took up a relaxed position against the stair rail lower down and watched calmly as the blazing Malaugrym began to shrink away from the two Harpers, concentrating all of its energies on slashing Sharantyr with barbs it had grown on the ends of its tentacles. As she chopped and slashed those rubbery appendages down to a few, the Malaugrym dwindled and suddenly rolled away from her, down a few steps, to lie asprawl, gape mouthed and very human.
'Impressive,' said the new arrival, levering himself up from his elbow to stand facing them. He looked like a youngish, handsome man with wavy brown hair that threatened to fall right over one eye. The only sign that he was a shapeshifter was an extra arm, half-hidden in the folds of his loose, open-necked shirt. A third hand could be seen at his belt, fingers endlessly stroking the pommels of the ranked throwing knives there. Silver-bladed throwing knives.
This Shadowmaster spread his other hands in an 'I mean no harm' gesture and came up a step.
'Keep your distance,' Sharantyr told him, breathing heavily, her eyes afire. The sword in her hand pulsed once, warningly.
'Of course,' the Shadowmaster said. 'But please believe me, all of you. I mean you no harm. I see that you're mortals and may be unaware of our ways here in the Castle of Shadows. Be advised: This kin you slew- Phenanjar by name, if you're interested-was long a foe of mine. You have done me great good by his removal, and I regard you as friends.' He advanced another step. 'I would be pleased if you looked upon me as a friend, too.'
