quavering, 'Wha-what will ye be doin' to me?'
'Well, minstrel boy,' the brigand leader drawled, displaying teeth that might have made a boar envious-an old and very sick boar, mind-'the proud army of which I'm swordlord hasn't been paid in a goodly while, and-' 'Pike,' the half-orc rumbled from behind Elminster, 'what army? There's just ye 'n me, near's I can tell-'
'Hush!' the brigand leader said severely, and favored Elminster with another crookedly reassuring smile. 'Pay no attention to my friend behind ye. I-hem hem blaugh ahum-chose him for this duty because of his, ah, kindly ways toward donors we meet on the road. Donors, I say, because 'tis our habit to, at this time, ask ye for some small tokens for passage on our road… a toll it pains us to request, mind ye, but-'
Elminster forestalled more of this by scaling a gold piece into the man's grubby outstretched palm.
Pike's eyes widened as he looked down at it, and then narrowed. He scratched his nose and stepped forward.
'Well,' he said jovially, ' 'tis a beginning, right enough, an' I'm right grateful to see ye've got the idea of the th-'
Elminster added a second gold coin to the first and turned to face Glorym. 'Would ye like the same? I'm in a hurry…'
'Aye,' Glorym rumbled, but Pike's eyes had narrowed again. 'In a hurry? That's an awful shame…'
Elminster smiled pleasantly at him and said, 'So it is, friend Pike, because I perceive ye and Glorym here share the same fondest wish. Ye both want to die rich.'
He gestured, and both brigands wriggled in midair, their faces telling the world of their sudden terror at discovering they could no longer move. As the white-bearded, gaunt old man between them crooked a finger, one of the gold coins in Pike's palm drifted smoothly through the air to settle into Glorym's grasp.
Elminster smiled at them both and steered their frozen, floating bodies together, gently arranging their hands on each other's throats, tossing away their weapons, and closing the fingers of their free hands firmly around the coins. Then he snapped his fingers. Magic made none-too-clean fingers tighten, and the trapped, frightened eyes began to bulge almost immediately.
'And so ye shall,' he added brightly, and went off down the road whistling.
The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19
'Oh? They must be destroyed?' Amdramnar's tone was lazily unconcerned as he set aside the platter of shadowslug and rose from his chair, his form swelling visibly. 'I think not.'
The Harpers made as if to rise, but Sharantyr laid a quick restraining hand on Belkram's arm, her eyes on the motionless Malaugrym out in the corridor, and Belkram froze. The three of them stared out at the watchers in the passage, who stared right back, faces impassive.
Between them, in the small open space encircled by the velvet-shrouded seats of Amdramnar's forechamber, tentacles and surging rubbery pseudopods and knots of muscled bulk were boiling and trembling in a tight mass. Sparks and brief sprays of radiance burst around them but seemed constrained by an invisible cylinder surrounding the entangled Malaugrym. A continuous din of snarls, barks, roars, and hisses came from a score of dripping maws that both combatants had grown- eyeless mouths on the ends of wormlike stalks that bit at each other in mindless savagery, rising and falling like surf around the heaving bodies.
Shar and the Harpers had never seen such savage energy sustained for so long and contested in so small a space. The foes began to grow within the cylinder as one found a strangling grip on the other. The trapped one-the three Faerunians could no longer tell them apart-tried to reach air by throwing out breathing tubes, and the other sought to overtop and ensnare these. Entwined, they soared up inside the cylindrical shield, growing quickly toward the mist-shrouded ceiling of the chamber, and all the while, the stone-faced Malaugrym stood silent and unmoving in the corridor, just watching.
And then, suddenly, it was done. In a cascade of abruptly freed sparks, the cylinder collapsed and fell away from around the two gasping, heaving tentacled forms, to be followed, blurring instants later, by the dwindling of the two Malaugrym into human forms once more. The panting men glared at each other until the newcomer found breath enough to snarl a stream of curses that the listening humans could barely understand.
Then he whirled suddenly, lashing out with talons that shot to long-sword length in a trice, stabbing at Sharantyr's eyes.
She flung herself back in the seat and brought her blade up sharply, and the black, seeking talons melted away before the sword's quickening blue glow as suddenly as they had come. Shar stared over them into the Malaugrym's eyes and saw her death in the look of cold promise he gave her.
She replied with a wintry, silent smile that seemed to amuse him. He lifted his lip in a sneering answering grin as he backed toward the door.
'My thanks for the invigorating exchange of views, Olorn,' Amdramnar said in a voice that sounded like a sword blade softly sliding through a stomach, 'but I'll expect a request to enter next time.'
The other Malaugrym started to hiss a reply, but Amdramnar waved a hand and the door boomed closed with lightning speed, no doubt coming close to striking Olorn's face.
Their host held up his hand and muttered a quick incantation, then quickly touched the door that had just closed and the one Sharantyr had used earlier.
Then he turned, bowed to them, and sat down again. 'My apologies, friends-if I may be so bold as to call you so, now that I've fought in your honor-but it appears that you're now enmeshed in our family disputes, like it or not. As you might have heard, that was Olorn, and he's an even more charming individual than Phenanjar. Was.'
He gave them a little smile and added, 'He's a tireless foe, I'm afraid. If you see him again, strike first-and to kill-or he'll slay you. It is also important that you know one thing more: Olorn's strong allies are two similarly young and ambitious Shadowmasters, Iyritar and Argast, though they try to keep their affiliation hidden from most of the kin. Both are good at sorcery-by your standards, very good-and you'd better consider yourselves at war with them both, as they'll no doubt behave as if you are, the moment Olorn tells them of what just occurred.'
'What about you?' Itharr asked, eyeing the platter of shadowslug. 'Are we a danger to you, now that others know we're here?'
Amdramnar shrugged. 'Not really. I am thought odd by many of the kin, but so are many others, and tolerance must needs be the order of things in many family dealings. You saw how they watched but made no move? They were telling me of their neutrality in this, by that very action. It is how things are done in the castle.'
Somewhere in Faerun, then the Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19
No one was around to see, so Elminster stepped behind a tree, became a bedraggled-looking crow, and leapt lightly to a leaf-shrouded branch. There he nestled up against the trunk and grew still.
And far away, in a corridor where shadows drifted idly in the ever-present gloom, a pale, grisly object that trailed white hair and a long white beard behind it like a tail faded slowly into solidity, flew purposefully forward through the shadows to a certain spot, and then rose up into the concealing gloom and waited.
A breath or so later, figures came into view down the passage. One was a man whose fingers were a nest of small eels wrapped securely about a scepter whose pale red glow parted the shadows like a slicing sword. The other was a loping, shambling thing of many snouts and protruding ears and eyestalks, a creature that whuffled and tapped the stones of the passage floor and walls with long, spidery fingers as it came.
'So have any of these idiots survived?' it asked sourly.
'I don't believe so,' was the curt reply. 'Well, perhaps one from the first foray, but no one's talking about it. Milhvar goes about grinning and saying arch things, almost as if he intended them to fail!'
'Why wouldn't he? If he kills off all the most rebellious or hopeless younglings, he won't be the only one who'll be going about grinning, either! Believe you me, there's parents in this castle who'd be relieved to see their own young gone…'
The two figures waved very different hands in front of a certain section of wall and it split in twain, drawing back to reveal an opening. The moment they'd passed through it, the humanlike Malaugrym turned around to survey the passage behind suspiciously but did not see the head floating above him, in the heart of a concealing drift of shadow.
The door whispered closed, and for some moments the head stared down thoughtfully at where the Shadow-master had been. Then it faded away.
