'You've nothing that can help us?' One of the three lancecaptains said, not bothering to keep the contempt out of his voice. The spellmaster made a silent show of looking him up and down and committing his face to memory, but all of them knew any hostile move the wizard made in this gathering would result in his death. Not a few of the personal belt daggers around the map would be poisoned, too.
'You're a brave man, sir of the lance,' Nentor Thuldoum said in silken tones, 'if a foolhardy one. A wizard of the Network always has something that can be turned to use, and it's always more than his foes-and others,' he added pointedly, staring around at the impassive soldiers' faces, 'expect. I have a spell ready that can create a beast to explore the ruins for us… but only I will be able to see through its eyes.'
'And if there's an enemy wizard at the Roost?' Amglar asked quietly. 'Will such a one be able to see you through it-and send any magic through you, to strike us here?'
'No,' the spellmaster said. 'In fact, it's unlikely that any wizard who meets my creature will escape alive.'
'Cast your spell, then,' Amglar ordered, his voice riding over a murmur of disbelief at the wizard's words from the officers. 'The sooner we know, the sooner we can act.'
'Stand back,' the wizard said curtly. 'All of you.' He drew himself up and glared around at the black-armored men-and their sullen faces. 'Let no man disturb my casting, on pain of death. Lord Manshoon's standing orders apply here as in the Keep.'
By the time the last of those words left his mouth, Nentor Thuldoum stood alone in the center of an open space perhaps twelve paces across, ringed by a warily silent audience. He looked around at them and smiled. Good; the more who saw this, the better.
From the safe pouch at his belt, Thuldoum drew a small sphere of blown glass that held a veined, gelatinous mass trapped in its heart. He held it on his fingertips, and for the benefit of the assembled soldiers murmured an incantation that was far longer and more impressive than it needed to be.
Then he made a dramatic and totally unnecessary gesture, and blew the sphere gently out of his palm. It plunged to the hard-trodden earth in front of him and burst with a tiny singing sigh.
A drunken man's nightmare boiled up from where it had been, growing with frightening speed, rearing up until it was larger than a horse. Men gasped and backed away in gratifying alarm; the spellmaster smiled tightly at them and pointed west and a little south, into the trees. His creation gathered itself up and drifted obediently off across the road, soldiers scrambling to get out of its way.
It was a shapeless bulk of translucent gray-white jelly that swam and flowed constantly. Countless staring eyes and silently snapping mouths slid across its changing outer surface, appearing and disappearing with bewildering speed.
'A mouther!' one of the veteran armsmen gasped. The drifting thing did look like the deadly gibbering mouther of yore… though no gibberer had ever risen man-high off the ground and flown about at a wizard's bidding, so far as Thuldoum knew.
Then it was gone into the trees, and his world became a place of dark trunks and branches and shifting shadows, looming up before him, thick and tangled…
'Bring me a seat,' he said, not breaking his vision from his creation, 'and something safe to drink. Someone who knows traps and castles should stand by me, too-we'll both have questions to ask each other when my creature reaches the Roost.' Galath's Roost, Mistledale, Flamerule 16
Galath's Roost had been blasted apart four centuries ago by mages who knew their business. Since that day, the small keep atop its stony height had been swallowed by the forest. Massive duskwoods and cedars rent what was left of its walls and yet held them up, their trunks cupping chambers that were open to the sky and walls that ran to nowhere. Their leaves all but hid the riven keep from view… but if one stood a little way off and in just the right spot, the faint flicker of a fire glimmered through the trees.
The room whence the fire came had one wall open to the night-but the two pilgrims who'd built the fire and now huddled around it had good and prudent reasons for not choosing any of the better-preserved rooms in the Roost. They were discussing that now.
'A good job, they did,' the taller one said grudgingly.
'You're certain they left this room safe?' asked the other, clutching his expensive talisman of the god under his chin. The gilded image of Tyr's warhammer and scales shone back the firelight, serene and unchanging.
'All but that door,' the first one replied, pointing. 'If you go out that, a very large crate of rubble will fall on you.'
'Ah,' said the other. 'I'd best go water the gods' gardens out the way we came in, then.' He sipped from a battered tin cup, making no move to get up, and added, 'A good thing we found that cellar, or they'd have seen us, sure.'
'That was no cellar,' his tall, lean companion chuckled, scratching under his much-patched tunic. 'That was the castle cesspit.'
'What?' the shorter pilgrim said, staring down at his boots and then at his elbows and his cloak-but finding no foulness. 'Is my nose as bad as all that, then?'
'After four hundred years,' his companion told him kindly, 'dung is just dust.'
'Huh,' the shorter pilgrim agreed, and launched into a dry chuckle that ended in a fit of coughing. 'I guess the Realms're covered deep in old dung, then. Urrrgh. Auuh.' These last two comments accompanied a grunting attempt to rise-an attempt that ended in a disgusted wave of one dirty hand, and a return to a more or less comfortable lounging position against a pile of moss-cloaked rubble.
In all the activity, neither devotee of Tyr noticed a dark, many-eyed bulk slithering silently out of the night, over the stones in the ruined end of the room. As they decided aloud that a prayer to the Lord of Justice might be prudent before they wandered off into the woods to relieve themselves, the thing of eyes and jaws crept unnoticed toward them.
''Tis your turn to begin the devotion,' the shorter pilgrim mumbled.
'Do it be in truth, Jarald? Or've you just forgotten the words to the Call of the Just again?'
'I've not! I remember them well!' the shorter pilgrim said heatedly. 'Will you plague me with the misdeed of one night down all the years to come?' Behind him, unseen in the flickering confusion where the firelight played on a broken end of stone wall, something that swam with many eyes and hungry mouths reared up, looming darker and larger, drifting tendrils of itself across the ceiling to hang above the two oblivious pilgrims.
'I don't rightly know,' his taller companion said, with a slow grin. 'How long did you plan to go on living?'
From the darkness above came a sudden swift movement…
6
The fire was dying down; he'd have to make this swift. The taller pilgrim cleared his throat, lurched forward from a seated position to his knees, and began. 'Hear us, O Great Balance, as we hear thee! From our knees we cry to theeeee!'
His words ended in a surprised cry as he raised his eyes to the firelit ceiling-and found himself staring at an oozing, descending blob of jelly that swam with jaws and eyeballs! And all of those eyeballs were staring at him!
The horrid thing lunged at him, seven or more sets of fangs biting the air hungrily as they came. The pilgrim flung himself backward and to his feet, out of reach, and the thwarted reaching thing turned with fearsome speed and struck at the other pilgrim.
The shorter man was already on his feet, watching the monster with a surprisingly calm expression of curiosity on his face. He sidestepped the attacking tendril-and found a second questing arm reaching down, almost upon him. He was trapped between them. As they reached in, he shrugged and grimaced.
An instant later, the many-fanged mouths opened wide for their first savage strike-but the pilgrims were gone. Two clouds of dark, whirling globules stood for an instant where the men had been. And then the jaws bit
