'Now how could I tell that?' replied the man whose arms split into tentacles. A choking merchant struggled in the coils of two of those tentacles.
The Malaugrym shook the merchant, much as a hunting cat shakes a rat in its jaws, and tightened his tentacles with lazy strength, tearing the man's head off. Blood sprayed in all directions as the corpse convulsed, wriggling in its final agony.
'Well? Are you going to eat this one?' Bralatar asked, his hands lengthening into talons to tear the man's body apart. He licked his lips in anticipation of the feast.
Lorgyn took one bite, then tossed the headless body aside. 'No. I'll find something a little more succulent,' He looked across the night-shrouded garden where they stood, at a building whose distinctive red lanterns marked it as a brothel. 'In there.'
'No wonder old Elminster wanted Faerun for himself!' Bralatar said, watching his comrade reach up with a small forest of tentacles and swarm up the side of the building. 'It's a neverending love-feast and brawl!'
'Aye,' Lorgyn called down, heedless of whose attention they might alert, 'only better!'
A man's head suddenly appeared out of one window. 'Hoy!' he snarled, 'what're-doppelgangers! Call the Watc-'
A tentacle descended in a slap that carried the weight of falling stone, breaking the man's neck as a child snaps a twig. He fell onto the sill, and said no more.
The Malaugrym's tentacles were busy at a higher window. He reached in to a bed where a fat merchant was rolling among slippery silk sheets, pretending he couldn't find the giggling owner of the bed, wriggling around beneath them.
'Not here!' the merchant hollered, clutching at a pillow. 'Where's she gone? Oh, sweet merciful gods, help me… my partner'll be furious when he learns how much I spent for an hour of pleasure, and then couldn't find the wench for the size and opulence of her bed! Are there other men lost under here, I wonder? That wagon of mine that went missing last moon, perhaps? I'll just have to see! May-'
'Oh, be silent!' Lorgyn snarled in exasperation, snapping out a tentacle to wrap around the man's jaws.
The fat merchant suddenly grew a mouth as wide as a horse and caught the tentacle; an extra mouth appeared in his forehead and hissed, 'Get your own plaything!'
Lorgyn recoiled in amazement. 'Who-?'
The grotesque mouth spat the tentacle back at Lorgyn and shrank away to nothingness, dwindling into features the Malaugrym at the window recognized. 'Lunquar!'
'The same,' the older Shadowmaster replied, ignoring the sudden terrified scream from the bedclothes beneath him. He pinned the woman down without sparing her a glance, and said, 'I've been watching you two break necks and hurl bodies about for days now; why such a bold rampage?'
'Fun, Lunquar, fun!' Lorgyn said exultantly, using one long tentacle to snatch up the man whose neck he'd just broken and shake him as a trophy. 'See?' There was a scream from the window below.
'That's just what I mean,' the Shadowmaster on the bed said. 'You left that one dangling half out of a window! Hear the screaming now!'
'So?'
'So why rouse half of Faerun when a little subtlety could win you thrones?'
'What fun is that?' the voice of Bralatar came floating up to them. 'You can rule just as well through fear… in fact, whenever we've the time to spare, we should spread a little more fear!'
'Your style, perhaps; not mine,' the older Shadowmaster replied. 'I'm saving my fury for when I meet up with one of Mystra's Chosen!'
'Aye,' Lorgyn agreed, his voice menacingly soft. His eyes glowed a sudden emerald green in the gloom. 'If you want reasons for rampaging, there's always… revenge.'
12
Sembia, Flamerule 23
Birds called and fluttered in a wood where moss grew green on old, proud trees, untouched by a woodsman's axe for three hundred years. A stone wall as high as six men kept errant axes out, for the wood was part of a private estate in the fair uplands of Sembia-an estate that saw few visitors, and even fewer uninvited ones.
Yet one can never be too careful, and trolls may lurk anywhere. So it was that the war dogs Warhorn and Bolder wandered the grounds diligently, carrying two hundred pounds of taut muscle each behind their spiked war collars. Their jaws closed often on squirrels, and they suffered nothing larger than that to live-except men they knew.
No man they knew smelled quite like the peculiar odor now in Warhorn's nostrils. The mighty war dog growled a deep warning to Bolder and advanced cautiously toward the smell, questing from side to side like a soldier.
Bolder caught up to him, stiffened, and rubbed his flank alongside Warhorn to signify he'd smelled the scent, too. They went forward soundlessly together on stiff, alert legs, lips drawn back to bare huge teeth.
The smell grew strong indeed, prickling in their throats. Of a sudden, they broke apart and rushed around either side of a great shadowtop tree, a forest giant big enough to hide four dogs behind. They went with eyes aflame and jaws agape, feet scrabbling on the mossy turf-and vanished.
All that the listening birds heard was two wet snapping sounds, then a brief thudding, and shortly afterward, a rustling of leaves as something large climbed the forest giant.
'Never fear, never fear,
For my smiles are all for thee.'
A man in a bloodied apron sang ere he struck the brass gong that hung by the door.
'So come away, lady fair, And we will married be!'
He set down the metal basin of meat scraps, wiped his hands on his hips, and waited-but the expected hungry canines did not come.
The man struck the gong again. 'Warhorn? Bolder? Gone deaf, have ye?'
The words had just left his lips when the two war dogs raced into view, running hard… and yet without their usual fluid grace… almost as if they weren't used to loping. The man stared hard at them for a moment. He crouched down and asked merrily, 'So what have ye been into, my hearties? Highsummer mushrooms again?'
He leaned forward to pat Warhorn, and barely had time to notice a strange golden fire in the old dog's eyes before the tentacles took him. Snakelike they coiled up his patting arm and shook him, and he was still struggling for breath to shout when they broadened and slapped over his nose and mouth.
His frantic struggles were brief. His slayer rose slowly to an impossible height for a dog and held the dangling corpse upright. The other dog cocked its head for a moment, surveying the limp body. The canine form began to melt and flow, shifting slowly into an exact duplicate of the unfortunate servant.
Delicate tentacles undid the apron and held it out while Bralatar continued surveying the dead man critically, noting tiny scars, pimples, and precisely where hair grew. He shifted himself to match. He took the apron, careful to knot it as the man had worn it, and announced, 'Done.'
Lorgyn nodded and passed over the man's belt and ring of keys as he sank back down into dog shape atop the dead man. His tentacles coiled and squeezed, trembling with sudden effort.
When he was done, a bloody, boneless mass was all that was left of the servant. Tentacles dragged the gory thing behind the nearest tree and became digging claws. Soon all trace of the murder was gone.
Bralatar hummed the tune the man had been singing as he went to a wrought and fluted metal gate. One faithful war dog trotted at his heels.
In the small garden beyond, svelte nymphs and winged women of weathered stone posed in frozen wantonness among fountains and pools and floating lilies… and Dorgan Sundyl strode through them unseeing, bored to the depths of his being.
His muscles gleamed with oil and the vigor of this morning's workout, and his uniform shone back the sun. A
