When they heard Kli-Kli’s shouts, everyone started staring at him in bewilderment. At least, the expressions on Alistan’s and Egrassa’s faces reflected the same thought that I had had—the jester must have gone insane.
Meanwhile the king’s jester reached them and began performing something like a dance by a flea high from smoking charm-weed, at the same time yelling all the while that Tomcat had been right about the cloud.
When I reached him, he was still howling, and the others were staring at him as if he had the plague.
“Harold!” Kli-Kli cried, turning to me. “You listen to me at least! The cloud!”
“What cloud, my friend?” I asked in the most ingratiating voice I could manage, the way they talk to crazy people.
“Open your eyes and look! Not at me, you idiot! At the sky!”
Arguing with someone who’s sick in the head is more trouble than it’s worth and so, under the goblin’s keen gaze, I started looking at the rain clouds. Several other members of the group followed my example. But neither they nor I could see anything frightening.
Just the same clouds as an hour earlier: gray, unbroken, spewing rain down onto the ground.
“Mmm . . . They all look the same to me.”
“That one there!” said Tomcat, pointing way off into the distance with one finger.
In response there was a flash of lightning on the horizon and immediately one of the clouds was lit up for an instant with purple fire.
Hallas swore quietly.
“I was hoping I could be wrong,” Tomcat said bitterly.
The thing that the storm created by the Nameless One’s minions had been hiding had finally reached us, even though it had been obliged to make a substantial detour along the way.
“Sagra save us!”
“What is that rotten garbage, Tomcat?”
“Everyone shut up!” Markauz roared above the others’ howls and questions. “Tomcat, can you do anything about this?”
“No.”
“Lady Miralissa, Tresh Egrassa?”
“We’ll try.”
Miralissa and Egrassa started drawing something on the soaking wet ground—a cross between an octopus and a star with a hundred light beam tenctacles. The elfess whispered words rapidly. The lines of the form on the ground began pulsating with yellow flame.
I was really hoping that their shamanism would help us. Ell stood in front of the two working the magic, almost on the very edge of the precipice, holding his bow at the ready, although I didn’t think arrows would be effective against magic. The others, including me, crowded together behind the elves and observed the approaching danger.
It was making straight for us at full speed. Somewhere inside that seething cloud, at its very center, a purple flame was being kindled, and the cloud was moving against the wind with only one goal in mind—to overtake us.
Miralissa stopped whispering and began singing in orcish. Every word seemed to hang in the air like a tiny, jingling bell, vibrating and humming, its sound reflected in the yellow shape drawn on the ground.
“What are those repulsive beasts?” Loudmouth gasped.
He was as white as chalk, and I’m sure that right then my face didn’t look much better, either.
A winged creature dived down out of the cloud. Then another, and another.
And then there were ten of the long creatures with broad wings circling in a predatory dance, disappearing into the purple glow and then reemerging from it. Their flight was smooth and spellbinding, but just then I didn’t particularly feel like admiring the creatures’ fluent grace.
“What is that, may an ice worm freeze my giblets?” Honeycomb whispered, clutching his useless ogre hammer desperately in both hands.
“I don’t know!” said Tomcat, staring fixedly at the creatures.
They were small and rapacious, absolutely unlike anything else. Their oily skin had a purple shimmer to it. And that was what I disliked the most.
“
Something yellow spurted out of the drawing on the ground and went shooting off toward the magic cloud with the speed of one of the gnomes’ cannonballs.
Whatever it was, along the way it grew until it reached the size of a small house.
The yellow met the purple and burst straight into the body of the cloud, which shuddered as if it were a living being, and recoiled. There was a blinding flash inside it.
And that was all.
The cloud had eaten the elves’ creation.
The magical purple glow with those creatures dancing in a circle stopped right above our heads. Then the
