his armor clanking with each step.
Whereas his subjects were short, perhaps half of Soth’s six-foot stature, the king stood almost as tall as a normal human. His skin was bright red, like the rest of his tribe’s, his face gaunt. The armor he wore heightened his muscular appearance, and he moved with the steady step of one used to treading unopposed through even the most chaotic battlefield. Soth had seen creatures like this before, had even faced a few in combat. They were proud and skilled and deadly. Defeat with honor was a foreign idea to such warriors, as was mercy for bested foes.
“Throw down your sword, knight,” the goblin king shouted. He lifted the studded mace he carried and shook it menacingly at Soth. “Let me split your skull and be done with it.”
The young Knight of the Sword swallowed hard. “I am glad to hear you speak the tongue of humans,” he said, “for I can inform you that the path of surrender is one I will not tread. Release my friends and give me the artifacts your tribe unlawfully holds. Only then will I leave.”
“And if I don’t turn these things over to you?”
Unbidden, the teachings of one of the elder knights flew into Soth’s mind: When facing tribes of goblins, a direct challenge to the king or leader can prevent greater bloodshed. If the king is defeated, the tribe will often disperse, for they hold such deaths to be a sign of displeasure from their gods.
Soth straightened and held his sword point-down, a clear sign of disdain for the goblin king. “If you fail to release my friends or do not give me the things that rightfully belong to my Order, I will face you in individual combat. It is my right as a knight to demand this of you, and it is your duty as a warrior to accept. Unless, of course, you fear me.” Soth forced a smile. “If that is so, I will face your champion.”
For a moment the goblin king stood in shocked silence. “I do not fear you, human.” He sneered. Raising his mace high over his head, the king barked a command. The mob rushed forward. Over the cries of the charging soldiers he added, “But I am not foolish enough to send only one of us against your blade.”
Soth slashed the first goblin to come close enough, then cut a second from shoulder to stomach. As the soldiers died, the blood pooled around the knight’s feet, making the stone floor slippery. Panic gripped him just long enough for a spear tip to slip past his guard. The flint bit into his leg. As he struck that attacker down, another goblin stabbed him in the back. His left arm went numb, and his head began to swim.
This isn’t how it happened, Soth realized as another goblin fell before his blade. On the day I entered the cavern, the goblin king accepted my challenge. I killed him and a dozen more of his kind. The others fled. I won. My courage earned me the right to petition the Knights’ Council for advancement…
Another jolt of pain lanced through Soth’s sword arm, making it difficult for him to grip his weapon. He looked down and saw a yawning hole in his armor. The wrist beneath the hole was almost translucent, and the flesh that barely covered the bone was pale and scabrous. The skin of a dead man, he realized, though the gibbering voices in his mind tried to push the thought away. Goblin voices? No. Something else, something in a bone-filled room at the end of a long tunnel. And the wound on his arm wasn’t the work of goblin spears, but the dragon in Castle Ravenloft.
Lord Soth’s fury silenced the voices in his mind. He looked out across the room and saw the gelatinous thing. A half-dozen of the creature’s mouths were biting into Azrael’s flesh. The werebeast lay curled on the floor, howling in pain, partially buried beneath the monster’s bulk. Magda was on her knees a few feet from Azrael, swinging wildly at the thing with a wooden club. Wherever the cudgel struck, an eye closed, a mouth grew silent, or an ugly, blackened welt formed on the creature’s cloudy mass. Tentacles snaked around her arm and entwined themselves in her hair, trying to pull her closer to the large, fanged mouth that opened an arm’s length before her.
“Sabak!” the woman cried. “I will avenge you. I will take your body through the portal when I slay these men.”
The silly bardic tale again, the death knight thought. She thinks she is Kulchek, hammering at her foes.
The thing turned many of its eyes to Lord Soth. The watery orbs registered surprise, and the mouths babbled even louder. A thick, writhing tentacle ending in a clutch of pointed digits shot toward the death knight. Soth slashed the arm with his sword. The blow severed the tentacle cleanly but also sent a lightning bolt of pain from his injured wrist to his chest. The sword dropped from his hand with a clatter.
Again the thing studied Lord Soth. The death knight returned the clinical, appraising gaze. As he looked at the mass of eyes-some without pupils, some without irises-a notion took hold in his mind. Perhaps the bardic tale wasn’t so silly after all.
He raised his hands. Although his right wrist fought against him, Soth wove an intricate arcane pattern in the air.
At a single word, a magical command as ancient as the world of Krynn itself, a brilliant light filled the room. The golden radiance was almost a physical thing, with weight and substance-rather like a deluge of clean, fresh water. Soth’s never-blinking eyes smarted at the flash, but the magical light did not blind him. From the ear-splitting shriek that went up from the unearthly creature at the room’s center, however, the death knight assumed its multitude of eyes had not proven as sturdy.
The creature stiffened, and its eyes became white, sightless orbs swimming in its liquid body. After the hundred-voiced scream died away, the mouths were silent for a moment. Then they began to whimper and mewl. That proved enough to break its hypnotic hold over Magda and Azrael.
The Vistani recovered first, blinking away the pain the spell had caused her eyes. She recoiled from the creature before her, but for only an instant. Gripping the cudgel, she struggled to her feet and swatted away the tentacles reaching for her. At the vigorous attack from the Vistani, the sightless thing edged away, positioning its bulk over Azrael.
A shout came from beneath the creature. “Bloody hells! Get this great mound of spit off me!” A horrible sound, like a dull cleaver slicing through raw meat, followed the cry. The thing lurched again, this time away from the dwarf.
Azrael lay on the floor, three of the creature’s mouths still attached to his arm and shoulder. The fanged maws continued to work their teeth deeper into his flesh. It took all the werebeast’s strength to pry the mouths apart. Magda moved to the dwarf's side and contributed a few well-placed blows.
Soth retrieved his sword, lifting it with his uninjured hand. He warily approached the gibbering thing, studying it as he did so. A thousand waving fingers protruded from the creature now, surrogate eyes searching the room for some escape route, keeping attackers at a distance. Mottled bruises dotted its smooth skin where Magda had struck it, and three puckered wounds marked where Azrael had torn the mouths from its side. One moment the creature appeared as a giant fringed mushroom suddenly pushed up from the filthy floor, the next it was a monstrous, spiky flatworm, slithering along the stones, seeking escape.
“The thing has no scent,” Azrael said, wonderingly. “I would have smelled it when we entered the room, but it just doesn’t have a scent.” He kicked the mouths that lay on the floor. “Has quite a bite, though.”
Magda helped Azrael to his feet, though she kept a wary eye on the creature. “Do you need help, my lord?” she asked of the death knight, who was moving in for an attack.
For a reply Soth stabbed the creature, burying his blade to the hilt. The sword thrust did little to harm the thing; like the injuries wrought by Azrael, the stab wound puckered closed almost the moment the steel left the flesh.
The thing gathered into a ball and slid toward a corner, its thin feelers sweeping over the death knight, trying to read his intentions. When Soth raised his sword to strike again, thick ropes ending with gaping mouths shot from the creature and wrenched the blade from his grasp. Before Magda or Azrael could take a step toward Soth, a single tentacle, this one as thick around as a jungle snake, encircled the death knight’s waist and pulled him to the thing’s side. The creature’s milky flesh pushed up against the knight’s armor. Pulsing skin filled the gaps in Soth’s helmet, sealing out the air.
With his face pressed so close to the monster, Soth could see the ebb and flow of the thick ooze that made up its body, the play of filtered torchlight in its flesh as mouths opened and closed. At the center of the creature lay a lumpy mass, pale but darker than the matter around it.
Soth flexed his arms and snapped free of the dozens of ropy arms binding him. He drove his gauntleted left hand, held open like the tip of a boar-spear, deep into his attacker. The thing tried futilely to push him away, surprised that its attacker had not suffocated, but the death knight was too strong. His arm buried almost to the shoulder, Soth grabbed the pulpy mass that was the creature’s brains and heart. The thing whimpered only once as Soth crushed the life from it, then it slumped to the floor.
When the death knight pulled himself free of the creature’s limp form, he saw that Magda and Azrael were
