"What did you make of that cooking smell?" Belkram murmured from at the head of the stairs. "My stomach just growled."
"Is that what I heard?" Itharr asked, eyebrows dancing.
"Belt up and stow it," Shar murmured with menacing softness. "The question is a good one." As if in agreement, her stomach turned over with an audible sound of protest.
The look she gave them both just dared them to comment, but at that moment someone began to ascend the stairs. Itharr propelled his two companions downward with gentle pressures on their backs, muttering as he did so, "Well, to my nose it seemed like someone frying a gigantic oyster or mussel in herbed butter, and I can hardly wait to sink teeth into it. Seeing what it looks like, mind, stands not so high on my list of dreamy desires."
The Malaugrym reached the large midstair landing a pace before they did and halted to watch them, his eyes glinting in suspicion.
"Who are you?" he asked coldly. "What shapes are these?" And then his eyes fastened on the shadow-shrouded blade in Sharantyr's grip and he hissed and raised his hands in gestures that could mean only spell-casting.
Elminster's Safehold, Kythorn 19
Selune sailed serenely among the stars outside the window in the ceiling of the Safehold, and cast her cool light down on the table where, after many long hours, the Mage of Shadowdale still sat slumped in thought. Elminster stirred as the full glory of the moon cast ivory fire around him, and stroked one of the knots in the richly polished tabletop.
His moving finger awakened an old magic, and a small crystal coffer was suddenly floating in front of his nose. It held a locket, a few exquisitely beautiful earrings-kings' tears at the end of sapphire spindles, keepsakes he'd given Lansharra and found again after her death-and a lock of blue-green glossy hair. His fingers took it up. This was all that was left, now, of Essaerae, once so young and beautiful in Myth Drannor.
Mystra had forbidden him to use Art on this glossy remnant, he recalled, to try to bring her back. Sitting alone in the moonlight, Elminster turned the silken hair over and over in his hands, remembering dark and laughing eyes in that long-ago moongleam, and nights that stretched softly on forever… and he came to a sudden decision.
"Overgod or no Overgod," Elminster murmured, "I must do as I see right, for the good of all Toril."
He laid the hair gently-someone watching might have said reverently-back in the coffer and banished it again to its place of hiding. Then he reached out his foot to a certain floor tile and uttered a word that was all hissings and inbreaths. Under his boot a rune flashed into momentary brilliance, and the tile slid aside.
The tentacles that emerged from the void below were long and delicate, and in their curled tips they held a box of polished, rainbow-hued abalone. Elminster took a circular silk-wrapped bundle from inside the box and thanked the tentacles gravely. They closed the lid and withdrew as softly as they had come.
The silk was black and crumbling with age. From its folds Elminster drew forth a circlet of silver-blue metal that looked almost as decrepit. Setting the crumbling crown on his head, the Old Mage beckoned a crystal ball down from its role as a bookend on a dusty shelf, to float over the table in front of him.
Then he leaned forward and stared into the scrying crystal, and the crown on his brow began to wink with tiny moving lights. The same light danced in the old wizard's eyes as he whispered, "Midnight… Midnight… Ariel Manx… Mystra to be…"
And where she slept under the cold light of Selune's watchful eye, Midnight whimpered in her sleep and twisted onto her side as a gruff voice softly whispered in her dreams and she began to see places, and folk, and things. A tablet swam into her view, and the voice told her, "A useless thing, this, but one of three such playing pieces in this game forced on all the gods."
There was more, but the young sorceress had been very tired, and much of it whirled around old memories of ardent young men and older mages she'd seduced to gain their magic. The rest was lost to the sound of the gruff voice saying, "Bah!" more than once.
In the end, she came sharply awake, sweating in terror, with the image of a yawning grave stark and bright in her mind. From it echoed that testy voice, saying, "Beware, lass. Gods who dare not pursue a tablet will not hesitate to use mortals who can, even such a one as… Midnight."
The Castle of Shadows, Kythorn 19
The Malaugrym was swift, and there was no telling what sort of spell he was weaving, so Belkram regretfully shot out his tail, wrapped it around the Shadowmaster's ankle, and pulled. An instant later, a flash of violet radiance washed over them all as the magic took hold, and the two Harpers found themselves swaying and dazed but in their true forms again, tails and horns and such gone.
Their state made Sharantyr's cold reply to the Shadow-master's question about the shapes they wore an unintended irony. "Our own," she said crisply, tossing her saddlebag aside without taking her eyes from him.
Suddenly released from Belkram's grip, the Malaugrym swayed but thrust out half a dozen sucker-covered tentacles to brace himself against the wall and steps. He snarled in anger, a snarl that became a lunge of snapping fangs as his neck lengthened with lightning speed. Sharantyr turned her face away from those gleaming fangs and struck at him frantically. The serpentine neck reared back, but once her blade had flashed past, the Malaugrym struck, plunging his teeth toward Sharantyr's breast.
Inches before the shapeshifter's fangs would have touched home, a Harper lunged to the rescue. Belkram's punch glanced off Sharantyr's forehead as it drove the Shadowmaster's head aside, and the lady Knight staggered back as the Harper and the Malaugrym struck the wall together.
The shapeshifter put a hand on Belkram's face to pin his head against the wall, and grew talons to put out his opponent's eyes, but Belkram sat down suddenly and vanished from under the shapeshifter's grasp just as Itharr's blade burst through the Malaugrym's body, sword tip spraying blood.
The Malaugrym merely sneered and stepped back, his flesh flowing away from around the blade to leave it bare. "Mortals in our castle?" he hissed incredulously, and seemed almost gleeful as he added, "There can be only one proper punishment for such effrontery!"
"Death, I suppose?" Belkram asked, launching himself from the landing in a kick that drove the feet out from under the Malaugrym.
The shapeshifter fell on the stone steps and rebounded, rising to keep Itharr's blade at bay with a flailing wall of saw-edged tentacles.
"Blinding, dismemberment-and other enjoyable diversions," he replied pleasantly, pressing forward. His tentacles fenced with both Harpers, and behind the wall they wove, the Malaugrym raised his hands almost leisurely to cast another spell.
Sharantyr set her mouth in a grim line and sprang forward, her blade flashing. Where it touched a tentacle sent to intercept it, smoke rose and the shapeshifter grunted in astonished pain. The lady ranger dove through the hole she'd cut and found herself face to face with the furious Malaugrym as her blade whipped through his throat once, and then back across it again on her backswing.
Blood sprayed her, and the shocked Malaugrym staggered back, choking on his incantation, wisps of smoke curling up from his throat. "Usss-" he hissed. "Oorthhh…," and he coughed weakly and shook his head, backing away.