Certainly, if not for the Lord of Bats, the crimson road would have claimed the warlock long before now. Being alive, no matter the situation, had to be preferable to being dead. Right? It was a question he often asked himself. And despite his ties, he did delight in the various arcane tricks and amazing curses he was now able to call upon. And what about the impressive space hidden within the folds of his cloak? Other men would give far more than he to be able to wear such a thing as an article of clothing.
On the other hand, if not for the pact he'd sworn to the Lord of Bats, he wouldn't have to daily attend to the bidding of Behroun Marhana, a fouler and pettier man Japheth had yet to meet. What a convoluted series of events had put him in such thrall, he mused. If only-
"You're insane!" Seren's sudden accusation brought Japheth back to the present. While he had been touring, for the hundred thousandth time, his past indiscretions and failures, the others had continued their discussion. Something had riled up the war wizard, and even Thoster's eyes were wide with unexpected surprise. What had he missed?
Nogah raised a conciliatory, webbed hand. "I grant that on its face, the task we must accomplish…"
A rivulet of mist edged across the tower and into the balcony. It seemed a live thing, a fog tentacle seeking something.
"How peculiar," said the warlock. He wondered if the opaque cold front was natural weather after all. For one thing, his dust-enhanced vision was having difficulty piercing it.
Alerted by his comment, the kuo-toa glanced at the advancing mist streamer. She shrieked, then lisped, "Gethshemeth knows!"
She backed away from the advancing streamer. She rasped, "The mist is merely a cloak-it hides whatever force the great kraken has thrown at us!"
Great kraken? Japheth repeated mentally. What folderol is this?
The war wizard spat out a flurry of loose syllables and waved her red-runed wand. A gentle breeze issued from nowhere to blow toward the balcony opening. The mist's ominous advance slowed, hesitated, and then began to retreat in the face of the mild but unrelenting draft. But how long would the woman's casting keep it at bay?
An ululation of feral anticipation soared up from somewhere below the tower, hollow yet somehow more threatening because of the muffling, mysterious mist.
"The kuo-toa…" began Japheth, his voice a dry croak. He tried to shake off the lethargy the traveler's dust sometimes produced when he didn't succumb to its vision of the burning road. "The kuo-toa outside that are converging on us-are they with you, Nogah?"
She hissed, blinked rapidly. She said, "Fool! I told you I am anathema in Olleth. The Sea Mother has demanded my head for my affront. But worse, all those I subverted with the Dreamheart now follow Gethshemeth, the great kraken. It sends them against me now, lest I contrive a plan to take back what it stole!"
Seren broke in. "Fool? You're asking us to go against a great kraken and call us fools?"
The moist patter of many squishy feet sounded loud on the open stair.
Captain Thoster drew his slender straight-sword from its silver sheath. Metallic disks inset flush in the blade's side whirred and spun with golem-like precision. A greenish fluid pulsed within straight, hair-thin conduits that ran from hilt to tip, whetting the fine edge of the blade with an emerald sheen. Thoster called it his Blade of Venom, an antique but deadly weapon found among Lantan's watery remains. A product of vanished gnome craftsmen, who infused knowledge of golems and gears into their works.
Seren began the opening phrases of a spell.
Anusha… Japheth couldn't see her. Was she gone, or had the sensitivity granted by his traveler's dust passed?
"Are we facing the great kraken itself?" asked Thoster. The captain stared into the wide, fog-obscured opening on the balcony. "It could reach this high, I think."
Japheth replied, his voice growing surer, "I saw only kuo-toa converging, no kraken small or great."
"Well… maybe we ain't all dead!" exclaimed Thoster. A small grin chased away worry lines with deeper grooves. "Fish-men I can handle. No offense, Nogah." The captain turned to face the stairs, his blade whirring and clicking like a hungry insect.
Unless the kraken has come in the meantime, thought the warlock. Better be sure.
Japheth projected an arcane summons into the space hidden within his cloak, to his hidden fortress, shadow-drenched Darroch Castle. The call roused those he sought from their lightless roosts. Crying and chirping their eagerness in registers higher than men could hear, they emerged as a dark swarm from Japheth's billowing cloak.
Seren and Nogah both exclaimed in tones surprisingly similar for such disparate family trees. Thoster, familiar with the warlock's many abilities, grinned wider.
The cloud of flapping black motes arced straight into the wall of mist, immediately lost to sight.
But bats did not rely on eyes alone, and now, neither did Japheth. Nay, he was the bat swarm. Closing his eyes on the tower interior, he opened his perceptions to the audibly sculpted, texture-defined world the bats inhabited.
His fingers, grown long and composed only of sound, caressed the tower as its rounded sides fell away behind. The wet, uncertain boundary of the sea lapped up from below. Bipeds with large, noise-muffling eyes and hard scales scampered from the water's edges up the beach of sound-scattering sand, to join their brethren already snorting and giggling at the tower's base.
Japheth directed the darting swarm out over the water. His touch-sight stretched down to pat the sea's inconstant surface. The water was impenetrable, but its fluid, ever-changing nature betrayed the shapes of what lay beneath. Mostly, that was bulging swells of water that rolled endlessly to the shore, there to break and froth on the sand. But the swarm also discerned schools of fish as small mounds sliding along the surface, the edges of a half-formed coral reef, and what might even be a drowned shipwreck.
Nowhere could he perceive what he most feared to discover: great, sinuous bulges in the water hinting at tentacles hundreds or more feet in length, or a great bulblike central body with a brain more ancient than the founding of Impiltur. Japheth had seen pictures of kraken in the Candlekeep stacks.
He found no evidence of such a shape, but something else was fast approaching.
A handful of ballista-like shapes arrowed through the water. They left V-shaped wakes behind each one's single high fin that pierced the boundary into air. Sharks, and big ones. Worryisomely, the contours of reflected sound revealed each bore a rider, but the swirling seawater foiled him from teasing out real shape from fancy.
The swarm veered closer, darting down to intersect the line of the onrushing fins.
Japheth saw a warty arm rise from the water and point. He had just a heartbeat to study it, to recognize that its oozing, sound-absorbing flesh wasn't the scaled arm of a kuo-toa, before pain cut his connection to the swarm.
He opened his eyes, his mouth dry.
"What?" said Captain Thoster.
"Kuo-toa, maybe twenty. Well, maybe they're not exactly kuo-toa; they looked warped somehow. And, I think… a covey of water witches."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The slushy, damp patter of kuo-toa feet on the stairs knifed terror through Anusha. She instinctively tried to get away-
The girl woke in her flesh body as if from a nightmare, breathing hard and struggling to sit up.
Pain smote her forehead. Dazed, she fell back, blinking in darkness broken only by a ruler-straight thread of light that ran from near her left temple down past her left foot. It was the seam of the travel chest's lid, in which her body slept away her dream travels. Not for the first time, she imagined it was like this inside a sarcophagus. Unlike most sarcophagus residents, though, she could leave whenever she wanted.