“And you feel you have to summon this thing from a universe away rather than just give the creatures you created yourself a single order?”
“The black firedrakes were created to serve the Ransar of Innarlith,” Marek said.
The dragon smiled a little and Marek tensed under the dragon’s scrutinya look that came painfully, infuriat-ingly close to patronizing.
“If you’ll watch and see,” Marek continued, “all will become clear to you, I’m sure. Really, Insithryllax. Where has your patience gone?”
The Red Wizard turned back to the demon and said, “Yes, Pristoleph. But first, you must wear a disguise.”
The demon’s form blurred. It stood more erect and its legs shrank. Clothing formed around it almost as though it was weaving itself from the thin air. In a breath or two the monstrous entity had been replaced by a black-skinned man in rough-spun clothes. The gray eyes turned white and circles of deep, penetrating brown formed in their centers.
“Nicely done,” Marek said, and the transformed maurezhi smiled a broad, gap-toothed grin. “But not precisely what I had in mind.”
Marek cast a spell and the demon in its human form shrank away, holding up arms that even then began to lose their healthy color to return to that pallid, awful gray. It was only back in its natural form for a moment before its legs came together, its joints popped, and its skin tore.
The demon howled in pain, but the transformation didn’t take long.
It looked down at itself, confused at first, but then the admiration for its new shape was written plainly on its new face. The demon twitched its new body, testing its own ability to move like a snake moves. Its face looked more human than it had moments before, but when it opened its mouth, a long, thin tongue that ended in a fork flicked over its lips.
“There,” the Red Wizard said, “that’s better. Now, since I know you’ll be loath to tell me your name, I’ll have to give you a new one.”
“A name?” the demon asked aloud, surprised by the hissing sibilance of its new voice.
“Svayyah,” Marek said.
40
25 Eleint, the Year of Rogue Dragons (1373 DR) Pristal Towers, Innarlith
Pristoleph sat on a cool marble bench, letting the late summer sun that shone through the skylights and windows warm his already burning hot skin. The room was the uppermost floor of the second tallest tower of his magnificent manor home. From nearly a hundred feet in the air, the city looked peaceful, even beautiful, and Pristoleph often found himself drawn to that lofty space to sit alone and think.
His eyes drifted lazily from one of the sixteen triangular windows to one of the sixteen statues lined up along the walls of the octagonal room. He’d collected the statues for years, finding them in all corners of the world. Some were very oldolder even than the ancient empire of Netheril and others he’d had commissioned from the artists himself, the newest one only a few months before.
He turned his face back up to the skylights, which, like the windows in the tall, straight side walls, were triangles cut from the pyramidal roof. Through the skylights he could see the long orange pennant spreading itself along the gusty wind from its pole at the apex of the pointed roof.
Uncharacteristically calm, even contentif such a thing could be imagined from a man like Pristolephhe took a deep breath and smiled.
But his smile faded almost as quickly as it came to his lips. A strange feeling nettled at the back of his neck, and though he didn’t remember hearing anything, he could swear his ears had something akin to an aftertaste, the feeling of having heard something. He turned to look behind him but he was still alone in the big room. The statues all stood mute sentinel around the perimeter, staring out at nothing with eyes of marble, bronze, and wood.
In the center of the room, ringed by an ornamental railing of polished brass, was a hole down which a spiral stairway sank into the room below. Even as Pristoleph assured himself that there was no one on the stair, a scuffle of booted feet sounded from below, and the head of one of his black firedrake guards appeared, scanning the room with a furrowed brow over his coal-black eyes. He saw Pristoleph and came up to the top of the stairs.
“Ransar?” the firedrake said. “All is well?”
“I believe so, Sergeant Nevor,” Pristoleph said, “but I have the strangest”
Pristoleph was silenced by the black firedrake’s shuddering, strangled cry of shock and pain. The dark-skinned, black-clad man’s knees buckled and he dropped to the floornot dead, but nearly so. His longaxe clattered onto the wood floor next to him. Pristoleph stood as the huge, terrifying form of a water naga shimmered into existence. It stood just at the top of the stairs, behind Nevor, and by the way it held its right hand, Pristoleph could tell that it was the naga’s touch that had felled his guard.
But not his only guard.
“Firedrakes!” Pristoleph called.
The naga, slithering on its blue-green scales, charged him, its clawed hands out in front of it, its fangs bared and its forked tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.
“Firedrakes, to me!”
Pristoleph drew the dagger from his belt and tried to jump to the side to avoid the charging naga, but his shin clipped the marble bench. He fell to his right and the naga slithered past him, raking along the left side of his chest and digging ragged furrows in his skin that flared with burning pain.
He let loose a hissing curse as the dagger fell from his hand. He clambered away from the naga, literally crawling across the floor.
The naga surged forward at him, and he grabbed for the. dagger. The weapon looked small, hopelessly insufficient when compared to the bulk of the massive creature, but it was enchanted to bite a little deeper, hurt a little more, and slice a little faster than any ordinary dagger. Pristoleph didn’t usually come to his statue gallery armed at all, so he had to be thankful that he’d thought to carry the dagger with him that day.
Surging above him, the naga opened its eyes wide and hissed at him, the humanlike, feminine face and arms the only thing about it that wasn’t a hellish serpent. Pristoleph felt a tingling wash over his body and he rolled away. A burst of panic welled up within him.
“Guards!” he screamed, and only then heard them coming up the stairs.
The naga heard it too and backed off enough to look at the stairs without giving Pristoleph too easy an opening with his dagger. The ransar picked up the knife with a shaking hand and paused long enough to fight back the fear. He could feel it fall away as suddenly as it came, and there was something about the feeling that made him think it came from outside himit must have been some foul magic of the naga’s.
Nevor tried to get to his feet but couldn’t. When a black firedrake in its bestial, dragonlike form, swooped up the stairs, it almost tripped over the sergeant.
“Dlavin,” the dying sergeant gasped, and Pristoleph was thankful that Nevor had named the drake. In their natural forms, Pristoleph could never tell one from another. “To the ransar.”
Nevor fell to the floor again, breathing but unconscious, and Dlavin took wing just long enough to hit the wood floor between Pristoleph and the naga.
“Kill it!” Pristoleph barked, and before the words were even out of his mouth, the winged creature belched forth a cloud of black acid that sprayed over the naga.
Pristoleph could hear it sizzle, and he climbed to his feet, watching and waiting for the serpent to dissolve before his eyes. But that didn’t happen. The naga winced at what appeared to be a minor burn, then smiled into the black firedrake’s reptilian face.
The acid should have killed it.
Fighting down the fear again, Pristoleph tightened his grip on his dagger and glanced over to the/Stairs to see two more guardsVarnol, in his human guiseand a second firedrake in its dragonlike form emerge from the room below. It took them both all of a heartbeat to figure out what was going on and rush to the aid of the ransar.