Ulisss lowered its head in a gesture of submission and sighed in disgust. One day it would catch its cruel mistress in a moment of weakness and slay her—but not this day.
Transtra let the fires rage up and down her arms as she slithered up to the huge serpent-creature and embraced its head as if it were a pet, stroking it behind its horns just where Ulisss best loved her touch.
Warily tense muscles under iron-hard scales quivered under her caress, relaxed with a slow surge, then slowly, reluctantly started to rub against her as the monster began to purr. Transtra let a spell-image of Mirt flow into his slow, dim mind and said softly, “Hearken, 0 scaly beloved, for I’ve a task for thee. Follow this man—aye, his girth is amusingly enormous—and…”
As she whispered on, the behir’s eyes grew brighter and more golden with wicked hunger and excitement—and when she released it, it slithered off on its mission with eager haste.
Transtra swayed upright, folded her arms across her breasts, and watched it go. Though there was a dangerous glitter in her eyes, the smile that crept slowly across her face was catlike in its anticipation. As she readied the spell that would let her watch both Mirt and Ulisss and spy on what befell from afar, her tongue curled out between her lips in private mirth. The possible loss of a business associate was a small price to pay for the grand entertainment to come.
* * * * *
“What can go wrong? The plan is perfect,” Iraeghlee said testily, its mouth-tentacles whipping and curling in irritation.
“You’re not the first down the centuries to say those words,” Yloebre remarked dryly, twirling the slim glass of duiruin in its fingers so the luminous golden bubbles deep in the black wine winked and sparkled. “Any number of things can go awry.”
“Such as?” Iraeghlee challenged. “Not even the Merciless Ones Beneath Anauroch know of our whisperer. The beholder’s no fool, yet has no inkling of its presence … or, thus, our influence.”
“That may be so only because we’ve not awakened any control over it yet,” Yloebre told the depths of the glass it held. The small worms there curled and uncurled in their endless undead dance that kept the oily black wine from thickening into a syrup.
“Do you doubt my skill?” Iraeghlee spat, leaning forward in its chair with a hiss of rippling silk sleeves. “It ate the whisperer, which in turn ate its way into what little Xuzoun has of the paltry things eye tyrants are pleased to call their brains! I felt it take in beholder blood and grow! I felt it through the linkage my magic made—a link I can make anew whenever I desire! Do you doubt me, younger one? Do you truly dare?”
“Untwist thy tentacles and hiss less loudly,” Yloebre responded calmly, sipping more wine. “I doubt nothing about your ability to establish control over the eye tyrant—only as to our shared ability to escape the notice of the powers hereabouts. The whisperer is a brain node, linked to you by magic. The Place of Skulls above us, and the city above that, seem to fairly crawl with wizards and priests able to see magic in use, and themselves governed—nay, driven—by that appalling human fault known as ‘curiosity’ What’s to keep us from coming under attack within a breath or two of you crushing Xuzoun’s will?”
Iraeghlee’s mauve skin was almost black with anger. Its voice quivered with rage and menace as it said slowly, “Hear this, feeblewits, and let one hearing be enough: No drow nor human, from matron mothers to archniages, can detect our whisperer, or us, while we remain here.”
Yloebre glanced at the stone walls around them, adorned by a single glowshift sculpture that chimed softly from time to time as its shape altered. The chamber held only their floating chairs, several floating tables (including the palely-glowing one between them), and the fluted and many-hued array of flasks and glasses that its current sample had come from. Unseen runes of power crawled and twisted on the undersides of the tables, awaiting a call to life from either illithid, but there were no other defenses save what they could personally cast or wield.
Not that such things were likely to be needed. They were six shifts away from a cesspool-cellar under the gambling house known as the Blushing Bride’s Burial Pit in southern Skullport—a chain of trapped teleports that should be long enough to fool or slay even the most persistent and powerful of nosy wizards.
It was at about that moment that the table between them grew two dark, grave eyes—and exploded into blazing shards that hurled both mind flayers back against the walls of their hideaway, broken and sizzling.
The last words Yloebre ever heard, as it struggled against rising, searing red pain, was a man’s voice saying disgustedly, “Stupid illithids. Must they always meddle?”
The crushed, half-melted bodies of the mind flayers slid like slime down the walls; neither survived long enough to see Halaster Blackcloak’s eyes blast their tables and flasks to dancing sparks and flying dust.
After his gaze had roved about the entire chamber and he was satisfied no other mind-signatures were to be found on the whisperer growing in the beholder’s distant brain, the wizard sighed and turned to pass through the teleport once more—only to turn slowly and glare with renewed fury at the turning, chiming glowshift sculpture.
It had escaped—or resisted—his destructive gaze unharmed. Halaster’s black eyes narrowed, then hardened into rays of darkness that leaped and stabbed through the air, only to strike the sculpture and be drained away to somewhere else, leaving the chiming construct unharmed.
“Who—?” Halaster snarled, shifting into a more tangible, upright form.
The sculpture cleared its throat and said mildly, “Why, me, of course. We agreed that action in thy house was undesirable if not of thy doing—but we said nothing of mere watching. Tis how I learn things, ye see.”
“Elminster,” Halaster said, fading back into a darkness studded with two eyes as sharp as spear points, “one day you’ll overstep the marks I set… and then…”
“Ye’ll try to slay me, and fail, and I’ll have to decide how merciful to be with ye,” the sculpture replied merrily. “Those who set marks, know ye, are usually better employed doing something else.”
“Do not presume to threaten me,” Halaster’s voice replied, as if from a great distance, as the darkness that was the Master of Undermountain began to whirl about the unseen teleport.
“That was not a threat,” the sculpture said mildly. “I never threaten—only promise.”
The reply that came back out of the teleport sounded very much like the rude lip-flapping sound known in some realms as a “raspberry.”
Durnan was still swearing when the whirling blue mists faded and the world returned: a darkly cavernous world of many lamps and torches, sharp with the smell of a recent spellblast. Its smokes curled lazily past him as he stumbled on uneven, shifting rubble then crouched, blade up, to look all around.
There was a murmur off to his right. Durnan looked that way first and found himself regarding an interested crowd of mongrelmen, hobgoblins, bugbears, ores, wererats, kenku, blade-bristling humans, drow, imps, and worse. They were standing on a torchlit street making bets and excited comments—as they stared right back at him.
Skullport. He was in Skullport. The surprise on some of the faces and a sudden flurry of betting suggested his arrival hadn’t been expected. Wherefore this crowd had gathered to witness something else. Durnan glanced left and right into the dark, smoking ruin around him. Ah hah. Indeed.
A beholder hung in the air off to his left, its eyes gleaming with malice as it glared at him and through him, at… a mauve, glistening creature with a tentacled face and white, pupilless eyes that stood in dark, ornate robes well off to his right—and was raising its three-fingered hands in clawing, spell-hurling gestures as it coldly hissed an incantation. A mind flayer… and an eye tyrant. Dueling with magic. And he was between them.