“Enough!” Mirt growled as he watched the unfortunate falling man cut to ribbons. The moneylender spat a second strange word, and the blades obediently melted away, leaving the alley empty of menacing forms in his path. He strode on.
His next few steps were in slippery black blood, but the star-motes still twinkled in the gloom ahead, heading for a sudden, distant flash of spell-light. In its flare Mirt saw many folk gathered to watch something off to the left, crowded together to enjoy—a fight? A duel? Bets were being placed, and the more belligerent were jostling for a better view.
There was another flash, which resolved itself into the blue pinwheel that marked the appearance of someone using an old catch-teleport spell—and out of its heart stumbled Durnan, moving fast. Mirt’s old friend was in some sort of ruin, caught in the midst of a spell-duel between—gods blast all!—a beholder, and someone… a mage? Nay, mauve skin—a mind flayer. Ye gods. Hasty business indeed!
“Idiot!” Mirt described Durnan fervently and broke into a trot, feeling in his pouch for some other small salvation or other.
“Hearken, all!” he panted to the uneven stones ahead of him, as his shaggy bulk gathered speed, “and take note. ‘Tis the Wheezing Warrior to the rescue —again!”
* * * * *
Something cold struck the back of his neck and clung. Durnan snarled and chopped at it, even as a pair of black tentacles twined about his blade and pulled, seeking to drag it down.
Durnan slashed out with the dagger in his other hand, trying to free his sword. The chill at the back of his neck was spreading, cold caressing fingers moving along his shoulders. “What, by the bones of the cursed—?” he snarled.
The beholder smiled down at him. “Your memories will be mine first, before I take the tiny candle that you call a mind—and blow it out!”
Durnan rolled his eyes. “You sound like a bad actor trying to impress gawping North Ward nobles!” Then the point of his dagger found the pommel of his sword. He pressed down firmly and hissed a certain word.
The gem in the pommel burst with a tiny blaze of its own—and slowly, in impressive silence, all of the black tentacles faded away. “So much for your spell,” the tavernmaster grunted, throwing the dagger hard into the beholder’s large, staring central eye.
The world erupted in a roar of pain and fury. The eye tyrant bucked in midair like a wild stallion trying to shake off ropes, shuddered, then rolled over with terrible speed, eyestalks reaching out to transfix Durnan in many fell gazes.
Nothing happened.
“Mystra, grant that my spellshatter last just a trifle longer,” Durnan prayed aloud, hands stabbing down to his boots for more daggers. That great mouth was very close now, and the roaring coming from it was shaking the tavernmaster’s body. Teeth chattering helplessly, Durnan watched those fangs gape wide…
* * * * *
Not far away, a black cobweb quivered and seemed to stiffen. Then a hoarse, dusty voice issued from it—a voice that squeaked and hissed from long disuse. “Someone’s using a speUshatter,” it told the empty darkness of the crypt around it.
Not surprisingly, there was no reply.
After a moment’s pause, the cobweb shot forth an arm like the tentacle of a black octopus and plunged it into the stone of the far wall—as if the tentacle was a mere shadow, able to freely drift through solid things. Then the entire cobweb shifted like a gigantic, ungainly spider and followed the tentacle, sliding into the stones of the crypt wall like a purposeful ghost.
A breath later, the black tentacle emerged from a solid wall in Skullport, wriggling out across an alley and turning to probe up and down the narrow, reeking way as if it had eyes. A rat paused in its gnawings and scuttlings to watch this new, probably edible worm or snake—but sank back down behind a pile of refuse when the tentacle grew swiftly into a spiderlike growth that covered most of the wall. This spiderlike thing then became a flapping black cloak… from which grew the shuffling figure of a robed, cowled man whose eyes gleamed in the darkness as brightly as the rat’s own.
The man’s robe swished past the cowering rodent as he stepped out of the alley, looked across a blackened, tumbled area of devastation where a building had burned or been blasted apart, and said clearly, “Hmmm.”
A beholder was bobbing above a lone human, the magelight of carelessly-crafted spells streaming around it, but constrained from reaching its human by some invisible shield or other. The spellshatter, no doubt.
“Hmmm,” the man said again, and stepped back into the wall, sinking smoothly into the solid stone until only two dark, watchful patches remained to mark where his eyes must be.
Wisely, the rat scuttled silently away. With archwizards, one can never be sure, and Halaster Blackcloak was known to be both one of the most powerful archwizards of all and more than a little erratic in his behavior. He seemed to be settling into the wall to watch whatever was going on in the ruins, but—if one could ever be safe in Skullport—it was better to be safely away from him. Far away from him.
* * * * *
Asper slid to a stop on a high catwalk and caught at its rail for a moment to catch her breath. It had been a long, hard run, and more than one foolish beast had tried to make her its supper along the way. The blade in her hand was still dark and wet from her last encounter, and the leap from the end of the little-known tunnel—that wound down through the heart of Mount Waterdeep to end in a sheer drop from the ceiling of the cavern that held most of Skullport—down to the dark roofs below was always a throat-tightening thing.
Gasping for air, Mirt’s lady tossed her head. Sweat streamed down her face despite her frequent wipings, plastering ash-blonde tresses to her forehead and dripping from the end of her nose. Asper sighed air deep into her lungs, shook her head to hurl away more sweat, clipped the ring on her sword pommel to the matching one at her throat and spun the ribbon around so the gory blade would bounce along at her back as she traveled on. Then she peered out over Skullport, waiting for her breathing to slow.
The deadly place seemed somehow quiet tonight, the mysterious guardian skulls—or whatever they truly were— drifting here and there through the gloom high above the streets, where the stone fangs of the cavern ceiling made a silent forest close overhead. Asper loved this world of flitting bats, occasional screams, and muttered conspiracies. She enjoyed a leisurely prowl among the crumbling roofs’ gargoyles, glowing wards, and wrought iron climb-nots, where crossbows waited for thieves to trip their lines.
But this journey had been anything but leisurely. Asper clung to the rail as if it was a lover and peered north. There had been something, a flicker —there!
Spell-light flashed in a place of darkness. Some sort of ruin, it seemed, liberally endowed with rough heaps and pillars of blackened stone. In the second flash Asper saw the unmistakable sphere of a beholder, eyestalks writhing in pain or rage, quivering in the air low above some sort of foe. Probably a man. The sort of trouble Durnan or her beloved were almost sure to be drawn into.
Asper vaulted lightly over the rail and fell through the cool air, ignoring the oath uttered by a startled face at a window as she passed. Her boots found a second catwalk, slipped for a moment on damp boards as they sank and danced back up under her landing, then held firm. Asper crouched low as the catwalk’s tremblings grew gentler, the fingertips of one hand just touching the boards in front of her, and looked again at the beholder. The problem was, Skullport was all too apt to be crawling with this sort of thing. The right sort of strife for Mirt and Durnan to get caught up in, but had they chosen this particular strife, or found amusement elsewhere?