The image struck him without warning-struck him so hard it forced a gasp from his throat. For an instant, perception that wasn't quite sight overlaid his vision of Beth-Abz. His mind was again filled with an impression of daggerlike teeth, but now to that image was added a churning mass of something that could be tentacles, and a single, staring eye.
He reared back in his seat. As suddenly as it had come, the vision was gone.
He felt pressure on his left arm. Julia had grabbed his biceps, and was staring into his face. "Teldin… ?" she asked.
The Cloakmaster drew a hand over his eyes. There was no doubt about that, was there? That was definitely an image provided by the cloak.
He forced himself to take a deep breath, let his muscles relax, and listened to his heartbeat slow back to some semblance of normalcy. He looked at Beth-Abz again, bracing himself for a resurgence of the magical image. But this time all he saw was a large, handsome man.
He struggled to keep his voice calm as he said, "You're not really as you seem, are you?"
If the big man gave any response, it was too subtle for Teldin to spot it. "It's over," the Cloakmaster said, more harshly. Julia looked at him as though he were crazy, but he pressed on. "We're not buying it anymore. Drop your disguise now."
For almost half a minute, the only sound Teldin could hear was the pounding of his own heart. Beth-Abz's colorless eyes-unmoving, unblinking-were fixed on his. Teldin could almost sense the intensity of the man's thoughts. Beth-Abz's expression gave no indication when he reached his decision, but the moment was impossible to miss.
The lines and contours of the burly warrior's body shifted, like flowing water. His limbs withdrew into his body, and his body itself shortened and broadened. The chair he'd been sitting in scraped across the floor, pushed back from the table by his new bulk. His head, too, was reabsorbed into the bloated body, to be replaced by multiple, writhing processes that extended upward. As the outline changed, so too did the figure's texture and color. The man's clothes vanished as though they'd been, absorbed into his flesh through his pores. Then the skin thickened, shifted, and cracked into what looked like discrete scales. A mouth opened in the center of the swollen body, and above it lay a great, staring eye.
The transition took only an instant. Even before it was complete, however, Julia was on her feet, a short sword seeming to sprout magically from her hand. She tried to interpose herself between Teldin and what Beth-Abz was becoming.
The Cloakmaster grabbed her left arm, gestured her to be calm. Unwillingly she obeyed, lowering her shining blade.
Although his heart was beating so hard he imagined the crew could hear it like a slave galley's drum, Teldin remained seated. He struggled to keep the rush of terror he felt from showing on his face.
Beth-Abz was a beholder, an "eye tyrant." Teldin had seen only two, one on the Rock of Bral and one on the cluster world of Garden. The former had been dead and stuffed, mounted over the door of a tavern. The latter, though, had been alive… and lethal. The Cloakmaster remembered with a chill the destruction the beholder had caused with the magical blasts it could create. Teldin felt his muscles tensing, as though that could possibly save him when the creature lashed out with its power.
But…
It could have killed me at any time, Teldin realized, but it didn't. Why would it do so now? He let himself relax a degree and observed the creature silently.
The bulk of its body was roughly spherical, maybe five feet in diameter. Teldin guessed that that body might weigh about six hundred pounds. But, then, weight doesn't mean much, does it? he reminded himself. The beholder was. floating in the air so that its center was about four feet off the ground. The body was covered with discrete plates of what looked like hardened skin and were colored a dark brown-green. In the center of the body, facing Teldin, was a single enormous, lidless eye the size of a dinner plate. Bloodshot white surrounded an almost colorless-"spit-colored"-iris, in the center of which was a horizontal, slit-shaped pupil. And beneath the eye was a great, loose-lipped mouth. Although the mouth was closed, the way the lips bulged clearly showed that it was full of teeth the size of small daggers. Sprouting from the top of the body were ten armored and segmented protrusions, like the legs of lobsters or spiders, almost as long as Teldin's arm, each tipped with a single small eye no larger than a man's fist. While the central eye was fixed, steady and unblinking, on the Cloakmaster, the ten smaller eyes moved constantly, tracking around the room, making a sickening, faint clicking as their joints flexed.
''Who…" Teldin's voice cracked. Four of the small eyes pivoted to focus on him. He took a deep breath, and forced control. "Who are you?' he demanded.
"I am Beth-Abz," the beholder stated. Its voice was low-pitched, slow, blurred, hard to understand. That's how a swamp would sound if it could talk, Teldin told himself. "Beth-Abz." the creature repeated, "of the clan Beth, of the nation Gurrazh-Ahr." It paused. When it spoke again, its voice was less certain-tentative, almost, Teldin thought. "You saw through my disguise. How is this?"
Teldin blinked in surprise. From what other people had told him about beholders, they weren't given to asking questions. If something puzzled them, or confounded them, they tended to blow it apart so they wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. He shrugged. "I have my ways," he said vaguely. "But I'm asking the questions. What are you doing on my ship?"
"You already know my reasons," the beholder said slowly. "I have already told this one"-with a pair of eyestalks, Beth-Abz indicated Julia-"the details of my travels."
"That was the truth, then?" Teldin demanded. "You expect us to believe that?"
The beholder's ten eyestalks moved in unison, a strange, circular gesture. The creature's equivalent of a shrug? Teldin wondered. "I would have no reason to tell you an untruth," Beth-Abz pronounced simply.
"All that you told me about crewing on various ships," Julia cut in, "you're trying to tell me you did all that' You?" She gestured vaguely at the spherical shape across the table.
"It is as I said."
"Why in human form?" she demanded.
Beth-Abz chuckled-a horrible, burbling sound like swamp gas rising from the bottom of a fetid marsh. "Would humans and their kin sail with me otherwise?"
Teldin nodded slowly. He understood the rationale; it was much the same that Estriss the mind flayer had discussed with him long ago.
But there were still things that the Cloakmaster didn't understand. He didn't know much about beholders, but he had heard travelers' tales. "What about your clan?" he asked. "What about clan Beth? Why did you leave it? Or does it still exist?"
"Clan Beth is still in existence," Beth-Abz admitted, "as is nation Gurrazh-Ahr." The creature paused-uncomfortably,
Teldin thought. "I broke with my clan," the beholder continued slowly, "something that young such as myself do only with serious provocation."
Teldin leaned forward, fascinated. "What provocation?"
"It is hard to explain, and I would not expect any to understand it."
"Try me," Teldin suggested.
Again the beholder's eyestalks made their circular gesture. "The way of nation Gurrazh-Ahr is obedience and loyalty," Beth-Abz explained, "to the clan, and to the hive mother- the ultimate. The existence of an individual is subordinated to the existence of the clan, and the existence of the clan to the existence of the nation. I found that… intolerable.