Dragonbait jerked his head from Mist to Olive. Mist appeared to concentrate on the small lizard for a few moments and then began to “translate” his silence. As the dragon spoke for the opponent who had defeated her in combat, Olive’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped.
“I don’t believe you,” she told Mist. “You’re making this all up. It’s impossible!”
“No one could make up so improbable a tale,” Mist sniffed. “Not even you, bard.”
Olive fixed her attention on Dragonbait. The lizard was already gathering the party’s belongings that were still salvageable from the destruction Mist had wreaked on them.
Olive planted herself firmly before him and demanded to know. “It’s not true what she said, is it? You can’t be what she said. You’re a lizard!”
Dragonbait looked down at the halfling without expression, holding her eyes with his own unblinking ones. Olive grew nervous beneath his gaze because she realized Mist had told her the truth. He really was one of them. Though he hadn’t seemed like one of them before, there was no other explanation for all his actions.
“It’s true.” she squeaked.
Dragonbait nodded.
Boogers! Olive swore silently. How do I get into these messes? More importantly, how do I get out of this one?
21
Moander’s Puppet and Mist’s Pursuit
Alias stirred beneath the moss-stained roots, and her mind crawled back from the lands of darkness. She twisted once, then again, straining against her bonds.
She recalled the passage through the wall of enchanted masonry. It had felt like an immersion in a cold mountain lake, chilling her skin and knocking the wind out of her. When she had finally gasped for air, there was a spongy mat against her face—a fragrant glove of pungent, vegetable smells which had reminded Alias of mushrooms in butter sauce gone bad in the summer heat.
And then she knew nothing. It was like the dark emptiness that preceded her appearance at The Hidden Lady.
When Alias awoke, the exposed portions of her skin were chilled and slightly wet from the fog. She had no idea how long she had slept, or what had happened while she did, but her adventures in Cormyr and Shadow Gap, and the conversations at Shadowdale, all remained crisp and clear in her memory. If anything, they felt more real than the adventures she’d experienced before she had received the deadly, cursed tattoo.
Finally, she opened her eyes to glare at the curse scrawled across her arm, only to find it trapped in a blanket of green fibers. She tried to shake loose, but her arm was held fast. She tried to move her left arm, but that limb was also pinned down by the same sort of damp, slimy blanket.
Alias tried kicking. Her legs were trapped, too. She wriggled and thrashed and bucked, but a wet root, as thick as her arm, held her to the ground. Whenever she moved, the tendrils moved with her. She sensed one of the bonds tearing, but new shoots sprouted immediately to replace it.
Frustrated, she looked around. She lay on an odd collection of garbage, bog peat, sickly green vines, and large moldy roots. At the edge of her vision she spotted something clean and white jutting out from the greenery. Alias recognized it as a human bone.
She felt the pile of boggy vegetation shift as though it were moving on a great wagon. She was lying on a ledge at the leading edge of the pile, about fifteen feet from the ground, but she could see no horses or oxen ahead.
A pile of dead leaves shifted by the right side of her head. As she watched, a single, green tendril burst through the rotting vegetation. At the tendril’s tip was a pumpkinlike pod. The tendril swiveled toward her, and the pumpkin pod opened like a flower. At its center was a great, weeping eye, trapped on all sides by jagged, spined teeth.
The sight touched some memory buried within Alias, a memory she wished had stayed buried. She screamed.
The pumpkin pod closed up, startled or frightened by her reaction. The tendril withdrew into the refuse pile.
Alias swallowed with some difficulty, keeping her eyes fixed on the spot where the tendril had sprouted. When it did not reappear, she began to look around again, though her eyes kept returning to that site every few seconds to make sure her ocular companion had not returned.
The mound was passing over terrain that resembled the plains about Yulash. The sun was on her left and there was a thick, dark line of green across the horizon straight ahead.
If that’s the rising sun, we must be heading south out of Yulash, toward the Elven Wood, she thought. Unless I’ve slept for days again—then we could be anywhere.
The sound of something moving through the garbage made her realize she and the wretched tendrils were not alone. Three figures appeared at the corner of the mound—men, moving in a matching stride like soldiers. A vine trailed behind each man, attached somewhere to his back.
The man in the center cast a long shadow on her and blocked out the sun, so she could only make out his silhouette at first. The sun shone through the light robes he wore—revealing spindly legs, but a powerful torso. He wore some sort of helmet. She could not make out his features, but by his bearing she knew he was Akabar.
The men who flanked the mage were dressed in moldy, torn battle gear. They moved stiffly as they picked their way through the garbage.
“Akabar?” she said softly, but the figure did not respond. “Akabar? What’s going on? Cut me out of this stuff.”
“I’m afraid I must inform you,” the lean figure began in the roundabout speech of the South, “that I am not your Akabar.” He broke rank from the two soldiers and knelt beside her head.
He was Akabar. He had Akabar’s face, marked with the three blue scholar-circles on his forehead, and Akabar’s square-shovel beard, and the same sapphire earring which marked him as a married man. His dark eyes, though, were completely fogged over in gray and patches of listless white swirled through them. The thing Alias had mistaken for a helmet was a cap of vines that pressed suckers against the mage’s forehead and into his ears. Dried blood flaked around the suckers.
Her breath came in short gasps as a scream tried to claw its way up her throat. She found the strength to ask, “Who are you?”
“I am Moander,” said the thing that was Akabar, “the most important being in your world.”
In a smooth, gentle motion he lowered his body into a cross-legged sitting position and waited for his prisoner to stop squirming. Having exhausted herself in a futile effort to pull away from the mound of garbage, Alias finally lay still. She turned her head away from Akabar’s body and kept her eyes squeezed tight. “Oh, gods,” she moaned.
“Just a god, singular,” Moander replied. “The only one that matters. Hold on, you have something stuck to your chin. Let me get it.”
Akabar used the sleeve of his robe to dab at a fleck of garbage near Alias’s mouth. He used too much pressure and pushed her head backward into the spongy bed of compost. It was as though he were unaware of his own strength.
“There. Much better. Now we can talk.”
“You’re not Akabar,” Alias whispered, still trying to convince herself, but not wanting to believe it.
“Not really, no, but I’m all the Akabar you’re going to get for a while. Might as well make the best of him. By rights, he should have died of fear, being the first human in this millennium to behold my godliness. How he survived I’ll never know. But that kind of luck shouldn’t be tampered with, so I left his body in better shape than the others. Look.”
Alias felt shambling footsteps through the boggy ground and looked past Akabar’s body at his companions. One’s neck was ripped open, and his face was pale and ghostly without its lifeblood. The other had no face at all, only a slab of pummeled, bloody meat. Both had tendrils rigged around their bodies, moving them like puppets.