Even as some darkness returned to his vision, and glimpses of his spellchamber with it, laced with drifting smoke, there was a fresh burst of brightness, laced with a shattering roar. A tremor shook the room, almost tossing the Master of Ironwind Tower off his feet.
Sparks were flooding forth from that conflagration and dying almost as soon as Throon saw them, only to be supplanted by more motes surging from behind. The motes surged from the widening, angrily glowing maw of what had been his least stable portal, the one he’d planned to gird with at least two more forcebrace spells before using again. Something, no, someowe, using magic as powerful as his own had seized control over that warp-way and was widening it, either to force something gigantic through it or to ensure that something unwilling could be thrust through it, struggling, and not be harmed in the passage.
Throon called on the Vaedren to drink the energies of his spellweb, collapsing it in dangerous haste, because just now, taking the slow, careful, usual way of dismantling the webwork of magics was undoubtedly far more dangerous. Something large and dark was already looming up in the widening maw of the portal, something batwinged and shambling, as large and as gnarl-muscled as an ogre, its dark-rimmed eyes flashing with unfriendly menace, and a writhing forest of what looked like hungry red sucking worms where its belly should be.
Throon had seen such beasts before, both deep in the Underdark and in tomes where a long-ago sage’s odd sense of humor had caused him to label such creatures “ineffable horrors.”
Ineffable, indeed. Hungry and hostile, quite evidently. Already the thing was erupting out of the portal, trembling with the pain of brushing against surging energies in its haste to pounce on the lone Red Wizard standing before it and begin feeding.
The Master of Ironwind Tower calmly lashed it with the raw powers of the collapsing spellweb, searing the beast so that it shuddered and trailed both stinking smoke and fluids leaking from bubbling skin. But it spread its great hands wide to grapple and crush, and continued lumbering toward him.
Throon slashed at it again, unleashing all the spellweb energies in a great burst that momentarily blinded him and hurled his foe away.
Yet when the dazzle faded from his eyes and the last sparks winked out in the air around Throon, the horror still stood, its breast gaping open and most of its tentaclelike sucking intestines dangling in sizzling ruin.
It had been driven against the far wall of the room with some force… but now peeled itself away from those stones with an audible sucking sound, leaving patches of scorched hide behind, and came lumbering toward him again.
* * * * *
“Not so swift, Throon,” Rundarvas Thaael snarled into his scrying orb, baring his teeth in an unlovely smile. “You’ll not escape that easily.”
He turned to a third portal, now gaping open under the combined efforts of three sweating apprentices and carefully cast a spell through it that consumed two tiny vials of liquid. The first to wink out of existence contained some of the purple-green ichor of the ineffable horror, but the second was one he’d treasured for years, containing as it did four precious drops of blood spilled long ago by a certain young and ambitious Red Wizard by the name of Maelarkh Throon.
“Let what afflicts one afflict the other,” he murmured, turning back to his orb to see if the bloodlink had worked. The next damage the Master of Ironwind Tower dealt to the Underdark monster should also be suffered by Throon himself. Or to put it another way, this should be good…
* * * * *
Dust both rained and reigned in the halls and tharms of Ironwind Tower. The screams had ended, but curses could still be heard amid the rebounding echoes of the turret-shaking blasts that had raised the blinding cloak of dust through whose gloom many folk were scurrying.
Most of them were servants busily fleeing out and down, seeking the lower shauls, but a handful were Throon’s apprentices.
They came rushing the other way, hurrying to the Master’s spellchamber.
Not one of them really expected to reach it in time.
* * * * *
Maelarkh Throon cursed as he felt his hands begin to boil. The hulking horror was lurching forward at him despite its obvious pain and this new pain of his own could mean only one thing. Some of the Art lashing and surging around the riven chamber must be a bloodlink spell, cast from afar on him.
To bind him to the monster now shambling forward to slay him, no doubt, so that any harm he dealt it would also be visited on him.
That left him with only his hands, and any knife he could snatch, against its great reach and corded muscles. Which meant that the Master of Ironwind Tower would die in agony, sucked bloodless, long before the larger, stronger ineffable horror perished.
Already his arms were growing heavy, and his tongue thickening. The Vaedren burned on Maelarkh’s wrist, and with a hiss of satisfaction he sank into that pain, seized on it, and rode it down into the tireless blood-red throb of linked enchantments…
If Thaael had cast the bloodlink using old Omslauvur’s incantation, it could be shattered thus…
The Vaedren’s surge was as fierce as he could make it; the bloodlink was already heavy upon him. For more than a moment Maelarkh Throon staggered blindly through a wild chaos of bursting radiances, sickening surges, and ear-clawing shrieks as enchantments sliced at each other, crashed into entanglements, bit, melted, sheared, and spilled Art wildly in all directions.
His limbs were heavier, his shoulders broader, and his balance different. Maelarkh Throon tried to curse, but found that his voice had become deep and somehow liquid.
He’d twisted the forming bloodlink, not smashed the spell—so while there was no link between the ineffable horror and himself, there was also no longer any difference in their shapes.
The Vaedren on his wrist was the only way any of his apprentices could recognize the Master of Ironwind Tower now. From batwings to writhing intestines, Maelarkh Throon was every lumbering inch an ineffable horror.
* * * * *
“Hrast!” Rundarvas Thaael slammed his fist down on the spellbook floating before him, sending it swooping away in a tinkling of clashing metal pages to crash into the bookshelf it had come from. “How did he do that? Surely that silly bracelet can’t—”
He threw up his hands to wave away the rest of his useless question, whirled around in a vicious whirring of robes, and snapped to his apprentices, “You and you—through the portals! Get into Throon’s spellchamber and slaughter both beasts. It matters nothing to me if you can see that wristlet clearly on one of them and not the other. He may be able to trade places with the Underdark creature! Go!”
Though Ahraul was one of the most able apprentices of Thaaeltor, his master hadn’t ordered him to plunge through a warp-way into Ironwind. He itched to do so, to slay then plunder. Yet he knew better than to utter a sound just now— as Rundarvas Thaael whirled around, paunch wobbling, and said gleefully, “Be ready. I shall watch what befalls in Ironwind—and you shall be my lightning, striking in a trice at my command!”
Ahraul inclined his head in a solemn nod, but Thaael had already spun back to stare into his scrying orb, so as not to miss an instant more. He was leaning forward like a hunting beast straining at the leash, hungry to pounce and plunder Ironwind of spellbooks and the like, the moment battle was done. A moment later, a sound arose from deep in his throat.
The Master of Thaaeltor had started to growl.
The horror was coming for him, seared chest and all.
Maelarkh Throon did not stay to greet it. Hastening across the room as swiftly as his unfamiliar body allowed him, the Red Wizard touched a certain sequence of widely separated tomes, ignoring the flaring radiances of magic that arose angrily from them, and stepped back as a section of shelving flung itself open, swinging wide like a door.