The lich stood smiling down at the Knights, as the darkly handsome man was doing now. Florin caught sight of a ring on the man's finger, and he tried to fix the device on it-an M with a flaring left leg and a right leg that curled right around to form a ring-in his memory for later.
If there was a later.
"So much for my little jaunts here to explore and plunder this place," the man drawled, still regarding the Knights with a sneer. "I believe I've found almost everything, as it happens. Enjoy your deaths."
He was suddenly not there.
The groaning, feebly crawling Knights faced the lich across a bare and empty expanse of floor.
The lich shuffled forward, grounding its staff from time to time in unhurried ease, to peer at the results of its spell. Faint rattling and rasping sounds arose as it hummed a merry tune-or tried to-and came forward, the rings on its bony fingers winking with bright and quickening glows.
Florin tried to rise, but he couldn't. He collapsed beside Islif. Wisps of smoke rose from her limbs. Jhessail lay sprawled and silent under Semoor's legs, but Pennae seemed to have been shielded from the green flames by the tumbling bodies of the two priests, and she was now rising unharmed from behind them, trying to tug them to their feet.
"Up, holynoses!" she said. "Our time to save everyone's behinds!"
Semoor laughed, a little wildly. "You want us to defeat that?"
"No, I want you to die trying!" Pennae snarled. "Look at it this way: Lord Manshoon has gone, so you've just got one mad, gone-beyond-dead archwizard to deal with, not two of them!"
"M-Manshoon?" Doust stammered. "As in Zhentil Keep?"
"Yes. Saw him once across a crowded street and remembered that voice and those looks. Now think of some spells!"
"Before you ask," Semoor told her, "no, we don't know how to teleport like Manshoon did."
"Well then," Pennae said, "we won't be able to get out of this place that way."
Florin and Islif were struggling to rise again, and behind them, Jhessail-reeling about unsteadily in a real daze-was on her feet.
Pennae gave them all a tight smile, whisked her dagger behind her back, and strolled forward to meet the lich.
"I don't suppose," she asked, "you could direcr us poor lost travelers out of this palace, Lord?"
In reply, the lich threw back its skull-head and cackled, then pointed with a finger that flared with ruby radiance as the ring on it unleashed its power. Florin shrank down into something brown and hairy and snorting.
Or rather, snoting. A fat, hairy boar, or boar piglet, or whatever young boars were called. Pennae knew she should have been trying to leap at the lich or at least get past it and try to flee, but she couldn't help staring.
Florin had a long snout and was lying contentedly on the floor, loudly asleep. He was about the size of a small hunting dog that had somehow swallowed a handkeg of ale whole.
As Pennae stared, Islif fought her way to her feet… only to shrink right down again, sprouting a snout and long, brown hair and snores of her own.
"Dung and tluining doom!" Pennae whispered, realizing her peril. She whirled to run just as the ruby glow flared again.
Then she was trying to run but was somehow heavy and wet and weak and collapsing into helpless sliding softness, too, and the world went dim. Her attempts to shriek came out as squalling, snorting squalling that… that… that sent all Faerun and its cackling liches away.
The lich tapped its staff on the floor in a way that seemed somehow satisfied, then shuffled forward again.
Straight for Jhessail. It reached out a long and skeletal arm toward her. "My lady," it said, "it has been so long. It seems years since I felt your warm and yielding eagerness, your ardent mouth upon mine. Come to me now! Come."
The red-haired mage backed away in horror.
Silent in their own terror, hardly daring to move, Doust and Semoor exchanged helpless glances.
Jhessail's shoulders met the wall. She had nowhere left to go.
The lich advanced.
The fire answers back As they go through lives so bitter There are those who faith do lack Worship they may soon deem fitter When altar-fire answers back
Two priests of Bane conversed in the temple courtyard in Zhentil Keep.
"Done so soon? They haven't much backbone, these priestesses of Sune! All that warm and all-conquering love a poor shield against true pain, eh?"
"Done, hah! The whip broke!" The Tyrant-har of Bane held up his ruined lash for inspection. What should have been its upper third dangled uselessly, hanging by the merest thread. "A bare backside did that! Someone's been selling us shoddy work, to be sure!"
His superior frowned. "You only brought one lash?"
"Far from it. I broke the other three earlier, one by one-and I'm not the strongest arm among us, by a long bowshor! These new 'holier lashes' are naed, utter naed, I tell you!"
The Watchful Hand of Bane nodded. "We'll have to find out who made them, track them down, and exalt them with a fittingly slow and painful death for the greater glory of Bane." He shook his head. "Work, work… never ends, does it? Why, just last-"
No one customarily crossed that temple courtyard in Zhentil Keep except clergy of Bane, so neither of the priests was in the habit of paying much attention to movements around them there.
They never saw the long, gleaming blade racing through the air, all by itself and point-first like an arrow. Speeding out of the shadows, it sliced open their throats so deeply that their heads wobbled on their shoulders before their bodies toppled.
By then, the flying sword Armaukran was far across the square and climbing, trailing a thin ribbon of blood through the twilight, as Horaundoon hurried to find more Zhentarim ro slaughter.
Arrogant priests were easy prey. What was puzzling him was how he was going to manage the slaying of an eye tyrant. Or thirty.
The wall was cold, hard, and smooth behind her shoulder blades. Jhessail drew in a deep breath and closed her eyes, then cast one of the few spells she had left, carefully saying the Weave-words-gibberish, they would seem to most hearers-then the rhyme: "So now let all beholding gazes upon me see, not one Jhessail, but rather three!"
She passed her hands, held vertically, back and forth in front of her so the forming mirror images would appear to shift through each other, and which Jhessail was the real one wouldn't be glaringly obvious to the lich.
Sidestepping back and forth to enhance the confusion, she willed the two false images to move to her righr, then raised her hands to sketch out the elaborate gestures of… a counterfeit, no spell at all. A false magic she hoped might give the lich pause for a moment, as three identical Jhessails worked an impressive-looking magic it couldn't recognize.
Instead, it grinned, brown-gray flesh crumbling away from its skull and falling past its jaws as it did so. "Ah, up to your old tricks! How I love being overwhelmed byyour caresses! Come to me, Mara! Come to your Elmariel now!"
Not waiting for her to obey, it shuffled forward, right past Doust and Semoor. On either side of it but a few paces away, the two priests stood frowning at each other, at a loss as to what to do.
The lich steadily closed the gap between itself and the three anxiously spellweaving Jhessails.
Doust shrugged and soundlessly mouthed the word "Breakbone!"
Semoor shrugged back "why not?" agreement, and they both worked breakbone spells; magics probably far too feeble to affect a lich whose bones were animated and prorected by its own magic, but what else was left to them?