Heh-hah!
Right. Enough glee. Drathar crouched and went back to peering hard through the tangle of trees. In the eyeblinking aftermath of his spell, with the fire in the distant trees dying down, it was getting harder and harder to see. He doubted he'd slain Florin or the other man. His spell had struck just short, hurling them away rather than shattering them. Unless a helpful tree had done those shatterings for him when they'd been flung against it…
Not something he could trust in. He crouched, sinking into uncertainty again. Should he just blast away and so fell Boarblade and his men along with the Knights? Or save his spells to defend himself and leave Boarblade's men be, to help him do his work for him?
Would they help him? Or was he watching himself trade the Knights for new and stronger foes, who'd have the Pendant of Ashaba and be just as determined to defend it?
Drathar shook his head again. And some folk thought Zhentarim spent all their days preening and flogging slaves and spellhurling…
Holy Fist, when was the last time he'd flogged a slave?
In his fearful determination to get out of her reach, the man she'd wounded hadn't chosen an easy way up the cliff. Pennae knew the face she'd just climbed, and she was unhurt to boot. She swarmed up the weathered stones, tasting the iron tang of her foe's blood in her mouth as she bore the dagger between her clenched teeth. She was certain she'd passed him during her ascent, with quite some time to spare.
More than time enough to plant that dagger in the turf, pluck up two rocks of the right size from among the many strewn about atop the cliff, move to just the right spot, and wait.
Still and silent in the night, she hid in the darkness beyond the fading firelight splashing leaping teflections off the cliff face. The man never saw her until the first stone, flung full in his face, broke his jaw and left him stunned, just clinging to the weathered stone and fighting to try to think.
"B-Boaiblade," he mumbled, aftet a moment, remembering his own name with some difficulty as he stared up into the merciless smile of the beautiful woman who'd crouched down to face him.
Then her second stone slammed into his nose, shattering it; the ruptured hargaunt hissed wildly in pain and erupted in oily, foul-smelling liquid all over his face-and Telgarth Boarblade lost his hold.
His despairing cry was very short. It wasn't a particularly tall cliff. But with nothing but very hard rocks awaiting him at the bottom, and his head reaching them first, it didn't have to be.
That cry ended abruptly. Pennae looked down at the sprawled, broken figure in smiling satisfaction.
Apprehension rose in her a moment later when she saw something dark and amorphous and leathery slither away from the man's face and flow away across the tocks, rippling and creeping.
Doust Sulwood darted into view, slithering down the scree slope from the ledge in some haste. He caught up to the eerie thing and battered it enthusiastically with his mace until it flapped wildly and stopped moving. Then he emptied an unlit lantern over it-and lit the dripping mess on fire.
Watching it sizzle wetly amid the flames, Pennae's smile returned.
"Want to see who you're killing?" Semoor called from what sounded like the safety of the ledge. Stlarning holynoses.
"Yes!" Dauntless bellowed back, seeing Florin staggeting gtimly back to join him. The Harper was struggling to stand somewhere farthet off-which left a lone otnrion of the Putple Dtagons, just now, to battle these mysterious men whose faces seemed to shift and even melt as they swung theit blades.
One of them was down, sliced open by the Harper earlier, and another was fighting an unsteady battle to stand up. He'd been caught in the same spell-blast that had flung Florin and the Harper over yonder.
Which still left two-two who were clearly visible as Semoor's spell banished night, crearing a sphere of bright sunlight.
Unfortunately, the two melt-faces were moving well apart so as ro come at Dauntless from sharply opposing sides at the same time. Their swords, daggers, and reeth all gleamed. They wore identical merciless smiles.
"Gah," the Harper groaned from somewhere behind Dauntless. "This light! It's like fighting on a stage in some Swotd Coast city theater!"
"We'll be… right with you," Florin gasped, reeling, from even closer at hand.
"Worry not," Dauntless called back over his shoulder. "There are only two, after all."
Florin lurched past him, swinging his sword for balance. One of the melting-faced men mistook the ranger's groggy state for clumsiness and went for an easy lunge to the vitals.
The man blinked as Florin was somehow-and quite suddenly- nowhere near the sword reaching for him. Rather, he was past the lunging man and aiming a cut at the back of an undefended knee on his way on to cross swords with the other melt-face.
That cut landed, and the knee's owner crashed to the ground, shoulders first. Winded, he was still struggling for breath when the sharpest knife Dauntless owned sliced through the shapeless thing on his face, which was rearing up like a snake-and slashed it right off his face.
Shorn of his nose, the man screamed. So did the shapeless thing on the ground beside him. Spurting gore and squalling, it had been severed into two pieces. Both of them reared up in energetic undulations, seeking to get away as swiftly as possible.
The Harper bent and deftly diced both into many small, wriggling fragments. "These should be burned," he said. "I've never seen them before, but I think I know what they are. Hrasted if I can remember the name, though. They shapechange."
"Ah," Dauntless said as he cut the fallen man's throat. In the same movement he turned to menace the last of the melting-faced men. "Useful to know. Can they change themselves into hard metal armor, or do swords still work on them?"
Florin was striking a series of ringing blows against the desperate parries of that last man, who was backing away as he saw that he now stood alone. His dazed and reeling fellow blade had just been slain by the Harper-who was now carefully butchering the hargaunt that he'd just sliced away from the dead face it was clinging to.
"Mercy!" the last melting-faced man ctied suddenly. "I am Glays Tarnmantle and can offer twenty thousand golden lions of the realm in return for my life! I-"
The masklike, drooping thing on the man's face flowed with sudden urgency, streaming into his nose and mouth.
Glays struggled to shout something through its surging, but his nose was swelling up, stuffed full. His mouth was already distended into a grotesque, froglike shape, and as he shuddered and clawed at the shapeless thing, his face went slowly reddish-purple.
It was almost black by the time he staggered, then teeled, eyes bulging.
He fell headlong, crashing down to trampled forest turf. The sword clattered from his hand, and he lay still. The thing that had choked him flowed out onto the ground, dark and shapeless and menacing.
"Hooh," Dalonder Ree said, eyeing the corpse. "It seems something was in a real hurry to collect that gold. We should burn that something."
"When we're done here," Florin said, pointing.
A large-boned skeleton was striding out of the night at them. It plucked up a fallen sword, hefted it, and then swung it with a flourish, still walking their way.
Dauntless sighed. "Some nights, you wonder what else the forest can spit up to entertain you."
Hefting his own sword, he strode to meet the skeleton.
In the chamber of scrying, everyone looked like a ghost.
Ot so the saying went, established years ago by war wizards after their first experience of seeing the glow of over two dozen scrying spheres lighting all faces eerily from beneath.