Кейт Новак - Song of the Saurials

“And then you screamed,” Dragonbait interjected.

“Yes!” Alias exclaimed, suddenly remembering what had made her scream out in fear. “Nameless is in terrible danger! We must find him before it’s too late! Moander is trying to turn him into one of its minions!”

Olive shifted in her sleep from one uncomfortable position to another. Somewhere far overhead, birds started to chirp loudly. Olive came half awake, but from the back of her mind came a reminder that she didn’t want to be awake, so she kept her eyes closed and ignored the birds. A beam of sunlight struck her face. Olive drew her hood up over her eyes. Then her stomach rumbled.

“Damn!” the halfling grumbled. She glared up angrily at the well shaft overhead, which taunted her with its inaccessibility. If only it had been nearer a wall, they could escape. She was experienced at climbing walls. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hang from ceilings, and the well came out in the center of the ceiling. She sat up and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

“Stupid well!” she muttered, rummaging through her knapsack. There wasn’t any fruit left. She and Finder had finished it off last night. Buried in the bottom of the knapsack, she found three stale sweet rolls. She left two for the bard and took one for herself, nibbling at it slowly as she studied the excavation Finder had begun last night.

The bard had climbed to the top of the passageway wall, where he had dug into the dirt and pounded at the stone with Olive’s broken shovel until he’d created a second shaft in the ceiling. It was all of four feet deep. He’d finally slipped down from the wall, frustrated and exhausted. In the morning light, Olive judged the old well shaft to be at least fifty feet deep. She estimated it would take about a week for one man and a halfling to dig that far straight up. Finder was trying to angle his shaft toward the well shaft, hoping to connect with it so they could climb out the rest of the way through the well. Since the well shaft was only twenty feet from Finder’s shaft, digging to it should only take days … days without water or food.

Olive crept over to the corner where Finder lay sleeping. He slept like the dead, heavy and still. Asleep, the power of his voice and the animation of his face were not apparent, and he looked far older. Once he’d been lord of the ruined manor house somewhere above them, commanding the respect of his peers and the worship of his apprentices. Now he was curled up like a corpse, buried alive by his own magical horn.

Olive studied his face and hands carefully. There were no signs of vegetation growing out of his ears or his wrists. There was no hint of green in his skin. Maybe Finder had been right and his clothing had protected him from whatever had burst out of the burr.

Something clattered in the passage behind Olive. The halfling swung around with her dagger drawn. Pebbles were rolling from the top of the fresh wall of dirt created when Olive had collapsed the ceiling. Something was shifting inside the pile.

Olive knelt beside the bard and shook his shoulder frantically. “Finder!” she whined.

Finder groaned and looked up groggily at the halfling. “Go ’way,” he growled.

“Finder, something’s trying to get in by digging through the cave-in!” Olive whispered urgently.

The bard sat up and reached for Olive’s sword, which he’d been using as a dagger.

A large rock tumbled down the pile, and a muck-encrusted vine as thick as Olive’s arm slithered out from where the rock had been. It rose up like an angry snake, and they could see that there was a mouth at its tip—a lipless maw full of rows of sharp fangs. Olive had seen just such a growth before on Moander’s body in the Realms.

“Nameless,” the mouth called out. It spoke in the same grating, high-pitched voice as Xaran.

Finder rose to his feet and approached the vine carefully. “Is that you, Xaran?” he asked, halting a few feet from the mouth.

The vine twisted so that the mouth faced the bard. “You will do Moander’s bidding whether you choose to or not. It is only a matter of time,” the vine mouth said.

“You are mistaken,” Finder said heatedly. “Moander tried to pervert my singer. I will never deal with the Darkbringer.”

“In time, you will return even your precious singer to Moander,” the vine mouth said.

“You can go to hell!” Finder snarled. He slashed out with Olive’s sword and sliced the mouth off the end of the vine. The vine whipped around his sword arm. Finder tried to pull it loose with his other hand, but twinelike tendrils flared out from the vine and lashed his hands together at the wrists.

Olive leaped forward, slashing with her dagger, and hacked through the vine near where it came out of the pile of rubble. What was left of the vine retreated back into the debris. The tendrils wrapped around Finder’s arms went limp, but Olive had to help the bard free himself from them.

“Well, that was heartening,” Finder said glibly.

“What was heartening?” Olive asked incredulously. “That Xaran is still alive waiting to grab you and turn you into a vegetable?”

“No,” Finder said. “what was heartening was that Xaran used a tendril to slither in here, instead of simply disintegrating this pile of rubble. It must have injured its disintegrating eye.”

“Great. Since you stabbed its central eye, now it has only nine more to use on us,” Olive said.

“Eight. The eye that charms beasts will be useless against us,” Finder reminded the halfling. “And I imagine both of us have the will to resist the eye that causes sleep.”

“Oh … now I feel better,” Olive said sarcastically. “There are only seven ways left for it to kill or capture me.”

“Xaran doesn’t have any hands to dig himself out, but we do,” Finder said.

“But Xaran can put out another tendril and strangle us in our sleep,” Olive protested.

“We’ll just have to keep watch.”

Olive heard a shout, as if from far away. She silenced the bard with a wave of her hand and listened hard. In a few seconds, there was another shout.

“Orcs!” the halfling said in panic. “There are still orcs alive out there! They’ll dig Xaran out, then come in after us! Then what?”

“A good question,” the bard muttered. “A good question indeed.”

The Mouth of Moander peered into her scrying pool at the Nameless Bard and his halfling companion. It was only a matter of time before they were recaptured, but Moander didn’t allow her to take her eyes off them. Last night, the high priestess had felt a rare moment of pleasure and hope when the bard’s dagger had survived Xaran’s disintegration ray and destroyed the beholder’s central eye, and she had dared to gloat over her master’s setback when the bard had felled the orcs and ruined their warren with his magical horn. Now the evil god kept the priestess’s eyes fixed on the bard, savoring her fresh despair.

Coral wished fervently that she was standing at the top of the well with a rope to help the bard escape. Since the priestess had been unable to scry Akabar this morning, presumably because he’d rejoined the protected Alias, Moander was now relying on Nameless to locate the Turmishman. Without Nameless’s help, the search for Akabar could go on far too long, increasing the risk that someone would find the hiding place of the god’s new body, perhaps even someone with power enough to destroy the body and free the possessed saurials.

Moander forced Coral to speak the very words it used to taunt her. “Even if the bard could fly out of that trap, he cannot escape the Darkbringer now. The seeds of possession grow in him,” the god declared through Coral’s mouth.

“No!” Coral insisted. “Xaran’s spores exploded hours ago, and the bard still shows no signs of possession. He has resisted your evil seeds.”