The Magehound   ::   Каннингем Элейн

This power was his to command until the day he died, so by this reasoning the sigil should burn a glowing red shadow of itself onto the parchment

But it did not. Whatever magic the medallion had once held was long gone.

Zilgorn rocked back on his heels and considered this. Chalzaster had no patience for anything mundane or magic-dead, so every person with him had surely been a wizard, or possibly a cleric. All had died quickly, according to the power they held: most of them in the act of attacking, the great Chalzaster in mid-spell. But the elf woman, a creature whose essence and body and soul were fashioned of magic as surely as a rainbow was made of light, had been drained so quickly that she had left nothing but a transparent, profoundly empty image. Zilgorn had never heard of such a thing, but he knew death well-well enough to see his own death foretold by the bones of Chalzaster, and his pretensions of magical power mocked by the elf's frozen ghost.

The necromancer stiffened. "Away from here! Flee this place at once!"

The panic in his voice lent wings to the other men's feet. They charged from the ruined temple and stumbled frantically down the narrow path.

They pulled up short at the water's edge, eyeing the dark, simmering surface as they struggled to calm their frenzied breathing and quiet their pounding hearts.

Quiet.

It occurred to Zilgorn suddenly that the swamp had become eerily silent At twilight, the swamp usually seethed with life, but no crocodiles roared from the shallows, no birds shrieked or twittered in the canopy, no monkeys scolded. Even the insects had stopped humming. The swamp itself seemed to be huddled down, wary and watchful.

Then a terrible thrumming roar ripped through the air, at once both as deep as thunder and as shrill as a falcon's cry. Zilgorn, dazed and defeated though he was, thought he heard a dissonant chorus of lost voices reverberating through the inhuman roar. One of those voices he knew well.

The necromancer squared his shoulders and prepared to join Chalzaster in whatever afterlife their efforts had earned them. He summoned a lightning sphere, the most powerful spell left to him, suspecting that magic would act as a lure and make his end quicker. That wasn't cowardice, he assured himself. Didn't Chalzaster die on his feet, ready to hurl one last spell?

But the magical weapon quickly dissipated, fizzling in Zilgorn’s hands like a campfire in a monsoon. He hardly noticed, for his eyes were fixed on the creature that rose slowly, silently from the dark water.

The creature's face was enormous, hideous beyond words, the sort of visage that surely haunted the nightmares of demons. The face was framed by huge elf ears that were not only pointed, but also barbed. Its massive skull was covered not by hair, but by a tangle of writhing, snapping eels. Black as obsidian were its eyes, and they showed no intelligence that Zilgorn could understand, they were as soulless and single-minded as a shark's. As the creature waded toward shore, it revealed a muscled body shaped roughly like that of a man, but utterly devoid of beauty. Each sinew was corded like a drawn bow, and its gut was sharply concave beneath the massive chest. Four arms, each ending in grasping talons, reached toward Zilgorn.

"A-a laraken," he breathed, though in truth the monster was larger and mightier than any measure Zilgorn knew of such creatures. The approach of death lent its own clarity, and Zilgorn recognized the monster as a kindred spirit: a creature of power and hunger. He remembered all that he had done over the years and understood that this was the death he had earned. Nothing in all of Halruaa could have frightened him more than that knowledge.

Zilgorn had seen death in all its forms, and he had dealt death in manners that stretched the bounds of normal possibility. He had summoned and commanded creatures so fearful that a glimpse of them would stop most men's hearts and turn a warrior's bowels to water. But the necromancer could do nothing to stop the screams that tore from his throat.

Tore from his throat! Zilgorn's head snapped back, forced by an unseen power as he felt his voice, the instrument of his magic, wrenching loose. The pain seared through him and was gone, leaving him empty and mute. Instinctively he lunged forward, as if to seize back his voice, and he watched in horror as his outstretched hands withered to skin-shrouded bones.

He wanted to flee, but his limbs would no longer obey his will. Power and life flowed out of him like blood from a mortal wound. The laraken, which had reached the river-bank and loomed over them at twice the height of a man, slowly began to gain flesh. Its sunken belly swelled as it drained the magical essence of the wizard Zilgorn and the dying men behind him.

The proud necromancer's last thought was one of relief, for without a voice, he could not die screaming, and there was no one to witness his final defeat.

He was wrong on both counts.

In a tower room that overlooked Halruaa's western mountains, a place far from the Swamp of Akhlaur, an elf woman bent over a low, round scrying bowl. The death of Zilgorn played out before her in all its detail, and her sharp ears caught the new note in the laraken's roar: the necromancer's trained voice, raised in a final keening shriek of pain and terror.

When the magical vision ended, the elf woman leaned back and brushed a glossy green curl from her face. She glanced at the wemic, a lion-like centaur, who crouched in watchful silence by her side.

Neither elves nor wemics were common in Halruaa, and together they were as oddly matched as any two companions in all the land. Kiva, the elf woman, was of wild elf blood, and her coloring was common among forest folk in the southern lands. Her abundant hair was deep green in hue and her skin a rich coppery shade. Her face was beautiful but disturbing, for there was no gentleness in its sharp lines, and her eyes were as golden and enigmatic as a cat's. She was resplendent in a gown of yellow silk and overdress of gold-embroidered green. Emeralds flashed on her fingers and at her throat. The wemic, in sharp contract, was clad only in his own tawny hide. He was a massive creature, with the lower body of a lion and the brawny, golden-skinned torso of a man. A thick mane of black hair fell to his shoulders, and his eyes, like the elf woman's, were a feline shade of amber. His only ornaments were the ruby earring fastened in one leonine ear and the massive broadsword slung over his shoulder.

"Zilgorn was the best of the lot," Kiva mused in a singularly clear, bell-like voice. "I thought he'd make a better showing for himself.