Murtagh

—Nasuada lay before him, chained to the ashen slab in the Hall of the Soothsayer, even as the prisoners had been held upon the altar in Nal Gorgoth. The pleading in her eyes was as loud as any speech, but they each had their roles to play, and he could not help her. The king commanded, and he obeyed, and she suffered because of it. They all suffered.

“No, no, no,” Murtagh muttered. He banged the rim of his shield against his forehead. The impact helped dispel the images still playing behind his eyes.

The tunnel opened up into yet another cave. As with so many of them, it was lit by slime, and ranks of purple-capped mushrooms edged a small pond far to his right. Rings spread across the surface of the water, as if something had just jumped into—or out of—the pond.

A thicket of larger mushrooms stood before him, like so many stunted, unwholesome trees.

As he picked his way between the woody stems, a sharp chittering caught his ear. He stalked quietly between the mushrooms and soon saw…an odd shape crouched over the body of a fallen cultist.

As the red glow from the werelight touched the creature, it twisted to look at him with the face of a nightmare. A glistening black tongue as long and thick as his arm lolled from narrow, shrewish jaws, which were too thin to entirely contain the muscle. Loose, sagging skin as pink and pale as a piglet—bare of fur, save for an occasional white bristle sprouting from warty growths—hung in repulsive wrinkles over protruding bones. From the narrow skull stared lidless eyes no bigger than a fish egg and seemingly too sensitive to bear the soft glow of the werelight, for the creature squinted and recoiled as if in pain. Most disturbing of all were the beast’s front paws, or rather…hands. It had long, humanlike fingers with broken, grime-packed nails smeared with the blood of the dead cultist, and the fingers opened and closed as if to squeeze the life from another unfortunate victim. Dragging behind the beast was a thick rope of a tail, as limp as a dead earthworm.

Revulsion filled Murtagh. The creature—the fingerrat, as he thought of it—seemed wrong in a fundamental manner, as if its very existence were a perversion of all that was good and right.

He reached out to the fingerrat’s mind. What he discovered only increased his aversion: a gnawing hunger dominated the animal’s consciousness, and all it seemed to think about was the pleasure of eating the warm man-flesh below it and its anger at being interrupted. The others would be coming soon, and—

Others?

More chittering sounded in the shadows. A horde of pale fingerrats crept closer, feeling their way with their long fingers, their tails sliding across the cave floor like so many scaleless snakes.

The creature squatting over the corpse uttered a descending moan—Murtagh recognized the cry as one of the many sounds he’d heard filtering through the underground complex—and it returned to tearing at the body, using its tongue to flense skin and muscle from the man’s chest.

“Begone with you, foul creature!” Murtagh shouted, and sprang forward, waving Zar’roc.

The fingerrat shrieked like a pained infant as it cowered. Then it hissed, showing rows of translucent needlelike teeth, and—with shocking speed and agility—jumped toward Murtagh’s throat.

He fell back and slashed the air in front of him, hoping to hit the creature.

Zar’roc struck, but Murtagh’s edge alignment was off, and the hilt twisted in his hand, and he almost dropped the sword.

He staggered as the fingerrat crashed into him and hot blood gushed over his corselet of mail. Teeth snapped at his throat, stopped only by his wards. Then he threw the creature off, and it fell to the ground, nearly cut in half, squalling and thrashing in its death throes.

The stench of offal made him gag. No help from his spells there.

The squeals of the wounded beast did nothing to deter its approaching kin. They continued to crawl closer through the mushroom thicket while uttering harsh laughing sounds that raised the hair on Murtagh’s neck. Something seemed desperately wrong with the creatures, as if they were half mad from living underground, or else so crazed from the constant smoke that they had no sense of self-preservation.

“Don’t do it,” said Murtagh, keeping Zar’roc at the ready. “I’ll kill you all.”

More of the fingerrats appeared out of the darkness. How many were there now? Thirty? Forty? He tried to count, but it was impossible to keep track of any one individual as they moved amongst themselves.

“Naina,” Murtagh said, and the werelight above him flared in intensity until it was so bright, it banished all shadows beneath it.