XVI. IN THE DARK
The darkmantles looked just like growths on the cave’s ceiling. Cuatala was the first to distinguish them. She pointed, and the surfaces of one or two seeming stalactites quivered slightly, as if coming to attention. The monsters somehow registered that they’d been seen. They detached themselves from the ceiling and flew toward the party.
Graddick brandished his sword, ready to lunge at the one closest to him–and then went blind. A darkmantle’s similarity to a squid isn’t just its physical likeness. It moves through the air the way a squid propels itself through the water, and in place of ink it has magic.
“I can’t see!” he cried out, thinking he alone was afflicted. A powerful wallop threw him against the cave wall. His sword dangled from his clenched hand. Several tentacles wrapped around his forearms, one lashed his neck, and two more opened his mouth. He dropped to the ground suddenly, planting the pommel of his sword against the cave floor. The abrupt shift brought the darkmantle onto the blade.
“None of us can see,” said Cuatala.
“I’m sure they can” said Ystrien.
Vahaera said nothing. Her silence scared Graddick. “Vaharea–Where are you?” he called out. Then another of the creatures slammed into him, and he found himself wrangling, in the dark, with more flapping and lashing tentacles. The thing wanted to harm him, but he struggled against it heedlessly; he had the confused sense that he was merely plunging through swampy underbrush, that ahead of him, asleep on some muddy, sunlit bank, lay the half-Drow woman. He remembered plunging through the thickets outside Impiltur with his half-siblings, the sister who had died several years later, the brother who had run away because he hated hearing his mother talk about that king. The children hardly knew what to make of the frog eggs that lay everywhere, orange and olive green, in the clear vernal pools. They’d thrown them at each other, poked them, dared one another to step through them with bare feet.
Then the tentacles around Graddick went limp. The magical darkness lifted. Vahaera stood over the unconscious monster and the knight beside it.
“Are they all dead?” panted Graddick. “What happened?”.
“Close enough,” she said. “I took care of this one with a spell. Not a flashy one. A spell that gets into the victim’s head.”
***
The adventurers left the hideout as clueless about the slaves’ marks as they had been. Abel shrugged off their disappointment and advised them to stop asking questions.
“What does it matter now? You have the money. It’s Thayan magic, that’s for sure, and that should tell you all you need to know.”
