Tak

The Conjuration - Part 5

     "I have cast a Cage spell around you," explained the wizard. "It will protect you from the spirit I am about to conjure. Only a minor spirit. A puck. Something I can easily conjure on my own, but quite capable of gobbling you up if the Cage spell fails. You may nod once to show you understand this."

     Tak nodded, his forehead beaded with nervous sweat. He thought seriously about running, of getting the hell out of there before his master could raise the spirit. He had no doubt, though, that Molos Gomm could strike him down before he could reach the stairs, and having demonstrated his unreliability the old wizard might well end his life there and then. A small flame of pride began to burn inside him. He'd pass this bloody test! He'd show him! Besides, after all the hard work of teaching him, he couldn't believe he'd put him in a position in which he had no chance of survival. Having put so much into him, Molos Gomm would want a return on that investment; a long career as a valuable assistant. He stayed put, therefore, while Molos Gomm moved away and began the casting of another spell.

     First he created another magic cage. A larger one thirty feet across that enclosed Tak and the centre of the room. This one was more robust, and Molos Gomm explained that it would be impassible to Tak as well as the spirit. If his personal cage failed, he would be trapped in with the creature. He then spent another few minutes describing what the thing would do to him. How other victims had clawed their own faces off or had the flesh flayed from their bones, or been turned inside out, and how some of the less fortunate had still been alive when the fiend had finished with them and returned to its own dimension.

     "I saw a young man once," he said conversationally, as if discussing the weather. "About your age. Tried dabbling in a bit of conjuration but failed to take sufficient precautions with his personal protection. When I found him, he'd been opened up like a rat on a dissecting table. I could see his heart beating inside the gaping ruin of his ribcage. He begged us to kill him, but my master (did I mention this was during my apprentice days?) made me watch him for half an hour until he died naturally. Most important lesson old Claff ever taught me. Oh well, can't stand here chatting all day."

     He began the casting of the summoning spell, while Tak shivered with terror, aware that even a muscle twitch could leave him helpless and exposed. He knew the story had been made up. A man simply couldn't live, injured the way he'd described. He'd been trying to scare him, to see if fear alone could break his self control. It had terrified him nevertheless, but it also made him angry and even more determined to pass this test. I'll show him! he vowed silently. I'll show him he can't scare me with horror stories!

     Molos Gomm had lit several candles and one of the braziers and was now sprinkling a white powder into the flames, generating the pungent smell of burning rubber and thick, black smoke that coiled near the ceiling. He then began intoning long, terrible words of magic, each of which made the flames leap and dance. The air in the middle of the room began to shimmer and ripple like water. There was a sound like ripping cloth, and suddenly there was something there. Something so horrible that the mere sight of it almost made Tak cry out and stumble away in terror.

     It was basically humanoid. The general arrangement of features and limbs was that of all the intelligent mammalian races inhabiting the island continent of Garon, but it was distorted and deformed worse than any of the aborted fetuses stored in bottles of alcohol in Molos Gomm's divination laboratory. It was what one of those stillborn monsters might have looked like, perhaps, if, by some godless miracle, it had lived and grown to adulthood.

     Its upper body was strong and well formed, except for the hands that were little more than twisted hooks of gristle and bone bearing dirty yellow nails as long and sharp as daggers. The legs, though, were shrunken and twisted. So puny and weak that the creature should not have been able to stand. Somehow it did stand, though.  It not only stood but capered back and forth across the room until it bumped into one or other of the room's containment spells. The head was bald and bulbous, more swollen on one side than the other so that the facial features were pushed over. One hideous yellow eye was almost hidden beneath a protruding brow ridge, while the other bulged the size of a tennis ball but blind and sightless, the tiny pupil leaking a thin dribble of pus. The nose was a gaping hole in the front of its face and saliva drooled idiotically from the slack, toothless mouth.