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arcanist.”
    Eluraunt Malabrak flung up a hand to redouble his personal ward even before he spun around.
    And then froze, puzzled. A lone woman, as gaunt as a staff, barefoot and empty-handed in a nightrobe?
    “Put that down,” she commanded calmly. “It was a gift from Telamont Tanthul—and now it is all I have to remember him by.”
    “The Most H—who are you?”
    Genuinely astonished, Malabrak surreptitiously activated the rings he wore as he set down the half-melted bracer. He’d come to this decaying mage’s tower to seize or steal magic on the orders of the Three, but obeyed them only because to do otherwise would be to walk alone, renouncing all memory of great Thultanthar. He considered himself their equal, if not more, in power; few wizards in Faerûn could hope to stand against him for long.
    “Tabra is my name, and this is my home.”
    The name meant nothing to Malabrak, so he shrugged.
    “I do not recall inviting you here,” she added, lurching a step closer. Into the full light.
    The arcanist felt his mouth tighten in disgust. She’d been disfigured by torture, her body a mass of protruding scars, so deformed that her right eye rose above the other, her head twisted out of shape. One breast was higher, and her hips tilted at the opposite angle so that her lower breast sat just above. She was almost impossibly gaunt, as thin as a maltreated slave. Yet her face, despite its twisted shape, was beautiful. Beautiful and arresting in its sadness. Grief rode her.
    “You didn’t,” Malabrak told her scornfully, “but I don’t think I need your invitation.” He looked her up and down, lip curling. “I doubt you receive many.”
    The disfigured woman smiled bitterly—and Malabrak felt and heard the faint, high-pitched tinkling sigh of his wards falling away.
    He gasped, and let fly with all the blasting might of his readied rings, holding nothing back. Anyone who could do that to his war—
    His own magics rebounded off something unseen and came roaring right back at him, so swiftly that he hadn’t time to dodge or do anything before he was snatched off his feet and flung the length of the room, back a long way to where a distant back wall was waiting for him.
    He struck it with a thunderous crash that broke bones and drove all the wind out of him. As he writhed, stunned, the woman walked slowly toward him, lurching at every step, her face impassive.
    Malabrak fought to work the swift and simple spell that would whisk him away from this place, returning him to—
    He managed it, but all that happened was that his limbs quivered, the room seemed to dance sideways for a moment, and … he was still against the wall, the real pain beginning now, pinned in place.
    “W-who are you?” he managed to gasp, tasting blood. By his last word, it was dripping from his chin.
    The woman came to a stop in front of him. “I,” she replied, “am the last apprentice of Ioulaum. You Thultanthans captured me and tortured me, because your Most High desired to learn Ioulaum’s longevity. I was confined and enslaved, as he invaded—ravaged—my mind time and time again. He learned much, but saw glimpses of what I yet kept from him. So he forced me into stasis when he got too busy, rather than slaying me. I was freed by his death, left with the aches I’d become used to—and one new one.”
    Malabrak shook his head, not wanting to ask what it was, as she lurched still closer.
    “Now,” she told him softly, through that lopsided jaw, “I ache to destroy all arcanists of Thultanthar.”
    “N-no!” Malabrak gasped out, truly frightened for the first time since the day Thultanthar had come crashing down. He’d been on his way back to the city then, to report, and if he’d been just a trifle faster …
    He shivered.
    “You interrupted my snack,” Tabra added, “but I see you have two eyeballs, ripe for the plucking …”
    “ No !” Malabrak screamed, spraying blood.
    That earned him a lopsided smile.