I stared at it, not really looking at what it was at the moment, but more studying how it was changing constantly. It was as if there was always a part of it moving, morphing into the next character. The hair shifted, the skin changed, the arms lengthened, nothing really staying complete for more than a few seconds before starting to change into the next shape or color. Its voice, its chair, its eyes all changed as well. That really impressed me. When I did a disguise spell, I could do clothing and size and shape, but never the quality of the eyes. From this Shifter’s eyes it looked as if it was actually fifty or a hundred different beings all melding together. For all I knew, it was. I wanted to ask it how it did what it did, but then remembered my lips were again sealed.
“Ten percent!” Aahz said through his teeth, his voice barely under control.
“On top of the first five percent, bringing the total to fifteen percent.”
I thought I could see a blood vessel in Aahz’s neck trying to break out from under the green scales. Any moment Tanda was going to have to seal his mouth as well, from the looks of it. I wanted to tell the Shifter how greedy it was being, but luckily I couldn’t.
“No,” Tanda said. “We will give you another five percent, and five percent more for each time we require your help in this journey, but not one bit above that.”
The Shifter had become a tall creature with a very thin face and hundreds of tiny teeth crammed into a very ugly mouth. And at that moment the mouth smiled, or at least did something I thought was a smile.