"There it is!" breathed the old fisherman, pointing knobby finger to the churning water off the New Coast peninsula. "The Boil above Itzan Klertal."

Lyim Rhistadt looked over the bow of the small fishing boat to where a swath of sea appeared to boil in a wide, dark, frothing circle. Dead fish and other sea creatures bubbled to the top as if in a stewpot. Since its birth more than three hundred fifty years before, New Sea had roiled here, like an eternal flame, to mark the spot where the evil city once known as Klertal had stood. Lyim had never seen anything like this angry black water, and it fascinated him.

"Take me closer," he ordered the fishermen he'd paid handsomely to ferry him to this locally feared triangle of sea. Lyim's eyes never left the spot where angry black water boiled and churned.

"This is near enough," hissed the sailor's son, a thin lad with a wispy mustache and fly-away hair the color of mouse fur. His eyes grew wide as he saw bloody bits of fish float nearer their small boat. His lips trembled. "We'd best turn back, Pa."

Lyim's left hand stopped the old man as he leaned into the oars to turn the small craft. "I paid you a year's wages to take me to the Boil."

"And that we have done," said the old fisherman, beads of sweat forming on his upper lip. "Any closer, and we'll surely be pulled into the maelstrom."

"If it's a closer look he wants, I say push him in and let him swim," grumbled the man's other son, a surly, suspicious lad with thick, veined forearms. He had strongly opposed his father accepting the job from the first, when the strange, secretive man had approached them on the dock back in the tiny fishing village of Balnakyle.

Lyim's coal-dark eyes pierced the burly son's, saying what his lips did not. I have not searched five long years to let your pitiful fear stop me now. The surly lad drew back to the farthest corner of the dinghy, and still it was not far enough from the shrouded man who hid his right hand.

"You'll take me wherever I say." Lyim turned his back on all three of the fishermen dismissively, mentally measuring the distance to the angrily boiling waters. He could easily swim the distance, and yet it was the principle of the thing. He had paid these fainthearts well.

The boat shifted abruptly. It was too silent behind him. Lyim whirled around to find father and sons, hands outstretched, closing in on him slowly. They froze in the dark shadow of Lyim's gaze.

The mage's left hand reached into his dark shroud and withdrew a small, wrapped cocoon. He didn't hesitate for a heartbeat before locking his eyes on the surly

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son and mumbling the words to the spell that had come to mind. There came one short, high-pitched scream, then a hideous slurping and popping sound. Where once stood a dark-haired human was now a flapping mass of tentacles trying desperately to support a heavy, soft body with bulging eyes. The squid fell against the side of the dinghy, then slipped overboard into the sea.

"Maginus?" yelped the father, leaning overboard with his other son. Both desperately searched the surface of the rippling sea. When Maginus didn't answer, his family drew back from the edge in horror and looked to Lyim's face. The mage sat and calmly crossed his legs.

Lyim derived great pleasure from watching them realize his profession. The sailors looked fearfully from him to the seething water and back, as if trying to decide which was more dangerous, a mage or the angry boiling sea. They decided to take their chances with the sea, because both men wordlessly snatched up the oars and paddled the dinghy closer to the roiling water.

Satisfied at last, Lyim stood carefully once more and shrugged the simple shroud he wore down from his shoulders, letting it dangle from his forearms. He was naked from the waist up and oblivious to the quaking fishermen. The mage closed his eyes and concentrated on the remembered pattern of the spell he sought; its only component was verbal, so it was more important than ever to be precise. At last Lyim opened his eyes and let the shroud slip to the bottom of the dinghy. He saw the men's eyes shift from his nakedness, searching for the source of the odd hissing sound. Both gasped aloud when they found it at the end of Lyim's right arm.

The appendage that was no longer an arm.

The limb was a writhing thing covered not with flesh, but with scales of brown, red, and gold, patterned symmetrically in rings and swirls. At the end of the limb, where a hand should have been, thrashed the head of a snake, its eyes inky black and malevolent. Sighting the two frightened fishermen, the hideous creature hissed and flicked its tongue.

The younger man backpedaled in undisguised horror. The father had to grab his son's arm to keep him from falling overboard and joining aginus.

Lyim had never grown used to the looks of revulsion his snake arm drew. He had a difficult time not recoiling from it himself. Nearly six years had passed since his own master, Belize, had viciously thrust Lyim's right arm into a magical portal at Stonecliff. When then-apprentice Lyim had been allowed to withdraw his arm from the extradimensional bridge, he found his limb had been replaced by a living snake.

Soon, Lyim reminded himself, people would no longer draw back from him in horror. Below, in Itzan Klertal, he would learn the secret for removing, once and for all, the hideous thing his arm had become.

The thought propelled the mage on, made him mumble the words that would polymorph him into a sea creature. The sensation was an odd, painless stretching that sounded worse than it felt, with all manner of pops and crackles. Lyim grew to tower nearly twice the height of the witless men in the little dinghy. He gingerly passed his thick, insensitive tongue over hundreds of needle-sharp teeth. Though he could feel nothing through his thick, green-scaled hide, he knew the luxurious mane of hair of which he was so proud was now like limp seaweed. His left arm had lengthened as if made of hot taffy; he could touch his wide, webbed feet, so useful for swimming, without even bending.

But no amount of research had prepared the mage for what it would feel like to be a scrag, a water troll. Despite years of living with his repulsive limb, Lyim was still vain enough to be glad he couldn't see how grotesque he must look now. Yet the water troll was the safest form to adopt to explore the ruins of Itzan Klertal in search of the Coral Oracle.

The boat was pitching dangerously with the added weight of Lyim's new, ten-foot-tall form, not to mention the fishermen's frantic scrabbling to get away from him. Lyim threw himself overboard, heedless of the huge wave he left in his wake. The men were as good as dead anyway.

The mage-turned-scrag instinctively reached out his long, green arm toward the swirling maelstrom and drew powerful downward strokes, kicking his wide, webbed feet. Lyim wasn't surprised to see that even as a scrag, his snake arm remained. Nothing he had tried in nearly six years had removed it for more than a day. He had starved himself, but while he withered, the limb flourished. He had chopped off the snake, even doused it in oil and burned it in his desperation, willing to live with only one arm. But the grotesque limb always regenerated. Illusionary spells to disguise it simply misfired, even when cast by the most powerful mages he could bribe. He had journeyed far and wide looking for anyone who might know how to fix his magically mutated limb. Each fruitless trip left him more bitter and frustrated. He hoped fervently that this trip to the sunken city would end that pattern.

Strangely, the failure that had left him the most bitter was the first. Oh, the Council of Three had been kind enough when he'd agreed to return to Wayreth with Justarius after the fiasco that had caused the mutation at Stonecliff. They'd taken him under their wing, so to speak. Par-Salian, LaDonna, and Justarius had given him lodging for more than a month while they searched their books and their collective memories for some way to banish the snake from his limb. Justarius had even encouraged him to take his Test while they searched. Despite the handicap of his right arm during spellcast- ing, Lyim's natural ability had helped him to struggle successfully through the arduous trial of magic taken by all mages who wished to progress beyond rudimentary spells. He saw it as vindication for all that he had suffered, and somehow he connected that positive sign with the belief that the Council of Three would find some way to cure him.