Free Monsters and Magicians by Robert Adams Page A

course."
    "All right," agreed Fitz, feeling like a taken mark, "I'll shove off in the morning: east, I guess. I'll send
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    Cool Blue to track down Sir Gautier and bring him back here, then leave signs they can follow to catch up to me. Til head along that glen just north of here; as I recall, it runs roughly east-west."
    "Be you cautious," admonished the cat, "for many and great dangers lie ahead along your path to the Dagda. I am forbidden to myself accompany you, as I have previously told you, else I would, old friend. It were better that you go not alone, but travel with at least one other; even the blue lion were better than none at all. So hurry slowly, take no unnecessary risks, leave clear and unmistakable signs for those to follow and allow them time to catch up to you. You mean more to this world than you presently could comprehend.
    "Now, sleep."

    .

    return beaming of "his" body. "But if you do, become a deer, there are more than enough shrubs over there to feed another."
    "I am rather going to become a cat and eat a deer," "said" the other. "What about you?"
    "Sister-mine," beamed Fitz's body, "do as you wish, indulge yourself, for we two must return soon enough from this lovely place. I think 111 become a young bull and trot over to visit with the heifers of yonder herd."
    "You would!" came the response. "Just for that, I should become a lioness and make my meal of young bull flesh, this day . . . but I won't. But before you change, watch me make my kill. . . please?"
    "Of course I will, sister-mine. Then I will be able to use some of that kill in forming my young bull."
    A few rods away, a slender but well-formed body rose up into the air, moved forward at some speed and then sank, as lightly as a falling feather, into the depths of the thicket around which the cervines browsed. To the mind of Fitz, the sun-browned body appeared to be that of a girl in her mid-teens, as totally devoid of clothing as the masculine body he just now inhabited. Like "his" body, the female's was possessed of reddish-blonde hair, almond-shaped blue-green eyes separated by the bridge of a straight, slender nose. Her face of course lacked the curly, feir beard that his bore, but both owned lull lips that smiled often to show the white teeth. Fitz guessed her height at between five feet and five feet four, her weight at a hundred pounds, tops. Her nipples were the same red-pink as her lips and the breasts, though smallish, stood up proudly. Though her hands and

    feet were on the small side, they were proportionate to her body which, at the distance from which "his" body's eyes had viewed it, had seemed almost hairless, apparently hirsute adornments appearing only at armpits and crotch. The fine bones had all looked to be properly sheathed in flat muscles.
    While the cervines browsed on, unsuspectingly, the eyes of the body within which Fitz was visiting continued to watch the base of the thicket, knowing what to expect to see.
    Then, with the suddenness of a lightning-bolt, a yellow-and-black, hook-clawed streak launched itself from out the dense dimness of the thicket, landing squarely on the back of a plump doe. One taloned paw hooked under the chin of the frantically plunging deer and drew the head up and back so far and at such angle that the spine was compelled to snap . . . as it quickly did. As the dying doe sank beneath her deadly rider, the rest of the deer scattered at flank speed, making no single offer to fight, as was their natural way unless defending fawns or cornered by predators of any kind.
    The cat speeded the death of the kicking, twitching cervine by using strong jaws and sharp fangs to tear out the throat, the torrents of deer blood from the veins and arteries drenching her yellow-gold, black-spotted hide, dripping from her stiff whiskers.
    To his own big-boned, hundred-sixty-pound body mass, Seos began to gather and add a vast assortment of natural materials—animal (from the new-slain doe), vegetable (from