Sacrifice of the Widow

by Lisa Smedman

  Too late. Qilué’s awareness exploded into pain as Danifae’s morningstar slammed into Halisstra’s back, smashing the priestess to her hands and knees.

  Halisstra understood it all then. The pain of betrayal was even greater than the sharp ache of her shattered ribs.

  You could have warned me, Halisstra thought.

  The bitter rebuke was directed at Eilistraee, but it was Qilué who answered, I tried.

  Halisstra, at last hearing her, nodded weakly.

  Danifae’s morningstar slammed into her back a second time, knocking her to the ground. She dimly heard Danifae give an order to the draegloth, then its bestial roar.

  Feliane answered with a battle song.

  Danifae’s fingers twined in Halisstra’s hair and yanked her head up.

  “Watch,” Danifae said, her voice a harsh gloat.

  Qilué did, through Halisstra’s eyes. Feliane wounded the draegloth, but the monster didn’t even slow. He slammed Feliane to the ground and began tearing at the priestess’s body with his fangs.

  Feliane screamed as her stomach was torn open. Halisstra’s vision blurred with tears.

  Another gone to Eilistraee. Only Halisstra was left, and her mind was filled with despair and doubt.

  “Have faith, Halisstra!” Qilué cried. “Eilistraee will—”

  Danifae slammed a fist into Halisstra’s temple. Sparks of pain exploded inside Qilué’s mind as well, disrupting her awareness. She fought to cling to it as Halisstra coughed, weakly, blood dribbling from her lips. Halisstra turned her head slightly, looking up at Danifae. The other drow swung her morningstar in a lazy arc, her face ugly with cruel mirth.

  Halisstra’s despair brimmed over. I am not worthy, she thought. I have failed.

  “No!” Qilué shouted. “You—”

  Too late. She lost the connection. Her awareness was back in her own body, and she stared into the font. Perhaps it was not too late. She summoned silver fire and stabbed a finger into the water, unleashing a beam of pure white flame. Instead of blasting Danifae, however, the magical flame skipped off the surface of the holy water like a stone and ricocheted into the night.

  The water in the font rippled, obscuring the scrying. Qilué could see movement—fragmentary glimpses of what was going on. A flash of silver: the Crescent Blade, picked up by Danifae and tossed contemptuously aside. The head of a morningstar, swinging in a deadly arc. Halisstra’s eyes, brimming with tears. Danifae’s face, twisted with hatred as she spat. Sound was likewise garbled. Halisstra’s voice, faintly whispering, “Why?” Danifae’s voice, haughty and triumphant: “… weak.”

  Qilué thrust a hand at the moon, clutching desperately for some other magic that could be channeled through the scrying.

  “Eilistraee!” she cried. “Hear me! Your Chosen needs your aid!”

  Behind her, the six lesser priestesses shot uneasy glances at one another. They crowded closer, prayers tumbling from their lips. “Eilistraee,” they crooned. Swaying, they placed their hands on Qilué’s shoulders, lending power to her prayer. Silver fire built once more around Qilué, brighter than before, but slowly. Too slowly.

  The ripples in the font cleared. Words bubbled up from its depths. Danifae’s voice, gloating.

  “Good-bye, Halisstra.”

  Then the whistle of a descending morningstar.

  Qilué heard a dull crunch, a sound like wet wood splintering. She looked down and saw collapsed bone and blood where Halisstra’s face had been.

  “No!” she cried as the image slowly faded from the font.

  She plunged a hand into the water as if trying to pluck Halisstra from it. Holy water slopped over the edges of the font, trickling down its smooth stone sides like a flood of tears. Qilué channeled everything she had into one last spell and felt the water grow as warm as blood. Eilistraee had granted her the power to heal the most grievous of wounds with a touch. Even if Halisstra had slipped beyond life’s door, Qilué could resurrect her with a word, but could the spell reach her? Would it have any effect in the domain of Eilistraee’s greatest enemy?

  It might. Lolth was silent, after all, her priestesses bereft of their power. That was why Halisstra had been sent on this quest, except that something had turned Qilué’s last spell, and the souls streaming into the darkened tunnel had been moving towards … something.

  The font was quiet and still. Images no longer filled it. Qilué lifted her dripping hand from the water.

  One of the priestesses leaned closer, stared down into the font’s blank depths. “Mistress Qilué,” she whispered—mistakenly addressing her, in a moment of extreme tension, as a drow of the Underdark would address her matron. “Is she … dead? Is all lost?”

  The other priestesses held their breath, waiting for Qilué’s reply.

  Qilué glanced up at the moon. Eilistraee’s moon. Selûne shone brightly, not yet diminished, the Tears of Selûne twinkling in its wake.

  “There is still hope,” she told them. “There is always hope.”

  She needed to believe that, yet deep in her heart was a sliver of doubt.

  Qilué stood beside the font for the rest of the night. The other priestesses crowded around her for a time, and she answered their nervous questions as soothingly as she could. When at last they fell silent, she sought to touch the mind of Eilistraee.

  In a moonlit glade, deep in a forest that needed only the moon’s light to thrive and grow, she found her goddess. Eilistraee was a drow-shaped glimmer of unspeakably beautiful radiance. Qilué touched that with her mind. She needed no lips to frame her question. The goddess poured moonlight into her heart, throwing the words that were scribed upon it into sharp relief. She answered in a voice that flowed like liquid silver.

  “House Melarn will aid me yet.”

  Qilué sighed her relief. All was not lost. Not yet. If Eilistraee had indeed heard Qilué’s prayer and revived Halisstra, there was still a chance that the Melarn priestess would slay Lolth.

  “And House Melarn will betray me.”

  The glow that was the goddess flickered and grew dim.

  Qilué started. Her awareness was back in her body again. She stood in the forest beside the font, the connection with her goddess at an end. The priestesses who had aided in her scrying were seated on the ground, clothed. Snow dusted their hair and shoulders. More snow fell and the sun was rising, a blood-red smudge against the clouds to the east. Much time had passed since Qilué had slipped into communion with Eilistraee, and the hand that gripped the edge of the font was covered in snow. She shook it off and shivered.

  Something was wrong. She could feel it in the sick hollow that had opened in her stomach. Turning to the font, she cast a second scrying. Far easier than the first had been, its target was on Toril, at least, not in some deep hollow of the Abyss. The target was the matron mother of one of the noble Houses of Menzoberranzan—a priestess of Lolth. Qilué leaned closer and saw that the drow was wielding magic.

  Sensing Qilué scrying her, Lolth’s priestess stared a challenge at her observer. Wild laughter, joyous and cruel, bubbled from the font as she began a magical attack.

  Qilué had seen enough. She ended the scrying.

  One of the priestesses of Eilistraee who had waited with Qilué rose to her feet. “Lady Qilué?” she asked. She sounded nervous, uncertain. “Is something wrong?”

  The other priestesses also rose, some whispering tense prayers, others silent with dread anticipation.

  Qilué closed her eyes. Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “Halisstra has failed,” she told them. “Lolth lives. Her Silence is broken.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Month of Uktar, the Year of Risen Elfkin (1375 DR)

  Q’arlynd stood, hands laced together behind his back, at the broken lip of what had once been a broad street of calcified webbing. Across the wide chasm he could see a jagged protrusion, the spot where the street had anchored to the far wall. Similar protrusions dotted the walls above and below him. The city that had filled t
he vast cavern had been more than a hundred layers deep. This once-intricate stone web lay in a shattered heap far below, together with fragments of the noble Houses, temples, and academies that had hung from it like glowing pendants. The magical glow that had suffused the stone was all but extinguished, hidden under the scab of mold and fungi that had grown in the three years since the city’s fall.

  He shivered. The air was cool and moist, humidified by the constant trickle of water that dampened the cavern walls. He’d grown up in Ched Nasad, but a century of life there still hadn’t inured him to the climate. He could feel the chill deep in his bones.

  Ched Nasad had once been home to nearly thirty thousand drow. Perhaps one-tenth of that number remained, scrabbling out an existence in the ruins while trying to salvage whatever the duergar stonefire bombs hadn’t burned. And fighting. Always fighting. Only a handful of the hundred or so noble Houses had survived the fall of the city—Houses of no consequence whose strongholds had been at the less desirable, outer edges of the web, against the damp cavern walls. They squabbled amongst themselves still, unable to come together in an alliance that might rid what remained of the city of its Jaezred Chaulssin masters.

  Somewhere under that dark jumble of stone lay the ruins of House Melarn. It had been the first of the noble Houses to fall, and it had taken a good chunk of the city down with it, which was fitting, since House Melarn’s matron—Q’arlynd’s mother—had been murdered by those below her. That murder had set the other eleven noble Houses squabbling with one another, rendering them unable to meet the duergar threat.

  “Divided we fall,” Q’arlynd murmured.

  He lifted his left arm and stared at the House insignia he wore on a wide leather band around his wrist. Carved into the adamantine oval was House Melarn’s symbol, a glyph vaguely reminiscent of a stick-figure person, arms bent and one leg raised as if dancing. The insignia counted for little now. Q’arlynd was the only one of his House to survive, and he was male. Since inheritance and title passed through the female line, he could make no claim on any of the property that had been salvaged from the ruins of his former home. He’d had to watch, powerless, as it was looted by others.

  Lowering his hand, he leaned forward to stare down at the bulge, low on the opposite wall, that was the domicile of House Teh’Kinrellz—the House he had reluctantly offered his services to after the city’s fall. Below it was a depression in the rubble: the salvage excavation. The uncovered stones glowed faintly with faerie fire, a jumble of lavender, indigo, and crimson that looked like an iridescent puddle from above. A platform slowly rose over the hole as it was winched up from a high ledge. The dozen dark shapes slumped on it would be the slaves, exhausted from a cycle of digging.

  The effort seemed futile. Though some magical treasures must have survived the fall, so deeply did they lie buried that excavating them would have taken an army of dwarves and the better part of a century. The efforts of House Teh’Kinrellz offered one thing, however—a semblance of organization. Under the leadership of that once-insignificant House, the drow of Ched Nasad might yet reclaim their cavern.

  Q’arlynd snorted with bitter laughter. Who was he fooling? The city was as likely to be reclaimed as rothé were to suddenly sprout wings and fly.

  Stone shifted under his left foot. It gave him the instant’s warning he needed to pull his foot away. A chunk of stone tumbled from the edge, smaller fragments falling in its wake. Q’arlynd listened but couldn’t hear them land. The bottom of the cavern was too far below.

  Enough of this.

  He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and took a step back from the edge, then another. He ran forward, flinging himself into space.

  The air snatched at his piwafwi as he fell, yanking its hood back from his head. It pressed his shirt and trousers against his body and plucked at his shoulder-length white hair, turning it into a ragged streamer. He opened his eyes, feeling the wind squeeze tears from them. He flung out his arms to let air whistle through his splayed fingers. His heart hammered wildly in his chest, and it felt as though his stomach flattened against his spine. Grinning, he watched in morbid fascination as the floor of the cavern rushed up to meet him. That jumble of stone below—that was death.

  Closer, closer …

  Now!

  Q’arlynd mentally shouted a command, activating the magic of his House insignia. His body jerked to a halt so close to the ground that his neck purse bounced off an up-thrust slab of stone. In the instant that he went from falling to levitating, his vitals felt as if they were being pulled from his body by an invisible hand. Bright sparkles of light crackled across his vision. Blackness roaring with blood nearly claimed him, but he shook it off and fought down the urge to vomit.

  He floated, dizzy but exultant. A laugh burst from his lips, wild as that of the victim of a hideous mirth spell. Then he got hold of himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d free-fallen from a great height. As a student at the Conservatory, he’d competed with the other novice mages to see who had the most nerve, but that had been years ago.

  Never had he come so close to hitting the ground.

  Twisting his body upright, he gave a second mental command, one that would summon a driftdisc to carry him back to House Teh’Kinrellz. As he waited for it, something caught his eye. The body of a drow female lay on the rubble. A corpse in the fallen city was unremarkable in itself, but he hadn’t heard of any recent quarrels, and the body looked fresh.

  Very fresh.

  He sank to the ground, landing gracefully. The back of the female’s head looked like a hollow, broken cup. Something had smashed it in. The patch of red that stained her hair and the rubble she lay on was still spreading.

  Q’arlynd looked around warily, certain he’d just interrupted something, but he didn’t see anyone nearby. Even a glance through his crystal revealed no invisible enemies lurking nearby. Tucking the magical quartz back into his pocket, he cast an incantation that revealed obvious magical items on the dead female—the sword in her scabbard, her boots, two rings on an outflung hand. Mediocre dweomers all.

  As Q’arlynd stepped closer on shifting rubble, part of the mystery resolved itself. A chunk of calcified web, also bright with blood, lay near the corpse’s feet.

  “By the Dark Mother,” he whispered. He looked up, trying to calculate the odds of the stone that had been dislodged by his foot falling in precisely the right spot to strike the female on the head. Lolth’s work, surely.

  He shook his head.

  Kneeling on the unstable rubble, he rolled the body over to see if she wore a House insignia. She did not, but there was a silver chain around her neck that held a sword-shaped pendant with blunted edges. On the blade was engraved a circle on which a sword was superimposed—the holy symbol of Eilistraee.

  The pendant emitted an aura of magic. Q’arlynd nearly left it where it was, but the mystery of what a priestess of a forbidden faith was doing in Ched Nasad intrigued him. He broke the chain and slipped the pendant into a pocket. It would prove useful, should he ever need to cast doubt on someone’s loyalties.

  The priestess looked young, perhaps still in her first century of life. Her forehead didn’t yet have frown lines. Q’arlynd didn’t recognize her. Perhaps she was a scavenger, come to Ched Nasad in search of plunder.

  His lips twitched at the irony of it. All she’d harvested from the ruin was death.

  He eased the rings from her fingers and pocketed them. Then he slid her sword half out of its scabbard. The blade gritted against something. Sand had found its way into the scabbard. The blade was steel, rather than adamantine, and filigreed with gold. It looked like something the surface elves had made. It wasn’t something Q’arlynd wanted to keep. He preferred fighting from a distance, with spells. He slid it back into its sheath and continued to search the body.

  A dozen tiny swords hung from a metal loop attached to the priestess’s belt. They reminded Q’arlynd of keys on a ring, though their edges had no notches. They were silver and shape
d like the pendant but not magical. On an impulse, he unfastened them from her belt and pocketed them, too. He felt around inside her pockets but found nothing of interest. The insides of her pockets were also gritty—more sand. Her clothes, however, were dry, so it wasn’t river sand.

  He yanked the boots from her feet. They were too large for him at the moment, but their magic would shape them to his feet, assuming he decided to keep them and not barter them away. One of the boots had several tiny spines embedded in its sole, and at the end of each of the spines was a moist chunk of green plant flesh. She must have stepped on a spiny plant. Q’arlynd sniffed them, but the scent wasn’t one he recognized.

  He plucked the spines out and tossed them aside, then stroked his chin with a forefinger. “A surface plant?” he mused aloud.

  He stood, contemplating the mystery the priestess presented. That she’d used magic to reach Ched Nasad was clear. The vegetable matter on the spines was still fresh, which it wouldn’t be if she’d walked to the ruined city through the Underdark. She couldn’t have teleported there. The Faerzress that surrounded the ruined city would have made the odds of arriving on target about as unlikely as …

  Well, as unlikely as winding up in the precise spot for a rock, dislodged by a foot above, to strike her dead.

  A portal, perhaps?

  If there was a portal, it was something Q’arlynd wanted to keep to himself.

  Knowing that others might see the body and draw the same conclusions he had, he touched it and spoke the words of a spell. The body vanished from sight. A second spell ensured that the invisibility would remain in place. Straightening, he reached into a pocket for a tiny length of forked twig, and spoke a divination. He closed his eyes and slowly turned, the twig in his hand.

  There. A faint tug at his consciousness caused him to lean forward.

  Opening his eyes, he set out across the shifting rubble. He’d only gone the equivalent of a dozen paces when he saw a horizontal crevice between two slabs of rock—an opening just large enough for a drow to worm through on her belly. The mental tug came strongly from within.