Sacrifice of the Widow

by Lisa Smedman

  “Why?”

  “Leliana’s a higher-ranking priestess. I thought she would offer me a greater reward.” He spread his hands—and winced, as a blade nicked his finger. “It’s as simple as that.”

  “I believe you.”

  Q’arlynd glanced up. “You do?” Hope flared in him like a bright flame.

  Qilué smiled. She gestured, and the whirling curtain of blades that had surrounded him was gone. “I’ve come to ask a favor of you,” she said. “One favor. You can say yes or no to it of your own accord, but if the answer is yes, I will place a geas on you that compels you to fulfill it. Do you understand?”

  Q’arlynd nodded. He did indeed. He’d seen the effects of a geas firsthand long ago. One of Lolth’s priestesses had cast it upon a House boy, compelling him to clean her boots each night by licking them with his tongue. Then she’d walked through the filth of the lizard pens. The boy had refused to clean the boots—and had quickly sickened and died, the magic of the geas hollowing him out from within.

  His lips parted—he’d been about to flippantly ask what would happen if he said no to her request—then he realized there was really only one answer to her question. “What task must I perform, Lady?”

  “You were once a Nightshadow.”

  “A petitioner, nothing more,” he said carefully. “I never wore the mask.”

  “You attended their meetings.” She switched to silent speech. You know their passwords.

  Ah, so that was what she wanted. A spy. “I know the ones they used in Ched Nasad, decades ago.”

  Show me one.

  He demonstrated one for her: fists drawing apart—as if stretching an assassin’s cord—then suddenly flipping upside down, fingers curled, in the sign for a dead spider.

  “Do you know what soultheft is?” Qilué asked.

  Q’arlynd nodded. He had indeed heard of it. His brother had been stupid enough to boast that he’d one day kill a matron mother and steal her soul—preferably, their own mother. “It’s a powerful spell. Done using Vhaeraun’s mask, I understand, once the victim is dead.”

  Qilué moved closer. “Do you think you could pass as a Nightshadow? Could you fool them into thinking you’re one of their own?”

  He smiled, his eyes still respectfully on the ground. “I believe so, Lady.”

  Qilué and lifted his chin with a finger. She stared into his eyes. “Will you?”

  Q’arlynd was forced to meet her eyes. He saw enormous strength of will there but also something more, something that tempered this strength. He knew, suddenly and with certainty, that she’d meant it when she said she’d let him choose whether to perform this “favor” of hers. She wasn’t commanding him. She was asking him. A female, asking a male.

  He didn’t even have to think about his reply. It was his chance to prove himself, to serve not just a powerful priestess but a powerful mage—one who was a Chosen of the goddess of magic. A rush of excitement filled him. If he’d been of a religious mind, he might have whispered a prayer of thanks. To … somebody.

  “I am yours to command, Lady Qilué.”

  “A favor,” she reminded him, her hand falling away from his face.

  Q’arlynd smiled and cocked his head, a playful gesture. He was at ease, on familiar ground. “Of course. A favor. What is it?”

  Qilué’s expression tightened. “Five nights ago, a Nightshadow attacked our shrine in the Forest of Lethyr. He was attempting to steal the soul of one of our priestesses.”

  “He did not succeed?”

  “No.”

  The answer had been abrupt. There was more to the story than this, but whatever it was, Qilué wasn’t going to tell him.

  “There have been other attacks on our priestesses,” she continued. “Other soulthefts.”

  Q’arlynd listened in silence, thinking of Rowaan. He felt a twinge of something. Guilt, he supposed.

  “The males committing them are led by a Nightshadow named Malvag. They plan to use the soul-charged masks to open a gate between Vhaeraun’s domain and Eilistraee’s, so that Vhaeraun can slay our goddess.”

  Q’arlynd whistled softly. “Is that possible? The gate, I mean. I’m sure Eilistraee can take care of herself.”

  “To open such a gate, the Nightshadows would need to work high magic—something that requires complete cooperation between spellcasters and complete faith in one another.” Qilué gave a tight smile. “Can you honestly imagine Nightshadows trusting each other?”

  Q’arlynd chuckled. “Hardly likely.”

  “Even if they fail to conjure a gate, the attempt will consume the souls of the priestesses who were killed. I don’t want that to happen. I want the magic that’s binding their souls to the masks dispelled, and the priestesses freed—and that means stopping Malvag.”

  “You want him killed?”

  “If he can be.”

  The “if” gave Q’arlynd pause, but only for a moment. He could guess what was coming. “You want me to impersonate the Nightshadow who was killed in the Forest of Lethyr.”

  Qilué nodded. “We know his name: Szorak, of House Auzkovyn. He was one of three Nightshadows who joined Malvag’s scheme. He’s the only one from House Auzkovyn. The other two were from House Jaelre, and it’s doubtful they knew him well. Neither they nor Malvag himself have seen Szorak without his mask. You’re about Szorak’s height and build, and your eyes are the same color. We won’t need to use a glamor on you, and we know much about Szorak, since his sister was one who converted to our faith.”

  As Qilué said this, a pained expression came to her eyes. There was a story there, but this was not the time to ask about it.

  “So far so good,” Q’arlynd said, “but if I show up without a soul-charged mask—”

  “We will provide a mask,” Qilué said. “Not Szorak’s, but one that looks just like it. A square of cloth, created by polymorphing a gem—one that contains the body and soul of a priestess who has volunteered to risk herself in this venture.”

  Q’arlynd stroked his chin nervously. He was being asked to risk just as much. “Won’t the Nightshadows be able to tell I’m not one of them?” he asked. “I’ve sworn myself to Eilistraee—I’ve taken the sword-oath.”

  “You spoke the words.” She touched fingers to his chest. “But your heart …” The fingers lifted. “One day, perhaps, a song will dance there.”

  Q’arlynd gave a dutiful nod. He’d worry about that later. He had a job to do, and a potential matron to impress.

  “Where is Malvag now?”

  “We don’t know. He’s cloaked himself with powerful magic that prevents me from scrying him, but we do know where he and the other Nightshadows will meet on the night of the winter solstice: in a cavern lined with darkstone crystals. The cavern has no entrance or exit; it’s unconnected to anything else in the Underdark. The only way to reach it is to teleport.” She smiled. “Fortunately that’s something, Leliana tells me, that you claim to be quite adept at.”

  Q’arlynd allowed himself a modest smile. Qilué had obviously believed Leliana, or she wouldn’t have sought him out. “Where is this cavern located?”

  “Again, we don’t know. We assume that it doesn’t lie very deep in the Underdark, and that there’s no faerzress near it, since teleportation to it is possible. All we have is a description of it, a brief description provided by the corpse.”

  Q’arlynd’s eyebrows raised. “You expect me to teleport there on the strength of a description?”

  “I realized that this would be impossible, without you having viewed the cavern. That is why I took the additional precaution of having the necromancer animate the body of the dead assassin. He then asked Szorak to ‘describe’ the cavern a second time—by drawing it.”

  “Ah,” Q’arlynd said. “I see. You want me to study the drawing then try to teleport there.”

  Qilué gave him a measuring stare. “Can you do it?”

  Q’arlynd carefully kept his thoughts from showing on his face. If the sketch had
been done by the equivalent of a zombie, with only the shakiest of muscle control and no spirit to guide his hand, it wouldn’t be very accurate. The resulting “drawing” would probably be no more than a few crude scratch marks.

  He stroked his chin nervously. His stomach felt hollow at the very notion of what Qilué was asking—and he hadn’t even jumped yet, but the thought of attempting an “impossible” teleport was tempting simply for the sheer challenge of it. Qilué was hanging upon his answer, every muscle in her body taut. If he pulled this one off, it would really impress her. If he managed to stop Malvag and save the souls of a couple of priestesses in the bargain, the rewards would be rich indeed. Qilué was a veritable conduit to Mystra herself. The very thought made him lightheaded.

  “I can do it,” he said.

  Qilué beamed. “Good.”

  Part of him reveled in that smile. Another part wondered if he’d just signed his own death order. He crushed the second part mercilessly. To advance in life, one had to take chances.

  “The geas, then,” Qilué said.

  Q’arlynd bowed his head.

  The high priestess laid cool fingers on his forehead and invoked the names of both Eilistraee—and Mystra. “I command you to perform this service for me,” she began. “To locate Malvag, and …”

  When she finished, Q’arlynd’s forehead tingled. A shimmer of silver magic shivered the hairs on his arms erect then was gone.

  It was done. The geas had been laid upon him.

  Now all he had to do was achieve the near-impossible.

  “One favor,” Jub whispered as he descended through the cavern on a thread of silk. “One favor I promised Qilué, and this is what she asks: to sneak into the lair of a dracolich.”

  The dracolich in question had already swooped past him once, causing Jub to spin madly on his thread. The undead wyrm was an enormous creature, black as old blood and with wings so broad they brushed the walls on either side of the passage. The monster left the stench of death in its wake and had a deep, unhealed wound in its left flank, yet it lived—after a fashion. Jub was awed by the amount of magic it must have taken for a dragon to transform itself into an undead creature.

  Jub had magic, too—the tiny metal box, attached to a leather armband, that he wore above his left elbow. He’d gotten a real bargain on the phylactery from the thaumaturgical shop in Skullport because of its “curse.” It didn’t polymorph properly—it would only change its wearer into “vermin,” but that was just fine with Jub. With it, he could change into pretty much any bug he could think of, big or small. He usually liked to turn into a fly—nobody ever suspected a fly of spying—but Qilué had warned him that that wouldn’t be a healthy form to choose this time around. The males he was searching for worshiped Selvetarm, champion of the Queen of Spiders. They were bound to be hundreds of her pets around, wherever they were holed up, so Jub had polymorphed into a spider himself. It was, he reflected with sly grin that set his fangs quivering, the perfect disguise.

  The spider body had come in pretty handy so far. It had gotten him past a bunch of traps. It was fist-sized—too light to trigger the spring-spikes or pits. It had also enabled him to scurry into a crack in the wall when a heavy block of stone smashed down. The body had its drawbacks, however. Shooting out strands of web left his ass feeling twitchy, and having three pairs of eyes took a lot of getting used to. All of the colors were flat, and he kept getting mixed up about what was close and what was far away—not to mention distracted by the rush of the walls going past while simultaneously seeing the cavern dwindling away behind him. He didn’t know how spiders could stand looking in all directions at once.

  Reaching the floor of the cavern, Jub snapped the thread of silk and looked around. Several passages led out of there. They all looked enormous to Jub, but if he’d been walking around in his regular, half-orc, half-drow body, the white bristles on the top of his head would have brushed the ceilings of most of them. That figured … Dolblunde had been built by rock gnomes.

  He scuttled along the cavern, trying to decide which side passage to explore first. Walking had been tricky at first, but now that he had the hang of having eight legs he could move pretty quickly. He’d covered a fair chunk of the ancient city already. Something was bound to turn up soon, unless Qilué had been wrong about the Selvetargtlin being there, of course. She might have been lied to.

  Jub paused at the entrance to one of the passages. A noise issued from it, a clicking sound. It came to him through his feet, which were sensitive to vibrations in the floor. Deciding to check it out, he scuttled into the passage.

  His leg hairs quivered more rapidly as he drew closer to the source of the sound, which stopped, then started again, then stopped again. The passage was wide enough for a pair of rock gnomes to have walked through it side by side, its ceiling high and narrow as a knife slash and its floor surfaced with crushed stone. The tunnel wound through the rock like a stream, which it probably had been at one point.

  Jub knew he was on the right track when he saw a clump of web on the wall. A spider must have passed that way, maybe one of the Selvetargtlin’s pets.

  About fifty paces along, Jub spotted a spider clinging to the wall. Hairy and black, it was about the same size as his polymorphed form. It turned as Jub scuttled by, watching him with its multiple eyes. Jub had chosen a spider form with a narrow body and long, graceful legs that would allow him to cover more ground. He hoped that bigger, heavier spider wouldn’t see him as prey. He crept past it, ready at a moment’s notice to polymorph back into his half-drow form and squish the thing, but the hairy spider ignored him.

  The passage opened, up ahead, onto a large cavern filled with humid air. The clicking noise came again, and something moved across the mouth of the tunnel. It looked, strangely enough, like animated black swords walking about on their points. As Jub drew closer, he could see that these “swords” were the legs of an enormous spider, its body big enough to have filled a small room. Its feet, sharp as whetted knives, clicked against the stone floor as it walked. It hung around just outside the passage as if guarding it, its abdomen expanding and contracting as it breathed.

  Jub scurried out of the passage, wary of those sharp, stabbing feet. The monster, like its smaller, hairier cousin in the passage behind Jub, ignored him. Good thing, too. All it would have to do was sit on Jub and he’d be dead.

  Jub scuttled up a wall, stopping when he was high enough to get a good view.

  The cavern was enormous. At the far end was a deep pool of water. Fringing the shore of the pool were dozens of small ruined buildings.

  Jub spotted at least a dozen people. Most were drow, easily recognizable, even to his limited eyesight, by their black skin and white hair. They wore robes, but Jub was too far away to tell if they were Selvetargtlin or not. He also spotted several aranea in spider form. He recognized them by their distinctive humpback and the humanoid arms jutting out from just below their chins. Their faces were entirely insectlike, with multiple eyes and gnashing fangs, but they moved with an intelligence and purpose that true spiders lacked.

  Jub scurried across the ceiling, toward the city. As he drew closer to the ruins, he could make out details of individual buildings. It looked as though it had once been a marketplace. Each building was fronted with a slab of stone that had probably served as a shop counter. The smashed remains of doors hung from rusted hinges, and the floor was littered with broken pottery, shattered crates, and bones. Most of the skulls that grinned up at Jub were small—rock gnomes—but here and there he spotted the heavy-browed skulls of his full-orc kin. They’d sacked Dolblunde more than six centuries ago, and the city had lain empty since then.

  It wasn’t empty any more. In addition to the handful of drow and aranea Jub had already spotted, the ruined marketplace was filled with spiders. Jub could see them scurrying around everywhere. Most were about his size, but some of the larger ones were as big as dogs. They’d spun webs in the vacant doorways and shop windows and darted from o
ne chunk of fallen masonry to the next. They paused and stared up at Jub with gleaming, multifaceted eyes as he made his way toward the center of the ruined marketplace.

  There, next to the remains of a well, was what at first glance looked like a spider even larger than the sword-legged monster that guarded the entrance. It was motionless, however, and as Jub drew closer he realized it was a statue. The body of a drow lay in front of it, but there was no one else close by.

  Jub descended on a strand of web for a better look. Close up, he could see the statue was only partially finished. The most detailed portion was the drow head that perched on top of the spider body.

  Qilué had been right. The drow she’d asked Jub to find must be there after all. That statue was of Selvetarm, Lolth’s drow-headed spider champion.

  The corpse that lay in front of the statue was a drow female. She was sprawled face-down on a block of stone that had been hauled out of a nearby building, by the look of the scuffs on the floor. She was dressed in a long black piwafwi embroidered, in red, in a spiderweb pattern. The back of it was stained with dried blood, and more blood crusted the stone she lay on. The smell filled Jub’s spider senses, making him twitchy.

  He landed on the block of stone next to the corpse. A platinum chain hung around her neck, the medallion on it partially hidden under her shoulder. Jub eased it out with his forelegs. The disk, also platinum, was embossed with the image of a spider—Lolth’s holy symbol. On the ground, next to the dead female’s dangling hand, was further proof of her status: an adamantine whip handle, topped with what had once been two living snakes. Their heads had been sliced clean off. They lay on the ground next to the whip.

  The body presented a puzzle. Those wounds looked like something the sword-footed spider might have done, except that the spider was hanging out by the tunnel entrance and didn’t seem inclined to move around much. Jub doubted that a priestess of Lolth—capable of controlling spiders with a thought—would have died like that.

  No, those wounds were probably blade thrusts, aimed at the back, just over the vitals, like a rogue’s surprise stab, swift and deadly, and without much warning by the look of it. Otherwise, the priestess would have taken a few of her attackers down with her using that whip of hers.