by Lisa Smedman
The weirdest thing was that the dead priestess was still lying there. She’d been killed a while ago, judging by the dried blood, but the Selvetargtlin didn’t seem to have noticed her yet.
When they did find her, things were going to get hot. Selvetarm was Lolth’s champion. His followers would be furious as a swarm of stirges when they found one of the Spider Queen’s priestesses murdered. They’d turn the cavern upside down looking for her killer.
Jub’s leg hairs suddenly vibrated. It took him a moment to identify the sound as the clash of steel on steel. It came from inside one of the nearby buildings—a windowless, two-story structure that looked as though it might have once been a warehouse. The doorway was invitingly open, its shattered double doors lying on the ground nearby, but Jub wasn’t stupid enough to blunder in that way. Instead he scrambled up a wall to the roof. Centuries of dripping water had pitted it, leaving holes in the thin stone just big enough to scuttle through. Jub crawled inside and clung to the ceiling, staring down.
Below him, two Selvetargtlin in blood-red robes danced around each other, one with an adamantine sword in hand, the other with a spiked mace of black iron. Both had long white hair that hung in thick braids that whipped around as they spun, parried, and thrust. Their robes barely moved. As one flipped back, Jub saw it was lined with chain mail. Both males wore steel gauntlets over their hands. A nasty looking blade stuck out of the back of each gauntlet.
The pair fought furiously, sword and mace clanging in a flurry of parried blows. They battled in silence—something that, he’d heard, was unusual for a Selvetargtlin. Selvetarm’s priests usually worked themselves up for a fight by shouting out their deity’s name. Nor were they using spells against each other. Odd, for a fight that seemed to be in deadly earnest.
The male with the mace feinted—then spun backward, the blade on his gauntlet slicing a line through the other male’s robe, exposing the gleaming chain mail that lined it. The second male retaliated by slashing at the first one’s neck, torso, and hamstrings—but the first avoided all three swings. He leaped into the air, his lower body twisting sideways. His boots struck the wall and stuck. Running up it like a spider, he crouched, ready to spring, but the Selvetargtlin with the sword was equally quick. He, too, ran up the wall as if it was a horizontal surface. The battle continued until suddenly the sword went spinning to the ground, smashed out of the hands of the male who had been wielding it. The disarmed Selvetargtlin leaped after it, but the male with the mace was just as fast. He landed on the floor a heartbeat after the first and smashed down with an overhand blow that should have left his opponent sprawling and bloody, but though the first had lost his sword, he still had his bladed gauntlets. He twisted and sprang inside the arc of the descending mace, punching both blades into the other male’s chest.
The death grunt was loud enough to set Jub’s hairs quivering. The mortally wounded Selvetargtlin collapsed on the floor, blood bubbling from his chest as the gauntlet blades yanked free. Shuddering with effort, he twisted his head to the side—an invitation to his opponent, who was at last retrieving his sword, to finish him.
The other drow laughed. “Well fought,” he said between gulps of air, sheathing his sword. Then he kneeled and slapped both gauntleted hands down on the other’s chest, a palm over each wound, and began to pray. Darkness, threaded with a tracery of white webbing, coalesced around his hands then bled down into the wounds. The threads of white stitched themselves back and forth, sealing the wounds shut, preventing the other from dying.
A moment later, the victor helped the healed Selvetargtlin to his feet. The other male wiped bloody lips with the back of his sleeve then picked up his mace. “You fought well, too,” he said, pausing to spit the last of the blood from his mouth. He rubbed the spot where the wounds had been. “I didn’t expect that last thrust. Let’s hope your chitines prove as competent.”
“They already have,” the other answered. “They’re surprisingly capable of following orders. Of course, it helps that they think those orders come from Lolth herself.”
Both males laughed.
Jub’s hairs shivered erect. Chitines were four-armed magical creations of the drow. Bred as slaves by wizards centuries ago, they were only three-quarters the height of a male. Abandoned by their creators as unfit, they had escaped, decades ago, to distant reaches of the Underdark, where they lived still. Jub had blundered into one of their web-filled caverns once—luckily for him, just one chitine denned there. He’d killed it but had come away covered in gouges from its hook-lined palms and feet. He’d been lucky to get out alive. The chitines hated the dark elves with an intense, smoldering anger. They attacked all drow on sight—even a half-drow like Jub.
Yet these Selvetargtlin were talking about the chitines as if they were pet lizards.
Lizards that, by the sound of it, were fighting battles for them.
The males were still talking, though in less boisterous voices as their breathing gradually slowed. Wanting to hear more, Jub descended from the ceiling on a thread of silk.
“… glad to hear your chitines fought well,” the Selvetargtlin with the mace was saying. “What was their target?”
“The Moonwood. They killed eight dark dancers.”
Jub jerked to a halt and thought, No wonder Qilué said this job was so important. These guys are attacking Eilistraee’s shrines.
“If our underlings do their job too well, we’ll bleed them gray, instead of just drawing them away with our feints,” the male with the mace said.
“I hope not. I want a few of them still standing when we jump to the temple, at least sixty-six of the bitches—one for each of us to kill.”
Both laughed as they walked toward the door.
“So the chitines didn’t suspect anything?” the Selvetargtlin with the mace asked.
“None.” The other grinned. “I told them the Spider Queen would reward them with …”
The voices faded away as the pair walked out into the street. Jub hung from his thread, slowly spinning in place, waiting for their shouts of alarm. The dead priestess was just outside the door. The two would practically have to step over her on their way outside, but no alarm came. The Selvetargtlin, it seemed, didn’t care that a priestess of Lolth had been killed.
Probably, Jub realized, because they’d killed her.
He wondered if he should follow the pair of clerics, but then figured they’d be walking too quickly for him to keep up. He’d heard enough, anyhow. “Temple,” they’d said. “The temple.” They were planning an attack on the Promenade. Sixty-six of them, it seemed—a curiously exact number.
The Promenade wasn’t far away—only a few leagues, as the worm burrowed—but its magical protections were rock-solid. Jub wondered how the Selvetargtlin were planning on getting inside. Far as he could see, there was no way they’d be able to.
He turned and scrambled back up the strand of web then out onto the roof. It was time to make his report.
He scuttled back to the tunnel, crossing rooftops where he could, but several times he was forced to scurry along the floor. He had an anxious moment when he reached the exit. The sword-foot spider nearly skewered him, its blade-sharp feet clacking down all around him as he made a dash for it—but then he was in the passage once more. He hurried along it, back to the empty cavern.
Once there, he ducked into another of the side passages and shifted back into his half-drow form. Qilué had told him to report any discoveries back to her the moment it was possible to do so. She probably didn’t expect him to get out of there alive with a dracolich flying around. That pricked his pride, but not so much that he wouldn’t do as she’d asked. He owed Qilué. Fourteen years ago, her consort had died while freeing Jub and a bunch of other wretches from a slave ship in Skullport. Instead of blaming the slaves for her consort’s death, Qilué had set them free—and invited them back to the Promenade to live. She hadn’t even tried to claim the slaves as her own. All she’d demanded, in return for their freedom
, was one favor from each of them.
Fourteen years later, Jub was finally going to pay her back.
His clothing and gear had polymorphed with him when he invoked the phylactery’s magic, and they were back on his half-drow form. He pulled a slim metal tube from his pocket and uncorked it then carefully tipped out its contents. A feather with a silver shaft fell into his hand, followed by a roll of parchment. He sat, cross-legged, and touched the magical quill to his tongue to prime it. Then he began to write.
His letters were clumsy—simple block letters, like a child would write. If anyone else but Qilué were going to read it, he’d have been embarrassed, but Qilué never made fun of him. She was as beautiful, body and soul, as Jub was ugly.
SELV. CLERICS ATTACKED THE MOON WOOD WITH CHITTENS. BUT IT WAS JUST A FAINT. THEYR GOING TO ATTACK THE PROMENAD, TOO. 66 OF THEM. NOT SURE WHEN.
He paused a moment, thinking, then added:
THEYR IN DOLBLUND, LIKE YOU THOT. I THINK THEY KILT A LOLTH PREESTIS THERE.
He paused again. Qilué had told him to write down every thing he saw and heard, no matter how insignificant it seemed. So he added:
THEYR GOING TO JUMP ON THE TEMPLE.
His message finished, Jub tapped the magical quill against the parchment three times. On the third tap, the words he’d written flowed back into the quill, vanishing from the page. Jub held the feather close to his mouth and whispered Qilué’s name, then released it. The feather streaked through the air like an arrow, vanishing in a sparkle of silver motes.
Jub shifted to a crouching position, hands and knees on the floor, ready to polymorph again. As he did, he heard something in the cavern outside, a soft, halting step, as if someone was shuffling along. As it drew closer to the tunnel he was hiding in, he activated his phylactery and scrambled up the wall in spider form. The shuffling—a vibration he could feel in his legs—stopped at the entrance to his tunnel. Something peered inside. It was one and a half times the height of a drow, with a recognizable head, arms and legs, but its body was entirely covered in a thick mass of tangled webs. Eight spider eyes stared out of a face dominated by a gaping mouth and gnashing fangs. The thing smelled like a combination of spider musk and rot. Wherever the crude blobs that were its hands and feet touched stone, they left a clump of clinging web.
The thing stared at Jub for several moments—long enough to unnerve him. Just when he was certain it had recognized him as an enemy, it withdrew. It shambled away through the cavern, its feet making sticky, shuffling sounds.
Time to get out of here.
Jub doubled back the way he’d come, climbing the steep walls of the cavern. When he reached its ceiling, his hairs picked up a faint air current emerging from a nearby crack in the rock. The air was flowing into the cavern and was slightly damp. It smelled of melting snow.
The crack was just wide enough for him to squeeze into. It was also a quicker way out—one that didn’t lead past all those traps. He scrambled up through it. The climb was a torturous one, and Jub nearly got stuck several times, but the higher he climbed, the better he could smell the wintery scent of the woods above.
The darkness of the shaft was starting to pale to gray when he passed a narrow fissure that opened onto a vast cavern. One glance into it was enough to halt him in his tracks. The floor of the cavern glittered with thousands of gems and coins, strewn about like pebbles on a beach. Half buried in these were statues, books, bejeweled breastplates and helms, silver-chased swords, chalices, and a host of other treasures. It was a sight that Jub had never expected to see in his lifetime—a dragon’s horde.
He knew better than to be tempted by it. He turned to go.
Something stirred the hairs on his legs … the flapping of massive wings.
A heartbeat later, an enormous head rose to eye level. A massive, slit-pupiled eye, large as a dinner plate and wrinkled as a prune, stared into the hole.
“Not so fast, little orcling,” a whisper-dry voice said.
Terrified, Jub tried to scramble away but found himself suddenly unable to move. His heart beat furiously and his rapid breath sent pulses through his abdomen. He screamed at his body to move, but it wouldn’t. Terrified— the dracolich must have seen through his spider disguise and recognized him for what he was—Jub raged at himself. If he’d gone back the way he’d come, instead of trying to take a shortcut, this never would have happened.
The tips of two claws poked into the hole, pinching Jub between them. He gasped as they knifed into his sides. The dracolich plucked him from the hole, and with a harsh whisper, it dispelled the magic of Jub’s phylactery, returning Jub to half-drow form. Its breath held the sharp tang of acid.
“I warned you not to trespass up here,” the dracolich told him in a voice hoarse as a dying man’s. “We had an agreement.”
The paralyzation that gripped Jub’s body was starting to wear off. “Sorry,” he gulped. Hope filled him. The dracolich didn’t realize he was a spy—it thought he was one of the Selvetargtlin! “I didn’t mean to break it. I thought this was a shortcut to the surface. I didn’t know it led to your lair.”
As he spoke, Jub desperately tried to activate his phylactery. If he could suddenly turn into a fly, he might be able to buzz away up the shaft and escape. He’d be too tiny for the dracolich to grab. The dracolich, however, seemed to have completely drained the magic from the phylactery.
The undead dracolich hovered, black wings lazily flapping, its massive, wrinkled eyes staring balefully at Jub. “You were warned,” it wheezed.
Then it inhaled, filling its lungs. Acid-tinged air seeped out through the chinks between its scales where chest muscle had once been.
Jub steeled himself. This was it. He was going to die. At least he hadn’t failed Qilué. Perhaps, when they both met again in Eilistraee’s domain, she’d smile at him and thank him. Maybe gently touch his hand and—
The dracolich exhaled. A stream of acid slammed into Jub’s chest, instantly searing a hole through flesh, ribs, and lungs, melting his spine. His upper body flopped backward like a broken doll, acid-seared flesh sloughing from it. There was one brief flash of pain so intense it was blinding.
Then came gray oblivion and a soothing song that swelled through him, washing the anguish away.
CHAPTER TEN
Dhairn stared down at the head Daurgothoth had tossed on the cavern floor. The grisly trophy was deeply pitted with acid, but enough of it remained to show that the intruder had been a half-breed—drow tainted with orc, by the look of the oversized incisors.
“You and I had an agreement,” the great black wyrm hissed.
Only its head and neck were visible. Its body was still submerged in the pool that filled one end of the cavern. Foul-smelling water dripped from its emaciated flesh into the water below. A moment before, the pool had been clear, but it had grown murky and stank like rotting garbage. The Selvetargtlin would have to expend magic on purifying it before they could drink from it again.
The dracolich’s withered tail swept back and forth through the foul water in obvious agitation. “You agreed that your priests would use only certain parts of the city, and not disturb me.”
“He’s not one of ours,” Dhairn told the dracolich. “He must have been a treasure hunter from the World Above.”
Bone scratched against rock as the dracolich flexed its claws against the rocky edge of the pool. “He was climbing up from below. He could only have come from a spot near this cavern.”
Dhairn stiffened. “You’re certain?” Leathery muscles creaked as the dracolich nodded. Its skin was dark as soot, its wrinkled eyes like enormous wrinkled balls. “Yes,” it hissed. Its acid-tinged breath reeked enough to make Dhairn’s eyes water.
Dhairn scowled at the remains of the half-orc head in frustration. The jaw hung by a thread of muscle and the tongue was an acid-eaten stub. The lips were burned away, exposing the teeth. There wasn’t enough left of the head to get any intelligible answers out of the corpse. The dracolich had acted
rashly. Dhairn would have liked to have learned whether the intruder was alone.
He poked the head with the tip of his sword, rolling it over. “Did the intruder say or do anything before he died? Anything that would lead you to believe he was of a particular faith?”
“He couldn’t speak. He’d polymorphed himself into a spider.”
Dhairn inhaled sharply. “Lolth.” He whispered the name under his breath, the word sharp as a curse.
That didn’t bode well. The priestesses of Eryndlyn must have sent out another spy. When that one also failed to return, they would retaliate, but if all went well, the exiled Selvetargtlin that Dhairn led would have a permanent home soon enough, and a powerful new ally once the seals on the Pit were removed.
“Your presence here is drawing unwanted attention,” the dracolich observed.
“I agree.” Dhairn lifted his sword and rested the heavy blade on his shoulder. “But our forces are ready to strike. I’ll send a summons to our knights. As soon as they’ve loosed their respective companies and assembled here, we’ll mount our attack.”
The dracolich’s eyes glinted. “And my payment for providing the gems and the magic to attune them?”
Dhairn met the undead dracolich’s eye with a level stare. “The secrets to the creation of the chitines,” he promised, an irresistible lure for Daurgothoth, who had been trying for centuries to magically breed his own unique race of servitors, “and a one-sixth share of all the plunder we wrest from Undermountain over the next six hundred years.”
The dracolich gave Dhairn a baleful look. “See to it that you deliver on your promises.”
Dhairn bowed, the blade of his sword balanced on his shoulder. “By the strength of Selvetarm’s sword arm, we shall.”