Relentless

by R. A. Salvatore

  Webs spewed from the fingers of the priestesses, attaching to their respective trees, climbing high and out toward each other in the highest branches, then with filaments drifting down to attach across the way.

  The priestesses and wizards supporting them felt the magic, too, though they didn’t understand it. Regardless, their energies filtered into the unknown ritual.

  The web grew, very quickly, filling the air between the trees.

  So soon after, Yvonnel and Quenthel fell back to the eastern end of the meadow, the other priestesses and wizards following them. The web was there, completed but almost fully translucent, a filament here or there shining only in those moments when the wind pushed it to align with the first rays of dawn coming into the sky behind the drow.

  The ground shook now continually.

  Matron Zhindia was coming.

  As she fell into the fullness of the moment, her child moving from her body, the magic of the spell filling her with unbridled joy and hope and a great sense of oneness with everything—with her fellow humans, with every sentient race, with animals, with the plants, with the stones and the water and the air itself—Catti-brie knew a level of peace she had never before imagined. More than she had known in the magical forest of Mielikki in the years when she was, in some regard, dead.

  This was understanding. This was beauty.

  This was power.

  For a brief flash, she wished that she still was wearing her ring. Perhaps she could quiet the primordial, perhaps even open the portals!

  But no, she realized just as quickly. Her understanding of the multiverse was clearer now and she understood that Maegera would not be affected by this magic, by her attempts at persuasion, by anything at all. For Maegera was a wall, a literal force of nature, and no spell she might cast, even in the heightened state, would matter at all in that regard.

  Her mind whirled, the pain intense but the joy sweet, so unbelievably sweet.

  She sensed the moment of culmination, the moment of separation, the true power of creation, upon her. Distantly, she heard the dwarves, heard Copetta, begging her to push the child out.

  She didn’t need the encouragement.

  This moment beckoned to her and she rushed to it with every ounce of strength, physical and emotional and mental, she could muster, and as the child passed into the world, Catti-brie threw all of that strength through the moment and out wide and far, out to the drow allies gathered near Gauntlgrym, north to Luskan and those who battled the Margaster invasion, west aiming for the ruins and the missing monk, and in the fleeting hope that there she might find a bit of Drizzt’s spirit, to tell him at least that his child had arrived.

  Even if he would never see the baby.

  In the beauty, in the pain of the moment, Catti-brie threw forth a magical bomb, as had Malice those centuries before, but not to assault the invaders, no.

  That she would not do. For all of Zaknafein’s assurances, she could not so taint this moment of love and beauty with carnage.

  Instead, she planted her flag, her beacon, across the northland, encouraging her allies, calling to them all, willing her thoughts and magical force to them to raise and bolster their spirits.

  In the west, she heard a call back, and it was from Afafrenfere, and she reached toward the lost monk and planted in the courtyard where he had fallen that image, that moment of beauty, sticking it there like a flag of triumph that Drizzt might know.

  She was out of her body. She was, in that instant, as Drizzt had gone and Afafrenfere had gone, lost in a flowing stream of connectedness and consciousness. Of oneness, truly, as everything was broken down before her into its tiniest elements, and they were all so similar. Starstuff.

  There was harmony here, and eternal and universal beauty and calm, that mocked the mortal concerns, that made the wars and strife of mortal beings seem . . . stupid.

  The cry of a child brought her flying back into the room, to her waiting body, and she blinked open her eyes to see Copetta holding the child.

  The babe was swaddled already—she could see only the head and the white hair, and the cord, still attached, hanging down from under the blanket.

  “Aye, lady, ye’ve a beauty here,” she heard Copetta say. “She looks like you, but she’s her da’s eyes.”

  Catti-brie hardly unpacked that.

  Her da.

  Her da!

  She had a daughter.

  Her da!

  Drizzt, who would not know her.

  But she was okay now, for in the moment of creation, through the power of the magic, she, too, had crossed into that place between the living and eternity—she would never think of it as the living and the dead anymore.

  Drizzt was there, and her heart ached for her loss keenly in this moment, particularly in this moment.

  But Drizzt was okay.

  It was okay.

  Chapter 30

  The Web of Past and Future

  One other heard Catti-brie’s call, and though he didn’t immediately recognize it for what it was, Gromph Baenre understood that something huge was afoot. He moved to his crystal ball and sent his vision to Bleeding Vines—to find the place all but abandoned.

  He managed to manipulate his angle and swing out to the south, then the west, then east, to locate Zhindia and her forces at long last.

  And beyond them, not far and waiting, he recognized the Baenres and their allies, and he was smart enough and knowledgeable enough about the petty gyrations of the matrons to understand and recognize, too, those who seemed not to be allied with House Baenre.

  Indeed, a skirmish in one small pocket broke out between soldiers of House Fey-Branche and those of House Barrison Del’Armgo.

  “Lovely,” the great mage muttered sarcastically. “Idiots.”

  He was about to dismiss the image, to let them fight it out and be done with the lot of them, when a familiar voice carried alongside this magical force he was sensing.

  The beast will soon escape and no house will leave unscarred, if any house leaves at all, Kimmuriel Oblodra told him.

  To the Abyss with all of them, then, Gromph thought.

  Even whichever holds the blessing of Lolth?

  The point was not lost on the former archmage.

  Your inaction now is action, Kimmuriel warned him. Any who survive will know that Gromph allowed the catastrophe. Lolth will know that Gromph allowed the catastrophe, the destruction of her minions.

  The moment of communication was fleeting, Kimmuriel’s telepathy fading to nothingness.

  Gromph sat back from his scrying device and took a deep breath, his hands going up to cover his mouth.

  He nodded, sorting it out, then ran from the room, from his extradimensional chamber and down through the Hosttower of the Arcane. In the side room to the tunnel at the base of the lowest stair, he dismissed his wards and magical locks and pushed through the door, and before he could convince himself otherwise, he threw the lever, once more letting the power of the Hosttower flow down into the tendrils, the veins.

  Across the leagues to the south it flowed, gathering speed and gathering ocean water, and in that magical journey, summoning elementals from the water plane.

  “I announce the arrival of Matron Zeerith Do’Urden,” Myrineyl Baenre told Quenthel, who was standing on the eastern edge of the meadow in the shadows of the trees as the sun rose behind her. Grim-faced Baenre guards surrounded her as she conferred with Yvonnel and Kimmuriel Oblodra.

  Before them, across the way, other scouts came out of the forest cover, specifically avoiding the main trail, as they had been ordered.

  “Zhindia comes,” Yvonnel noted, nodding off to the east.

  “Matron Zhindia,” Quenthel corrected, drawing a chuckle from Yvonnel.

  “Does it really matter now?”

  “It might. It might not” was all that Quenthel would answer.

  “Matron Mother?” Minolin Fey, who had come in with Myrineyl, dared ask.

  Quenthel scowled at her.<
br />
  “Matron Zeerith is not patient . . .” Minolin Fey dared to press.

  “Then bring her,” Quenthel told her, but she needn’t have, for there was Zeerith, floating in on her magical disk, Matron Byrtyn Fey beside her.

  “Where are we?” Zeerith demanded before any formal greeting.

  “We are already fighting, though it is just a testing by Matron Mez’Barris,” Byrtyn Fey added. “If we fight here, am I to send my full force at House Barrison Del’Armgo? I will need support, else she will destroy me utterly and quickly.”

  “You will need more than I could give you,” Zeerith said with obvious disgust. “More, likely, than the Matron Mother could share. Do not doubt that Matron Mez’Barris has other matrons behind her. Tell us, Matron Mother Baenre, what is our course?”

  “You seem to have already decided yours,” Quenthel replied.

  “You ask me to commit suicide, and that in the disfavor of Lolth, I fear,” Zeerith bluntly replied.

  “Driders,” came a call from the side.

  “Then let us see our course,” Quenthel answered. “Together.”

  “And quickly,” Byrtyn begged.

  “There!” Yvonnel said, pointing to the trees across the way. Huge shadows moved about through the underbrush, occasionally coming clear enough into the sun for the drow, whose eyes were not strong in the daylight, to make out the distinct form of a drider abomination.

  “They will suspect that the open ground is a trap,” Zeerith said.

  “They are driders,” Yvonnel replied. “They won’t care.”

  Quenthel motioned to the side, and Baenre soldiers rushed out onto the field, forming a line quickly and presenting a shield wall.

  Several huge spears flew down at them and before most had even landed, the ground began to shake more violently under the thunder of the charge, with hundreds of abominations pouring through the trees across the way, exiting the paths, even the main one strung with magical webbing.

  “What will happen?” Myrineyl asked.

  “I don’t know,” came the honest answer from both Quenthel and Yvonnel.

  A group of driders led by one huge female appeared on the path beyond the translucent web. Whether they saw it or not, they didn’t slow, charging onto the field.

  Or trying to.

  For there came a great flash of dark light, deep purple, almost black. Then another, and several more as each drider plunged through the trap.

  Dark smoke lifted, leaving the abominations writhing and screaming in pain on the field. The ones behind managed to stop and looked on in horror, like everyone else, as those few who went through suffered in obvious agony.

  Suffered and writhed, shrieked and tumbled, bones snapping, skin splitting—a sight inspiring the very worst memories of those who had been turned into such an abomination. The difference became stark, though, as the behemoth driders began to shrink, bloated bodies withering, eight legs becoming two.

  In short order, nine drow, not nine drider abominations, sat on the meadow, confused, each tapping herself or himself all about with trembling hands to see if it was true. They wore the jerkin and battle armor still, though now that their bodies had shrunk, it was knee-length, not just to their waists.

  It could not be!

  But it was. Their magical web had undone that which Lolth had done, because no priestess of the Spider Queen believed herself to have the power to transform a drow into a drider. Any priestess, and there were very few, ever given that “privilege” understood herself to be a conduit to the work of Lolth and nothing more.

  This before them, more powerful still, wasn’t the will of Lolth. How could it be?

  Yvonnel glanced around. Time had seemed to stop. Everyone around the meadow, drow and drider, even the slave goblins and bugbears House Baenre would send into battle, stood staring, mouths hanging open in shock.

  This was the highest heresy possible.

  “Do you doubt me still?” Kimmuriel Oblodra shouted at the Baenre priestesses.

  Before either Yvonnel or Quenthel could reply, from a hillock in the forest across the way, Matron Zhindia screamed her outrage. “For Lolth!”

  She was answered, stunningly, by one of the driders-turned-drow, a broad-shouldered woman who was the first of the nine to lift herself from the ground. “Damn Lolth!”

  “Mal’a’voselle Amvas Tol,” Minolin Fey Baenre remarked, and Quenthel and Yvonnel nodded. “The weapon master of what most considered the very first First House of Menzoberranzan.”

  “Kill them all! It’s a lie!” Zhindia screamed in a voice thick with magic.

  “You are the lie!” Matron Mother Quenthel yelled back, her voice, too, magnified by a magical spell.

  “I have handmaidens at my side.”

  “Do you indeed?” Quenthel replied with confidence.

  The moment of hesitation shattered. Drow and slave soldiers rushed to form defensive lines on the eastern end of the meadow, while Zhindia’s drow and slave soldiers formed into battle groups across the way, in the shelter of the forest shadows. Wizards and clerics alike began their intended spells, and the driders rushed all about, confused and shouting, both to one another and to the nine drow remaining on the field.

  Directly across from Yvonnel, a drider on the path rushed down and leaped through the magical webbing—eagerly, almost—and again came that dark, fiery flash and the screaming and writhing. That obvious pain did not discourage the others, though—quite the opposite! One by one or in small groups, the abominations swarmed to the web and plunged through.

  The few driders of House Baenre, House Do’Urden, House Fey-Branche, and every other house in view of the spectacle didn’t wait for permission but charged forward, sprinting across the field and into the forest, to the path, before turning back and plunging through the web.

  The glorious web.

  “Go and greet the driders, the former driders,” Yvonnel told Minolin Fey, Myrineyl, and Saribel Do’Urden. “Guide them to us that we might tell them that they are free.”

  “Free to join House Baenre, if they wish, as family,” Matron Mother Quenthel said, and more than a few gasped at that! Even after all they had just witnessed, such an offer seemed incomprehensible and utterly blasphemous.

  And yet, the three priestesses rushed out onto the meadow, heading for Mal’a’voselle Amvas Tol.

  “Now what?” Matron Byrtyn Fey asked.

  “What have you done?” Matron Zeerith added. “What does it mean?”

  “I do not know,” Quenthel admitted.

  “Open revolt!” Zhindia snapped at Yiccardaria and Eskavidne.

  The handmaidens looked to each other, their drow faces masks of great concern.

  Then, together, they broke out in mocking laughter.

  “How does this amuse you?” Zhindia roared at them. “They just defied your goddess. They, the Matron Mother Baenre herself, just slapped blessed Lolth in the face!”

  “Did she?” Yiccardaria gasped, clapping her hand across her heart for dramatic effect—quite the practiced move for one who was not normally a bipedal humanoid.

  Eskavidne laughed even louder.

  “The others will side with me,” Zhindia declared—and loudly, for she knew that the Hunzrin contingent, including First Priestess Charri, were watching this unfolding wildness.

  No, Zhindia thought. “Wildness” was not the right word.

  “Chaos,” she whispered, her correction and her epiphany.

  “Sometimes it takes these inferior creatures a bit of time to understand, sister,” Eskavidne said to Yiccardaria, and they laughed again, then touched their fingers together, drew a portal in the air, and stepped through it to their abyssal home.

  “It’s a shame about Zaknafein, though,” Yiccardaria muttered as she entered the door.

  Such a door was not like a physical door, of course, but Matron Zhindia Melarn started when it closed as surely as if it had been a physical portal slamming shut.

  Another group of driders,
wearing the colors and insignias of several houses, rushed across the field, desperate for that magical web.

  “Barrison Del’Armgo,” Yvonnel noted of more than a few. “And no doubt Zhindia’s own house driders join the resurrected ones as drow once more on the field.”

  “Matron Zhindia,” Zeerith corrected.

  Quenthel chuckled at that and looked to Yvonnel, who joined her. Once in Menzoberranzan—long ago—the woman chosen by each family to sit on the Conclave, before it was called the Ruling Council, only wore her title while at the table.

  They didn’t need to tell the others that then, however. Indeed, they both understood that they could not.

  Sequential effect.

  “Do not attack Matron Zhindia,” Yvonnel advised her aunt.

  “No,” Quenthel agreed. “It is time to go home. It is time for all of us to go home.”

  “You don’t think there will be a fight about this?” Zeerith asked.

  “Of course there will,” said Yvonnel. “Menzoberranzan will be a bloody battleground.”

  “A true civil war is quite possible,” Quenthel added.

  “What have you gained?” an outraged Sos’Umptu called from a short distance away.

  The four, and many others, turned to regard her.

  “Do you think this will stand?” Sos’Umptu yelled at them. “Lolth herself will come against you! I only pray that she will use my imperfect body as her avatar to destroy the mockery you have made of glorious House Baenre!”

  Yvonnel locked the priestess’s gaze with her own.

  And shrugged.

  Sos’Umptu ran off.

  “Is she wrong?” the skeptical and clearly terrified Zeerith asked. “What has happened but a pause? What have we gained?”

  Yvonnel and Quenthel together turned to regard the field. “Many hundreds”—Quenthel paused and smiled, for more and more driders were eagerly rushing through that web, desperate to try, even in the face of such agony of transformation, even against any fears that it might be a trick designed to punish them even more—“Perhaps a few thousand soldiers to our cause.”