by Monte Cook
“A drow!” one of them gasped, and others quickly took up the cry. Young faces frowned in fear and determination, and young hands moved in a weaver’s nightmare of complicated gestures.
* * * * *
In the chamber whose domed ceiling winked with glimmering stars, Laeral stirred, lifting her head from Khelben’s bare, hairy shoulder. The chiming came again, and the Lord Mage of Waterdeep answered it with a louder, barking snore. Laeral’s lips twisted in wry amusement. Of course.
She sat up, her silvery hair stirring around her bare shoulders, and sighed. The books they’d been studying lay spread open around them on the bed, abandoned for slumber, and Laeral carefully lifted her long legs over them as she rolled off the bed, plucked up a robe, and went to see what was wrong.
She was still padding down the tower stairs with a crystal sphere of stored spells winking ready in her hand when she heard shouts from below, the whoosh of released magic, then a blast that shook the entire tower.
She lurched against the wall, cradling the sphere to keep it from a shattering fall—and was promptly flung across the stair by another, even more powerful blast.
“True trouble,” she murmured to the world at large and launched herself down the stairs in a long glide that called on the stairway enchantments to let her fly—and not crash on her face.
The tower shuddered and shook under another blast before she hit the bottom, and a long, racing crack opened in the wall beside her. Laeral lifted her eyebrows at it as she plunged through an archway where dust was drifting down, headlong into the battle raging below.
* * * * *
“Gods above!” Dauntless murmured, as the door he’d seen the drow slip through banged open in front of his nose, and dust swirled out. There was a dull, rolling boom, and doors and windows creaked and slammed all over the tower. “I must be crazed to leap into this,” he murmured, touched the silver harp badge pinned to the inside throat of his jacket for luck—and trotted into the booming darkness. Not far away, in the shadow of another building, a cloaked and hooded figure the Harper hadn’t noticed nodded to itself and turned away.
The passages inside were an inferno of whirling spell energies, swirling dust, and shouts—but he could follow their fury up and on, stumbling in the gloom, until he came out into a room whose floor was cracked and tilted crazily, where dust-cloaked figures knelt and scrambled and waved their arms in spellcasting.
In their midst, standing alone in a ring of fires in the center of the room, was his beautiful Lady of Mystery, shards of black glass all around her, something that looked like silver smoke boiling away from her sweat-bedewed body, and fury blazing out of her dark face. He almost cowered back at the sight of it—and in his moment of hesitation, a white-faced young man in flapping robes bounded out from behind a pillar with a long, bared sword in his hand, green-glowing runes shimmering up and down its heavy blade, and charged at the drow.
Spells slammed into her from three sides as he ran, almost tripping over the embroidered edge of his robe, but she was staggering helplessly in their grip when he skidded to a halt, grimly aimed his blade—and with both hands thrust it through her flat belly.
The Lady of Mystery coughed silver fire almost into the duty apprentice’s face, and he reeled back as the sword shattered with a wild shrieking, spat bright shards away in all directions, and slumped into dust around the convulsed dark elf. The young wizard hurled himself away in real horror as silver fire scorched his cheek and he realized who—or rather, what—this intruder must be. A cold, bright golden glow cracked across the chamber, Dauntless found himself slammed back against its wall in the company of all of the dusty robed figures, and a furious Lady Mage of Waterdeep strode barefooted into the center of the room, snarling, “Is this the hospitality of Blackstaff Tower?”
In the utter silence that followed her shout, Laeral set down a crystal sphere she’d been carrying and strode toward the drow who was standing upright again, silver fire blazing up around her in an unearthly nimbus of glowing smoke.
Laeral’s unbound hair swirled around her as she stretched forth her hands, like a mother desiring a daughter’s embrace, and asked in a voice not far from tears, “Sister—too long unseen—what troubles you?”
“My own ineptitude,” Qilué replied, and burst into tears. She swayed amid silver flames, weeping, for a long moment, then, with a sob, rushed into Laeral’s waiting arms.
About the Author
Monte Cook is a senior game designer at TSR. He and his wife Sue live in the Northwest in their house full of books with a grumpy rabbit named Wilbur. In his spare time, he enjoys games of all sorts (particularly role playing games), music, and reading strange and obscure books about parapsychology, UFO’s, and conspiracies.