“How true. The old tyrant did condescend to say that he isn’t the only one interested in the fugitives’ whereabouts. The priestesses are equally concerned, but that emphatically did not make them want to join forces with Gromph. Matron Mother Baenre herself ordered him to drop the matter.”
“Matron Baenre,” said Ryld. “I like this less with every word you speak.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just because Triel Baenre rules all Menzoberranzan, and I’m about to flout her express wishes . . . Anyway, the archmage says he can no longer investigate the disappearances himself. Seems the ladies have their eyes on him, but, lucky me, I am not so burdened.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re going to find the missing males. If they fled the city, they could be anywhere in the Underdark by now.”
“Please,” said Pharaun with a grin, “you don’t have to try to cheer me up. Actually, I’m going to start looking in Eastmyr and the Braeryn. Apparently some of the runaways were last sighted in those déclassé vicinities, and perhaps they linger there still. Even if they do intend to depart Menzoberranzan, they may still be making preparations for the journey.”
“If they’ve already decamped,” Ryld said, “you might at least find a witness who can tell you what tunnel they took. It’s a sensible plan, but I can think of another. It’s reckless to gamble your life when you don’t even understand the game. You could flee Menzoberranzan yourself. With your wizardry, you’re one of the few people capable of undertaking such a dangerous trek alone.”
“I could try,” Pharaun said, “but I suspect Gromph would track me down. Even if he didn’t, I would have lost my home and forfeited the rank I worked my whole life to earn. Would you give up being a master just to avoid a spot of danger?”
“No.”
“Then you understand my predicament. I imagine you’ve also figured out why I called on you today.”
“I think so.”
“Of course you have. Whatever it is that’s truly transpiring, my chances of survival improve if I have a comrade to watch my back.”
Ryld scowled. “You mean, a comrade willing to defy the express will of Matron Mother Baenre and risk running afoul of the Archmage of Menzoberranzan as well.”
“Quite, and by a happy coincidence you have the look of a drow in need of a break from his daily routine. You know you’re bored to death. It’s painful to watch you grouch your way through the day.”
Ryld pondered for a moment, then said, “All right. Maybe we’ll find out something we can turn to our advantage.”
“Thank you, my friend. I owe you.” Pharaun took a drink and held out the flask again. “Have the rest. There’s only a swallow left. We seem to have guzzled the whole pint in just a few moments, though that scarcely seems possible, refined, genteel fellows that we—”
Something crackled and sizzled above their heads. Waves of pressure beat down on them. Ryld looked up, cursed, scrambled to his feet, and drew a dagger, meanwhile wishing he’d strapped on his weapons before stepping outside Melee-Magthere.
Pharaun rose in a more leisurely fashion.
“Well,” he said, “this is interesting.”
chapter
two
Scourge of vipers writhing in her hand, soft, thin gown whispering, Quenthel Baenre, Mistress of Arach-Tinilith, prowled about, glaring at the younger females standing huddled in the center of the candlelit, marble-paneled room. She always had a knack for striking fear into the hearts of those who displeased her, and these students were no exception. Some trembled or appeared to be biting back tears, and even the sullen, fractious ones refused to look her in the eye.
Enjoying their apprehension, Quenthel prolonged her silent inspection until it was surely on the verge of becoming unbearable, then she cracked the whip. Some of her startled pupils gasped and jumped.
As the five long black- and crimson-banded vipers that comprised the lashes of the whip rose twisting and probing from the adamantine handle, Quenthel said, “All your lives, your mothers have told you that when a student ascends to Tier Breche, she remains here, sequestered from the city below, for ten years. On the day you entered the Academy, I told you the same thing.”
She stalked up to one of the students trapped at the front of the group, Gaussra Kenafin, slightly plump and round-faced, with teeth as black as her skin. Responding to Quenthel’s unspoken will, the whip snakes explored the novice’s body, gliding over its contours, tongues flickering. The Mistress of Arach-Tinilith could see Gaussra straining mightily not to recoil for fear that it would provoke the reptiles into striking.
“So you did know,” Quenthel purred, “didn’t you?” “Yes,” Gaussra gasped. “I’m sorry. Please, take the snakes away!” “How impertinent of you. You and these others have forfeited the right to ask me for anything. You may kiss her.”
The last statement was addressed to the serpents, and they responded instantly, driving their long fangs into cheek, throat, shoulder, and breast. Gaussra collapsed—fully expecting to fall into a seizure, mouth foaming, her own blackened incisors chewing her purple tongue.
Shaking from the sting of the bites, Gaussra sat on the floor, very much alive; her terror was apparent, her humiliation complete.
“You will return to your House,” Quenthel said, relishing the look on Gaussra’s face as the true meaning of that statement sank in. “If you come that close to my scourge again, the vipers will allow their venom to flow.”
Quenthel stepped away from Gaussra, who scrambled to her feet and ran from the chamber.
“You all knew what was expected of you,” she said to the rest of the novices, “but you tried to sneak home anyway. In so doing, you have offered an affront to the Academy, to your own families, to Menzoberranzan, and to Lolth herself!”
“We just wanted to go for a little while,” said Halavin Symryvvin, who seemed to carry half of her insignificant House’s paltry wealth in the form of the gaudy, gold ornaments hanging about her person. “We would have come back.”
“Liar!” shouted Quenthel, eliciting a flinch.
Rearing, the whip vipers echoed the cry.
“Liar!”
“Liar!”
“Liar!”
In other circumstances, Quenthel might have smiled, for she was proud of her weapon. Many priestesses possessed a whip of fangs, but hers was something special. The snakes were venomous and likewise possessed a demonic intelligence and the power of speech. It was the last magical tool she’d crafted before everything turned to dung.
“Oh, you would have returned,” she continued, “but only because your mothers would have sent you back or else killed you for shaming them. They have sense enough to cleave to the sacred traditions of Menzoberranzan even if their degenerate offspring do not.
“Your mothers wouldn’t mind if I slaughtered you, either. They’d thank me for wiping clean the honor of their Houses. But Lolth desires new priestesses, and despite all appearances to the contrary, it is remotely possible that one or two of you are worthy to serve. Therefore I will give you one more chance. You won’t die today. Instead you will sever a finger from each of your hands and burn them before the altar of the goddess to beg her forgiveness. I’ll ring for a cleaver and a chopping block.”
Quenthel surveyed their stricken faces, enjoying the sickly, shrinking fear. She would enjoy watching the actual mutilations as well. The most amusing part might be when a novice had already cut one hand, and had to employ it, throbbing and streaming blood, to maim the other. . . .
“No!”
Surprised by the outburst, Quenthel peered to see who had spoken. The mass of would-be truants obliged her by dividing in the center, opening a lane to the willowy female standing in the back. It was Drisinil Barrison Del’Armgo, she of the sharp nose and green eyes, whom Quenthel had from the first suspected of instigating the mass elopement. Somehow the long-legged novice had smuggled a sizable dagger, more of a short sword really, into the disciplinary session. She held it ready in a low guard.
Quenthel reacted as would any dark elf in the same situation. She yearned to accept the challenge and kill the other female, felt the need like a sensual tension pressing for an explosive release. Either responding to her surge of emotion or else themselves vexed by Drisinil’s temerity, the whip vipers reared and hissed.
The problem was that, despite Quenthel’s assertions to the contrary, the students were not altogether devoid of importance. They were the raw but valuable ore sent to the Academy to be refined and hammered into useful implements. No one would fret over a few amputated pinkies, but the matron mothers did expect that, for the most part, their children would survive their education, an assumption the idiot Mizzrym renegade had already called into question. True, Pharaun had only lost males, but still, by any sensible reckoning, he had used up the school’s quota of allowable deaths for several years to come.
At this juncture it would be a poor idea for Quenthel to kill any student, certainly a scion of the powerful Barrison Del’Armgo. Quenthel didn’t want to stir up discord between the Academy and the noble Houses when Menzoberranzan already perched on the brink of dissolution.
Besides, she was a bit concerned that the other failed runaways might take it into their heads to jump into the fight on their ringleader’s side.
Quenthel quieted the vipers with a thought, fixed Drisinil with her steeliest stare, and said, “Think.”
“I have thought,” Drisinil retorted. “I’ve thought, why should we spend ten years of our lives cooped up on Tier Breche when there’s nothing for us here?”
“There is everything for you here,” said Quenthel, maintaining the pressure of her gaze. “This is where you learn to be all that a lady of Menzoberranzan must be.”
“What? What am I learning?”
“At the moment, patience and submission.”
“That’s not what I came for.”
“Evidently not. Consider this, then. All the priestesses of Menzoberranzan are currently playing a game, and the object of the game is to convince others that nothing is amiss. If a student leaves ArachTinilith prematurely, as none has ever done since the founding of the city, that will seem peculiar, a hint that all is not as it ought to be.”
“Perhaps I don’t care about the game.”
“Your mother does. She plays as diligently as the rest of us. Do you think she will welcome you home if you jeopardize her efforts?”
Drisinil’s emerald eyes blinked, the first sign that Quenthel’s stare was unsettling her. “I . . . yes, certainly she would!”
“You, a traitor to your House, your city, your sex, and the goddess herself?”
“The goddess—”
“Don’t say it!” Quenthel snapped. “Or your life ends, and your soul is bound to torment forevermore. I speak not only as Mistress of Arach-Tinilith, but as a Baenre. You remember Baenre, Barrison Del’Armgo? We are the First House, and you, merely the Second. Even if you should succeed in departing Arach-Tinilith, even if your gross and uncouth dam should be so unwise as to accept you back into that hovel you Del’Armgo call a home, you will not survive the month. My sister Triel, Matron Mother Baenre, will personally attend to your destruction.”
It was no less than the truth. There was no love lost between the two Baenre sisters, but when it came to maintaining the supremacy of their House, they supported one another absolutely.
Drisinil swallowed and lowered her eyes a hair. “Mistress, I mean no disrespect. I just don’t want to mutilate myself.”
“But you will, novice, and without any further delay. You really have no other option . . . and isn’t it convenient, you already have a knife in your grasp.”
Drisinil swallowed again, and, her dagger hand shaking a little, brought the blade into position to saw at her little finger. Quenthel thought the procedure might go easier if the novice walked a few steps and braced her pinkie atop the nearby table, but apparently she was taking “without any further delay” quite literally, and that was fine with the high priestess. In her imagination, she was already savoring the first slice when a blare like a sour note blasted from a hundred glaur horns split the air.
For an instant, Quenthel faltered, not frightened but disoriented. She had been told what this ugly noise was but had expected never to actually hear it. To the best of her knowledge, no one ever had.
The priestesses of Menzoberranzan enjoyed a complex relationship with the inhabitants of the Abyss. Some infernal entities were the knights or handmaidens of Lolth, and during worship were venerated as such, but on other occasions the clerics did not scruple to snare spirits with their summoning spells and compel them to do their bidding. Sometimes the creatures stalked the physical plane of their own volition, slaughtering any mortal who crossed their path, not excepting the drow, who were by some accounts their kindred.
The founders of the Academy had shielded Tier Breche in general and Arach-Tinilith in particular with enchantments devised to keep out any spirit save those the occupants saw fit to welcome. Countless generations of priestesses had deemed those wards impregnable, but if the ear-splitting alarm told true, the barriers were falling one by one.
The blare seemed to be coming from the south. The pleasures of chastisement forgotten, Quenthel ran in that direction past countless chapels, altars, and icons of Lolth in both her dark elf and spider forms; past the classrooms where the faculty gave instruction in dogma, ritual, divine magic, torture, sacrifice, and all the other arts the novices needed to learn. Their books, chalkboards, and whimpering, half-dissected slave victims forgotten, some of the teachers and students appeared on the brink of venturing out to investigate the alarm, while others still looked startled and confused.
The blaring stopped. Either the demon had given up attempting to force its way in, or else it had breached every single ward. Quenthel suspected the latter was the case, and when the screaming started, she knew she was right.
“Do you know what’s breaking through?” she panted.
“No,” hissed Yngoth, perhaps the wisest of the whip vipers. “The intruder has shielded itself from the Sight.”
“Wonderful.”
The echoing cries led Quenthel into a spacious candlelit hall filled with towering black marble sculptures of spiders, set there to make the temple’s entryway as impressive as possible. The battered valves of the great adamantine double door in the curved south wall gaped crookedly, half off their hinges, affording a glimpse of the plateau outside. Several priestesses lay battered and insensible on the floor. For a moment, Quenthel couldn’t make out what had caused the mess, then the culprit scuttled across her field of vision toward another hapless servant of Lolth.
The intruder was a gigantic spider bearing a close resemblance to the gleaming black effigies around it, and upon seeing it, Quenthel scowled at an unfamiliar and unwelcome pang of doubt.
On the one hand, the demon, if that was what it truly was, was attacking her pupils and staff, but on the other, it was a kind of spider, sacred to Lolth. Perhaps it was even her emissary, sent to punish the weak and heretical. Maybe Quenthel should simply step aside and permit it to continue its rampage.
It sensed her somehow, turned, and rushed toward her as if it had been looking for her all along.
Though many spiders possessed several eyes, this one, she observed, was exceptional beyond the point of deformity. The head behind the jagged mandibles was virtually nothing but a mass of bulging eyes, and a scatter of others opened here and there about the creature’s shiny black bulb of a body.
Its peculiarities notwithstanding, the spider’s manifest hostile intent resolved Quenthel’s uncertainty in an instant. She would kill the freakish thing.
The question was, how? She did not feel weak—she never had and never would—but she knew it was scarcely the optimal time for her to fight such a battle. On top of any other disadvantages, she wasn’t even wearing her mail tunic or piwafwi. She rarely did within the walls of Arach-Tinilith. For the most part, her minions feared her too much
to attempt an assassination, and she had always been confident that she wouldn’t need armor to disappoint any who did not.
As she backed away from the charging spider, her slim, gleaming obsidian hands opened the pouch at her belt, extracted a roll of vellum, and unrolled it for her scrutiny, all with practiced ease and likewise with a certain annoyance, for the magical scroll was a treasure, and she was about to use it up. But it was necessary, and the parchment was scarcely the only magical implement hoarded within those walls.
Rapidly, but with perfect rhythm and pronunciation, she read the verses, the golden characters vanishing from the page as she spoke the words. Dark, heatless flame leaped from the vellum to the floor and shot across that polished surface faster than a wildfire propagating itself across a stand of dead, dry fungus, defining a path that led from herself to the demon.
The black conflagration washed over the demon’s dainty bladed feet. It should also have driven the many-eyed creature helplessly backward, but it didn’t. The arachnid kept coming nimbly as before, which was to say, considerably faster than the best effort of a drow.
“The spirit has defenses against the magic!” cried K’Sothra, perhaps the least intelligent of the whip vipers and certainly the one most inclined to belabor the obvious.
Quenthel wouldn’t have time to attempt another spell before the spider reached her, nor could she outrun it. She would have to outmaneuver it instead. Dropping the useless sheet of parchment, she turned and dived beneath the belly of one of the statues. Unless it had the power to shrink or shapeshift, the invader wouldn’t be able to negotiate the same low space.
She slid on the floor, rubbing her elbows hot. One of the snakes cursed foully when its scaly, wedge-shaped head rapped against the stone. She rolled over and saw that she had only bought herself a moment. No, the demon couldn’t slip under the statue but, clustered eyes glaring, it was rapidly clambering over the top of it. Up close, it had a foul, carrion smell.
Quenthel knew that if she permitted the spider to pounce down on her, the monster would hold her down and snip her apart with its mandibles. She sprang to her feet and swung her whip.
R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation Page 3