Quenthel hadn’t asked about the trinket, nor had Gromph expected her to. He always wore his amulet of eternal youth and the brooch that helped him imbue Narbondel with radiant warmth. Beyond those two staples, he tended to adorn the Robes of the Archmage with a constantly changing array of charms and talismans, depending on his whim and the particular magical tasks he expected to perform that day. His sister had had no reason to suspect that this particular trinket was of any particular significance, certainly not to herself.
If she had noticed it at all, she probably assumed the stone was onyx, ebony, or jet. In actuality, it was polished ivory cut from a unicorn’s horn after Gromph slew the magical equine—sacred to the despicable elves of the World Above—in a necromantic rite. The orb was only black because of the entity he had placed inside it only two hours before.
“That was her,” he murmured, too softly for any of the spellcasters bustling about him to overhear. “Did you take her scent?”
Yes, the demon answered, its silent voice like a nail scratching the inside of Gromph’s head. Though it was unnecessary. I may not possess the power of sight, but that has never hindered me as I sought my prey.
“I was just making sure. Now, can you succeed where Beradax failed?”
Of course. No one of your world has ever escaped me. Afterward, I will feast on Quenthel’s soul, one tiny morsel at a time.
Most likely the netherspirit would do exactly that, and if it failed, Gromph had six more waiting in line to pick up where it left off. Perhaps it wouldn’t even come to that. He had, after all, manipulated events in such a way as to inspire more mundane assassins.
A third-year student came scurrying up with a stubby chalcedony wand in his hand. Recalled to more immediate concerns, Gromph sighed and prepared to teach the youth how the device worked.
Pretending to take an interest in an itinerant vendor’s rack of cheaply forged and poorly balanced daggers, Ryld turned and surreptitiously surveyed the intersection.
A fellow with what the weapons master suspected were selfinflicted sores on his legs chanted for alms and shook a ceramic bowl. Since it was a rare if not demented dark elf who ever felt the tug of pity, the beggar sat near the entrance to a shabby boarding house catering to non-drow.
A female hurried by with a hooked and pointed pole—virtually a pike, when one really looked at it—on her shoulder and a giant weasel on a leash. She was plainly an exterminator headed out to rid a household of some substantial infestation.
A snarling noble from House Hunzrin drew his rapier and lashed a commoner with the flat, evidently because the latter had been a trifle slow stepping out of his way. The Hunzrins were notorious for their virulent arrogance. Perhaps it stemmed from the fact that they controlled the greater part of Menzoberranzan’s agriculture. Or maybe they were compensating for the fact that, for all their wealth, they were stuck living in “mere East.”
Any number of other rather drab and hungry-looking souls rushed on about their business.
“Reliving childhood memories?” the wizard asked.
“You forget,” Ryld replied, “I was born in the Braeryn. I had to work my way up to get to Eastmyr.”
“I daresay you took one look around, then kept right on climbing.”
“You’re right. Just now, I was checking to see if someone’s tailing us. No one is.”
“What a pity. I was hoping that if we asked enough questions in diverse male gatherings, some more friends of the runaways would try to murder us, or at least seek to learn what we’re about. Perhaps the rogues are too canny for that.”
“What do we do now?”
“Visit the next vile tavern, I suppose.”
They started walking, and Pharaun continued, “Say, did I ever tell you how, two days into my first mission to the World Above, I wound up having to tail a human mage while the sun was blazing in the sky? I was blind with the glare, my eyes—”
“Enough,” Ryld said. “You’ve told this a thousand times.”
“Well, it’s a good story. I know you’ll enjoy hearing it again. There I was, blind with the glare . . .”
As the two masters strolled on, they passed a doorway sealed with a curtain of spiderweb. Forbidden by sacred law to disturb the silken trap until such time as its builder ceased to occupy it, the luckless occupant of the house had placed a box beneath his front window to serve as a makeshift step.
Across the way, a ragged half-breed child, part dark elf, part human by the look of her, brushed past a drunken laborer, then quickened her pace a trifle. Ryld hadn’t actually seen her lift the tosspot’s purse, but he was fairly certain she had.
Pharaun came to a sudden halt. “Look at this,” he said.
Ryld turned, the long, comfortable weight of Splitter shifting ever so slightly across his back. On a wall at the mouth of an alley, someone had clumsily daubed a rudimentary picture of a clawed hand surrounded by flames. Though it was small and smeared in paint that barely contrasted with the stone behind it, Ryld was slightly chagrined that Pharaun had noticed it and he hadn’t, but he supposed wizards had a nose for glyphs.
“Do you know what this is?” asked Pharaun.
“An emblem of the Skortchclaw horde, one of the larger tribes of orcs. I’ve been to the Realms that See the Sun a time or two myself, remember?”
“Good, I’m glad you confirm my identification. Now, what is it doing here?”
Ryld took a reflexive glance around, searching for potential threats, and said, “I assume some orc painted it.”
“That would be my supposition, too, but have you ever known a thrall to do such a thing?”
“No.”
“Of course not. What slave would dare deface the city, knowing that each and every drow takes pride in its perfection?”
“A crazy one. We’ve all seen them go mad under the lash.”
“Whereupon they attack their handlers. They don’t creep about scrawling on walls. I’d like to questions the people in these houses on either side. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this occurrence.”
“You get curious about the strangest things,” Ryld said, shaking his head. “Sometimes I think you’re a little mad yourself.”
“Genius is so often misperceived.”
“Look, I know this puzzle is going to nag at you, but we’re right in the middle of trying to find the runaways and so save your life. Let’s stick to that.”
The tall, thin wizard smiled and said, “Yes, of course.”
They walked on.
“But eventually,” Pharaun said after a moment, “when we’ve located the rogues and covered ourselves in glory—or at least convinced Gromph to let me continue breathing—I am going to inquire into this.”
They traveled another block, then a column of roaring yellow fire fell from the sky, engulfing Pharaun’s body. Wings beat the air, and an arrow streaked at Ryld.
The netherspirit couldn’t see the new enchantments surrounding Tier Breche, but as the uttermost attenuated projection of its substance washed over them, it could feel them.
Metaphorically speaking, the wards were not unlike a castle. There was the motte, the steep slopes of which would slow an enemy’s approach while the defenders rained missiles down on him. Atop that loomed the thick, high walls, virtually unbreachable and unclimbable. Amid those was the recessed gate, defensible by spears and arrows loosed from three directions. Within the passage itself, murder holes gaped in the ceiling to rain burning oil on the invaders’ heads, while beyond it rose a gatehouse with battlements at the top, another barrier to enclose the first section of the courtyard and turn it into a killing pit.
Gromph’s first countermagic, the one that had admitted the late and unlamented Beradax to the temple, had stormed the fortress like a rampaging army equipped with catapults, rams, and siege towers. The archmage’s second effort resembled a mine sappers had excavated to pass unobtrusively beneath the walls. Except that this hole ran though extradimensional space.
As the n
etherspirit understood it, this method of egress was arranged by the Baenre eldermale so that the occupants of ArachTinilith would experience another kind of terror. They had already discovered the dread of a screaming alarm, and they would learn the fear that came when death slipped into their midst without any warning at all.
Pulling in the longer tendrils of its ectoplasmic substance, the entity—it and its kind had no names, an advantage in that most wizards therefore lacked the ability to summon them—poured its formless form into the tunnel, albeit not without a measure of trepidation. If Gromph’s magic was unable to neutralize the conjurations of his minions, this was where the spirit would discover it in some unpleasant way.
As it crept down the mine, it sensed the wards poised above and around it, enchantments like hanging axes, precariously balanced and eager to fall, or taut tripwires attached to crossbows, or caltrops strewn lavishly underfoot. The constructs of mystical force fairly quivered like living things with their compulsion to slay, but none of them detected the intruder.
The other end of the tunnel, which would not exist for mortal eyes unless they were magically augmented, opened on a corridor. The netherspirit climbed out and took its bearings. It was inside one of the spider leg annexes of Arach-Tinilith, some distance from Quenthel’s suite, but that was all right. It was confident that nothing could bar its path to its target.
The intruder hunched and drifted around a corner and saw a novice standing watch. Happily, the dark elf female didn’t notice it, though that was scarcely a surprise. For some reason it didn’t fully understand, Gromph had given it the guise of a demon of darkness, and it was all but indistinguishable from the ordinary, empty gloom behind it.
The netherspirit yearned to kill the mortal, but Gromph had forbidden it to do harm to anyone but Quenthel unless she was fool enough to stand between it and its appointed prey. With a pang of regret, it slipped past the sentry and on down the corridor. Soon it came upon a row of cells. Within the square little rooms, students recited their devotions.
So eager for bloodshed was the entity that the hall seemed to last forever. Soon enough, though, the spirit reached the spider’s cephalothorax. This was the round, firelit heart of the temple, home to the grandest chapels, the holiest of altars, and the quarters of the temple’s senior priestesses.
The intruder flowed into a spacious and largely empty octagonal chamber, where the air was perceptibly cooler than in the surrounding rooms and hallways. Statues of Lolth stood between the eight open rectangular doorways, and inlaid lines and curves of gold defined a complex magical sigil on the floor, a pentacle seemingly focused on a nexus of power at the exact center of the room. The same figure adorned the lofty ceiling, reinforcing the enchantment.
The netherspirit had no particular desire to discover what that enchantment was. It crawled along the walls, making sure not to touch the edge of the design.
Waves of power beat from the middle of the figure as something woke or became more real in the center of the chamber. A sharpness tore into the top of the spirit’s vaporlike body, stunning it for an instant with a burst of unexpected pain.
Something jerked the living darkness toward the middle of the chamber. It realized that despite its lack of solidity, something had caught it with the equivalent of a hook and line. It also understood that simply avoiding the pentacle hadn’t been good enough. Apparently when one entered the room, one was supposed to say a password or something.
The pulling ended abruptly, and the pain diminished. Shaking off its shock and disorientation, the darkness cast about and discerned the being crouching over it. The attacker was nearly as amorphous as itself, but the essence of it was fixed, hard, a mass of knobs and angles.
The attacker extruded additional lengths of itself to transfix the darkness. The piercings burned, made the spirit shake uncontrollably, and seemed to be leeching out its strength.
This, Gromph’s agent realized with a kind of wonder, was the cold that could extinguish a mortal life in a heartbeat. The intruder had never felt the sensation before—not in a painful way—and shouldn’t have been feeling it at all, but the prisoner of the pentacle wasn’t just cold. It was the essence of cold, the pure idea of cold given life, just as the netherspirit to some degree embodied the concept of darkness.
Bits of the assassin began to clot, to gum, and to harden to a brittle rigidity, at which point they broke away. It wasn’t truly injured as yet, but if it wanted to keep it that way, it knew it had better strike back at its assailant.
It washed its leading edge over the spirit of cold and discovered stress points, hairline cracks, imperfect junctures. Of course—the prisoner’s structure resembled a mass of ice.
Gromph’s agent materialized members like hammers, which pounded at the weak spots. It slid thin planes of itself into the fissures, then thickened them, forcing the edges apart.
The cold spirit snatched its frigid claws out of its foe. Its mind babbled a psionic offer of surrender. The cloud of darkness ignored it and continued the attack.
The freezing prisoner of the sigil exploded into motes of frost. They peppered the spirit of darkness for a moment then they were gone.
Pleased with itself, the victor turned, inspecting each of the doorways in turn, trying to see if the battle had attracted anyone’s attention. Apparently not, and actually, that made sense. The struggle had been relatively quiet, conducted largely on another level of existence.
The darkness reached the entrance to Quenthel’s suite without further incident. Another sentry waited there, a spiked mace all but crackling with mystic force in her hand. Left to her own devices, she might hear her superior’s distress and try to intervene, and the spirit decided to prevent such an occurrence. It rose around the priestess, blinding her, thickened a length of itself, and whipped it around her neck.
The female thrashed a little, then passed out for want of air. Her assailant laid her down and slid beneath the door.
Scores of costly icons decorated Quenthel’s private rooms, so many that the place seemed a temple of Lolth in its own right. Beyond that, however, the suite was sparsely furnished, albeit with exquisite pieces, as if the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith practiced an asceticism at odds with the habits of the average sybaritic Menzoberranyr.
The darkness sent an intangible ripple of itself probing ahead. At once it discovered an element of Quenthel’s personal defenses. It was not, as the spirit might have expected, a hidden mantrap woven of potent divine magic but a simple set of crystal wind chimes rendered invisible and hung at a point where any oblivious intruder would be sure to bump his head on them. Apparently the Baenre priestess believed that so long as an assassin gave her a heartbeat’s warning, she would be able to handle the threat herself.
Maybe she could. The netherspirit would never know, because it had no intention of informing her of its coming. It took a certain ironic amusement in sliding its smokelike form directly through the dangling crystals without disturbing them in the slightest.
Eyes closed, in Reverie no doubt, Quenthel sat straight-backed and cross-legged on a rug. Along the back wall, pulses of mystical force throbbed from a pair of iron chests and from behind a theoretically secret door. The high priestess had invoked some formidable magic to protect her valuables. It was too bad she wasn’t similarly careful with her life.
Gromph’s agent flowed forward, and something reared hissing atop a round little table. It was the five vipers comprising an enchanted whip. Distracted by the magical power blazing at the back of the chamber, the netherspirit had missed feeling the lesser emanations of the vipers.
Fortunately, it didn’t matter. The animate darkness had skulked too close to its prey for anything to balk it. It solidified a twisting strand of itself and slapped the table over, sending the whip flying. At the same time it darted, stretching, to pounce on Quenthel.
Her slanted eyes opened but of course saw only blackness. She opened her mouth to speak or shout, and the demon shoved a tendril inside.
chapter
seven
For an instant, the world blazed bright and hot, searing Pharaun’s skin. However, when the flame was gone it left little more than a tactile memory of pain. Gasping, the wizard took stock of himself. Except for a blister or two, he was all right. Some combination of the protective enchantments woven into both his vest and piwafwi, his innate drow resistance to hostile magic, and the silver ring he wore bearing the insignia of Sorcere, had saved him from fatal burns.
Ryld had drawn Splitter. An arrow whizzed down from a rooftop across the street, and the burly swordsman batted it out of the air. A huge flying mount wheeled overhead, vanishing from view before Pharaun could get a good look at it.
“Are you all right?” Ryld asked.
“Just singed a little,” Pharaun replied.
“Here are your rogues, not so canny after all. We’ll either have to rise into the air after them or pull them down to the street.” “We’ll do neither. Follow me.”
“Run?” the weapons master asked, swatting away another arrow. “I thought we wanted to catch one of them.”
“Just follow.”
Pharaun began moving down the street, meanwhile peering upward, looking for his attackers. Ryld scowled but trailed along behind him.
The Master of Sorcere glimpsed a swirling motion from the corner of his eye. He pivoted. Crouched on the edge of a roof, a spellcaster spun his hands in fluid mystic passes.
Gesturing, speaking rapidly, Pharaun rattled off his own incantation. He was racing the other mage, and he finished his magic first. Five darts of azure light leaped from his fingertips, shot at the spellcaster, and plunged into his chest. From that distance, he couldn’t tell how badly he’d hurt his colleague, but at the least his foe flailed his arms in pain. The Academician’s attack had disrupted his spell.
Ryld knocked another arrow away, and only then did Pharaun realize that this time, the shaft had been hurtling at him. An instant later, a studded mace seemingly made of shadow flew out of nowhere and swung itself at his head. Splitter flicked over and tapped that manifestation. As conjured objects often did, the war club vanished at the greatsword’s touch.
R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation Page 10