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 netherspirit understood it, this method of egress was arranged by the Baenre eldermale so that the occupants of Arach-Tinilith 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 second 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 second’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.
“In here,” Pharaun said.
The two masters ran to the arched sandstone door of one of the modest houses on the street. Pharaun suspected that the tenants had locked it at the first sign of trouble, and evidently Ryld agreed, because he didn’t bother trying the handle. He simply booted the door and broke the latch. The weapons master scrambled inside.
The front room of the home was crowded. Pharaun might have expected that. The population of the city had grown considerably since its founding but the number of stalagmite buildings was of necessity fixed. The poor had to squeeze in wherever they could.
Thus, an abundance of paupers lived in the hovel, and a goodly number of them had gathered in this common space, either to relax or to dip rothé stew from the iron caldron on the trestle table. Surprisingly, the simple meal actually smelled appetizing. The aroma made Pharaun’s mouth water and reminded him that he hadn’t dined in several hours.
Ryld brandished Splitter at the occupants of the house with a flashy facility calculated to quell aggressive impulses.
“We apologize for the intrusion,” Pharaun said.
The weapons master glowered at him. “Why are we running?”
“That pillar of fire was divine magic, not arcane.” Pharaun lifted his hand, displaying the silver Sorcere ring and reminding his friend of its power to identify, not just protect him from, magic. “It’s priestesses attacking us. Killing them would call attention to us, make the Council even more eager to put a stop to our inquiry. It might even make them want to kill us irrespective of how our mission turns out or of what Gromph decides.”
Pharaun grinned and added, “I know I promised you glorious mayhem, but that will have to wait.”
Ryld replied, “It’s a difficult thing to sneak away from foes who hold the high ground.”
“I’m an inexhaustible font of tricks, haven’t you noticed?” Pharaun beamed at the assembled paupers and said, “How would you all like to assist two masters of the Academy engaged in a mission of vital importance? I assure you, Archmage Baenre himself will wax giddy with gratitude when I inform him of your aid.”
His audience stared back at him, fear in their eyes. One of the female commoners produced a bone-handled, granite-headed mallet and threw it. Ryld caught it and hurled it back. The makeshift weapon thudded into the center of the laborer’s forehead, and she collapsed.
“Would anyone else care to express a reservation of any sort?” Pharaun asked. He waited a beat. “Splendid, then just stand still. I assure you, this won’t hurt.”
The Master of Sorcere pulled a wisp of fleece from a pocket and recited an incantation. With a soft hissing, a wave of magical force shimmered through the room. When it touched the paupers, they changed, each into a facsimile of Ryld or Pharaun himself. Only a single child remained unaffected.
“Excellent,” said Pharaun. “Now all you have to do is go outside, at which point, I recommend you scatter. With luck, many, if not all of you, will survive.”
“No!” cried one of Ryld’s doubles in a high, agitated voice. “You can’t make us—”
“But we can,” said Pharaun. “I can fill the house with a poisonous vapor, my friend can start chopping you to pieces…. So please, be sensible, go now. If the enemy breaks in here, your chances will be significantly worse.”
They looked sullenly back at him. He smiled and shrugged, and Ryld hefted Splitter. The commoners began to scurry toward the door.
The two masters fell in at the back of the crowd, prepared to chivvy folk along as necessary.
“Shadows of the Pit,” murmured Pharaun, “I wasn’t at all sure they would actually do it. I am a persuasive devil, aren’t I? It must be my honest face.”
“Decoys aren’t a bad idea,” said Ryld, “but now that I think of it, why not just turn us invisible?”
Pharaun snorted. “Do I tell you which end of the sword to grip? Invisibility’s too common a trick. I’m sure our foes are prepared to counter it. Whereas the illusion may work. It’s one of my personal, private spells, and we Mizzrym are famously deft with phantasmata. Now, when we get outside, don’t lose track of me. You don’t want to go skipping off with the wrong Pharaun.”
Most of the commoners had vacated the house. Pharaun drew a deep breath, steadying himself, and he and Ryld plunged out into the open.
The commoners were scattering as directed. As far as Pharaun could tell, no one had attacked any of them. Perhaps, as he’d hoped, the enemy was entirely flummoxed.
The masters, fleeing like the rest, turned one corner and another. Pharaun was beginning to feel the smugness that comes from outwitting an adversary when something rattled and rustled above his head. He looked up in time for it to slam him in the face and knock him down. Dropped from a fair height, the thick, coarse strands of rope comprising the net struck with the force of a club.
Also trapped, Ryld cursed, the language vulgar enough to make the Braeryn proud.
Pharaun needed a second to shake off the shock of the impact, and he realized his current situation was even more unfortunate than he’d initially thought. The net, woven in a spiderweb pattern, was animate. Scraping his skin, striving to render him completely immobile, the heavy mesh shifted and tightened around him.
A foulwing landed on the street. In the saddle sat an otherwise handsome priestess with a scarred face—a Mizzrym face, lean, intelligent, and sardonic. Strangely, she wore a domino mask, and Pharaun suspecte
d he knew why.
Grinning, the female said, “I knew you’d try to trick me with illusions, Pharaun. That’s why I brought a talisman of true seeing.”
Though he wasn’t sure she could see it from outside the net, Pharaun made it a point to smile back when he said, “And you were correct. Hello, Greyanna.”
Quenthel was immune to fear. She did not, could not, panic. Or so she had always believed, and in fact, she wasn’t panicking, but she was as desperate and bewildered as any ill-wisher could desire.
She wasn’t certain, but she believed the vipers’ hissing and a bump and clatter had roused her from her trancelike state of repose. She’d opened her eyes and seen nothing. Evidently someone had conjured a patch of darkness around her, or worse, cursed her with a blindness spell. She opened her mouth to speak to the whip snakes, and something cold and thick jammed itself inside.
Her throat clogged, she was suffocating. Meanwhile, something else, something that felt like the cool, dexterous tip of a demon’s tentacle, slid around her wrist.
She yanked her hand away just before the unseen member could lock around it and thrashed to keep her limbs free of the other tendrils that began to grope after them. None of it helped her breathe.
She battered furiously at the space around her. Logic told her that her attacker had to be there, but her fists merely swept through empty space. Her chest ached with the need for air, and she felt unconsciousness nibbling at her mind.
She did the only thing left. She bit down.
At first, she couldn’t penetrate the mass, but she strained, snarled in her throat with effort, and her teeth sank into something leathery and oily.
In an instant, it vanished. It didn’t yank itself free, it just melted away. Quenthel’s teeth snapped together with a clack.
Scrambling to her knees, she sucked in a couple deep breaths, then called, “Whip!”
Dissolution Page 10