“We have to fall,” said Ryld. “If we just float here, they’ll shoot and magic us to pieces.”
“Let’s go,” Pharaun replied.
The masters released their holds and plummeted. One of the soldiers hit Ryld with an arrow, but the missile failed to penetrate his armor. A ball of flame exploded in the air, but Relonor had aimed too high, and the blast only made his targets flinch. Pharaun used his House insignia to slow his descent just a little. He thought that otherwise he’d break his legs.
As a result, he saw Ryld—who possessed a similar levitating talisman, his bearing the sigil of Melee-Magthere—reach the ground a moment ahead of him. The Master of Melee-Magthere tucked into a ball, rolled, sprang up with short sword in hand, and lunged at the soldier who’d loosed the arrow. The masked male leaped backward, dropped his bow, and whipped his scimitar out of its scabbard again. While he was so engaged, Ryld yanked Splitter out of the ground.
Pharaun landed. Despite his attempt to cushion the impact, it slammed up his legs and sent him staggering. As he fought to recover his balance, he noticed Relonor swirling his hands in a star-shaped pattern.
As the Master of Sorcere lurched upright, the other mage completed his incantation. A long, angular reptilian thing sprang from the palms of the older drow’s outstretched hands as if they were the doorway to another world. Wreathed in flowing blue flame, the monster charged Pharaun.
Relonor was a gifted mage but no marvel as a tactician. In the excitement of the moment, he’d reflexively cast his favorite spell, and characteristically for a Mizzrym retainer, it was an illusion. He’d forgotten that his foe, born in the same House, might well recognize the sequence of mystic passes. Of course, even if Pharaun hadn’t, his silver ring would have shown him what sort of magic the other male was creating.
He ignored the phantasm and reached into a pocket to snatch a tiny crystal and commence a spell. He ignored the apparition even when it lunged so close he felt the imaginary but searing heat of its halo of flame.
An intense coldness, visible in the fan of drifting ice crystals it instantly created, exploded from his hand. It passed right through the reptile, dissipating the illusion in the process, and washed over Relonor. It painted him with rime, and he fell backward.
Pharaun grinned. Greyanna was a fool to accost him with so few retainers in her train. Didn’t she realize that two masters of Tier Breche were more than equal to the worst that she and her four dolts could do?
The foulwing flapped its batlike wings and hopped closer to the melee. As its legless body pounded down on the ground, Greyanna opened a leather bag and flung a handful of its contents into the air.
The falling motes flared with greenish light when they struck the ground. Each seethed and sparkled upward like a spore instantaneously growing into a fungus. In an instant, a number of animate skeletons stood upon the street. They carried a miscellany of weapons and shields but shared a common purpose. As one, they oriented on the masters and advanced.
Shifting back and forth, Ryld cut the undead creatures down. Pharaun took momentary shelter behind his friend, then the swordsman cried out, staggered, and dropped his guard. The skeletons surged forward, and the twins, who’d been hovering at the periphery of the fight, darted in as well.
Caught by surprise, Pharaun only just had time to conjure a dazzling, crackling fork of lightning. The power held the enemy back for a moment, and Ryld recovered his balance.
“All right?” asked the Master of Sorcere.
“Yes.” Ryld chopped a spear-wielding skeleton’s legs out from under it. “Something was trying to tamper with my mind, but it’s gone now.”
“It won’t stay gone unless I confront the spellcasters.”
Pharaun floated up into the air, beyond the skeletons’ reach, making sure he would have a clear shot at Greyanna and the others. In his absence, the creatures would likely be able to surround Ryld, but that couldn’t be helped.
Surveying the scene, he saw that Relonor was still lying motionless on his back. Positioned beyond the melee, Greyanna and her sister priestess were reading from scrolls.
For a moment, Pharaun’s thoughts exploded into a terrifying madness, but reason quickly reasserted itself. He sucked in a deep breath, trying to quell the residual fear, and a second assault wracked his body. He cried out, and the agony passed. Somehow he’d weathered both spells.
He threw a seething ball of lighting at Greyanna, but it winked out of existence halfway to the target, unmade by the priestess’s defenses. She and the other cleric employed their scrolls again.
A dazzling, searing beam of light erupted from Greyanna’s hand. It slashed across Pharaun’s face, and he closed his eyes just in time to keep it from blinding him. It was painful nonetheless, but his own defenses kept it from burning his face off.
The other priestess flailed at him with a sizzling bolt of lightning. As it was one of his own favorite forces to command, it hardly seemed fair. He stiffened with the shock for a moment or two, and the magic lost its grip on him.
He feared the spasm had cost him precious time. By the time it passed, he thought the priestesses were surely in the process of casting new spells, but when he looked at the lesser of the two she wasn’t creating any magic. She’d dropped her suddenly blank scroll on the ground and was rooting in her leather pouch, presumably for another means of magical attack.
Clasping a bit of coal and a tiny dried eyeball held in a little vial, Pharaun created an effect. Power sighed and rippled through the air, and a mass of darkness appeared around the female’s head, blinding her.
The wizard’s thoughts flew apart once more, then reassembled themselves. He rounded on Greyanna. She was still clutching her scroll, evidently still casting from it. He began to conjure, and she, evidently uncertain of the parchment’s power to protect her, tore open the bag.
It had occurred to Pharaun that the sack might have more spores in it, but he’d assumed they would produce more skeletons. This time, though, the glittering motes burst in midair, swelling into ugly little beasts resembling a cross between a bat and a mosquito.
The stirges swirled around him, jabbing at him with their proboscises, striving to drink his blood. They interfered with the motion of his hands and so spoiled his conjuration. He restored his weight and fell back to the ground, where Ryld, beset by clinking skeletons on all sides, beheaded one with a sudden cut. One of the twins edged toward him but balked when the big male pivoted in his direction.
Pharaun slammed down on the street. Trailing chattering stirges, he sprinted toward the fallen Relonor. A couple skeletons turned to hack at him, but most of them were too intent on killing Ryld to notice him. Up close, the things stank. Pharaun thought they must still have some scraps of rotting flesh about them somewhere.
Just as he reached the unconscious wizard, Greyanna’s foulwing landed on the other side of the body with a ground-shaking thump. Pharaun roared out a painfully loud magical shout, and the beast recoiled, carrying its rider with it.
Pharaun stooped, ripped the brooch off Relonor’s sash, turned, and ran. Greyanna screamed in rage. The foulwing roared its strange double roar, and two sets of jaws clashed shut behind the fleeing male.
A stirge’s proboscis jabbed him in the back, staggering him, but was unable to penetrate his piwafwi. Another spell rattled his mind but with no permanent ill effects. A skeleton appeared on his flank, swinging a notched, rusty axe at his head. Splitter flashed in an arc and smashed the undead thing into tiny pieces.
Pharaun caught hold of the hem of Ryld’s piwafwi and glanced around at Greyanna.
Her face a mask of fury, she tossed away her scroll, which was likely blank, and held her hands high to receive the long staff materializing from some extradimensional storage. He could see why she wanted the instrument. It blazed with mystic power, but it was also slow in attaining tangibility. Some chance interaction of the magical energies playing about the battleground was retarding its transition to the physical plan
e.
Why, then, didn’t she leave off summoning it and attack in some other manner? Why—
In a flash of inspiration, the answer came to him, and it was astonishing.
But he was scarcely in a place conducive to contemplation of his discovery, and it was time to remedy that. He peered at the brooch he’d taken from Relonor, found the trigger word implicit in the kaleidoscopic pattern shining around it, and spoke.
Greyanna regarded the open space in the middle of the ring of aimlessly milling skeletons, and the stirges swooping and wheeling above. A moment before, Pharaun and his hulking accomplice had been standing there, but they were gone. If her eyes had not deceived her, her brother had flashed her that old familiar mocking grin as he vanished. How dare he smirk at her like that when it was she who had driven him from House Mizzrym!
She regarded her iron staff, taller than she was, square in cross-section, graven with hundreds of tiny runes, and warm as blood to the touch. The weapon had failed her. She trembled with the impulse to swing it over her head and smash it against the stone beneath her feet until it was defaced, deformed, and useless.
She didn’t, because she knew Pharaun’s escape was really her fault, not the staff’s. She should have summoned the weapon sooner. She should have been more aggressive with the sack. Damn this degrading and inexplicable season! Because of its vicissitudes, her mother had instructed her to play the miser with every personal resource, even though she was fighting for the welfare of House Mizzrym and all Menzoberranzan.
Well, she wouldn’t make the same mistake next time. It was her responsibility to look after her troops and return them to the castle.
She dismounted, squared her shoulders, put on a calm, commanding expression, and proceeded with the business at hand.
Neither of the twins were hurt, and her cousin Aunrae merely needed the ball of darkness around her head dispelled. It was Relonor who concerned Greyanna, but fortunately the mage was still alive. A healing potion mended him sufficiently to stand, clutching his sash so it wouldn’t slip off and shrugging out of his ice-encrusted cloak.
While the twins helped Relonor hobble about and so restore his circulation, Aunrae came sidling up to Greyanna. To her cousin’s admittedly jaundiced eye, in Aunrae the usual Mizzrym tendency to leanness had run to a grotesque extreme. The younger female resembled a stick insect.
“My commiseration on your failure,” Aunrae said.
Her expression was grave, but she wasn’t really trying to hide the smile lurking underneath.
“I didn’t realize just how powerful Pharaun has become,” Greyanna admitted. “Before his exile, he was quite competent but nothing extraordinary. It was his cunning that made him so dangerous. I see that all the decades in Tier Breche have turned him into one of the most formidable wizards in the city. That complicates things, but I’ll manage.”
“I hope the matron will forgive you your ignorance,” Aunrae said. “You’ve wasted so much magic to no effect.”
The conjured skeletons and stirges began to wink out of existence, leaving a residue of magic energy. The air seemed to tingle and buzz, though if a person stopped and listened, it really wasn’t.
“Is that how you see it?” Greyanna asked.
Aunrae shrugged. “I’m just worried she’ll feel you bungled things, that your hatred of Pharaun made you blind and clumsy. She might even decide someone else is more deserving of the preeminence you currently possess. Of course, I hope not! You know I wish you well. My plan for my future has always been to support you and prosper as your aide.”
“Cousin, your words move me,” Greyanna said as she lifted the staff.
No one could heave such a long, heavy implement into a fighting position without giving the opponent an instant’s warning, so Aunrae was able to come on guard. It didn’t matter. Not bothering to unleash any of the magic within her weapon, wielding it like an ordinary quarterstaff, Greyanna bashed the mace from the younger priestess’s fingers, knocked her flat with a ringing blow to her armored shoulder, and dug the tip of the iron rod into her throat.
“I’d like to confer on one or two matters,” said Greyanna. “Do you have a moment?”
Aunrae made a liquid, strangling sound.
“Excellent. Listen and grow wise. Today’s little fracas was not in vain. It proved that Relonor can locate Pharaun with his divinations. Even more importantly, the battle enabled me to take our brother’s measure. When we track him down again, we’ll crush him. Now, do you see that I have this venture well in hand?”
Deprived of her voice, Aunrae nodded enthusiastically. Her chin bumped against the butt of the staff.
“What a sensible girl you are. You must also bear in mind that we aren’t hunting Pharaun simply for my own personal gratification. It’s for the benefit of all, including yourself. Therefore, this isn’t an ideal time to seek to discredit and supplant one of your betters. It’s a time for us to swallow our mutual distaste and work together until the threat is gone. Do you think you can remember that?”
Aunrae kept nodding. She was shaking, too, and her eyes were wide with terror. Small wonder; she must have been running short of breath. Still, she had the sense not to try to grab the staff and jerk it away from her neck. She knew what would happen if she tried.
Greyanna was tempted to make it happen anyway. Aunrae’s submission was a small pleasure beside the fierce satisfaction that would come from ramming the staff into the helpless female’s windpipe. The urge was a hot tightness in her hands and a throbbing in the scar across her face.
But she needed minions to catch the relative she truly hated, and, annoying as she was, Aunrae was game, and wielded magic with a certain facility. It would be more practical to murder her another day. Greyanna was sure she could manage it whenever she chose. Despite her ambitions, Aunrae was no threat. She lacked the intelligence.
Feeling a strange pang of nostalgia for Sabal, who had at least been a rival worth destroying, Greyanna lifted the staff away from her cousin’s throat.
“You will whisper no poison words in Mother’s ears,” the First Daughter of House Mizzrym said. “For the time being, you will leave off plotting against me or anyone else. You will devote your every thought to finding our truant brother. Otherwise, I’ll put an end to you.”
Ryld had never experienced instantaneous travel before. To his surprise, he was conscious of the split second of teleportation, and he found it rather unpleasant. It didn’t feel as if he were speeding through the world but as if the world were hurtling at and through him, albeit painlessly.
Then it was over. He’d unconsciously braced himself to compensate for the jolt of a sudden stop, and the absence of any such sensation rocked him on his feet.
By the time he recovered his balance, he knew more or less where he was. A whiff of dung told him. He looked around and confirmed the suspicion.
Pharaun had dropped the two of them in a disused sentry post on a natural balcony. The ledge overlooked Donigarten with its moss fields, grove of giant mushrooms, and fungus farms fertilized with night soil from the city. Hordes of orc and goblin slaves either tended the malodorous croplands or speared fish from rafts on the lake, while rothé lowed from the island in the center of the water. Overseers and an armed patrol wandered the fields to keep the thralls in line. Additional guards looked down from other high perches about the cavern wall.
Ryld knew Pharaun had transported them about as far as was possible. In the Realms that See the Sun, teleportation could carry folk around the world, but in the Underdark, the disruptive radiance of certain elements present in the rock limited the range to about half a mile—far enough to throw Greyanna and her pack off the scent.
Pharaun held the pilfered golden ornament up, inspecting it.
“It only holds one teleportation at a time,” he said after a moment. Even after all his exertions, he wasn’t panting as hard as he might have been; not bad for such a sybarite, thought Ryld as he set down his bloody greatsword. “It’s us
eless now, and I lost my dancing rapier, curse it, but I’m not too disconsol—”
Ryld grabbed Pharaun by the arm and flipped him, laying him down hard.
The wizard blinked, sat up, and brushed a strand of his sculpted hair back into place.
“If you’d told me you craved more fighting,” Pharaun said, “I could have left you behind with my kin.”
“The hunters, you mean,” Ryld growled, “who found us quickly.”
“Well, we asked a fair number of questions in a fair number of places. We even wanted someone to find us, just not that lot.” Pharaun stood back up and brushed at his garments, adding, “Now, I have something extraordinary to tell you.”
“Save it,” Ryld replied. “Back there in the net, when you and Greyanna were chatting, I got the strong impression that the priestesses weren’t just hunting some faceless agent. They knew from the start their target was you, and you knew they knew.”
Pharaun sighed. “I didn’t know the matrons would choose Greyanna to discourage our efforts. That was a somewhat disconcerting surprise. But the rest of it? Yes.”
“How?”
“Gromph has invisible glyphs scribed on the walls of his office. Invisible to most people, anyway. They protect him in various ways. One, a black sigil shaped a little like a bat, is supposed to keep scryers and spellcasters from eavesdropping on his private conversations, but when he and I spoke, it was drawn imperfectly. It still would have balked many a spy, but not someone with the resources and expertise of, oh, say, his sisters … or the Council.”
Ryld frowned. “Gromph botched it?”
“Of course not,” Pharaun snorted. “Do you think the Archmage of Menzoberranzan incompetent? He drew it precisely as he wanted it. He knew the high priestesses were trying to spy on him—they surely always have and doubtless always will—and he intended them to overhear.”
“He was setting you up.”
“Now you’re getting it. While the clerics stay busy seeking me, the decoy, my illustrious chief will undertake another, more discreet inquiry undisturbed, by performing divinations and interrogating demons, probably.”
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