Pharaun nodded. “Did you hear about tribal emblems appearing in the streets?”
“Yes,” she said. “That bespeaks a kind of madness, don’t you think?”
“Maybe in one or two thralls,” said Ryld. “What of it? You promised my friend information. Tell us something we don’t already know, and I mean facts, not your impressions.”
The clairvoyant smiled. “All right. I was building up to it. Every few nights a drum beats somewhere in the Braeryn, calling the lower orders to some sort of gathering. Many of the occupants of this house clear out. With what little remains of my clairvoyance, I’ve sensed many others skulking through the streets, all converging on a common destination.”
“Nonsense,” said Ryld. “Why has no drow patrol heard the signal and come to investigate?”
“Because,” said Pharaun, “the city possesses enchantments to mute sound.”
“Well, maybe.” Ryld turned back to Smylla. “Where do the creatures go, and why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but perhaps, with my health and occult talents restored, I could find out.” She beamed at Pharaun. “I’d be happy to try. I fulfilled the letter of our bargain, but I do realize I haven’t provided you with all that much in exchange for the priceless gift you gave me.”
“That remark touches on the question of your future,” the wizard said. “You’d have no difficulty reestablishing your dominion here in the Stenchstreets, but why live so meanly? I could use an aide of your caliber. Or, if you prefer, I can arrange your safe repatriation to the World Above.”
As he spoke, he surreptitiously contorted the fingers of his left hand, expressing himself in the silent language of the dark elves, a system of gestures as efficient and comprehensive as the spoken word.
“I think—” Smylla began, then her eyes opened wide.
She whimpered. Ryld pulled his short sword out of her back, and she collapsed. Pharaun skipped back to keep her from toppling against him.
“Despite her previous experiences,” the lanky wizard said, “she couldn’t quite leave off trusting drow. I suppose it shows you can take the human out of the sunshine, but not the sunshine out of the human.” He shook his head. “This is the second female I’ve slain or murdered by proxy in the brief time since our adventure began, and I didn’t particularly want to kill either one of them. Do you suspect an underlying metaphysical significance?”
“How would I know? I take it you bade me kill the snitch because she was feeding us lies.”
“Oh, no. I’m convinced she was telling the truth. The problem was that I deceived her. Her metamorphosis didn’t really purge her disease. It was a bit tricky just suppressing it for a few minutes.”
Pharaun stepped back again to keep the spreading pool of blood from staining his boots, and Ryld cleaned the short sword on the dead human’s bedding.
“You didn’t want to leave her alive and angry to carry tales to Greyanna,” the weapons master said.
“It’s unlikely they would have found one another, but why take the chance?”
“And you asked Smylla about the marks on the walls. You’re just too cursed curious to let the subject go.”
Pharaun grinned. “Don’t be silly. I’m the very model of single-minded determination, and I was asking to further our mission.”
Ryld glanced at the door and the iron bar. They were still holding.
“What does the strange behavior of goblins have to do with the rogue males?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Pharaun answered, “but we have two oddities occurring at the same time and in the same precinct. Doesn’t it make sense to infer a relationship?”
“Not necessarily. Menzoberranzan has scores of plots and conspiracies going on at any given time. They aren’t all connected.”
“Granted. However, if these two situations are linked, then by inquiring into one, we likewise probe the other. You and I have experienced a depressing lack of success picking up the trail of our runaways. Therefore, we’ll investigate the lower orders and see where that path takes us.”
“How will we do that?”
“Follow the drum, of course.”
The door banged.
“First,” said Ryld, “we have to get out of here.”
“Easily managed. I’ll remove the locking talisman from the door, then use illusion to make us blend with the walls. In a minute or two, the residents will break the door down. When they’re busy abusing Smylla’s corpse and ransacking her possessions, we’ll put on goblin faces and slip out in the confusion.”
chapter
ELEVEN
Quenthel’s patrol had stalked the shadowy, candlelit passages of Arach-Tinilith for hours, until spaces she knew intimately began to seem strange and subtly unreal, and her subordinates’ nerves visibly frayed with the waiting. She called a halt to let the underlings rest and collect themselves. They stopped in a small chapel with the images of skulls, daggers, and spiders worked in bas-relief on the walls and the bones of long-dead priestesses interred beneath the floor. Rumor whispered that a cleric had cut her own throat in this sanctuary and her ghost sometimes haunted it, but the Baenre had never seen the apparition, and it wasn’t in evidence then.
The priestesses and novices settled on the pews. For a while, no one spoke.
Eventually Jyslin, a second-year student with a heart-shaped face and silver studs in her earlobes, said, “Perhaps nothing will happen.”
Quenthel stared coldly at the novice. Like the rest of the party, the younger female cut a warlike figure with her mace, mail, and shield, but her dread showed in her troubled maroon eyes and shiny, sweaty brow.
“We will face another demon tonight,” Quenthel said. “I feel it, so it’s pointless to hope otherwise. Instead I suggest you concentrate on staying alert and remembering what you’ve learned.”
Jyslin lowered her eyes and whispered, “Yes, Mistress.”
“Wishful thinking is for cowards,” Quenthel said, “and if you fools are lapsing into it, we’ve lingered here too long. Up with you.”
Reluctantly, someone’s links of supple black mail chiming ever so faintly, Quenthel’s minions rose. She led them onward.
In light of the two previous intrusions and the obvious uselessness of the wards the mages of Sorcere had created, Quenthel had placed Arach-Tinilith on alert and organized her staff and students into squads of eight. Most of the units would stand watch at set locations, but several would patrol the entire building. The Baenre princess had opted to lead one of the latter.
She’d also decided to throw open the storerooms and armories and dispense all the potent enchanted tools and weapons still deposited there. Even the first-year students bore enchanted arms and talismans worthy of a high priestess.
Not that the gear had done much to bolster Jyslin’s morale, nor that of many another novice. Had Quenthel not been suffering her own carefully masked anxieties, their glumness might have amused her. The girls had seen demons throughout their childhoods. They’d even achieved a certain intimacy with them in Arach-Tinilith, but this was the first time such entities had posed a threat to them, and they’d realized they hadn’t truly known the ferocious beings at all.
No doubt some of the females had also been perceptive enough to recognize that they themselves had been in comparatively little danger until Quenthel mustered them in what was more or less her personal defense. If so, their resentment, like their uneasiness, was irrelevant. They were her underlings, and it was their duty to serve her.
“It’s the wrath of Lolth herself,” whispered Minolin Fey-Branche, a fifth-year student who wore her hair in three long braids. Obviously, she didn’t intend for her voice to carry to the front of the procession. “First she strips us of our magic, then sends her fiends to kill us.”
Quenthel whirled. Sensing her anger, her whip vipers rose, weaving and hissing.
“Shut up!” she snapped. “The Spider Queen may be testing us, eliminating the unfit, but she has not conde
mned her entire temple. She would not.”
Minolin lowered her eyes. “Yes, Mistress,” she said tonelessly.
Quenthel noticed that no one else looked reassured, either.
“You disgust me,” the Baenre said. “All of you.”
“We apologize, Mistress,” said Jyslin.
“I remember my training,” Quenthel said. “If a novice showed a hint of cowardice or disobedience, my sister Triel would make her fast for a tenday, and eat rancid filth for another after that. I should do the same, but unfortunately, with Arach-Tinilith under siege, I need my people strong. So all right, though it should shame you take it, you can have another rest. You’ll fill your bellies, and it had better stiffen your spines. Otherwise, we’ll see how many of you I have to flog before the rest cease their cringing and whining. Come.”
She led them on to a classroom where the kitchen staff had set a table. She’d ordered them to prepare a cold supper and leave it at various points around the temple, so that the weary sentinels could at least refresh themselves with food, and the cooks had done a decent job of it. On a silver salver lay pink and brown slices of rothé steak steeped in a tawny marinade, their aroma competing with Arach-Tinilith’s omnipresent scent of incense. Other trays and bowls held raw mushroom pieces with a creamy dipping sauce and a salad of black, white, and red diced fungus, while the pitchers presumably contained wine, watered as per her command. Quenthel hoped the alcohol would hearten those residents whom Lolth’s absence and the incursions of the past two nights had terrified, but she didn’t want any of the temple’s defenders sloppy drunk and incapacitated.
Some of Quenthel’s minions fell to as if they expected this to be their last meal. Others, likely as certain of their fate, seemed too tense to do more than pick at the viands.
The mistress of the Academy supposed that, though she intended to survive the night, in a sense, she belonged to the latter party. Her stomach was somewhat queasy, and the long hours of edgy anticipation had killed her appetite.
Come on, demon, she thought, let’s get this over with….
The entity failed to respond to her silent plea.
She decided her throat was a little parched, caught Jyslin’s eye, and said, “Pour me a cup.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
The second-year novice performed the service with commendable alacrity. She filled the silver goblet too high for gentility’s sake, but Quenthel expected no better from a commoner. The Baenre accepted the cup with a nod and raised it to her lips.
Her whip of fangs hung from her wrist by the wyvern-hide loop that pierced its handle. She felt a thrill of alarm surge across the psionic link she shared with the vipers. At the same instant, the snakes reared and dashed the goblet from her grasp. She stared at them in amazement.
“Poison,” Yngoth said, his slit-pupiled eyes glinting in their scaly sockets. “We smelled it.”
Quenthel looked around. Her followers had heard the serpent’s declaration and were gawking at her and the reptiles in consternation. They appeared to be in perfectly good health, but she trusted the vipers and knew it wouldn’t last.
“Purge yourselves,” she said. “Now!”
They never got the chance. Almost as one, they succumbed to the toxin, swaying, staggering, and collapsing. Some retched involuntarily as the sickness hit them, but it didn’t help. They passed out like the rest.
Quenthel shifted the whip back to her hand, peered in all directions, and bade the vipers do the same. She’d realized her demonic assailants were supposed to suggest the several dominions of the goddess, and therefore an “assassin” of some sort would turn up sooner or later. Still, she foolishly assumed that being would attack in some obvious way just as the “spider” and “darkness” had. She hadn’t expected it to employ stealth and attempt to poison her, though in retrospect, that tactic made perfect sense.
The question was, had the demon done all it planned to do, or, since its first ploy had failed, would it strike at her in some other way?
Off to the west, someone screamed, the sound echoing down the stone halls. Quenthel had her answer, and it was the one she’d expected.
Her heart beat faster, her mouth felt drier still, and she realized she wasn’t eager to confront this new intruder, certainly not without the support of her personal guards. Yet she was mistress in these halls, and it was unthinkable to turn tail and let an invader make free with her domain.
Besides, if she fled, the cursed thing would probably track her anyway.
Leaving her fallen patrol with their useless magical treasures strewn about them on the floor, she strode toward the noise. She shouted for other underlings to attend her, but no one responded.
In a minute or so, she entered a long gallery, where wall carvings told the history of Lolth as it had occurred and as it was prophesied: her seduction of Corellon Larethian, chief deity of the contemptible elves of the World Above, their union and her first attempt to overthrow him, her discovery of her spider form and her descent into the Abyss, her conquest of the Demonweb and her adoption of the drow as her chosen people, and her future triumph over all other gods and ascendancy over all creation.
A silhouette appeared in the arched entry at the far end of the hall. It changed color and shape—humanoid, quadruped, blob, worm, cluster of spikes—from one instant to the next. Somehow perceiving Quenthel, it let out a cry. Its voice sounded like a wavering, cacophonous jumble of every noise she’d ever heard and some she hadn’t. Within the first discordant howl she caught the shrill note of a flute, the grunt of a rothé, a baby crying, water splashing, and fire crackling.
Quenthel recognized the demon for the profound threat it was, but for a moment, she was less concerned for her safety or fired with a fighter’s rage than she was surprised. Poison surely suggested an assassin, yet the demon before her was plainly an embodiment of chaos.
The spirit started down the gallery, and the walls bulged, flowed, and changed color around it. Quenthel reached into the leather bag hanging from her belt and brought out a scroll, then something hit her hard in the back of the neck.
Ryld peered about the room. Judging from the sunken arena in the center of the floor, the ruinous place had, in another era, served as a drinking pit—one of those rude establishments where dark elves of every station went to forget about caste and grace for a few hours, guzzle raw spirit, and watch undercreatures slaughter one another in contests that were often set up in such a way as to give them a comical aspect.
In other words, it would have been a crude sort of place by the standards of elegant Menzoberranzan, but it had grown cruder since the goblinoids had taken it over. Scores if not hundreds of them packed into the space, and the mingled stink of their unwashed bodies, each race malodorous in its own particular fashion, was sickening. The loud gabbling in their various harsh and guttural languages was nearly as unpleasant. It all but drowned out the rhythmic thuds that filtered through the ceiling, but of course the shaggy gnoll drummer on the roof wasn’t playing for the folk already inside but to guide others still in transit.
To Ryld’s surprise, a fair number of the creatures assembling there hailed from outside the Braeryn. He observed plain but relatively clean and intact garments suggestive of Eastmyr, and even liveries, steel collars, shackles, whip marks, and brands—the stigmata of thralls who’d sneaked away from their mistresses’ affluent households. Obviously, those who’d come from beyond the district couldn’t have heard the drum through the magical buffers. Some runner must have carried word to them.
Still magically disguised as orcs, though not the same ones who’d tricked the two bugbears, the masters of Tier Breche had squeezed into a corner to watch whatever would transpire.
Certain no one would hear him over the ambient din, Ryld leaned his head close to Pharaun’s and said, “I think it’s just a party.”
“Do you see them celebrating?” Pharaun replied. His new porcine face had a broken nose and tusk. “No, not as such. They’d be conside
rably more boisterous. They’re waiting for something, and eagerly, too. Observe those female goblins chattering and passing their bottle back and forth.” Pharaun nodded toward a trio of filthy, bandy-legged creatures with flat faces and sloping brows. “They’re aquiver with anticipation. If they’re still as giddy after the gathering breaks up, we may want to seek solace for our frustrations in their hairy, misshapen arms.”
Certain his friend was joking, Ryld snorted … then realized he wasn’t quite sure after all.
“You’d have relations with a goblin?”
“A true scholar always seeks new experiences. Besides, what’s the point of being a dark elf, a lord of the Underdark, if you don’t exploit the slave races to the utmost?”
“Hmm. I admit they might be no worse than one of those priestesses who demand you grovel and do exactly as you’re—”
“Hush!”
The drum had stopped.
“Something’s happening,” Pharaun added.
Ryld saw that his friend was correct. A stir ran through the crowd and they started to shout, “Prophet! Prophet! Prophet!”
The master of Melee-Magthere didn’t know what he expected to see next, but it certainly wasn’t the figure in the nondescript cloak and hood whose upper body appeared above the heads of the crowd. Perhaps he’d climbed up on a bench or table, or maybe he’d simply levitated, for this “Prophet,” plainly beloved of the lower orders, appeared to be a handsome drow male.
The Prophet let his followers chant and shout for a minute or so, then he raised his slender hands and gradually they subsided. Pharaun leaned close to Ryld again.
“It’s possible the fellow’s not really one of us,” the wizard said. “He’s wrapped in a glamour somewhat like ours, but his spell makes every observer perceive him in a favorable light. I imagine the goblins see him as a goblin, the gnolls, as one of their own, and so forth.”
“What’s inside the illusion?”
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