Dissolution

by Byers, Richard Lee

  Houndaer swallowed away a dryness in his mouth. Ryld hadn’t the sense to run? Well, good. Then they’d kill him.

  The noble and drider fanned out to come at the Master of Melee-Magthere from opposite sides. Omraeth hung back and commenced another song.

  Advancing to meet his adversaries, Master Argith glided through the first of three moves—parry, feint high, slash low—of one of the broadsword katas he’d taught Houndaer back on Tier Breche. The noble discerned an instant too late that the purpose was to distract attention from the crossbow in the weapons master’s other hand. The dart plunged into Omraeth’s throat, ending his song in an ugly gurgle and dissipating the charged heaviness of arcane force accumulating in the air. The spellsinger fell backward, and it was two to one.

  Houndaer told himself it didn’t matter. Not when he was wielding Ryld’s own greatsword, a weapon that could supposedly shear through anything, and Tsabrak’s blade was dripping poison. They only needed to land one light little cut to incapacitate their foe.

  Ryld gave ground before them. Houndaer assumed he wanted to put his back against the wall, so neither of his opponents could get behind him, but with an agility astonishing in so massive a fighter, Ryld changed direction. In the blink of an eye, he was driving forward instead of back, plunging at the half-spider on his left.

  Startled, Houndaer faltered, then scrambled toward Ryld and the drider. It would take him a few heartbeats to close the distance.

  In that time, Ryld charged in on Tsabrak’s right, the side opposite the creature’s sword arm. A drider’s spidery lower half was sufficiently massive that, like a mounted warrior, he had difficulty striking or parrying across his torso.

  Tsabrak slashed at the weapons master’s head. The stroke was poorly aimed, and Ryld didn’t bother to duck or parry, simply concentrated on his own attack.

  Tsabrak made a desperate effort to heave himself aside. Still, Ryld’s broadsword crunched through the top of one of the drider’s chitinous legs. Tsabrak cried out and lurched off-balance.

  Stepping, Ryld whirled his weapon around for what would surely be the coup de grâce. Houndaer shouted a war cry, ran a final stride, and swung the greatsword. He wasn’t in a proper stance, and the stroke was a clumsy one, but it sufficed to drive the weapons master back. Ryld knew better than anyone how deadly was that enormous blade.

  As soon as the stroke whizzed past, the master advanced with a thrust to the chest. Houndaer wrenched the greatsword around for a parry. It should have been impossible to bring such a huge weapon about so quickly, but it seemed to grow as light as a roll of parchment in his hands. Ryld’s broadsword caught on one of the hooks just above the leather-girt ricasso.

  Ryld retreated, snatching his weapon free. Houndaer shifted the greatsword into a middle guard, and Tsabrak hobbled up beside him. The drider’s face twisted in pain, and pungent fluid spattered rhythmically from his wound.

  Ryld continued to back away. The rogues spread out again, though not so widely as before. Tsabrak began to make a soft whining sound in the back of his throat.

  Then, seemingly without any windup, just a sudden extension of his arm, Ryld threw his sword. Though the weapon wasn’t intended for such an action, it streaked through the air as straight and sure as an arrow. The point plunged into Tsabrak’s chest.

  The drider’s eyes widened. He coughed blood, then flopped forward at the waist, dropping his sword. His spider half, slower to die than the upper portion, continued to limp forward.

  It was all right, though, because Ryld had no melee weapon save for a dagger, which would surely be of little use against a blade as long as the greatsword. Houndaer rushed in to deliver the finishing stroke.

  “Tuin’Tarl!” he screamed.

  His face still as blank as a zombie’s, the weapons master dodged to the side.

  Houndaer turned, following the target, and saw that Ryld had ducked behind one of a row of wooden mannequins. Up close, the crudely carved dummies were oddly disquieting figures, smirking identical smiles despite their countless stigmata of dents and gashes.

  Ryld stood poised, waiting, and Houndaer discerned the spy’s intent. When his adversary lunged around one side of the dummy, the master would circle in the opposite direction, thus maintaining a barrier between them.

  Houndaer saw no reason to play that game, not if his new sword was as keen as it was supposed to be. He brought the blade around in a low arc. It tore away the mannequin with scarcely a jolt, depriving Ryld of his pitiful protection.

  Unfortunately, the weapons master sprang forward at the very same instant, before Houndaer could pull the greatsword back for another cut. Ryld slashed at the noble’s throat.

  Houndaer frantically wrenched himself back, interposing his weapon between himself and the spy, before recognizing that the cut had been more of a feint than anything else. Ryld had tricked him into assuming a completely defensive attitude, then seized the opportunity to dash past him. Houndaer cut at the master’s back but only managed to tear his billowing cloak.

  The Tuin’Tarl gave chase, and Tsabrak, dying or dead but still mindlessly ambulatory, staggered into his path. Houndaer shouted in frustration and cut the drider down.

  When the hybrid fell, the noble could see what was happening behind him. Ryld had reached Tsabrak’s fallen sword. Heedless of the venom drying on the blade, the teacher slipped his toe under the weapon, flipped it into the air, and caught it neatly by the hilt. His expression as unfathomable as ever, he came on guard and advanced.

  I can still kill him, Houndaer thought, I still have the reach on him.

  Aloud, he shouted, “Here! I’ve got one of the masters here!”

  Ryld stepped to the verge of the distance, then hovered there. Confident in his ability to defend, he wanted Houndaer to strike at him. A fencer couldn’t attack without opening himself up.

  At first, the noble declined to oblige. He intended to wait his opponent out. Ryld beat his blade.

  The clanging impact startled a response out of him, but at least it was a composed attack. Feint to the chest, feint to the flank, cut low and hack the opponent’s legs out from underneath him.

  Even as he flowed into the final count, he remembered Ryld teaching him the sequence, and sure enough, the instructor wasn’t fooled. He parried the genuine low-line attack, then riposted to Houndaer’s wrist. The broadsword bit through his gauntlet and into the flesh beneath.

  Ryld pulled his weapon free in a spatter of gore. He drove deeper, cutting at Houndaer’s torso. The Tuin’Tarl floundered backward out of the distance, meanwhile heaving the greatsword back into a threatening position.

  His bloody wrist throbbed, and the huge blade trembled. It was brutally hard to hold it up, its enchantments notwithstanding. He choked up on it, his weakened hand clutching the ricasso, but that only helped a little. He listened for the sound of another party of rogues rushing to his aid. He didn’t hear it.

  “Well done, Master Argith!” Houndaer declared. “I declare myself beaten. I yield.”

  Ryld stalked forward, broadsword at the ready.

  “Please!” said the Tuin’Tarl. “We always got along, didn’t we? I was one of your most dutiful students, and I can help you get out of here.”

  The teacher kept coming, and Houndaer saw that his face wasn’t empty or expressionless after all. It might be devoid of emotion, but it revealed a preternatural, almost demonic concentration, focused entirely on slaughter.

  Houndaer saw his own inescapable death there, and, suffused with a strange calm, he lowered the greatsword. Ryld’s blade sheared into his chest an instant later.

  The echoing metallic crash startled Quenthel. It was well that she’d spent a lifetime learning self control, for otherwise, she might have cried out in dismay.

  She and her squad were patrolling the temple. After the events of the past four nights it would have been mad to relax their vigilance, but as the hours had crept uneventfully by, her troops began to speculate that the siege was over.
After all, it was supposed to be. The bone wand had supposedly turned the malignancy of the past night’s sending back on she who cast the curse.

  Yet Quenthel had found she wasn’t quite ready to share in the general optimism. Yes, she’d turned an attack back on its source, but that didn’t necessarily mean her faceless enemy had succumbed to the demon’s attentions. The spellcaster could have survived, and if so, she could keep right on dispatching her unearthly assassins.

  From the sound of it, another such had just broken in, and Quenthel didn’t have another little bone wand.

  For a moment, the Baenre felt a surge of fear, perhaps even despair, and she swallowed it down.

  “Follow me,” she snapped.

  Perhaps her subordinates would prove of some use for a change.

  Their tread silent in their enchanted boots, the priestesses trotted in the direction of the noise. Greenish torchlight splashed their shadows on the walls. Parchment rattled as one novice fumbled open a scroll. Female voices began to shout. Power reddened the air for an instant and brushed a gritty, pricking feeling across the priestesses’ skin.

  “It’s not a demon,” said Yngoth, twisting up from the whip handle to place his eyes on a level with Quenthel’s own. Her stride made his scaly wedge of a head bob up and down.

  “No?” she asked. “Has my enemy come to continue our duel in person?”

  She hoped so. With her minions at her back, Quenthel would have a good chance of crushing the arrogant fool.

  But alas, it wasn’t so. Her course led her to the entry hall with the spider statues. The poor battered valves hung breached and crooked once again. This time the culprit was a huge, disembodied, luminous hand, floating open with fingers up as if signaling someone to halt. A lanky male in a baggy cloak had taken shelter behind the translucent manifestation from the spears and arrows that several priestesses were sending his way.

  Quenthel sighed, because she knew the lunatic, and he couldn’t possibly be her unknown foe. By all accounts, he’d been too busy down in the city the past few days.

  She gestured with the whip, terminating the barrage of missiles.

  “Master Mizzrym,” she called. “You compound your crimes by breaking in where no male may come unbidden.”

  Pharaun bent low in obeisance. He looked winded, and, most peculiarly for such a notorious dandy, disheveled.

  “Mistress, I beg your pardon, but I must confer with you. Time is of the essence.”

  “I have little to say to you except to condemn you as the archmage should have done.”

  “Kill me if you must.” The giant hand winked out of existence and he continued, “Given my recent peccadilloes, I half expected it. But hear my message first. The undercreatures are rebelling.”

  Quenthel narrowed her eyes and asked, “The archmage sent you here with this news?”

  “Alas,” the mage replied, “I was unable to locate him but knew this was something that must be brought to the attention of the most senior members of the Academy. I realize no one ever dreamed it could happen, but it has. Walk to the verge of the plateau with me, and you’ll see.”

  The Baenre frowned. Pharaun’s manner was too presumptuous by half, yet something in it commanded attention.

  “Very well,” she said, “but if this is some sort of demented jest, you’ll suffer for it.”

  “Mistress,” Minolin said, “he may want to lead you into—”

  Quenthel silenced the fool with a cold stare, then turned back to Pharaun.

  “Lead on, Master of Sorcere.”

  In point of fact, the high priestess didn’t have to walk all the way to the drop-off to tell that something was badly wrong in the city below. The wavering yellow glare of firelight and a foul smoky tang in the air alerted her as soon as she stepped outside the spider-shaped temple. Heedless of her dignity, she sprinted for the edge, and Pharaun scrambled to keep up with her.

  Below her, portions of Menzoberranzan—portions of the stone, how could that be?—were in flames. Impossibly, even the Great Mound of the Baenre sprouted a tuft of flame at its highest point, like a tassel on a hat. Once Quenthel’s eyes adjusted to the dazzling brightness, she could vaguely make out the mobs rampaging through the streets and plazas.

  “You see,” said Pharaun, “that’s why I ran halfway across the city, dodging marauders at every turn, to reach you, my lady. If I may say so, the situation’s even worse than it may look. By and large, the nobles haven’t even begun reclaiming the streets. They’re bogged down on their estates fighting their own household goblins. Therefore, I suggest you—”

  The mage was smart enough to stop talking at the sight of Quenthel’s glare.

  “We will mobilize Tier Breche,” she said. “Melee-Magthere and Arach-Tinilith can fight. Sorcere will divide its efforts between supporting us and extinguishing the fires. You will either find my brother Gromph or act in his stead.”

  Pharaun bowed low.

  Quenthel turned and saw that her priestesses and novices had followed her out onto the plateau. Something in their manner brought her up short.

  “Mistress,” said long-eared Viconia Agrach Dyrr, one of the senior instructors, rather diffidently, “it makes perfect sense for Melee-Magthere and Sorcere to descend the stairs, but …”

  “But you ladies have lost your magic,” Pharaun said.

  The sisters of the temple gaped at him.

  “You know?” Quenthel asked.

  “A good many males know,” the mage replied, just a hint of impatience peeking through, “so there’s no point in killing me for it. I’ll explain it all later.” He turned back toward the rest of the clerics. “Holy Mothers and Sisters, while you may have lost your spells, you have scrolls, talismans, and the rest of the divine implements your order hoards. You can swing maces, if it comes to that. You can fight.”

  “But we’ve lost too many sisters,” Viconia said to Quenthel. “The demons killed a couple, and you, Mistress, by summoning the spiders, slew more. We don’t dare risk the rest. Someone must endure to preserve the lore and perform the rituals.”

  “That’s far too optimistic,” Pharaun said.

  Viconia scowled. “What is, boy?”

  “The assumption that, should you remain up here, annihilation will pass you by,” the wizard replied. “It’s more plausible to assume that if the orcs triumph below, they’ll climb the stairs to continue their depredations up here. You profess devotion to Arach-Tinilith. Surely it would be more reverent to engage the undercreatures in the vault below and thus deny them the slightest opportunity to profane your shrines and altars. Similarly, it would be better strategy to fight alongside allies than to wait till they perish and you’re left to struggle alone.”

  “You’re glib, wizard,” the Agrach Dyrr priestess sneered, “but you don’t know our efforts are needed. Flame and glare, they’re only goblins! I think you’re just a scareling.”

  “Perhaps he is,” Quenthel said, “but how dare we seek the Dark Mother’s favor if we decline to defend her chosen city in its hour of need? Surely, then, we never would hear her voice again.”

  “Mistress,” said Viconia, spreading her hands, “I know we can find a better way to please her than brawling with vermin in the street.”

  Quenthel lifted her hand crossbow and shot her lieutenant in the face. Viconia made a choking sound and stumbled backward. The poison was already blackening her face as she collapsed.

  “I thought I’d already demonstrated that I rule here,” the Baenre said. “Does anyone else wish to contest my orders?”

  “If so,” Pharaun said, “she should be aware that I stand with the mistress, and I have the power to scour the lot of you from the face of the plateau.”

  Ignoring the boastful wizard, Quenthel surveyed her minions. It appeared that no one else had anything much to say.

  “Good,” the Baenre said. “Let us rouse the tower and the pyramid.”

  chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  With Quenthel
in the lead, the Academy descended from Tier Breche like a great waterfall. Some scholars tramped after her on the staircase, while others floated down the cliff face. A few, possessed of magic that enabled them to fly, flitted about like bats.

  “Perhaps Mistress would care to bide a moment,” said Pharaun. At some point he had slipped off to his personal quarters long enough to wash his face, comb his hair, and throw on a new set of handsome clothes. He returned alone, still claiming ignorance of Gromph’s whereabouts. “This is as good a spot as any to spy out the lay of the land. We’re below some of the smoke but still high enough for an aerial inspection.”

  Since Gromph was still either unavailable or uninterested, the Mizzrym was—with obvious relish—acting in the archmage’s stead. It was arguably an affront to House Baenre as much as the archmage, but Quenthel had given the order anyway. Until her brother returned or the crisis abated, she needed someone to speak for Sorcere, and she was sure it would upset Gromph in an amusing way to have this dandy taking his place for so important a task.

  She halted, and her minions came to a ragged, jostling stop behind her. The whip vipers reared to survey the cityscape along with her. From the corner of her eye, she saw Pharaun smile briefly as if he found the serpents’ behavior comical.

  “There,” said Quenthel, pointing, “in Manyfolk. It looks as if House Auvryndar may have finished exterminating their own slaves, but a mob keeps them penned within their walls.”

  “I see it, Blessed Mother,” said Malaggar Faen Tlabbar from the step behind her. The First Sword of Melee-Magthere was a merry-looking, round-faced boy with a fondness for green attire and emeralds. “With your permission, that might be a good place to start. We’ll lift the siege and add the Auvryndar to our own army.”

  “So be it,” Quenthel said

  The residents of the Academy reached the floor of the lower cavern, whereupon the instructors, particularly the warriors of the pyramid, set about the business of forming the scholars into squads, with swordsmen and spearman protecting the spellcasters. Then they had to arrange the units into some semblance of a marching order.