by Филип Этанс
"I could go back to her," Halisstra said.
She could feel both Feliane and Uluyara stiffen. From Seyll she felt a wave of disappointment mixed with fear.
"If she would have you," Feliane whispered.
That stopped Halisstra. Had she passed a point of no return, one where Lolth would reject her or worse, punish her for the heresies she'd already committed? Would Eilistraee abandon her for even considering a return to the Spider Queen? Would she manage to work herself into a godless afterlife by her own indecision?
No,Seyll whispered into her mind, obviously having sensed her thoughts. Eilistraee understands doubt and weakness and forgives both.
"Do you understand, Halisstra," Feliane said, "what Seyll has given up by coming here?"
Halisstra shook her head in an effort to gently shake off the elf's words.
"She has abandoned Arvandor to come here," Feliane continued. "Seyll has doomed herself to an eternity in the wild Astral, and she's done it for you."
"Has she?" Halisstra asked, eyeing the ghost of Seyll, who floated there staring at her. "Or has she done that for Eilistraee? Did she come here on her own, or was she sent by a goddess who fears the loss of her assassin?"
Yes,Seyll said. Yes to all those questions. I have come here on my own, for Eilistraee, to protect you from Lolth, to protect you from yourself, and to assure that you will do what you must do.
"Why?" Halisstra asked. "Why now?"
Because something is going to happen, Seyll replied.
"Something is going to happen," Uluyara repeated.
Right now, Seyll asked, this very moment, do you want to go back to Lolth? If she poured her «grace» over you right now, would you accept it, accept her, and turn your back on Eilistraee?
"I don't know," Halisstra answered.
You must decide, said Seyll, and you must decide now.
The apparition gestured behind her at the long row of disembodied souls. Something was different, and it took Halisstra a few seconds to realize what was happening. The line of souls disappeared into the gray distance, what might have been miles away. The colorless ghosts were changing, one after another as if a wave was passing through them. Color and life, even substance returned to each soul in turn, but only for a brief moment, then the effect passed to the next dead drow in line. As the color passed in and out of them they convulsed, twisting in the air more from pleasure than from pain. The wave drew closer and closer, scattering the line of drow in its wake.
"She's back," Halisstra whispered.
Seyll came closer to her, wrapping her ghostly body around Halisstra, who stiffened but didn't push the apparition away.
She is back, Seyll whispered into her mind. Soon her power will course though you. I can protect you, but you have to want me to. You have to want Eilistraee, not her. Not that demon. Please.
"Please," Uluyara whispered.
Halisstra closed her eyes and tried to return Seyll's ghostly embrace, but her arms closed over nothing.
"Eilistraee," Halisstra called, her voice breaking, "help me!"
Seyll grew solid in her arms, and Halisstra felt the priestess's body quiver. Seyll screamed, and Halisstra heard it both in her rattling ears and in her tortured mind.
"Seyll," Uluyara shouted over the sound of pure agony that was ripped from Seyll's momentarily corporeal throat. "No. ."
Seyll's body disappeared, and Halisstra's arms wrapped around only herself. The scream echoed in her mind but left her ringing ears to the silence of the Astral Plane. She opened her eyes and saw Seyll floating in the gray nothing in front of her. The priestess's body was twisted and broken, her face wracked with pain. She had grown more transparent, and was quickly fading away.
"Seyll. ." Halisstra whispered.
The priestess looked her in the eyes one last time, and though it seemed to cause her a considerable amount of pain to do so, she smiled as she faded from sight.
Halisstra felt her body sag even as she was infused with an energy and confidence unlike anything she'd felt before.
"She's gone," Uluyara whispered.
"She didn't abandon only Arvandor," Feliane said, her eyes wide with horror. "She let the power of Lolth pass into her."
"To protect me," Halisstra whispered.
"It killed her," Feliane said. "She didn't choose the Astral, she chose oblivion."
"The thing that I most feared myself," said Halisstra. "It was oblivion that drove me to Eilistraee."
"She sacrificed herself," Uluyara said.
"For me?" asked Halisstra.
"And for Eilistraee," Feliane said.
Halisstra's mind reeled, but her eyes cleared of tears, and blood began to flow in her tired muscles. She felt alert, refreshed, even as she was overwhelmed.
"She sacrificed herself," Halisstra repeated, "so I could. ."
"So you could serve Eilistraee," Uluyara finished for her. "So you could wield the Crescent Blade."
Halisstra put a hand on the hilt of the weapon that could kill a goddess and said, "I hesitated, but I hope not for too long."
"She's awake," Feliane warned, "or resurrected. She'll fight back."
Halisstra thought about that. She tried to imagine facing Lolth herself in battle, and for the life of her she couldn't.
"We'll follow the souls to Lolth," Halisstra said, moving in that direction even before she finished speaking.
Feliane and Uluyara fell in behind her.
Chapter Twenty-six
"No," Pharaun muttered, "this way. .?"
He turned left when the corridor forked. He had cast a number of divinations and was doing his damnedest to follow them all.
"None of your spells are working," Quenthel asked, "are they?"
Pharaun didn't bother looking at her but continued along the corridor hoping he would stumble on something that might get them on the right track.
"I'm getting. . contradictory information," he shot back, "but at least I'm doing something. You said you've been here before—why aren't you taking us right to her?"
Quenthel didn't answer, and they shared a look that served as an agreement not to continue bickering.
"It's as if the farther we go into this spider fortress, the stranger our surroundings become," Danifae said. "There were no right angles anywhere when we first walked in, but now there are. They seemed to appear the moment I got comfortable wandering the corridors without them. Still, we have seen nothing alive, haven't been harried by a single guardian, and for all intents and purposes we have the run of the place. What does it mean?"
"That Lolth wanted us to come," Quenthel replied, shooting a contemptuous glance at Danifae.
Pharaun and Valas exchanged a look that told each other they'd reached very different conclusions.
The wizard paused in a section of corridor that had widened out to well over twenty feet. The ceiling was low, the darkness comfortably dense, and the smell of rot fortunately not as overwhelming as it had been most of the time. He cast another spell and concentrated on his surroundings, searching for signs of life. He could sense dead spots through which his magic couldn't penetrate—walls perhaps lined with lead or some other particularly dense substance. Still, far at the edge of the limits of his perception, Pharaun could make out signs of life.
"A light wash," he whispered to himself, "but it's there."
"What?" Quenthel asked. "What's there?"
The wizard opened his eyes and smiled at Quenthel.
"There is something alive in here with us after all," he said, "but the sign is strange—diffuse and distant as if the creature is either very far away, only barely alive, cloaked in magic that protects it from divination, or some combination of those things. I can't get a. . Mistress?"
Quenthel dropped to her knees, and Pharaun instinctively backed away. The air was charged, and the Master of Sorcere's skin tingled, but whatever was happening had a much more profound effect on the two females.
Quenthel dropped to her hands, her face coming dang
erous inches from smashing into the cold, rusted steel of the ruined spider fortress. Her muscles jerked and spasmed, and her face was twisted into either a rictus of agonized pain or a grin of some kind of feral pleasure— Pharaun couldn't tell which.
Danifae fell to the floor as well, but she was facing up. Her back arched, and soon she was touching the floor only from one tiny spot on her head and the tips of her toes. Pharaun couldn't help admiring the curve of her body, marred as it was by the same petty wounds—cuts, abrasions, welts, and bruises—that they'd all accumulated along the way. Not sure he wasn't seeing only what he wanted to see, Pharaun thought Danifae's expression was one of total pleasure, complete physical abandon.
Next it was Jeggred's turn to fall. The draegloth dropped to one knee, his three remaining hands reaching out to grab blindly at the walls. He ripped jagged rents in one steel partition. Brown dust covered his fur, clinging to it in clumps until it looked like the half-demon was rusting the same as the spider fortress. Jeggred screamed so loudly Pharaun had to clamp his hands over his ears.
Even as the draegloth's scream faded into panting—desperate gasps for air—Pharaun looked at Valas. The scout seemed entirely unaffected, and Pharaun himself felt no burning desire to writhe around on the floor.
"Whatever it is," Pharaun said to the scout, "it only seems to be affecting the—"
He thought at first that he was going to say "the females," then he realized that it was affecting the priestesses and the one creature among them born of Lolth's peculiar hell.
It ended as abruptly as it began.
Jeggred, who had been the one least affected by the sudden rapture, was the first to stand and begin to brush himself off. His face—normally difficult to read—gave Pharaun nothing.
"What happened?" the wizard asked, but the draegloth ignored him. "Jeggred?"
Quenthel sat back on her haunches and held her hands up to her face. Her eyes scoured her rust-dusted hands as if searching for something.
Danifae took longer to recover, rolling into a fetal position on the unforgiving rusted steel floor and making a noise Pharaun at first thought was crying.
"Mistress?" Valas asked, crouching to get to Quenthel's eye level but not stepping any closer than the half dozen paces that already separated them.
Quenthel didn't speak, didn't even give any indication that she had heard Valas. Pharaun didn't bother asking what happened. He was beginning to understand what he'd witnessed.
Quenthel began to speak.
At first she moved her lips in a mute pantomime, then she whispered at the edge of hearing, then she chanted a litany in an ancient tongue not even Pharaun recognized.
She continued for a minute or so then stopped. Pharaun's eyes played over her, and he watched as all the cuts and bruises, scrapes and welts faded away, leaving her skin a perfect, almost glowing black. She even seemed to gain back some of the weight she'd lost. Her hair appeared cleaner, softer, and even her piwafwiand armor shone with renewed life.
Quenthel Baenre stood and looked down at Danifae, who had uncurled herself to sit with her back to the wall, smiling as she whispered a prayer of her own that sealed her cuts, made her bruises disappear, and brought the twinkle back into her big, expressive eyes. A tear traced a path down one of her perfect ebony cheeks, and she didn't bother to wipe it away.
Pharaun looked back at the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith, who stood tall and still in the darkness of the spider fortress, seeming to glow. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving.
In one fluid, graceful motion Danifae swept up to her feet, her perfect white teeth shining in the gloom as she grinned from ear to ear. Pharaun found himself returning that smile. Jeggred rolled up onto his feet but in the same movement sank down to his knees in front of Danifae and Quenthel. The draegloth was breathing hard.
"They are alive, and they're here," Quenthel whispered. She looked at Pharaun and more clearly said, "They are behind walls that shield them from your spells, and they are further protected from most divinations, but they are here."
"Who?" Valas asked.
"I sense them too," Danifae said. She put a hand on Jeggred's wild mane and absently stroked it back into place. "I think I could find them. I think they're actually waiting for us."
"Wait," Pharaun said, stepping closer to Danifae—until a fierce growl from Jeggred stopped him. The young priestess patted the half-demon's head, and he calmed quickly. "Did what I think happened actually happen? Did she. .?"
"Lolth has returned to us," Quenthel said.
"She has," Danifae agreed.
She appeared as if she wanted to say more.
"Is there something else?" Pharaun asked. "Is that it? Is our journey at an end?"
"Mistress?" Jeggred said, looking directly into Danifae's eyes. "What did the voice say? I couldn't quite … it was too far away to …»
Danifae ran her fingers through his fur and said, "The voice said—"
"Yor'thae,"Quenthel finished for her.
"Yor'thae.. ." Danifae whispered.
"High Drow?" Valas asked, correctly identifying the language.
"It means, 'Chosen One, " Pharaun explained.
"One. ." Quenthel whispered, shaking her head.
At the same time, Danifae mutely mouthed the word, "Yor'thae."
Quenthel used her eyes to get Pharaun's attention then said, "Our journey is far from over, Master of Sorcere. Lolth has not only returned but she has asked me to come to her, has invited me to be her chosen vessel. This is why she brought me back, all those years ago. This is why she dragged me from the Abyss and back to Menzoberranzan. I was meant to come here, now, and to be her … to be Yor'thae."
Deep in the heart of the First House, in a room protected from everything worth protecting a room from, Triel Baenre watched her brother fight for the life of Menzoberranzan.
He was losing.
She could see what was happening in the Bazaar, every detail of it, through a magic mirror, a crystal ball, a scrying pool, and half a dozen other similar items, most of which had been created by Gromph himself. She paced back and forth across the polished marble floor, looking from scene to scene, angle to angle, as the transformed lichdrow made a mess of the heart of her city.
Wilara Baenre stood in one corner, her eyes darting from one scrying device to another, her arms crossed in front of her, her fingers drumming against her shoulders with barely contained frustration.
"The archmage will prevail, Matron Mother," Wilara said, not for the first time that day.
"Will he?" Triel asked.
It was the first time she'd replied to one of Wilara's hollow reassurances, and it took the attending priestess by surprise.
"Of course he will," Wilara answered.
Triel waited for more, but it became obvious that Wilara had nothing else to say.
"I'm not entirely certain that this is a fight he can win," Triel said, as much to herself as to Wilara. "If we're all being tested and this is Gromph's test, he will pass or fail on his own. If he fails, he deserves to die."
"Is there nothing we can do to help him?" asked Wilara.
Triel shrugged.
"There are soldiers and other mages," the attending priestess went on.
"All of whom are required elsewhere. The duergar still press, even if the tanarukks are turning away," said Triel. "The siege of Agrach Dyrr goes on unabated. . but, yes, there are always more soldiers, always more mages, and there is Bregan D'aerthe and other mercenaries. If the lich kills Gromph I certainly won't let him rampage through the rest of Menzoberranzan turning our citizens to stone and smashing the architecture."
"Why not send those forces in now?"
Triel shrugged again and considered the question. She had no answer.
"I don't know," Triel said finally. "Maybe I'm waiting for a sign from—"
She was back.
Triel fell to the floor, her body going limp, her head spinning, her mind exploding in a cacophony of sound and shadow, voices
and screams. Tears welled up in her eyes so she could only barely see Wilara lying in a similar confused, twitching, limp state on the floor across the room.
The Matron Mother of House Baenre felt every emotion she'd ever known simultaneously and at their sharpest and most intense. She hated and loved, feared and cherished, laughed and cried. She knew the endless expanse of the limitless multiverse and saw in crystal detail the square inch of marble floor right in front of her eye. She was in her scrying chamber and in the Demonweb Pits, in her mother's womb and in the smoldering Bazaar, in the deepest Underdark and flying through the blazing skies of the World Above.
She took a deep breath, and one feeling after another fell away, each a layer of confusion and insanity. Pieces of her mind began to function again, then pieces of her body. It took either a few minutes or a few years—Triel couldn't be sure how long—for her to realize what had happened and sort through the sensation that had been so familiar all her life, then was gone, then returned.
Lolth.
It was the fickle grace of the Queen of the Demonweb Pits.
Triel didn't try to stand at first but lay there and stretched, luxuriating in the wash of power, exulting in the return of Lolth.
Gromph knew of so many ways to kill someone, he'd forgotten more than most drow ever heard of. There were spells that would kill with a touch, kill with a word, kill with a thought, and Gromph searched his mind for precisely the right one as he ran to both avoid the rampaging gigant and keep it contained in the ruined Bazaar.
He wore the skull sapphire that gave him even more choices and afforded him protection from negative energy—like Nimor's enervating breath. In his memory he stored a few more, and in time Gromph settled on one spell, with some input from Nauzhror and the small circle of Sorcere necromancers. The archmage gathered the Weave energy within him and brought the words and gestures of the incantation to mind. However, in order to cast the spell—and it was a powerful spell indeed—the archmage would have to stop running.
It wasn't the first time that the battle with Dyrr came down to timing. Would he have enough time to cast the spell before the gigant rolled over him?