Annihilation

by Athans, Philip

  It is a huecuva, Nauzhror provided.

  “An undead creature,” Gromph said to the halfling. “You’re a huecuva. Do you know what that is?”

  The halfling shook his head, terror plain in his bloodshot eyes.

  Gromph, my young friend, the lichdrow’s voice reverberated in the wizard’s head, welcome back. Of course I accept your gracious invitation. It will be my honor to attend you on your last day.

  Gromph nodded, mumbled through a simple necromancy, and directed it at the halfling. The archmage felt the undead creature come under his control.

  “Stand up straight,” Gromph commanded, and Dietr instantly complied, though it seemed to cause him some discomfort.

  Gromph cast another spell on him, one that set a flicker of magical fire playing over the halfling’s dead flesh.

  “No …” the halfling muttered. “Please …”

  Gromph tightened his grip on his staff and conjured a globe of protective force around himself.

  “Please don’t …” the huecuva pleaded.

  Gromph looked around the Bazaar—abandoned tents and stalls, most with their wares secured under lock and key, and a few curious drow eyes watching from safe places in the surrounding stalactites.

  “Won’t you please just let me—?” Dietr begged.

  “Silence,” Gromph said, and the halfling was compelled to obey. “You decided to come through with me, Dietr, and now you’re in Menzoberranzan, not Luiren. In Menzoberranzan, undead are property.”

  The huecuva’s mouth worked in silence, and his skin crawled over his bones.

  Gromph felt something, a presence, and quickly scanned the Bazaar again. At the far end of the wide thoroughfare was a splash of green light. The spell he’d cast on Dietr continued to give Gromph the ability to see a distinctive aura around undead, and the green light was just such an emanation, but all Gromph saw was the aura—a smudge of green light surrounding empty space.

  Gromph rushed through another incantation, leaning his staff against his chest so he could use both hands to work the magic. Twisting tendrils of blue-hot flame leaped from his fingertips, growing as they made their way unerringly at the green shadow. The fire shuddered in the air and was drawn thin. It poured into a spot at the top of the shadow and disappeared into it.

  The crown, Nauzhror sighed.

  “Stand in front of me,” Gromph said to the halfling.

  The huecuva did precisely as he was told, even as the wave of blue fire shot back at Gromph. The flames hit the halfling full in the chest, and activated the protective spell Gromph had cast on him. The blue fire was replaced by a flash of red-orange that carried back along the path of the reflected spell. The green shadow was replaced by the fully revealed form of the lichdrow Dyrr, who was no longer invisible.

  The fire from the huecuva’s defensive aura burned the lich, making Gromph smile. He looked at the halfling and saw that Dietr was smoking, his dead flesh smoldering. His face was twisted with agony.

  “Go,” Gromph commanded. “Kill the lich.”

  Dyrr cast a spell on him, but Gromph’s defenses proved capable of turning it away. It made the archmage a little dizzy, and that was all. Dietr staggered forward, reluctant but compelled to act. He wasn’t moving fast enough.

  “Kill the lich,” Gromph called after him, “and I’ll send you home to your mother.”

  Dietr believed the lie and broke into a run. Dyrr moved up to meet him and raked a clawed hand across the huecuva’s face. Red-orange fire flared at the touch, blowing blistering heat into the lichdrow’s masked face.

  Dyrr threw up an arm, but the damage had been done. He roared, frustrated and angry.

  Gromph was already working his next spell. Before Dyrr could strike again, it took effect, and the lichdrow’s arm stopped in mid-swipe. Gromph hadn’t quite expected the spell to work, but it had. Dyrr was frozen.

  “Take me home!” the undead halfling shrieked.

  He raked his own set of undead talons across Dyrr’s sunken cheeks. The frozen lichdrow growled at the pain and humiliation of the wound and was able to move again.

  Taking advantage of Dyrr’s misdirected rage at the huecuva, Gromph channeled the energy of a minor divination into a blast of arcane fire. He sent the silvery light pouring over the lichdrow and had to close his own eyes against its brilliance.

  Dyrr had been casting a spell—likely one that would have blasted Dietr to flinders—but the arcane fire took him full in the face. His spell was ruined, and the lichdrow was burned again.

  You’re hurting him, Grendan said into Gromph’s mind.

  Dietr struck again, digging a deep furrow into the lichdrow’s forearm. Thick, dead blood oozed slowly from the wound.

  The lichdrow looked at Gromph, and the archmage could see in his undead eyes that he was hurt, and hurt badly. Gromph smiled, and—

  Dietr exploded in a shower of black fire, dead flesh, and yellowed bones.

  What’s happening? Nauzhror asked.

  The sphere of magical energy that surrounded Gromph winked out—its magic spent—as the archmage realized that the black fire that had destroyed his huecuva hadn’t come from Dyrr.

  The lichdrow looked up into the air over the Bazaar, and Gromph followed his gaze.

  Nimor Imphraezl hung suspended on batlike wings a dozen yards above the floor of the Bazaar.

  Wings? Gromph thought.

  I knew he was no true drow, said Nauzhror.

  “Well,” Nimor said to the lich, his voice deeper, weightier than Gromph remembered, “seems you need me after all.”

  Ryld stood knee-deep in the freezing water of the cold swamp. Jeggred was nowhere to be seen. The constant noise made it hard to pick out the sound of the draegloth moving. The strange smells masked Jeggred’s rancid breath. The pinpoint stars and the odd patch of bioluminescence made it impossible to see the draegloth in the cold water and thick vegetation. The faerie fire the strange swamp cat had cast on him had long since faded away.

  He saw things moving in the water from time to time, mostly snakes, but no disturbances big enough to be the draegloth. Something slid past his leg, but there was no sign on the slime-covered surface that anything had passed by. It was definitely something alive, but it couldn’t possibly be Jeggred. It didn’t touch him again, whatever it was.

  Careful with each step, Ryld made his way across the swamp much more slowly than he’d hoped. The thin coating of bright green algae that covered the water made it impossible for the weapons master to see his feet. With each step his boot met some resistance: a rock, something soft, something that might have been alive, something that was solid and round like a quarterstaff—there were a lot of those—and something sharp like a dagger blade.

  A bubble as big as Ryld’s fist slowly expanded on the surface a few feet in front of him, sat there for a few seconds, then popped. Ryld stopped and watched it and winced when the smell of the air that had been trapped in the bubble finally wafted past his nose. The smell was reminiscent of the draegloth’s horrid breath, but it was different enough that Ryld was sure that it wasn’t Jeggred who’d sent up the bubble—and it wasn’t the first such bubble he’d seen.

  Ryld stepped forward, his foot again brushing past some hard object below the water. He used a Melee Magthere technique to slow his breathing and steady the shivering that threatened to slow his reaction time. He could see his breath condensing in the air in front of him in puffs of white steam when he exhaled, the air cold enough to make his teeth sting when he inhaled.

  An explosion of water doused his face and made him close his eyes. The water was thick with slime and grainy bits of something—Ryld couldn’t even guess what. His eyes blazed with flashes of yellow light and pain that made his jaw tense. Still, he brought his sword up in front of him and slashed twice at whatever it was that had splashed him. His blade met no resistance.

  From much farther below, a set of claws grabbed at his left thigh, punctured, then pulled down. The claws dragged deep, ragg
ed furrows in his skin, and Ryld could feel the heat of his own blood soaking his leg then cooling when it mixed with the cold water of the swamp.

  Stepping back and stabbing down, Ryld tripped over something in the water that felt like a length of petrified rope. Though he did his best to judge where the draegloth must have been to have clawed him like that, Splitter sank into the spongy ground under the water, never touching Jeggred. Ryld fell backward until the water wrapped him in its freezing embrace.

  The draegloth’s next attack pushed one of Ryld’s arms off the pommel of his greatsword and flipped it out to his side. Another set of deep cuts appeared on the underside of his left arm. Ryld wanted to scream, but he was under water, so he kept his mouth shut and brought his greatsword back under control. Even in the roar of swirling water that overwhelmed his hearing, the weapons master could sense the draegloth’s jaws snap closed half an inch from his throat.

  The draegloth was on top of him, and all the half-demon had to do was keep Ryld under water and eventually the weapons master would drown. The mistake the draegloth made was to reveal his position so clearly, though, and Ryld took full advantage of that mistake.

  Pressing up with one leg, Ryld felt the heavy weight of the half-demon. The weapons master pressed harder, curling backward and straightening his leg—not an easy task since the draegloth outweighed Ryld by more than two hundred pounds. He almost had the draegloth rolled over his head, but—maybe due to resistance from the water, the cold, shivering, or exhaustion—Ryld’s knees gave way, and the draegloth fell onto him.

  Jeggred’s claws found the underside of Ryld’s breastplate and made some shallow but painful cuts in the weapons master’s belly. The cold water slowed the flow of blood, though. Ryld almost subconsciously noted the irony in that. He would drown in the water that was keeping him from bleeding to death.

  Ryld pressed again, using Splitter instead of his legs. Either the draegloth feared the greatsword or being totally submerged made him lighter, but Ryld managed to roll the half-demon off him. He made a few more blind jabs with Splitter to keep the draegloth at bay while he stood.

  When Ryld’s head finally cleared the water, he looked around for Jeggred even before he started to breathe again. The draegloth was nowhere to be seen. Ryld struggled to his feet, slipping twice on what felt like slime-covered rocks. Still he managed to get Splitter up in front of him in both hands and ready.

  Ryld staggered through the water and across more odd obstructions under it, several paces from where he guessed that Jeggred should have been lying after the weapons master rolled him off.

  He would have kept going but stopped when he heard another loud splash behind him.

  Ryld spun, keeping his sword up and ready, and saw a disturbance on the water: what he thought looked like signs of a struggle. Puzzled that Jeggred would be so brazen after having effectively taken Ryld by surprise more than once in that cursed swamp, the weapons master took one step closer to the splashing with his sword in front of him and over his head in an effort to be ready for any eventuality.

  The draegloth burst out of the swamp in a flurry of claws and legs. Water arced from his white mane as his head snapped back. He was wrapped in dark green ropes, some sort of plant he must have gotten himself tangled in. Ryld thought he saw the plants move, slithering against Jeggred’s body like constricting snakes.

  Jeggred had barely enough time to take a deep breath. As quickly as he came up, the draegloth disappeared into another swirling eddy that broke up the slime covering the water.

  Ryld didn’t have time to understand what he’d seen. Something wrapped itself around his ankle and pulled. The weapons master knew a hundred tricks to keep him on his feet even if someone really wanted to pull him down, but as much as he tried, whatever it was that had him was too strong.

  So he cut it.

  Splitter was still in his hands and still as sharp a sword as ever saw battle in the Underdark. Ryld brought the weapon stabbing down along the side of his body then in and through whatever had grabbed him.

  It wasn’t easy—the thing around his ankle was as sturdy as it was strong—but he severed it and stopped short of cutting off his own foot. Ryld struggled backward through the water then stopped and turned when he saw something moving in the corner of his eye.

  Half a dozen of the green, ropy vines were sticking up out of the water like snakes scanning for their next meal. Ryld saw no eyes, no mouths, only green stalks as big around as one of the weapons master’s sturdy wrists. They had no faces, but they were very much alive and appeared for all the world as if they were looking for him.

  One of the vines burst toward him, unraveling itself from the water to snake quickly through the air at Ryld’s throat.

  The weapons master sliced fast and hard at chest level and took the first four inches off the end of the attacking vine. Greenish-yellow sap leaped from it like blood from a wound, and the vine quivered then fell into the roiling, slime-covered water.

  Another vine tried to wrap itself around Ryld from behind, and he could feel even more of them worrying him from beneath the surface. Ryld kept Splitter moving in fast, fluid motions in front of him and to either side, cutting through the water, taking the ends off one animated vine after another.

  Jeggred came back up, gasping for breath and ripping at a mass of the dark green vines. He was covered in the swamp slime, vine sap, and blood. One of the vines slipped around his face and into his mouth—a mistake. The draegloth bit down, and the bloodlike sap splashed over his cheeks. The vine quivered and went dead, but half a dozen more burst out of the water to take its place, and the draegloth was dragged under once again.

  This swamp, Ryld thought as he chopped down two more attacking vines, will kill us both before we can kill each other.

  Another reason to hate the World Above.

  Jeggred came back up again for just long enough to take another breath, and Ryld got the feeling that the draegloth was finally getting the upper hand over the damnable vines. Ryld cut through another vine then sliced off one that had almost managed to get all the way around his wounded thigh. The vines were still coming at him one after another, and Ryld had no way of knowing how many there were or if, let alone when, they might finally give up or he might kill the last of them. That and the possibility that the draegloth might come at him again made up the weapons master’s mind.

  Ryld looked around, flicking his greatsword to his right to slice a vine then in front of him to cut through another, letting the movement of the vines in his peripheral vision chose his targets for him while he scanned for an escape route.

  To his right—he had lost all sense of direction a long time before so had no idea if he was facing north, south, east, or west—the water gave way to slightly more solid if not entirely dry land. Larger trees with long, whiplike branches made a forest of thin lines. Behind those hanging branches Ryld saw a scattering of orange lights that must have been torches burning in the distance.

  He knew there might be any number of sentient creatures that could have lit those torches, and surely none of them were drow. Still, he might be able to use any sort of habitation to his advantage. If Jeggred chased him there, and it was a human town, an orc town, or an elf town, they might not like dark elves, but they’d be terrified by the draegloth. That could buy Ryld time, if not allies.

  Another vine managed to get around his ankle and tug. Ryld went down to one knee, his face almost falling under the slimy water before he managed to slice the vine off him. He left a cut in his boot that let in the water, and he shivered. Free of the vine, the weapons master ran. He didn’t bother trying to be quiet but splashed headlong through the knee-deep water. Behind him, Jeggred surfaced again, tore at the vines still covering his midsection, roared, took a deep breath, and went back down.

  Ryld stepped onto dry ground and hopped in an unseemly fashion as a set of vines worried at his heels. The ground was slippery and muddy, covered in patches with slick moss, but Ryld continued
running, working past the occasional loss of footing. From behind him came the draegloth’s peculiar growl and a flurry of splashes. As Ryld ran through the stinging, whiplike branches, dodging between the close-set trees while barely managing to keep on his feet, he could hear the half-demon panting, tearing, and growling behind him. Jeggred had surfaced again and was fighting his way free of the vines.

  The weapons master ran on, and soon the sounds of the struggling draegloth were joined by the faint echo of voices ahead. He came out of the forest of whiplike branches, still at an all-out run. The clearing was wide and relatively dry. A collection of stumps replaced the trees, and Ryld jumped up onto one of them then hopped to another and another, making his way toward the settlement. The stumps provided more even footing and were less slippery than the muddy, mossy ground.

  The torches burned from long poles stuck into the ground in a circle around a collection of a dozen small shacks and tattered tents. Even Ryld, who knew little of the World Above, could tell that the settlement was a temporary one and not an established village. The voices he heard echoing from one of the more permanent-looking buildings sounded human. The weapons master could pick out the occasional word in the human’s common trade language. He’d learned the language at Melee Magthere but had few opportunities to use it, and many words were still unfamiliar to him.

  Off to one side of the settlement was a huge pile of trees, cut down, stripped of their branches, and stacked carefully in a pyramid almost ten feet tall. In Menzoberranzan it would have been a king’s ransom in wood.

  Ryld made his way one stump at a time toward the bigger building but paused briefly to sheathe Splitter—and he was hit hard from behind. He fell forward off the stump, the greatsword still in his right hand, and pain blazed from his back. He fell onto a stump, pushed off, rolled forward, and saw the dark shape of Jeggred scrambling up behind him. The weapons master kicked out hard with both feet and smashed the draegloth between his legs. Jeggred grunted and backed off, long enough for Ryld to get to his feet.