However, the dazzling light erased any shadows close enough for him to work with. He hadn’t thought his ploy all the way through. Worse, his body remained determinedly locked in paralysis to the staff, which itself was planted as solidly as a five-hundred-year-old tree in the forest. And the blades of Exorcessum were tidily sheathed in the scabbards he’d borrowed from Thoster. The red-runed blade was only inches from his left hand, but thanks to the aching rigidity of his muscles, it might as well have been a mile.
“Veil!” he rasped, “Help me!” The scarf uncoiled from his neck in billowing loops. One end wriggled down his arm and wrapped the staff’s headpiece. The other end whipped out like a striking adder. It caught one drow warrior around the neck in a winding grasp. The moment of contact between drow and staff closed, lightning cracked the air. And Demascus’s muscles eased, just as the drow warrior dropped, smoke issuing from eye sockets.
The Veil went limp, steaming and a little blackened at the edges. Demascus fell, too, in a convincing imitation of a rag doll. He hit the web floor with one shoulder and tucked into a flopping roll that moved him a few paces closer to the edge of the dais. He found himself staring up into the face of another drow warrior holding a glaive with a spike on the end.
The drow tried to stab him with the pointy bit.
Demascus jerked out of the way. The spike grazed his armor but failed to pierce flesh. As the warrior raised the glaive for a second try, Demascus pulled his knees up to his chest, then lashed out as if his legs were a released spring. He smashed a boot heel into the warrior’s knee. The joint made a funny popping sound. The drow collapsed, gasping in surprise at his sudden inability to hold his own weight.
And Demascus was up. He was shaking like a drunkard too long deprived of drink, sure, but being on his feet was better than on his back.
The three remaining drow—the last warrior, the fellow in the wizardly robes, and Chenraya—got their bearings. The howling ettercaps and driders kept up their din. Demascus hoped his friends were responsible. At least none of the driders had yet tried to climb the dais to help their mistress, despite that Demascus was in among the drow leaders, killing or disabling them one by one.
One by one … Yes. That was how it was supposed to be. None of this stealing and running. The Sword of the Gods might strike from the shadows, but he never, ever ran from a fight. A cold grin stretched Demascus’s lips.
The imprimatur of his ancient office swept the deva into its joyous, bloodythirsty embrace.
“The Sword has come,” he said, his voice suddenly resonant. His announcement gave all the drow pause. Even Chenraya blanched. His eyes sparked as he considered how he’d exterminate each one in turn. The wonderful thing about his office was that he was allowed to remove everyone who learned of its existence, at his sole discretion. Which was convenient.
His weapons were out and moving in a rhythm of defending curves and slashing threats, though he didn’t recall drawing them. The runes on each blade flared brighter and lifted slightly from the metal. The interweaving of his kata created a light painting in the air, a palimpsest of rune on rune, red on white, a fractal lure capable of fascinating the weak-minded.
None of the dark elves, however, apparently suffered from that particular mental handicap. The last warrior narrowed his eyes, hefted his ebony shield, and flicked his short sword from its sheath, launching a fluid series of cuts. Demascus parried each with his weaving blades. But the warrior caught each of Demascus’s countering cuts just as deftly on his shield.
This one was skilled! And wasting the deva’s time. Each moment he spent fencing gave Chenraya and the robed drow time to marshal their own attacks. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the priestess gesticulating, purple light building on her fingertips.
“Lolth blast you!” screamed Chenraya, her arms suddenly motionless in a pose of exultation. The hair on Demascus’s neck lifted as if something immensely powerful moved beneath him like a sea monster under the waves threatening to breach.
The deva threw himself to one side. A gray bolt of power sundered the air where he’d been standing, brushing him, and where it touched, he lost feeling. The deadened spots were only a spattering, but each one was more than mere numbness; they were like holes in his existence. He laughed. He felt most alive when the stakes were highest! Even though a distant part of his mind was yelling at him to be careful, the Sword ignored it.
The drow warrior cut a trail of blood in the deva’s forearm with his flicking short sword. Demascus’s counterblows banged harmlessly on the shield. He should probably stop playing and neutralize them, before they coordinated their offensive. He lurched toward the muttering male wizard, whom the deva had left alone for too long. The warrior got in his way and, still startled, left off whatever spell he’d been concocting with a surprised exclamation that summoned the night. A natural ability these dark elves drew on instinctively when threatened, some past life whispered in his ear.
Blackness pinched out Demascus’s mark of radiance and settled over the central circle, blotting out all that occurred within its velvet cover. The drow could see perfectly in the dimness.
And with a flick of the Veil, it wrapped around his head like a blindfold, so the Sword could sense his surroundings, too. The scarf was still recovering from its previous exploit, though, so everything seemed scratchy and uncertain.
Chenraya was chanting again, maybe preparing for another shivering blast of divine power. The robed one who’d summoned darkness dug in the satchel hanging at his belt, searching for something.
The warrior charged. Demascus pretended to stumble, using the motion to duck under a sword swing as he went down on one knee. He shuffled and made a quarter turn so he was again directly between the two remaining male drow. Chenraya was still out of reach.
The wizard yelled something in a tongue Demascus didn’t recognize. Probably something like, “He can see us!”
Demascus grinned. “I am the Sword of the Gods,” he intoned. “Do you think darkness could deny an assassin of heaven?”
Queen Arathane called the storm. Despite how far they were beneath the surface, lightning answered and thunder roared. With her spear, she blasted waves of ettercaps, spiders, and lurching animated miners, rendering them indistinguishable smoking heaps. Even so, new waves of foes clambered over the wreckage to reach her.
Riltana and Chant fought at her side. The three of them constituted a competent and impressive force. Chant never missed with his enchanted crossbow. Riltana’s swordplay was dazzling. But there were too many. The spiders seemed endless, and it wasn’t the large ones that worried the queen most. It was the tiniest ones; they were hardest to notice.
Then the inevitable finally happened. A tiny scarlet recluse scuttled up Arathane’s armor and bit her neck. It felt like a splinter of lava under her skin. She slapped the spider away. The pain and a wave of dizziness made her stagger.
“Your Majesty?” said Chant, turning to her. Then an ettercap lying prone at the pawnbroker’s feet ended its ruse; it latched onto Chant’s leg and bit. Blood splattered.
Riltana rushed from behind and knifed the creature, even as a new wave of ettercaps closed.
Chant waved Riltana back with one hand as he shot a bolt that divided three times to lay low as many ettercaps. He took a step and winced. Blood trickled down his leg from the bite. He said, “Are you all right, Your Highness?”
Arathane lied, “I’m fine. How about you?” A thread of weakness wound down her spine and sent feelers into her arms and legs. But she made a show of discharging another blast, scattering a new mass of attackers.
However … if the venom spread any farther, her facade would crumble.
As a monarch, that just wouldn’t do. “We need to consider pulling out.” Even if that meant leaving Demascus? It pained her to contemplate it, but a leader couldn’t be swayed by sentiment.
Riltana narrowed her eyes. “What’s taking that leech-son deva so long?”
“Demascus!”
someone called near the entrance. He couldn’t see that far with the scarf around his eyes, so he snatched it away. The drow dimness had lapsed, and normal vision was possible. He saw the floor between him and the exit was blocked by a mass of screaming ettercaps, groaning undead, and at least one drider. A glitter of storm-sharp light, followed by thunder, threw a handful of shadows across him before it guttered out. A fierce fight raged there.
“Demascus? Get your ass back here with that staff! We need to leave!” the voice came again. It was familiar … a woman he knew. He just wasn’t sure it concerned him. Especially not when he had three such premier targets to deal with. Not when the killing-glee sparked on his spine like a fuse, promising a wondrous detonation.
The drow wizard produced a scroll from his bag. But the warrior prevented Demascus from doing anything about it with his dancing sword. His facility with the weapon surprised Demascus. Few foes had ever fended him off for so long. Especially when hindered by having only one blade to the deva’s two. In Demascus’s defense, the Veil of Wrath and Knowledge was oddly unresponsive. Its ends were flapping all about without guidance. The scarf should have kept its ends tucked out of the way.
Finally Demascus broke around the warrior and charged the wizard. The same sensation as before, of something indefinably large moving just beyond sight, feathered across Demascus.
“Chenraya,” screamed the dark elf wizard, followed by something Demascus couldn’t understand. He assumed it was something along the lines of “You betraying bitch!”
Another fountain of awful energy burst from the floor. The blast swept away the remaining bits of darkness clotting the air, its virulence too extreme to allow any lesser blight in its presence.
Demascus leaped into a flailing shadow created by a lightning glare from the periphery of the chamber. He slipped into it not a heartbeat before the drow priestess’s calling engulfed the space where he’d been and where the drow wizard still screamed in fury and terror. He stepped across the all-too-brief shadow lane caused by a dying lightning bolt. He stepped back into reality at Chenraya’s elbow. What remained of the drow wizard was a greasy pool of flesh in which floated oddments of clothing. The single remaining drow glared at the priestess with undisguised hate.
The priestess was cackling.
Chenraya had just swatted down an able-bodied ally, even though it lessened her chances of beating Demascus, just because of the charge she got from killing. The realization partially woke Demascus from his daze. His assassin’s guise and power threatened to slip from him entirely. I’m not anything like her, he thought. I only kill those who deserve it. Those whose fate and the gods command! Except that you enjoy it, he accused himself. All too much.
He could imagine Riltana’s voice. “Now’s not the time to contemplate your navel, idiot!”
The final drow warrior saw Demascus appear behind Chenraya. But the dark elf didn’t betray the deva’s presence to the priestess. Demascus realized he’d just made an ally, if only briefly, in the drow’s hate for Chenraya.
Demascus sheathed his white-runed blade and snatched up the Veil of Wrath and Knowledge in his free hand. The fabric stirred at his touch. He turned to Chenraya. But he couldn’t detect the Veil’s secret shadow, the dim shroud only he could see. No time to wonder why.
He sheathed his other blade, then flipped the Veil around the drow priestess’s neck and pulled it tight. Sometimes the best tricks were the oldest.
Chenraya tried to gasp. But the scarf was already so tight she only squeaked. Then she thrashed like a bear caught in a trap. Her strength amazed him. Her feminine frame belied the vicious power of her limbs. He kicked her behind the knees and pulled her head back. With her feet no longer completely supporting her weight, her ability to resist was curbed. But she still flailed and pummeled like a demon. And he supposed she might partly be one, given whom she worshipped.
The drow warrior seemed to finally decide his distaste for Chenraya was less than his hatred for someone who would lay a hand on one of his own. He rushed the deva.
Demascus circled, trying to keep Chenraya between himself and the warrior. Her resistance allowed a few of the warrior’s quick sword thrusts to prick him, though none seriously. Besides, he only needed to keep pressure around her neck for just a few more heartbeats and Chenraya would be done. Just to be sure, he tied off the scarf as tightly as possible.
Her cloak picked that moment to reveal itself as an animate threat. The dark material spilled off her like liquid. Then it inflated, appearing for all the world like a very large spider with huge, razor-sharp mandibles. They snapped with convincingly loud clacks and tried to bite the deva around the neck. His only choice was to release his choke on the priestess or risk losing his head to a decapitating bite. He threw himself back.
Chenraya lurched forward, into the arms of the drow warrior. Her cloak-guardian retained its newfound spider shape and advanced. Demascus swept Exorcessum’s twin blades out of their sheaths. The hilts fit his hands as if made for him. He laughed. With the tools of his office in hand, did these drow really think they could stand before him?
He stepped up to meet the advancing cloak-spider. Chenraya, eyes still bugged out and skin noticeably pale from the scarf still fastened around her neck, squeaked out a single word. A word like the one used by the other dark elf to shroud the dais in darkness.
This word summoned arachnids. A blinding downpour of black, biting spiders, impossible to see through, or live through, if one wasn’t drowborn!
He slipped out from beneath the hem of lowering arachnids by a hair’s breadth. A few sticky legs latched onto him even as he spun away from the swarming mass by leaping from the dais. He awkwardly swatted at the crawling things before they could find a chink in his armor or crawl up his chest and onto his face. Even for someone like him, it was awkward to swat spiders while holding two swords and still land on his feet from a dozen-foot fall into a crowd of monsters, most of which were waiting for him.
Chenraya couldn’t breathe. What felt like iron cable constricted her throat. The deva had abandoned the dais, but not his strangling cord. Though spiders shrouded her like a feather bed, she took no comfort from it. She could see perfectly well through the otherwise solid mass of swarming arachnids. The last Bregan D’aerthe mercenary stood unmoving, studying her. She gesticulated, mouth agape, eyes bulging, at the constriction at her throat. For all her strength, she couldn’t loosen it. Alarm and fear coursed in her blood like acid. She might die here!
The male finally took action. He spun her around and fumbled at a fabric knot that bulged at the nape of her neck. Only moments had slipped by, but the pressure behind her eyes expanded like a balloon, and exploratory fingers of darkness intruded on her vision. For the first time in her long life, Chenraya couldn’t see, not through this darkness. She panicked. No strength remained, so she flailed, with no breath to call out to Lolth for aid; she couldn’t even gasp. Whether she lived or died was all down to a single drow mercenary whose name she’d refused to learn. Which meant …
This is it, she thought. She’d have collapsed, but the swarming spiders held her upright with hundreds of tiny legs. Miraculously, the strangling cord was pulled away! She sucked in huge breaths. The surrounding swarm gave her space to breath.
“You saved me,” she rasped to the figure before her.
The last Bregan D’aerthe nodded. He held the offending white length of fabric in one hand. He took her left hand with the other. His grasp was warm, warmer than she would have guessed. She had never allowed herself such intimacy with the inferior sex before.
She cleared her throat. “I owe you a great debt. Please tell Lolth that, through you, her plans have moved a step closer to completion.”
“What?”
She plunged her favorite dagger into the mercenary’s heart with her right hand. Then she chanted the keystone word that would finally create the opening to her home, to Menzoberranzan.
The drow collapsed, his eyes round with accusation
. It was the last expression he ever made. The strangling cord in his hands trembled, then slithered down the dais like a white snake. She let it go; it no longer mattered. The entire Demonweb was shuddering. Her ritual had come to fruition. The temporary portal in the ceiling shuddered open.
Oh, such glory would be hers! She’d acquired a portion of a dead Primordial so powerful, yet so tractable, that it would prove the perfect component. Thanks to her, Lolth’s coming apotheosis would succeed. And when Lolth became the new Goddess of Magic and the Weave, wouldn’t she raise Chenraya Xolarrin up as her first exarch?
Yes, Chenraya decided, as the influence of the temporary gate pulled her into its embrace. And as an exarch, a divine being in her own right, she’d be in a position to deal with her lessers as they deserved. A time of reckoning for the less-fair sex was imminent.
DEMONWEB
21 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
DEMASCUS LANDED IN THE MASS OF SLAVE-SOLDIERS AT least ten feet from the dais base. He didn’t land gracefully, and he garnered a few more bites. But he’d escaped the shroud of spiders above, and was on his feet a moment later, his twin swords accelerating like threshing blades. Two ettercaps rushed him, hoping to bring him down while he was still distracted. Their hope was in vain. Spidery ichor sprayed those shoving closer, a gory warning to the others to stay clear of him unless they wished the same.
He grinned, as the office of the Sword once more began to expand across his awareness—
“Demascus!” The cry for aid was louder than ever and truly desperate this time. A note of despair cut through his killing trance, enough that he was able to recognize Riltana’s voice.
“Chant’s hurt; Arathane’s poisoned. Help!”
Sword of the Gods: Spinner of Lies Page 22
