R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation

by Richard Lee Byers; Thomas M. Reid; Richard Baker

  Where was the Spider Queen? Perhaps she was bored with her toy Menzoberranzan, magnificent though it was. Perhaps she intended to break it to make space for a new one.

  In time, Greyanna’s dodging and backtracking brought her to a street she recognized, a double row of prosperous shops—to be precise, establishments owned by tradesmen under the patronage of House Mizzrym. She herself had called hereabouts, collecting rents and fees, occasionally chastising a fool who was late paying on a loan or had otherwise displeased Matron Mother Miz’ri.

  It occurred to Greyanna that if the merchants perished, they’d contribute no more gold to Mizzrym coffers. Whereas if she conducted them to safety, she might curry some favor with her mother. Miz’ri had grown impatient with her continuing failure to kill Pharaun and had even hinted that another might carry the mantle of First Daughter with more grace.

  At the very least, preserving Mizzrym assets would feel more constructive and less frustrating than simply skulking about, and so Greyanna instructed her followers to extract the frightened traders and artisans from their homes.

  She loosed a crossbow bolt at the hobgoblins, and her soldiers did the same. Her wizard conjured a cold, towering shadow like the silhouette of a mantis, which mangled several thralls in its oversized pincers before melting out of existence. In all, at least a dozen brutes fell, but others shambled forth from the smoke and fiery glare to take their place.

  Voices of torment, she thought, how many undercreatures were there in Menzoberranzan?

  Until that day, Greyanna had never really noticed. She guessed no one else had, either.

  The hobgoblins charged.

  The Mizzrym princess shouted, “Dark wall!”

  Three of her retainers, those closest to the onrushing thralls, stooped and touched the ground, conjuring a curtain of shadow between themselves and the undercreatures, then fell back.

  One of the Mizzrym warriors herded the shopkeepers farther from the threat. The rest, Greyanna included, scrambled to form a line at a narrow place three yards behind the intangible barrier. The princess pulled a little silver vial from her belt pouch and guzzled the bitter, lukewarm contents down. She shuddered and doubled over as her muscles cramped, and the discomfort gave way to a tingling warmth.

  Hobgoblins strode from the darkness. They’d dwelled among dark elves too long for the trick to deter them more than a moment.

  At least the blinding veil precluded their advancing in anything resembling a coherent formation. They screamed and charged in a gapped and formless wave, which looked murderous even so.

  The first hobgoblin to lunge at Greyanna was particularly large and, in marked contrast to his fellows, hairless from the shoulders up. A mistress or master had depilated the slave to prepare the canvas for a work of art, hundreds of tiny round burn scars arranged in a complex swirling pattern.

  The thrall cut at Greyanna’s head. Under other circumstances, she would have retreated out of range, but that would break the line. Wishing she’d brought a shield to the revel, she lifted her mace in a high parry. The hobgoblin’s broadsword rang against the stone haft of the war club and skipped off.

  At once she riposted with a strike to the flank, and the undercreature whipped his targe around to block. The blow bashed a dent in the round steel shield and knocked the hobgoblin reeling back, his slanted eyes wide with surprise. He didn’t know about the potion that had lent her an ogre’s strength.

  Greyanna struck to the side, slaying the slave who was menacing her neighbor, then her own bald adversary came edging back. He hovered for a few blinks of an eye, then feinted to the flank and finished with a cut to the chest. Discerning the true threat, she half-stepped inside the arc of the attack and swung at his jaw. The blow crunched home, and he toppled backward with a shattered, bloody chin and a broken neck.

  She killed two more hobgoblins, then something prodded her shin, a thrust that failed to penetrate her boot. She looked down, and it was a kobold, armed with a fireplace poker, who had apparently been scurrying about the feet of the larger slaves. Greyanna killed the reptilian imp with a roundhouse kick.

  She cast about for her next adversary. She didn’t seem to have one. The fight was over, and the few surviving hobgoblins were running away.

  “Form up!” she shouted. “I want a column with the traders in the middle. Fast!”

  Once the procession was under way, Aunrae, striding along at Greyanna’s side, asked, “May I know where we’re going? An ally’s castle?”

  “No,” Greyanna replied. “I suspect we couldn’t get in. We’re going to hide our charges in Bauthwaf.”

  The column crept past corpses and burning stone, and as they made their way to the cavern wall, other commoners came running out of their homes to join the procession. Greyanna’s first impulse was to turn away those without ties to House Mizzrym, but she thought better of it. Many of the newcomers carried swords, and she could press the dolts into martial service if needed.

  Occasionally someone collapsed, coughing feebly, poisoned by the stinging smoke. The rest stepped over her and pressed on.

  Someone gave a thin, high cry, as if at an unexpected pain. Greyanna spun around. The goblins weren’t attacking. Her client the canoe maker had simply seized his opportunity to knife another male in the back.

  “A competitor,” the craftsman explained.

  The labyrinthine fortress known as the Great Mound contained a number of magically sealed areas. Unbelievably, the rebellious slave troops penetrated everywhere else. The Baenre fought the goblinoids in the stalagmite towers, across the aerial bridges that connected them, and through the tunnels beneath them, even along the balconies and skywalks of the stalactite bastions, reclaiming their domain a bloody inch at a time.

  The thralls made their final stand in the courtyard, a spacious area surrounded by a weblike iron fence. The barrier was a potent magical defense, and, as the Baenre had just discovered, of no use whatsoever if one’s foe was already inside the compound.

  Triel floated down from the battlements above to take a hand in the last of the fighting. Jeggred, who’d stood beside her since the battle commenced, drifted down as well. Both mother and demidemon son wore a copious spattering of blood, none of it their own.

  In truth, Triel could have left the task of clearing the yard to her warriors, but she was enjoying herself. Partly, it was simple drow bloodlust, but she’d also found a directness, a simplicity, in slaughtering goblins that was sadly lacking in the complex task of ruling the city. For the first time since ascending to her mother’s throne, she felt she knew what she was doing.

  Half a dozen minotaurs, formidable brutes she had often employed as her own personal guards, chanted, “Freedom! Freedom!” as they swung their axes or crouched to gore an enemy with their horns. Triel read the last line of runes from a scroll that, when the rebellion commenced, had contained seven spells.

  Dazzling flame blazed up from the ground beneath the minotaurs’ hooves. Four of the huge beasts fell down screaming and thrashing. The other two leaped clear of the conflagration. They didn’t escape harm entirely. The fire burned away patches of their shaggy fur and seared the flesh beneath, but the injuries didn’t slow them down. They bellowed and charged.

  A minotaur towered over a drow of normal stature, and made Triel look like a tiny sprite. Still, she smiled as she stepped forward to meet the foe. One of the slaves focused on her and the other, on Jeggred.

  The matron mother knew a minotaur liked to overwhelm an opponent with the momentum of its initial rush. She waited until the creature was nearly on top of her, then sidestepped. He was lumbering too fast to stop or compensate, and she smashed his knee with her mace as he plunged by.

  The slave fell on his face, and she robbed him of the use of his limbs with a bone-breaking strike to the spine. Meanwhile, Jeggred simultaneously chewed on his own opponent’s neck and ripped at the brute’s torso, hooking the guts out.

  After that, Triel and the draegloth killed several
gnolls before running out of foes. Panting, the Baenre strode to the foot of a wall and floated upward again, high enough to peer beyond the eminence of Qu’ellarz’orl to the burning city beyond. Jeggred followed.

  Earlier, when she’d first discerned that slaves throughout Menzoberranzan were rebelling, she’d used a certain magical diamond to call the males of Bregan D’aerthe from their secret lair. The sellswords were at their work.

  One neighborhood in the south of the city was thick with goblins. Even from the Great Mound, she could make out the boil of motion in the streets. Then, over the course of just a few breaths, that agitation ceased, as the creatures apparently fell dead all at once.

  It was an extraordinary feat of mass assassination, but the mercenaries had only cleared one small part of Menzoberranzan. They couldn’t reclaim the entire city by themselves, if, in fact, the job could be done at all.

  Triel shouted down into the yard, to any officer within earshot, “Assemble my troops. We’re marching out.”

  Jeggred couldn’t speak for joy. This had already been the best night of his admittedly young life, and he was drunk on slaughter. He’d killed and killed and killed and killed again, an ecstasy that put his sport with Faeryl Zauvirr to shame.

  And his mother said it wasn’t over! They were going to descend into the city to gorge on murder, and Jeggred would know a fiend’s transcendent bliss. The only hard part would be remembering not to kill dark elves, just everyone else.

  He squeezed Triel’s shoulder with a quivering hand, one of the smaller ones.

  Valas Hune skulked around the corner, then blinked. A keep blocked the street, where no bastion should be—then the huge thing moved.

  No, not a keep after all, but the biggest stone giant he’d ever seen. The scout knew that some Houses kept giant slaves as well as the more common goblinoids and ogres, and, gray in the firelight, with a long head and black, sunken eyes, this specimen still wore iron bracelets dangling lengths of broken chain. From somewhere it had procured a greataxe sized for a creature of its immensity, and was using it to pulp any drow it noticed scurrying about.

  Valas had gotten separated from his comrades sometime back. That was all right. He was used to traversing wild places by himself, though in truth, he’d never explored any tunnel as perilous and unpredictable as Menzoberranzan had become this night.

  He’d been killing orcs and gnolls, first with his shortbow, and, after the arrows ran out, close in with his kukris. He’d thought he was making some genuine progress until he encountered this.

  It was a daunting sight, but someone would have to kill the big undercreatures as well as the little ones, if Menzoberranzan was to survive and Bregan D’aerthe was to be paid for its services.

  Valas touched a fingertip to a nine-pointed tin star pinned to his shirt, and murmured a word in a language of a race few Menzoberranyr had ever even heard of. In the blink of an eye he was crouched on the stone giant’s shoulder.

  The surface was smooth and rounded. He started to slip off, but, reacting like the accomplished rock climber he was, negated his weight and caught himself. He clambered within reach of the giant’s neck and started hacking at the arteries within the behemoth’s neck with both kukris.

  To no avail. Perched somewhat precariously, Valas couldn’t use his strength and weight to full advantage, and his first stroke skipped harmlessly off the giant’s rocklike hide.

  The behemoth did feel the impact, though. Its head snapped around, the chin nearly brushing Valas away. The giant glared down at him, and he struck, this time with greater success. With a crackle of lightning, the enchanted weapon split the slave’s lower lip.

  Crying out in pain and anger, a deep sound Valas felt in his bones, the stone giant flinched its head away. A huge gray hand rose up to catch the drow, who scrambled forward and cut at the colossus’s neck.

  Dark, thick blood leaped forth and washed Valas into space. He fell hard onto a rooftop and watched the giant stumble about, clutching at its throat. After a few steps, the huge thrall fell backward, crushing some unlucky hobgoblins that were wandering by.

  Gromph was in a vile humor as he floated up the cliff face. He’d cast light into the foot of Narbondel the same as always, and the world exploded into madness. Orcs lunged out of nowhere and attacked his guards. His own ogre litter-bearers summarily dumped his luxurious conveyance on the ground and joined in the uprising.

  The archmage had sought to strike the undercreatures dead with a spell, but nothing happened. Someone had conjured a magical dead zone around him. Either one of the orcs was a shaman powerful enough to create such an effect, or, more likely, one of the brutes had stolen a talisman from his owner.

  However they’d managed it, the beasts were charging, and the spells in Gromph’s memory were just odd little rhymes, his robe and cloak, mere flimsy cloth, and his weapons, inert sticks and ornaments. Well, probably not all of them, but he wasn’t reckless enough to stand and experiment while the orcs assailed him with their pilfered blades. Forfeiting his dignity, he turned and ran. The exertion made his chest throb where K’rarza’q had gored him.

  When he reached the edge of the plaza, he thought he must have exited the dead zone. He’d better have, because he could hear the grunting ogres with their long legs catching up behind him. He turned, pointed a wand, and snarled the trigger word.

  A drop of liquid shot from the tip of the rod. It struck the belly of the lead ogre and burst into a copious splash of acid.

  With his magic restored, Gromph obliterated every attacker who lacked the sense to run away. His dark elf attendants were already dead, leaving him to make his way back to Tier Breche alone.

  As it turned out, the slave rebellion was pandemic, and the trek wasn’t altogether easy. He considered going to ground in some castle or house, but when he saw the flames gnawing stone, he knew he had to get back.

  Dirty, sore, and coughing, he eventually made it home, and when he rose to the top of the limestone wall, he saw something that lifted his spirits, albeit only a little.

  Eight Masters of Sorcere stood in the open air, chanting, gesturing, attempting a ritual, while an equal number of apprentices looked on. The wizards had fetched much of the proper equipment out of the tower. That was something, Gromph supposed, but the incantation was a useless mess.

  The Baenre reached out and hauled himself onto solid ground and his hands and knees, another irksome affront to his dignity.

  He rose and shouted, “Enough!”

  The teachers and students twisted around to gawk at him. The chanting died.

  “Archmage!” cried Guldor Melarn. He was supposedly without peer in the realm of elemental magic, though it couldn’t be proved by his performance thus far that night. “We were worried about you!”

  “I’m sure,” said Gromph, striding closer. “I noticed all the search parties you sent out looking for me.”

  Guldor hesitated. “Sir, the mistress of the Academy commanded—”

  “Shut up,” said Gromph. He’d come close enough to see that the teachers were standing in a complex pentacle, written in red phosphorescence on the ground. “Pitiful.”

  He extended his index finger and wrote on the air. The magic words and sigils reshaped themselves.

  “My lord Archmage,” said Master Godeep. “We drew this circle to extinguish the fires below. If you break it—”

  “I’m not breaking it,” said Gromph, “I’m fixing it.” He turned his gaze on one of the apprentices, some commoner youth, and the dolt flinched. “Fetch me a bit of fur, an amber rod, and one of the little bronze gongs the cooks use to summon us to supper. Run!”

  “Archmage,” said Guldor, “you see we already have all the necessary foci for fire magic.” He gestured to a brazier of ruddy coals. “I’m whispering to the flames below, commanding them to dwindle.”

  “And making more smoke in the process. That’s just what we need.” Gromph kicked the brazier over, scattering embers across the rock. “Your approach is
n’t working, elementalist. I should exile you to the Realms that See the Sun for a few decades, then you might figure out what it takes to extinguish a fire of this magnitude.”

  The male came sprinting back with the articles Gromph had requested. The Baenre whispered a word of power, and the pentacle changed from red to blue.

  “Right, then,” he said to the wizards. “I assume you can tell where you’re meant to stand, so do it and we’ll begin. I’ll say a line, you repeat it. Copy my passes if you’re up to it.”

  For a properly schooled wizard, magic was generally easy. He relied on an armamentarium of spells, many devised by his predecessors, a few, perhaps, invented by himself. In either case, they were perfected spells that he thoroughly understood. He knew he could cast them properly, and what would happen when he did.

  An extemporaneous ritual was a different matter. Relying on their arcane knowledge and natural ability, a circle of mages tried to generate a new effect on the fly. Often, nothing happened. When it did, the power often turned on those who had raised it or discharged itself in some other manner contrary to their intent. Yet occasionally such a ceremony worked, and with his station, his wealth, and his homeland at stake, Gromph was resolved to make this one of those times.

  After the mages chanted for a time, power began to whisper and sting through the air. The archmage tapped the beater to the gong, sounding a clashing, shivering tone. At once a vaster note answered and obscured the first, a booming, grinding, deafening roar. Gromph’s subordinates flinched, but the Baenre smiled in satisfaction, because the noise was thunder.

  Perched high in the side cavern, the residents of Sorcere had an excellent view of what transpired next. The air at the top of the great vault, already thick with smoke, grew denser still as masses of vapor materialized. The shapeless shadows flickered like great translucent dragons with fire leaping in their bellies. Following each flash, they bellowed that godlike hammering blast, as if the flames pained them.