“All things in due time,” Danifae said and offered the mage a smirk of her own.
“Indeed,” Quenthel answered, eyeing her nephew coldly.
Pharaun forced a smile, just to irk the draegloth, though when he looked at Quenthel and Danifae, he heard Aliisza’s troubling words in his mind. Maybe neither of them was the Yor’thae.
Nimor found Crown Prince Horgar at his field headquarters—a large, rough-walled, stalagmite-dotted cavern in the Dark Dominion not far from the battle lines at Tier Breche. The chamber stank of sweat, blood and the thick smoke from stonefire bombs. Nimor hung near the ceiling of the cavern in his half-dragon form, invisible by virtue of one of his spells.
Squads of duergar streamed in and out of the cavern, coming and going from the battle, their blocky armor ringing, their dusky skin smoke-blackened and bloody. Some were still enlarged—duergar possessed an innate magical ability to double their size—so Nimor presumed they had just come from the battle.
They spoke to each other in their inelegant language, their voices deep and gravelly. In the conversations, Nimor caught the ripple of a faint undercurrent of fear. Perhaps the duergar forces at last had encountered the spells of a priestess of Lolth. If so, even the tiny intellects encased in their small bald heads must have understood the implications.
Two elderly clerics, each as bent and twisted as a demon’s heart, tended the wounded. Nimor didn’t know the name of the deity they served and did not care. Occasional explosions in the distance—stonefire bombs and spells, no doubt—occasionally shook the cavern and rained rock dust on the inhabitants.
Prince Horgar stood to one side of the table, bent over a low stone table, looking at a makeshift map of the approaches to Tier Breche and issuing orders to two of his commanders who stood to either side of him. After a few moments of exchanged words, nods, and gestures at the map, the two bald commanders offered agreement with whatever Horgar said, gave him a salute—by thumping their pick hafts against the cavern floor—and stalked off.
Horgar stood alone over the table. He stroked his chin, staring at the map, lost in thought.
Horgar’s scarred bodyguard stood near the Prince. He held a bare warhammer, but his slack stance indicated that he expected no threat to his lord. Nimor smiled without mirth and flexed his claws. With the keen senses gifted him through his dragon heritage, Nimor studied the chamber. Duergar also possessed an innate ability to turn invisible. Nimor wanted no surprises.
As he had expected, he sensed no one in the cavern other than those duergar he could already see.
Horgar stood upright and stared at the cavern wall, no doubt still wrestling with some problem or strategy that plagued his pathetic little mind. He put a hand to his axe haft and rubbed the back of his bald head.
Calling upon the power of his brooch, Nimor levitated down until he stood directly behind the unsuspecting Horgar. The little dwarf was muttering in his awkward tongue.
Lesser races, Nimor thought with contempt.
Nimor might have said something to Horgar before killing him, might have shown himself, might have evoked fear, but he did none of those things. He was the former Anointed Blade, an assassin without peer. When he killed, he did so without fanfare.
Moving with a rapidity and ease born of long practice, he reached around Horgar and tore open the dwarf ’s throat. He turned visible the moment he struck.
The hole in the prince’s throat sprayed blood across the map, across the cavern wall. Horgar gagged and fell across the table, his muttering becoming a fading, wet gurgle. The prince tried to turn to see his attacker, but Nimor had split his throat so thoroughly that the muscles of the gray dwarf ’s neck would not function.
Nimor grabbed Horgar by the top of his head and jerked his face around, partially to let Horgar see who had killed him and partially to ensure that the crown prince was beyond the ability of the duergar clerics to help. Horgar’s eyes went wide, and Nimor satisfied himself that the gaze had flashed recognition even as the duergar’s life blood pumped from the gash in his throat. The prince’s gnarled body began to spasm in its death throes. The clerics would be unable to save him.
Shouts of surprise and rage erupted around Nimor—the stomping of boots, the clank of armor, the ring of weapons. He looked up to see duergar charging him from all sides, rushing to their fallen prince. Some were enlarging as they charged, growing taller and broader with each step. Others called upon their innate ability to turn invisible and vanished from his sight.
No matter. Nimor smiled, swallowed, triggered a reaction in his lungs, and exhaled a cloud of billowing, viscous shadows that nearly filled the whole of the cavern. He poured all of his pent up frustration, anger, and shame into the exhalation. The cloud of darkness engulfed the onrushing duergar and siphoned energy from their souls. Nimor heard them shouting in pain, cursing, shrieking. He stood unharmed in the midst of the cloud, grinning at the death around him.
The shadows dissipated quickly. Duergar lay scattered around the cavern, some of them dead, some of them dying, some of them weakened so much that they could no longer stand. A few, perhaps, would live.
Unless a drow patrol happened upon them.
Nimor located Horgar’s scarred bodyguard. The duergar lay to Nimor’s right, still holding his warhammer. The gray dwarf ’s eyes were unfocused, and drool dripped from the corner of his mouth. Nimor stepped to him, knelt, and looked him in the face.
“You should have chosen your master with more care,” he said and slit the guard’s throat.
He found the death pleasingly cathartic. It always did him good to kill.
Without another word, Nimor rose, shifted back into the Shadow Fringe, and left the cavern of dead and dying duergar behind him. He wanted to see Kaanyr Vhok before he returned to Chaulssin.
Inthracis walked the flesh-lined lower halls of Corpsehaven. The walls squirmed in his wake. Nisviim, his jackal-headed arcanaloth lieutenant, walked beside him.
The screams of mortal souls sounded in the distance, audible through the walls. No doubt some of his mezzoloths were feeding soul larvae to his canoloth pets.
“Shall I sound the muster for the Regiment, Lord?” Nisviim asked.
Despite the arcanaloth’s muzzle and overlarge canines, his voice and diction were impeccable. His heavy robes swooshed with each step. He toyed with one of the two magical rings on his hairy fingers as he spoke.
“Soon, Nisviim,” Inthracis answered, “but first we must attend to a small matter in my laboratory.”
The arcanaloth cocked his head with curiosity but kept his questions to himself.
“Very well, Lord,” he said.
Nisviim was as skilled an enchanter as Inthracis was a necromancer. Ordinarily, an arcanaloth of Nisviim’s power would not have been content to serve as a second to Inthracis, but Inthracis had long ago learned Nisviim’s true name. With it, he kept Nisviim obedient and subservient. The only alternative to service for Nisviim was pain.
They approached the flesh-and-bone door that led to one of Inthracis’s alchemical laboratories. Two hulking, round-bodied, four-armed dergholoths stood silent guard outside the door, both of them dead, both of them animated by Inthracis’s spells. Recognizing their master, the guardian dergholoths made no move to stop Inthracis’s advance.
Inthracis telepathically projected the password to suspend the wards on his door. The doors flared green as the wards dispelled. Decaying hands reached from the jambs to swing the portal open. The stink of rot, pleasant to Inthracis, wafted into the hallway.
Inthracis and Nisviim walked through the dergholoths and entered. Corpsehaven’s dead pulled the door closed behind them.
Animated hands, arms, and claws crawled the floor of the laboratory—the aftereffects of some of Inthracis’s experiments. All of them scrabbled out of the ultroloth’s path. Several immobilized and magically silenced barbed devils lay on tables, all of them partially dissected. Beakers and braziers covered the multitude of bone workbenches. The hand
kerchief with which Inthracis had daubed Vhaeraun’s blood soaked in an enchanted beaker filled with shadow essence. A bound fire mephit chained to the beaker held his tiny, flaming hand under the glass. Inthracis hoped to turn the blood into a distillate strongly resistant to Shadow Magic.
“Follow, Nisviim,” he said.
They crossed the laboratory to the opposite wall, where Inthracis spoke a word of power. The corpses in the wall rearranged themselves at its utterance, squirmed wetly aside, and formed an archway. A small, secret, heavily warded chamber lay beyond. With a mentally projected series of words, Inthracis temporarily deactivated the wards.
The ultroloth walked through, as did his lieutenant.
The arcanaloth believed that he had never before seen the chamber, but Inthracis knew better. Nisviim had been in the chamber many times, but he remembered none of them.
Within the room, reclined in a clear case of glassteel, was Inthracis’s body. Or at least one of them. As a matter of prudence, he kept at all times at least one clone of himself in temporal stasis. Were his current body to die, his soul, and his memories and knowledge, would immediately inhabit the clone. Upon being released from stasis, the clone would live; Inthracis would live.
He had been through three cloned bodies already, and the process had served him well. He’d died under devil claws before Dis’s gates in battle with the forces of Dispater, and he’d been consumed by a caustic ooze on the fungus-filled thirty-fourth layer of the Abyss.
“A clone, Lord,” Nisviim observed.
Inthracis pushed aside the memories of his earlier deaths and nodded. The time had come.
Without preamble, he spoke aloud Nisviim’s true name: “Heed me, Gorgalisin.”
Instantly, Nisviim’s body went slack, his eyes vacant. The arcanaloth stood perfectly still, as much an animated corpse as the dergholoths outside the laboratory. At that moment, Inthracis could have commanded Nisviim to do anything and the arcanaloth would have done it without question. Indeed, had he desired it, Inthracis could have used the invocation of Nisviim’s true name to wrack the arcanaloth’s soul or stop his heart.
He did not desire it, of course. A bound, named arcanaloth was too valuable an asset to waste with an amusing death.
Instead, Inthracis said, “In the event that you gain knowledge of my death or if I do not return to Corpsehaven within a fortnight of this day, you will enter this chamber—” and Inthracis telepathically projected into Nisviim’s mind the words to bypass the wards of his laboratory and the secret clone chamber—“and dispel the stasis on this body. Thereafter, you will return to your quarters and forget that any of this ever occurred. Nod if you understand.”
Nisviim nodded.
“Return now to your quarters,” Inthracis said, “and let slip from your consciousness all that has transpired during the last hour. Thereafter, sound the muster and summon the regiment to the Assembly Hall.”
Nisviim nodded, turned, and walked slowly from the chamber.
Inthracis watched him go, content that even if he died in combat with the drow priestesses, or if Vhaeraun betrayed and murdered him, he would live again.
In a thoughtful mood, he studied his hand, compared it to that of the clone in stasis. He wondered for a few heartbeats as to the nature of identity. Was the vivified clone still him? Was Nisviim still Nisviim when commanded by his truename?
For a moment, Inthracis felt as much a construct as Corpsehaven, no more truly alive than the dead who prowled its halls.
chapter
eight
The storm railed against the temple for hours. Feliane and Uluyara sat in peaceful Reverie throughout, untroubled by the angry scream of the wind and the blistering patter of the smoking, acidic rain. Halisstra allowed them their rest.
Within only a few hours, the storm abated, as though the plane itself was too exhausted to continue its tirade. Even the ever-present wind died down somewhat. Halisstra offered a prayer of thanks to Eilistraee, rose quietly, and exited the makeshift temple.
She stepped forth into the fall of night. Lolth’s tiny sun was just vanishing behind the distant horizon, casting its last spiteful rays of blood-red light over the landscape. The violence below too had abated, and Halisstra took a moment to enjoy the silence—no storm, no keening webs, no whispered, “Yor’thae.”
She felt free of Lolth, entirely free. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply, a clean breath.
She turned and saw that the walls of the temple were pitted from the rain, but that the symbol of Eilistraee over the door remained intact, untouched by the storm.
Our goddess is stubborn, Halisstra realized with a smile.
High above her, the river of souls flowed on toward their eternal fate. Looking at them, she felt a pang for Ryld. She hoped he had found at least some peace.
The souls flowed as one toward a range of craggy mountains that soared so high they looked like a wall between worlds. Halisstra noticed that while vortices of power still churned in the sky, there were fewer than before.
She felt as though events were settling down, consolidating before the final resolution. Unfortunately, she did not know just what the final resolution would be. She pressed the flat of the Crescent Blade against her palm and tried to keep her heart calm.
Feeling small but still determined, she walked to the edge of the tor and looked out and down on the Demonweb Pits.
The sight nauseated her.
Evidence of the destructive violence had survived the storm. Legs, torn carcasses, and pedipalps lay strewn across the broken land for as far as she could see. Ichor stained the rocks, even after the rain. Gorges, holes, and pits marred the surface of the landscape; webs spanned every opening; lakes of acid steamed poison into the air.
Soon, she knew, the wind would return and with it, the keening of the songspider webs and the call to Lolth’s Yor’thae.
Why did Lolth need this Yor’thae, Halisstra wondered? What was the Chosen supposed to do?
With effort, she pushed the questions from her mind. Lolth’s schemes no longer concerned Halisstra.
She touched the symbol of the Dark Maiden embossed on her breastplate and smiled. She felt that she had stepped on a new path, that Lolth’s voice would no longer pull at her soul. She was free of the Spider Queen.
For now, said a stubborn voice from the depths of her brain, but she pushed it back down.
The sun sank behind the mountains and its light faded entirely. Halisstra felt a painful itch between her shoulder blades, as though she had been poked with needles. She turned and saw, through a convenient hole in the clouds, eight red stars rising into the sky. Seven were bright, one dim. Clustered like a spider’s eyes, the stars looked down on Halisstra with palpable malevolence.
She answered their gaze with a defiant stare and a raised blade.
Gromph sat behind the enormous, polished dragonbone desk in his office in Sorcere. A dim green glowball cast the room in viridian and threw long shadows on the walls. Various trinkets, weapons, sculptures, and paintings decorated the office, the magical flotsam Gromph had gathered over the course of his long life.
His magical ring had almost fully regenerated his flesh. The burns were entirely gone; the blisters healed. He tapped his fingertips on the desk—the skin was still slightly tender and tingly—and thought about his next steps.
Though he’d had little time to spare, he had managed a quick meal of spiced mushrooms and cured rothé meat while he and Nauzhror had awaited Prath’s arrival. Gromph had not taken the time to bathe or change his attire, so the stink of filth and smoke still oozed from him. More conscious of the smell in the close confines of his office, he crinkled his nose, spoke the words to a cantrip, and used the minor magical power to mend his clothes and clean himself up, at least a bit.
A knock sounded on the zurkhwood door that opened onto the hallway.
“It is Prath, Archmage,” the apprentice called.
With a flick of his finger, Gromph temporaril
y suspended the wards on his door.
“Enter,” he commanded, and Prath did.
The wards reengaged when the door shut.
Prath nodded to Nauzhror, who sat in one of the two cushioned chairs opposite Gromph’s desk, and crossed the room.
“Sit, apprentice,” Gromph said and indicated the second chair.
Prath sank into it, saying nothing.
Gromph studied the two wizards, thinking the apprentice overly muscular and fidgety, the Master overly fat and ambitious. Neither yet understood exactly what Gromph proposed to do. Gromph’s personal office was perhaps the most secure location in the city, the haven from which he could begin in secret his assault on House Agrach Dyrr. A series of wards— far more than those that simply prevented entry through the doorway—sheathed the room to prevent not only physical intrusion but scrying and other magical surveillance. Gromph perceived the wards in the room around him as a tickle on the newly regrown hairs of his arms, a slight charge in the air.
Of all the mages in Menzoberranzan, only the lichdrow would have had a chance to penetrate Gromph’s ward scheme, and only maybe.
Of course, the lichdrow was no more than dust at the moment. Gromph intended to ensure that he stayed that way.
A half-full chalice of fortified mushroom wine sat on the smooth, white desktop beside the remains of Gromph’s meal. Near the chalice and silver plate sat one of Gromph’s two personal scrying crystals. Unlike his crystal ball, unlike the great lens in Sorcere’s scrying chamber, the crystal on his desk was not smooth surfaced, but rather was a head-sized, irregularlyshaped piece of brown, black, and red banded chrysoberyl. Those in the World Above called it “cat’s eye,” and its properties as a scrying medium were highly valued.
Unfortunately, a chrysoberyl scrying crystal typically did not have the range of most other types of crystals. Still, for close work, there was nothing better. And Gromph’s crystal had an added benefit: He could cast certain types of spells through it.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 80
