At that, Vhok smiled and tipped his head to acknowledge the point. A few of the tanarukks chuckled.
“What then?” the cambion asked. “Do you have yet another wondrous scheme to offer me?” He gestured at his battle scarred, retreating column. “You see the result of your last.”
Vhok’s men laughed at that, but it was forced laughter. No doubt their retreat shamed them.
Nimor kept his smile, though it was difficult.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I would speak of it privately. Your tent?”
Nimor knew that Vhok’s command tent was a magical structure that formed and collapsed into a fist-sized ball of cloth upon command, so it was always a convenient bit of private space.
Vhok studied Nimor’s face for a moment before he said, “Very well.” To Rorgak, Vhok said, “Have the legion take a meal. I will not be long.”
Vhok added something else in a low tone, speaking to his lieutenant in Infernal. Though Nimor could not understand the language, he understood the meaning. Vhok was instructing Rorgak to stand ready in case Nimor attacked Vhok in the tent.
Nimor merely stared at Rorgak as the big, red-scaled lieutenant nodded to Vhok then headed back into the ranks, barking out orders. The tanarukk column broke ranks for a meal, but many bloodshot gazes stayed on Nimor.
Vhok pulled the magical wad of cloth from his pack, picked as level a spot as he could find on the tunnel floor, and cast it to the ground, uttering a command word in a harsh, forgotten language.
The cloth unfolded itself time and again until finally it sprung up into the pennoned, red-and-gold command tent that Nimor knew well. Vhok gestured him in, his breastplate shining in the torchlight. He kept one hand on his blade.
Nimor furled his wings and entered. Within, he found the tent fully furnished with a fine wooden table, a luxurious divan, and a plush couch. The decanter of what Nimor assumed to be brandy—one of Vhok’s indulgences—sat on the table with two empty glasses beside it.
“Furnished and stocked,” Nimor said, turning a circle. “An excellent magic item, Kaanyr. You need only dancing girls. Speaking of which, where is your little winged sweetmeat?”
Vhok snorted derisively, but Nimor heard the affectation in it.
“Gone,” Vhok said. “At least for now.”
“Ah, fickle women,” Nimor said, and decided not to press further. “May I sit?” he asked.
Vhok indicated the couch. Nimor crossed the tent and collapsed onto it.
“We did not have to lose this fight, Kaanyr,” he said.
“Only one of us actually fought this fight,” Vhok answered. “The other fled when things got difficult.”
Nimor struggled to retain his smile.
From outside the tent, near the flap, Nimor’s keen hearing betrayed the quiet scrape of a boot on stone—Rorgak, no doubt.
Only when he had full control of his tone of voice did Nimor say, “Lolth’s return alone saved Menzoberranzan. That and an unfortunate choice in allies.”
Vhok looked at him sharply.
“Not you,” Nimor said. “The duergar.”
Vhok’s expression relaxed and he nodded. “True, that,” he said.
To Nimor’s surprise, the cambion poured two small chalices of the liquor from the decanter and offered one to Nimor.
Nimor took it, but he did not drink. Vhok remained standing.
“Our little princeling is dead,” Nimor said, swirling the brandy in his goblet.
Vhok raised an eyebrow. “You?”
Nimor nodded. When Vhok sipped from his brandy, Nimor did the same. The liquor had traveled well.
“Serves the little fool right,” the cambion said. “Duergar are useless creatures.”
“We are in agreement on that at least, Kaanyr,” Nimor said. “The gray dwarves are a race of imbeciles.” After a pause, he added, “I tracked you down to thank you for warning me of Lolth’s return during my battle with the Archmage.”
Vhok smiled around his goblet and said, “We were allies.”
“Indeed. And as far as I’m concerned, we still are.”
When Vhok did not reply, Nimor filled the silence by raising his glass in a toast and saying, “To grand undertakings.”
Vhok raised his own glass half-heartedly and took a sip, eyeing Nimor over the rim. Afterward, he asked, “Is there something else, drowling? Or did you return only to express your gratitude and drink my brandy?”
Nimor decided to take Vhok’s obnoxiousness as a jest and laughed it off.
He leaned forward to refill his chalice. As he poured, he said, “There will be other battles, Kaanyr. Perhaps not tomorrow or the next day, but someday. As I said, I still regard you as an ally. We were effective together and would have triumphed but for some unanticipated contingencies.”
“ ‘Unanticipated contingencies’?” Vhok said with a snort. “That’s what you call Lolth’s return?”
Nimor shrugged, sat back, and took another gulp of brandy. “Call it what you will,” he answered. “Do you deny that we made an effective team?”
Vhok considered it while he drank.
“I don’t deny it,” said the cambion, “but at this moment, I wish we’d never met and that I’d never seen that cursed drow hive.”
Nimor nodded as though in understanding.
“But feelings change with time and distance,” Vhok said. “And I am always open to a future opportunity. Provided it involves no duergar.”
He laughed and Nimor joined him.
That was the answer Nimor had wanted to hear. Vhok could be a valuable ally in his quest to regain his status as Anointed Blade.
“I know how to find you,” Nimor said.
Vhok set down his chalice and stared at Nimor, his smile hard.
“A threat?” Vhok asked.
Again the shuffle from outside the tent.
“An observation,” Nimor replied. “We’ll see each other again, Vhok. I have no doubt of it.”
With that, Nimor activated his ring, slipped back into the Shadow Fringe, and left Menzoberranzan and its environs far behind.
Prath and Nauzhror watched, their eyes fixed on the image in the scrying crystal as Gromph began his attack on the wards of House Agrach Dyrr.
Gromph whispered the incantations to a few preparatory spells meant to augment his magical sight, then began.
He found it surprisingly easy to breach the outer network of wards that surrounded the fortress. Without disrupting the grid, without breaking any of the interconnected lines of power, he gently bent a few aside, created a conceptual opening in the layers of the net, and slipped his scrying eye through.
“Well done, Archmage,” said Nauzhror, exhaling loudly. Prath only smiled.
A second layer of interconnected wards awaited him—stiffer magic that he couldn’t bend without triggering alarms. After a few moments of study, he opted for a different approach. But he would need to work quickly.
Conscious that he was sweating, Gromph cast two spells in such rapid succession that they might as well have been a single incantation. First, he sealed off a tiny section of the network. With his next breath, he rapidly dispelled the sealed section, opening a hole in the net, and sent the scrying eye through. He turned his perspective and held his breath as he released his first spell.
He watched in alarm as the entire network quivered, the interconnected flow of magic momentarily disrupted by the tiny hole he had fashioned.
He allowed himself to exhale slowly as the magic redirected itself around the hole and flowed anew. It had self-corrected. Gromph had succeeded. He was in.
“Daring,” Nauzhror breathed.
Gromph moved the scrying eye to ground level, within the walls of House Agrach Dyrr. He took a moment to gather himself.
He knew that he would face only pockets of wards of varying power, sub-networks guarding this or that room or building. Most of them were unconnected to the larger grid of defenses.
He held onto the image while he took one hand f
rom the crystal and drained the rest of his mushroom wine. Prath looked around the office, found the bottle on a nearby table. He retrieved it, returned, and refilled the chalice.
Gromph moved through and around each of the wards in turn. He could have dispelled them easily enough, but eventually that would have been discovered. For those he could not work through, he dispelled them, but after examining the building or room to his satisfaction, he replaced the ward with a similar one of his own casting.
“No tracks,” Prath said.
“No tracks,” Gromph agreed. Not yet, anyway.
Presumably, the magic shielding the lichdrow’s phylactery was masked from his scrying eye. He would “see” it only when he bumped up against it. Accordingly, he could locate the phylactery only through the process of elimination—eventually, he would attempt to view an area that appeared open to scrying but which he would not, in fact, be able to scry. That would be where the phylactery was located.
Of course it was also possible that the phylactery was not in the stalagmite fortress at all. If so, Gromph would never locate it before the lichdrow reincorporated. The thought gave him pause. He put it out of his mind.
Methodically, he moved his scrying eye through each of the buildings of House Agrach Dyrr, one room at a time.
Nauzhror crowded his head closer over the image until a look from Gromph backed him off.
“Apologies, Archmage,” Nauzhror muttered.
Gromph moved the image through dining halls, shrines, training rooms, bedrooms, laboratories, slave quarters, kitchens, amphitheatres, always seeking an invisible wall that would block his scrying eye. Troops, mages, and priestesses hurried through the halls. He could not hear them, though their expressions showed their agitation. He did not let his scrying eye linger long on any one person, lest they sense the divination.
Sweat from his forehead dripped onto the scrying crystal, blurring the image. Prath wiped it away with the sleeve of his piwafwi.
Gromph moved the image down another hallway, past another group of—
“Larikal,” he said, recognizing the short-haired, uncomely Third Daughter of House Agrach Dyrr. She led a group of three male mages that Gromph recognized as graduates of Sorcere. He let the image linger on the group for a time. His spell showed that each of them bore a variety of magical items: wands, rings, cloak pins, brooches, a staff in Larikal’s hand.
“Geremis, Viis, and Araag,” Nauzhror said, naming the wizards. “Sub par students, the lot of them.”
Gromph nodded and kept the scrying eye with them, keeping a mental count in his head; he moved the image off of each person before he reached twenty.
Larikal barked orders, but Gromph could not read their lips. The mages moved from room to room, hallway to hallway, casting spells and concentrating for a time. Gromph kept the scrying eye just above and behind them, each in turn. Though he could not hear the words uttered by the mages, he studied their gestures.
“What are they doing?” Prath asked.
“Casting divinations,” Gromph said, a fraction of a heartbeat before Nauzhror said the same thing.
“Powerful divinations,” Nauzhror added, watching as Geremis finished his gesticulating and put a hand to his brow in concentration.
Realization struck Gromph. “They are looking for the phylactery,” he said. “They must be.”
All of them understood the implication: Yasraena did not have the phylactery in her possession, and she too thought it was hidden somewhere in the House.
A good sign,” Nauzhror said.
Gromph nodded. He needed to hurry.
Seeing nothing else of import, he moved the scrying eye away from Larikal and her pet wizards and continued to move through the Agrach Dyrr complex. The process was time-consuming but he endured. He took the time to study each room with care, to cast additional divinations designed to root out the lichdrow’s masking spells. Again and again he found nothing, nothing but a desperate drow House under siege and fighting for its life.
“Could the phylactery not be in the fortress?” Nauzhror finally asked, after hours of fruitless searching.
Gromph didn’t even bother to look up. “Silence,” he commanded.
It had to be there. The lichdrow would not have allowed the phylactery to be far from him. The risk was too great.
Gromph continued the search. He scoured each building thoroughly. In an isolated portion of the complex, he found the lichdrow’s alchemical laboratory, library, and quarters. Shimmering gem golems carved in the shape of drow wizards stood rigid guard at every door.
“His laboratory,” Prath said, eyeing the uncountable number of beakers, braziers, chemicals, and components. The room was disordered, as though someone had searched it roughly.
Thinking that the lichdrow’s laboratory or quarters were a likely hiding place for the phylactery, Gromph moved carefully through the lichdrow’s wards and pored over the rooms. His frustration mounted when he found nothing. He went over it again, certain that somewhere was the telltale spoor of a masking spell. Again he found nothing.
He was exhausting his spells, exhausting his body. Between his spell duel with the lichdrow and his scrying of the fortress, he had spent fully half of his repertory. If he did not find the phylactery soon, he would have to rest, restudy his spellbooks, re-memorize the incantations that slipped from his fatigued mind one by one as he cast them. By then, Yasraena might have located the phylactery herself.
He sighed, mopped his forehead, and moved on. He had only the temple to Lolth and a few other structures remaining.
The temple first.
With minimal effort, he slipped past the elaborate wards that protected the temple of Lolth. No doubt Yasraena herself had cast them. Gromph thought her spellcraft paltry. Her wards were no match for him.
The interior of the temple appeared much the same as the temples to Lolth maintained by other great Houses. A sacrificial altar, limned in violet faerie fire and dotted with candles, sat in the apse at one end of the large, oval nave. Behind the altar towered the enormous sculpture of a spider, carved in lifelike detail from smooth basalt or perhaps jet.
Gromph knew it to be a guardian golem that would animate should anyone enter the temple without authorization.
High-backed, ornate stone benches lined the nave, facing the apse. Transparent gossamer curtains, made to look like spiderwebs, hung across the temple’s faerie fire limned windows. Spider motifs appeared on everything, from the black altar cloth to the carved door jambs to the armrests of the benches. Spiderwebs hung in every corner, the silvery threads and their small black creators regarded as blessings from Lolth.
A depiction of the Spider Queen in her hybrid form—a beautiful drow female head and torso jutting from the bloated body of a giant black widow—decorated the underside of the temple’s domed ceiling. Gromph wondered in passing whether Lolth appeared the same since her return, whether Lolth was the same.
Almost the whole of the temple glowed in Gromph’s sight, alight with enhancements and protections cast by Lolth’s priestesses. Otherwise, the nave was empty.
Gromph blew out a frustrated sigh and prepared to move on, but something rankled him. He kept the scrying eye on the temple, looking, thinking.
“What is it, Archmage?” asked Prath, excitement in his voice. “Have you found it?”
“Silence,” Nauzhror admonished the apprentice, though the Master’s voice too betrayed a certain eagerness.
Gromph shook his head. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but . . .
The spider golem!
His scrying eye did not show it as magical, yet it should have detected as such—strongly—unless the Agrach Dyrr priestesses had replaced the former golem with a normal statue. He deemed that unlikely.
An excited charge ran through him. He caused the scrying eye to draw nearer to the golem until its image filled the viewing crystal. He pored over it, inch by inch. Was it standing atop a secret panel in the floor? He cast another series of divinat
ions, attempting to get even an inkling of whether or not the golem’s magic was being masked.
At first he met with no success, but he persisted.
Finally, and for only an instant, he caught a flash of a faint red glow, like light squeezed from under a closed door. In that single instant, the golem flared in his sight, as befitted the latent magic that would animate it, but a still brighter glow flared from within the golem.
Nauzhror smiled, Prath gasped, and Gromph could not contain a chuckle.
“The golem,” Nauzhror breathed.
The Master of Sorcere sounded as exhausted as Gromph, though he had done nothing other than observe.
“The golem is masked,” Gromph said, nodding. He could not believe the lichdrow’s temerity.
“The golem is the phylactery?” Prath asked.
Gromph studied the construct for a while longer, confirming his suspicion with a series of spells.
When he finished, he said, “No, but the phylactery is embedded within it.”
Despite the evidence they had seen in the crystal, Prath and Nauzhror’s faces showed disbelief.
“Within the temple’s guardian golem?” Prath said. “It is heresy.”
“It is ingenious,” Nauzhror countered.
Gromph agreed. The lichdrow, a male, had not only hidden his phylactery within House Dyrr’s temple of Lolth, he had hidden it within the body of the temple’s most powerful guardian. Gromph had located it only because he had known the spider sculpture to be a golem that should have glowed in his magic-detecting sight. That it had not had caused him to look more closely, and he still had almost missed it.
With a slight exertion of will, Gromph let the image in the scrying crystal fade. It moved to gray, then to black.
The archmage leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head. His entire body ached, his temples pounded, and sweat soaked him. Unfortunately, he could not take time to recover. Getting through the anti-scrying wards and finding the phylactery had been the easier of his two tasks. Next he had to get himself physically into House Agrach Dyrr, into Lolth’s temple, and destroy first the golem, then the phylactery.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 82
