Condemnation (2 page)

Quenthel fell silent, perhaps chagrined by her mistake. Halisstra didn’t hold it against her—she had made the same mistake herself.

“That raises an excellent question,” said Pharaun. “Presumably, we do not wish to stay here for very long. So, then, what shall we do?”

He looked deliberately at Quenthel Baenre, challenging her with his question.

Quenthel didn’t rise to the bait. She gazed off at the silver glow in the east, as if she hadn’t heard the question. Moon shadows faint as ghosts began to grow from weathered walls and crumbling columns, so dim that only the eyes of drow accustomed to the gloom of the Underdark could perceive them. Quenthel reached down to the sand beside her and let a handful run between her fingers, watching the way the wind swept away the silver stream. For the first time, it occurred to Halisstra that Quenthel and the other Menzoberranyr might feel something of the same weariness, the same desolation, that lay over her own heart, not because they felt her loss, but because they understood that they had witnessed a loss, a great and terrible one.

The silence stretched out for a long time, until Pharaun shifted and opened his mouth as if to speak again. Quenthel spoke before he could, her voice cold and scornful.

“What shall we do, Pharaun? We shall do whatever I decide we should do. We are exhausted and wounded, and I have no magic to restore our strength and heal our wounds.” She grimaced, and let the rest of the sand slip through her fingers. “For now, rest. I will determine our course of action tomorrow.”

Hundreds of miles from the desert ruins, another dark elf stood in another ruined city.

This was a drow city, a jutting bulwark of black stone that thrust out from the wall of a vast, lightless chasm. In arrangement it had once been something like a mighty fortress built upon a great rocky hilltop, only turned on its side to glower out over an empty space where foul winds from the unplumbed abyss below howled up into unseen caverns above. Though its turrets and spires leaned boldly out over a horrifying precipice, the place did not seem frail or precarious in any sense. Its massive pier of rock was one of the bones of the world, a thick spar rooted so securely in the chasm wall that nothing short of the unmaking of Toril would tear it loose.

Those few scholars who remembered the place knew it as Chaulssin, the City of Wyrmshadows, and even most of them forgot why the city was called that. In the lightless fortress on the edge of an abyss, the shadows themselves lived. Inky pools of midnight blacker than a drow’s heart curled and flowed from tower to tower. Whispering darkness slithered like a gigantic, hungering dragon in and about the needle-like spires and the open-sided galleries of the dead city. From time to time the living shadows swallowed portions of the city for centuries, drawing a palace or a temple deep into a cold place beyond the circles of the world.

Nimor Imphraezl climbed deliberately through Chaulssin’s deserted galleries, seemingly oblivious to the living black curtains that danced and writhed in the city’s dark places. The maddening howl of the endless hurricane rising up past the city walls ripped at his cloak and sent his long silver hair streaming from his head, but he paid it no mind. This was his place, his refuge, and its perils and madness simply familiar features undeserving of his attention. Nimor wore the shape of a slim, almost boyish dark elf, which was to say that he was short of stature and slender as a reed. The top of his head would barely reach the nose of a typical female, and any female with a little height to her would tower over him head and shoulders.

Despite his graceful build, Nimor virtually radiated power. His small frame seemed to burst with a precise strength and lethal quickness far out of proportion to his body. His face was narrow but handsome, almost beautiful, and he carried himself with the supreme arrogance of a noble-born drow who feared nothing in his path. It was a part he played well, being a drow of a high House, a prince of his ruined city. If he was something else, something more, well … those few dark elves who lived there with him were much the same.

Nimor reached the end of the gallery and turned inward, climbing up a grand stairway cut through the heart of the monolithic spur to which Chaulssin clung. The cacophony of the winds outside faded quickly to a distant but deep whispering, sibilant and penetrating. There was no place one could go within Chaulssin to escape the sound. He set his hand on the hilt of his rapier and followed the spiraling black steps up into a great dark chamber, a vaulted cathedral of shadows in the heart of the city. Flickering torches of everburning fire in bronze sconces cast faint, ruddy pools of light along the ribbed walls, streaks of red that faded into the blackness of the vault overhead. Up there the shadows were close indeed, a roiling well of blackness that even Nimor’s eyes could not penetrate.

“Nimor. You are late.”

Standing in a circle in the center of the room, the seven Patron Fathers of the Jaezred Chaulssin turned as one to watch Nimor approach. On the far side of the circle stood Patron Grandfather Mauzzkyl, a hale old dark elf with broad shoulders and a deep chest, his hair thinning to a sharp widow’s peak.

“The Patron Fathers do not wait on the pleasure of the Anointed Blade of the Jaezred Chaulssin,” Mauzzkyl said.

“Revered Grandfather, my delay was unavoidable,” Nimor replied.

He joined the circle in the place that had been left for him, offering no obeisance and expecting none from the others. As the Anointed Blade he answered only to the Patron Grandfather, and in fact stood higher among the Jaezred Chaulssin than any of the Patron Fathers except Mauzzkyl.

“I am lately come from Menzoberranzan,” he added, “and tarried as long as I could to observe events before departing.”

“How stand matters there?” asked Patron Father Tomphael. He was slender and rakish, much like Nimor in appearance, but he preferred the robes of a wizard to the mail of a fighter, and he possessed a streak of caution that sometimes verged on cowardice. “How does our revolt fare?”

“Not as well as I might like, but about as well as I expected,” admitted Nimor. Tomphael’s divinations had no doubt revealed that much. Did the Patron Father hope to catch the Anointed Blade concealing a failure? Nimor almost smiled at the simplicity of it. “The slaves were crushed easily enough. Gromph Baenre took an interest in things, and his agents seem to have destroyed or driven off our illithilich friend. On the positive side, we did expose something of the spider-kissers’ weakness to the common Menzoberranyr, which is promising, and the priestesses obliged us by using a significant amount of their hoarded magic to destroy their own rebellious slaves. The city is weakened thereby.”

“You might have taken a more direct hand in the affair,” said Patron Xorthaul, who wore the black mail of a priest. “If you had slain the archmage’s lackeys—”

“The revolt we sponsored still would have been crushed, and I would have put them on their guard too soon,” Nimor interrupted. “Remember, Patron Xorthaul, this was never intended to be anything other than a simple feint, easily deflected, by which we might assay the real strength of the matron mothers of Menzoberranzan. The next blow will be the one that beats down their guard and slices deep into flesh.” He decided to turn the topic and set someone else on the defensive. “As I am the last to arrive, I have no news of how affairs proceed in the other cities. What of Eryndlyn? Or Ched Nasad?”

Cold smiles twisted cruel faces. Nimor blinked. It wasn’t often that the patron fathers encountered an event in which they could collectively take pleasure. Grandfather Mauzzkyl himself broke the news.

“Eryndlyn proceeds much as we expected—Patron Father Tomphael brought tidings not dissimilar to your own—but Ched Nasad… . From Ched Nasad, Patron Father Zammzt returns in triumph.”

“Really?” drawled Nimor, impressed despite himself.

He restrained a hot flash of jealousy and turned to face Zammzt, a dark elf of such unremarkable appearance he might have been a lowly armorer or swordsmith, a common artisan barely a step above a slave. Zammzt merely folded his arms across his chest and inclined his head in recognition of Grandfather Mauzzkyl’s remark.

“What happened?” asked Nimor. “Ched Nasad should not have fallen so easily.”

“As it happened, Anointed Blade, the stonefire bombs your duergar allies provided us had a devastating effect on the calcified webs upon which Ched Nasad was built,” Zammzt said, doubtless feigning his humility. “Just as flame consumes a cobweb, the stonefire devoured the very structure of the city. With their castles and their palaces plummeting to the bottom of the cavern like burning sparks of paper, the Ched Nasadans could organize no real defense at all. No strong point of any significance survived the fires, and few of the House armies escaped from the conflagrations to contest the cavern.”

“What is left of the city?”

“Very little, I’m afraid. A few isolated districts and outlying structures relegated to side caverns survived the fire. Of the city’s people, I would guess that half perished in the fall and roughly one-third fled into the outer tunnels, where they will doubtless come to a variety of bad ends. Most of the survivors belong to those minor Houses allied with us, or minor Houses who were quick to appreciate the new order of things in the city.”

Nimor stroked his chin and said, “So, from a city of twenty thousand, only three thousand remain?”

“A little less, after the slaves fled the city,” Zammzt replied, allowing himself a fierce grin. “Of the spider-kissing females, nothing remains.”

“Likely some number of Lolth priestesses escaped with those who fled into the Underdark,” Nimor mused. “They won’t all die in the tunnels. Still, that is great news, Patron Father. We have freed our first city from Lolth’s dominion. Others are sure to follow.”

Patron Father Xorthaul, the mail-clad priest, snorted in dissent.

“What’s the point of removing the Lolth-worshipers from a city if you must level the city to do it?” he asked. “We may rule Ched Nasad now, but all we rule is a smoking chasm and a few dispossessed wretches.”

Mauzzkyl shifted his weight and said sharply, “That does not matter, Xorthaul. We have spoken before of the costs of our efforts. Decades, even centuries of misery are nothing if we achieve our ends. Our master is patient.” The revered grandfather offered a hard, cruel grin. “We have in two short months accomplished something our fathers among the Jaezred Chaulssin have worked toward for centuries. I would gladly repeat a dozen Ched Nasads all across the Underdark if it succeeded in breaking the Spider Queen’s stranglehold over our race. Ched Nasad may be in ruins, but when the city rises again it will rise in our image, its society molded by our beliefs and guided by our secret hand. We are not mere assassins or anarchists, Xorthaul, we are the cold and deliberate hand that culls the weak, the blade that sculpts history.”

The collected dark elves nodded assent. Mauzzkyl turned to face Nimor.

“Nimor, my Anointed Blade, Menzoberranzan cries out for the cleansing fire that has purged Ched Nasad. Do not fail in this.”

“Revered Grandfather, I assure you that I will not,” Nimor said. “I have already prepared my next move. I have reached an understanding with one of the great Houses. They will support us, but they require a demonstration of our resolve and competence. I am reasonably confident that I can oblige them. Within days, one House of Menzoberranzan will be lacking a matron mother and another will be ensnared in our net.”

Mauzzkyl smiled in cold approval and said, “I wish you good hunting, then, Anointed Blade.”

Nimor bowed once, and turned to leave the circle. Behind him, he could hear the patron fathers dispersing, each to return to his own hidden House in cities scattered over thousands of miles through the Underdark. Secret cabals of the Jaezred Chaulssin existed in at least one minor House of most drow cities. Each patron father ruled absolutely over a conspiracy of faith and gender that spanned generations, centuries, and the formidable hatred of one drow for another. The glaring exception was Menzoberranzan. There, the old Matron Baenre who had ruled absolutely for so long had never allowed the assassin House to gain a foothold. While eight patron fathers returned to cities where there were dozens of loyal killers and priests of Lolth-hating gods at their command, Nimor Imphraezl went alone to Menzoberranzan to resume the destruction of a city.

Sunrise was splendid and terrible. For an hour or more before dawn it had been growing lighter, as the stars paled in the rose-streaked sky and the frigid blast of desert wind slackened toward a fitful calm. Halisstra waited for it, watching from the top of a rambling, half-buried wall. Long before the sun broke over the horizon she was astounded by how far she could see, picking out dark jagged mountains that might have been ten miles or a hundred miles away. When the sun finally rose, it was like a fountain of liquid gold exploding across the barren landscape, in the space of a moment blinding Halisstra completely. She gasped and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, which ached from that single brief glimpse as if someone had shoved white daggers into her head.

“That was unwise, my lady,” murmured Danifae from close by. “Our eyes were not meant to look on such a sight. You might do yourself an injury … and without Lolth’s favor, it may prove difficult to heal such a thing.”

“I wished to see a dawn,” Halisstra said.

She turned away from the light of day and shaded her eyes, then dropped lightly to the sand in the shade of the great wall. In shadow she could tolerate the brilliance of the sun, but what would it be like in the middle of the day? Would they be able to see at all, or would they all be blinded completely?

“Once,” she said, “our ancestors gazed on the daylit world without fear of the sun. They walked unafraid beneath the sky, beneath the fires of day, and the darkness was what they feared. Can you imagine such a thing?”

Danifae offered a demure smile that did not reach her eyes. Halisstra knew the look well. It was an expression the maid used to indulge her mistress, agreeing to a remark to which she had no response. Danifae indicated the ruined palace and its courts with a tilt of her head.