Condemnation (5 page)

No, Gromph decided. I am no revolutionary anxious to sweep away the old order—not yet, anyway.

Besides, the most likely cause of all the trouble was some insidious new snare of Lolth’s devising. Gromph wouldn’t put it past the Spider Queen to fall completely and inexplicably silent, just to see who might slink out of the shadows in order to take advantage of her priestesses’ temporary “weakness.” That meant that sooner or later, Lolth would tire of her game and restore her favor to her clerics. When that happened, woe to anyone foolish enough to have shown the shallowness of his allegiance to the established order. No, the wisest thing to do was to pass along to Triel what he’d learned, and to make sure Matron Baenre didn’t hoard the knowledge to herself. Pharaun’s words indicated in a few quick brushstrokes a very grave danger to Menzoberranzan, and Gromph refused to be remembered as the archmage who allowed his city to be razed.

With a sigh, he stood and dropped silently back down the shaft. He rather hoped Triel was in the middle of something awkward, so that he could savor the petty pleasure of interrupting her with news that could not wait.

“The question is not where we should go next,” observed Pharaun with a wry grimace. “The question is how we shall escape Hlaungadath alive.” The Master of Sorcere was exhausted. Dust plastered the blood and sweat on his face, and he was so tired he could do no more than collapse into the shadow of a long, crumbling wall. Having long since exhausted any spells useful in battle, he wielded a wand of thin black iron from which he called forth bolts of lightning. Pharaun glanced up at the sky as if to gauge how much more daylight remained, and he quickly winced away. “Will the cursed sun never set?”

“Get up, wizard,” said Quenthel. “If we rest, we die.”

She, too, trembled with exhaustion, but she stayed on her feet. The long snake-headed whips she carried still coiled and hissed dangerously, covered with gore, but blood trickled from a nasty cut above her left eye, and two furrows of broken and twisted links in her mail shirt showed just how close she’d come to dying under the claws of some hulking monstrosity of gray skin and spiderlike eyes.

“You’re more vulnerable to the lamias’ powers of suggestion and illusion while you’re fatigued,” Halisstra said. “Better to die fighting than to fall under the dominion of such a creature.”

She was in much the same condition as the others. Since she and Danifae had survived their initial encounter with the monsters, it had been an hours-long running battle through the streets and empty buildings of the ruins. First, a large pride of lamias had tried to overwhelm the party with their beguiling powers, but drow on guard for such magical tricks were no easy prey. Halisstra and the others steeled themselves for a fight against the lion-bodied monsters, but the lamias—deceitful and cowardly things that they were—withdrew from the battle and instead hurled wave after wave of beguiled thralls at the drow party. Lamias might have lacked for physical courage, but the manticores, asabis, gargoyles, and other assorted creatures under their control certainly did not.

“Neither option appeals to me,” Quenthel growled. She turned slowly, studying the walls and structures around them, seeking escape. “There. I can see the open desert just beyond those buildings. Maybe they’ll abandon the chase if we leave the city.”

“Unwise, Mistress,” said Valas. He crouched by an archway leading into their temporary refuge, watching for the next assault. “Once we leave the shelter of the walls, they’ll know exactly where we are. We’d be visible for miles out in the open, even with our piwafwis—they weren’t made to hide us in bright daylight on an open plain. Concealment is our best defense.”

Ryld nodded wearily. He stood by another doorway, his greatsword resting on his shoulder.

“They would surround us and drag us down out there,” the Master of Melee-Magthere said. “Best to try to keep moving within the ruins, and hope the lamias—ah, damn. We’ve got more company.”

Rubble shifted somewhere in the maze of crumbling walls beyond their refuge as something large padded closer.

“Watch out for illusions,” Halisstra said.

She balanced her mace in her hand and tugged at her shield, making sure it was strapped securely to her arm. Behind her, Danifae crouched, a long dagger in her hand. Halisstra wasn’t happy about arming her battle captive, but at the moment they needed all the help they could get, and it was plainly in Danifae’s best interests to make sure they didn’t all fall prey to the denizens of Hlaungadath.

The lamias tried something new. Against the gap in the wall that Jeggred guarded, the monsters hurled a wave of lizardlike asabis, savage creatures that hissed in anger as they threw themselves against the draegloth with scimitars and falchions clutched in their scaly hands. Three more challenged Valas while a pair of gargoyles streaked over the walls and dropped into the midst of the ruined building behind Ryld, their great black wings raising huge clouds of dust with every beat. The weapons master whirled to face the threat behind him, cursing.

Jeggred howled in rage and leaped to meet the rush of the asabis, batting aside flashing blades and snapping jaws while he tore at the lizard warriors with his great talons. The white-haired demon used his four arms to wreak terrible carnage, but even Jeggred was tiring. Blows he would have eluded with his freakish speed landed awkwardly. He blocked one slashing scimitar badly with his left outer arm, and suffered a long bloody cut halfway from elbow to wrist. Another blade scored his torso, starting a stream of red across his white-pelted chest. The draegloth roared in rage and redoubled his efforts.

Ryld slashed at the gargoyles while Halisstra and Quenthel ran to his side. Quenthel lashed at one with her whip. The snake heads wound around the creature’s taloned legs and sank fangs into stony flesh, but the gargoyle beat furiously for height and dragged the priestess off her feet and across the dusty structure. Pharaun raised his wand to blast the monsters with deadly lightning, but spun in a half-circle and fell, a crossbow bolt transfixing his right forearm. The wand flew from his hands.

“The rooftops!” the wizard called.

Halisstra backed away from the gargoyles and squinted at the bright sky, searching for more attackers. Tawny blurs crouched atop a high wall perhaps forty or fifty yards distant, a handful of lamias who carried heavy crossbows and watched carefully for opportunities to shoot into the fray, their beautiful faces twisted into evil grins. Even as she watched, one took at shot at Ryld. The bolt whistled past the weapons master’s head, smashing a divot from the soft stone wall nearby. Ryld flinched away.

“Someone take care of the snipers!” he snapped, while slashing at the gargoyles.

A second later, two more bolts flew at Ryld. One bounced from his breastplate, but the other caught him on the right side while his arms were raised to wield Splitter. The bolt lodged in the arm-opening of his armor. Ryld staggered back two steps and collapsed in the dust.

Halisstra reached down and snatched up Pharaun’s wand.

“Aid Quenthel,” she told Danifae.

She leveled the wizard’s weapon at the lamias on the high wall. She knew something about using such devices—a talent she wouldn’t normally have wished to reveal, but the fight was desperate. She spoke an arcane word, and a bolt of purple lightning shot out at the first lamia, blasting the creature from the wall in a spray of shattered stone. Thunder reverberated in the dusty ruin. She aimed at the next lamia, but the monsters weren’t stupid. They abandoned their lofty perches at once, leaping back behind the wall to avoid more lightning.

From the shadow of the back wall, Pharaun returned to the battle, armed with another wand. This one produced a blazing bolt of fire, which he directed against the gargoyles overhead. With shrieks of pain, the monsters flapped off, though the one poisoned by Quenthel’s whips didn’t get far before its wings folded. It plummeted down among the rooftops some distance away.

Valas dispatched the last of his attackers with a double-handed slash that nearly cut the creature in two, and Jeggred stood amid a virtual heap of asabi bodies, his flanks heaving. The wizard glanced around once, and noticed Ryld on the ground.

“Damn,” he muttered.

He knelt by the weapons master and turned him over. Ryld was dying. Blood streamed from the bolt in his chest, and he fought for each breath, bloody spittle streaking his gray lips. The wizard scowled, then looked up at Quenthel.

“Do something,” he said. “We need him.”

Quenthel folded her arms with a cold frown and said, “Unfortunately, Lolth does not choose to grant me spells of healing at the moment, and I have already expended almost all of the healing magic I brought on our journey. There is little I can do for him.”

Halisstra narrowed her eyes, thinking. Again, she didn’t like the thought of what she was about to do, but there was a benefit to revealing her secret. If she proved herself useful, the Menzoberranyr would be hesitant to discard her.

Besides, she thought, they likely already know.

“Move aside,” she said quietly. “I can help him.”

Quenthel and Pharaun looked up suspiciously.

“How?” Quenthel demanded. “Do you mean to say that Lolth has not withdrawn her favor from you?”

“No,” Halisstra replied. She knelt by Ryld and examined him. She would have to move quickly. If he died, he would be beyond her assistance. “Lolth has denied me spells, just as she has Quenthel, and presumably every other priestess of our race. I have some ability to heal by a different means, though.”

With that, she began to sing. Her song was a strange keening threnody, something dark and eerie that tugged at the drow admiration for beauty, ambition, and black deeds skillfully done. Halisstra molded the shape of her voice and the ancient words of the song, summoning the magic of her lament as she set her hand on the quarrel and drew it from the wound.

Ryld started, his eyes wide and staring, and blood spurted over Halisstra’s hands—but the wound closed into a puckered scar, and the weapons master coughed himself awake.

“What happened?” he groaned.

“What happened, indeed?” Quenthel replied. She eyed Halisstra suspiciously. “Was that what I thought it was?”

Halisstra nodded and stood, wiping blood from her hands.

“It is a tradition in my House that those females who are suited for it may study the arts of the bae’qeshel, the dark minstrels. As you can see, there is power in song, something that few of our kind care to study. I have been trained in the minstrel’s lore.”

Ryld sat up, looking down at his breastplate and the bloody quarrel lying in the dust. He looked up at Halisstra.

“You healed me?” he asked.

Halisstra offered her hand and pulled him to his feet.

“As your friend Pharaun observed, we need you too much to allow you to inconvenience us with your death.”

Ryld met her eyes, obviously considering some reply. Gratitude was not an emotion many drow bothered to act upon. The weapons master perhaps wondered what Halisstra might choose to do with his. She spared him any more serious reflections by turning her attention to Pharaun, and handing the iron wand back to him.

“Here,” she said. “You dropped this.”

Pharaun inclined his head and replied, “I admit I was surprised to see you wield it, but I heard you sing in Ched Nasad. Shame on me for not adding two and two.”

“Let me see your arm,” Halisstra said.

She sang the song of healing again, and repaired Pharaun’s injury.

She would have examined the others and aided them if she could, but Quenthel interrupted her.

“No one else is dying,” the high priestess said. “We must move now or our enemies will surely descend on us again. Valas, you lead the way. Head toward the outer walls so that we may make for the open desert if we decide to flee.”

“Very well, Mistress Baenre,” the scout acquiesced. “It will be as you say.”

THREE

Kaanyr Vhok, the half-demon prince known as the Sceptered One, stood on a high balcony over the old dwarven foundry and watched his armorers at work. The great smelter had once been the heart of the fallen realm of Ammarindar. The cavern was immense, and its roof rested upon dozens of towering pillars carved into the shapes of dragons, glowing red with angry firelight and the lurid radiance of molten metal. The clanging of hammers and roar of kilns at work filled the air. Dozens of hulking tanarukks, bestial fiends bred from orcs and demons, toiled on the foundry floor. They might have lacked the skill and enchantments of the dwarves who once worked there, but Kaanyr Vhok’s soldiers possessed a cunning instinct for the making of deadly weapons infused with dark lore.

Kaanyr himself fit the infernal scene well. Tall and powerful, he had the stature of a strong-thewed human warrior and the strength of a stone giant. His skin was red and hot to the touch, and his flesh was hard enough to turn a blade. He was strikingly handsome, though his eyes danced with malice and his teeth were as black as coal. He wore a golden breastplate and carried a pair of wicked short swords made from some demonic black iron in rune-chased scabbards at his belt. He grinned fiercely with delight as he looked out over the gathering storm of his army.

“I now lead nearly two thousand tanarukk warriors,” he said over his shoulder, “and I have just as many orcs, ogres, trolls, and giants at my command. I think the time has come to try my strength, my love.”

Aliisza allowed herself a smile and moved closer, pressing herself to the demon prince’s side. Like Kaanyr Vhok, she too possessed demonic blood. In her case, she was an alu-fiend, the spawn of a succubus and some mortal sorcerer. Wings as smooth as black leather sprouted from her shoulder blades, but other than that she was dusky and seductive, voluptuous and inviting, a half-demoness whose allure few mortal men could resist. She was also clever, capricious, and very skilled in magic, and therefore well-suited to be the consort of a demonspawned warlord such as Kaanyr.

“Menzoberranzan?” she purred, tracing the filigree of his armor with one fingertip.