Daughter of the Drow (26 page)

Within the hour, Shakti and her hired wizard slipped through a back door in the Hunzrin compound. She led the mage to the barracks that housed the clan’s soldiers. She selected a soldier—a dispensable male, of course—and explained the task before him.

“You will enter the home of Liriel Baenre through the door used by her collection of pet lizards. This wizard here will shrink you to a fraction of your normal size.”

“How small?” the soldier ventured.

Shakti held out her hands, one above the other, measuring a distance of about six inches between them.

The male blanched, his face paling nearly to blue in the heat spectrum. “But the lizards—” he began.

“You are armed,” she snapped. “The soldiers of House Hunzrin have been trained to handle foes greater than lap-lizards!”

The soldier considered the wrath on the priestess’s face and decided that the safer course would be to hold his tongue and do as she said. Never mind the fact that to a six-inch drow, a large gecko was nearly as fearsome a foe as a dragon!

So he inclined his head in a gesture of respect and acceptance. “As you command, Matron—” the male paused, letting his intentional error linger in the air like incense. “Lady Hunzrin,” he corrected.

It was an obvious ploy, a ridiculous currying of favor that would have earned him a sharp cuff—or worse—from most drow females. But even a lowly soldier could recognize the ambition, the pride, on this one’s face, and the singleminded fervor exceptional even among the fanatic drow. Shakti would hear only the implied compliment in the male’s words, and not the mockery.

As he’d anticipated, the young priestess received his flattery with a complacent smile. She nodded to the wizard, who handed the soldier a small vial.

“When you are safely inside, drink this potion. It will reverse the spell and return you to your normal size,” the wizard instructed.

“Be certain you are not seen,” Shakti added. “Kill the servants only if you must. Once you are sure we will not be detected, you may let me in through the back. The doors will almost certainly not be warded from the inside.”

At a nod from the priestess, the wizard began to cast the spell. Eyes closed, he half sang the arcane words in a long, drawn-out chant, all the while sweeping the air with elaborate gestures. Shakti sat calmly through the spell, patient for once despite her eagerness. Considering the price of this spell and the reputation of the wizard, she’d expected a bit of a show.

Through it all, the soldier stood at attention: tense, stoic. The chant rose to a high, wailing note, and the wizard ended the spell with a flurry of hands and a brief flash of purple light.

Smoke, the same eerie purple hue as the vanished light, wafted from the wizard’s outflung hands. It streamed unerringly to the soldier and surrounded him, head to foot, like a drow-shaped cloud. Immediately the cloud began to move inward, compacting itself against the soldier’s body and pressing him on all sides.

The male’s eyes bulged as the magic haze tightened around him. Slowly, inexorably, the draw’s body began to give under the pressure. Agony twisted his face, and his mouth opened in a shriek of anguish. On and on it went, the shrinking and the screaming.

Shakti leaned forward, her eyes gleaming with twisted pleasure as she watched. Finally the male was small enough to suit her purposes, and she stopped the wizard with a nod. The purple smoke dissipated at once, and the soldier, now small enough to sit on Shakti’s hand, slumped to the floor.

“By the way, this may hurt,” the mage said casually.

The priestess took in the wizard’s sated expression, the perverse delight in his eyes, and saw opportunity written there. Even in vengeance, Shakti was a frugal manager, as canny as any merchant in the city.

Tour fee,” she said, handing the wizard coins totaling slightly less than the agreed-upon amount. She nodded pointedly to the tiny drow on the floor, and her single raised eyebrow suggested the wizard had already been amply paid by the pleasure his spell brought him.

The wizard did not argue with her silent logic. He took the offered coins and, with a final satisfied glance at his handiwork, slipped out into the darkness that was Menzoberranzan.

Shakti stooped and picked up the soldier, marveling at how fragile the fighter was at this size. She could crush him merely by tightening her fingers. Only with great effort did the priestess restrain from following the tempting impulse.

Instead she promised herself a treat when this was over a dozen tiny soldiers, acting out a battle to the death for her amusement. How marvelous, how godlike, that would feel! How thrilling, the sense of power! It would be as if she were touching the very shadow of Lloth. Such a thing was more than an amusement, the young priestess rationalized; it would be an act of devotion, and well worth the high price of the wizard’s spells.

Shakti tucked the male into the front of her robe. He should be secure enough, clinging to the chain of her bouse insignia and wedged in her ample cleavage. It pleased her, this blatant reminder of the power females wielded over lowly males.

Shakti Hunzrin was not one for subtleties.

The Hunzrin priestess stooped, under the pretense of picking up a dropped package, and surreptitiously placed the miniature fighter near Liriel’s front door. As instructed, he sprinted toward the lizard door and pressed it inward.

Shakti took a deep breath and began to walk away. She would circle around and approach the house from the back. If all went well, her tiny spy would admit her to the Baenre girl’s castle, and she would search the place quickly, before its owner returned.

A sound came from behind her, a high piping cry that sounded like the squeaks of a wounded scurry rat. Shakti froze, and swore. The tiny door had been trapped, after all.

She spun around and glared furiously at the small figure staggering toward her. She snatched up the drow male and held him close to her eyes. Protruding from his body was a dart, such as those the drow used in their tiny crossbows. Considering his current size, the male might as well have been impaled upon a three-foot spear. And he’d been gut-shot, one of the more painful and lingering deaths.

Shakti swore again, and her eyes darted to the street. A patrol of lizard-mounted drow approached, making their silent rounds of the city.

“You were worried about lizards,” she hissed at the tiny male. “Yet if you were to live long enough, you would be grateful you met this one.”

With those words, she tossed the drow soldier in the path of a passing lizard mount. The creature’s long, slender tongue whipped out and curled around the unexpected morsel. Back it snapped, so quickly that the lizard’s rider did not notice what his mount had eaten.

Once again Shakti retraced her steps to the Hunzrin complex. Now that she knew the nature of the traps guarding the door, she would send in another servant, one far more valuable than a male soldier.

Less than an hour later, Shakti stepped triumphantly through Liriel’s back door. She regarded the creature who had let her in with a mixture of pride and revulsion. Its face was a hideous parody of a drow visage. Dark blue in color, with long pointed ears that looked almost like horns, the head could well have belonged to some creature of the Abyss. But its body was that of a thick snake, nearly ten feet in length and covered with dark blue scales. The creature’s swaying tail ended in a barbed, poisonous tip. This was a dark naga, one of the rarest creatures of the Underdark and a valued ally of House Hunzrin.

“Pay Ssasser now,” hissed the naga in an airy, whistling voice. He bared his fangs in a grin of anticipation, and his long pronged tongue flicked out. “Ssasser’s servitude to Hunzrin family over.”

That was not the terms of our agreement. When I have Liriel Baenre under my power, you will be free,” Shakti reminded him.

The creature scowled, and then it brought forth a tremendous belch. Its thin lips pursed and it spat a small dart at Shakti’s feet. This did Ssasser swallow, when through the door Ssasser came. A good trap, it was. If Ssasser knew not about the magic trip-wire, dead might Ssasser be.”

Shakti kicked the dart aside. Among the dark naga’s many talents was the ability to swallow virtually anything without harm. Weapons, poisons, spellbooks—all were safely stowed in the internal organ that allowed the naga to carry whatever it needed. Granted, catching a crossbow-fired dart was a bit out of the ordinary, but the naga had clearly been up to the challenge.

“Cost Ssasser, it did, the spell of invisibility,” the dark naga hinted.

“And you will have another, at no additional charge,” the priestess promised. Above all its other weapons, the naga was prized for its magical ability. The high cost of developing its natural magic often forced the nagas into servitude. This creature was in debt too deeply to buy its way free of the Hunzrin family anytime soon, so Shakti felt she could be generous.

She bade the snake-thing return to House Hunzrin, and then began the search of the castle. Liriel’s home was, as Shakti expected, a virtual den of dissolution. Since the Hunzrin priestess had little interest in luxuries, she gave most of the house scant attention. The one room she want-ed was the study.

And in it, she found what she sought. Books were rare and expensive, but Liriel had more than her fair share of them. Most, beautifully bound in rare leathers and embossed with elegant drow runes, were neatly organized on shelves. Shakti gave these no more than a glance. She was more interested in the crude, battered books that seemed to be scattered everywhere.

Books were stacked on the study table, piled against the wall, tossed about on the floor. And such books! Many of them were about humans and human magic—subjects strictly forbidden in Menzoberranzan.

Elated with this discovery, Shakti hugged one of the damning volumes to her cbest. Drow had died for lesser offenses, and the possession of these books was enough to bring serious trouble even to a member of House Baenre. But that was not quite enough for Shakti; she wanted to know why Liriel sought this information about the surface world.

No one took such risks motivated only by intellectual curiosity. Was House Baenre planning another strike against the surface? Or perhaps seeking an alliance with a group of humans? If either of these things proved true, the city would almost certainly rise up in rebellion.

Shakti tossed the book aside and reached for another. Instantly she froze as loose pages fluttered from the discarded book.

The priestess stooped and picked up a page. It was fine vellum parchment, covered with small, elegantly formed drow script. Even without light, the nearsighted priestess could read the page, for it was written in everdark ink, the rare, glowing ink used only by the most powerful and prosperous of drow wizards.

As she read, her excitement grew. These were Liriel Baenre’s notes, written in her own hand! Shakti scanned page after page, and the emerging picture surpassed her darkest dreams of vengeance.

Liriel Baenre had found a way to take her innate drow powers to the surface. She’d found an amulet, a human artifact of some sort, that granted her this power.

The pages fluttered unheeded from Shakti’s hands as the importance of this discovery struck home. She read in these handwritten pages Liriel Baenre’s death warrant. Most of the city’s drow would cheerfully kill to possess such magic. And then what might happen? For good or ill, such a thing could change Menzoberranzan forever.

But how, wondered Shakti, had Liriel done such a thing? Eagerly the priestess took up one book after another. Finally, tucked between the pages of a particularly battered volume, she found what she sought: a handwritten bill signed only with a faint, familiar design. Shakti recognized the mark of the Dragon’s Hoard.

A wild grin twisted Shakti’s face. She knew the merchant band well. In fact, she had recently acquired a new rothe stud from the Dragon’s Hoard, a white ram whose compact size and unusually fine fleece marked him as the property of House Zinard, a family of the drow city Ched Nasad. The rothe was stolen, of course, for the Zinards would never part with such a valuable animal.

It was whispered around Menzoberranzan that contraband goods of almost any kind could be had from the

Dragon’s Hoard. The merchant band protected the many secrets of its clients, but surely Shakti could find a way to make one of the merchants talk. She was as talented at torture as any drow in Menzoberranzan. Oaths of secrecy, even fear of death at Captain Nisstyre’s hands, would mean little to the unfortunate male who fell into her hands.

Before the bell rang to summon Lloth’s faithful to chapel, Shakti had extracted some fascinating information from her chosen captive. The merchant had known nothing about Liriel Baenre, but he’d spoken eloquently on the subject of his employer.

Nisstyre, it seemed, was not just any merchant captain. He was a wizard trained in the schools of Ched Nasad, who had fled the city many decades past rather than submit to the mind-searching test of loyalty to Lloth. Shakti thought she might know why.

In his last, agonized moments, the tortured drow had confessed that he himself was a follower of Vhaeraun, the drow god of intrigue and thievery. It seemed unlikely the servant would dare to follow such a god without the knowledge and consent of his master. This gave Shakti a powerful weapon to use against Nisstyre, but oddly enough the female was not inclined to wield it.

The concept of a rival deity fascinated her. She had never entertained such thoughts, knowing it was her lot to become a priestess of Lloth. She had always resented this, but had never seen another way.

Now, for the first time in her life, Shakti began to move past discontent toward ambition. The city teetered on the brink of anarchy. What better time than this to break the power of Lloth’s priestesses? And what better tool than a rival deity? If this Vhaeraun had a powerful, hidden following in the city, perhaps she could find something that would persuade them into open warfare against the faltering matriarchy. Even more delightful, a proven connection between Vhaeraun’s followers and House Baenre could very well topple the threatened first house. Liriel would not survive such a conflict, of course, but even that delightful prospect paled before the larger picture emerging in Shakti’s mind.