Maestro (22 page)

That elation turned to doubt, though, when Kimmuriel recoiled in anger.

Kimmuriel chastised his mother for causing him to deliver to Gromph Baenre the fabric of the spell the deceived archmage had used to bring Demogorgon to the Underdark, and in doing so, thinning the boundary of the Faerzress itself.

Yvonnel couldn’t sort it out for a long while, but as K’yorl responded to Kimmuriel, it became clear: Lolth had done this. In the Abyss, in a balor’s lair, the Spider Queen in K’yorl’s form had used Kimmuriel to deceive Gromph. And now Kimmuriel was in hiding from the dangerous Gromph. Yvonnel could feel Kimmuriel’s hatred and could sense his desire for vengeance against his mother. And even K’yorl’s doubts and confusion would have no sway here in convincing Kimmuriel that she had not done this to him.

Yvonnel felt the battered woman’s deep regret. The former Matron Mother of House Oblodra desperately wanted to set things straight with her son—not out of any love for Kimmuriel, of course, but simply out of worry over her own legacy. What a curse her name would become, perhaps even centuries after her demise, when all the drow believed it was she who broke the boundary of the Faerzress and loosed the demon lords upon the Underdark. And there was nothing K’yorl could do about it.

Kimmuriel shut them out then, so suddenly and forcefully that Yvonnel was thrust from the melding, and her eyes blinked open back in the Room of Divination. She suppressed her panic, and her instinct to slap K’yorl, too, out of her trance. Instead she focused on the image in the scrying bowl, nodding as she realized that K’yorl was no longer in the hive-mind, that her consciousness was flying fast along the corridors of the Underdark—backtracking the call of the whistle, perhaps.

The image flickered and formed, then went away again, repeating the process several times.

And the last image caught Yvonnel’s attention and took her breath away.

But the stoup waters cleared, and K’yorl groaned and opened her eyes, the connection broken.

“Where are they?” Yvonnel Baenre demanded, the bared power of her voice forcing K’yorl from her thoughts and into the present. K’yorl stared at her adversary, and even sneered.

“Where are they?” Yvonnel repeated. “Tell me or I will fetch the illithid Methil and bid him wrest the information from your thoughts. In that event, he will leave some foul presents behind, I promise.”

K’yorl tried to maintain her glare, but Yvonnel’s expression made it clear that she was not bluffing. The illithid Methil El Viddenvelp would implant deep suggestions, even memories, to terrorize K’yorl, leaving her helpless to distinguish reality from nightmare.

“Kimmuriel is not certain . . .”

“Of their exact location,” Yvonnel finished for her. “Where are they? And who are they? Jarlaxle, I know, but the others . . .

“Drizzt Do’Urden,” K’yorl blurted and Yvonnel’s breath left her once more.

“Where?” she demanded with what little voice she could muster.

“You ask . . .”

“Last opportunity,” Yvonnel said with a low and threatening growl.

K’yorl stuttered no more. “Jarlaxle and his companions are in the Underdark, a few days out from Menzoberranzan.”

Yvonnel pulled her hand from the magical stoup, but commanded the enchanted Baenre tool to hold K’yorl in place. Glowering all the way, the young and dangerous Baenre walked up to stare K’yorl in the face, her eyes barely an inch away.

“You do not need to make me your enemy,” she said with surprising tenderness. “I understand that you hate me—no, more than that, I understand that you hate House Baenre above all others. That is well and good and likely deserved. And I do not care.”

She paused and cupped K’yorl’s chin in her hand. “Why are they coming?”

K’yorl’s responding expression was one of pure incredulity. “For House Do’Urden,” Yvonnel said. “To rescue the elf called Dahlia.”

K’yorl managed a small nod of affirmation.

“This is marvelous, do you not see?” Yvonnel asked, and she spun away, laughing. She stopped quickly and spun back on K’yorl. “Jarlaxle is hiding Gromph from Matron Mother Quenthel?”

K’yorl nodded, her expression showing her belief she was surely doomed now.

“Bold!” said Yvonnel. “And brave—Jarlaxle comes personally to see to this. Marvelous!”

K’yorl stared at her incredulously, having no way to sort out the glee, unexpected for such a dangerous situation.

“And we have a better way to spy!” Yvonnel said.

K’yorl’s jaw drooped open and she shook her head, clearly at a loss.

Yvonnel understood that dumbfounded look. To K’yorl Odran, this Yvonnel Baenre standing in front of her was a reflection of, perhaps a reincarnation of, or indeed perhaps even one and the same with, the Yvonnel Baenre she had known before.

She did not understand that this mere child before her was so much more.

“Splendid!” Yvonnel cried out, rushing back around the stoup and sinking her hands once more into the rim, to again contact the hands of K’yorl Odran.

“Go, now,” Yvonnel instructed, and when K’yorl did not immediately respond, she added, “To Jarlaxle! At once!”

She paused a moment, then reconsidered. “No, to Kimmuriel,” she instructed. “To him, but do not contact him.”

“The illithids . . .” K’yorl meekly protested.

“Go!”

In moments, they were across the planes once more, though as soon as they neared the spot where Kimmuriel stood, his delicate hands massaging the brain of the great hive-mind, Yvonnel telepathically instructed K’yorl away.
Follow the path again to Jarlaxle.

Perhaps they could have gotten out there straightaway from the Room of Divination, but Yvonnel had wanted something else, ever so briefly. She had felt the power surrounding Kimmuriel on their initial pass, emanating at the edges of her consciousness. The hive-mind.

Glorious power!

Oh, but she would experience that someday, she promised herself as her thoughts and K’yorl’s wound back to Toril, and back to along the winding corridors of the Underdark. In a heartbeat, though Yvonnel was not even aware of her own heartbeat at that amazing moment, she found herself looking at the mercenary leader, Jarlaxle.

Her uncle.

The purple eyes of one of his companions caught her and held her. From the memories of the Eternal, this new Yvonnel knew this was Drizzt Do’Urden, the ultimate heretic, and also, in the greatest of ironies, the beloved tool of Lolth. And they were heading, blindly, to Menzoberranzan.

Yvonnel could hardly contain her joy.

She telepathically bade K’yorl to flicker through Drizzt’s thoughts, then to the third, unknown companion.

There, she got an amazing surprise, to learn that this was no drow but a human in perfect drow disguise. A human . . . weak-minded, susceptible.

Yvonnel sensed Jarlaxle’s unease—the wary mercenary suspected that something was amiss.

At her bidding, K’yorl went back into the thoughts of the disguised human, and there they stayed, hidden from Jarlaxle and Drizzt, and even from the unwitting human host. As they had done with Minolin Fey in the corridor in an earlier session, they now looked out through the eyes of Artemis Entreri.

A short while later, Yvonnel emerged alone from the Room of Divination. Minolin Fey waited outside. The priestess glanced past her into the room, looking curiously at the unmoving K’yorl, who remained at the stoup, her hands melded with the stone.

“She is held, mind and body,” Yvonnel explained. “You will go to her often and magically sustain her.”

“Mistress?”

“It could be days, tendays even. I’ll not have her die of thirst.”

Minolin Fey seemed not to understand.

“If K’yorl Odran perishes, or becomes too weak to continue her task, I will return you to Errtu in the Abyss in her stead.”

Minolin Fey’s widening eyes told Yvonnel that she had heard that command clearly.

“And inform Matron Mother Quenthel and all the others that no one is to enter this room,” Yvonnel added. “Any who disobey will face my wrath, and it will not be a pleasant thing.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

Yvonnel swung around and walked away to the echoes of her favorite words. She wasn’t quite sure what she had done, or how. Through some combination of her own divine magic and the powers of the scrying room, she had magically held K’yorl. That alone was nothing special of course, but in this case, it had accomplished much more. K’yorl was locked in place, in body and in thought. She saw the world through the eyes of Artemis Entreri, though neither of them knew it.

And Yvonnel, too, could access that vision simply by looking into the waters of the stoup. She had magically created the perfect spy in the adventuring trio’s midst: one of their own. And in the process, she had turned K’yorl Odran into what amounted to a living crystal ball.

What a fabulous day it had been! They were coming. Drizzt Do’Urden was delivering himself to her in Menzoberranzan.

“I know not what to make of it!” Jarlaxle said to Matron Mother Zeerith the next morning, when he had slipped away from the other two to meet the woman in an appointed place, less than a day’s march from the gates of Menzoberranzan.

“Have you called to Kimmuriel?”

“Finally, he answered,” Jarlaxle said, holding up the small silver whistle he kept on a chain, one Kimmuriel had psionically attuned to his thoughts so he could hear it across miles, even across the planes of existence. “I had thought him lost to me.”

“He is in the hive-mind of an illithid colony,” Zeerith reminded him.

“He will be of little help on our mission,” Jarlaxle explained. “None, actually, until we are back in Luskan, where he will try to unravel Dahlia’s insanity. He will not venture into the Underdark.”

“Gromph is about,” Zeerith reasoned.

“It is more than that,” Jarlaxle explained, and he reflexively glanced back in the direction of his companions, who had been acting so curiously. “There is something about the thinning of the Faerzress . . . a mind sickness.”

“The chaos of the Abyss seeps through?” Zeerith wondered aloud.

“The illithids are very sensitive to such things, and terrified of them, of course,” Jarlaxle explained. “Kimmuriel will not come here.”

“Do you still wish to follow through with your plans?” Zeerith asked, after a long pause to digest the information.

“I want to get Dahlia out of there, yes. It will wound Matron Mother Baenre, but not mortally, and will force her hand in allowing the Xorlarrin family to assume complete control over House Do’Urden.”

“Or she will disband House Do’Urden all together.”

“She’ll not do that,” Jarlaxle said with some confidence. “She has pressed the other Houses into a tight corner—even her allies have come to fear her as much as they fear their rivals. She has shown them that she considers herself far above them, above their counsel even. The matron mother’s one play to assure no movement against her is to bring House Xorlarrin back, and to do so in a way that offers them, you, the same independence as every other House. Are your children up to that task?”

Zeerith gave a little noncommittal laugh. She wasn’t going back to Menzoberranzan, they both had decided. Jarlaxle’s play to weaken the matriarchy had Matron Mother Zeerith’s fingerprints all over it. Those other matron mothers who decided to wage war to keep their power unchallenged would surely conspire to murder Matron Mother Zeerith first, if they could find her.

“You will need Kimmuriel before this is through,” she said, and Jarlaxle didn’t argue the point.

“I might need him simply to deal with my companions,” he replied, glancing back the way he had come, to the chambers that held Drizzt and Entreri.

“Our people are running patrols in the outer corridors,” Zeerith explained. “I can lead you there and give you my imprimatur. That should get you into the city, though from there, there is little I can offer.”

“Who among your children know I’m coming for Dahlia?”

“None.”

“Thank you,” Jarlaxle said with a bow. He didn’t trust Zeerith’s flock, of course. There was simply too much opportunity for personal gain for any of them. In truth, Jarlaxle was shocked that he trusted Zeerith—might she not regain favor with Quenthel by double-crossing him?

It was a calculated risk. Zeerith might come to consider that Jarlaxle’s odds of succeeding were so tiny and, given that, any gains she might make with him would not outweigh the possibilities for her to find favor with the Ruling Council once more.

But no, he decided, Zeerith’s best play was with him. Her relationship with the men of her House was no ploy. She hadn’t elevated the Xorlarrin males in any twisted plot to give her an edge on the other Houses—far from it! House Xorlarrin’s climb was in spite of Zeerith’s unusual feelings toward the weaker gender, and not because of them. But she had held her ground through the decades because there was honest conviction behind her decision. To Zeerith’s belief, subjugating the males of Menzoberranzan meant that the drow could only achieve half of their potential.

“This journey has left me uncertain,” he admitted. “Nothing is as it should be, or as I anticipated.”

“Demon lords walk the Underdark. Are you surprised by the chaos?”

Jarlaxle thought of the fit of—of what? Delusion? Insanity?—that had come over Drizzt and Entreri in the earlier fight. Might that increase? He was tempted to take off his eye patch, that he might experience whatever had gripped the two, if indeed it was some outside influence, but he quickly dismissed that notion.

“Concerned, more than surprised,” he replied. “Let me go to them and offer the choice. I will return to you this way momentarily, and if with them, then know we will press on. I would like to be in the city this very tenday.”

“They are not to know of my involvement, on pain of their deaths,” Matron Mother Zeerith reminded him.

“You don’t trust me?” Jarlaxle asked, feigning dismay.

“I do not trust them,” she corrected, and Jarlaxle grinned and spun away.

He was back with Entreri and Drizzt a short while later, the two settled very near to where he had left them. Entreri guarded the north corridor, a winding and climbing trail, absently spinning his jeweled dagger on its point against the tip of his extended index finger.