Ambergris could only hope that Jermander and Ratsis hadn’t noticed her spell, her waggling fingers creating a translucent hammer in the air behind Horrible, striking hard, right through the woman’s skull just an instant before the Shifter had stopped the warrior woman’s killing blow even more effectively with the ram’s head attack.
Running on after Afafrenfere, she took some comfort in knowing for certain that the monk hadn’t noted her treachery. His vision and course narrowed by sheer outrage, Afafrenfere was seeing nothing but the straight line path that would take him to the drow.
And the dwarf wouldn’t get there before him, or even with him, she realized. She slowed her pace just enough to cast a second spell, a whispered command to “halt” that had the weight of divine power behind it. Despite his urgency and rage, Afafrenfere skidded to a stop, momentarily only, but enough for Ambergris to catch up.
“He dies!” the monk insisted.
“Yeah, yeah, don’ we all?” Ambergris replied, and she grabbed Afafrenfere’s arm so that he could not sprint out ahead of her.
“Hurry!” the monk urged.
“Be easy,” the dwarf countered. “If ye’re wantin’ to jump into this dark one’s face, then ye’re wantin’ to be dead!”
Afafrenfere tried to pull away anyway, but Ambergris had a grip to make a stone giant proud, and he wasn’t wriggling free. Together they came to the edge of the cliff. Down below lay Drizzt, in clear sight, still caught and bent over backward awkwardly on the root. Below him and to the side, a gray mist was forming.
“Fly away!” Ambergris cried to the monk, shoving him to the side. Afafrenfere tried to protest, but Ambergris shoulder-blocked him hard, and both went rushing down the side of the hill, a slope not as steep as that near Drizzt, but one that still left the pair scrambling simply to keep their feet under them.
“Fly away!” Ambergris kept saying, and whenever the monk tried to argue or to slow down, the dwarf barreled into him, buckler leading, and kept him moving along.
Finally, many yards down the side, Afafrenfere managed to catch a hold on a tree as he passed and pull himself out of the insistent dwarf ’s way.
Ambergris skidded to a stop.
“What are you doing?” a flustered and sputtering Afafrenfere yelled at her.
“Keepin’ ye alive!” she shouted back at him.
Afafrenfere responded with a growl and started to shove past her.
Up came Ambergris’s Skullbreaker, smacking the monk in the face and laying him low. “Shut up, ye fool. Ye’re feedin’ the worms were meself not wanting a bit o’ company, and to be sure yerself ’s th’only one o’ that bunch I e’er could stomach.”
She grabbed the dazed and disoriented monk roughly by the collar and tossed him up over her shoulders, then trotted off into the forest.
With Bol and Horrible out of the way, Ratsis’s spiders increased their barrage, lines of webbing flying all around Dahlia, and despite her protests and frantic movements, she was becoming inexorably wrapped and trapped. One of her arms became pinned to her side, and she lost the flail in her other hand, unable to pull it free of the webbing.
With all of her considerable strength, Dahlia could not twist the weapon free, nor yank her wrapped arm free, nor could she get her legs free of the piling webs.
“Well done,” Jermander congratulated and he started forward from the brush, sword in hand. He was almost to Dahlia when a form appeared, leaping down from the branches of the same tree where Horrible had fallen. The agile newcomer hit the ground with a second leap, one that lifted him right atop one of Ratsis’s arachnids. He came down hard, sword set tip-down, and with expert precision, he drove the weapon right through the pony-sized spider’s bulbous eye. The eight-legged beast thrashed and shrieked as goo bubbled up around the blade, but only for a moment before it crumbled down and lay still.
Jermander eyed the newcomer. Behind him, Ratsis screamed in protest over the demise of one of his treasured pets.
The newcomer, a smallish but well-muscled man, jerked the sword free and started Jermander’s way. Ichor dripped from his long blade. He held a smaller dirk in his left hand.
Jermander was no cowardly commander hiding in the bushes, however. Noted for his skilled blade work, the shade didn’t shy from many fights. He brought his fine silver sword up in a salute and stalked in.
“You are with Dahlia, then?” he asked as he neared, his sword waving before him.
“No,” came the curt reply, the small man’s sword slapping hard across to drive Jermander’s leading thrust aside.
Jermander rolled his blade free deftly, re-angled, and went straight back in with the sword—only to have a backhand roll of the dirk move the strike harmlessly aside.
Which Jermander had expected, of course, and so he worked fast, suddenly— retract and stab, retract and stab, retract once more, turning the sword up and over in a diagonal downward slice. He didn’t expect to land a blow, and he didn’t come close, but was merely trying to get a measure of this unexpected and unknown opponent.
“Yet you leaped in to defend her?” the shade remarked.
“I don’t like spiders.”
“How do you feel about elf women?” Jermander said with a light grin—one that was wiped away immediately as this newcomer raged forward suddenly, his feet moving fast, his blades a blur of circling and stabbing.
Jermander worked furiously with his fine sword, and more so with his feet as he found himself in the unusual position of full retreat! This warrior of Cavus Dun was well known in many regions of the Shadowfell. Long and lanky, deceptively fast and carrying a light and thin mithral blade that glowed with magical energy, Jermander had risen high in the ranks of the hireling hunters as much for his fighting skills as his organization and leadership qualities—and more so in the beginning.
He needed every bit of that skill now to fend the speeding strikes of his adversary, and though he could hardly take the time to sit back and consider the moment, or his opponent, a thought did occur to him.
“You are Alegni’s man!” he shouted between the ring of metal on metal. As he spoke the words, he knew them to be true; this one’s complexion and reputation had indeed preceded him.
Artemis Entreri didn’t even smile in response, just kept up his impeccable offensive barrage, kept Jermander on his heels.
Ratsis was just about to order his remaining spider to shift its webbing attack to the newcomer when he and the Shifter heard Jermander’s claim that this unexpected addition to the fight was Alegni’s man.
The two glanced at each other and Ratsis swallowed hard.
“We are not in accordance with the wishes of a Netherese Lord?” the Shifter whispered breathlessly.
Her answer had to wait as a low feline growl filled the air.
The Shifter’s eyes widened as she looked past Ratsis, her expression prompting Ratsis to turn likewise, affording them both the view of a large black panther standing atop the ledge where the drow had flown. A large black panther seeming very intent on them.
“Guenhwyvar!” Dahlia cried, her voice somewhat muffled by the stubborn webbing.
Ratsis’s gaze darted from the cat to Dahlia to Jermander and Alegni’s man and back to the Shifter, who was shaking her head.
“I will expect my payment in full,” she said, and she hustled away into the shadows—and back to her homeworld.
Ratsis glanced around again. Three of his mercenary group lay dead, and the value of Dahlia had therefore increased to him personally. But caught between health and wallet, Ratsis soon enough realized the price he would almost surely pay if he tried to follow the enticing course of his greed.
He sent his remaining spider to intercept the cat, but held no reasonable hope that the arachnid would slow this powerful beast.
He glanced again at Dahlia, wrapped and ready for delivery.
So close.
But not now, Ratsis realized, and he was glad that he, too, had learned the difficult art of shadow-stepping.
“Alegni’s man!” Jermander yelled again, barely dodging a sword thrust that got past his own blade and almost took him in the hip.
“You keep saying that as if you know what it means,” Entreri teased and taunted.
“I know Alegni!”
“You know what he wishes you to know.” Across came the sword, taking Jermander’s blocking weapon aside, and in stepped the small killer with a halfturn and wide slash of his dagger, and then a backhanded stab back across which almost got Jermander in the face as he tried to counter.
“Effron employed me!” Jermander argued, and he tried to keep the panic out of his voice—though unsuccessfully, he realized by the grin on the face of Alegni’s champion.
“Effron employed me as well,” said his opponent, “to kill you.”
Jermander stared at him dumbfounded, but not before wisely backing out of reach.
“He is in love with Dahlia,” Entreri explained and leaped forward, leading with a wild, circular flurry of his long sword which had Jermander flailing all around to keep up.
And the small man tossed his dirk—he didn’t throw it at Jermander, but merely tossed it up before him, close enough for Jermander to snatch it from the air. The shade warrior almost did just that, but realized the diversion for what it was and protected against a sword thrust instead.
He should have protected from something else, though he couldn’t know it, for indeed Entreri came forward with the expected thrust, half-turning once more, but only, Jermander soon realized, so that he could hide the movement of his free hand, down to his belt buckle and suddenly forward.
At first, Jermander thought he had been punched in the chest, and he staggered back a few steps, working his sword defensively. Only when he realized that Entreri wasn’t pursuing, only when he noted the smug look on the small man’s face, did he begin to understand, and he glanced down at his chest to see a small knife buried up to its hilt.
He tried to speak out, but found that he had no air in his lungs.
Jermander fought against the dizziness and breathlessness. Strangely, he felt no pain. He steadied himself and assumed a posture to continue, but as he expanded his focus once more and looked to his opponent, he saw that the man had his dirk in hand once more—had he caught it before it had ever hit the ground?—and now cocked his arm, ready to throw.
Jermander tried to clutch up into a smaller target and readied his sword for a block.
Entreri pumped his arm and the warrior dodged, then dodged again with a second fake.
Each movement brought on more dizziness, waves of disorientation. Jermander told himself that it was time to flee, and he, too, started that shadowshift, to return to the other world, the Shadowfell.
But shadowshifting took concentration, and this time, Entreri didn’t fake.
Jermander felt the profound thud as the dirk plunged in beside the knife. He saw the man stalking in at him as his body went numb, and then a gray mist filled his vision.
For a moment, Jermander thought he was slipping away into the Shadowfell. The sensation and the view seemed much the same.
A blinding flash ended that thought, ended all thought, as a sword creased his skull.
THE GENDER OPPRESSED
Driders are not the quietest of creatures, particularly when a score of them, armed and armored and anxious for battle, scrabble along rocky cavern floors and walls.
Something was afoot, Yerrininae believed. He could feel it, and it was a tangible sensation, not just a gut instinct.
The air was colder—unnaturally colder.
The drider leader drove his charges on, rushing around blind bends in the corridor recklessly. He had sent two scouts up front, and he knew now—he just knew—that the pair were soon to encounter . . . something.
So focused was the large mutant that he nearly passed through a remarkable juncture in the otherwise unremarkable corridor.
Yerrininae skidded to a stop, his eight legs clacking and scraping on the stone. Behind him, several driders pulled up fast, frantic to avoid a collision with their merciless leader.
“What is it, my commander?” one dared ask, as the others wandered around in confusion.
Yerrininae continued to look to the wall instead of the open corridor ahead. He moved over slowly, almost reverently, and eased his great spear out wide with his left hand, the other reaching tentatively for a peculiar crease in the wall. A smile widened upon his face as the drider ran his fingers along that peculiar groove.
“My commander?” the other drider asked again.
“This is no natural crease in the stone,” Yerrininae explained. “This is a worked juncture—once, long ago, likely a portal . . . a door of some sort.”
The other drider dared move up, and on Yerrininae’s bidding, lifted his hand to also feel the straight lines of the worked stone. “What does it mean?” he asked.
Yerrininae straightened and looked all around, considering the caverns and corridors they had traversed that day. “It means that this was the outer waypoint.”
“Of?”
Yerrininae looked at the drider and grinned.
A shriek stole the moment, echoing off the stones, bouncing all around them as if a hundred drider warriors were suddenly under great duress. Yerrininae leaped sidelong down the corridor, legs working perfectly to spin him as he landed in full stride, charging along, spear at the ready.
Only a few bends later, they found their scouts, though the driders were only barely visible beneath a mound of flailing semi-translucent ghostly dwarves.
No, not ghostly, but actual spirits, Yerrininae realized, and he commanded his charges forward, into the morass.
The large drider led the way. Yerrininae was never one to view a battle from afar. He crashed into a small horde of the ghosts, his fine drow great spear stabbing and slashing every which way.
But to little effect, for these creatures were only partially bound to the material plane. He could barely hit them, with weapon or with appendage. Similarly, their reciprocating swings did not connect solidly.
When a dozen other ghosts leaped away from one of the unfortunate scouts to charge his direction, though, Yerrininae understood that those seemingly insubstantial attacks could surely combine to great effect, for that drider scout from which they had crawled slumped right to the floor, its face a ghastly mask of missing eyes and torn lips, its head all twisted around as if it had been squeezed between heavy stones. The creature lolled around, propped by the symmetry of its eight legs, but hardly alive.
“Close ranks!” the drider leader demanded.
As the valuable drider warriors fell back, Jearth ordered his shock troops past them and into the enemy.
Goblins, orcs, and bugbears surged forward along the corridor and into the wider cavern beyond, fighting every instinct in them which told them to turn around and flee—for those who did so, those who even hesitated slightly, felt the bite of a drow crossbow bolt.
“Dwarf ghosts!” Ravel said happily from the back. “Gauntlgrym! It must be! Right before us. We have found the dwarven city.”
“We cannot be certain,” Berellip said beside him.
“I can feel the power of the place,” Ravel argued. “Primordial power.” He wasn’t bluffing, nor was he imagining anything due to the appearance of dwarf ghosts. The sense of bound magic was powerful and primal. He could feel it under his feet. Ravel had done a lot of work with elementals during his tenure in Sorcere. Gromph Baenre was quite fond of summoning them by the dozen, all different types, merely to torment them.
He thought to confer with his brother Brack’thal, who had reputedly been supremely skilled in the elemental arts in the years before the Spellplague. Only briefly, though, for he did not want to give Brack’thal the satisfaction.
Even without that confirmation, Ravel knew the feeling of elemental magic, and such was the tingling energy he felt in the floors and walls now, a deep resonance of the purest energy.
Along the wall to the left came Tiago Baenre, charging his lizard above the heads of the many drow crowding the area.
“The goblinkin will be of little effect,” he told Ravel and the others. “These ghostly defenders are quite beyond them.”
“Shall you throw a lightning net upon them, dear brother?” Berellip remarked, and behind her, Saribel giggled.
“It might prove quite potent,” Ravel replied, ignoring the sarcasm.
Berellip gave an exasperated sigh and moved past him, Saribel and the other priestesses of Lolth in tow.
As soon as they had moved past Tiago, the young Baenre signaled to Ravel, Shall I gather your wizards that you can enact a second lightning net?
The question caught Ravel off guard, so much so that he balked and even moved back a step. He stared at Tiago for a few moments, ensuring that the warrior was serious. He glanced down the corridor; the sounds alone convinced him that his goblinkin fodder were indeed being slaughtered.
Ravel nodded. He wouldn’t give his sisters the satisfaction of being saviors.
“They are a stubborn bunch,” Berellip admitted to Saribel. They had hit the dwarves with a vast repertoire of spells, from shining beams of unholy light to waves of biting flames. They had used their allegiance to Lolth to compel the ghosts away and had even tried to harness the spirits to their will, to dominate them and turn some against the others.
But this was a stubborn group indeed, much more so than typical for such undead creatures.
“They are fighting for their most ancient homeland,” Berellip continued, reasoning it out as she went along. “They are bound here as guardians, singular in their devotion.”
“They will not be easily turned, nor easily destroyed,” Saribel agreed.
“Fight on,” Berellip instructed Saribel and the others, and she fell into her next spellcasting but stopped abruptly, startled when Tiago Baenre, Jearth Xorlarrin, and a host of lizard riders charged past her.
The cavalry swept into the cavern, veering to the right as they extended their line.
In came Yerrininae and the driders on their heels, reinforcing that line as it began to sweep back to the left, effectively clearing the nearest right hand corner of the cavern.
Into that void went Ravel and his spellspinners. Berellip spat on the stone and urged her priestesses on with more powerful spells. She began casting her own bursts of brilliant devastation, focused lines of unholy light, as Ravel and his wizards took their places and began their web-spinning.
Now it was a competition as priestess and wizard vied for the top honors in the ghostly slaughter.
“Damn you,” Berellip cursed Tiago when he called for a retreat at precisely the right moment, drow rider and drider alike running back to the opposite flank just in time for the spinning lightning net to cross above them harmlessly.
The dwarf ghosts did not flee as the orcs had back in the cavern city, and a host of them fell under that net. The sparking, biting filaments crackled as it battered them.
Berellip and many other drow averted their sensitive eyes from the bright white energy.
When all finally settled, the number of ghosts was greatly diminished. The few remaining drifted back to narrower halls, moaning all the way.
“Secure the cavern!” Jearth’s voice rang out above the din. “Huzzah for Ravel!”
A great cheer went up, and Berellip seethed.
Her visage did not soften as Tiago Baenre rode up beside her and Saribel.
“You chose sides,” Berellip warned. “You chose wrongly.”
“Not so,” Tiago flippantly replied. “It was a coordinated effort and you and your priestesses played no small role. It would seem that I was wrong, and that priestesses have a place, after all. Other than in the bedroom, I mean.”
“Blasphemy,” Saribel mouthed, and Berellip stared at the upstart male incredulously.
“It was quite a beating you put on your brother over such an innocuous, and indeed a worthwhile, slight,” said the confident young Baenre, who was ever so full of surprises.
“Are the Baenre sisters so used to you speaking in such a manner?” Berellip warned.
“Of course not!” Tiago said with a laugh.
“You dare?” Saribel said.
“My dear Berellip,” Tiago said, unwilling to even acknowledge Saribel, other than to toss her a lewd wink, “you are a priestess of Lolth.” He gave a shallow bow, hindered as he was by sitting astride his lizard mount. “And I am the son of House Baenre.”
“You are a male,” Berellip said, as if that alone should humble Tiago. But he only sat straighter and laughed at her.
“I understand,” Tiago said with a nod. “By all conventions, you are my superior, and so you believe that to be the case. But consider, upon whose side in our battle would Matron Mother Quenthel stand? In customary terms, you are correct in your indignation, but in practical terms?”
“You’re a long way from House Baenre,” Berellip warned.
“Do you believe that I was selected to go along with you at random?”
That gave Berellip pause.
“Selected,” Tiago said again, emphatically. “House Baenre knows your every movement, and every intention. Understand now that I alone will determine if House Baenre will allow Xorlarrin the room you desire to found your city. I alone. A bad word from me will doom Xorlarrin to a noble—excepting perhaps some spellspinners, as their powers have intrigued Matron Mother Quenthel of late. Since Gromph has retired mostly to his room at Sorcere and meddles little in Baenre business, Quenthel has come to see a growing gap in the armada of House Baenre, one that would be nicely filled by absorbing some of Xorlarrin’s skilled spellspinners.”
“Then she would want them obedient!” Berellip argued, and her tone made her sound desperate, and so clearly revealed that she had lost the initiative in this argument.
Tiago had easily gained the upper hand, and he wasn’t about to let it go. “She will want what I tell her to want,” the brash young warrior replied. “And to dispel any secret hopes you now harbor, understand that if I am killed out here beyond Menzoberranzan, Matron Mother Quenthel will hold Zeerith Q’Xorlarrin personally responsible. And of course, her daughters as well.”
Berellip stared at him, not blinking, not backing down, not willing to give him the satisfaction.
“You would doom Xorlarrin to a noble,” Tiago quietly reiterated, and then he smiled and signed so that only Berellip could see, I do anticipate our next coupling, and he rode away, as if nothing was amiss.
Not so far behind that encounter, Brack’thal Xorlarrin leaned against the corridor’s stone wall, his sensitive fingers feeling the stone, his thoughts permeating the stone. Ravel had felt the tingling of elemental energy here, but that paled compared to the understanding Brack’thal had for such magic. In his day, he had been one of the strongest evokers in Menzoberranzan, a drow who could reach to the elemental planes, so it seemed, to bring forth fire and lightning and other primordial powers. Once he had commanded an entire company of earth elementals, for no better reason than to impress the masters of Sorcere.
Now he felt it, the fiery beast, the god of flaming destruction. This was why Matron Zeerith had included him in his hated brother’s expedition, and now, suddenly, feeling that power, experiencing the clarity of mind which could only be brought through such a close communion with an old and basic power, Brack’thal held his curses back, and even thanked Zeerith for allowing him this journey.
He did not even watch the battle at hand before him. His sisters would win out, he fully expected, and he could no sooner turn from this stone, from the deep sensations and vibrations of the primordial beast of fire than he could from a tryst with Lady Lolth herself.
For the promise was no less.
The promise of power.
The promise of magical strength as it had been those many years ago.