Condemnation (21 page)

Pharaun stepped forward and gestured boldly at the leading boat, barking out the words of a spell. From his fingertips a small orange bead of flame streaked out, darting across the dark water with the speed of an arrow. It seemed to vanish into the blackness, swallowed by the bulk of the leading boat—and a brilliant blast of flame erupted right at the pursuer’s prow, scouring the foredecks with a roar that echoed through the great cavern. Duergar wreathed in flames lurched and stumbled in the distance, with more of them falling or throwing themselves over the side.

“Well done!” Quenthel cried.

Even Jeggred roared in glee, but a moment later a buzzing globe of blue energy rose from the second ship and streaked back at them. Pharaun started a spell of deflection or warding, but he was unable to parry the blow, and glaring streaks of lightning enveloped Coalhewer’s boat. The very air roared with dozens of thunderclaps and explosions as crawling arcs of electricity detonated barrels, casks, and fittings, or sizzled into flesh. Halisstra cried out and buckled to the deck as a bolt stabbed through her left hip, while Ryld collapsed jerking to the deck, his breastplate glowing blue-white with the lightning ball’s energy.

The skeletal rowers kept at their toil, driving the boat onward.

Pharaun jerked out his wand and hurled a bolt back at the boat that had launched the lightning ball at them. A skipping meteor of blinding fire flew at them from the leading boat, bounding across the water with an almost animate hunger. By a stroke of good luck, the missile struck a lowlying rocky outcropping and detonated behind them, spreading a slick of burning fluid across the water’s surface. The third boat fired its catapult again, sending a cometlike ball of flame whizzing clear over the bridge to explode a short distance ahead.

“Damnation,” Coalhewer snarled. “They’ve got the range on us!”

“It seems that I am somewhat outnumbered,” Pharaun called out between spells. “Perhaps we should redouble our efforts to escape?”

Arrows hissed past them, clattering against the boat or sticking into the zurkhwood decks with heavy tchunks!

“Halisstra,” the wizard called, “would you take my wand—the one in my hand, I mean—and use it to discourage that fellow on the first boat?”

Halisstra ignored the hot ache in her hip and scrambled aft. She took the iron wand from the wizard’s hand, aiming at the lead boat as she barked out its command word. The air crackled with sparks and ozone as the bolt blasted back at the pursuing boat, only to flare impotently against some kind of spell shield that had been raised by the duergar wizards behind them.

Pharaun chanted out the words of another spell, and a thick white mist arose in their wake, its billows spreading across the water with startling speed. Almost instantly, it sprawled across their stern like a wall of white, completely blocking the pursuing boats from view.

“There,” said the wizard. “That should slow them a bit.”

“It’s fog. Won’t they just sail right through it?” Ryld asked.

“That is no ordinary fog, my friend. That fog is thick enough to arrest an arrow in mid-flight. Best of all, it is highly acidic, so that anyone blundering about in there will be slowly eaten away.” The wizard smiled and folded his arms. “Ah, damn it, I’m good.”

Quenthel opened her mouth, most likely to take issue with the wizard’s self-congratulations, when Danifae called from the bow, “Stop! Rocks ahead! Stop!”

“Bloody hell!” gasped Coalhewer. “All back full! All back full, ye great bony louts!”

The turning skeletons slowed their furious pumping, unable to arrest the heavy wheels all at once, and slowly began to spin the paddles back the other way. The dwarf did not wait on them, slamming his wheel hard over to veer away from the black line of fanglike rocks ahead. The lake seemed to come to an end, shoaling up quickly to meet the plunging ceiling. The shoreline extended left and right for as far as Halisstra could see. The boat slued to an awkward halt, its starboard bow rebounding from a thankfully rounded rock in their path. The impact staggered everyone on board, and nearly pitched Danifae headlong over the bow.

“Now what?” Ryld asked, picking himself up off the deck. “They’ve got us pinned against the cavern wall.”

“How long will your fog delay the gray dwarves?” Quenthel snapped at Pharaun.

“No more than a couple of minutes,” he answered. “They might choose to back out and go around, of course.”

Pharaun stared intently at his handiwork. In the distance, duergar screamed in pain, their cries of agony oddly muffled by the insidious white mist.

“The spell is unlikely to kill or disable very many of them,” the wizard added, “and I don’t think it’ll sink their boats.”

“Then this is where we get off,” Quenthel said. She pointed at the cavern wall. “We’ll take cover in the rocks there, and stay out of sight. We’ll send the boat that way—” she pointed toward the east—”and let the crown prince’s men chase it away from us.”

“I won’t be yer decoy!” Coalhewer snapped. “Ye got me into this mess, and ye’ll get me out of it!”

The dark elves ignored the dwarf as they hurriedly threw their packs to the wet rocks below the bow. Jeggred bounded down into the icy water and struggled up on shore, followed by Ryld and Pharaun. Valas swarmed down from the bridge and vaulted down as well.

“You’re wasting my time,” Quenthel said to the duergar captain. “Go on, now, and take your chances, or stay here and face the draegloth.”

She leaped lightly to the boulders below, joined by Halisstra and Danifae a moment later.

“But if ye … ah, damn the lot of ye to Lolth’s spidery hells!” Coalhewer swore.

He dashed back up to his bridge and began to bark orders at the skeletal rowers again. The boat slowly backed away from the rocks.

“If they catch me,” he shouted back, “I’ll tell them exactly where to find ye!”

Quenthel narrowed her eyes. She started to gesture to Jeggred, but Halisstra shook her head and started a low, droning bae’qeshel song. She gathered the force of her will and hurled it full upon the livid dwarf.

“Escape, Coalhewer,” she hissed. “Flee as quickly as you may, and do not let yourself be caught. If you are caught, better to swim to safety than to let yourself be taken.”

The invisible webs of the spell settled about the dwarf like a snowfall of deadly venom. He stared open-mouthed at Halisstra, then whirled to redouble his efforts to take his boat clear before the fog lifted. Quenthel glanced at Halisstra and raised an eyebrow.

“It seemed best to make sure he would flee as we wanted him to,” Halisstra explained as she quickly gathered her things and hurried for the cover of the boulders and stalagmites above the waterline.

Quenthel followed a step behind her. They splashed ashore and settled behind a large rock just as the prow of the first duergar boat, still glowing red with embers left from the fireball Pharaun had hurled at it, nosed through the deadly mists. The dark elves drew their piwafwis close around them and held still, watching as the duergar stirred and broke from whatever shelters they’d managed to find from the acidic fog.

One of the gray dwarves pointed and shouted, and the others joined the clamor. Turning sharply in the water, they slewed around the ship’s bow and set off after Coalhewer’s vanishing boat.

Good, signed Pharaun. I was afraid they were using magic to follow us. It seems that Master Coalhewer will render us one last service after all.

What do you think will happen when they catch him? Ryld asked.

The duergar boats pulled out of earshot.

“I suppose it depends on whether or not he can swim,” Halisstra said.

NINE

A long day’s march later, pausing only long enough to allow Pharaun to finally craft a sending to pass news of Gracklstugh’s army to Gromph, the company came to the Labyrinth. They emerged from winding, unexplored passageways into a series of miles-long natural tunnels interspersed with long, hewn ways and small, square chambers. Coalhewer, his boat, and the pursuit from Gracklstugh they’d left twenty miles or more behind them.

The tunnels were black basalt, cold and sharp, the frozen remnants of great fires from the beginning of the world. From time to time the party encountered great vertical rifts hundreds of feet high, where tunnels ended in blank walls with rough, perilous steps cut up or down to a different level where the path continued. Whole sheets of the world’s crust had sunk or fractured in places, shearing off the old lava tunnels and leaving behind vast, lightless chasms deep in the earth. A few of these places were spanned by slender bridges of stone, or circled by crude paths hacked from the hard rock of the walls. Everywhere they turned, more square passages and twisting, smooth-floored tunnels branched from their line of march, so that in the space of an hour Halisstra was forced to concede that she’d become hopelessly lost.

“I see why they call this place the Labyrinth,” she said softly, as the company threaded its way along a narrow ledge overlooking another of the chasms. “This place is truly a maze.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Valas replied from the front of the party. He paused to examine the path ahead, and another of the ubiquitous openings on one side. “It’s close to two hundred miles from north to south, and almost half that from east to west. Most of it is exactly like this, a confusion of lava tubes and hand-cut tunnels with thousands of branching turns and twists.”

“How can you hope to find House Jaelre in all this?” Ryld asked. “Do you know this place so well that you’ve mastered it?”

“Mastered it? Hardly. You could spend a lifetime here and never see the whole thing, but I do know something of its ways. Several well-traveled caravan routes exist along some of the straighter paths, though we’re not near any of those. Few travelers approach the Labyrinth from the east, as we have.” The scout stepped a little ahead and brushed his hand against the wall, near the place where the other tunnel opened up. Old, strange symbols glowed with a greenish light beneath his fingertips. “Fortunately, the builders carved runes to identify their secret ways. It’s a code of markings that holds true throughout the Labyrinth. I solved the puzzle when I last journeyed here. We’re not in tunnels I traveled before, but I think I know how to reach them from here.”

“You are a lad of many talents,” Pharaun observed.

“Who carved these tunnels?” Halisstra asked. “If this place is as big as you say, it must have been a powerful realm in its day, but I can tell at a glance those marks aren’t ours. Nor are they duergar, illithid, or aboleth.”

“Minotaurs,” Valas replied. “I don’t know how long ago their realm rose or fell, but there was a great kingdom of them here at some point in the past.”

“Minotaurs?” Quenthel sneered. “They’re bestial savages. They could hardly have the wits or the patience to undertake work of this scope, let alone build a great realm.”

Valas shrugged and said, “That may be true now, but a thousand years ago, who knows? I’ve found plenty of their artifacts and remains scattered through this region. The horned skulls are quite distinctive. My friends among House Jaelre told me that many minotaurs still roam the wild places and disused passages of the Labyrinth, including demonic beasts armed with powerful sorcery. Their patrols skirmished with the monsters regularly.”

“One wonders whether we might at some point in our journey happen to pass through a realm filled with cheerful, civilized folk genuinely concerned for our well-being and eager to help us on our way,” Pharaun muttered. “I am beginning to think our fair city lies at the bottom of a barrel of venomous snakes.”

“If so, we’re quicker, stronger, and more venomous than any other snake in the barrel,” Quenthel said with a smile. “Come, let’s continue. If there are any minotaurs about, they would be well-advised not to show themselves where the children of Menzoberranzan choose to walk.”

The company continued on for several hours more through endless gloomy halls and contorted passages before calling a halt to rest and replenish their strength. The stretch of the Labyrinth they wandered seemed to be quite deserted. They found few signs that anything, even the mindless predatory creatures of the Underdark, had passed that way in many years. The air was preternaturally still and silent. Whenever their whispered conversation died away for a moment, the quiet of the place seemed to rush in upon them, pressing close with a strangely hostile quality, as if the very stone resented their presence.

After Valas and Ryld had been set to watch, the rest wrapped themselves in their piwafwis and made themselves as comfortable as possible on the cold stone floor of the cavern. Halisstra let her eyes fall half-closed and drifted off into a deep Reverie, dreaming about endless tunnels and strange old secrets buried in mold. In her dream she thought she could make out a faint, distant rustling or whisper in the quiet, as if she might hear something more if only she moved a little ways off from the others, out into the darkness alone. Despite the fact that the air was completely still and motionless, she discerned the distant deep sighing of wind far off in the tunnels, a low moaning sound that tickled at the edge of her awareness, like something important she had forgotten. Lolth’s whispers sometimes came to one in that fashion, a sibilant sigh of wordless intent filling a priestess with knowledge of the demon queen’s desires.

Hope and fear stirred in Halisstra’s heart and she came closer to wakefulness.

What is your wish, Goddess? she cried out in her mind. Tell me how House Melarn might win your favor again. Tell me how Ched Nasad might be made whole. I will do anything you command of me!

Faithless daughter, the wind whispered back to her. Foolish weakling.

Horror jolted Halisstra from her Reverie and she sat up straight, her heart pounding.

Only a dream, she told herself. I dreamed of what I wished to happen, and what I feared might come, but nothing more. The Spider Queen has not spoken. She has not condemned me.

Nearby, the others lay on the cold stone floor or sat wrapped deep in their own meditations, taking their rest, while a little distance away Ryld stood guard, a broad-shouldered shape motionless in the dark. The daughter of House Melarn lowered her eyes and listened to the curious sound of the wind, surrounded in the darkness her people had made theirs.