Condemnation (50 page)

“Lolth will do as she will,” Valas answered. “I, however, am loyal to Bregan D’aerthe, and to my city. We can’t allow you, or even your god, to deflect us from our quest, Tzirik.”

Tzirik’s face clouded and he said, “You and your companions will not gainsay the will of Vhaeraun. I refuse to permit it.”

He crouched and raised his shield, snarling out the words of another divine spell. Valas fired again, but his arrows only ricocheted from the priest’s shield. Tzirik finished his spell and placed his wounded hand on the ground. A powerful tremor blasted through the stone and bludgeoned the Menzoberranyr, flinging them about like dolls and ripping open great cracks in the substance of the stone plain, crevices that led into absolute blackness below.

Valas staggered back and forth, trying to keep his balance as the stones cracked and buckled beneath him. Danifae steadied herself and snapped off a shot with her crossbow that passed through the blades and struck Tzirik a ringing hit on the breastplate, but the bolt shivered into pieces on the priest’s armor.

Quenthel managed a desperate, off-balance leap to keep from toppling into a gaping crevice beneath her. She rolled awkwardly, and came up with a short iron rod in her hand. The high priestess barked a command word and discharged a white sphere of some magical, viscous substance at the priest, but Tzirik’s seething blades ripped apart the viscid glob in a spray of gluey strands.

“Get up, Halisstra,” Quenthel hissed. “Your sister priestesses need you!”

The powerful tremors took Halisstra’s feet out from under her the first time she tried to stand. She shook her head and tried again.

My sisters need me? she thought. Strange, as our goddess apparently has no use for any of us who serve as her priestesses. If Lolth chooses to turn her back on me, to spurn my faithfulness and devotion, then the least I can do is return the favor.

Throughout Halisstra’s life she had willingly joined ranks with her worst enemies, her most bitter rivals, when something rose to threaten the absolute dominion over dark elf society she and her sister priestesses shared. Staring off into the endless, empty expanse of the Demonweb Pits, she found that she would not take one single step in Lolth’s name.

“Let him do as he will,” she said to Quenthel. “Lolth has taught me not to care. If we managed to preserve Lolth’s very existence today, do you think she would be grateful? If I tore my own heart out and laid it on the Spider Queen’s altar, do you think she would be pleased by my sacrifice?”

Bitter laughter welled up in her throat and Halisstra gave herself over to it, even as Tzirik’s tremors subsided. Her heart ached with a hurt that could rend the world in two, but she could not find a voice for it.

Quenthel stared at her in horror.

“Blasphemy,” she managed to whisper.

The Mistress of Arach-Tinilith gathered up her whip and turned on Halisstra, but before she could strike, Tzirik struck with another spell, scouring the entire party with sheets of incandescent flames that raced back and forth across the stone plain like water sloshing on a plate. Halisstra threw herself flat and cried out in pain. The others cursed or cried out, scrabbling for cover that did not exist.

“Leave me!” Tzirik commanded from within his cage of whirling steel.

He stooped down and picked up his scroll, while the Menzoberranyr picked themselves up from the smoking stones.

Ryld rose slowly, his flesh seared at face and hands, and watched as the cleric started to cast his spell again. The weapons master eyed the spinning blades surrounding the priest, and with the quickness of a big cat, he gathered up his legs and sprang into the barrier, crouching low into the tightest ball possible. Droplets of blood splattered nearby as the whirling magical blades sparked and sliced against the weapons master’s dwarven armor, drawing blood in a dozen places—but the Master of Melee-Magthere was through the barrier.

He staggered to his feet with an animal grunt of pain, Splitter gripped awkwardly in his slashed hands, but he managed to drive at Tzirik with the point of the greatsword. Once again the cleric was forced to drop his scroll. He parried the thrust with his shield and lashed back with his spiked mace.

Ryld avoided the blow only by leaping backward, so close to the whirling blades that sparks flew from his shoulders as the razors kissed his back. He recovered and glided forward again, spinning his deadly sword and slashing quickly at the Jaelre cleric.

Valas, standing outside the whirling blades, reached up to the nine-pointed star token on his breast and touched it. In the blink of an eye he vanished, reappearing inside the barrier behind Tzirik. He dropped his bow and drew his kukris, but Tzirik surprised him.

Turning his back on Ryld, the strong cleric took three powerful strides and slammed his heavy shield into the Bregan D’aerthe even as Valas got his knives in hand. With a roar of anger the Jaelre shoved Valas back into the curtain of deadly razors and sent the scout stumbling through, spinning and screaming as the blades sliced his flesh.

Ryld made Tzirik pay by darting forward to strike out with a full double-handed slash across the torso that spun the priest half around, but the cleric’s plate armor held against the blow. In response, Tzirik leaped in close to Ryld, inside the fighter’s reach, and rained down a barrage of wicked blows with the spiked mace, driving the weapons master back.

Ryld gathered himself for another assault, but at that moment Quenthel hurled herself through the blades as well. One sliced her calf deeply and sent her stumbling when she passed through, and she went to one knee with a gasp of pain, blocking Ryld. Tzirik stepped back out of reach of the Baenre’s whip, and quickly called out a spell. Ryld froze in place as the cleric ensnared him, freezing his will and paralyzing his muscles.

Quick as a snake, Tzirik turned on Quenthel and hammered her to the ground even as she tried to stand on her injured leg. Avoiding the hissing serpent heads, Tzirik kicked her whip back outside the curtain of blades, and turned to crush Ryld’s skull while the weapons master was helpless before him. The bronze mace drew back for the lethal blow—and Tzirik was sent reeling away from his intended victim, battered by a powerful blast of sound.

Halisstra, standing just on the other side of the blades, followed with a second bae’qeshel song and scoured the cleric again. She would not fight for Lolth again, but she would fight for her companions, Ryld in particular.

“Do not kill the priest,” she called to her companions. “We need him to bring us home!”

“What do you suggest, then?” Danifae snapped from beside her. “He seems intent on destroying us!”

“Indeed,” said Tzirik.

The Jaelre priest recovered from Halisstra’s spells and lashed out with one of his own, calling down from the black skies above a column of crawling purple fire that blasted Halisstra and Danifae. The cleric wheeled to confront Quenthel, who was just gathering herself to leap at his back. He hefted his mace.

“I take great pleasure in slaying clerics of the Spider Queen,” Tzirik said. “When you awake in Minauthkeep, I’ll slay you again there.”

He advanced on her, his cruel eyes alight as Quenthel hobbled awkwardly, seeking to dodge the inevitable blow.

Tzirik’s breastplate simply vanished. The cleric halted in consternation, and glanced down. All other pieces of his full plate armor remained in place, but then—slowly—his arming coat vanished as well, revealing the smooth black flesh of his torso and chest.

“What in the Masked Lord’s name?” he muttered, and glanced up just in time to turn away from Danifae, who shot a bolt at his heart that instead caught the cleric’s shield. His mystification turned abruptly and instantly to pure terror. “No!” he screamed. “N—”

Some unseen force ripped open Tzirik’s bare chest and began to pluck the gory ribs one by one out of his jerking torso. Blood and bits of bone splattered all around, yet the cleric impossibly kept to his feet as he was flensed alive before the astonished Menzoberranyr.

Halisstra, who had seen many terrible things at Lolth’s altars, recoiled in horror. With a cold, distant part of her mind, she noted that the flesh and bone torn out of Tzirik simply faded away, just as his armor had.

It’s not happening here, she realized. Tzirik is being murdered, but back in Minauthkeep.

One final obscene blow seized the contents of Tzirik’s chest cavity and literally strewed them abroad. The Jaelre priest sank to his knees as his eyes rolled up in his head. From some immense distance a shining silver cord appeared, tethered to the priest’s back. It recoiled sharply into his astral body with a psychic force that plucked at Halisstra’s very soul, and Tzirik was gone, as if he had never existed.

“Gods …” Valas managed to say, then he grunted in shock.

All of them felt it at the same instant—a violent wrenching of their psyches that rent the stone plain and the black temple into a thousand silvery shards.

Halisstra opened her mouth, a scream of terror welling up inside her, but before she could draw another breath she was yanked away into oblivion.

Halisstra awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright from the musty old divan in Tzirik’s hidden chamber. It took her a moment to understand that she was alive. The experience of having her soul wrenched from the Demonweb Pits back to Faerun in an instant by Tzirik’s destruction was not something she cared to repeat. It took her a moment longer than that to understand that she was no longer in any physical pain.

Where she did ache, though, was in her heart. A great, hot hurt throbbed in the center of her being, a grief so keen and vast that Halisstra could not imagine anything that could swallow it.

She pressed her hand to her chest as if to smooth out the ache beneath her breastbone, and slowly looked around. The others in the company were rising, too, all variously dazed or groggy from their experience. To her right, Tzirik lay still on his couch, his body torn apart. Blood splattered the walls of the chamber, and awful pieces of the Jaelre cleric lay discarded on the floor. Beside the priest’s ruined corpse squatted Jeggred, licking blood from his white fur. A pair of Jaelre warriors lay close at hand, their throats torn out.

“Mistress?” the draegloth asked Quenthel. “What happened? What did you learn?”

Quenthel’s eyes fell on Tzirik’s corpse and the dead Jaelre guards nearby, and she scowled.

“What in the goddess’s name were you thinking?” she asked the draegloth. “Why did you slay him?”

“The guards? They seemed likely to object to my work on the heretic,” answered Jeggred.

“No, not them,” the priestess said, “Tzirik!”

Jeggred’s eyes narrowed, and a low growl began in his throat. The half-demon straightened and paced around the couches toward Pharaun, clenching his claws.

“Wizard, if you caused me to fail in my duty to—”

“Pharaun …” Quenthel said, frowning as she struggled to collect her thoughts. It didn’t take her long. Recollection dawned in her eyes, and she wheeled to glare at the Master of Sorcere. “You abandoned us in the middle of the Demonweb Pits, when we needed you the most. Explain yourself!”

“I deemed it necessary,” Pharaun said. “We were in mortal danger, but we could not flee without Tzirik’s complicity, and it seemed clear to me that Tzirik had no intention of going anywhere. The best method for escape I could contrive was to direct a sending to Jeggred, and instruct him to slay Tzirik’s material body. As the priest is the one who cast the spell of astral travel, his death ended it for all of us—rather more abruptly than I would have liked, but I could think of no other options. I told Jeggred you ordered it, since I was not certain he would kill the cleric simply because I asked him to.”

“Your cowardice ripped us away from the one place we had a hope of winning our answers,” Quenthel growled.

“No,” said Halisstra. “Pharaun’s prudence engineered our escape from an impossible situation, in the one manner that had any hope of working.”

“What is the point of escaping, when we failed to complete our quest?” the Baenre demanded.

“Answers? There were no answers to be had, Quenthel,” Halisstra said. “We could have abased ourselves before her until the end of time, and the Spider Queen could not have cared less. The quest was pointless—and it was a quest you were never certain of anyway. Or were there storehouses to raid in the Abyss?”

“I let your blasphemy and pridefulness pass in the Demonweb Pits, girl, but I will not do so again,” Quenthel said. “If you speak to me again in such a manner, I will have your tongue torn out at the roots. You will be punished for your lack of faith, Halisstra Melarn. The Spider Queen will visit unimaginable torments upon you for your lack of respect.”

“At least that would be a sign that she lives,” Halisstra replied.

She stood and began to gather her belongings. In the stone halls beyond their chamber, she could hear distant shouts of alarm and the clatter of many feet coming nearer. It seemed almost beneath her notice.

“The Jaelre are coming,” Danifae said. “They might have something to say about the evisceration of their high priest.”

“I would prefer not to have to cut my way out of this castle,” Ryld offered. “I’ve had my fill of fighting today.”

With a low growl, Quenthel tore her attention away from Halisstra and studied the small chamber. She chewed her lip in agitation, as if wrestling with an idea she didn’t like, then she muttered a curse and turned to Pharaun.

“Do you have a spell that can get us out of here?”

Pharaun smirked, obviously pleased that Quenthel had been forced to resort to his powers so quickly after condemning his actions.

“It’s a bit of a stretch, but I think I can teleport us all at once,” he said. “Where do we wish to go? I can’t bring us safely into the Underdark, but other than that. …”

“Anywhere but here,” Quenthel replied. “We need time to consider what we’ve seen and learned, and what we must do next.”

“The cave mouth the portal from the Labyrinth led to,” Valas said. “It’s several days’ march from here, and not heavily traveled.

“Fine,” Quenthel snapped. “Take us.”