Homeland (6 page)

Vierna glanced curiously at her sister. At the same instant that Maya had sensed Nalfein’s death, Vierna, melded with Dinin, had felt a strong emotive surge. Elation? Vierna brought a slender finger up to her pursed lips, wondering if Dinin had successfully pulled off the assassination.

Briza still held the spider-shaped knife over the babe’s chest, wanting to give this one to Lolth.

“We promised the Spider Queen the third living son,” Maya warned. “And that has been given.”

“But not in sacrifice,” argued Briza.

Vierna shrugged, at a loss. “If Lolth accepted Nalfein, then he has been given. To give another might evoke the Spider Queen’s anger.”

“But to not give what we have promised would be worse still!” Briza insisted.

“Then finish the deed,” said Maya.

Briza clenched down tight on the dagger and began the ritual again.

“Stay your hand,” Matron Malice commanded, propping herself up in the chair. “Lolth is content; our victory is won. Welcome, then, your brother, the newest member of House Do’Urden.”

“Just a male,” Briza commented in obvious disgust, walking away from the idol and the child.

“Next time we shall do better,” Matron Malice chuckled, though she wondered if there would be a next time. She approached the end of her fifth century of life, and drow elves, even young ones, were not a particularly fruitful lot. Briza had been born to Malice at the youthful age of one hundred, but in the almost four centuries since, Malice had produced only five other children. Even this baby, Drizzt, had come as a surprise, and Malice hardly expected that she would ever conceive again.

“Enough of such contemplations,” Malice whispered to herself, exhausted. “There will be ample time …” She sank back into her chair and fell into fitful, though wickedly pleasant, dreams of heightening power.

Zaknafein walked through the central pillar of the DeVir complex, his hood in his hand and his whip and sword comfortably replaced on his belt. Every now and a ring of battle sounded, only to be quickly ended. House Do’Urden had rolled through to victory, the tenth house had taken the fourth, and now all that remained was to remove evidence and witnesses. One group of lesser female clerics marched through, tending to the wounded Do’Urdens and animating the corpses of those beyond their ability, so that the bodies could walk away from the crime scene. Back at the Do’Urden compound, those corpses not beyond repair would be resurrected and put back to work.

Zak turned away with a visible shudder as the clerics moved from room to room, the marching line of Do’Urden zombies growing ever longer at their backs.

As distasteful as Zaknafein found this troupe, the one that followed was even worse. Two Do’Urden clerics led a contingent of soldiers through the structure, using detection spells to determine hiding places of surviving DeVirs. One stopped in the hallway just a few steps from Zak, her eyes turned inward as she felt the emanations of her spell. She held her fingers out in front of her, tracing a slow line, like some macabre divining rod, toward drow flesh.

“In there!” she declared, pointing to a panel at the base of the wall. The soldiers jumped to it like a pack of ravenous wolves and tore through the secret door. Inside a hidden cubby huddled the children of House DeVir. These were nobles, not commoners, and could not be taken alive.

Zak quickened his pace to get beyond the scene, but he heard vividly the children’s helpless screams as the hungry Do’Urden soldiers finished their job. Zak found himself in a run now. He rushed around a bend in the hallway, nearly bowling over Dinin and Rizzen.

“Nalfein is dead,” Rizzen declared impassively.

Zak immediately turned a suspicious eye on the younger Do’Urden son.

“I killed the DeVir soldier who committed the deed,” Dinin assured him, not even hiding his cocky smile.

Zak had been around for nearly four centuries, and he was certainly not ignorant of the ways of his ambitious race. The brother princes had come in defensively at the back of the lines, with a host of Do’Urden soldiers between them and the enemy. By the time they even encountered a drow that was not of their own house, the majority of the DeVirs’ surviving soldiers had already switched allegiance to House Do’Urden. Zak doubted that either of the Do’Urden brothers had even seen action against a DeVir.

“The description of the carnage in the prayer room has been spread throughout the ranks,” Rizzen said to the weapons master. “You performed with your usual excellence—as we have come to expect.”

Zak shot the patron a glare of contempt and kept on his way, down though the structure’s main doors and out beyond the magical darkness and silence into Menzoberranzan’s dark dawn. Rizzen was Matron Malice’s present partner in a long line of partners, and no more. When Malice was finished with him, she would either relegate him back to the ranks of the common soldiery, stripping him of the name Do’Urden and all the rights that accompanied it, or she would dispose of him. Zak owed him no respect.

Zak moved out beyond the mushroom fence to the highest vantage point he could find, then fell to the ground. He watched, amazed, a few moments later, when the procession of the Do’Urden army, patron and son, soldiers and clerics, and the slow-moving line of two dozen drow zombies, made its way back home. They had lost, and left behind, nearly all of their slave fodder in the attack, but the line leaving the wreckage of House DeVir was longer than the line that had come in earlier that night. The slaves had been replaced twofold by captured DeVir slaves, and fifty or more of the DeVir common troops, showing typical drow loyalty, had willingly joined the attackers. These traitorous drow would be interrogated— magically interrogated—by the Do’Urden clerics to ensure their sincerity.

They would pass the test to a one, Zak knew. Drow elves were creatures of survival, not of principle. The soldiers would be given new identities and would be kept within the privacy of the Do’Urden compound for a few months, until the fall of House DeVir became an old and forgotten tale.

Zak did not follow immediately. Rather, he cut through the rows of mushroom trees and found a secluded dell, where he plopped down on a patch of mossy carpet and raised his gaze to the eternal darkness of the cavern’s ceiling—and the eternal darkness of his existence.

It would have been prudent for him to remain silent at that time; he was an invader to the most powerful section of the vast city. He thought of the possible witnesses to his words, the same dark elves who had watched the fall of House DeVir, who had wholeheartedly enjoyed the spectacle. In the face of such behavior and such carnage as this night had seen, Zak could not contain his emotions. His lament came out as a plea to some god beyond his experience.

“What place is this that is my world; what dark coil has my spirit embodied?” he whispered the angry disclaimer that had always been a part of him. “In light, I see my skin as black; in darkness, it glows white in the heat of this rage I cannot dismiss.

“Would that I had the courage to depart, this place or this life, or to stand openly against the wrongness that is the world of these, my kin. To seek an existence that does not run afoul to that which I believe, and to that which I hold dear faith is truth.

“Zaknafein Do’Urden, I am called, yet a drow I am not, by choice or by deed. Let them discover this being that I am, then. Let them rain their wrath on these old shoulders already burdened by the hopelessness of Menzoberranzan.”

Ignoring the consequences, the weapons master rose to his feet and yelled, “Menzoberranzan, what hell are you?”

A moment later, when no answer echoed back out of the quiet city, Zak flexed the remaining chill of Briza’s wand from his weary muscles. He found some comfort as he patted the whip on his belt—the instrument that had taken the tongue from the mouth of a matron mother.

asoj, the young apprentice—which at this point in his magicusing career meant that he was no more than a cleaning attendant—leaned on his broom and watched as Alton DeVir moved through the door into the highest chamber of the spire. Masoj almost felt sympathy for the student, who had to go in and face the Faceless One.

Masoj felt excitement as well, though, knowing that the ensuing fireworks between Alton and the faceless master would be well worth the watching. He went back to his sweeping, using the broom as an excuse to get farther around the curve of the room’s floor, closer to the door.

“You requested my presence, Master Faceless One,” Alton DeVir said again, keeping one hand in front of his face and squinting to fight the brilliant glare of the room’s three lighted candles. Alton shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other just inside the shadowy room’s door.

Hunched across the way, the Faceless One kept his back to the young DeVir. Better to be done with this cleanly, the master reminded himself. He knew, though, that the spell he was now preparing would kill Alton before the student could learn his family’s fate, before the Faceless One could fully complete Dinin Do’Urden’s final instructions. Too much was at stake. Better to be done with this cleanly.

“You …” Alton began again, but he prudently held his words and tried to sort out the situation before him. How unusual to be summoned to the private chambers of a master of the Academy before the day’s lessons had even begun.

When he had first received the summons, Alton feared that he had somehow failed one of his lessons. That could be a fatal mistake in Sorcere. Alton was close to graduation, but the disdain of a single master could put an end to that.

He had done quite well in his lessons with the Faceless One, had even believed that this mysterious master favored him. Could this call be simply a courtesy of congratulations on his impending graduation? Unlikely, Alton realized against his hopes. Masters of the drow Academy did not often congratulate students.

Alton then heard quiet chanting and noticed that the master was in the midst of spellcasting. Something cried out as very wrong to him now; something about this whole situation did not fit the strict ways of the Academy. Alton set his feet firmly and tensed his muscles, following the advice of the motto that had been drilled into the thoughts of every student at the Academy, the precept that kept drow elves alive in a society so devoted to chaos: Be prepared.

The doors exploded before him, showering the room with stone splinters and throwing Masoj back against the wall. He felt the show well worth both the inconvenience and the new bruise on his shoulder when Alton DeVir scrambled out of the room. The student’s back and left arm trailed wisps of smoke, and the most exquisite expression of terror and pain that Masoj had ever seen was etched on the DeVir noble’s face.

Alton stumbled to the floor and kicked into a roll, desperate to put some ground between himself and the murderous master. He made it down and around the descending arc of the room’s floor and through the door that led into the next lower chamber just as the Faceless One made his appearance at the sundered door.

The master stopped to spit a curse at his misfire, and to consider the best way to replace his door. “Clean it up!” he snapped at Masoj, who was again leaning casually with his hands atop his broomstick and his chin atop his hands.

Masoj obediently dropped his head and started sweeping the stone splinters. He looked up as the Faceless One stalked past, however, and cautiously started after the master.

Alton couldn’t possibly escape, and this show would be too good to miss.

The third room, the Faceless One’s private library, was the brightest of the four in the spire, with dozens of candles burning on each wall.

“Damn this light!” Alton spat, stumbling his way down through the dizzying blur to the door that led to the Faceless One’s entry hall, the lowest room of the master’s quarters. If he could get down from this spire and outside of the tower to the courtyard of the Academy, he might be able to turn the momentum against the master.

Alton’s world remained the darkness of Menzoberranzan, but the Faceless One, who had spent so many decades in the candlelight of Sorcere, had grown accustomed to using his eyes to see shades of light, not heat.

The entry hall was cluttered with chairs and chests, but only one candle burned there, and Alton could see clearly enough to dodge or leap any obstacles. He rushed to the door and grabbed the heavy latch. It turned easily enough, but when Alton tried to shoulder through, the door did not budge and a burst of sparkling blue energy threw him back to the floor.

“Curse this place,” Alton spat. The portal was magically held. He knew a spell to open such enchanted doors but doubted whether his magic would be strong enough to dispel the castings of a master. In his haste and fear, the words of the dweomer floated through Alton’s thoughts in an indecipherable jumble.

“Do not run, DeVir,” came the Faceless One’s call from the previous chamber. “You only lengthen your torment!”

“A curse upon you, too,” Alton replied under his breath. Alton forgot about the stupid spell; it would never come to him in time. He glanced around the room for an option.

His eyes found something unusual halfway up the side wall, in an opening between two large cabinets. Alton scrambled back a few steps to get a better angle but found himself caught within the range of the candlelight, within the deceptive field where his eyes registered both heat and light.

He could only discern that this section of the wall showed a uniform glow in the heat spectrum and that its hue was subtly different from the stone of the walls. Another doorway? Alton could only hope his guess to be right. He rushed back to the center of the room, stood directly across from the object, and forced his eyes away from the infrared spectrum, fully back into the world of light.

As his eyes adjusted, what came into view both startled and confused the young DeVir. He saw no doorway, nor any opening with another chamber behind it. What he looked upon was a reflection of himself, and a portion of the room he now stood in. Alton had never, in his fifty-five years of life, witnessed such a spectacle, but he had heard the masters of Sorcere speak of these devices. It was a mirror.

A movement in the upper doorway of the chamber reminded Alton that the Faceless One was almost upon him. He couldn’t hesitate to ponder his options. He put his head down and charged the mirror.

Perhaps it was a teleportation door to another section of the city, perhaps a simple door to a room beyond. Or perhaps, Alton dared to imagine in those few desperate seconds, this was some interplanar gate that would bring him into a strange and unknown plane of existence!

He felt the tingling excitement of adventure pulling him on as he neared the wondrous thing—then he felt only the impact, the shattering glass, and the unyielding stone wall behind it.

Perhaps it was just a mirror.

“Look at his eyes,” Vierna whispered to Maya as they examined the newest member of House Do’Urden.

Truly the babe’s eyes were remarkable. Though the child had been out of the womb for less than an hour, the pupils of his orbs darted back and forth inquisitively. While they showed the expected radiating glow of eyes seeing into the infrared spectrum, the familiar redness was tinted by a shade of blue, giving them a violet hue.

“Blind?” wondered Maya. “Perhaps this one will be given to the Spider Queen still.”

Briza looked back to them anxiously. Dark elves did not allow children showing any physical deficiency to live.

“Not blind,” replied Vierna, passing her hand over the child and casting an angry glare at both of her eager sisters. “He follows my fingers”

Maya saw that Vierna spoke the truth. She leaned closer to the babe, studying his face and strange eyes. “What do you see, Drizzt Do’Urden?” she asked softly, not in an act of gentleness toward the babe, but so that she would not disturb her mother, resting in the chair at the head of the spider idol.

“What do you see that the rest of us cannot?”