R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation (23 page)

Smylla frowned. From a subtle shift of expression, the mage knew she was deciding whether or not to lie.

“More drow males than usual have visited the Braeryn,” she said. “Indulging their most sordid impulses, I assumed, but as far as I know they didn’t stay here. If they did, I don’t know where.”

Ryld sighed. Pharaun knew how he felt. Generally speaking, the wizard relished a baffling, brain-cramping puzzle, but even he was growing impatient at their lack of progress.

Given the lack of any sensible leads, he resolved to follow where intuition led. Still caught up in his role of sympathizer, he dared to step to the cot and pat Smylla on her bony shoulder. She gasped. In all likelihood, no one had touched her for a long while, either.

“Don’t abandon hope,” Pharaun said. “Perhaps we can still make a trade. Fortunately, my comrade and I are interested in other matters as well. Has anything peculiar occurred in the Braeryn of late?”

The clairvoyant rasped out another painful-sounding laugh.

“You mean aside from the fact that last tenday, the animals rose up against me?”

“I do find that interesting. As you confessed, your magical talents withered away some time ago. Since then, you’ve dominated the goblins through bluff and force of personality, and it worked until a few days ago. What changed? Where did the undercreatures find the courage to turn against you? Have you noticed anything that might account for it?”

“Well,” said Smylla, “it could just be they saw me failing physically, but—” Her cracked lips stretched into a grin. “You’re good, Master Mizzrym. You give me a smile, friendly conversation, a soft touch on the arm, and my tongue starts to flap. That’s loneliness for you. But I will have my cure before I give up anything of importance.”

“Very sensible.” Pharaun extracted an empty cocoon from one of his pockets. “What do you wish to become?”

“One of you,” she said, leering. “I once heard a philosopher say that everyone becomes the thing he hates.”

“He must have been a cheery fellow to have about. Now, brace yourself. This will only take a moment, but it may hurt a little.”

Employing greater care than usual, he recited the incantation and used the ridged silken case to write a symbol on the air.

Magic shrilled through the air, and the temperature plummeted. For a moment, the whole room rippled and shimmered, then the distortion concentrated itself on Smylla’s shriveled body. Tendons standing out in her neck, she screamed.

Beyond the door, one of the bugbears shouted, “We want to get even, too! We had a bargain!”

Smylla’s sores faded away, and her emaciated form filled out into a healthy slimness. Her ashen skin darkened to a gleaming black, her blue eyes turned red, and her ears grew points. Her features became more delicate. Her snowy hair thickened, changing from brittle and lusterless to wavy and glossy.

“The pain went away,” she breathed. “I feel stronger.” “Of course,” Pharaun said.

She stared at her hands, then sat up, rose from the cot, and tried to walk. At first she moved with an invalid’s caution, but gradually, as she proved to herself that she wouldn’t fall, that hesitancy passed. After a moment, she was striding, jumping, and spinning like an exuberant little girl testing her strength, her grimy nightshirt flapping about her.

“You did it!” she said, and the pure, uncalculated gratitude in her crimson eyes showed that even wearing the flesh of a dark elf maiden, she was still human at the core.

Though it was foreign to his own nature, Pharaun found her appreciation rather gratifying. Still, he hadn’t transformed her to bask in her naïve sentimentality but to elicit some answers.

“Now,” he said, “please, tell us.”

“Right.” She took a deep breath to compose herself and said, “I do believe something emboldened the undercreatures in this house. What’s more, I think it’s affected goblinoids throughout the Braeryn.”

“What is it?” asked Ryld.

“I don’t know.”

The warrior grimaced.

“What led you to infer this agency?” Pharaun asked. “I assume you were housebound even before you barricaded yourself in your room.”

“I saw a change in the brutes who live here. They were surly, insolent, and foul-tempered, ready to maim and kill one another at the slightest provocation.”

Ryld hitched his shoulders, working stiffness out or shifting Splitter to lie more comfortably across his back.

“How is that different than normal?” asked the weapons master.

Smylla scowled at him and said, “All things are relative. The creatures exhibited those qualities to a greater extent than before, and whenever I heard tidings from beyond these walls, they suggested the entire precinct shared the same truculent humor.”

Pharaun nodded. “Did you hear about tribal emblems appearing in the streets?”

“Yes,” she said. “That bespeaks a kind of madness, don’t you think?”

“Maybe in one or two thralls,” said Ryld. “What of it? You promised my friend information. Tell us something we don’t already know, and I mean facts, not your impressions.”

The clairvoyant smiled. “All right. I was building up to it. Every few nights a drum beats somewhere in the Braeryn, calling the lower orders to some sort of gathering. Many of the occupants of this house clear out. With what little remains of my clairvoyance, I’ve sensed many others skulking through the streets, all converging on a common destination.”

“Nonsense,” said Ryld. “Why has no drow patrol heard the signal and come to investigate?”

“Because,” said Pharaun, “the city possesses enchantments to mute sound.”

“Well, maybe.” Ryld turned back to Smylla. “Where do the creatures go, and why?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but perhaps, with my health and occult talents restored, I could find out.” She beamed at Pharaun. “I’d be happy to try. I fulfilled the letter of our bargain, but I do realize I haven’t provided you with all that much in exchange for the priceless gift you gave me.”

“That remark touches on the question of your future,” the wizard said. “You’d have no difficulty reestablishing your dominion here in the Stenchstreets, but why live so meanly? I could use an aide of your caliber. Or, if you prefer, I can arrange your safe repatriation to the World Above.”

As he spoke, he surreptitiously contorted the fingers of his left hand, expressing himself in the silent language of the dark elves, a system of gestures as efficient and comprehensive as the spoken word.

“I think—” Smylla began, then her eyes opened wide.

She whimpered. Ryld pulled his short sword out of her back, and she collapsed. Pharaun skipped back to keep her from toppling against him.

“Despite her previous experiences,” the lanky wizard said, “she couldn’t quite leave off trusting drow. I suppose it shows you can take the human out of the sunshine, but not the sunshine out of the human.” He shook his head. “This is the second female I’ve slain or murdered by proxy in the brief time since our adventure began, and I didn’t particularly want to kill either one of them. Do you suspect an underlying metaphysical significance?”

“How would I know? I take it you bade me kill the snitch because she was feeding us lies.”

“Oh, no. I’m convinced she was telling the truth. The problem was that I deceived her. Her metamorphosis didn’t really purge her disease. It was a bit tricky just suppressing it for a moment.”

Pharaun stepped back again to keep the spreading pool of blood from staining his boots, and Ryld cleaned the short sword on the dead human’s bedding.

“You didn’t want to leave her alive and angry to carry tales to Greyanna,” the weapons master said.

“It’s unlikely they would have found one another, but why take the chance?”

“And you asked Smylla about the marks on the walls. You’re just too cursed curious to let the subject go.”

Pharaun grinned. “Don’t be silly. I’m the very model of singleminded determination, and I was asking to further our mission.”

Ryld glanced at the door and the iron bar. They were still holding.

“What does the strange behavior of goblins have to do with the rogue males?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Pharaun answered, “but we have two oddities occurring at the same time and in the same precinct. Doesn’t it make sense to infer a relationship?”

“Not necessarily. Menzoberranzan has scores of plots and conspiracies going on at any given time. They aren’t all connected.”

“Granted. However, if these two situations are linked, then by inquiring into one, we likewise probe the other. You and I have experienced a depressing lack of success picking up the trail of our runaways. Therefore, we’ll investigate the lower orders and see where that path takes us.”

“How will we do that?”

“Follow the drum, of course.”

The door banged.

“First,” said Ryld, “we have to get out of here.”

“Easily managed. I’ll remove the locking talisman from the door,

then use illusion to make us blend with the walls. In a moment or two, the residents will break the door down. When they’re busy abusing Smylla’s corpse and ransacking her possessions, we’ll put on goblin faces and slip out in the confusion.”

Quenthel’s patrol had stalked the shadowy, candlelit passages of Arach-Tinilith for hours, until spaces she knew intimately began to seem strange and subtly unreal, and her subordinates’ nerves visibly frayed with the waiting. She called a halt to let the underlings rest and collect themselves. They stopped in a small chapel with the images of skulls, daggers, and spiders worked in bas-relief on the walls and the bones of long-dead priestesses interred beneath the floor. Rumor whispered that a cleric had cut her own throat in this sanctuary and her ghost sometimes haunted it, but the Baenre had never seen the apparition, and it wasn’t in evidence then.

The priestesses and novices settled on the pews. For a while, no one spoke.

Eventually Jyslin, a second-year student with a heart-shaped face and silver studs in her earlobes, said, “Perhaps nothing will happen.”

Quenthel stared coldly at the novice. Like the rest of the party, the younger female cut a warlike figure with her mace, mail, and shield, but her dread showed in her troubled maroon eyes and shiny, sweaty brow.

“We will face another demon tonight,” Quenthel said. “I feel it, so it’s pointless to hope otherwise. Instead I suggest you concentrate on staying alert and remembering what you’ve learned.”

Jyslin lowered her eyes and whispered, “Yes, Mistress.”

“Wishful thinking is for cowards,” Quenthel said, “and if you fools are lapsing into it, we’ve lingered here too long. Up with you.”

Reluctantly, someone’s links of supple black mail chiming ever so faintly, Quenthel’s minions rose. She led them onward.

In light of the two previous intrusions and the obvious uselessness of the wards the mages of Sorcere had created, Quenthel had placed Arach-Tinilith on alert and organized her staff and students into squads of eight. Most of the units would stand watch at set locations, but several would patrol the entire building. The Baenre princess had opted to lead one of the latter.

She’d also decided to throw open the storerooms and armories and dispense all the potent enchanted tools and weapons still deposited there. Even the first-year students bore enchanted arms and talismans worthy of a high priestess.

Not that the gear had done much to bolster Jyslin’s morale, nor that of many another novice. Had Quenthel not been suffering her own carefully masked anxieties, their glumness might have amused her. The girls had seen demons throughout their childhoods. They’d even achieved a certain intimacy with them in Arach-Tinilith, but this was the first time such entities had posed a threat to them, and they’d realized they hadn’t truly known the ferocious beings at all.

No doubt some of the females had also been perceptive enough to recognize that they themselves had been in comparatively little danger until Quenthel mustered them in what was more or less her personal defense. If so, their resentment, like their uneasiness, was irrelevant. They were her underlings, and it was their duty to serve her.

“It’s the wrath of Lolth herself,” whispered Minolin Fey-Branche, a fifth-year student who wore her hair in three long braids. Obviously, she didn’t intend for her voice to carry to the front of the procession. “First she strips us of our magic, then sends her fiends to kill us.”

Quenthel whirled. Sensing her anger, her whip vipers rose, weaving and hissing.

“Shut up!” she snapped. “The Spider Queen may be testing us, eliminating the unfit, but she has not condemned her entire temple. She would not.”

Minolin lowered her eyes. “Yes, Mistress,” she said tonelessly.

Quenthel noticed that no one else looked reassured, either.

“You disgust me,” the Baenre said. “All of you.”

“We apologize, Mistress,” said Jyslin.

“I remember my training,” Quenthel said. “If a novice showed a hint of cowardice or disobedience, my sister Triel would make her fast for a tenday, and eat rancid filth for another after that. I should do the same, but unfortunately, with Arach-Tinilith under siege, I need my people strong. So all right, though it should shame you take it, you can have another rest. You’ll fill your bellies, and it had better stiffen your spines. Otherwise, we’ll see how many of you I have to flog before the rest cease their cringing and whining. Come.”

She led them on to a classroom where the kitchen staff had set a table. She’d ordered them to prepare a cold supper and leave it at various points around the temple, so that the weary sentinels could at least refresh themselves with food, and the cooks had done a decent job of it. On a silver salver lay pink and brown slices of rothé steak steeped in a tawny marinade, their aroma competing with Arach-Tinilith’s omnipresent scent of incense. Other trays and bowls held raw mushroom pieces with a creamy dipping sauce and a salad of black, white, and red diced fungus, while the pitchers presumably contained wine, watered as per her command. Quenthel hoped the alcohol would hearten those residents whom Lolth’s absence and the incursions of the past two nights had terrified, but she didn’t want any of the temple’s defenders sloppy drunk and incapacitated.