R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation (33 page)

She stared fiercely, obviously trying to pick out the real Valas from the false. It didn’t help. When she swung, she struck at the image on his left.

The illusion vanished on contact, and at the same instant, he sprang. She couldn’t come back on guard in time to fend him off. He hooked a leg behind her and threw her to the ground, then kicked her repeatedly in the head until she went limp.

Laughter echoed through the candlelit corridors of ArachTinilith. Quenthel frowned. She’d been expecting something to happen, eagerly anticipating it, in fact. What she wasn’t expecting was an explosion of mirth, and she couldn’t guess what it meant.

She strode forward, and her patrol followed behind. They seemed edgy, but not quite as reluctant as they had the night before. The fate of Drisinil, Molvayas, and the rest of the plotters had convinced the survivors that Quenthel still enjoyed the favor of Lolth, at least to the same dubious extent as the rest of the stricken clergy.

The laughter rang on and on until at last the searchers found the source. Hunched over, her shoulders shaking, a novice knelt before one of the smaller altars of the goddess. Steady despite the paroxysms of glee, her index finger painted lines of graceful calligraphy on the floor. Quenthel couldn’t make out what the girl was using for pigment until she lifted her hand to her face like an artist dipping a brush in a paint pot. She’d gouged her eyes out, another seeming handicap that didn’t impair her writing.

The mistress stepped close enough to inspect the lines of blood. For all her erudition, she couldn’t read the characters, but she could feel the power in them. They pulled at her and repelled her at the same time, as if they might yank her spirit, or a piece of it, out of her body.

She wrenched her eyes away from the symbols and swung her whip. The vipers cracked into the eyeless female’s back, their venomous fangs tore into her, and she collapsed, dead or merely insensible. Quenthel didn’t particularly care which.

“What was she writing, Mistress?” Jyslin asked.

“I don’t know,” Quenthel admitted, smearing the glyphs with her toe, “something in one of the secret tongues of the Abyss. Scribing it may have been a way of casting a spell, so I made sure she wouldn’t finish.”

“What was wrong with her?” Minolin asked.

Quenthel was still surprised that the Fey-Branche had not, as expected, turned out to be one of the traitors.

“I don’t know that, either,” said the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith. She actually did have an idea, but wasn’t sure of it yet. “Let’s move on.”

A quarter-hour later, a runner, dispatched from a squad stationed in the third leg of the spider, found Quenthel to report that one of her comrades had gone mad. Quenthel went to see for herself, half expecting more gouged eyes and bloody writing.

But the new dementia took a somewhat different form. The victim had taken shelter, if that was the right word for it, in a small library devoted, for the most part, to musty treatises on warfare in all its aspects. She sat on the floor in the corner defined by two tall sandstone bookshelves, rocking and whimpering to herself.

Quenthel stooped, jammed her fist under the girl’s chin and forced up her head.

“Rilrae Zolond! What ails you? What happened?”

Rilrae’s face was blank and seemingly devoid of comprehension. Tears flowed down her cheeks. She smelled of mucus, and the breath snuffled in her nose. She didn’t answer Quenthel’s question, just made a feeble, ineffectual effort to turn her face away.

The mistress sighed and let her go. She’d seen cases like Rilrae before, generally in some dungeon or torture chamber. The junior priestess had experienced something sufficiently unpleasant to drive her deep inside her own mind. Had Quenthel still possessed her Lolth-granted powers, or been carrying the proper equipment, she might have been able to shake Rilrae out of her delirium, but as matters stood, the useless creature wouldn’t be providing any information. Annoyed, the mistress nearly vented her frustration by giving Rilrae a stroke from her whip, but she didn’t want to appear rattled or upset in the eyes of her followers.

She led the patrol on and eventually found a suicide sprawled in the corridor with froth on her lips and an empty poison bottle still clutched in her hand.

One of the second-year students reeled from a doorway a few yards farther down. Glaring and twitching, she unrolled a parchment, possibly one Quenthel herself had dispensed from the temple armory, and began shouting the words. The Baenre recognized the trigger phrase of a spell intended to summon a certain type of plague demon.

She snatched out her hand crossbow and pulled the trigger. Others did the same. The flurry of poisoned darts punctured the scroll and the novice as well. She fell onto her back, cracking her head against the calcite floor. The spell, still a syllable or two from activation, dissipated its power in a harmless sizzle of red light.

Quenthel reflected that a pattern was becoming clear. Some power struck a female and more or less drove her mad. She then separated herself from her companions, either making an excuse or just running off, the better to manifest her lunacy in one bizarre behavior or another.

It was odd that the girls’ companions never even noticed the attack occurring, odd, too, that the demon assaulted only one member of a group and not all—or that it attacked any, given that the previous intruders had only attacked those lesser priestesses who attempted to hinder them.

The unseen demon’s search pattern was equally peculiar. The location and sequences of its attacks seemed to indicate that the being was bouncing erratically around from one end of the temple to the other.

“Mistress,” said Yngoth, “I know what’s happening.”

“As do I,” Quenthel said. “I’ve merely been confirming it.” She turned to Minolin. “Fey-Branche.”

“Yes?” Minolin asked.

“You’re in command of these others. You will all evacuate the temple. Get the sane people out, and the mad ones, too, but only if you can do it quickly.”

The Fey-Branche princess blinked. “Mistress, we believe in your authority,” she said. “We’re not afraid to stand with you.”

“I’m touched,” Quenthel sneered, “but this isn’t a test. I want you to go.”

“Exalted Mother,” Jyslin said, “what’s happening? Which demon invaded the temple tonight? The assassin? Did it poison our sisters to make them go insane?”

“No,” the Baenre said, “not in the way you mean.”

“Then—”

“Go!” Quenthel raged. “Minolin, I told you to take them out of here.”

“Yes, Mistress!”

The Fey-Branche hastily formed them up and led them away. The corridor seemed very quiet once they’d disappeared.

“Mistress,” said Hsiv, “was it wise to send them away?”

“You question my judgment?” Quenthel asked.

The viper flinched. “No!”

“You sought to protect me, so I’ll let it go. This time. I dismissed the girls because they can’t help me, and I’d like to have some underlings left when this nonsense is over.”

“They might have guarded you from another would-be mortal killer.”

“We can hope that if Minolin gets everyone out, there won’t be any more. Besides, why in the name of the Demonweb did I create
you
?”

Greenish candlelight rippling on black scales, Yngoth reared and twisted around to look Quenthel in the face.

“Mistress,” the viper hissed, “we are rebuked. We’ll keep watch. What will you do?”

“Wait, and prepare myself.”

She found a classroom possessed of a reasonably comfortable instructor’s chair, the high limestone back carved into the stylized shape of a stubby-legged spider. She sat down, laid the whip at her feet, removed a thin shaft of polished white bone from her pouch, and set it in her lap, holding it at either end.

Closing her eyes, she commenced a breathing exercise. Within a heartbeat or two, she slipped into a meditative trance. She thought she would need the utmost clarity to contend with the night’s demon, because Jyslin had guessed wrong. The intruder didn’t encapsulate the art of the assassin, nor the spirit of the drow race, for that matter. It embodied the concept of evil.

The traitor elves of the World Above professed to hate evil. In reality, Quenthel thought, they feared what they didn’t understand. Thanks to the tutelage of Lolth, the drow did, and having understood it, they embraced it.

For evil, like chaos, was one of the fundamental forces of Creation, manifest in both the macrocosm of the wide world and the microcosm of the individual soul. As chaos gave rise to possibility and imagination, so evil engendered strength and will. It made sentient beings aspire to wealth and power. It enabled them to subjugate, kill, rob, and deceive. It allowed them to do whatever was required to better themselves with never a crippling flicker of remorse.

Thus, evil was responsible for the existence of civilization and for every great deed any hero had ever performed. Without it, the peoples of the world would live like animals. It was amazing that so many races, blinded by false religions and philosophies, had lost sight of this self-evident truth. In contrast, the dark elves had based a society on it, and that was one of the points of superiority that served to exalt them above all other races.

Paradoxically, though, a touch of the pure black heart of this darkest of all powers could be deadly, just as the highest expression of comforting warmth was the fire that consumed. Even folk who spent their lives in the adoration of evil generally had no real comprehension of the endless burning sea of it raging below and beyond the material world, and that was just as well. Even a fleeting glimpse could convey secrets too huge and fearsome for the average mind. Its touch could annihilate sanity and even identity. The threat was sufficiently grave that the majority of spellcasters hesitated to regard the force directly. They preferred to treat with evil at one remove, by dealing with the devils and undead that embodied it.

But it appeared that Quenthel’s unknown enemy was the exception. He’d dipped right into the virulent fountainhead and drawn forth a power that dwelled therein.

That demon was presently intangible, a creature of pure mind. That was why it seemed to move and act so erratically; it was passing not through physical space, a medium in which it didn’t exist, but from consciousness to consciousness, head to head. And simply through that intimate contact it poisoned its hosts, even if it didn’t particularly intend to. It suffused them with a darkness too big and too powerful for their little minds to sustain

It was searching for Quenthel all the while, to show her the most profound malevolence of all.

She prayed she could endure the venom until she worked the Xorlarrin’s magic. She’d have to. Since the demon was invisible and insubstantial, she wouldn’t know it hadn’t come close enough for the talisman to affect until she felt it infesting herself.

To make sure she would indeed detect it, she sank ever deeper into her trance. She became acutely conscious of the rise and fall of her chest and the air hissing in and out of her lungs. The steady thud of her heartbeat and the surge of blood through her arteries. The pressure of her buttocks and spine against the chair. The feeblest of drafts caressing and cooling her left profile. The vipers shifting restlessly, brushing her feet and ankles, the touch perceptible even through her boots.

Yet none of the sensations was of any particular significance. They presented themselves so vividly only because she’d entered a state of utter dispassionate quietude, and thus receptivity. A condition in which she would be equally cognizant of events within her mind and soul.

She recalled acquiring this capacity when she herself was a novice in Arach-Tinilith. She’d learned every divine art easily. It had been one of the signs that Lolth had chosen her for greatness. But relatively speaking, this particular mastery had come harder than most. According to Vlondril, unwrinkled but showing signs of madness even then, it had been because Quenthel was of too dynamic a character. She had no instinct for passivity.

Abruptly the Baenre realized her thoughts were nudging her out of the desired state. Vlondril had also said that was always the way. The mind didn’t like to hush. It wanted to babble. Quenthel took another deep, slow breath, exhaled it through her mouth, and expelled that importunate inner voice along with it.

Time passed. She had no idea how much time, nor, immersed in the meditation, did she care. The temple was utterly silent, which surely meant that most everyone had exited, or perhaps, in one or two instances, perished.

Gradually it dawned on Quenthel that her trance wasn’t quite perfect. The dead quiet, proof that all instruction, prayers, and rituals had ceased, irked her just a little, and she doubted she could purge that final hint of emotion. She cared too much about her role of Mistress of Arach-Tinilith. She’d come to the Academy intent on making it grander and more effective than ever before. Thus would she honor Lolth and demonstrate her fitness to one day rule the entire city. Instead, she’d presided over an extended disaster, regular functions disrupted, residents battered or even dead.

It galled her to think how many of her sister nobles would blame her, but she knew it wasn’t her fault. It was in large measure the fault of the teachers and students themselves. Most who had perished earned their destruction by dint of their idiotic little mutiny, and actually, that was as it should be. The traitors had violated the precepts of Lolth.

Indeed, when Quenthel thought about it, the real misfortune might be that weaklings like Jyslin and Minolin were still alive. They were cowards and whiners, unfit, but they’d survive merely because the manifestation of evil hadn’t passed their way, and because the Baenre herself had sent them to safety. Perhaps that had been a mistake.

Quenthel realized she was ruminating once more. With an effort of will she arrested the internal monologue.

But as Vlondril had taught her, it was devilishly hard to attain passivity by straining for it. Besides, Quenthel was pondering important matters, new insights that would guide her steps in the days to come.