Authors: Richard Baker
“It is in peril already, young Gromph. I mean to impose some measure of order on the inevitable. You could be of great assistance to me in the coming days, or. …”
“I see,” said Gromph.
He narrowed his eyes, considering his options. He could feign acceptance, and do as he wished anyway, but that would certainly invite the lich’s wrath at the time and place of Dyrr’s choosing. He could refuse outright, which would likely result in a deadly contest on the spot to determine whose will would prevail.
Or I could agree in earnest, he thought. Who’s to say that we might not channel the forces marshalling against the city into useful chaos, valuable progress? There will doubtless be tremendous damage, but the Menzoberranzan that emerged from such a crucible of blood and fire might be a better, stronger city in the end, a city purged of the ruthless tyranny of the sadistic priestesses and instead governed by the cold, passionless intelligence of pragmatic wizards. Every cruelty could be made to serve a rational purpose, every excess curbed to produce a city whose strength was not spent on its own internecine strife. Would not such a city be worthy of his loyalty?
Would such a city have any place for a Baenre? he answered himself.
No revolution such as Dyrr dreamed of could possibly end with anything but complete annihilation for the First House of Menzoberranzan. While Gromph despised his sisters and loathed many of the simpering relations who populated Castle Baenre, he would be damned if he would allow some lesser House to unseat his high and ancient family as the supreme power of Menzoberranzan. There could be, really, only one response.
As quick as thought, Gromph raised his hand and unleashed a terrible, brilliant blast of colors at the lich, a spell whose energy he had prepared with such care and effort that it took only the merest act of will to unleash it. Colors never seen in the gloom of the cavern city lanced through his conjury, each carrying with it a different doom, blight, or energy. A quivering blue bolt of electricity passed so close to Dyrr that the lich’s ancient robes crackled with tiny arcs, while a bright orange ray burned the ancient creature with acid powerful enough to melt stone. A third ray, a beam of insidious violet, was deflected by the lich’s animated buckler. The device tittered like a wicked child as it intercepted the attack.
“I am the Archmage of Menzoberranzan,” Gromph roared. “I am no one’s errand boy!”
Dyrr recoiled with a wailing shriek of anger as the acid splattered and hissed, gnawing at his ancient flesh. The smell of burning bone filled the magnificent conjury with a horrid stench. Gromph followed up his first assault by raising an abjuration he hoped would turn Dyrr’s spells back at him. The archmage fully expected that it would take every ruse, every defense, every subtle and deadly spell at his command to defeat a thing as powerful as the Lord of Agrach Dyrr.
Gromph concluded his turning spell just in time, as Dyrr recovered with impossible speed and lashed out with a dire black ray of invidious energy that would have ripped away great portions of the archmage’s very life-force had it struck home. Instead, the ebon beam rebounded on Gromph’s shield and struck Dyrr in the center of his torso. This, however, had an unforeseen effect. Instead of shredding the ancient lich’s own life-force, the crackling black energy swelled the Lord of Agrach Dyrr with its horrible power. The lich laughed aloud.
“A clever move, Gromph, but I fear it miscarried. Living creatures are grievously harmed by that spell, but the undead are invigorated by it!”
The archmage muttered a curse and struck again, this time directing a vile green ray at the laughing lich. It burned a perfect round hole in Dyrr’s breastbone, blasting undead flesh and bone to dust. The lich screeched again in whatever passed for pain in its undead state and leaped aside before Gromph could disintegrate him outright.
Even as the archmage commenced another casting, Dyrr snarled out the words of a dark and murderous spell that clawed horribly at Gromph’s flesh, sucking greedily at the very fluids of his body and bleaching his skin with a thousand needles of agony. Gromph gasped aloud in pain and lost the spell he’d been preparing to cast, stumbling back over a marble bench and falling heavily to the floor.
Damn it all, he thought. I need to buy a moment’s respite.
Fortunately, he was in his sanctum, surrounded by a dozen weapons he might employ.
Gromph rolled to his elbow and barked out, “Szashune! Destroy him!”
In one alcove of the room, a tall statue of a four-armed swordsman carved from perfect black obsidian stirred to life, striding out into the chamber as it hefted and clashed its ebon blades like a living warrior.
Dyrr skittered away several steps and spoke a word. The lich soared up out of the spiderstone golem’s reach, but Gromph used the opportunity of the distraction to summon up the most destructive spell he knew and hurl it at the airborne lich. From his outstretched hands eight brilliant orbs of blinding white energy streaked out to blast through the lich’s undead form, each detonating in a stone-shattering explosion that demolished great gaping pieces of the undead sorcerer. The exploding meteors caused no small damage to Gromph’s sanctum, blasting a pair of old bookshelves to flinders and snapping an arm from the spiderstone golem as if the device was a toy damaged by a petulant child. Gromph cried out in triumph as pieces of Dyrr clattered to the floor.
Dust billowed from the hovering form of the lich, and his skull nodded down to his breastbone almost as if his animating magic was failing him, but the bony creature returned to itself with startling speed. Dyrr looked up again as wicked green light grew strong in his eye sockets, and he laughed.
“My old bones aren’t the entirety of my being, Gromph,” he rasped. “You abuse them to no great effect.”
He started to intone another spell, but the archmage struck again, seeking to dispel any enchantments or abjurations protecting the lich. Dyrr’s flying spell failed, and the lich sank down into blade-reach of the living statue waiting below.
The golem rushed forward. The massive construct pounded at the lich with terrific blows of its three remaining arms, its gleaming black face completely expressionless. The conjury rang with the mighty impact of the blows. Gromph bared his teeth in a savage grin.
“You might not be tied to your moldering corpse, lich, but you’ll have a difficult time casting spells when you’ve been dismembered and buried in a dozen different graves,” he called. “You were a fool to challenge me here!”
Gromph prowled closer, looking for an opening to strike again with a spell.
Dyrr endured two, then three tremendous blows from the towering statue, staggering in his steps as bone cracked and split. The demon-faced buckler darted and wheeled around him, laughing shrilly and blocking even more blows than that, parrying strike after strike from the stone construct. The sorcerer retreated a step, found his footing, and spread his arms wide. His gleaming black robes shimmered once, and exploded outward in a deadly spinning saw of razor-sharp blades that carved chunks of stone from Gromph’s golem and diced tables, furnishings, and books with abandon.
Blades slashed through the archmage’s own potent defensive enchantments, gashing him in a dozen places, though nowhere deep enough to kill. Gromph threw himself flat to duck beneath the disk of flying razors, blinking blood from his eyes as his golem crumbled into worthless black rock.
Dyrr shouted in triumph and leaped forward at the archmage, swinging his adamantine staff with startling speed and swiftness. Gromph yelped in surprise and rolled aside just in time to avoid a two-handed blow that split the marble flagstone right where he’d fallen.
“That does not befit mages of our station!” Gromph howled, scrambling to his feet.
Dyrr didn’t answer. Instead the lich leaped after him, clearing off whole tabletops and bookshelves with great two-handed sweeps of his staff.
Gromph shouted a spell that ripped the lich’s weapon from his grasp, hurling it across the room with such force that the adamantine rod stuck, quivering end first, in the chamber’s wall like a javelin thrown by a giant.
As Dyrr floundered for balance, Gromph took a moment to craft a potent spell defense, a shimmering globe that would completely negate the effects of all but the most powerful of spells. So fortified, he hunted quickly through the various incantations locked in his mind, seeking the most efficacious to employ against the Lord of Agrach Dyrr.
“Ah,” Dyrr remarked, studying the shimmering sphere. “An excellent defense, young Gromph, but not impervious to one of my skill.”
The lich muttered a word of awful power and scuttled forward, his skeletal talons outstretched. Seemingly unconcerned by Gromph’s defensive spell the lich plunged his hand through the dancing globe of color and grasped the archmage by one arm. Gromph shrieked in dismay as the power of the lich’s spell struck full upon him, blasting his defensive globe to motes of winking light and locking his every muscle into an absolute rigidity.
“Gromph Baenre, thou art encysted,” Dyrr intoned, his naked teeth gleamed against the great and terrible blackness within his skull.
The archmage had one long glimpse at the triumphant lich standing over him, then he started to fall. Gromph, unable to move, plummeted straight down through the floor, through the flickering rooms and chambers of Sorcere, through a vast distance into the yawning black rock below the tower, the city, the world. For one terrible instant Gromph felt himself at the bottom of a measureless well, staring up through uncounted miles of darkness at the pinprick figure of his nemesis above. The darkness fell in upon him and smothered him in its embrace.
In the archmage’s chambers in Sorcere, the lich Dyrr stood, looking down at the spot in the floor where he had condemned Gromph Baenre. Had he been a living mage Dyrr might have panted for breath, trembled with fatigue, or perhaps even collapsed from mortal wounds sustained in the fierce duel, but the dark magic binding his undead sinews and bones together was not subject to the weaknesses of the living.
“Bide there a time, young Gromph,” he said to the empty place. “I may find a use for you yet, perhaps in a century or two.”
He made a curt gesture and vanished from the conjury.
The great peals of a thunderclap echoed through the black stone passageways, a rumbling so deep and visceral that Halisstra could feel it more than hear it. She crouched in the shadow of a great stone arch and risked a quick glance across the great hall. On the far side, below the drow party, a handful of hulking monsters picked themselves up off the floor and sought cover. Several more lay still in the rubble and wreckage of the lower portion of the hall.
“That broke their rush,” Halisstra called out to her companions. “They’re regrouping, though.”
“Determined bastards,” Pharaun said.
The wizard sheltered behind a towering pillar of stone, grimacing with fatigue. Over the previous day and a half the company had marched at least thirty miles through the endless corridors of the Labyrinth, pursued at every turn by seemingly endless hordes of minotaurs and baphomet demons. On two occasions the dark elves had narrowly avoided fiendishly clever efforts to trap them by closing off the tunnels they were fleeing through.
“I have few spells of that sort left,” Pharaun said. “We need to find a place where I can rest and ready more spells.”
“You’ll rest when we all do, wizard,” Quenthel growled. The Baenre and her whip were splattered with gore, and her armor showed more than one ugly rent where a deadly blow had barely been turned. “We’re close to the Jaelre. We must be. Let’s move again before the minotaurs organize another charge.”
The other drow exchanged looks, but they pushed themselves to their feet and followed Quenthel and Valas into another passage. This ran for perhaps four hundred yards before opening into another great hall, this one featuring tall, fluted columns and a floor paved with well-fitted flagstones. Graceful, winding staircases rose up along the cavern walls to meet long, sheltered galleries where dim faerie fire burned, illuminating chambers that might once have been workshops, merchant houses, or simply the modest homes of soldiers and artisans.
“Drow work again,” Ryld observed. “And again, abandoned. You’re certain this is the place, Valas?”
The scout nodded wearily, his right hand clamped over a shallow but bloody wound on his left shoulder.
“I have been in this very cavern before,” he replied. “These are Jaelre dwellings. Up there a number of armorers lived, and over on that wall was an inn I stayed at. The palace of the Jaelre nobles lies just through the next passage.”
Quenthel leaped up a short, curving stairway and glanced into some kind of shop, its windows dark and empty. She swore and moved past several others, looking into each in turn before descending back to the floor of the main hall.
“If these are the Jaelre dwellings, then where in all the screaming hells are the Jaelre?” she demanded. “Did the accursed minotaurs slay them all?”
“I doubt it,” Halisstra said. “No battle was fought herewe would have seen the signs. Even if the minotaurs had carried off all the bodies over the years, there would be scorch marks, broken flagstones, the remnants of ruined weapons. I think the Jaelre left this place of their own accord.”
“How long ago was it that you were here, Valas?” asked Ryld.
“Almost fifty years,” the scout said. “Not that long ago, really. The Jaelre skirmished frequently with the minotaurs back then, and these caverns were guarded by both physical and magical defenses.” He studied the great chamber carefully. “Let me proceed ahead a little ways. I will see if I can find anything in the palace that might illuminate this riddle.”
“Should we all go?” Ryld asked.
“Best not. There is only one entrance to the palace, and we could be trapped inside if the minotaurs return in numbers. Remain outside, so that you can escape if you need to. I will return in a few minutes.”
The scout slipped off into the darkness, leaving the company in the abandoned hall.