Condemnation (32 page)

Moving slowly and carefully, the company advanced in an open skirmish line, prepared to defend themselves against any attack. They followed the old road for more than a mile, just as Pharaun had said they would, and they came upon the wreckage of old walls and battlements ringing some ancient stronghold. Green vines wreathed the walls, thriving despite the winter season, but the wall was cracked and holed in a dozen places. A rusted iron gate lay across the road where it pierced the walls, a barrier that had long since fallen into uselessness. Beyond the walls, a small stony tor rose from the forest floor, crowned by a large pentagonal keep of white stone. At first Ryld thought the place was whole and intact, but as he studied it, he realized that the tower-tops were holed and that more than one of the flying buttresses linking the outlying towers to the main body of the keep had collapsed with the years. Green vines knotted their roots in the riven stone, covering the ruins in a living blanket.

“Ruins,” Jeggred growled in disgust. “Your insipid spells have failed you, wizard—or you have deliberately led us astray. Are you in league with our treacherous scout, perhaps?”

“My spells do not fail,” Pharaun replied. “This is the place. The Jaelre are here.”

“Then where are they?” the draegloth snarled. “If you—”

“Silence, both of you!” Valas snapped. He moved a few steps away from the gate, his footfalls as soft as those of a stalking leopard, an arrow lying across his bow. “This place is not as abandoned as it looks.”

Ryld moved over to take shelter by a tottering old column of masonry, setting one hand on Splitter’s hilt. Danifae and Pharaun did the same on the other side of the road, staring hard at the ruined keep. Quenthel, however, chose not to move at all.

Instead she stood confidently in the center of the path and called out, “You of House Jaelre! We wish to speak with your leaders at once!”

From a dozen places of concealment, stealthy shapes in dark cloaks that deceived the eye by mimicking the wearer’s surroundings slowly stood, bows and wands pointed at the Menzoberranyr. One of the figures, a female carrying a double-ended sword, pushed back her hood and eyed the company with cold contempt.

“You are miserable spider-kissers,” she hissed. “What do you have that the lords of House Jaelre could possibly want, other than your corpses feathered with our arrows?”

Quenthel bridled and allowed one hand to fall to her whip. The weapon writhed slowly, the serpent heads snapping their fangs in agitation.

“I am Quenthel Baenre, Mistress of Arach-Tinilith, and I do not bicker on doorsteps with common gate guards. Announce our arrival to your masters, so that we can get in out of this damnable rain.”

The Jaelre captain narrowed her eyes and motioned to her soldiers, who shifted position and made ready to fire. Valas shook his head and lowered his bow, stepping forward quickly with one hand in the air.

“Wait,” he said. “If Tzirik the priest is still among you, tell him that Valas Hune is here. We have a proposition for him.”

“I doubt our high priest will have much use for any proposal of yours,” the guard captain said.

“If nothing else, he’ll find out why we came a thousand miles from Menzoberranzan to speak to him,” Valas replied.

The captain glared at Quenthel, then said, “Lower your weapons and wait there. Do not move, or my soldiers will fire, and there are more of us than you think.”

Valas nodded once, and set his bow down on the ground. He glanced at the others, and took a seat on the edge of a crumbling old fountain. The rest followed suit, though Quenthel didn’t demean herself by taking a seat. Instead she folded her arms and waited with imperious displeasure. Ryld glanced around the courtyard full of hostile warriors, and rubbed his head with a sigh.

Quenthel knows how to make an impression, eh? Pharaun gestured discretely.

Females, Ryld replied, just as discretely.

He carefully reached into his cloak and withdrew the brandy flask again.

FOURTEEN

The most doleful torment of incarceration, reflected Halisstra, was boredom, pure and simple. Like most of her extraordinarily long-lived kind, the priestess hardly noticed the passing of hours, days, even tendays when her mind was engaged. Yet, despite the wisdom and patience of her more than two hundred years, a few hours’ confinement in a featureless stone cell seemed more onerous than months of the harsh discipline she endured in her youth.

The endless hours of the day crept by, a day in which her body longed to rest despite the painful glare of sunlight streaming in through that one cursed window. Meanwhile her thoughts veered wildly from praying for her comrades to return and rescue her to fomenting the most hideous and agonizing tortures she could imagine for each one for abandoning her to capture.

Eventually, she fell into Reverie, her mind empty of new schemes or old memories, and her awareness so dim and distant that she might have been sleeping in truth. Exhaustion had finally caught up with her, not just the sheer physical exhaustion of the long tendays of travel and peril through desert, shadow, Underdark, and forest, but a kind of mental fatigue rooted deeply in the grief she still carried for the loss of the House she was to one day rule. Halisstra might not have permitted herself to shed a tear for Ched Nasad, but the malignant truth of her plight had an odd way of surfacing in her thoughts, poisoning them with a cold, hopeless disbelief that was difficult to set aside. Long hours of imprisonment offered her the opportunity to exhume the hateful situation in its entirety and contemplate her loss of station, wealth, and security until her horrible fascination was in some way sated.

At dusk the guards brought her fresh food, a bowl of some bland but nourishing stew and another half loaf of bread. Halisstra found herself ravenously hungry, and she devoured the meal with little thought to the possibility of poison or drugs. Soon after she’d finished, the door to her cell was unlocked with a rusty scraping of iron, and Seyll Auzkovyn slipped inside again.

The priestess had shed her long, heavy cloak, and wore an elegant lady’s riding outfit, an embroidered green jacket and knee-length skirt over a blouse of cream and high boots that matched the jacket. The sight of a drow priestess dressed as a noble surface elf struck Halisstra as jarringly incongruous.

“Did the surface lord dress you like that?” she sneered at the Eilistraee worshiper. “You seem almost a perfectly helpless gentlelady of the accursed sun elves in that outfit.”

“How else should I dress?” Seyll replied. “I’m among friends here, and need not wear armor. Besides, I found that the skull and spider motifs of my previous wardrobe seemed to alarm the surface folk.” She made a small gesture to the jailers outside, and the door was closed behind her. “Anyway,’ she added, “there are no sun elves here.”

“They’re all the same to me,” Halisstra said.

“When you know them better, you’ll be able to tell their kindred easily enough.”

“I have no wish to know them better.”

“Are you so certain of that? There is always advantage in knowing one’s enemies… especially if they need not be your enemies.”

Seyll knelt easily on the floor beside Halisstra and composed herself. She was young, not much more than a hundred, and pretty enough in her own way, but her carriage was … wrong. Her eyes lacked the hungering ambition or the cold appraisal Halisstra was accustomed to seeing mirrored in the faces around her. One could easily mistake Seyll’s patient expression for a sort of submissiveness, the lack of the will necessary to achieve, and yet there was a calm assurance about her that hinted at strength held in check.

Halisstra’s eyes fell to Seyll’s hands, as the priestess smoothed her garments. They were strong, and callused like a weapons master’s.

“I had the opportunity to examine the heraldry of your arms today, and study the devices. Melarn is a leading House of the city of Ched Nasad, is it not?”

“It was,” Halisstra said.

She instantly regretted the slip. If the surface folk didn’t know of Ched Nasad’s fate, then she hardly needed to provide them with a gift of information. She had to set a price on anything she revealed.

“You were defeated in a House war?”

It was a reasonable guess on Seyll’s part, as most drow Houses that vanished, lost status, or otherwise fell low usually did so because of the actions of other Houses.

“Not quite.”

Seyll waited a long moment for Halisstra to elaborate, and when she did not, the Eilistraee priestess shifted tactics.

“Ched Nasad is a long way from Cormanthor. At least six or seven hundred miles, with the great desert of Anauroch and the phaerimm-haunted Buried Realms between here and there. Lord Dessaer is curious about the circumstances that would bring a high-ranking daughter of a powerful House of Ched Nasad into the lands of his people. To be honest, I am curious too.”

“So this is to be the method of interrogation, then?” Halisstra said. “A sympathetic ear to garner the answers to questions asked in seeming friendship?”

“Some account of your purpose in Cormanthor must be made before Lord Dessaer will release you into my parole. If your business is as innocent as you say, you need not be imprisoned here.”

“Release me?” Halisstra laughed long and quietly. “Ah, I see you have not lost your penchant for cruelty despite your apostasy, Auzkovyn. Did your surface friends ask you to play on a prisoner’s hopes by offering freedom in exchange for cooperation, or did you suggest the tactic? Did you really think a single day in this accursed cell would reduce me to desperately grasping at phantom hopes?”

“The hopes I offer are not phantoms,” Seyll said. “Tell us what you’re doing here, show us that you’re no enemy of the peaceful folk of Cormanthor, and you will have your liberty.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that.”

“I am here, am I not?” Seyll answered. “Clearly some of our kind learn to live in peace with the surface folk.”

“Of course you have nothing to fear among the surface folk,” Halisstra retorted. “Your vapid, dancing goddess is too weak to threaten them.”

“As I told you before, I was a priestess of Lolth when I was captured,” Seyll said. She formed her hands into a gesture of supplication, a ceremonial pose Halisstra knew well. In the tongue of the abyssal planes where Lolth dwelt, Seyll mouthed the words of a high and secret prayer: ” ‘Great Goddess, Mother of the Dark, grant me the blood of my enemies for drink and their living hearts for meat. Grant me the screams of their young for song, grant me the helplessness of their males for my satiation, grant me the wealth of their houses for my bed. By this unworthy sacrifice I honor you, Queen of Spiders, and beseech of you the strength to destroy my foes.’ “

The infernal words seemed to crackle with dark power, each harsh syllable charged with an evil potency that spread through the cell like a slick of poison. Seyll made a drawing motion of her hand, showing the manner in which the knife was to be wielded, and settled back on her heels.

Shifting back to Elvish, she closed her eyes and said, “Many hapless souls died beneath my knife, yet I found redemption and peace here. Whether the same awaits you is a question I cannot answer, but I offer myself as proof that you can walk these lands in peace if you wish.”

Halisstra stared at Seyll, almost as if seeing her for the first time. She had been about to condemn the priestess once more as a weak failure, a traitor to the one true drow goddess, but the words died on her lips. No one but a priestess of high station would have been taught that rite, yet Seyll had decided to turn her back on Lolth. Not only that, but she still lived, and seemed to have found some amount of contentment in her decision. Halisstra had of course been indoctrinated over years of training to regard heresy, apostasy, as the vilest sort of crime imaginable. Yet in her years of sacrifice and abasement before the Spider Queen’s altar she had never before encountered a true apostate. Oh, she’d slandered some of her rivals with false accusations of turning away from the Spider Queen, but actually sitting in the presence of someone who had committed the ultimate betrayal of the goddess, and—so far, at least—lived to tell the tale… .

“I want to challenge you to do something,” Seyll said. “I believe you have the intelligence and the imagination for it, but we shall see. Imagine, for a moment, that you could live in a place where you can walk the streets without fearing an assassin’s dagger in your back. Imagine that your friends—real friends—want nothing more from you than the pleasure of your company, that your sisters cherish your accomplishments instead of resenting your successes, and your children are not murdered for an accidental failing. Imagine that your lovers seek you out for who you are, and not your station or influence. Imagine that your goddess asks you to celebrate her with your joy, not your terror.”

“There is no such—”

“You answer too quickly. I asked you to imagine it, if you can,” Seyll said. She stood and moved away, turning her back on Halisstra. “I will wait.”

“I can’t imagine such nonsense. It’s an empty fantasy, signifying nothing. We’re not meant for such things; no one is, not dark elf, not light-elf, not even the insipid humans. Only a fool dwells on dreams.”

“Yet, for the sake of argument at least, would it not seem a pleasant thing?” Seyll said over her shoulder. “You must entertain impossible dreams all the time. All thinking creatures do. Perhaps you’ve dreamed of having your enemies in your power, or of a lover you couldn’t take, or of rising to the station you truly merit.”

Halisstra snorted, truly irritated, and shook her hands in her manacles.

“If you can imagine the destruction of all your enemies at once,” Seyll pressed, “you can certainly imagine the faithfulness of a friend or a goddess pleased by your loyalty, not your sacrifice.”

“All gods demand sacrifice. You delude yourself if you think Eilistraee is any different. Perhaps you’re simply too weak-minded to understand your bonds.” Halisstra looked away and added, “You have succeeded in boring me again. You may leave now.”

The priestess walked to the door. She rapped once on the rusty iron and waited, turning back to face Halisstra.