Condemnation (37 page)

The wizard craned back his head and called, “Ho! Beholder! As we are at something of an impasse, will you consent to parlay?”

Quenthel fumed.

“You speak for us, wizard?” she growled.

From the heights of the tower overhead the deep, rasping voice came again.

“Parlay? On what account? You have invaded my home, impudent fools.”

“Pharaun—” Quenthel started.

“You have a book we want,” the wizard replied, ignoring the high priestess. “I guess it’s called the Geildirion of Cimbar. Give it to us, and We’ll trouble you no more.”

The beholder fell silent, evidently considering the offer. Quenthel stared daggers at the wizard, but like the others, she listened for the beholder’s reply.

“The book is extremely valuable,” the creature replied finally. “I will not yield it up because some whelp of a dark elf demands it of me. Retreat, and I will consent to spare your lives.”

Quenthel snorted and said, “As if we expected anything different.” She made a small wave of her hand to call the others’ attention to her, and signed, On the count of three, Pharaun will dismiss his spell. Danifae and Ryld—you will follow me up the shaft. Pharaun, when we reach the halfway point, you will then teleport yourself and Jeggred to the floor above and take the monster unawares while it focuses its attention on defending the shaft. Valas, you remain here and cover our ascent with your bow. Come up as quickly as you can once we reach the top. The Baenre did not wait to entertain any refinements to her plan, beginning her countdown at once.

One, two… three!

Pharaun made a curt gesture and dismissed his spell of antimagic. Ryld felt the arcane power of his belt, his gauntlets, and his sword flood back into his limbs. He drew Splitter and ascended into the shaft, using the levitation charm with which his Melee-Magthere insignia was imbued. With luck, the sword’s ability to disrupt enchantments would shield him from the worst of what the beholder mage could send their way.

Quenthel and Danifae rose alongside him, three black, graceful forms sliding smoothly up into the darkness. Pharaun moved up beside Jeggred and watched their progress, one hand on the draegloth’s white-furred shoulder.

The ceiling of the shaft featured a circular opening at one side, cluttered somewhat by the remnants of the old stairwell that once climbed the tower. Ryld peered at the opening, expecting incandescent death at any moment.

The beholder mage did not disappoint him.

A brilliant green ray flashed into existence, lancing toward Ryld. He parried it with Splitter, and felt a tingle in the hilt as the greatsword destroyed the insidious ray. Beside him, Danifae yelped and swerved aside from another tremendous bolt of lightning that arced out to sear all three dark elves, leaving the odor of charred wood and ozone in the air.

Arrows hissed up from underneath, whistling past the weapons master as Valas fired at the unseen foe. Ryld snarled in defiance and willed himself upward with more haste. Another spell struck Quenthel—some kind of dispelling magic that snuffed out her levitation. She flailed her arms and plummeted to the floor below. Ryld reached out to catch her, but the Baenre was simply not close enough. She struck the floor at the bottom of the shaft after a fall of close to forty feet. Quenthel crashed into the rubble like a falling meteor, and vanished in dust and wreckage.

“Keep going!” shouted Danifae. “We’re almost at the top!”

The beholder mage must have reached the same conclusion. A moment later, a barrier of solid ice appeared, walling off the top of the shaft and trapping the drow beneath it.

“Damn!” swore Ryld.

Danifae glowered at the barrier and said, “Maybe we can—”

At that moment, Jezz the Lame appeared on the floor of the chamber. He wheeled and hurled a spell back through the doorway, then slammed the door shut.

“Whatever it is you’re doing, finish it,” the Jaelre called. “The devils have returned in force!”

Ryld looked up at the sheet of ice covering the top of the shaft, then down again at the rubble-strewn floor. Quenthel lay half-buried in the shattered masonry, unmoving. Spells rumbled above the ice, sure signs that Pharaun and Jeggred had found their foe, but the creature’s barrier had effectively cut the company in half. Abandoning the effort to get at the beholder mage might give the monster the chance to destroy the company in detail, but Quenthel was dead or injured below.

“Up,” Ryld decided. “Going back is no good. Valas, Jezz, aid Quenthel!”

He came up beneath the gleaming white ceiling and struck at the icy wall with Splitter, using the sword’s ability to rend enchantments. Razor-sharp shards of ice flew from the spot he struck, but the sword failed to undo the beholder’s magic. Ryld cursed and tried again, with no more success.

Below them, the door to the tower boomed with a heavy blow. Valas quickly shouldered his bow and scuttled over the heaps of masonry and rubble filling the bottom of the shaft, heading toward the spot where Quenthel had fallen.

Jezz the Lame growled something and worked a spell, clogging the tower’s foyer with a mass of sticky webbing. He mouthed the words of another spell and arrowed up into the air, leaving Valas and Quenthel on the floor of the shaft.

“Forget the priestess,” he called to Valas. “Come, if you want to live!”

The scout grimaced in frustration.

“I can’t climb and carry her!” he snapped as a second blow at the door splintered wood and bent iron.

The ancient door would not withstand another blow. Valas glanced up the shaft and down at Quenthel, and reached down and unfastened her House Baenre brooch from her shoulder. Her snake-headed whip stirred in agitation, and Yngoth actually struck at the scout, but Valas scrambled back and fixed the brooch to his tunic.

“I’m trying to save your mistress,” he barked at the whip.

The scout moved close and grasped Quenthel under the arms, using the power of her own brooch to levitate away from the floor.

Meanwhile, Ryld measured the icy barrier in front of him.

“All right, then,” he muttered.

He backed up, set his feet as best he could against the shaft’s wall, and drew Splitter back for the mightiest blow he could muster. With a cry of rage, he struck the wall a tremendous blow, Splitter’s blade shearing through the magical ice even as waves of excruciating cold washed over him. He ignored the pain and swung again, and again—and the sheet of ice cracked into a dozen pieces and fell away to the floor below. Without waiting for the others, Ryld hurled himself up into the beholder’s lair.

SIXTEEN

Within a day of Seyll’s murder, Halisstra began to wonder if she might have been better off going with the Eilistraee priestess and feigning conversion. It might have been a strategy unlikely to reunite her with her comrades, but it would have meant that she would have enjoyed shelter, food, and the opportunity to perhaps regain her equipment, instead of an interminable march through the freezing woods. As dawn approached, she could find no better shelter than a small, damp hollow surrounded by drow-high boulders and bare trees. Shivering, she shrugged off her stolen backpack and searched it thoroughly, hoping against hope that she had somehow overlooked some key implement or a scrap of food.

Seyll and her followers had not anticipated a wilderness sojourn of more than a few hours. They carried no more gear than Halisstra would have, had she decided to venture out to a well-known cavern a mile or two from Ched Nasad. They certainly hadn’t equipped themselves for the convenience of their captive’s escape.

With the crossbow she’d taken from Xarra and the bae’qeshel songs at her command, she had a fair chance of dropping any game she came across, but in her hours and hours of wandering she’d not seen anything larger than a bird. Even if she did succeed in killing something for her dinner, she had no means to cook it, and Halisstra was beginning to suspect that the forest itself conspired against her.

She was reasonably sure that she’d managed to keep heading west after her escape from the heretic. If Seyll hadn’t been lying when she said they were near the spot where Halisstra had been captured, the Melarn priestess was no more than one or two nights’ march from the small river Pharaun had described in his vision. Since the river ran south to north somewhere in front of her, it seemed a difficult target to miss as long as she kept moving west.

Halisstra tried to keep the sunset and moonset ahead of her, and a little to her left, since they’d be somewhat south of her at this time of year—or so she’d gathered from watching Valas navigate the woods over the past few days. Of course, she had no way of knowing whether to turn upstream or downstream when she did reach Pharaun’s river, since she couldn’t be sure that she’d struck the stream at the spot the wizard anticipated. For that matter, she was unlikely to know for certain whether she’d found the right stream at all. She’d already crossed a dozen small brooks in a day and a half, and while she didn’t think any of them could properly be called a river, she simply didn’t have enough experience of the surface world to be sure.

“Of course, that all presumes that I haven’t been wandering in circles for hours,” Halisstra muttered.

It could be that the most sensible thing to do would be to abandon the notion of searching for the Jaelre, and pick the straightest course out of the forest she could find. Sooner or later, she might find civilization again, and beg, borrow, or steal food and other supplies—or charm a guide who could lead her to the Jaelre.

She closed her eyes, trying to build a mental picture of Cormanthor and the lands around it. She was in the eastern part of the forest, she knew—so was her best course east, toward the rising sun? There was little on that side of the forest except for the human settlement of Harrowdale. if she recalled her geography. Or was she better off turning south? Several more dales lay in that direction, so her odds of reaching civilization seemed better that way, even if that meant she would have a longer trek to reach the eaves of the forest. North she ruled out at once, since she was fairly certain that Elventree lay in that direction. Any way she went, she would be turning her back on the Jaelre and her sacred mission, at least for a time.

“This would be easier if the goddess would consent to answer my prayers,” she grumbled.

When she realized what she’d said, she couldn’t help but glance around and put a hand to her mouth. Lolth did not look kindly on complainers.

She passed a cold, wet, and miserable day hunched down among the rocks of her small hiding place, drifting in and out of Reverie. More than once she wished she’d had the presence of mind to order Feliane to guide her to the Jaelre, or at least give up her cloak and pack before dashing off in a panic. Lord Dessaer’s rangers were most likely on her trail, of course, and they would not show her much mercy if she fell into their hands again. Even so, Halisstra was beginning to feel that a quick execution by the surface elves might be preferable to a long and lonely death by starvation in the endless forest.

At nightfall she rose, gathered her belongings, and scrambled out of her hiding place. She stood on the forest floor, looking toward the direction she reckoned west, then south, and west again. South might offer a better chance of finding a human or surface elf settlement, but she couldn’t bring herself to abandon the hope of rejoining her comrades. Better to try one more march west, and if she still hadn’t found Pharaun’s river by dawn, she’d think about giving up the effort.

“West, then,” she said to herself.

She walked for a couple of hours, trying to keep the moon left of her, even though she felt it rather than saw it. The night was cold, and high thin clouds scudded by overhead, driven by a fierce blast of wind that didn’t reach down to the shelter of the trees. The woods were cold and still, probably pitch black by a surface dweller’s standards, but Halisstra found that the diffuse moonlight flooded the forest like a sea of gleaming silver shadow. She paused to study the sky, trying to gauge whether she was allowing the moon’s passage to affect her course too much, when she heard the faint sound of rushing water.

Carefully she stole forward, trotting softly through the night, and she emerged at the bank of a wide, shallow brook that splashed over a pebbly bed. It was wider than any she’d seen yet, easily thirty to forty feet, and it ran from her left to her right.

“Is this it?” she breathed.

It seemed large enough, and it was about where she’d expected to find it—a march and a half from the place where she’d been captured. Halisstra crouched and studied the swift water, thinking. If she made the wrong decision, she might follow the stream into some desolate and unpopulated portion of the woods and die a lonely death of hunger and cold. Then again, her prospects weren’t very bright no matter what she did. Halisstra snorted to herself, and followed the stream to her left. What did she have to lose?

She managed another mile or so before the night’s walk and the cold air made her hunger too great to be borne any longer, and she resolved to stop and make a midnight meal of whatever supplies she had left. Halisstra shook her pack off her shoulder and started to look around when an odd whirring sound fluttered through the air. Without even thinking about it, Halisstra threw herself flat on the ground—she knew the sound too well.

Two small quarrels flew past her, one sinking into a nearby tree trunk, the other glancing from her armored sleeve. Halisstra rolled behind the tree and quickly sang a spell of invisibility, hoping to throw off her assailants’ aim, when she happened to glance again at the bolt. It was small and black, with red fletching; the bolt of a drow hand crossbow.

Several stealthy attackers moved closer through the wood, their presence indicated only by the occasional rustle of leaves on the ground or a low signaling whistle. Halisstra carefully stood, still hiding behind the tree.

In a low voice she called, “Hold your fire. I killed the Eilistraeen priestess who carried these arms. I serve the Spider Queen.”

Her voice carried the hint of a bae’qeshel song that gave her words an undeniable sincerity.