Authors: Richard Baker
“Persistent insects,” the beholder snarled as it caught sight of Ryld and the others. “Leave me be!”
The creature floated back through an open archway, retreating to another portion of its lair.
Pharaun turned wearily to face the others. One side of his clothing was spattered with smoking holes, where some kind of acid had burned him, and he trembled with fatigue.
“Ah, I see my worthy companions have at last elected to join me,” he observed. “Excellent! I was afraid you might miss the pleasure of hazarding life and limb against a murderous foe.”
“What’s wrong with Jeggred?” Quenthel managed.
“He’s ensnared by a holding spell of some kind, and I expended all of my dispelling magic in my duel. If you can free him, please do so. I wouldn’t want to be selfish, and keep the beholder all to myself.”
“Shut up, Pharaun,” Danifae rasped. “We have to finish the beholder, quick. There’s a pit fiend and a dozen more devils just behind us, and we’re about to be caught between the two.”
The wizard grimaced. A dangerous light flickered in his eyes as he looked at Danifae, then at Jezz the Lame.
“If your magical tome is this much trouble, perhaps we should keep it for ourselves,” the Master of Sorcere observed.
“Tzirik will not share the results of his divinations with you if you betray us,” the Jaelre said simply. “Decide what is more important to you, spider-kisser, and do it quickly.”
“Stop it, Pharaun,” Ryld said.
He moved over to where Jeggred stood frozen, and laid Splitter alongside the draegloth to break the enchantment that held him. The half-demon blinked his eyes and scowled, slowly straightening.
“One problem at a time,” Ryld continued. “Do you have any magic that can keep the devils off our backs long enough for us to defeat the beholder?”
The wizard answered, “No, they’d be among us in just a moment, and that would be a scene, wouldn’t it? Thewait a moment, I have an idea. We won’t keep out the devils. In fact, we’ll let them in.”
Infernal power crackled and snapped in the room behind them.
“That’s the pit fiend destroying my wall,” Jezz said. “Explain quickly, Menzoberranyr.”
Pharaun began chanting a spell, and weaving his hands in the arcane gestures necessary to shape and control his magic.
“Do not resist,” he told the others. “Ah, there we go. I’ve covered us all with a veil of illusion. We’re all devils now.”
Ryld glanced down at himself and noted nothing different, but when he looked back up, he saw that he was standing in the middle of a company of barbed devils. He recoiled momentarily, and noticed the other devils flinching too. Faintly, as though draped in a diaphanous gauze, he could see the natural forms of the other dark elves beneath their scaly exteriors.
“I can see through this,” he warned.
“Yes, but you’re expecting it,” said the devil who stood where Pharaun had. “This should create no small amount of confusion for our foes, but we must move quickly. We want the devils to come upon us while we’re dealing with the beholder.”
The wizard glided across the chamber, following the beholder, and the rest of the company fell in behind him, hurrying after Pharaun as the howls of the pursuing devils rose in the corridor behind them. They climbed a spiraling stair and found the beholder waiting for them in what seemed to be a large throne room. The monster hesitated as the company burst in, cloaked in their devilish guises.
“The dark elves are not here,” the beholder rasped. “Search the rest of the tower. They must be found!”
“I’m afraid you are mistaken,” Pharaun laughed, and he hurled a blast of lightning at the creature that charred a dinner plate sized patch of its chitinous hide.
At the same time, Valas fired a pair of arrows that sank into its armored body, while Ryld, Jeggred, and Danifae broke into a charge.
The creature recovered from its surprise with incredible alacrity, whirling to flay the attacking drow with its deadly rays and spells. Jeggred was flung across the room with a telekinetic ray, while Danifae had to throw herself flat to avoid the incandescent green sweep of a disintegrating ray. Ryld got three steps farther before no less than three of the monster’s thin eyestalks whipped around, spotting him at once and lashing out with more spells. A hail of incandescent bolts of energy streaked out to meet his charge, punching into his torso like the blows of a dwarven war-hammer. Ryld grunted in pain, and stumbled to the hard floor.
At that moment, a flood of devils climbed up out of the staircase behind them, pouring into the room. In the space of half a dozen heartbeats, the scene descended into complete chaos, as the devils thronged the room, some turning angry glares on the beholder, others simply halting in confusion, surprised to find so many of their fellows already in the room.
From the floor Danifae pointed up at the beholder and screeched, “The beholder is in league with the dark elves! Slay it! Eat its eyes!”
The devils paused just long enough for the beholder to scour their front ranks with deadly spells, and they set upon it, flinging themselves at the monster. Rock-hard talons clawed and gouged at the beholder, while devils exploded under bolts of white fire or crumbled into lifeless stone beneath the beholder’s eye rays.
Ryld had been about to leap up and engage the monster again, but he caught Pharaun’s cautioning gesture, and feigned injury. The wizard’s strategy was brilliantlet the beholder and the devils battle, and their foes might destroy each other.
“Weak-minded fools!” the beholder hissed. “The dark elves have deceived you!”
Still it wreaked terrible devastation with its spells and eye rays, trying to repel the devils’ attack. The stink of charred flesh and the eldritch sensation of deadly magic filled the air.
A palpable sense of wrong flitted across Ryld’s heart, and a hulking pit fiend climbed into the room. The mighty devil stood twice as tall as a drow, its torso rippling with muscle, its vast black wings mantling it like a cloak of ebon glory. It took in the scene with a malignant, measuring gaze, and Ryld’s heart sank as he realized that the powerful fiend was not in the least deceived by Pharaun’s illusion.
With one absent gesture the huge devil conjured up a great, seething orb of black fire in its claw, and hurled the sinister blast at Pharaun. The dark blot exploded in a tremendous explosion of evil flame that rocked the tower to its foundations, throwing Pharaun a dozen feet through the air and scorching him terribly as lesser devils and drow alike were sent flying like ninepins.
“They are right here!” the creature bellowed in a voice like a roaring forge. “Destroy the dark elves!”
The pit fiend started to call up another infernal blast, but Jeggredstill veiled in his devilish guisehurled into the mighty fiend’s flank, clawing and tearing with abandon. The great devil roared in rage, staggering under the draegloth’s assault.
“Lolth’s sweet chaos,” Ryld muttered.
Which was more dangerous, the beholder mage or the pit fiend? The beholder still blasted any devil it saw, veiled drow or not, and most of the pit fiend’s minions had fallen already. The pit fiend hammered and slashed at Jeggred, who stood toe-to-toe with the infernal lord, giving as good as he got.
The weapons master glanced between the two enemies, hesitated only a moment, and decided. Silently as an arrow whispering through the dark, Ryld scrambled up and leaped forward, aiming a tremendous cut at the beholder’s round body. The beholder mage spotted him at once and blasted a bolt of lightning in his direction, but he tumbled aside and kept coming. Another eye fixed on him, and the beholder’s drone took on a peculiarly horrid and deadly sound. Rather than wait to find out what spell the monster could cast with that eye, Ryld altered his path and bounded into the air, reaching out to sever the tentacle cleanly with Splitter’s gleaming blade.
The beholder’s drone broke in a piercing shriek of pain. The monster whirled to face Ryld with its jaws gaping, but the weapons master took careful aim and severed another waving eye before ducking down and scrambling beneath the bloated sphere of the hovering creature’s body. None of the beholder’s eyes could see directly beneath its own bulk.
Dropping to one knee, Ryld shortened his grip on Splitter, and thrust the greatsword up into the chitinous underside of the monster. Black thick gore streamed down the blade, and the huge monster shuddered and shrieked again.
“Well done!” Jezz cried.
The Jaelre renegade commenced to bark out arcane words, his hands weaving in mystical patterns. He conjured up a seething missile of mystic acid that burned another eyestalk from the beholder’s body as the monster rolled and twisted in agony.
Ryld yanked out his sword and rolled aside even as the beholder tried to crush him beneath its bulk, its jaws snapping at him. He found himself looking directly at the front of its body, where its great central eye had once gazed out from an armored carapace. The central eye was nothing but an empty socket. An old lesson came to the weapons master’s mind: a beholder that wished to learn magic had to blind itself in order to do so.
The lesser eyes flailed and twisted on their tentacles, trying to focus on Ryld. The weapons master saw his opportunity and his target at the same moment. With one swift bound he drove Splitter like a lance straight through the empty central socket and deep into the creature’s alien brain. With grim determination he sawed the greatsword in and out, side to side, while dark gore spurted and streamed from the awful wound.
The beholder gave one great shudder, its jaws snapped shut, and its waving eyestalksthose that remainedwent limp. It sank slowly toward the floor.
Ryld glanced up and saw another devil closing on him, apparently having discerned his true form through the illusion, and he snatched out his short sword to gut the fiend as it threw itself on him. The devil knocked him to the floor, its foul blood pouring out all over him. Ryld gagged in revulsion and shouldered the jerking corpse aside, wrenching his sword out of the creature’s midsection with his right hand while he dragged Splitter clear of the beholder mage’s eye with the left. He shook his head to clear his eyes of the blood of his foes.
By the chamber’s entrance, Jeggred sprawled to the ground beneath another terrible spell from the pit fiend, a roaring column of fire that blackened the draegloth’s fur and might have incinerated him outright if not for the half-demon’s native resistance to fire.
Jeggred screeched and rolled across the floor, trying to smother the burning embers, but as the pit fiend followed to strike at him again, Danifae appeared in front of it and dealt the monster a mighty blow that cracked its kneecap. The devil staggered and flared its wings for balanceand Valas buried three arrows in its back, sinking each shaft feather-deep between the fiend’s shoulder blades.
Ryld started forward cautiously, preparing to engage the devil lord in his own turn, but Pharaun, blistered and smoking, rose from the spot where the devil’s fireball had blasted him, and lashed out with a brilliant spray of iridescent colors that caught the pit fiend as it turned to confront the archer. A green ray carved a deep, black, boiling wound in the center of the pit fiend’s torso, while a virulent yellow ray exploded with crackling arcs of electricity as it grazed the devil’s hip. The monster staggered back two steps, and toppled, a smoking corpse. The chamber fell silent as the echoes of its thunderous fall died away.
Pharaun picked himself up gingerly, cradling one arm close to his body. One hand and part of his face were mottled and pink, abraded horribly by the fleeting touch of the beholder’s disintegration ray, while his robes smoked with the fading effects of the dark fireball the pit fiend had conjured. The other dark elves slowly relaxed their guard, glancing around in some surprise to find no more foes on the field, and no life-threatening injuries among their number. Quenthel fumbled at her belt and produced Halisstra’s healing wand, which she began to use to repair her own injuries, murmuring quiet prayers as she wielded the device.
“That,” said Pharaun, “was not easy. We should have demanded something more from the Jaelre for our services.”
“You came to us, spider-kisser,” Jezz said.
He limped up to study the beholder’s corpse where it sprawled on the steps of the ancient dais. Valas and Danifae followed, both keeping an eye on the stairwell behind them.
“Spread out and search for the book,” said the Jaelre. “We must locate the Geildirion and withdraw before all the devils in Myth Drannor descend upon us.”
Jezz followed his own advice at once, ransacking a set of dusty workbenches and cluttered scroll racks along the far side of the beholder’s room.
Ryld sat down on a step and started to scrape the blood from Splitter’s blade. He was exhausted. Jeggred, on the other hand, threw himself into the search, hurling heavy pieces of disused furniture aside and pulling down bookshelves. It occurred to Ryld that the draegloth was unlikely to find that the beholder had stashed a valuable book underneath the wreckage of a dusty old couch, but it seemed to keep the half-demon occupied. Ryld settled for staying out of the draegloth’s way.
“Hold still, all of you!” Pharaun said sharply.
The wizard spoke a spell and commenced to turn slowly in a circle, studying the whole room intently. The rest of the company, including Jezz, halted their hurried ransacking and watched him impatiently. Pharaun continued past Jeggred, past Valas, and halted as he faced a blank wall. He smiled in a predatory fashion, evidently pleased with himself.
“I have defeated the defenses of our deceased adversary,” he said. “That wall is an illusion covering an antechamber.”
He gestured again, and part of the wall not far from Ryld abruptly vanished, revealing a large alcove or niche filled with ramshackle bookshelves cluttered with various old tomes and scrolls. Jezz hopped awkwardly to the bookshelf and started rifling through the titles, shoving each into a satchel at his hip.
“Ryld, Jeggred, keep watch,” said Quenthel. She stood straighter, and the dazed look in her eyes was gone, but she frowned as she replaced the healing wand in her pack. “Valas, tidy up the beholder’s gold and jewels. There’s no point in leaving the loot here, and one never knows when it might be helpful.” She looked over at the Jaelre sorcerer, who stood holding a great tome covered in green scales. “Well, Master Jezz, is that the book you wished to recover?”