Authors: Richard Baker
“I’m not sure we can leave, even if we want to,” Ryld said. He jerked his head at Tzirik, who watched the scene with an expression of dark joy behind his mask. “Don’t we need him?”
“Should we leave, even to save ourselves?” Valas added. “We would seem to be culpable forthis.” The scout shielded his eyes from the sight of Vhaeraun’s efforts. “What happens when he breaches the temple? Mistress, what will happen? Is Lolth in there?”
Quenthel let out a shriek of despair.
Danifae fell at Quenthel’s feet and asked, “Mistress, have you been here? Have you been here before?”
“I don’t know!” the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith shouted.
She jerked her arm away from Pharaun and stormed over to Tzirik, weaving as the ground trembled underfoot. She spun him away from the facade of the temple, tearing him away from the dark adoration of his god, and gripped the breastplate of his armor with her hands.
“Why is he doing this?” she demanded. “What have you done, heretic?”
Tzirik blinked and shook his head, his eyes behind his mask still full of the glory of his epiphany.
“You do not know what you are witnessing, priestess of Lolth?” Tzirik said. He laughed deeply. “You have the rare good fortune to be present at the destruction of your goddess.” He disentangled Quenthel’s hands from his armor and took a step back, his voice rising in exultant glee. “You wish to know what is going on here, Lolthite? I will tell you. The Masked Lord is going to unseat your Spider Queen and overthrow her black tyranny forever! Our people will finally be freed of her venomous influence, and you and the rest of your parasitic kind will be swept away as well!”
Quenthel snarled in feral rage, “You will not live to see it!”
Her whip sprang into her hand, and she drew her arm back to flay the triumph from Tzirik’s face. Before she’d even started her lash, Vhaerauna bowshot distant, his back to the company as he chiseled and bludgeoned at the growing crack in the stone visagewaved his left hand without turning around. From beneath Quenthel’s feet a column of seething black magma exploded, hurling her dozens of feet into the air with bone-breaking force. Tzirik, standing almost within arm’s length, was untouched, but the rest of the company scattered to avoid the hot, stone-shattering impacts of great round blobs of the molten rock.
The god didn’t even break his hammerlike rhythm of blow after blow. He struck again and again, even as Quenthel plummeted back down to the flagstones of the plaza, screaming as gobs of the infernal rock clung to her flesh and burned. Valas and Ryld ran to her aid. Danifae cringed, but kept her eyes on the god engaged in his assault.
Pharaun studied the scene, and shook his head.
“This is insane,” he muttered.
He made a curious gesture with his hand and disappeared, teleporting away to some presumably safer locale. Halisstra saw him leave, and stood staring for one long moment before another impact of Vhaeraun’s sword threw her to the ground. She lay there, defeated, while Quenthel thrashed and shrieked in agony nearby.
“Ah,” breathed Vhaeraun. The god backed away from the face, which was split by a glowing green scar from the center of the forehead straight down the bridge of the nose and across the lips to the cleft of the chin. “Mother, have you nothing to say even now? Will you die in silence?”
The face remained impassive, the roiling light in the introspective eyes unchanged, but once again something seemed to tear the very fabric of the cosmos with a horrible ripping sound. A black gash appeared in the air near the face, and from it stepped another divine form.
Where Vhaeraun was lean and impossibly graceful, the newcomer was a thing of nightmare. Half spider and half drow, it clutched an armory of swords and maces in its six thickly muscled arms, and each of its chitinous legs ended in a vicious pincerlike claw. Its face, perversely enough, was that of a handsome drow male.
“Depart, Masked One,” the spider-god commanded in a tortured, burbling voice. “It is forbidden for you to intrude here.”
“Do not presume to stand between me and my destiny, Selvetarm,” Vhaeraun snarled.
The monstrous spider-god Selvetarm waited no longer, but darted forward with blinding speed, weaving his sextuple blades in an irresistible assault that might have dismembered a dozen giants in the space of two heartbeats.
Vhaeraun whirled aside, dancing through the storm of steel as if he chased Selvetarm’s weapons instead of the other way around, parrying blows he found too inconvenient to elude and riposting with supernal grace. When the gods’ weapons met, thunderclaps shook the ground.
Halisstra pushed herself upright, gaping in amazement. She might have stood transfixed at the scene indefinitely, but Ryld appeared at her elbow.
“We need your healing songs,” he hissed. “Quenthel is badly burned.”
What does it matter? Halisstra wondered.
Still, she climbed to her feet and made her way over to the fallen priestess. Quenthel writhed on the ground, hissing between her teeth as she strove unsuccessfully to master her pain. Ignoring the impossible duel that raged back and forth between the two deities, Halisstra focused on the Baenre’s injuries and managed to begin the discordant threnody of a bae’qeshel song. She laid her hands on Quenthel’s burns and wove as best she could, finding a momentary calm in the exercise of her talents for a tangible and immediate end. Quenthel’s thrashings eased, and in a moment she opened her eyes. Her spells cast, Halisstra merely slumped down again and stared at the battling gods.
“What do we do?” she whispered. “What can we possibly do?”
“Endure,” Ryld replied. He gripped her arm with one iron hand and met her eyes. “Wait and watch. Something will happen.”
He looked back toward Vhaeraun and Selvetarm, too.
Valas rose from Quenthel’s side and made his way over to Tzirik, crouching to keep his balance.
“Tzirik! What happens to this place, to us, if Vhaeraun defeats Selvetarm and destroys the face? Can you get us out of here?”
“What happens to us does not matter,” answered the priest.
“Maybe not to you, but it matters greatly to me,” Valas muttered. “Did you bring us here only to die, Tzirik?”
“I did not bring you here, mercenary, you brought me,” the priest replied, giving Valas only a fraction of his attention. “None but the Spider Queen’s priestesses could get this close to her temple, not even the Masked Lord. As to what happens when Vhaeraun defeats Selvetarm, well, we shall see.”
He turned his full attention back to the dueling gods.
The Masked Lord and the Champion of Lolth fought on furiously. Ichor oozed from several black wounds in the half-spider’s chitinous body, and dripping black shadow flowed from a handful of sword cuts that had kissed the graceful Vhaeraun. While the gods strove together in the realm of the physical, exchanging blows at a dizzying rate, they also confronted each other magically and psychically at the same time. Spells of terrible power blasted back and forth between them, deadlier even than Selvetarm’s six weaving weapons. Their eyes locked on each other with a tangible contest whose potency tugged at what was left of Halisstra’s reason, even from a hundred yards away. Missed blows and deflected spells caused terrible damage all around the two deities, gouging great craters in the walls of the temple and the flagstones of the plaza, and more than once coming perilously close to annihilating the mortal onlookers through sheer mischance.
“Treacherous jackal!” snarled Selvetarm. “Your perfidy will not be rewarded!”
“Simpleminded fool. Of course it shall,” Vhaeraun retorted.
He leaped in among Selvetarm’s flurrying blades and punched his shadow sword deep into the spider-god’s bulbous abdomen. The Champion of Lolth shrieked and recoiled, but a moment later he seized Vhaeraun’s ankle with one pincer and jerked the god to the ground. As quick as a cat he rained a torrent of deadly blows down on the Masked Lord.
Vhaeraun responded by invoking a colossal blast of burning shadowstuff that plunged straight down from some impossible height overhead and bathed both gods in black fire. Selvetarm roared in divine anguish, even as he hammered again and again at Vhaeraun.
With a horrible grinding sound that Halisstra and the other onlookers felt in their very bones, the stone plaza disintegrated beneath them.
Still locked in their furious struggle, the two deities fell through the great temple island into the black abyss that waited below. Their roars of rage and the ground-shaking clamor of their weapons grew fainter and fainter as they fell away into the pit.
“They’re gone,” Ryld said numbly, stating the obvious. “Now what?”
No one had an answer for him, as the company gaped at the castle-sized shaft into nothingness the gods had left behind them. Distant flickers of light still danced from their battle, far below. For the space of several minutes the drow did nothing, climbing back to their feet, no one speaking at all. Tzirik merely folded his arms and waited.
“Did they destroy each other?” Valas ventured at last.
“I doubt it,” Danifae said.
She looked thoughtfully at the glowing green crack that split Lolth’s face, but said nothing more.
“If Lolth didn’t care to respond to Vhaeraun’s assault, I doubt she’ll have anything to say to us,” Ryld said. “We should get out of here.”
The weapons master turned to speak to Tzirik, only to find that the Jaelre priest was locked in rapt attention, staring off into nothing, his expression alight with adoration.
“Yes, Lord,” he whispered to no one. “Yes, I obey!”
Even as Ryld stepped forward to question the priest, the Jaelre priest gestured and spoke an unholy prayer. A whirling field of thousands of razor-sharp blades like that he’d used against the goristro sprang into existence a short distance around him, barricading Tzirik behind a cylindrical wall of tumbling metal.
Ryld yelped a curse and leaped backward, throwing himself out of the path of the murderous blades.
Tzirik ignored the weapons master, continuing with whatever task Vhaeraun had assigned him. With fumbling fingers the cleric drew a case from his belt and extracted a scroll, unrolled it, and began to read aloud from the parchment, beginning the words of another powerful spell while protected from the Menzoberranyr by his deadly barrier.
Halisstra looked up at him in dull surprise, trying to discern what spell the Jaelre priest was casting. It was difficult to bring herself to care any longer.
Even as Halisstra sank back down in apathy and despair, the fight rekindled in Quenthel. She surged up, groping for her whip.
“It’s another gate!” she screamed. “Do not let him finish that spell!”
A few hundred yards distant, cloaked in darkness and drifting vapors, Pharaun sat cross-legged on the hard stone, hurrying to finish his spell. He’d watched the two gods battle to a standstill and plummet out of sight, but he was committed to his course and did not intend to stop. The spell of sending could not be cast quickly, and if he attempted to rush it, he would lose it all together. In the part of his mind that was not absorbed in the shaping of the magic, he wondered with no little trepidation whether the gods’ omniscience might be complete enough to note his presence, note that he was casting a spell, and deduce why he was casting itand whether the gods would deign to stop him. As best he could tell from his safe distance, though, Vhaeraun and Selvetarm were occupied with their fierce battle and were unlikely to be paying him much attention.
He completed the spell and whispered the message it would carry for him through the incalculable distances of dimensions and space, “Jeggred. We are in mortal peril. Slay Tzirik’s physical body at once. We will return quickly, but guard us until we do. Quenthel commands it.”
Pharaun sighed and stood, his expression thoughtful. The sending was reliable, but he didn’t know for certain the effects of attempting it from another plane of existence. Nor did he know how long it would take his words to reach Jeggred back in Minauthkeep, or if the draegloth would choose to do as he asked even in Quenthel’s name … or even if the cursed half-demon was still alive and free to kill the high priest.
The Master of Sorcere had a good sense of what to expect if all went as he hoped. It was only a matter of time, and not much at that.
“This would not be a good time to become obstinate, Jeggred,” Pharaun muttered, even though his sending was gone already. “For once, do as I ask without question.”
Warily, he began to creep back toward the distant cleft in the temple’s massive wall.
Surrounded by his tumbling wall of blades, Tzirik stood aside from the rest of the company, quickly and expertly reading aloud from his scroll. He didn’t bother explaining to the Menzoberranyr what Vhaeraun had told him to do, or why he was doing it. He simply proceeded as if they were not there at all, though he’d taken the precaution of raising a blade barrier to keep them from interfering.
Ryld and Valas stood close to the deadly, spinning razors, watching helplessly as the priest droned on. Danifae and Quenthel crouched a little father back, equally helpless, the determination to do something battling with their inability to discern what, exactly, they could do. Halisstra stood watching as well, but she merely waited to see what form her doom would take.
“Tzirik, stop!” cried Valas. “You have put us all in sufficient peril today. We will not allow you to continue.”
“Kill him, Valas,” Danifae said. “He will not listen, and he will not stop.”
The scout stood paralyzed as the priest’s chant approached the final, triumphant notes. His shoulders slumped, stricken with defeat. Without warning, Valas brought up his shortbow and fired.
The first arrow was deflected by a whirling blade in the magical barrier, but the second passed through cleanly and pierced Tzirik’s gauntleted hand. The priest cried out in pain and dropped his scroll, which fluttered to the stone plaza, unexpended.
The Jaelre whirled on Valas, eyes afire with hate through his masked helm, and said, “Are you still the bitches’ errand-boy, Valas? Don’t you see that you’re nothing but a well-heeled dog to them? Why do you persist in giving the Spider Queen your loyalty, when you could take the Masked Lord for your god and know true freedom?”