R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation (99 page)

“Neither option appeals to me,” Quenthel growled. She turned slowly, studying the walls and structures around them, seeking escape. “There. I can see the open desert just beyond those buildings. Maybe they’ll abandon the chase if we leave the city.”

“Unwise, Mistress,” said Valas. He crouched by an archway leading into their temporary refuge, watching for the next assault. “Once we leave the shelter of the walls, they’ll know exactly where we are. We’d be visible for miles out in the open, even with our
piwafwis
—they weren’t made to hide us in bright daylight on an open plain. Concealment is our best defense.”

Ryld nodded wearily. He stood by another doorway, his greatsword resting on his shoulder.

“They would surround us and drag us down out there,” the Master of Melee-Magthere said. “Best to try to keep moving within the ruins, and hope the lamias—ah, damn. We’ve got more company.”

Rubble shifted somewhere in the maze of crumbling walls beyond their refuge as something large padded closer.

“Watch out for illusions,” Halisstra said.

She balanced her mace in her hand and tugged at her shield, making sure it was strapped securely to her arm. Behind her, Danifae crouched, a long dagger in her hand. Halisstra wasn’t happy about arming her battle captive, but at the moment they needed all the help they could get, and it was plainly in Danifae’s best interests to make sure they didn’t all fall prey to the denizens of Hlaungadath.

The lamias tried something new. Against the gap in the wall that Jeggred guarded, the monsters hurled a wave of lizardlike asabis, savage creatures that hissed in anger as they threw themselves against the draegloth with scimitars and falchions clutched in their scaly hands. Three more challenged Valas while a pair of gargoyles streaked over the walls and dropped into the midst of the ruined building behind Ryld, their great black wings raising huge clouds of dust with every beat. The weapons master whirled to face the threat behind him, cursing.

Jeggred howled in rage and leaped to meet the rush of the asabis, batting aside flashing blades and snapping jaws while he tore at the lizard warriors with his great talons. The white-haired demon used his four arms to wreak terrible carnage, but even Jeggred was tiring. Blows he would have eluded with his freakish speed landed awkwardly. He blocked one slashing scimitar badly with his left outer arm, and suffered a long bloody cut halfway from elbow to wrist. Another blade scored his torso, starting a stream of red across his white-pelted chest. The draegloth roared in rage and redoubled his efforts.

Ryld slashed at the gargoyles while Halisstra and Quenthel ran to his side. Quenthel lashed at one with her whip. The snake heads wound around the creature’s taloned legs and sank fangs into stony flesh, but the gargoyle beat furiously for height and dragged the priestess off her feet and across the dusty structure. Pharaun raised his wand to blast the monsters with deadly lightning, but spun in a half-circle and fell, a crossbow bolt transfixing his right forearm. The wand flew from his hands.

“The rooftops!” the wizard called.

Halisstra backed away from the gargoyles and squinted at the bright sky, searching for more attackers. Tawny blurs crouched atop a high wall perhaps forty or fifty yards distant, a handful of lamias who carried heavy crossbows and watched carefully for opportunities to shoot into the fray, their beautiful faces twisted into evil grins. Even as she watched, one took at shot at Ryld. The bolt whistled past the weapons master’s head, smashing a divot from the soft stone wall nearby. Ryld flinched away.

“Someone take care of the snipers!” he snapped, while slashing at the gargoyles.

A moment later, two more bolts flew at Ryld. One bounced from his breastplate, but the other caught him on the right side while his arms were raised to wield Splitter. The bolt lodged in the arm-opening of his armor. Ryld staggered back two steps and collapsed in the dust.

Halisstra reached down and snatched up Pharaun’s wand.

“Aid Quenthel,” she told Danifae.

She leveled the wizard’s weapon at the lamias on the high wall. She knew something about using such devices—a talent she wouldn’t normally have wished to reveal, but the fight was desperate. She spoke an arcane word, and a bolt of purple lightning shot out at the first lamia, blasting the creature from the wall in a spray of shattered stone. Thunder reverberated in the dusty ruin. She aimed at the next lamia, but the monsters weren’t stupid. They abandoned their lofty perches at once, leaping back behind the wall to avoid more lightning.

From the shadow of the back wall, Pharaun returned to the battle, armed with another wand. This one produced a blazing bolt of fire, which he directed against the gargoyles overhead. With shrieks of pain, the monsters flapped off, though the one poisoned by Quenthel’s whips didn’t get far before its wings folded. It plummeted down among the rooftops some distance away.

Valas dispatched the last of his attackers with a double-handed slash that nearly cut the creature in two, and Jeggred stood amid a virtual heap of asabi bodies, his flanks heaving. The wizard glanced around once, and noticed Ryld on the ground.

“Damn,” he muttered.

He knelt by the weapons master and turned him over. Ryld was dying. Blood streamed from the bolt in his chest, and he fought for each breath, bloody spittle streaking his gray lips. The wizard scowled, then looked up at Quenthel.

“Do something,” he said. “We need him.”

Quenthel folded her arms with a cold frown and said, “Unfortunately, Lolth does not choose to grant me spells of healing at the moment, and I have already expended almost all of the healing magic I brought on our journey. There is little I can do for him.”

Halisstra narrowed her eyes, thinking. Again, she didn’t like the thought of what she was about to do, but there was a benefit to revealing her secret. If she proved herself useful, the Menzoberranyr would be hesitant to discard her.

Besides, she thought, they likely already know.

“Move aside,” she said quietly. “I can help him.”

Quenthel and Pharaun looked up suspiciously.

“How?” Quenthel demanded. “Do you mean to say that Lolth has not withdrawn her favor from you?”

“No,” Halisstra replied. She knelt by Ryld and examined him. She would have to move quickly. If he died, he would be beyond her assistance. “Lolth has denied me spells, just as she has Quenthel, and presumably every other priestess of our race. I have some ability to heal by a different means, though.”

With that, she began to sing. Her song was a strange keening threnody, something dark and eerie that tugged at the drow admiration for beauty, ambition, and black deeds skillfully done. Halisstra molded the shape of her voice and the ancient words of the song, summoning the magic of her lament as she set her hand on the quarrel and drew it from the wound.

Ryld started, his eyes wide and staring, and blood spurted over Halisstra’s hands—but the wound closed into a puckered scar, and the weapons master coughed himself awake.

“What happened?” he groaned.

“What happened, indeed?” Quenthel replied. She eyed Halisstra suspiciously. “Was that what I thought it was?”

Halisstra nodded and stood, wiping blood from her hands.

“It is a tradition in my House that those females who are suited for it may study the arts of the
bae’qeshel
, the dark minstrels. As you can see, there is power in song, something that few of our kind care to study. I have been trained in the minstrel’s lore.”

Ryld sat up, looking down at his breastplate and the bloody quarrel lying in the dust. He looked up at Halisstra.

“You healed me?” he asked.

Halisstra offered her hand and pulled him to his feet.

“As your friend Pharaun observed, we need you too much to allow you to inconvenience us with your death.”

Ryld met her eyes, obviously considering some reply. Gratitude was not an emotion many drow bothered to act upon. The weapons master perhaps wondered what Halisstra might choose to do with his. She spared him any more serious reflections by turning her attention to Pharaun, and handing the iron wand back to him.

“Here,” she said. “You dropped this.”

Pharaun inclined his head and replied, “I admit I was surprised to see you wield it, but I heard you sing in Ched Nasad. Shame on me for not adding two and two.”

“Let me see your arm,” Halisstra said.

She sang the song of healing again, and repaired Pharaun’s injury.

She would have examined the others and aided them if she could, but Quenthel interrupted her.

“No one else is dying,” the high priestess said. “We must move now or our enemies will surely descend on us again. Valas, you lead the way. Head toward the outer walls so that we may make for the open desert if we decide to flee.”

“Very well, Mistress Baenre,” the scout acquiesced. “It will be as you say.”

Kaanyr Vhok, the half-demon prince known as the Sceptered One, stood on a high balcony over the old dwarven foundry and watched his armorers at work. The great smelter had once been the heart of the fallen realm of Ammarindar. The cavern was immense, and its roof rested upon dozens of towering pillars carved into the shapes of dragons, glowing red with angry firelight and the lurid radiance of molten metal. The clanging of hammers and roar of kilns at work filled the air. Dozens of hulking tanarukks, bestial fiends bred from orcs and demons, toiled on the foundry floor. They might have lacked the skill and enchantments of the dwarves who once worked there, but Kaanyr Vhok’s soldiers possessed a cunning instinct for the making of deadly weapons infused with dark lore.

Kaanyr himself fit the infernal scene well. Tall and powerful, he had the stature of a strong-thewed human warrior and the strength of a stone giant. His skin was red and hot to the touch, and his

flesh was hard enough to turn a blade. He was strikingly handsome, though his eyes danced with malice and his teeth were as black as coal. He wore a golden breastplate and carried a pair of wicked short swords made from some demonic black iron in rune-chased scabbards at his belt. He grinned fiercely with delight as he looked out over the gathering storm of his army.

“I now lead nearly two thousand tanarukk warriors,” he said over his shoulder, “and I have just as many orcs, ogres, trolls, and giants at my command. I think the time has come to try my strength, my love.”

Aliisza allowed herself a smile and moved closer, pressing herself to the demon prince’s side. Like Kaanyr Vhok, she too possessed demonic blood. In her case, she was an alu-fiend, the spawn of a succubus and some mortal sorcerer. Wings as smooth as black leather sprouted from her shoulder blades, but other than that she was dusky and seductive, voluptuous and inviting, a half-demoness whose allure few mortal men could resist. She was also clever, capricious, and very skilled in magic, and therefore well-suited to be the consort of a demonspawned warlord such as Kaanyr.

“Menzoberranzan?” she purred, tracing the filigree of his armor with one fingertip.

“Of course. There seems to be nothing worth the taking in Ched Nasad, after all.” Kaanyr frowned, and his gaze grew distant. “If the dark elves are without the protection of their spider goddess, and unable to govern their interminable feuds, I may have an opportunity to seize the greatness I have always coveted. Having mastered the ruins of Ammarindar, I find that I hunger for something more. Subjugating a city of drow appeals to me.”

“Others have had that thought,” Aliisza pointed out. “The Menzoberranyr I spoke with in Ched Nasad suggested that his own city had suffered a significant slave uprising, sponsored by some outside agency. I think the duergar mercenaries who fought in Ched Nasad would not have left the city to whatever House hired them, once they’d managed to take it. If the duergar firebombs hadn’t worked so well, I suspect Clan Xornbane would rule Ched Nasad now.”

“Or I would,” Kaanyr said. He narrowed his eyes. “If you had reported the situation to me in a more timely manner, I might have been able to bring my army against Ched Nasad when the drow and duergar were exhausted from fighting each other.”

Aliisza licked her lips.

“You would have lost whatever forces you brought into the city,” she replied. “Your tanarukks could have endured the fires, of course, but the collapse of the city streets destroyed everything in the cavern. Trust me, you missed no opportunities in Ched Nasad.”

Kaanyr did not reply. Instead, he disentangled himself from Aliisza and vaulted lightly over the balcony rail, descending to the foundry floor. The warlord had no wings, but his demonic heritage conferred the ability to fly through effort of will. Aliisza frowned, and followed behind him, spreading her black pinions wide to catch the blazing updrafts of the room. Kaanyr was still sore about Ched Nasad, and that was not good, she reflected. If the warlord ever tired of her, he was certainly capable of having her killed in some grisly manner, past intimacies notwithstanding. There was nothing of which he was not capable, if his temper got the better of him.

The half-demon alighted beside a sand mold filling with molten iron. A pair of tanarukks stood by, carefully watching over the pour. Kaanyr squatted down by the white-hot metal and absently stirred his fingers in it. It was hot enough to cause him discomfort, and after a moment he shook the molten iron from his fingers and brushed them against his thigh.

“Good iron,” he said to the tanarukks. “Carry on, lads.”

He straightened and continued on his way. Aliisza fluttered to the stone floor and fell into step behind him.

“The thing that troubles me is this,” Kaanyr mused. “Why did the Xornbane duergar betray the House that employed them by burning the whole city? Was it simply a dispute over pay? Or did they intend from the start to bring ruin to Ched Nasad? If so, was Horgar Steelshadow behind it? Did the prince of Gracklstugh send his mercenaries to Ched Nasad to destroy the city, or did Clan Xornbane do that for someone else?”

“Does it matter?” Aliisza asked, sidling up beside him again. “The city was destroyed, regardless of anyone’s intentions. The great Houses of Ched Nasad are dead, and there aren’t many Xornbane dwarves remaining, for that matter.”