Archmage

CHAPTER 2

Matron Mother Zeerith Xorlarrin joined hands with her mighty nephew, the wizard Tsabrak, and began her spellcasting. Similarly, the wizard launched into his own casting, the two twining their magical energies into a unique spell, both arcane and divine.

Across the altar in the primordial chamber of Q’Xorlarrin, High Priestess Kiriy, Zeerith’s oldest daughter, held her breath in anticipation. She had never seen this ritual performed before, though she was well versed in necromancy.

“Dwardermey,” Tsabrak whispered a long while later, evoking the name of one of the fallen drow in the Silver Marches.

“Dwardermey,” Matron Mother Zeerith echoed, and they both repeated the call many times.

The body came from inside the stone block altar itself, facial features forming within the stone, and growing, rising. Then it was separate from the altar, the body of a slain dark elf, torn by swords and axes. “Kiriy!” Matron Mother Zeerith said sharply, and the high priestess realized that she was taking too long. She put aside her astonishment and launched into a simple spell to animate the dead.

A few moments later, the corpse of Dwardermey Xorlarrin sat up on the altar, then stiffly shifted to the side, legs hanging over the altar slab. High Priestess Kiriy looked to Matron Mother Zeerith, who nodded, and so Kiriy commanded the zombie to stand and walk. The unthinking zombie did walk, directly away from the high priestess, as ordered. It did not pause when it reached the lip of the primordial’s pit. It made not a sound when it pitched over the edge, tumbling through the swirl of the trapped water elementals to land on the lava skin of the godlike beast. The primordial drew Dwardermey in.

Tsabrak blew a great sigh. “This will take us tendays,” he said. “I am exhausted already, as are you.”

“We must,” Matron Mother Zeerith replied. “In this duty, we will salvage the goodwill of the Spider Queen.”

High Priestess Kiriy held her tongue, unsure that the exercise of summoning the corpses from the distant battlefield and properly disposing of them would do any such thing. But they had to try, she knew, for she understood as her mother understood: Lady Lolth was not pleased with their failures in the Silver Marches.

Perhaps that was why the dark elves killed in that war were so disproportionately Xorlarrin warriors.

So now they would perform their tedious duty, in the hopes that they would garner some measure of forgiveness or clemency from the merciless Spider Queen. Such a task would consume them for hours each day, and was no inexpensive feat. Tsabrak had to destroy a valuable gemstone for each summoning.

Perhaps it would be easier, Kiriy thought-but surely did not say-if Matron Mother Zeerith simply sent Tsabrak to the Silver Marches to physically reclaim the fallen dark elves of Q’Xorlarrin.

But of course, her mother would never do such a thing. Tsabrak was Zeerith’s lover now, her partner, and she had secretly elevated him to a position of power nearly equal to her own. And that, Kiriy feared-but again dared not speak aloud-might be the truth behind Lady Lolth’s disapproval.

A fireball stole the darkness in a far corner of the great cavern that housed Menzoberranzan. It was something more than a wizard’s blast, Gromph knew, as he watched from his window at the drow academy of Sorcere.

Cries drifted across the cavern, echoing. A battle raged, drow against demon, likely, or just as likely, demon against demon.

The Abyssal beasts were thick about Menzoberranzan now, these ugly creatures of destruction and chaos, wandering freely, untended, uncontrolled. Gromph had lost two students caught in a skirmish with a glabrezu over in the district called the Stenchstreets-the body of one apprentice wizard had been sent to him in two equal-sized boxes.

The gates of every house in the city were closed, sealed, every sentry on a nervous edge, every matron mother plotting and fretting in turn, wondering if she might turn a demon to her advantage or fearing that a horde of the beasts would descend upon her House and obliterate it. They could find no pattern to alleviate their fears. These were demons, changing direction at a whim, destroying simply for the joy of destroying.

A low growl escaped the archmage’s lips. What idiocy was this? What demons, literal and figurative, was his arrogant sister unleashing upon the city of Menzoberranzan?

He heard a knock on his door but ignored it. More bad news, likely: another student torn apart by a glabrezu’s giant pincers, a lesser House invaded, perhaps.

Another knock sounded, this one more insistent, and when Gromph didn’t respond, he heard, to his absolute astonishment, the door creaking open.

“You are fortunate that I did not enable my wards,” he said dryly, never turning. “Else you would be a red puddle from which a wounded frog would hop.”

“Truly, husband?” came the surprising reply, the voice of Minolin Fey. “Perhaps in that event you would find me more attractive.”

“What are you doing here?” Gromph demanded, and still he did not bother to turn to face the priestess.

“The matron mother is quite pleased with herself,” Minolin Fey replied. “The other matron mothers are too busy securing their gates to think about colluding against her.”

“Perhaps if she just burned down House Baenre, she would have even less to worry about,” Gromph sardonically replied.

He took a deep breath and finally turned a serious expression upon the high priestess. “How many has she summoned?”

“Who can know?” Minolin Fey replied. “Now the demons are summoning each other. The matron mother might as well have thrown fifty scurvy rats into a nest, the beasts reproduce so efficiently. Except that even scurvy rats have a few tendays of helpless infancy. The summoned demons are quite mature and capable of havoc from the moment they emerge through the dimensional gate.”

“Why are you here?” Gromph asked again.

“The true matron mother does not sit on the throne of House Baenre,” Minolin Fey dared to whisper.

“What are you suggesting?”

Minolin Fey swallowed hard and struggled for a reply.

Gromph knew well. Not so long before, Minolin Fey and some others, including Gromph on the periphery of their treachery, had conspired to bring down Quenthel’s reign. They had found a weakness, a seam in the matron mother’s armor, and one dating back to the Time of Troubles. In that chaos, as the gods returned to prominence in Faerûn and the divine powers were restored, Matron Mother Yvonnel the Eternal, Gromph’s mother and the ruler of Menzoberranzan for longer than the memories of the oldest drow, had channeled the unbridled power of the Spider Queen. Lolth’s magnificence had flowed through her as she utterly destroyed House Oblodra-the compound and almost all of the noble family. The Oblodrans had sought the quietness of the gods, of Lolth in particular, to seek great advantage, for they were an order of psionicists, whose magic was not dependent upon such divine beings.

A very few Oblodrans escaped the wrath of Matron Mother Yvonnel, the wrath of Lady Lolth-only Kimmuriel was now known to Gromph-but all of the other notables had been slaughtered in the catastrophe, except for one. Death would have been too easy for K’yorl Odran, the Matron of House Oblodra. No, Yvonnel had not killed that one, but had spared her and sent her to the Abyss, to the eternal torment of a great balor named Errtu. When Minolin Fey and her fellow conspirators had learned of this, they had hatched a plan to rescue the vicious and strangely powerful K’yorl, with her illithid-like psionic abilities. They would turn her upon the then-weakened House Baenre and the pitiful Matron Mother Quenthel, who would never survive such an unexpected onslaught.

“Surely the Spider Queen cannot be pleased by these actions,” Minolin Fey pleaded. “And surely, Lady Lolth knows that the better choice, the better matron mother. .”

“Bite back your words or I will remove your tongue,” Gromph warned her.

Minolin Fey blanched and fell back against the door, knowing well from his tone that he was not speaking idly. The archmage’s eyes flared with frustration and rage, and he sneered and growled again.

But then he sighed, the moment passing.

“She is not merely Quenthel any longer,” Gromph calmly explained. “She is not weak, nor is House Baenre.”

“We can do it through proxies,” Minolin Fey started to add, but Gromph cut her short with a glare that froze the blood in her veins.

“Never speak of K’yorl again,” Gromph warned. “Are you so foolish to miss the small matter that the matron mother now has an illithid at her disposal? Methil El-Viddenvelp serves my sister as he once served my mother.”

“As he has served your child,” Minolin Fey reminded him.

“Do not presume to understand anything about Methil. And I say again, for the last time, never speak of K’yorl again.”

“As you demand, Archmage,” the high priestess said, deferentially-and wisely-lowering her gaze to the floor.

“Get back to House Baenre and our child,” Gromph ordered. “You dare leave her unprotected in this time when demons haunt the ways of Menzoberranzan?”

Minolin Fey didn’t look up and didn’t answer, other than to slowly retreat back out the door, never turning her back to the archmage.

Gromph took little satisfaction in hearing her footsteps and the rustle of her robes rushing down the hall. Despite his outward anger, Gromph knew that her fear of Quenthel’s growing power was correct.

The old archmage looked back out the window, shaking his head. Quenthel had been brilliant in so locking down the city-perhaps that was what galled him most of all.

And Gromph had erred, he knew. He had come to hope that Yvonnel, his child, possessed of his mother’s memories and soon enough to be crowned as Matron Mother of Menzoberranzan, would serve as his ladder to ascension against the dark realities of Lolth’s failure to secure the Weave, and the Spider Queen’s apparent indifference to him even had she succeeded.

Soon enough, Quenthel would have Matron Mother Zeerith begging her to keep the city of Q’Xorlarrin as a Baenre satellite, and now, with the constant demonic threat lurking in every shadow, any movement by House Barrison Del’Armgo, House Melarn, House Hunzrin, or any others, had surely been halted.

“Brilliant,” he admitted, staring out at the city as another demonic fireball erupted.

He glanced back at the door, at where Minolin Fey had been. Perhaps it was time for him to go and speak with the Matron of House Fey-Branche, Minolin’s mother Byrtyn.

One of the former conspirators. The one who had found K’yorl Odran.

A gray and ugly fog blew in, sometimes thin and blurring the giant mushroom stalks into ghostly figures, other times so thick as to block Kimmuriel’s vision for more than a few feet in every direction. A great stench was carried on that steaming wind and fog, the aroma of rot and death, of burning flesh and hearty vomit.

Kimmuriel was too disciplined to let that bother him. So many who came here to this wretched plane of existence grew distracted by the grotesque sights and smells, and that distraction often led to violent ends.

The drow walked steadily, his eyes and his mind’s eye probing all around him. He would not be caught off guard.

He could hear her now, calling to him as she had done when he was a child-not with her physical voice, but psionically.

Kimmuriel Oblodra tried to hold his calm. He came in sight of her, of K’yorl, his mother, then, as she leaned against a mushroom stalk, looking every bit the same as she had on that awful day more than a century before, when Matron Mother Baenre had wrenched the whole of House Oblodra up by its stony roots and dropped it into the Clawrift, the great chasm that split the cavern that housed Menzoberranzan.

K’yorl had gone over with that tumbling stalagmite house, and Kimmuriel had thought her dead.

That notion hadn’t bothered him too greatly, though. He had already all but left House Oblodra to join Jarlaxle’s mercenary band, and he was not one to be bothered too greatly by such destructive and useless emotions as grief.

Or elation, he pointedly told himself as he once again looked upon his mother.

Gromph had sent him to Byrtyn Fey and she had directed him here, to the Abyss, to the throne of the great balor Errtu.

To K’yorl Odran, Errtu’s slave.

“My son, you are all that remains,” K’yorl greeted.

“It would seem that you, too-”

“No,” K’yorl interrupted. “I am dead in every way that matters. The Prime Material Plane is beyond me now, my mortal coil no more than an illusion, a manifestation here to keep Errtu amused.” She paused and shot him the slyest of looks as she added, “For now.”

Kimmuriel couldn’t miss the seething anger in her voice and behind her fiery eyes-orbs that had not lost a bit of their luster in the century and more of her imprisonment. After all these decades, the fiery and vicious K’yorl had not cooled.

“Matron Mother Yvonnel Baenre is long dead,” he said, to try to calm her.

“Cursed House Baenre just replaces her, one after another, but House Oblodra, our House, all that we had built, is no more!”

“You erred in the Time of Troubles,” Kimmuriel bluntly replied. “You reached too high and when the divine powers returned, you were punished for your hubris. We all were.”

“But you survived.”

Kimmuriel shrugged, as if it hardly mattered.

“And what have you done to repay Baenre?” K’yorl demanded sharply.

“I?” Kimmuriel replied incredulously. “I have served myself, as I please, when I please, how I please.”

“With Jarlaxle.”

“Yes.”

“Jarlaxle Baenre,” K’yorl said pointedly, for she was one of the few who knew the truth of that strange, Houseless mercenary.

“It is not a name he uses.”

“He serves House Baenre.”

“Hardly. Jarlaxle serves Jarlaxle.”

K’yorl nodded, digesting it all.

“It is time to pay them back,” she said at length. “Quenthel is a weakling, and she is vulnerable.”

“She has tightened her noose on the city.”

“And when it loosens? A dragon is dead, the Darkening has been defeated, and the fledgling city of Matron Mother Zeerith hangs by a single strand of a spider’s web.”

“I am surprised that you are so informed of the-”

“I have nothing but time,” K’yorl interrupted. “And Errtu torments me by showing me the turning of Menzoberranzan without me.”

“Then you know that Matron Mother Baenre will see to Matron Mother Zeerith’s troubles as well.”

“With demons.”

“You know much for a slave in the Abyss,” Kimmuriel said again, even allowing a bit of sarcasm into his normally impassive tone.

“I know much because I am in the Abyss! Errtu does not fear me, surely, and so he does not fear letting me know of Menzoberranzan.”

“Demons, yes,” said Kimmuriel.

K’yorl gave a little laugh, a wicked one indeed. “You must be my conduit, Kimmuriel. You must exact the punishment House Baenre rightly deserves.”

Kimmuriel dismissed that foolish notion even as the matron mother spoke it. He wasn’t about to go against Matron Mother Baenre and her vast array of powerful friends. Still, he heard and sympathized with every word. He hated Quenthel Baenre. Despite any logical protestations to the contrary, a simmering rage burned within Kimmuriel Oblodra for all that he had lost, for all that House Baenre had taken from him. He watched again in his memories the tumbling structure of House Oblodra, pitching over the side of the Clawrift, so many dark elves, his family, tumbling into oblivion.

For a long while, for many years, Kimmuriel had hated House Baenre. When first he had learned of Jarlaxle’s heritage, he had even considered murdering the mercenary.

That was a long time ago, of course, but now, hearing K’yorl, Kimmuriel realized that he hadn’t dismissed those feelings of rage quite as thoroughly as he had believed.

“I do not expect you to expose yourself to suspicion,” K’yorl said, as if reading his thoughts-and she probably was, he reminded himself, throwing up more mental guards.

“You ask me to serve as your instrument, your assassin against House Baenre, but do so without wishing me to expose myself to their wrath?” he asked skeptically.

“Not my instrument, but my conduit to my instrument,” K’yorl said with a crooked and knowing little smile, one that took Kimmuriel back across the centuries, one that he had known well in his youth.

“A mighty Baenre studies under you, I am told,” K’yorl said.

It was beginning to bother Kimmuriel more than a little just how much K’yorl was being told.

“The archmage, no less,” she said.

Kimmuriel remained impassive-there was no need to confirm anything, apparently.

“And how does Gromph Baenre feel about his sister the matron mother filling the streets of Menzoberranzan with demons?”

“He thinks it a brilliant ploy to insulate the matron mother from the wrath of the Ruling Council over her. . choices.”

“But how does he feel? Is he pleased by his sister Quenthel’s dangerous ploy?”

“You clearly know the answer.”

“He hates her. They all do,” K’yorl said. “She imposes order on a city of chaos. It will not stand.”

“I will not stop it.”

“Not directly.”

“I do not enjoy cryptic conversations, Matron Mother,” Kimmuriel said, and what he really didn’t enjoy-and he knew that this drow in front of him understood it well-was not being able to read her thoughts. Kimmuriel was used to holding a huge advantage in such conversations, with all but the mind flayers and Jarlaxle, for he could read the meaning behind every word with a simple glance into the flittering thoughts as the words were spoken.

“Fan the flames in the archmage’s humors,” K’yorl explained. “Subtly suggest a way for him to strike back at his sister. Let him battle demon with demon.”

“You ask me to implant a suggestion into the mind of the archmage to summon demons of his own? Into the mind of Gromph Baenre?” Kimmuriel didn’t try to hide his doubts. Those dark elves expecting and hoping for a long life simply didn’t do such things.

“It will be no difficult task. Gromph’s thoughts already flow in that direction.”

Movement to the side caught Kimmuriel’s attention, and he noted a massive, leather-winged beast moving toward them, one he knew to be the mighty balor Errtu. The creature moved close enough to tower over Kimmuriel, and sniffed the air a few times before plopping down in a mushroom fashioned into a throne just off to the side, one Kimmuriel hadn’t even noticed before-had Errtu brought it with him?

“To have Gromph call in a balor, perhaps?” Kimmuriel asked K’yorl, but he was looking at Errtu.

“Think bigger,” K’yorl replied. “Perhaps Gromph will think he is calling forth a peer of Errtu, but let his spell draw a bigger prize, a prize beyond his control?”

“You?” Kimmuriel asked dryly.

Both K’yorl and Errtu laughed at that.

“You cannot return to the Prime Material Plane at this time,” Kimmuriel said to Errtu.

The balor growled, but nodded. Errtu had been defeated on the Prime Material Plane, and so banished, a penalty of a century of exile.

“Banished by a Baenre,” K’yorl said. “Tiago Baenre.”

“Who is now Tiago Do’Urden, if he is even still alive,” said Kimmuriel.

“All the more reason to hate him,” said Errtu. The demon stared hard at Kimmuriel and focused his thoughts at the drow psionicist, who was overwhelmed by the sheer wall of demonic hate emanating from the creature.

“What do you know of the Faerzress?” K’yorl asked.

“What every drow of Menzoberranzan is taught at the Academy,” said Kimmuriel. The Faerzress was a region of the Underdark teeming with magical energy-the very stones of the region glowed with the power of magic, both the Weave and the extraplanar energies of the lower planes. Through the emanations of the Faerzress, the drow gained their innate magical abilities, and their innate resistance to magic. With the permeating glow of the Faerzress, drow smiths fashioned their fabulous weapons and armor. As the sun nurtured the surface world with its warmth and life energy, so the Faerzress fed the darkness of the Underdark.

“I will give you a spell,” K’yorl said, and closed her eyes. “Open your mind.”

Kimmuriel similarly closed his eyes and focused on receiving-and studying-K’yorl’s psionic impartation. He didn’t know all the words, for it was an arcane chant and not a psionic pattern.

“Give that to Gromph during your sessions,” she bade him. “Bit by bit, inflection by inflection. Let him find the strength to battle his sister and foil her plans, and so we will pay back House Baenre.”

Kimmuriel opened his eyes to stare at her intently.

“Would it so pain you to see House Baenre punished and Menzoberranzan thrust back into chaos?” she asked. “Would not Bregan D’aerthe profit from such. . tribulations?”

“And you would find a deep sense of sweet revenge?”

“Do you expect me to deny it?” K’yorl asked.

“No.”

“And would you not share in your mother’s satisfaction?” Kimmuriel said nothing.

“Then we are agreed?” K’yorl asked.

“When next Methil summons me to Gromph’s chamber to continue our work, I will offer him a view of what he might do to counter the matron mother. And, too, I will begin showing him a more powerful gate to the Abyss.”

“He will light the Faerzress with the power of that spell, and oh, but his surprise will delight you, my noble son.”

Despite himself, Kimmuriel grinned. He nodded and bowed deferentially to the mighty Errtu, then bent time and space and was once more back in Faerûn, in a tavern called One-Eyed Jax, in the port city of Luskan.

“What is wrong?” Matron Mother Zeerith asked when Tsabrak walked into her private chamber-unannounced and without knocking. She could see the look on her most powerful ally’s face, though, and so she knew he had not shown the disrespect out of anything more than abject misery.

“Tsabrak?” she demanded as he moved over and numbly sat down on a chair across from her.

“I looked in on the Silver Marches,” he said, his voice a defeated monotone. “I went to see if I could confirm the areas where our other warriors likely fell. It would make the corpse summoning easier, of course, if we knew. .” His voice trailed off.

“What do you know?” Matron Mother Zeerith asked, moving forward, sliding from her chair and across the floor to kneel before the seated mage, one hand on his knee, the other holding him by the chin, forcing him to look into her eyes.

“It’s gone,” he said.

Matron Mother Zeerith’s face screwed up with confusion as she tried to decipher that. “ ‘It’s’? What is gone?”

“The dweomer.”

“The dweomer?” she echoed, but suddenly it hit her and her eyes widened.

“The gift Lady Lolth imparted through my physical form,” Tsabrak confirmed. “The Darkening, Matron, it is gone.”

“Gone? The sky over the Silver Marches is cleared?”

“The sun shines brightly,” the despondent wizard replied.

“How can this be?” Matron Mother Zeerith looked all around. She rolled away from Tsabrak and up to her feet to begin pacing, muttering to herself. The implications were staggering. The Darkening had been channeled through Tsabrak, through a representative of House Xorlarrin, who had become the archmage of Q’Xorlarrin. Tsabrak was a powerful wizard-none would doubt that-but Zeerith wanted him spoken of in the same hushed tones normally reserved for Gromph Baenre alone.

The Darkening was the achievement that afforded him that possibility. The Darkening had elevated him in the eyes of all the drow. Few in Menzoberranzan would utter the name of Tsabrak Xorlarrin without the title of archmage attached.

But now it was gone.

Would the others see this as a sign that Tsabrak had lost the favor of Lolth, Matron Mother Zeerith wondered? Would they extend that criticism to House Xorlarrin, to Q’Xorlarrin?

“I felt the power,” she heard Tsabrak muttering to himself, and she turned back to regard him. He sat in the chair, eyes downcast, shaking his head slowly.

“True power,” he said. “The goddess flowed through me in beauteous power. She would take the Weave and make of it the Web. The new age would be heralded in, and I, Tsabrak, would lead that new age.”

“You alone?” Matron Mother Zeerith asked sharply, and Tsabrak looked up at her.

“House Xorlarrin,” he quickly corrected himself. “Who better? We have the most wizards. We-you! — have ever exalted in them, in us, in me, and have given to the males of your family hope unknown among the others of Menzoberranzan. I was positioned-”

“We were positioned!” Matron Mother Zeerith interrupted.

Tsabrak nodded. “But it is gone, Matron Mother. The skies are bright once more. And there were whispers. .”

He lowered his gaze once more and looked as if he might break down.

“What did you hear, Tsabrak?” Matron Mother Zeerith demanded. “When you walked among the folk of the Silver Marches, what did you hear?”

“Mielikki, the goddess,” he whispered. “It is said that she countered my magic, and did so through the body of the heretic Drizzt Do’Urden.” He looked up as Matron Mother Zeerith gasped.

“I have failed the Spider Queen,” Tsabrak said. “You should give me to the primordial.”

Matron Mother Zeerith dismissed that with a snort, and waved away Tsabrak’s words. “If you truly failed the Spider Queen, we would make of you a drider, fool.”

“Then do so!”

“Shut up!” she ordered. She rushed back at Tsabrak and skidded down to put her face right near his. “You did not fail. The magic failed, expired, or was defeated. We cannot know which. How draining was it for the Spider Queen to hold back the light of the sun on the World Above? Perhaps she intended the Darkening for only a certain period of time, and when our people withdrew, what was to be gained by holding strong to it?”

“It pains me to think that our beloved goddess has suffered yet another defeat. .”

“Enough of such foolishness,” Matron Mother Zeerith warned.

“And one with which I was so intimately involved,” the wizard said.

“We do not even know that it was a defeat,” Matron Mother Zeerith reminded him. “We will continue our work in bringing home our fallen and properly disposing of them. We will give due thanks to the Spider Queen with our every action. We cannot know her thoughts, and so we act with only good intentions to her, our Lady of Chaos.”

Tsabrak stared for a long time, but gradually began to nod. “Thank you,” he said. “My shock-”

“Say no more about it,” Matron Mother Zeerith interrupted. She pulled his head close against her and stroked his short, thick mop of white hair, comforting him, cooing softly in his ear, reassuring him.

But inside, Matron Mother Zeerith was anything but calm or reassured. Tsabrak’s dismay was clear, and surely a straight line from it to the now-failed Darkening gave him reason to worry.

For Matron Mother Zeerith, though, that fear was multiplied a hundredfold. She was until recently the Matron Mother of the Third House of Menzoberranzan, Lolth’s own city. She was a high priestess of Lolth, but she was not much like her peers, not the Baenres or the fanatical Melarni. Matron Mother Zeerith did not adhere to the hierarchy so common in Menzoberranzan. House Xorlarrin’s power came from the men of the House, not the women, from the wizards and not the priestesses.

It had been Matron Mother Zeerith’s hunch that this would be the new paradigm, and she thought her instincts correct when Lolth made a try for the goddess Mystra’s Weave. She thought her efforts well rewarded when Tsabrak, not Gromph Baenre, had been chosen to enact the Darkening.

In the new paradigm, would any House hold higher favor with Lady Lolth than House Xorlarrin? Would not her new city become the glorious enclave of Lolth, and so Menzoberranzan would be the satellite?

But now the Darkening was no more.

And Q’Xorlarrin was burying scores of dead.

Zeerith had suffered great losses in her entourage, in her family.

Lolth was angry, Zeerith believed. Would she focus that anger on Q’Xorlarrin, on Tsabrak, on Zeerith herself?

She continued to stroke Tsabrak’s hair for a long while, drawing as much comfort as she was giving, for what that was worth.

Matron Mother Zeerith, who understood well the wrath of the Spider Queen, feared that it wasn’t worth much.

Errtu chuckled, a wet and throaty noise that sounded as if it was soon to be accompanied by fountaining gouts of vomit.

“You are a beautiful one,” he said to the small figure standing in front of him.

Off to the side, out of the swirling, fetid mists, came a hulking, vulturelike vrock, a battered drow form writhing in one of its powerful clawed hands. On a nod from the other drow female, a doppelganger to this very captive, the vrock dropped its battered prisoner and bird-hopped away into the shadows.

That drow, prone in the muck, managed to turn her filthy head to regard the other, the one that looked exactly like her.

But looked like her for only for a moment longer, as the imposter K’yorl burst free of that restrictive drow form to become once more a creature with the lower torso and legs of a gigantic spider, and the shapely upper body and painfully beautiful face of the most exquisite drow of all.

She held up her right hand, nodding contentedly at the small digits that had already regrown to replace the ones Balor’s lightning sword had taken from her.

K’yorl whined and buried her face in the muck before the deadly brilliance of Lady Lolth.

“Your physical beauty is exceeded only by the beauty of your cunning, Goddess,” Errtu said, grinning widely.

“When Gromph weakens the barrier, Menzoberranzan will know chaos as never before,” Lolth replied.

“And you will rid yourself of the pesky demon lords, and when they have abandoned the Abyss to play in the Underdark of Toril, you will build your army,” said Errtu.

“Beware your tongue, Errtu,” Lolth warned. “Your betters lurk in the fog.”

The mighty balor grunted, but nodded.

“We had all thought you defeated, Spider Queen,” Errtu said. “When you lost the Weave, and then watched as Tiamat’s plans, too, were foiled, we wondered, truly, if perhaps you would recede.”

“In reminding me, do you gain pleasure, Errtu?” Lolth asked. “For I should remind you that were I to destroy you here in this place, your home, you would truly be obliterated, never to return.”

“But it is a great compliment that I offer,” said the balor. “For you have not receded, skulking into the shadows, and truly, great Lady of Spiders, great Goddess of Chaos, this ambition and plan are your greatest scheme of all.”

“And you stand to gain,” she reminded him. He nodded, growled wickedly, and smiled hopefully. “Did I not promise you that Balor would be removed? That you could thrive in his absence?”

“Unending ambition, great Lady of Chaos,” said Errtu, who was clearly elated by the developments. “It is how we survive the boredom of passing millennia, is it not?”

“And yet, if you climb to the highest point you will ever know, it will leave you merely at the lowest point I have ever known,” Lolth said, a most vicious reminder of their relative stations.

Errtu scowled.

“Do not kill this one,” Lolth instructed. She waved her hand and a powerful roll of energy lifted K’yorl from the floor and sent her flipping and spinning through the air. “I might need her again.”

“Kill her?” Errtu asked as if the very thought was preposterous. “Torturing her brings me great pleasure, Lady of Pleasure and Pain!”

“I feel the same way about balors,” Lolth remarked, and she was simply gone in a puff of acrid black smoke. “And do take care that she cannot use her psionic trumpets to warn Demogorgon or Graz’zt, or any of the other demon lords.”

Errtu sat on his throne and tapped his clawed fingernails together in front of his flame-filled eyes.

So much to hate.

That was his nourishment.