Archmage

CHAPTER 6

Alone, his brilliantly decorated and more brilliantly enchanted robes of the archmage whipping about him, Gromph Baenre moved briskly along the avenues of Menzoberranzan. He turned for the Stenchstreets, a place he hadn’t visited in many years, a place now alive with sounds.

Demons danced all around him and fights filled every alleyway- demon against drow or demon against demon. The archmage had summoned more than his share of demons over the centuries, and he could see that these creatures were under no one’s control. His foolish sister was just bringing in Abyssal beasts, even major demons, and setting them free to roam Menzoberranzan.

Demons usually went for the weakest targets, and so House Baenre would be little threatened by the beasts, while the lesser Houses, including those who might wish to band together to cause mischief against House Baenre, surely would. Quenthel’s plan to keep the city in line behind House Baenre seemed solid enough.

But at what cost?

The Stenchstreets, and many of the lesser neighborhoods of Menzoberranzan, had become an orgy of destruction and debauchery. Even here, where there was little organization among the Houseless rogues, the dark elves had gathered together in defensive groups-what choice did they have?

Gromph pressed into the same common room where Malagdorl Armgo and his entourage had defeated Marilith. A score of drow males started and jumped at his arrival, falling into defensive formations across from the doorway.

He could see the hatred and fear on their faces as they came to recognize him. He could see their uncertainty, their desire to attack him colliding with a very tangible, and very realistic, terror. Oh, how they wanted to kill him! They wanted to rush ahead and stab the Baenre, any Baenre, for this scourge of demons that had been loosed upon them.

But Gromph was the archmage, and they knew that such an attempt would cost them more than their lives, and indeed, would have them begging for the sweet mercy of death.

“Archmage,” one young warrior said, standing straight and bringing his weapon to his side. “We feared it was Bilwhr returning.”

“Bilwhr?”

“A great and cruel demon-” the young drow began.

“I know who Bilwhr is,” Gromph said dryly, and with clear annoyance-both at the impudent fool thinking to school him on the names of the great demons, and at the fact that such a fiend had arrived in Menzoberranzan. Bilwhr was a type of demon commonly called nalfeshnee, named for the greatest of that particular bent of fiend. Huge and incredibly powerful, nalfeshnees ranked high among the servitors of the demon lords, and of all the demons he had ever dealt with, this type was perhaps Gromph’s least favorite. For in addition to all the other failings found in demons, these deluded behemoths actually believed themselves just and abiding by the laws of the universe. Indeed, they served as the judges for souls first entering the Abyss and truly believed that what they meted out could be called “justice.”

In Gromph’s mind, the only thing worse than a psychotic demonic destroyer was a deluded psychotic demonic destroyer.

In other words, a nalfeshnee.

“You have seen Bilwhr?” he asked calmly.

The young drow nodded. “Twice a drow’s height and too wide to come through the door, though the beast would surely make its own door with little effort.”

“It had the face of a gigantic ape,” said another.

“And the body of a great rothé. .” a third offered.

“A boar,” another corrected. “Or half a boar, for it walked on two legs, not four, and with hands that could grip and crush a stone, it seemed.”

More than seemed, Gromph thought, but didn’t bother to say. He knew the power of a nalfeshnee quite well, and had seen one reshape a piece of cold iron with its bare hands.

“Bilwhr is determining who must be taken away,” the young drow added.

“To the Abyss?” Gromph asked.

“To death, at least,” the drow answered. “The beast has killed three already."

“At least three,” another put in. “Three that we have seen.”

Gromph was hardly surprised. The other demons, rampaging though they were, weren’t accumulating much of a body count of drow, from all he could tell, though many kobold and goblin slaves had been devoured. Marilith had left a score of drow wounded in her wake by all accounts, but she had only killed the one fighting beside Malagdorl, and that had clearly been a fight to the death or banishment.

But of course, the situation had to devolve to this, especially with a nalfeshnee demon roaming the ways.

“Where is. .?” Gromph started to ask, but before he could finish, there came a loud thump and a tremor that shook the mushroom-stalk rafters of the common room.

Bilwhr.

The archmage held up his hand to calm the group, all looking around and clutching their weapons desperately. With a sigh, the archmage went back to the door.

The building shook again under the weight of a thunderous footstep.

Bilwhr.

With a sigh, Gromph motioned for the commoners to stay in place, and he went out into the street.

“The beast,” one drow said, an unnecessary warning, when another heavy footfall shook the walls.

“He is the archmage,” the young drow reminded the rest. He led the way, tentatively, toward the window on the street side of the common room.

They heard the moans of the manes, lesser demons they knew to be flocking in front of mighty Bilwhr. These were the spirits of the dead consigned to the Abyss in their afterlife, like semi-intelligent zombies formed of Abyssal muck and cursed to serve the major demons throughout eternity, cursed to battle and be destroyed, only to rise again and serve again. They were the fodder of the Abyss in every manner, and so that proved true now. Before the dark elves arrived at the window, they saw such a flash of fiery power that they stumbled back and covered their stinging eyes.

Just outside, the archmage’s fireball roiled and burned, taking the rotting flesh from the manes and leaving them as puddles of goo on the stones of the Stenchstreets.

“You are in violation!” they heard Bilwhr roar, and they cowered back even more.

A flash of lightning crackled outside, the thunder of the blast shaking the building once more, and then the mushroom stalk rafters verily bounced under the weight of the charging demon. The young drow saw the huge beast, fully ten feet tall and four tons of power, pass by the window, its small wings flapping furiously behind it-though those strange appendages could never hope to lift the bulky Bilwhr from the ground.

Another lightning bolt sounded, then a great burst of wind shook the building, followed by a tremendous crash.

The wall by the door split and the demon-part of it, at least-crashed through. One arm, one shoulder, and the simian head struggled and twisted, splintering planks.

“Kill it!” the young drow cried, waving his sword and leading the charge. He fell back, as did his companions, only a stride later, though, as black tentacles grew out of the floor, waggling and grabbing, mostly at the struggling demon. So great was Bilwhr’s strength, though, that the beast got its thick boar legs planted and simply stood upright, tearing tentacles and floorboards and splintering the wall as if it was no more than brittle paper.

“You dare!” it bellowed, and the dark elves cried out and whimpered and rushed back for cover.

The great demon aimed its ire not at them, but at Gromph, and it burst back out into the street, staggering under the stubborn pull of the remaining tentacles.

Bilwhr had just disappeared from view when there came a blast beyond anything the young drow and his companions had ever experienced, an explosion so violent that it sent them all flying about the room, crashing through furniture and into walls. The front wall by the door all but collapsed under the power of the magical explosion, and shuddered violently as huge pieces of demon splattered against it.

One such chunk of Bilwhr-half an arm, a shoulder, and enough of the back to include one small leathery wing-came flying through the opening to bounce across the floor, and there it melted into black slime.

“The archmage,” the young drow said reverently, and the others nodded numbly, jaws open, eyes unblinking as they continued to stare out the window or through the hole in the wall.

Gromph retreated to his summoning chamber in the main tower of Sorcere on the plateau of Tier Breche, the drow academy. In a magical bag of holding, the archmage carried dozens of tomes, along with all of the scrolls and notes he could find regarding spells of summoning and demonology.

In the chamber, secured by powerful runes and magic circles, Gromph buried his face in the knowledge. Soon, he once more felt the insight he had noted in his time with Kimmuriel, when first he had considered countering demon with demon, and that led him to one particular blackbound book, In the Swirling Smoke of Abyss. In there, he found listings of the demons, the lords, the major demons, the minor demons, with all the known true names.

On a hunch-one implanted by Kimmuriel, though Gromph couldn’t know that-the archmage ruffled through some parchments that spoke of the Faerzress, the magical radiation that gave the Underdark its life and magical energy, and that also served as the barrier and door to the lower planes.

It was beginning to come clear to Gromph. His psionic training seemed to blend effortlessly with his insights regarding the spells of summoning. He unrolled many of those scrolls now, and in their words he recognized new possibilities.

He knew that he was close, that soon he could bring in a balor, even- that monster among many other major demons-and fully control the beast.

But not yet.

He found the appropriate references, the appropriate names, and stepped back from his summoning circle. First he enacted some personal wards and surrounded himself with protective glyphs. He was aiming for lesser demons, but powerful creatures nonetheless, and so he would take no chances.

Gromph began to chant, and he fell into his meditation, as Kimmuriel had taught him. He couldn’t believe the level of intensity. He felt as if he were in the Abyss, so clear did the image of the place, with its swirling fogs, come into his mind. He could smell the stench.

And he found, too, his targets, and so he beckoned them, then compelled them.

Many, many heartbeats later, Gromph opened his amber eyes to find that he was back in the summoning room of Sorcere. No longer was it a quiet place of meditation, however. The very stones of the walls shook with the sound of the thrumming wings of several large, hovering demons. They looked like gigantic flies, fully eight feet from the tip of their horn-like proboscis to the stinger that protruded from the back of their abdomens. Their faces were humanlike, save the nose, a curious facet of this particular manifestation of chaos that had led many demonologists to believe that these demons, chasme by name, were created by some vile bonding of demon spirit and wayward soul.

However they came to be, and whatever they were, summing a chasme was no small feat, and summoning a handful, as Gromph had just done, might, as far as the archmage knew, prove unprecedented.

He could hear their telepathic calls in his head, begging for instructions, and he knew that he controlled them.

He could feel it. They would obey his every command.

“Kill that one,” he instructed the others, pointing to what appeared to be the most aggressive of the group, and without hesitation, the other four fell over the targeted creature, bearing it to the floor with a tumbling crash.

They tore it apart, appendage by appendage, leaving a smoking, melting husk on the floor.

Gromph felt almost godlike, and he couldn’t suppress his grin as he considered the melding of psionics and arcane powers.

He understood the mind flayers much better at that moment, and understood Kimmuriel as well, and wondered how his brother Jarlaxle could possibly control the psionicist of House Oblodra.

This was true power, undeniable and unstoppable.

“Go and watch over the city,” Gromph instructed his chasme patrol. “Partake of no murder and no battle. You are spies, nothing more. Engage no one, not even those of your own wretched Abyss, without my permission.”

The four began to bob and weave all around each other, and Gromph could feel their mounting excitement and agitation. He sensed that they weren’t very happy about his commands, but he felt keenly that neither would they dare to defy him.

“Report to me whenever the height of Narbondel’s illumination gains or diminishes a full notch,” he instructed. “Every hour.”

The archmage began casting once more, and launched a spell into the midst of the magical circle that held the hovering, buzzing chasme, opening a gate that would take them out of tower’s low room and into the open air of the city.

Then Gromph sat back and took a deep breath, overwrought from his exertion, and from the realization of the sheer power he had realized in bringing in the group. He spent a long while quieting his thoughts, and compartmentalizing them, for he wanted no probing telepaths, not Methil, surely, and not even Kimmuriel, to recognize the gains in power he was making by mating the magic of the Weave with the strange mind power of psionics.

He gathered up his tomes and scrolls and retired to his room, and once there, put his face right into the black-bound examination of the Abyss. He would fight demon with demon, he decided, but Quenthel’s demons, or those brought in by the beasts she had loosed upon the city, would not be in her control.

While his own, like the chasme, like the balors he expected to soon realize, would adhere to his every command.

Lolth had spurned him-he was a mere male after all. Lolth had used him to bring insight and power to Matron Mother Quenthel.

But soon Gromph would help Yvonnel, his daughter, ascend to the position of matron mother, and he would be the power that put her there, and so controlled her.

A power beyond Quenthel.

A power beyond the demons she had set as a plague on the city.

A power beyond Lolth herself?

“I allowed him to defeat me as you instructed,” Bilwhr’s bellowing voice informed the Spider Queen and the balor Errtu.

Lolth chuckled at that, and Errtu snickered, a most horrid and shiverinducing sound, something akin to steel scraping against teeth.

“ ‘Allowed him’?” Errtu said incredulously. “You ‘allowed’ the Archmage of Menzoberranzan to defeat you?”

“You doubt my power?” Bilwhr retorted with a threatening growl. But then again, everything Bilwhr said was accompanied by a threatening growl.

“You were obliterated,” Errtu said plainly. “Perhaps you meant to follow Lolth’s demands and ‘allow’ it, but by the time you even realized that you were supposed to do so, Gromph Baenre had already blown your corporeal form to pieces.”

“My spies were about,” Lady Lolth said calmly before the volatile Bilwhr could argue.

“You said that if I was banished by the archmage, I need not serve a century,” Bilwhr replied.

“Patience,” said Lolth. “I assured you, of course. Patience.”

Bilwhr grumbled and growled, but followed Lolth’s waving hand and meandered off into the stinky mists.

“Two,” Errtu said. “Marilith and Bilwhr. And three if you count me.”

“Why would I count you?” Lolth asked. “What have you done to earn my favor?”

A look of panic crossed the balor’s face. “The slave, K’yorl. .” the great fiery beast sputtered in protest.

Lolth laughed at him and waved at him to put him at ease. “You will find your way to the Underdark, perhaps even the surface of Toril, in time,” she promised.

“When?”

“Gromph will reach out to the Faerzress with a full demand before the turn to the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant,” she said.

Errtu had to spend a moment considering that. They were now in the sixth month of the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls, 1486 by Dalereckoning.

“By the end of this very year?” the balor asked eagerly.

Lolth smiled and nodded. “The archmage is finding his way there as we speak. The first summoning has been completed. Next will be a major demon, a glabrezu likely, and when he is confident that he can fully command the beast. .”

“One which you have ordered to appear fully under his command, no doubt.”

The Spider Queen didn’t bother to answer. “From there, he will reach higher. A nalfeshnee, a marilith, a. .”

“A balor,” Errtu growled.

“He will call for Errtu,” Lolth explained. “But you will not answer that call.”

Errtu winced.

“He will believe that he has called for Errtu,” Lolth explained. “In his arrogance and cravenness, Archmage Gromph will reach much deeper. Too deep. Patience, my loyal friend. Patience.”