Charon's claw

THE GENDER OPPRESSED

Driders are not the quietest of creatures, particularly when a score of them, armed and armored and anxious for battle, scrabble along rocky cavern floors and walls.

Something was afoot, Yerrininae believed. He could feel it, and it was a tangible sensation, not just a gut instinct.

The air was colder-unnaturally colder.

The drider leader drove his charges on, rushing around blind bends in the corridor recklessly. He had sent two scouts up front, and he knew now-he just knew-that the pair were soon to encounter… something.

So focused was the large mutant that he nearly passed through a remarkable juncture in the otherwise unremarkable corridor.

Yerrininae skidded to a stop, his eight legs clacking and scraping on the stone. Behind him, several driders pulled up fast, frantic to avoid a collision with their merciless leader.

“What is it, my commander?” one dared ask, as the others wandered around in confusion.

Yerrininae continued to look to the wall instead of the open corridor ahead. He moved over slowly, almost reverently, and eased his great spear out wide with his left hand, the other reaching tentatively for a peculiar crease in the wall. A smile widened upon his face as the drider ran his fingers along that peculiar groove.

“My commander?” the other drider asked again.

“This is no natural crease in the stone,” Yerrininae explained. “This is a worked juncture-once, long ago, likely a portal… a door of some sort.”

The other drider dared move up, and on Yerrininae’s bidding, lifted his hand to also feel the straight lines of the worked stone. “What does it mean?” he asked.

Yerrininae straightened and looked all around, considering the caverns and corridors they had traversed that day. “It means that this was the outer waypoint.”

“Of?”

Yerrininae looked at the drider and grinned.

A shriek stole the moment, echoing off the stones, bouncing all around them as if a hundred drider warriors were suddenly under great duress. Yerrininae leaped sidelong down the corridor, legs working perfectly to spin him as he landed in full stride, charging along, spear at the ready.

Only a few bends later, they found their scouts, though the driders were only barely visible beneath a mound of flailing semi-translucent ghostly dwarves.

No, not ghostly, but actual spirits, Yerrininae realized, and he commanded his charges forward, into the morass.

The large drider led the way. Yerrininae was never one to view a battle from afar. He crashed into a small horde of the ghosts, his fine drow great spear stabbing and slashing every which way.

But to little effect, for these creatures were only partially bound to the material plane. He could barely hit them, with weapon or with appendage. Similarly, their reciprocating swings did not connect solidly.

When a dozen other ghosts leaped away from one of the unfortunate scouts to charge his direction, though, Yerrininae understood that those seemingly insubstantial attacks could surely combine to great effect, for that drider scout from which they had crawled slumped right to the floor, its face a ghastly mask of missing eyes and torn lips, its head all twisted around as if it had been squeezed between heavy stones. The creature lolled around, propped by the symmetry of its eight legs, but hardly alive.

“Close ranks!” the drider leader demanded.

As the valuable drider warriors fell back, Jearth ordered his shock troops past them and into the enemy.

Goblins, orcs, and bugbears surged forward along the corridor and into the wider cavern beyond, fighting every instinct in them which told them to turn around and flee-for those who did so, those who even hesitated slightly, felt the bite of a drow crossbow bolt.

“Dwarf ghosts!” Ravel said happily from the back. “Gauntlgrym! It must be! Right before us. We have found the dwarven city.”

“We cannot be certain,” Berellip said beside him.

“I can feel the power of the place,” Ravel argued. “Primordial power.” He wasn’t bluffing, nor was he imagining anything due to the appearance of dwarf ghosts. The sense of bound magic was powerful and primal. He could feel it under his feet. Ravel had done a lot of work with elementals during his tenure in Sorcere. Gromph Baenre was quite fond of summoning them by the dozen, all different types, merely to torment them.

He thought to confer with his brother Brack’thal, who had reputedly been supremely skilled in the elemental arts in the years before the Spellplague. Only briefly, though, for he did not want to give Brack’thal the satisfaction.

Even without that confirmation, Ravel knew the feeling of elemental magic, and such was the tingling energy he felt in the floors and walls now, a deep resonance of the purest energy.

Along the wall to the left came Tiago Baenre, charging his lizard above the heads of the many drow crowding the area.

“The goblinkin will be of little effect,” he told Ravel and the others. “These ghostly defenders are quite beyond them.”

“Shall you throw a lightning net upon them, dear brother?” Berellip remarked, and behind her, Saribel giggled.

“It might prove quite potent,” Ravel replied, ignoring the sarcasm.

Berellip gave an exasperated sigh and moved past him, Saribel and the other priestesses of Lolth in tow.

As soon as they had moved past Tiago, the young Baenre signaled to Ravel, Shall I gather your wizards that you can enact a second lightning net?

The question caught Ravel off guard, so much so that he balked and even moved back a step. He stared at Tiago for a few moments, ensuring that the warrior was serious. He glanced down the corridor; the sounds alone convinced him that his goblinkin fodder were indeed being slaughtered.

Ravel nodded. He wouldn’t give his sisters the satisfaction of being saviors.

“They are a stubborn bunch,” Berellip admitted to Saribel. They had hit the dwarves with a vast repertoire of spells, from shining beams of unholy light to waves of biting flames. They had used their allegiance to Lolth to compel the ghosts away and had even tried to harness the spirits to their will, to dominate them and turn some against the others.

But this was a stubborn group indeed, much more so than typical for such undead creatures.

“They are fighting for their most ancient homeland,” Berellip continued, reasoning it out as she went along. “They are bound here as guardians, singular in their devotion.”

“They will not be easily turned, nor easily destroyed,” Saribel agreed.

“Fight on,” Berellip instructed Saribel and the others, and she fell into her next spellcasting but stopped abruptly, startled when Tiago Baenre, Jearth Xorlarrin, and a host of lizard riders charged past her.

The cavalry swept into the cavern, veering to the right as they extended their line.

In came Yerrininae and the driders on their heels, reinforcing that line as it began to sweep back to the left, effectively clearing the nearest right hand corner of the cavern.

Into that void went Ravel and his spellspinners. Berellip spat on the stone and urged her priestesses on with more powerful spells. She began casting her own bursts of brilliant devastation, focused lines of unholy light, as Ravel and his wizards took their places and began their web-spinning.

Now it was a competition as priestess and wizard vied for the top honors in the ghostly slaughter.

“Damn you,” Berellip cursed Tiago when he called for a retreat at precisely the right moment, drow rider and drider alike running back to the opposite flank just in time for the spinning lightning net to cross above them harmlessly.

The dwarf ghosts did not flee as the orcs had back in the cavern city, and a host of them fell under that net. The sparking, biting filaments crackled as it battered them.

Berellip and many other drow averted their sensitive eyes from the bright white energy.

When all finally settled, the number of ghosts was greatly diminished. The few remaining drifted back to narrower halls, moaning all the way.

“Secure the cavern!” Jearth’s voice rang out above the din. “Huzzah for Ravel!”

A great cheer went up, and Berellip seethed.

Her visage did not soften as Tiago Baenre rode up beside her and Saribel.

“You chose sides,” Berellip warned. “You chose wrongly.”

“Not so,” Tiago flippantly replied. “It was a coordinated effort and you and your priestesses played no small role. It would seem that I was wrong, and that priestesses have a place, after all. Other than in the bedroom, I mean.”

“Blasphemy,” Saribel mouthed, and Berellip stared at the upstart male incredulously.

“It was quite a beating you put on your brother over such an innocuous, and indeed a worthwhile, slight,” said the confident young Baenre, who was ever so full of surprises.

“Are the Baenre sisters so used to you speaking in such a manner?” Berellip warned.

“Of course not!” Tiago said with a laugh.

“You dare?” Saribel said.

“My dear Berellip,” Tiago said, unwilling to even acknowledge Saribel, other than to toss her a lewd wink, “you are a priestess of Lolth.” He gave a shallow bow, hindered as he was by sitting astride his lizard mount. “And I am the son of House Baenre.”

“You are a male,” Berellip said, as if that alone should humble Tiago. But he only sat straighter and laughed at her.

“I understand,” Tiago said with a nod. “By all conventions, you are my superior, and so you believe that to be the case. But consider, upon whose side in our battle would Matron Mother Quenthel stand? In customary terms, you are correct in your indignation, but in practical terms?”

“You’re a long way from House Baenre,” Berellip warned.

“Do you believe that I was selected to go along with you at random?”

That gave Berellip pause.

“Selected,” Tiago said again, emphatically. “House Baenre knows your every movement, and every intention. Understand now that I alone will determine if House Baenre will allow Xorlarrin the room you desire to found your city. I alone. A bad word from me will doom Xorlarrin to a noble-excepting perhaps some spellspinners, as their powers have intrigued Matron Mother Quenthel of late. Since Gromph has retired mostly to his room at Sorcere and meddles little in Baenre business, Quenthel has come to see a growing gap in the armada of House Baenre, one that would be nicely filled by absorbing some of Xorlarrin’s skilled spellspinners.”

“Then she would want them obedient!” Berellip argued, and her tone made her sound desperate, and so clearly revealed that she had lost the initiative in this argument.

Tiago had easily gained the upper hand, and he wasn’t about to let it go. “She will want what I tell her to want,” the brash young warrior replied. “And to dispel any secret hopes you now harbor, understand that if I am killed out here beyond Menzoberranzan, Matron Mother Quenthel will hold Zeerith Q’Xorlarrin personally responsible. And of course, her daughters as well.”

Berellip stared at him, not blinking, not backing down, not willing to give him the satisfaction.

“You would doom Xorlarrin to a noble,” Tiago quietly reiterated, and then he smiled and signed so that only Berellip could see, I do anticipate our next coupling, and he rode away, as if nothing was amiss.

Not so far behind that encounter, Brack’thal Xorlarrin leaned against the corridor’s stone wall, his sensitive fingers feeling the stone, his thoughts permeating the stone. Ravel had felt the tingling of elemental energy here, but that paled compared to the understanding Brack’thal had for such magic. In his day, he had been one of the strongest evokers in Menzoberranzan, a drow who could reach to the elemental planes, so it seemed, to bring forth fire and lightning and other primordial powers. Once he had commanded an entire company of earth elementals, for no better reason than to impress the masters of Sorcere.

Now he felt it, the fiery beast, the god of flaming destruction. This was why Matron Zeerith had included him in his hated brother’s expedition, and now, suddenly, feeling that power, experiencing the clarity of mind which could only be brought through such a close communion with an old and basic power, Brack’thal held his curses back, and even thanked Zeerith for allowing him this journey.

He did not even watch the battle at hand before him. His sisters would win out, he fully expected, and he could no sooner turn from this stone, from the deep sensations and vibrations of the primordial beast of fire than he could from a tryst with Lady Lolth herself.

For the promise was no less.

The promise of power.

The promise of magical strength as it had been those many years ago.