Dissolution

SEVEN

For an instant, the world blazed bright and hot, searing Pharaun's skin. However, when the flame was gone it left little more than a tactile memory of pain. Gasping, the wizard took stock of himself. Except for a blister or two, he was all right. Some combination of the protective enchantments woven into both his vest and piwafwi, his innate drow resistance to hostile magic, and the silver ring he wore bearing the insignia of Sorcere, had saved him from fatal burns.

Ryld had drawn Splitter. An arrow whizzed down from a rooftop across the street, and the burly swordsman batted it out of the air. A huge flying mount wheeled overhead, vanishing from view before Pharaun could get a good look at it. «Are you all right?» Ryld asked. «Just singed a little,» Pharaun replied. «Here are your rogues, not so canny after all. We'll either have to rise into the air after them or pull them down to the street.» «We'll do neither. Follow me.» «Run?» the weapons master asked, swatting away another arrow. «I thought we wanted to catch one of them.» «Just follow.» Pharaun began moving down the street, meanwhile peering upward, looking for his attackers. Ryld scowled but trailed along behind him. The Master of Sorcere glimpsed a swirling motion from the corner of his eye. He pivoted. Crouched on the edge of a roof, a spellcaster spun his hands in fluid mystic passes. Gesturing, speaking rapidly, Pharaun rattled off his own incantation. He was racing the other mage, and he finished his magic first. Five darts of azure light leaped from his fingertips, shot at the spellcaster, and plunged into his chest. From that distance, he couldn't tell how badly he'd hurt his colleague, but at the least his foe flailed his arms m pain. The Academician's attack had disrupted his spell. Ryld knocked another arrow away, and only then did Pharaun realize that this time, the shaft had been hurtling at him. An instant later, a studded mace seemingly made of shadow flew out of nowhere and swung itself at his head. Splitter flicked over and tapped that manifestation. As conjured objects often did, the war club vanished at the greatsword's touch. «In here,» Pharaun said. The two masters ran to the arched sandstone door of one of the modest houses on the street. Pharaun suspected that the tenants had locked it at the first sign of trouble, and evidently Ryld agreed, because he didn't bother trying the handle. He simply booted the door and broke the latch. The weapons master scrambled inside. The front room of the home was crowded. Pharaun might have expected that. The population of the city had grown considerably since its founding but the number of stalagmite buildings was of necessity fixed. The poor had to squeeze in wherever they could. Thus, an abundance of paupers lived in the hovel, and a goodly number of them had gathered in this common space, either to relax or to dip rothй stew from the iron caldron on the trestle table. Surprisingly, the simple meal actually smelled appetizing. The aroma made Pharaun's mouth water and reminded him that he hadn't dined in several hours. Ryld brandished Splitter at the occupants of the house with a flashy facility calculated to quell aggressive impulses. «We apologize for the intrusion,» Pharaun said. The weapons master glowered at him. «Why are we running?» «That pillar of fire was divine magic, not arcane.» Pharaun lifted his hand, displaying the silver Sorcere ring and reminding his friend of its power to identify, not just protect him from, magic. «It's priestesses attacking us.

Killing them would call attention to us, make the Council even more eager to put a stop to our inquiry. It might even make them want to kill us irrespective of how our mission turns out or of what Gromph decides.»

Pharaun grinned and added, «I know I promised you glorious mayhem, but that will have to wait.» Ryld replied, «It's a difficult thing to sneak away from foes who hold the high ground.» «I'm an inexhaustible font of tricks, haven't you noticed?» Pharaun beamed at the assembled paupers and said, «How would you all like to assist two masters of the Academy engaged in a mission of vital importance? I assure you, Archmage Baenre himself will wax giddy with gratitude when I inform him of your aid.»

His audience stared back at him, fear in their eyes. One of the female commoners produced a bone-handled, granite-headed mallet and threw it. Ryld caught it and hurled it back. The makeshift weapon thudded into the center of the laborer's forehead, and she collapsed.

«Would anyone else care to express a reservation of any sort?» Pharaun asked. He waited a beat. «Splendid, then just stand still. I assure you, this won't hurt.»

The Master of Sorcere pulled a wisp of fleece from a pocket and recited an incantation. With a soft hissing, a wave of magical force shimmered through the room. When it touched the paupers, they changed, each into a facsimile of Ryld or Pharaun himself. Only a single child remained unaffected. «Excellent,» said Pharaun. «Now all you have to do is go outside, at which point, I recommend you scatter. With luck, many, if not all of you, will survive.» «No!» cried one of Ryld's doubles in a high, agitated voice. «You can't make us—» «But we can,» said Pharaun. «I can fill the house with a poisonous vapor, my friend can start chopping you to pieces. … So please, be sensible, go now. If the enemy breaks in here, your chances will be significantly worse.» They looked sullenly back at him. He smiled and shrugged, and Ryld hefted Splitter. The commoners began to scurry toward the door. The two masters fell in at the back of the crowd, prepared to chivvy folk along as necessary. «Shadows of the Pit,» murmured Pharaun, «I wasn't at all sure they would actually do it. I am a persuasive devil, aren't I? It must be my honest face.»

«Decoys aren't a bad idea,» said Ryld, «but now that I think of it, why not just turn us invisible?» Pharaun snorted. «Do I tell you which end of the sword to grip? Invisibility's too common a trick. I'm sure our foes are prepared to counter it. Whereas the illusion may work. It's one of my personal, private spells, and we Mizzrym are famously deft with phantasmata. Now, when we get outside, don't lose track of me. You don't want to go skipping off with the wrong Pharaun.» Most of the commoners had vacated the house. Pharaun drew a deep breath, steadying himself, and he and Ryld plunged out into the open. The commoners were scattering as directed. As far as Pharaun could tell, no one had attacked any of them. Perhaps, as he'd hoped, the enemy was entirely flummoxed. The masters, fleeing like the rest, turned one corner and another. Pharaun was beginning to feel the smugness that comes from outwitting an adversary when something rattled and rustled above his head. He looked up in time for it to slam him in the face and knock him down. Dropped from a fair height, the thick, coarse strands of rope comprising the net struck with the force of a club.

Also trapped, Ryld cursed, the language vulgar enough to make the Braeryn proud.

Pharaun needed a second to shake off the shock of the impact, and he realized his current situation was even more unfortunate than he'd initially thought. The net, woven in a spiderweb pattern, was animate. Scraping his skin, striving to render him completely immobile, the heavy mesh shifted and tightened around him.

A foulwing landed on the street. In the saddle sat an otherwise handsome priestess with a scarred face—a Mizzrym face, lean, intelligent, and sardonic. Strangely, she wore a domino mask, and Pharaun suspected he knew why. Grinning, the female said, «I knew you'd try to trick me with illusions, Pharaun. That's why I brought a talisman of true seeing.» Though he wasn't sure she could see it from outside the net, Pharaun made it a point to smile back when he said, «And you were correct. Hello, Greyanna.»

Quenthel was immune to fear. She did not, could not, panic. Or so she had always believed, and in fact, she wasn't panicking, but she was as desperate and bewildered as any ill-wisher could desire. She wasn't certain, but she believed the vipers' hissing and a bump and clatter had roused her from her trancelike state of repose. She'd opened her eyes and seen nothing. Evidently someone had conjured a patch of darkness around her, or worse, cursed her with a blindness spell. She opened her mouth to speak to the whip snakes, and something cold and thick jammed itself inside. Her throat clogged, she was suffocating. Meanwhile, something else, something that felt like the cool, dexterous tip of a demon's tentacle, slid around her wrist. She yanked her hand away just before the unseen member could lock around it and thrashed to keep her limbs free of the other tendrils that began to grope after them. None of it helped her breathe.

She battered furiously at the space around her. Logic told her that her attacker had to be there, but her fists merely swept through empty space. Her chest ached with the need for air, and she felt unconsciousness nibbling at her mind. She did the only thing left. She bit down. At first, she couldn't penetrate the mass, but she strained, snarled in her throat with effort, and her teeth sank into something leathery and oily. In an instant, it vanished. It didn't yank itself free, it just melted away. Quenthel's teeth snapped together with a clack. Scrambling to her knees, she sucked in a couple deep breaths, then called, «Whip!»

«Here!» Yngoth cried from somewhere on the floor. «We didn't see the demon until the last second. It is the darkness!» «I understand.»

At least she wasn't blind. She'd heard of demons made of darkness itself, though she had never had occasion to summon one. They were said to be hard to catch and even harder to bind. «Guard!» she called.

This time she didn't hear an answer and wasn't surprised. The invader's presence suggested the sentry was either a traitor or dead. Quenthel sensed something rushing at her. She flung herself sideways, and something crashed against the patch of wall immediately behind the space she'd just vacated. The stone floor chilled her through her gauzy wisp of a chemise.

As planned, she fetched up against the stand where she kept certain small pieces of her regalia. She leaped up and groped about the rectangular stone tabletop.

To her disgust, a couple items rattled to the floor, but then her fingers closed on a medallion of beautifully cut glass. Squinting, she invoked the trinket's power. A dazzling glare blazed through the room. Quenthel had to shield her own eyes, hoping the terrible light would destroy a living darkness altogether. The magic light and the equally supernatural darkness made for a split second when the lighting in the room was as it was before the creature had entered. At least Quenthel could open her eyes.

Her assailant, seemingly unaffected by the light, was a ragged central blot with long, tattered arms snaking throughout the room, ubiquitous as smoke. Drinking in all the glow, reflecting none, it was dead black and deceptively flat-looking. It thrust a long, thin probe at the medallion and Quenthel jerked the token aside. The shaft of blackness veered, compensating, and struck the medallion hard enough to knock it out of her hand. The light died instantly when the glass medallion shattered on the floor. Fortunately, the illumination had lasted long enough for her to note the locations of several other objects on the stand. She instinctively ducked, the tentacle swept over her head and tousled her hair, and she grabbed a scroll. As before, she would regret expending any of the spells contained therein—but she'd regret dying even more. Conversant with the contents of the parchment, she didn't need to see the trigger phrase to «read» it. She recited the words, and a shaft of yellow flame roared down from the ceiling through the spot where the core of the demon had been floating. The firelight showed that it was still there. The blaze passed right through it, and all its arms and streamers of murk convulsed. The column of flame vanished after a moment, leaving, despite the care the drow had taken to shield her eyes, a haze of afterimage bisecting her vision. It took her a second to realize that dull, wavering stripe was the only thing she could see. The darkness had survived. It had clotted its essence around her to seal her eyes once more. You're a tough one, she thought, sending the unspoken words to the mind of the demon as she, a divine emissary of Lolth, was trained to do.

There was no response, and Quenthel felt no connection made between her mind and the consciousness of the demon. This was no servant of Lolth's.

Alive and impossible to command, it would surely grab or strike at her, and this time intuition was failing her. She had no idea from where the attack would come, so she didn't know which way to dodge to evade it. She simply had to guess, jump somewhere and not let blindness and indecision delay her. She pivoted, and something struck her shoulder. At first it was just a startling jolt, then pain burned at the point of impact, and wet blood flowed. Either the darkness could harden its members into claws or else it had picked up a blade from somewhere in the chamber. Quenthel was glad her teachers had taught her to suffer a wound without the shock of it freezing her in her tracks, helpless to avert her adversary's follow-up attack. She kept moving, making herself, she hoped, a more difficult target. Something hissed. The source of the sound was almost under her feet. Evidently, dragging the whip handle behind them, her vipers had been slithering about endeavoring to locate her in the dark. She stooped, fumbled about their cool, sinuous lengths for a moment, achieved the proper grip, and lifted the weapon.

The serpents reared, hissed, and peered, each in a different direction. Quenthel realized they could see what she could not. The darkness was preparing to attack.

The priestess deepened her psionic link with her snake-demon servants. She still couldn't see where her adversary's tentacles were poised, but she had a sense of them. That would have to do. The darkness reached for her, and, turning and turning, she swung the whip repeatedly. Her aim was inexact, but the vipers twisted in the air to correct it. Toward the end, she was breathing harder, and her actions were getting bigger, slower, and wilder, as any combatant's will if she performs too many without a pause. Then something long and pointed plunged into the back of her thigh. Quenthel knew at once from the flare of pain and the gush of blood that this puncture wound was worse than the gash in her shoulder. She staggered a step, and her leg began to fold. The whip vipers hissed in alarm. She shouted to focus her will and quell the agony, to force the limb to obey. Throbbing, it straightened. She spun and struck at the tentacle that had stabbed her, lashing it to pieces before it could do the same again. At that same instant, her serpent familiars detected hands reaching for her neck. She spun, destroyed those as well, and at last the shadow stopped attacking. Feeling the blood stream down her leg to pool on the floor, her mind racing, Quenthel considered her situation. She must be causing the demon pain—if not it would attack relentlessly, never faltering until she fell—but that didn't necessarily mean she was well on her way to killing it. From what she knew of such entities, it seemed entirely possible that she would have to do more harm to the nucleus at the end of the tendrils to accomplish that. Assuming she could reach or even locate it amid the obfuscating gloom. It might be better not to try, to take advantage of this momentary respite and make a run for it, but she knew that if she moved the demon would move with her, which would mean she'd still be scurrying sightlessly along. In her suite, that wasn't an enormous problem—she knew every inch of the space by heart—but outside, she could easily take a hard, incapacitating fall. If that happened or if her leg gave out before she found help, her foe would have little difficulty finishing her off. No, she would kill the cursed thing by herself, quickly, while she was still on her feet. The only question was, how? One of the weapons in her hidden closet might do the trick, but she had no way of reaching them. The demon would slay her while she fumbled in the dark to manipulate the hidden lock. She would have to make do with the resources in her hands, which meant using another scroll spell and taking a gamble as well. The demon renewed the attack. Quenthel struck and deflected a tentacle with sawlike teeth on the edge. Next came an arm terminating in a studded bulb like the head of a mace. Poised to beat her skull in, that one was no use either. She sidestepped the blow, the vipers tore into the limb, and the living darkness snatched it back. A simple tentacle, with no blades or bludgeons sprouting from its end, snaked toward her. It seemed as if it was going to try to grab and restrain her weapon arm. She pretended she didn't notice. The strand of shadow dipped to the floor, hooked around Quenthel's ankle, and jerked her good leg out from under her. The change of target caught her by surprise, and she fell hard on her back, banging her head and shooting pain through her wounded limbs. It took her an instant to shake off the shock. When she did, she sensed the fiend's other limbs poised to slash and pound. She was almost out of time to recite the trigger phrase. But not quite.

She rattled off the three words, and power seethed and tingled inside her flesh. She discharged it into the living darkness, an easy task since the demon was holding onto her. She held her breath, waiting to see what would happen.

Like allowing her adversary to seize her, this too was a part of the gamble. The magic she had just unleashed would weaken a dark elf or pretty much any other mortal being to the point of death. However, depending on its precise nature, the demon—or whatever it was—might simply shrug it off. It might even feed on the blast of force and grow stronger than before.

The ploy worked. The fiend was susceptible, at least to some degree. She knew it when the entity's limbs flailed and thrashed in spasms, the one on her ankle releasing her to twist and flop about. The ambient darkness blinked out of existence for a second as the creature's grip on its surroundings wavered. One instant of vision was all Quenthel needed to mark where her enemy's ragged core was floating. She scrambled up, charged it, and found that she was hobbling, every other stride triggering a jolt of pain. She didn't let the discomfort slow her down. The creature of darkness was recovering. Two tendrils squirmed at Quenthel. She ducked one and lashed the other, which flinched back. After two more steps, she judged, hoped, that she'd limped within striking distance of the entity's formless heart. She swung the whip, and shouted in satisfaction when she felt the vipers' fangs rip something more resistant than empty air. She struck as hard and as fast as she could, grunting with every stroke. Her snakes warned her of tendrils looping around behind her, and she ignored the threat. If she left off attacking the center of the darkness, she might not get another chance.

The darkness obscuring the room started rapidly oscillating between presence and absence. Quenthel's motions looked oddly jerky in the disjointed moments of vision.

Tentacles grabbed and dragged her backward. She shouted in rage and frustration. As if responding to her cry, the arms dissolved, dumping her back on the floor.

Quenthel raised her head and peered about. There was no longer any impediment to sight. The murderous darkness was gone. Her last blow must have been mortal. It had just taken the creature another second or two to succumb. «It's dead!» hissed Hsiv. «What now, Mistress?»

«First. . I'm going to sit … and tend my wounds, then we're going to look… for my sentry,» panted Quenthel, attenuating her rapport with the vipers. In too deep and prolonged a communion, shades of identity could bleed in one direction or the other. «If she's lucky, she's already dead.» She wished she were as undaunted as she was trying to sound, but it appeared that demonic assassins were going to keep coming for her. She'd hoped that the appearance of the spider demon might be an isolated incident. She'd thought that if any more such fiends did appear, the renewed wards would keep them out. Plainly, she'd been too optimistic. At least Arach-Tinilith was the seat of her power. There, she could deploy a small army of retainers and a hoard of magical devices in her own defense, but those resources hadn't helped her against the darkness, and she couldn't help wondering how many hostile visitations a priestess in her condition could hope to survive.