Extinction

Chapter Eighteen

Gromph was surprised by the contents of the thought bottle. He could hear the gurgle of fluid, but what slid over his tongue felt like fine sand. As he swallowed it, a curious taste filled his mouth—a strange blend of ancient, desiccated insect and the sharp tang of ground amber.

Memories burst into his mind with the suddenness or spores exploding from an overripe fungus. Included among them was a spell—one that needed no verbal component, merely a somatic one: the act of swallowing the last of the bottle’s contents.

The illithid, sensing that something was wrong, leaped forward, one misshapen hand lashing out, but it was already too late. The last of the bottle’s contents slid across Gromph’s tongue and was swallowed, triggering the spell. A ripple of magical energy passed through the room quicker than thought, leaving Sluuguth frozen, eyes bulging in fury, tentacles halted in mid-lash a finger’s breadth from Gromph’s face. The thought bottle hung in mid-air where it had been knocked, and the duergar axe the illithid had been carrying was frozen between Sluuguth’s outstretched hand and the ground. He’d dropped it in surprise the instant Gromph’s thoughts told him what was about to happen.

Gromph stood up, steadying himself with one hand on his desk as the room blurred slightly. Unsticking oneself in time was always disorienting. He felt dizzy, slightly off balance, as if the world was solid but he was not.

With his memories restored, all was clear to him.

So that was why I erased everything but a single memory, the archmage thought, that I should offer these bottles to any creature who could dominate my mind.

It wasn’t because he hoped to trick the creature into drinking their contents but because he expected it to read that thought and make him drink from one of the bottles first, as a safety precaution.

Just as Sluuguth had done.

Gromph wasted no time basking in his foresight, however. He had to move quickly. The time-stopping spell was a powerful one, but it was brief. It would hold for no more than a few heartbeats. Bending swiftly, he picked up the battle-axe.

After a slight tug—inertia made the weapon feel as though it was stuck in mud—Gromph grasped the axe firmly in both hands and swung. Its blade bit cleanly through the illithid’s neck, severing it with a single stroke. Pulled by the blade, blood bulged at the exit wound, but the head itself remained on the shoulders.

As Gromph laid the weapon on his desk, the spell ended and time lurched forward again. Blood sprayed against the wall, Sluuguth’s head flew from his body, and the illithid crumpled in a heap. An instant later, the thought bottle thumped against the wall and clattered to the floor.

Looking down into the blade of the axe, Gromph saw a frenzied swirling as the enchanted blade added Sluuguth’s soul to those it had already stolen. The illithid’s face stared out in horror from the flat of the blade, tentacles lashing. Eventually it turned transparent and was gone.

“What a useful weapon,” Gromph said, setting the duergar battle-axe down again. He chuckled. “Perhaps I should hang it on the wall as a souvenir.”

Kneeling, he chanted the words to a spell and passed his hands over the corpse of the illithid. His palms tingled when they passed over the illithid’s out-flung hand. The gold signet ring on Sluuguth’s middle finger was magical, imbued with protective enchantments. He slipped it off the illithid’s finger and laid it on his desk. His hands tingled a second time as they passed over an elongated leather carrying case that hung at Sluuguth’s belt. Opening it, Gromph saw a tube inside. He eased out the tube—a length of hollow bone with a plug of wood at either end—and shook it. He heard the rustle of paper. Scrolls, perhaps? He would study them later, after taking the appropriate precautions.

Laying the tube down beside the ring, he completed his pass over the illithid’s body. One of the pockets in Sluuguth’s robe made his palms tingle a third time. Reaching inside it, Gromph pulled out a finger-length piece of quartz that had been cut into a prism. Tiny yellow sparks danced in its depths.

Gromph had seen similar devices before. They were magical constructs of the surface elves, who needed light to find their way through the Underdark. He spoke a word in their tongue—the surface elves were so predictable and almost always used the same command words—and the prism reacted as he expected it to, shedding a pale cone of candle-bright light. A second command word shaped the light into an eye-hurting, wand-thin beam of intensely white light. Had it not struck the wall of Gromph’s office, it would have shone for some distance.

Squeezing his eyes shut against the glare, Gromph spoke a third command word, and the harsh light disappeared. The prism was as it had been before, still cool as stone against Gromph’s palm.

“A useful trinket,” he said, slipping it into a pocket of his piwafwi. “Handy to read scrolls by, if nothing else.”

He almost ended his search there, but when he passed his hands a final time over the illithid’s corpse he felt the tingle once more.

Something was tucked deep into the pocket he’d just pulled the prism from. Digging into it, he pulled out a silver chain with a flat oval of green jade hanging from it. He recognized it at once.

“So that’s where the jade spiders disappeared to,” he muttered, slipping it into his own pocket.

Standing again, Gromph used magic to levitate the illithid’s head—no sense touching those limp, foul-smelling tentacles if he didn’t have to—and positioned it on the chest of the corpse. Then he pulled a pinch of dust from a pocket of his piwafwi and sprinkled it over Sluuguth’s body. He chanted a brief spell and pointed a finger. A harsh sizzling filled the air as a beam of green energy sprang from its tip. It washed over the corpse, illuminating it in a blaze of crackling light. An instant later, all that was left of Sluuguth was a thin smudge of dust on the floor.

Crossing the room, Gromph picked up the empty thought bottle. One of its sides was dented slightly, but the sigil-shaped pane of glass was still intact. It could be reused. He removed the dent with a mending spell, then set it on the table beside the second bottle and cast a minor spell that caused the spray of blood that had landed on the desk to dry to dark brown dust, which he blew away. He placed the unopened bottle carefully in the drawer, then picked up the one that had been uncorked.

He turned to the wall, and, with a wave of his fingers, released the fire elemental that Sluuguth’s spell had frozen in place. The elemental rushed out with an angry roar, filling the room with heat.

“Wherrre is he?” it said, flaring as it twisted this way and that, looking for the vanished illithid. “He must burrrn.”

“The illithid is gone,” Gromph answered.

The elemental flared white-hot with anger.

“You said I had only to burrrn an intruder to be free,” it growled. It pointed at the soot-smudged spot on the wall where the magical sigil had been. “Am I then to be put back in bondage?”

Shielding his face from the heat, Gromph said, “No. Your task has been altered, that’s all. After you perform it, you are free to go.” He showed the elemental the thought bottle. “In a moment, I will use this magical device. When I am done, you will relay the following information to me...”

A few moments later, Gromph found himself seated behind his desk, holding a corked bottle in his hand. A drawer containing a bottle identical to it was open, and a fire elemental hovered on the other side of the desk. Glancing at the wall, Gromph saw that the sigil that had held it had been activated. An intruder must have entered the office—Gromph cast a quick detection spell, but his magic revealed no trace of any creature, living or undead. Whoever the intruder was, he or she had left a gold ring and what looked like a spell tube on Gromph’s desk—and an impressive battle-axe, leaning against the side of the desk.

Suddenly worried, Gromph realized that the last thing he could remember was being trapped inside the sphere, floating on the lake. He had obviously made it back to Sorcere somehow, found his way into his study, and escaped the imprisonment spell. But how?

Gromph stared at the golden bottle he held in his hand—one of his thought bottles. The answer must be inside.

“Masterrr,” the fire elemental said, drawing his attention.

Gromph looked up.

“The Gracklstugh army, together with an army of tanarukk, arrre attacking Menzoberranzan,” the elemental announced, a tongue of bright red flame licking out of its mouth as it spoke. “The duerrrgar have set up a siege wall just inside Tier Breche and are attacking Sorcerrre. At least one illithid was among their number—a sorrrcerer by the name of Sluuguth. He had in his possession one of the amulets that contrrrols the jade spiders. You defeated him.”

That said, the fire elemental gave a roar of triumph as the invisible magical bonds that had held it fell away. It disappeared as abruptly as a blown-out candle.

“An illithid,” Gromph whispered.

That explained, then, why he held a thought bottle in his hand. A tickle of memory returned. He’d created the thing—and the bottle that matched it—for use in the event of his capture by a mind flayer. His plan had been to offer it to the creature...

There, the memory faded.

Shrugging, Gromph placed the bottle carefully in the drawer beside the other one and pushed the drawer shut.

“Sorcere is under attack?” he muttered. “We’ll see about that.”

Gromph strode toward the balcony where two of his students stood. They were Norulle, a fifth-year student who had used a hair-growth cantrip to cause a long, dwarflike beard to sprout from his chin—hardly an appropriate affectation, given whom they were fighting—and Prath, a first-year student who was still only in his thirties, and whose stocky build and bulging biceps should have caused his House to enroll him in Melee-Magthere, instead. Both had their backs to the corridor down which Gromph hurried and were sheltering behind the ghostly image of a turtle shell the size of a table that hung in the air, just in front of the balcony.

Norulle flinched as a hail of arrows struck it, most of them exploding to splinters as the spell destroyed them. One arrow, however, sparkled with arcane energy. It pierced the magical barrier and snagged the sleeve of Prath’s piwafwi. Barely glancing at it, Prath yanked it free and cast it aside. A moment later, a trickle of blood dripped from his hand. He shook it away.

The boy should have been a soldier, indeed, Gromph thought.

From outside came the sounds of battle: the shouted orders of the duergar below; the creak-and-thump of catapults being winched and shot; the crackling, explosive hiss of magical energy; and the frantic chanting of mages, casting retaliatory spells from the balconies above and below.

“Norulle, Prath—what’s happening?” Gromph asked as he strode out onto the balcony. “Where are your instructors?”

Norulle whirled around in surprise, a wand clutched in one hand.

“Master!” he gasped. “You’re here!”

Diamond dust glittered in Norulle’s hair and beard. Someone had cast a powerful protective spell upon him.

It was Prath who answered Gromph’s question, “Leandran’s gone. He was hit square on by magic fire.”

He pointed at a spot farther along the balcony—a smoldering crater in the stone floor. Through a hole at the center of it, Gromph could see the ground below. Smaller craters, also still smoking, pitted the wall behind that spot like splash marks. Each was ringed by a circle of frost. The two students had obviously used a cold spell to extinguish the blaze. Of Leandran, the school’s Master of Abjurative Magic, there was no trace, save for the lingering stench of burned flesh.

A whistling sound drew Gromph’s attention. He glanced to the side just in time to see an enormous clay pot arc up toward Sorcere and strike the side of the stalagmite, several dozen paces away. It broke against the stone, splashing liquid fire in all directions. The fire poured down the stone, burning everything in its wake: stone walls, a decorative arch of wrought iron above the balcony, and the balcony itself.

Figures on the balcony scurried away from the rush of flame—one of them a little too slowly. As some of the stuff poured down onto his piwafwi, his agonized screams filled the air. They were cut off a moment later when the wrought-iron arch, weakened by the fire, collapsed with a loud squeal of metal. Above the spot where it had been mounted, the wall continued to burn, and the flames soon ate a hole through the stone.

Gromph stared in the direction from which the pot of fire had come, at the protective barrier the duergar had erected. It stood just in front of the tunnel that gave access to Tier Breche from the Dark Dominion. The barrier appeared to be made of square-hewn lengths of fungus stem, stacked horizontally on top of each other, but had obviously been magically strengthened. The lightning bolts that one of the mages on a balcony above fired down into them did little more than chip off tiny pieces of the fungus, and the hailstones raining down from the ice storm another mage had caused to materialize in the air just above the barrier were melting before they struck it.

Yet another mage of Sorcere sent a cloud of acid billowing down at the barrier. The yellowish vapor swept over the fungus-log blockade and continued on down the tunnel beyond it. The barrier remained intact, however, and clay pots continued to sail into the air from the catapults behind it, whistling through the air to blast the walls of Sorcere with alchemical flame.

It didn’t look as though Arach-Tinilith was faring any better than Sorcere. The walls of the spider-shaped temple were also dotted with gouts of white-hot flame, and the ground in front of the building was strewn with corpses. Many were squat and bald—duergar—but many more were drow. Dark elf soldiers had given their lives in defense of the cavern. Of the priestesses, there was no sign. Like their goddess, they had retreated behind walls of stone, leaving others to do the fighting.

Farther back in the cavern, the third building of the Academy—the pyramid-shaped warrior training school Melee-Magthere—remained unscathed. The catapults could not reach that far, it seemed.

Norulle leaned over the balcony, directing his wand at the enemy. Pea-sized gobs of fire erupted from its tip, enlarging as they streaked toward the siege fortifications below. By the time they struck the fungus-log walls, they were several paces in diameter. Yet even though each exploded with a roar that was audible even over the chaos of battle, the walls remained firm,

Gromph’s eyes narrowed. The seeming invulnerability of the wall he could understand—the duergar must have carried the lightweight, fungus-stem logs with them in preparation for their siege, then used a spell to turn them to stone once they were in place. What he could not understand was why the duergar behind the walls were still able to work their catapults despite the searing heat of Norulle’s fireballs and the cloud of acidic vapor that had swept over them.

He watched as one of the senior students appeared suddenly on the field of battle below, just in front of the duergar barrier, and cast a spell Gromph himself taught—the great shout. A wave of noise crashed against the duergar positions, causing the logs that made up the fortification to visibly tremble.

But still the attack did not fatter. Arrows erupted from slits in the wall, one of them striking the student through the belly just as he teleported away.

“Master,” Prath shouted over the ringing in Gromph’s ears, catching Gromph’s attention at last. “Should we perhaps send a swarm of vermin against them? Insects—or perhaps rats?”

Gromph was about to ridicule that suggestion, but stopped.

“ ‘Out of the mouths of novices’,” he instead quoted, following the familiar saying with a chuckle.

Prath stared at him in confusion, a spark of hope in his eye.

“Was that the right spell to suggest, Master?”

“No,” Gromph answered, “but it’s given me an idea. Continue the fight—and keep your head down.”

Stepping back into the corridor down which he’d hurried a short time before, Gromph closed his eyes. It took only a moment to locate Kyorli. Pouring his awareness into his familiar, Gromph could feel legs swiftly running and whiskers twitching as they sniffed the stone across which the rat was running.

Kyorli, the archmage sent. Where are you?

Running. Running quick to Sorcere! But the way is blocked.

Gromph was able, with a bit or concentration, to see through the rat’s eyes. Kyorli was running through a tunnel, weaving through a forest of moving feet. The feet belonged to duergar, who were working in pairs, dragging away the bodies of their fellow soldiers. Two duergar, carrying the corpse or a slain companion, ran into a side tunnel.

Kyorli, Gromph commanded. That tunnel. Look inside.

Kyorli scurried to the tunnel mouth and peered in. Seeing through her eyes, Gromph saw what he’d expected: a duergar wearing a gray, hooded mantle and carrying a staff set with an egg-sized gem with a deep crack running down its center, symbol of the god Laduguer. The cleric stood in front of a dozen bodies that had been heaped on the floor of the tunnel, waving his staff over them as he cast a spell. A moment later the bodies began to stir. As one, the dead soldiers—animated with a gruesome semblance of life—rose to their feet and filed out of the tunnel.

Follow them, Gromph ordered, Watch where they go.

Kyorli did, from a safe distance. The undead duergar marched in a jerking line toward the mouth of the main tunnel. Reaching it, they cook up positions behind the siege wail, oblivious to yet another cloud of acidic vapor that boiled down from the cavern above, blistering their undead skin.

Gromph had to admit the duergar were clever. With Lolth’s priestesses bereft of their magic there was no one to turn an undead army back—or seize control of it. Once the magical fire had done its work they would march, unmolested, on Sorcere, Melee-Magthere, and Arach-Tinilith—then Menzoberranzan proper. And the only mage powerful enough to stop them was imprisoned far beneath the city—or so their commanders thought.

The view through Kyorli’s eyes shifted suddenly as the rat was forced to scurry out of the path of a running soldier.

That will do, Gromph told his familiar. Find yourself a place to hide. You’ll be able to join me in Sorcere soon enough.

Returning his awareness to his own body, Gromph strode with confidence to the balcony. He pulled from his pocket a small piece of engraved bone, and held out his palm to the two students who turned toward him.

“I need a small piece of raw meat,” he told them.

Norulle glanced around. “But Master, there is none here,” he said.

Prath met Gromph’s eye and slowly nodded. Drawing a dagger that had been hidden up a sleeve of his piwafwi, he placed his left hand on the rail of the balcony and sliced off the fleshy tip of his little finger. Picking up the bloody piece—and ignoring the grimace of his fellow student—he offered it to Gromph with his good hand.

Gromph smiled.

“Well done, apprentice,” he told the boy. “You’ll go far. What House are you, by the way?”

Prath smiled through his pain, clenching the stub of his severed finger against his palm to staunch the blood, and answered, “House Baenre, Master.”

“Ah.” Gromph had never met the lad before—he must have been a child of the lowest of the noble ranks.

Prath wasn’t quick-witted—any other student might have used a spell to summon a minor creature into his hand, killed it, and offered Gromph its flesh, instead—but he was loyal. Gromph could use that.

Smearing the blood on the bit of bone, Gromph cast his spell. With a flick of his hand, he hurled it in the direction of the wall that hid the duergar positions.

Then he shouted his command: “Break off your attack. Turn and fight the duergar, instead!”

Spells continued to rain down upon the fungus-stem wall. It took the other mages several moments to realize that the catapults had stopped firing. Then the undead duergar soldiers turned their backs on the wall. With unsteady, mindless motions they trotted into the tunnel that led to the Dark Dominion, weapons in hand. A moment later, the clash of battle echoed out of the tunnel, as they engaged their still-living companions in mortal combat.

Seeing that, the remaining warriors of Melee-Magthere burst out of their pyramid. Rushing forward with swords raised, they clambered over the siege wall and immediately began tearing both it and the catapults apart. Others picked up the stonefire bombs the undead duergar had left behind and heaved them into the tunnel.

Gromph smiled grimly as he watched. Eventually he turned and looked out beyond Tier Breche, at the city below. Despite the toehold the enemy had gained—and lost—in Tier Breche, Menzoberranzan seemed untouched by war. The stalactites and stalagmites of the noble manors still sparkled, and a ring of magical fire was creeping up the great spire of Narbondel. Gromph frowned, wondering which of the wizards of House Baenre had been keeping it going in his absence. It seemed that he was not quite as irreplaceable as he would have liked. He’d have to speak to Triel about that.

Then, after making his report to his matron mother, he would see what he could do to put an end to the siege.