Gauntlgrym

POWERS OLDER, POWERS DEEPER

THE ASHMADAI CAME INTO THE CIRCULAR CHAMBER WITH TENTATIVE STEPS, though the echoes of battle had long since faded. Valindra Shadowmantle led the way, flanked by two score of Sylora’s best warriors. The lich focused almost immediately on the throne, and she drifted that way, floating, not walking, while her minions spread out to examine the corpses scattered about the floor.

She stopped in front of the throne, sensing its great magic. Valindra had spent her life studying the Art, as a wizard in the famed Hosttower of the Arcane. Before the Spellplague, and before she had fallen into death then undeath at the hand of Arklem Greeth, Valindra had been a wizard of great power, impeccable scholarship, and considerable renown.

As a lich, Valindra had survived the Spellplague, though it had surely harmed her mind. But at long last, she was returning to her senses, and gathering her newfound powers in the unfamiliar energies of post-Spellplague arcana.

Its powers having transcended even the dramatic changes that had been visited upon Faer?n, the throne knocked her back to that time before. The magic in it was ancient, and reverberated within Valindra, taking her to a place of familiar comfort she had not known in decades.

She “cooed” and “ahh’d” before the throne, her emaciated, pale hands reaching out but never quite touching the powerful artifact. Lost in her thoughts and memories, in the better times she had known as a living wizard, Valindra failed even to notice when a pair of her Ashmadai commanders came up beside her.

“Lady Valindra,” one, a large male tiefling, said.

When she didn’t respond, he repeated the words much more loudly.

Valindra started and turned on him, her ghostly eyes flickering with threatening red flames.

“The dead are of the Plane of Fire, we believe,” the tiefling explained. “Minions of the primordial?”

Valindra’s perplexed expression conveyed that she hadn’t even really heard the question, let alone digested it.

“Yes,” another voice answered, and the two Ashmadai commanders and Valindra turned just as a bat fluttering up behind the throne seemed to fall over itself and take humanoid form.

“Minions of the primordial-worshipers, really,” Dor’crae explained. “These salamanders, and large red lizards deeper in the complex, even a small red dragon, have come to the call of the volcano.”

“There are more?” the male Ashmadai asked.

“They are many,” Dor’crae replied, walking around the dais to join the trio.

“Perhaps they will do our job for us, then,” said the Ashmadai. “Perhaps they already have.”

Dor’crae laughed at that notion, and waved out his arm, inviting the others to take another look at the result of the battle-a battle he had watched from the shadows of the room’s high ceiling.

“I would not…” he started to say, but he paused as he noticed that Valindra paid him no heed, that she had turned her attention back to the throne.

“I wouldn’t count on the inhabitants of the complex to defeat the likes of Jarlaxle and his mighty dwarf,” Dor’crae told the Ashmadai, “or of Dahlia and Drizzt Do’Urden.” He glanced at Valindra again, watching as she ascended the dais, still staring at the throne as if in a trance. “They are formidable enough, or were, but now are even more so. I watched them in this very room, and the other dwarf with them, a king of the dwarves it would seem, has somehow been magically… enhanced.”

The two Ashmadai scrunched up their faces, glanced at each other, then turned back to Dor’crae with obvious confusion.

“Through the power in that very throne,” Dor’crae explained, turning to Valindra as he spoke.

The lich didn’t seem to hear him.

“There is some ancient magic there that empowered him,” Dor’crae warned them all.

“Magic, yes,” Valindra cooed, her hand waving over the arm of the throne. Then, suddenly, the lich slapped her hand down and grabbed the throne.

Her eyes went wide and she issued a hiss of protest. It was clear that she was struggling mightily to hold onto the throne, as if it was trying to throw her aside. Stubbornly, the lich growled and fought back, then she turned and sat down on the throne, grasping the arms with both hands.

She growled and snarled, thrashing about, hissing, and sputtering a stream of curses. Her back arched as if some unseen force lifted her free, and she growled again and uttered a curse at some dwarf king and forced herself back down. To the onlookers, the three before the throne and many others about the room, she seemed like a halfling trying to hold back the charge of an umber hulk.

The struggle intensified. Flashes of lightning, blue-white and black, shot from the chair, and Dor’crae and the Ashmadai commanders fell back.

The throne of Gauntlgrym was clearly and violently rejecting Valindra, but the lich would not accept that.

But at last, with a rumble that shook the chamber, and indeed reverberated deep into the complex of Gauntlgrym, the throne expelled her, hurling Valindra through the air. She magically caught herself in mid-descent, and came down gently to her normal stance, floating just a few inches above the floor.

“Valindra?” Dor’crae asked, but the lich didn’t hear him.

She swept back in at the throne, hands extended like killing claws. With a wicked hiss, she shot fingers of lightning from her hands. When the bolts merely disappeared into the magical throne, the outraged Valindra summoned instead a pea of fire, which she threw onto the seat.

“Run!” the Ashmadai commander yelled, and the warriors scrambled all over each other to get away from the throne.

Valindra’s fireball engulfed the throne, the dais, and a good portion of the floor around it. The angry flames reached right up to the lich herself, who seemed not to care. None of the Ashmadai were caught in the blast, though one found his weathercloak aflame and had to roll about frantically on the floor to douse it.

When the flames and smoke cleared, there sat the throne, unbothered, unmarred, impervious.

Valindra shrieked and hissed and charged it, again throwing bolts of lightning into it as she rushed in, then clawed at it and punched it.

“She is powerful, no doubt,” the Ashmadai leader whispered as he walked up beside Dor’crae. “But I fear her presence here.”

“Sylora Salm decided that she should come,” Dor’crae reminded him. “That is not without reason, and it is not your place to question.”

“Of course,” the man said, lowering his gaze.

Dor’crae glared at him a bit longer, making sure he knew his place. They couldn’t afford such intemperate and mutinous whispers, not with powerful enemies just ahead. Truthfully, though, when Dor’crae looked back at the throne and the thrashing, insane Valindra, he found it hard to disagree with the zealot’s words.

They couldn’t begin to control the lich, and he knew without a doubt that if she saw a target for a fireball and the entire squad of Ashmadai happened to be in the blast area, she wouldn’t even care.

The tremor grumbled through the stone floor, giving all five a bit of a shake. It seemed nothing too much to Drizzt, but when he looked at Bruenor, the drow had second thoughts.

“What do you know?” Jarlaxle asked Bruenor before Drizzt could.

“Bah, the beast belched, and nothin’ more,” said Athrogate, but Bruenor’s expression told a different story.

“Weren’t the beast,” he said, shaking his head. “Our enemies have entered behind us. They fight the ancient ones.”

“The ancient ones?” Drizzt and Dahlia asked together, and they looked at each other in surprise.

“The dwarves of Gauntlgrym,” Jarlaxle explained.

“The throne,” Bruenor corrected. “They struck at the throne.

“To what end?

Bruenor shook his head, his expression revealing confidence that the throne was in no real danger. He glanced all around then, however, and added, “The ghosts’re gone.”

The others all looked around as well, and sure enough, they saw no ghosts in the wide corridor, though there had been some there only a few moments earlier.

“Gone back to fight for the throne o’ Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor explained.

“And what now for us?” Drizzt asked.

Jarlaxle seemed as if he was about to answer, but like all the others, he deferred to Bruenor.

“We go on,” Bruenor said, and marched ahead, Athrogate hustling to keep beside him.

“He seems very sure of himself,” Dahlia remarked to Drizzt and Jarlaxle as the dwarves stomped off. “With every turn and every side passage.”

It was true enough, and while Drizzt held faith in his friend-and really, what choice did they have?-he was more than a bit concerned. Near to the audience chamber, the passages had been clear and undamaged-or no more so than Jarlaxle, Athrogate, and Dahlia had remembered them-but soon after the five companions had descended the first long stairwell, they had found more ruin and rubble. Corridors had twisted and cracked apart, and the second stair Bruenor had led them to had proven impassable.

But the dwarf remained undaunted and took them off on an alternate route.

Drizzt didn’t know what magic might have been in that throne, but he hoped it truly was a memory of Gauntlgrym, not some deception placed in his mind by their enemies-as had been done to Athrogate.

Jarlaxle moved ahead to watch over the dwarves.

“You fought well in that canyon,” Drizzt remarked quietly.

Dahlia arched her eyebrow at him. “I always fight well. It is why I am alive.”

“You fight often, then,” Drizzt said with a slight smirk.

“When I have to.”

“Perhaps you’re not as charming as you believe.”

“I don’t have to be,” Dahlia replied without missing a beat. “I fight well.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”

“With yourself as the evidence, I am sure,” Dahlia replied.

She pressed on faster, leaving an amused Drizzt in her wake.

“Every tunnel!” the Ashmadai commander cried as the whole of his group shrank back toward the entrance that had brought them into the room. The colorless forms of ghost dwarves flooded into the circular hall from every one of the exits in front of them, forming ranks with all the discipline of a living army.

“Can they touch us? Can they hurt us?” one woman asked, her teeth chattering, for indeed the room became very cold.

“They can tear you apart,” Dor’crae assured them.

“Then we fight!” the commander cried, and all around him gave a rousing battle cheer.

All except for Dor’crae, who was thinking that it might be time for him to take the form of a bat and fly away. And except for Valindra, who began to laugh wildly, loudly, and so hysterically that the cheering died away bit by bit, each Ashmadai voice going silent as a new set of eyes fell upon the lich.

“Fight them?” Valindra asked when at last she commanded the attention of all. She began to cackle again, uncontrollably it seemed. She brought forth her emaciated hand, palm up, closed her eyes, and her laughter became a chant.

The Ashmadai circled behind her, ready to run away, having seen the destructive power of her magic.

But no fireball filled the room. Instead, a scepter appeared in her hand. At a cursory glance, it looked much like those carried by the Ashmadai, and that brought more cheers. But as each of them came to view Valindra’s scepter more closely, those cheers turned to gasps.

The Ashmadai scepters, their staff-spears, were red in color when first presented, but that hue wore away with time and use, and most held weapons of uneven hue, more pink than red. But not the scepter Valindra held. It was ruby, and not just in color. It seemed to have been carved of one giant gemstone, rich red, its color so fluid and deep that several of the nearby Ashmadai held forth their arms, as if they meant to sink their fingers right into it.

Valindra grasped it powerfully and thrust it horizontally above her head, and its ends flared with a powerful red light.

“Who is your master?” she cried.

Confused, the Ashmadai glanced around at each other, some mouthing “Asmodeus,” others quietly and questioningly asking, “Valindra?”

“Who is your master!” Valindra yelled, her voice magically magnified to fill the chamber and echo about the stones, the ends of the scepter flaring again in response to her cry.

“Asmodeus!” the commander yelled back, and the others followed his lead.

“Pray to him!” Valindra ordered.

The fanatics scrambled to form a kneeling circle around the lich, and each looped his right arm over the shoulders of the person to his right, left arms reaching high for the amazing scepter. They began to chant, and their circle began to slowly rotate to the left as they crawled on the hard stone.

From a few steps back, Dor’crae watched it all with blank amazement. He knew that scepter. Szass Tam had kept it back in Thay, knowing well that it was the most treasured artifact of the Ashmadai. Dor’crae had suspected all along that Sylora Salm had brought it west with her, given that almost the entire cult of Ashmadai had come to Neverwinter Wood, and given their complete obedience to her. When Valindra had joined their ranks those years ago, Sylora’s power over the lich had only confirmed that suspicion.

Dor’crae could hardly believe that Sylora had given the scepter to Valindra, to that unstable and powerful undead creature.

Dor’crae shook those thoughts away. It was not the time. His warriors were on their knees, and the dwarves fast approached.

“Valindra!” he called to warn her, but she, too, was deep into her chanting and she seemed not to hear.

“Valindra, they come!” the vampire yelled, but again, the lich made no sign that she heard him.

The nearest ghosts took on a reddish hue as they came within the wide glow of the ruby scepter, and Dor’crae noted that they seemed to hesitate there, their faces twitching with discomfort, pain even. Smoke began to pour from the scepter’s ends, circling between Valindra and the closest dwarves, swirling across the stone floor, and sinking lower, as if reaching into the rock itself. The stone melted, liquefied, red bubbles forming and popping, releasing acrid yellow smoke into the air.

As one, the ghosts stopped and threw up their hands, shielding their eyes.

Through the floor it came, as if standing up in a shallow pond. The large head appeared first, spiked and crested with rows of jagged red bone. Hooked black horns reached out to either side and curved upward and over, where they narrowed into points facing each other. Wide eyes showed no pupils-pits of fire and nothing more, the eyes of an angry devil. A wide mouth curled back in a perpetual hiss, revealing huge canines and rows of teeth that could tear flesh from bone with ease. Taller it climbed as if scaling a ladder in the molten floor, its glorious, naked body coming forth from the lava with not a scratch or burn, its red, leathery wings spreading wide as they came free of the hole.

The whole of the creature was red, hot like the fires of all Nine Hells, its skin stretched over corded muscles and rows of bone. Black spikes lined its back in a sharp ridge narrowing at the base of its spine, where they gave way to a flashing red tail, barbed in a black tip and dripping lethal venom. The long claws of its hands, too, shone black, like polished obsidian. In its right hand, it held a gigantic mace, obsidian black and with a four-bladed head, each side a cleaver in and of itself. Smoke wafted from that weapon, and an occasional lick of flame appeared along its angry head.

Finally the fiend stepped from the bubbling pool, a huge, clawed foot scraping down upon solid stone, black claws screeching.

The beast wore only a green loincloth set with an iron skull in front, black leathery bracers tied tight around its muscular forearms, and macabre jewelry: a necklace of skulls, human sized but seeming smaller on the eight-foot-tall devil, and more skulls tied around its thrashing tail.

The Ashmadai wailed and prostrated themselves, face down, not daring to look upon the glorious devil.

It was not Asmodeus, of course, for to dare to even try to summon that one would have brought ruin upon them all. But Dor’crae’s estimation of Valindra jumped mightily at that terrible, glorious moment, and truly he felt the fool for ever doubting Sylora Salm. With the scepter, Valindra had called deep into the Nine Hells, and she had been heard.

Dor’crae was no student of devil-kin, but like anyone else who had spent time with dark wizards, he knew the primary beings of the lower planes. Valindra had been heard indeed, and she had been granted, for her efforts, the services of a pit fiend, one of the personal servants of the devil god, a duke of the Nine Hells, answerable only to the unspeakable archdevils themselves.

The beast surveyed its ghostly enemies, then half-turned to regard Valindra and the groveling Ashmadai. It reached out with its long arm toward the scepter, clawed fingers grasping for the item.

And again Dor’crae thought it was surely time for him to leave, but the pit fiend didn’t take the scepter from Valindra. Instead, it seemed to lend her its powers, to be funneled through the item.

The scepter glowed more brightly, and Dor’crae had to turn his shoulder and throw his elbow up high, bringing his cloak up to shield his face. He, too, was an undead thing. So many times had the vampire dominated unsuspecting humans, the weak willed who would give in to his demands. But he realized in that moment the horror of his former victims.

Despite himself, he was on his knees. He found that he could not look upon the pit fiend any longer, and he buried his face in his hands and bent to kiss the floor. Trembling, helpless, he could only die again right then and there. There was no escape. There was no hope.

“Dor’crae,” he heard, more in his thoughts than his ears, as Valindra reached out to him, her voice thin and far, far away.

“Dor’crae, arise,” she ordered.

The vampire dared to look up. Valindra still stood as she had, the scepter thrust up above her, its ends emitting wave after wave of energetic red light.

The pit fiend stood before her now, having let go of the artifact, and the scepter itself seemed greatly diminished, as the duke of devils seemed greatly enhanced.

Dor’crae’s pain subsided, as did his hopelessness. He dared rise to his knees, then to his feet.

“The primordial’s minions will not recognize that we also wish its release,” the vampire warned. “And there is the dragon-the red dragon from the depths below…”

Valindra smiled at him and shrugged, as all around her the Ashmadai struggled to their feet, and the vampire wondered if Valindra had called to each of them, individually and by name, and somehow all at once.

“Lead on, Beealtimatuche,” the lich said.

With the pit fiend thus leading, the procession moved past the writhing mass of prostrated dwarf ghosts, the creatures squirming in agony, and stalked out of the chamber.

The Ashmadai said nothing, but the looks on their faces spoke of awe and wonderment, and elation. But no such feelings washed through Dor’crae. He had known wizards to summon beings of the lower planes-usually minor demons or imps. He had heard of those who had dared bring forth more powerful minions, demons and devils, or elementals.

Those attempts at summoning greater servants had not typically ended well. He looked at the scepter, the source of the power for the summoning, and knew instinctively that the bulk of its stored energy had been spent in bringing forth the devil-a mighty devil that had to be tightly controlled.

Pit fiends were servants only to the archdevils themselves, and now, it seemed, a servant to Valindra Shadowmantle.

But for how long?