Maestro

CHAPTER 16

I request entry, Archmage Gromph.”

The voice caught Gromph by surprise. The night was late, well past midnight, and the moon had set. Darkness had fallen deeply over Luskan.

Gromph slipped a robe over his slender shoulders and moved to the tent flap, pulling it aside just enough to view the woman standing a little ways back from his heavily warded entryway.

It was Catti-brie, dressed in a simple shift, and with her black lace cape pulled around her shoulders.

Gromph licked his thin lips. He knew his psionic intrusions were assailing her and confusing her, and possibly even tempting her.

But this?

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want,” she answered, and the archmage swallowed hard.

“Then enter,” he said, stepping back and pulling the flap wider. “I command the glyphs and wards to allow you.”

Catti-brie came forward on bare feet, looking more nervous with each step, as if she expected some burst of magical energy, lightning or fire or freezing cold, to assault her as she entered the wizard’s private tent.

By the time she arrived inside, Gromph had already conjured a magical light, one tinted blue, quietly glowing. In that glow, Gromph could even better appreciate the sheer beauty of this woman, her beautiful skin, so smooth and clear, and those huge blue eyes. And that hair! Auburn locks thick enough to get lost in. Her shift clung teasingly to her frame, solid and strong, but so promisingly supple. She was not drow, but Gromph could not deny her beauty.

“Well met,” he said with a smile. “This is a night I have long awaited.”

“No more than I,” said Catti-brie, and her black lace cloak fell to the floor behind her.

Kiriy stood alone in the hallway, the sounds of battle all around her, and waited.

“Matron Mother Zhindia?” Kiriy called again, and again she waited. Every glance about grew a bit more nervous. Had her siblings escaped the driders? And what of the dangerous Tiago?

And where were the Melarni priestesses? Kiriy had come into House Do’Urden as their conduit. Their ritual allowed them to follow her every movement, allowed them to intrude upon her enemies with mighty spells hurled from afar. But where had they gone?

Kiriy knew Zhindia would not answer, that the matron mother could not hear her. Her efforts to reach the matron mother were desperation and fear, not certainty of success.

It occurred to her that perhaps she had been set up by the Melarni. Perhaps the invasion of House Do’Urden would fail-maybe with House Baenre coming again to its aid-and in that event, would Kiriy be named as the perpetrator?

“No,” she said resolutely. “The Spider Queen is with me-is with us!”

She nodded, knowing what she must do. Even without the Melarni, even without knowing why the magical connection had been severed, Kiriy understood her mission. It was, in fact, as clear to her as the door just down this curving corridor, the door of the private quarters of Matron Mother Darthiir Do’Urden.

Nodding, the first priestess moved to the door. She cast several protection spells upon herself, then disenchanted the door. With a deep breath, for she could not truly know the extent of explosive magical warding placed upon this door, she pushed through into the anteroom.

The door to her right was closed, the one to her left ajar, enough for her to see the abominable surface elf seated in a curled position on the bed, hugging her bare knees and rocking in a stupor.

Kiriy closed the door and cast a spell of holding upon it, then moved for her prey.

“Do you know me, iblith?” she asked, entering.

Dahlia glanced up, but her stare remained blank.

“Do you know why I’ve come?” Kiriy asked.

No response at all, and Kiriy sighed. She had hoped it would be more fun than this. She started around the bottom of the bed, grinning as she turned her glance sidelong at Dahlia. She noticed then that the woman was holding something, some metal bar, beneath the bend in her legs. Kiriy took a cautious step away and began quietly casting, deliberately going through the words and movements of a spell of holding.

She wanted to take her time here, to make this abomination feel every moment of terror and agony, but she reminded herself that time was not on her side. Above all else, she had to make sure that Dahlia was dead-and consecrated in such an unholy manner that she could not, could never, be resurrected.

Her spell was complete and Dahlia started, as if in shock, then froze in place.

Kiriy Xorlarrin laughed at her. “Now you will be set free, iblith,” she whispered. She drew out a ceremonial dagger. She wanted to feel her blood, and wanted to be close enough to see the pain in the woman’s eyes.

She knew just when to free Dahlia from the spell of holding, too, just enough to hear that last wail before death.

“I always wondered how some of my kind could find a human attractive,” Gromph said. He let his robe slip to the floor and sat naked on the edge of his bed, patting the spot next to him. “Now I see you and I understand. I will show you pleasures you cannot begin to imagine.”

Catti-brie wore nothing but her smile and that simple nightgown, almost sheer, and hanging only to mid-thigh.

She didn’t feel naked, though. Her grin was full of knowledge, and her knowledge was as protective as the finest suit of mithral armor.

“As pleasurable as you expect I found those mind-magic intrusions you have been injecting into my thoughts?” she asked.

That got Gromph’s attention, and he looked at her curiously for a moment, then painted on an incredulous, surely feigned expression.

“That is quite a game that you designed and delivered,” Catti-brie went on. “I suppose I should be impressed-”

“You should be thankful,” Gromph interrupted. He sat back easily, turning up his hips to more fully expose himself, letting her know that he understood the game to be up, and more importantly, that he didn’t care. “That I, the Archmage of Menzoberranzan, would take the time and effort to so pleasure you from afar.”

“But I find myself truly disappointed,” Catti-brie resolutely pressed on. “To think that one as accomplished as you, one whose reputation rivals the legends of Khelben, or even Elminster, would unlock such new and great mysteries of this other magic for use in such a petty manner.”

Gromph laughed at her and patted the bed again.

“Though I suppose that after so stupidly summoning Demogorgon to Menzoberranzan, you find it refreshingly small to attack a person in such a manner from afar,” Catti-brie finished, and Gromph’s demeanor turned ugly for a brief and telling instant. Catti-brie knew she had hurt him with that remark.

She wanted to hurt him a lot more than that.

“Attack?” he echoed, his expression reverting to confidence and ease. “I merely offered to you a vision. You let me in. Willingly. And in your accusation you referred to ‘those mind-magic intrusions,’ inferring more than one instance. Yet only once did I offer you a telepathic hint of the pleasures we two might enjoy together.”

His laughter cut into her heart. She didn’t want to believe him, and logically did not believe him, but the doubt …

“The rest-and were there many?-came wholly from your own imagination,” he said slyly. He beckoned to her with one hand and touched himself with the other. “Come,” he said, patting the bed insistently. “Do tell me of these fantasies. Let us see what pleasure they might inspire.”

And Gromph found that he was not alone on the bed-an unexpected guest was now sitting beside him, hot breath on his neck.

“Have you met Guenhwyvar?” Catti-brie asked.

Gromph snickered, but glanced warily at the huge black panther out of the corner of his eye. “Do you mean to kill me then?”

“Would I not be justified?”

“You would not be able to, but that is beside the point. Are you angry with me, or at yourself for your own weakness and infidelity, because you know in your heart that you liked what you imagined?”

“It was an attack,” Catti-brie insisted. “Without consent!”

“So you must tell yourself.”

“That is the only way you could ever have me, Gromph Baenre. Without my willingness, and thus, you will never have my heart or my soul.”

“I have already proven that thinking errant, woman!” the archmage replied. He sat up straight, and as Guenhwyvar beside him growled, he snapped his fingers in the air and the panther exploded into a cloud of gray mist, swirling and dissipating back to her Astral home.

“I have been in your mind,” he went on. “And I see now that you have witnessed our lovemaking as surely as any physical lover you might ever have known.”

“Without consent!”

“Does it matter?”

“You’ll not get back into my thoughts, Archmage. I see you now. I know you now.”

“And I know you, in the most intimate of ways.”

“You know nothing,” Catti-brie retorted. “You are a rapist and nothing more.”

“You hide behind a label and false claim,” he replied through a wide smile. “What you felt, you felt alone-oh, would that it were different!” His laughter mocked her outrage. “So deny me now, and go and hide from me. But can you hide from yourself?”

“You have no power over my free will, and that is the measure of intimacy,” Catti-brie pressed on against his sheer awfulness. “You’ll not get back into my thoughts, nor will you ever get beneath my robes.”

“Truly?” Gromph asked slyly. “Dear human, you will be amazed by the things I can accomplish, particularly when a woman tells me that I cannot.”

“And you will be amazed at what I might do. Do you actually believe that you needed to invite me in so that I would not be destroyed by your glyphs and wards? Then what of Guenhwyvar, who crawled in under the back flap of your tent without a magical whistle of warning? Oh yes, mighty Gromph, I dispelled your defenses long before you knew I was near to your abode.”

Gromph held up his hands and sighed, as if in some sort of perverse salute. “You are impressive, I must say, and in so many ways,” he admitted. “I find it truly lamentable that you are wound up in your nonsensical notions of fidelity, and to a pathetic warrior no less! And I am disappointed that one of your accomplishments-a chosen priestess, I am told, and a wizard of no small measure-clings to some ridiculous peasant superstition of entwining honor and sex.”

“I don’t even bother to pity you,” Catti-brie replied, coolly and confidently. “You are merely revolting.”

Gromph shrugged as if it did not matter, then waved his hand and magically sent his robes up and over his shoulders, dressing fully though he didn’t even sit up, as if it, too, no longer mattered.

“I will let you be gone from this place,” he said, and he sighed once more and looked over his shoulder plaintively at his bed. “Ah, pretty Catti-brie,” he said, and turned back.

But the woman was already long out of there, had simply vanished.

Gromph spent a long while sitting in that place, replaying that unexpected and, he had to admit, troubling encounter. This woman was clever, and very powerful. She had unwound his psionic intrusions, though there was little chance that she had ever trained in, or even experienced, such things as that before. And surely, given the strength and intensity of his suggestions, her mind had ruled above her flesh-no small feat for anyone.

And on a more pragmatic level, she had almost won out fully-Gromph knew that he must not ever allow that to happen again. If he had not, coincidentally and for another purpose, memorized a spell for dispelling magic that night, the sensations upon his delicate flesh would have been delivered not by Catti-brie, but by the claws and teeth of that terrible panther.

She had dispelled his wards. Few matron mothers could do such a thing.

Catti-brie was, he feared, more powerful than she knew.

That was often a dangerous thing.

She rocked back and forth, lost in the roiling current of half-finished thoughts that dived over bottomless waterfalls and hurled her into unrelated internal conversations. This was the essence of Dahlia’s life, with lucid moments being the rarest event of all.

She clutched Kozah’s Needle between her knees, her hands holding the four bars tightly together. The feel of that powerful magical weapon sometimes gave Dahlia a focus to break free of the wildly running rivers of her thoughts. Her most lucid moments in her time in Menzoberranzan had been in battle, when the demons had come. The intensity of those moments, the rush of excitement, the surrender to instinct, all of it, forced clarity and focus.

But not now. Not sitting on her bed in her empty room, in her empty life. In these moments, as her mind wandered in and out, she often took up Kozah’s Needle, hoping against hope that she might find a lifeline to clarity.

She was just rocking now, thoughts careening and meandering, with no rationality or reason or purpose.

The river of her thoughts slowed then, as if a mental dam was being constructed right in front of them. Fluid notions coalesced and circled, suddenly stagnant and rolling back in on themselves. Even in her ongoing bewilderment, Dahlia sensed the change, and from somewhere in the far recesses of her mind, from some memory of a similar mental weight, she understood it to be an attack.

Only then did she realize that there was another person in the room-she could smell the perfume. A priestess, no doubt, and so she knew the dam being constructed in her mind was a magical spell of holding, to freeze her and render her helpless.

She felt Kozah’s Needle. Tangible. Focal.

She heard a whisper, but the words would not yet register fully.

She felt a blade against her right side, just under her armpit. The tip bit into her, the poison burned.

Back rolled Dahlia, her right arm snapping out from under her bent legs, wrist twisting to crack the flail out hard, striking the priestess against the shoulder. The drow woman spun away, her dagger flying from her grasp.

Dahlia leaped up to stand on her bed and put her twin weapons into a gracefully spinning routine, the muscle memory forcing her focus, the imminent danger and incoming battle bringing her fully into the present moment.

She saw the priestess-she did not recognize this one-fall back farther and regain her balance, her other arm, and one of those terrible snake-headed whips, coming up in front of her. And she began to cast another spell.

Dahlia leaped from the bed, flipping a somersault sidelong, and not at the priestess. Not yet. It would bring her too close to those biting serpents, and she wanted nothing to do with them. The ribs on her right side burned and she felt the dullness of the drow sleeping poison.

She slapped her flails together repeatedly, sparks flying with each metallic clang. Both arms rolled out wide, then came crashing back together, inner palm to inner palm, the collision resealing the ends of the flail together, combining the two weapons into one.

Dahlia leaped again, diving off to the side and only narrowly avoiding a magical hammer that appeared in the air and struck at her.

The priestess was casting again, and coming forward, the four snakes of her whip writhing and hissing, eager to bite.

Kozah’s Needle, now in its staff form again, kept the snakes and the priestess at bay, but, to Dahlia’s dismay, this one, like all the drow, was quite skilled at martial combat. She couldn’t get close enough to score a solid hit.

And the spell seemed nearly complete.

Dahlia didn’t want to do it. She knew the charge in her weapon wasn’t strong enough, but she had to interrupt that spell, so she stamped Kozah’s needle on the floor, releasing the lightning energy.

The priestess lifted off the floor and flew backward, her white hair dancing wildly, her spell scrambled and lost. But she wasn’t hurt, not badly at least, and she was right back to her feet, in a defensive crouch, and with another spell on her lips.

With a growl, fighting the interminable confusion, Dahlia came on. She found, though, that the turmoil in her mind was not her only unseen enemy. The wound in her side burned, slowing her.

Desperately, she thrust her staff ahead. She got inside the priestess’s reach, prodding the woman hard. But she was bitten on her forearm by two different snakes. She recoiled, gasping in pain, and overwhelmed with poison.

Dahlia stumbled across the room and fell back onto her bed. She tried to stand again, but her legs gave out beneath her and she crumpled to the floor.

Kiriy Xorlarrin gathered up her dagger, determined to kill this one slowly. She barely had the weapon in her hand, though, when the door burst open and her brother Ravel and that wretched Tiago Baenre charged in.

They surveyed the scene quickly, and Tiago’s face was a mask of outrage.

“You,” he said, shaking his head and coming forward. Behind him, an equally angry Ravel was casting a spell, and behind him, in the hall, Kiriy noted Saribel-no doubt the priestess these two males wanted to put on the throne of House Do’Urden.

Kiriy’s plan unwound right there, right then.

“Drizzt Do’Urden is in the city!” she cried the moment before Tiago leaped at her with that terrible sword of his.

Catti-Brie sat on her bed, heavier robes tight around her, and wrapped in her blankets as well, as if that extra fabric was somehow shielding her from the memory of her encounter with the insufferable Gromph.

She watched as the gray mist formed around her, as Guenhwyvar became substantial once more, returning at her call.

How glad she was when the panther appeared, unhurt, and hopped up on the bed beside her.

“Oh, Guen,” Catti-brie said, burying her face in the soft black fur. She wrapped her arms around the giant cat’s muscled shoulders and pressed her face in tighter, and her shoulders began to bob.

She had to give herself this moment, had to allow herself to break down and just melt.

But only for a moment, and then she sat back up and forced a wide smile on her face as she considered this wonderful feline friend.

“He’ll not ever be forgettin’ that meetin’,” she whispered, letting the dwarven brogue come back to her, using it to bring the strength and resolve of Clan Battlehammer. “We surprised him, we two, aye, and he’s knowing that his little tricks won’t be workin’.”

Guenhwyvar yawned hugely, those great teeth shining in the candlelight of Catti-brie’s tent, then slid down on the bed.

Catti-brie bent over the panther and nuzzled her, drawing strength from her, confident then that she had done the right thing, and that her confrontation with Archmage Gromph had put them back on proper footing. In the solidity of the black panther, so too did Catti-brie find solidity under her feet once more.

“Aye,” she said again to the cat, and to herself, and she closed her eyes and let herself fall into a restful and much-needed sleep.