Condemnation (28 page)

“If we allow the gray dwarves to infest the city,” one of the other matron mothers said, “we shall surely see illithid, aboleth, and humanoid armies at our doorstep in no time at all. We have many enemies. Look at what happened to Ched Nasad.”

The eight high priestesses exchanged somber looks.

“Clearly, the Council must reach some decisions quickly,” Triel Baenre said, breaking her thoughtful silence. “We don’t have much time if we wish to meet the duergar outside the city, so I will order half of Baenre’s troops to make ready to march. I advise the rest of you to do the same. If we decide to stand on the defensive in the city cavern, we can have our soldiers stand down, but if we decide to march, we will want to be able to inarch soon.”

“I favor a vigorous and aggressive defense of the city,” said Yasraena Dyrr. “Hard exertion now may serve to deter further attacks later. I will order half the strength of House Dyrr to make ready at once.” She studied the other matrons carefully and added, “Provided, of course, that some other Houses agree to shoulder a share of the risk and assist us. Either we all make the same commitment, or none.”

“House Baenre guarantees Agrach Dyrr until the return of the expedition,” Triel said briskly.

Nimor nodded to himself. He’d expected that the leader of Menzoberranzan’s strongest House would choose to lead by example in this instance. Among other things, it deflected any predatory designs of the other Houses into an external activity, where the Baenre could be seen to be taking strong and decisive action to secure the city. Triel was badly in need of such measures.

She looked up at the various guards, advisors, and guests in the council chamber and said, “The matron mothers must discuss how best to meet this treacherous attack in private. Leave us.”

“Captain Zhayemd,” Yasraena Dyrr said, “I would like it if you took command of the Agrach Dyrr contingent and began your preparations at once. I know you have fought your way through great peril already today, but you have intimate knowledge of the field of battle, and I have the utmost confidence in you.”

“I will serve to the best of my abilities,” Nimor said. “With the goddess’s aid, I will scour our city’s foes from our territory.”

He offered another deep bow to the matron mothers, and quietly withdrew.

The forest sounds abruptly returned, signaling the end of the spell of silence. Wind sighed in the treetops, a small brook ran somewhere nearby, and tiny rustles and scuttling sounds whispered in the darkness as the small creatures of the woods—or larger ones who knew how to be stealthy—moved about nearby. Halisstra listened for a long time, hoping to hear some sort of positive evidence that the surface dwellers had gone or that her comrades battled on somewhere nearby, but no ringing swords or thunderous spells split the night. She heard nothing as convenient as an enemy conversation to help her decide if her foes had left, or were instead crouched silently outside the darkness, waiting for her to emerge. Halisstra could be quite patient when it suited her, and she was not unused to hardship and danger, but the sheer nervous tension of stretching out to identify and categorize every tiny sound that came to her ears soon left beads of sweat trickling down her face.

If Quenthel and the others were nearby, I would hear it, she decided. The fight must have carried them far ahead by now.

Her heart pounded at the thought of being lost in the endless woods alone, a reviled enemy to any creature who walked the surface world.

Better to die trying to rejoin the others, Halisstra decided. At least I know where they’re going, if I can manage to keep my course.

First, she needed to escape from the darkness that sheltered her. She did not choose to dismiss the magical gloom, deciding to leave it to continue until it failed in an hour or two. There was a small chance that her enemies might be waiting quietly outside for the darkness to fail before moving in. Halisstra groped in her belt pouch and withdrew a slender ivory wand. She felt very carefully to determine if it was the wand she needed, and when she was convinced that she had the right one, she tapped it against her chest and whispered a word.

Though there was no way for her to verify it, sitting on the forest floor in the magical darkness, the wand’s magic had made her invisible. She stood as quietly as she could, cringing at every soft rustle or clink of her mail, and began steadily moving away.

Halisstra broke out into the open night much sooner than she expected—it seemed she had been sitting no more than six or seven feet from the edge of the darkness. Confident in her invisibility, she stood up straight and looked around. The forest looked much as it had before, except there was no sign of her companions or the woodsmen and surface elves who had attacked them. The moon was rising, and its brilliant silver light flooded the forest floor. She set off in what she hoped was a westerly direction, moving as quickly and quietly as she could.

She soon came upon the scene of a furious battle, if she read the signs right. Several large, blackened circles in the forest still smoldered. In other places the bodies of perhaps half a dozen surface elves and green-garbed human warriors lay where they’d fallen, most bearing the marks of sword, mace, and talon. Of the drow, there was no sign.

Halisstra tried to remember what she’d seen of the pale elves and their human allies, deciding that there might have been as many as fifteen to twenty of the surface folk.

“Where are your comrades, I wonder?” she asked the fallen warriors before moving on.

Halisstra only managed another half mile through the moonlit forest before she stumbled into the ambush. One moment she was stealing along, quick and confident, eager to catch up to the rest of the company and the familiar perils of their association, the next she was surprised by the appearance of a surface elf wizard who simply stepped out of a tree and hurled a spell at her, barking words of arcane might as he gestured with his hands.

“Quick!” he shouted. “We have her!”

Halisstra’s invisibility failed at once, undone by the surface wizard, and from the foliage and tree trunks all around her a dozen of the pale elves and the green-clad humans abruptly appeared, weapons at the ready. They leaped at her, murder in their eyes, filling the forest with their war cries and shouts of exultation.

Recognizing the hopelessness of her plight, Halisstra snarled in pure drow rage and charged to meet the surface warriors, determined not to sell her life cheaply.

The first foe in her path was a hulking human with a bristling black beard, fighting with a pair of short swords. He launched into a spinning attack, stabbing one blade at her eyes to raise her shield and slipping the other low to gut her while her guard was high. Halisstra simply dodged aside and hammered down at his extended left arm with her mace, striking a heavy blow that cracked bone and jarred the blade from his injured hand. The man grunted in pain but kept at her, giving ground grudgingly as he continued to hew and slash with his one remaining sword.

Three more of his comrades moved up to engage Halisstra from all sides, and she was forced on the defensive, batting spear and blade aside with her shield and delivering crushing parries with her magical mace. The forest echoed with the sounds of steel on steel.

“Take her alive if you can,” called the wizard. “Lord Dessaer wants to find out who these newcomers are and where they came from.”

“Easier said than done,” grunted the first swordsman, still holding his ground despite the loss of his off-hand blade. “She does not seem interested in surrendering.”

Halisstra growled in frustration and abruptly turned on the elf to her left, slipping inside the point of his spear and rushing him. The fellow backstepped and brought in his weapon as quickly as he could, but she had him.

With a snarl of cold glee she smashed her mace hard at the bridge of his nose. The weapon struck with a deadly crack of thunder and blew apart the skull of her victim, who fell in a nerveless heap.

She paid the price for her aggressive move a moment later when the elf swordsman behind her jammed the point of his weapon into her left shoulder blade despite her cat-quick effort to twist away from the attack. Steel grated on bone, and Halisstra cried out in pain as the strength fled from her shield arm. A moment later an arrow fired from an archer standing off a bit struck quivering in the back of her right calf, buckling her leg.

“Now we’ve got her, lads!” called the elf swordsman.

He raised his blade for another stroke, but Halisstra allowed herself to crumple completely to the ground and rolled up under his guard, destroying his left hip with another thundering blow of her mace. The elf screamed and reeled away to collapse thrashing in the snow.

Halisstra tried to regain her feet, but the wizard hammered her with a blinding bolt of lightning. The force of the spell literally picked her up and flung her through the air, depositing her in a small, icy creek nearby. Halisstra’s whole body jerked and ached from the wizard’s energy, and she became aware of the distinct, charred scent of her own burned flesh.

She pushed herself up on one arm and responded by hurling a bae’qeshel song at him, a deadly, sharp chord that flayed the bark from the trees and kicked up the dusting of snow into a stinging storm of white. The elf wizard swore and covered himself with his cloak, shielding his eyes and enduring the deadly song.

Halisstra began another song, but the warriors splashed up to her, and the burly human with the beard silenced her with a hard kick to the jaw that knocked her sprawling again. All went dark for an instant, and when she could see again, no less than four deadly blades were poised over her. The heavy swordsman glared down at her over the point of his sword.

“By all means, continue,” he spat. “Our clerics can question your corpse as easily as they can question you.”

Halisstra tried to clear her head of the roaring pain and the ringing in her ears. She looked around and saw nothing but death in the eyes of the surface dwellers.

I can feign surrender, she told herself. Quenthel and the others must know I’m missing, and they will make efforts to find me.

“I yield,” she said in the human’s brutish tongue.

Halisstra allowed her head to fall back against the stream bank and her eyes to close. She felt herself jerked upright, her mail stripped from her, and her hands bound roughly behind her back. The whole time she studiously ignored her captors, keeping her mind sequestered from her situation by focusing on the exhaustive catechisms to Lolth she had been obliged to learn as a novice.

“She must be someone important. Look at this armor. I don’t think I’ve ever seen its equal.”

“We’ve a lyre here, and a couple of wands,” muttered the ranger with the broken hand as he pawed through her belongings. “Be careful, lads, she may be a bard. We ought to gag her to be safe.”

“Bring me that healing potion, quickly. Fandar is dying.”

Halisstra glanced over at the elf swordsman whose hip she had shattered. Several of his companions knelt by him in the snow and mud, trying to comfort him as he writhed weakly in agony. Bright blood flecked the snow nearby. She watched the scene absently, her mind a thousand miles distant.

“Cursed drow witch. Thank the gods they don’t all fight like that.”

The elf wizard appeared in front of her, his handsome face taut and angry.

“Hood her, fellows,” he ordered the others. “No sense letting her know where she is.”

“Where are you taking me?” Halisstra demanded.

“Our lord has some things he would like to know,” the wizard replied. His smile had a distinctly cold and wintry cast to it, and his eyes were as sharp as knives. “In my experience, most drow are so venomous they’d rather choke on their own blood than do anything sensible and useful, and I expect you’ll prove no different. Lord Dessaer will ask you a few questions, you’ll call him something impolite, and we’ll take you out back and gut you like a fish. That’s a damned sight better than our captives fare in your hands, after all.”

The hood came down over Halisstra’s face and was jerked tight around her neck.

TWELVE

Ryld crouched in the shadows of a great tree with a trunk so thick and tall it might have been the forest’s Narbondel. Splitter rode between his shoulders, virtually unused in the company’s most recent battle. He leaned out a little and carefully peered into the dappled moonlight and shadow of the forest floor, searching for a target. With Pharaun he’d waited quietly to guard the party’s backtrail, hoping to turn the tables on the elves and humans who’d harried them so long. After several valiant attempts to bring the drow to close combat, the surface elves and their human allies had learned to respect the dark elf party’s skill and ferocity. They soon fought a slow and stealthy battle of arrows in the dark, punctuated with quick ambuscades and quicker retreats.

An arrow hissed in the dark. Ryld jerked back just in time to glimpse a white-feathered shaft fly past, so close to the tree trunk that its fletching kissed the bark. Had he relied on the tree for cover, the expertly aimed arrow would have skewered him through the eye.

“No point waiting any longer, now,” Pharaun whispered.

The wizard had greeted Quenthel’s order to lay an ambush with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, and he wasn’t at all unhappy to call the effort a failure and rejoin the rest of the band. He muttered the harsh syllables of a spell and gestured in a peculiar fashion, concentrating.

In a moment the wizard straightened and motioned to Ryld, Come. I’ve created an image that will make it seem that we still stand guard here, but you and I are invisible to our antagonists. Follow me quietly, and stay close.

Ryld nodded and moved off stealthily just behind the wizard. He took one last glance at the desolate forest behind them, wondering if the wizard’s trick would work.

Halisstra is back there somewhere, he thought. Most likely dead.

The surface dwellers had shown no interest in taking prisoners, and in the logical part of his mind Ryld simply wrote off her loss as another casualty of battle, just as he might account for the untimely fall of any useful comrade. He’d fought enough battles over the years to understand that warriors die, but despite that, he found Halisstra’s loss strangely unsettling.