Annihilation (47 page)

Lolth.

It was the fickle grace of the Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Triel didn’t try to stand at first but lay there and stretched, luxuriating in the wash of power, exulting in the return of Lolth.

Gromph knew of so many ways to kill someone, he’d forgotten more than most drow ever heard of. There were spells that would kill with a touch, kill with a word, kill with a thought, and Gromph searched his mind for precisely the right one as he ran to both avoid the rampaging gigant and keep it contained in the ruined Bazaar.

He wore the skull sapphire that gave him even more choices and afforded him protection from negative energy—like Nimor’s enervating breath. In his memory he stored a few more, and in time Gromph settled on one spell, with some input from Nauzhror and the small circle of Sorcere necromancers. The archmage gathered the Weave energy within him and brought the words and
gestures of the incantation to mind. However, in order to cast the spell—and it was a powerful spell indeed—the archmage would have to stop running.

It wasn’t the first time that the battle with Dyrr came down to timing. Would he have enough time to cast the spell before the gigant rolled over him?

We can help you choose your moment
, Nauzhror said.

I know
, Gromph answered,
but there are always … variables
.

The archmage stopped running, turned, and began his casting.

The gigant looked down at him, bathing Gromph in the light from its mad blue eyes. Gromph was sure he had time. The animated, petrified drow were too far away and moving too slowly to be of any concern, and the gigant had been slapping its tail around the Bazaar at random, as if Dyrr had little control over his new body. Gromph trusted in that.

He was wrong.

One set of trigger words from completing the spell, the enormous black tail of the blackstone gigant rolled over him. Gromph felt the words stop in his throat and felt his joints stiffen then nothing.

Triel stood and looked from scrying device to scrying device, trying to sort out what she was hearing. The magically transmitted voices of a hundred mages, priestesses, and warriors filled the air in an incoherent tangle of confusion and undisguised bliss. The doors of the scrying chamber burst open, and a priestess whom Triel recognized but whose name she couldn’t instantly recall staggered into the room. Tears streamed down her black cheeks, and her mouth worked in silent, incoherent attempts to put into words what she, Triel, Wilara, and every other servant of
the Queen of the Demonweb Pits all across the endless expanse of the multiverse had experienced.

The matron mother’s attention fell on one image: Gromph, petrified.

He had lost. The lich, in its freakish monster form, had turned the Archmage of Menzoberranzan to stone.

Triel felt her jaw tighten then she stood for a moment, letting the anger wash through her.

“Is this a sign?” she asked the Spider Queen.

Lolth didn’t answer, but Triel knew she could if she wanted to.

“It’s a sign,” the matron mother whispered.

Triel pressed her fingertips together, bent her neck in a slight bow, and willed herself to the Bazaar. There was a momentary feeling of upside down weightlessness, a black void, then she was standing in a deep crack in the stone floor of her city’s marketplace. The blackstone gigant reared up high above her, apparently having sensed her passage through the dimensions from House Baenre to the Bazaar. The creature opened its mouth to roar at her, but Triel spoke a few words, and it froze. The great, thrashing tail came to a sudden stop. It was as if time itself had taken a moment’s pause. Smoke still rose around her, and the animated stone drow lumbered on.

“This has gone on long enough, lich,” Triel said, “all of it. I will have no more dead drow, no more of my city ruined, no more challenges to my power or to the power of Lolth.”

Triel doubted the lichdrow could understand her. He seemed to have been subsumed by his adopted form, but she said it to everyone she knew was listening in, from House Baenre, Arach-Tinilith, Sorcere, and perhaps beyond the city into the command tents of her enemies.

She called directly upon Lolth, beseeching the restored goddess
for her most potent spell, asking for nothing less than a miracle.

Lolth didn’t answer in a drow’s voice as she had in the past. There were no words, only a feeling, a swelling of power, a rush of blood in the matron mother’s ears.

Triel sank to her knees amid a scattering of rough gravel and broken glass and pressed her forehead to the cool ground. She didn’t express her desires in words. She didn’t have to. What she was working was a wave of emotion, of feeling, of pure fear.

The terror of Lolth herself blasted out in all directions at once, in an expanding circle of fear with Triel at its center. All across the City of Spiders, drow stopped in their tracks, fell to their knees, or lay prone. Some leaned against walls or collapsed on stairs, but all of them knew the purest fear, the fear of a goddess, the fear of the eternal, the fear of chaos, the fear of darkness, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the certain, the fear of treason, and a thousand other horrors that brought the city to a full stop.

The blackstone gigant trembled and broke apart. Triel, still kneeling below it, didn’t dodge the falling black boulders, the pieces of the titanic construct, which disappeared before they hit the ground. Within seconds all that was left of the rampaging creature was the lichdrow, stunned, reeling, kneeling on the crumbling floor of the Bazaar a few paces in front of the matron mother. The animated statues stopped moving and stood frozen in place.

The wave of fear moved onward, past the walls of the city’s vault and into the crowded approaches to the Underdark beyond. It passed through the duergar lines, overtook the retreating tanarukks, and blindsided the scattered illithid spies. It affected all of them in different ways, but it affected all of them. By the time it was done—and it didn’t take long—there was no question, anywhere, that Lolth was back.

Triel stood and surveyed the damage. She looked down at Dyrr
and knew she could simply step over to him and kill him with a thought—or at least a dagger blade across his undead throat—but she didn’t. Killing the lich was someone else’s job.

The matron mother stepped to the rigid, calcified form of her brother. The expression frozen on his face was one of anger. Triel smiled at that.

“Ah, Gromph,” she said. “You couldn’t do it alone after all, could you? There are limits to your power as there are limits to mine, but together …”

Triel embraced the petrified form of her brother, wrapping her arms around his back as she whispered a prayer to Lolth.

Warmth came first, then softness, then a breath, then movement, and Gromph’s knees collapsed. Triel held him up, and he grasped her around the waist, his head lolling on her shoulder as he drew in a series of ragged, phlegmy breaths. When his legs came back under him, Triel released him and stepped back. Their eyes met, and Gromph opened his mouth to speak.

“No,” Triel said, stopping him. She glanced at the quickly recovering Dyrr, and her brother’s eyes followed hers. “Finish what you started.”

He opened his mouth to speak again, but Triel turned her back on him. She could hear his feet shifting on the loose gravel and glass, and she knew he was facing his enemy.

Triel walked away.

Anger, hatred, and exhaustion passed between the archmage and the lichdrow. They were done with each other. Both only wanted to finish it. They stood a dozen paces apart, eyes locked. Dyrr began to cast a spell, and Gromph surrounded himself in another globe.

Gromph began to cast a spell too, and the lichdrow kept casting. He was doing something complex. He meant to finish it indeed.

Before Gromph could finish his spell—one meant to burn the already wounded lich once more—Dyrr whispered something the archmage couldn’t quite hear, and the spell took effect. The skull sapphire burned red-hot against Gromph’s forehead, and he reached up to throw it off him—but it disintegrated before he could touch it. The dust that fell over the archmage’s face was dull gray and powerless. There would be no more protection from the
skull sapphire and no more stored necromancies. Gromph knew it had taken a wish to destroy it.

His own spell ruined, Gromph brought another to mind and said, “Well, everyone’s using the big spells today, aren’t we?”

The lich ignored the jibe and started casting a spell the same time Gromph did. It was the archmage’s that finished first: another minor divination spent to create a blast of arcane fire. The preternatural flames poured over the lich, who threw his arms over his face to block them but to no avail. Dyrr’s dry flesh crisped and curled, and the lich staggered in pain.

When the fire burned out, the lich lurched forward, red eyes bulging, his ever-present mask burned away, his face twisted in hatred and agony. Gromph could feel that despite the arcane fire Dyrr had finished his own spell.

Cold coursed through Gromph’s body, and he shook—and Gromph was getting painfully tired of shaking, shivering, and quivering—but the lich wasn’t through with him yet. He could feel the warmth, the life itself, being drawn from him. He staggered backward, barely managing to stay on his feet.

“I’ll drain you dry, Gromph,” the lich grumbled, his voice raspy and haggard. “You’ll die with me, with my House, and my cause.”

The lich began to cast again, and Gromph recognized the peculiar cadence and structure that revealed the incantation as a powerful necromancy. Gromph knew many ways to kill, but he also knew that Dyrr probably knew more.

The archmage’s hand tightened on his staff, and his arm jerked. A dull pain and a hard pressure settled in his chest, and when he tried to take a breath, no air came to him. His knees finally buckled, and he fell. Gromph forced air into his lungs, but barely a whisper made it in. Dark shadows began to coalesce at the edges of his vision, and his ears went numb with a roaring
rush of blood as his body fought in vain to keep his brain alive. The ring was of no help. The lich wasn’t wounding him, he was killing him soul-first.

Gromph tried to speak, to utter the words of a spell that might save him, but he couldn’t. Dyrr stepped closer, moving to stand over him. Gromph barely managed to turn his head to look up at the gloating lich. The archmage had other means of escape but couldn’t force himself to activate any of them. He could feel Nauzhror and Prath trying to speak into his head, but their words never fully formed. Gromph feared that his body was already dead.

He tightened his grip on the staff, and his arm jerked again—the staff.

Gromph forced every ounce of will he had left into pulling his other hand beneath him. He felt his fingers wrap around the staff.

“Fight it, Gromph,” the lich growled at him. “Suffer before you die.”

“Arrogant—” Gromph coughed out, surprising himself with his ability to speak, even if it was only that one word.

“What was that?” the lich asked, taunting him. “The last words of Gromph Baenre?”

“Not …” the archmage gasped.