Condemnation (7 page)

He was very tall and strongly built for a male—for any dark elf, really—just as tall as she was herself. His close-cropped hair was an exotic affectation in drow society, a strangely ascetic austerity for a race that delighted in things of beauty and personal refinement. Drow were ruthlessly pragmatic in their dealings with one another, but not in their grooming. Most males in Halisstra’s experience preened themselves, affecting silken grace and deadly guile. Pharaun virtually epitomized the type. Ryld, she realized, was something very different.

You fight well, she offered—not an apology, not to a male, but still something. You could have let me die in Ched Nasad, yet you risked yourself to save me. Why?

We had an agreement. You led us to safety, and we helped you escape.

Yes, but I had discharged my end of the bargain by that time. There was no need to honor yours.

There was no need not to. Ryld offered a slight smile, and shifted to a soft whisper. “Besides, it seems that it was in my own interests to save you, as not an hour ago you saved my life in turn. We are indebted to each other.”

Halisstra laughed at that, so quietly that no one more than ten feet away would have noticed.

We are not a race given to honoring our debts, she signed.

That has been made clear to me more than once, the weapons master replied. A brief flicker of pain crossed his face, and Halisstra wondered exactly whom the Master of Melee-Magthere had trusted, and why he’d done something so foolish. Before she could ask, he continued, So tell me of the bae’qeshel. I do not know of them.

“By tradition,” she whispered, “our wizards, swordsmen, and clerics are trained in academies. This is true in most drow cities. The reason you do not know of the bae’qeshel is that the bardic training is not a public matter. We pass our secrets, one mistress to one student at a time.”

I thought the noble Houses had little use for common minstrels.

“The bae’qeshel are not common minstrels, weapons master,” Halisstra said in a low voice. “We are a proud and ancient sect, the bae’qeshel telphraezzar, the Whisperers of the Dark Queen. I am a priestess of Lolth, as are the other females of my House, but I was chosen to spend many long years as a girl studying the bae’qeshel lore. I revere the goddess not only with my service as her priestess, but with the gift of raising the ancient songs of our race, which are pleasing to her ears. House Melarn has always been proud to raise one bae’qeshel into the sisterhood of Lolth’s service in each generation.”

“If your songs are sacred to Lolth, why do they work while other spells fail?” Ryld asked.

“Because the songs possess a power in and of themselves, like a wizard’s spells. We do not channel the divine power of the Queen of Spiders to wield our songs. Regrettably, my skill with such things is nothing compared to the divine might I could wield in Lolth’s name, if she would restore her favor to me.”

“An interesting talent, nonetheless,” he murmured. Ryld glanced back down the passageway toward the chamber where the others waited. “It seems quiet enough. We may have some time to wait yet. If I know Pharaun, he will need hours to regain his strength. Tell me, do you play sava?”

Nimor clung to the shadows of a gigantic stalactite, one of many such stone fangs reaching down from the ceiling of Menzoberranzan’s vast cavern. Old passages and precarious paths crisscrossed the city’s roof, and many of the stalactites were in fact carved into darkly beautiful castles and aeries all the more spectacular for their bold arrogance. Only drow would make homes out of fragile stone spears a thousand feet above the cavern floor. Highborn dark elves frequently possessed innate magic or enchanted trinkets that freed them of concern over heights, and gave little thought to dizzying overlooks that would terrify bats. Their slaves and servants were not so fortunate, and must have found life in a ceiling spire something peculiarly nerve-racking.

The more important ceiling spires were of course magically reinforced against the inevitable fall, and would not fail unless magic itself gave out—but more than one proud old palace stood dusty and abandoned at the top of the city, the House that claimed it too weak in the Art to maintain the spells that made the place tenable. It was in just such an empty place that Nimor crouched, leaning out over a dark abyss to study his target below.

House Faen Tlabbar, Third House of Menzoberranzan, lay below him and a short distance to his left. The castle sprawled over several towering stalagmites and columns, its elegant balustrades and soaring buttresses belying the underlying strength of the rambling towers and mighty bulwarks of dark stone. Faen Tlabbar’s compound was one of the largest and proudest of any in Menzoberranzan that did not sit on the high plateau of Qu’ellarz’orl, the most prestigious of the underground city’s noble districts. Instead House Tlabbar’s palace clambered up along the southern wall of Menzoberranzan’s great cavern, until its highest spires surmounted the plateau in whose shadow it sat, as if the matrons of the Third House wished to be able to peer over the plateau’s edge and gaze enviously upon the manors fortunate enough to be located alongside the exalted House Baenre.

It was an apt analogy for Faen Tlabbar’s political maneuverings. Only two Houses stood ahead of them in Menzoberranzan’s dark hierarchy: Baenre, the First, and Barrison Del’Armgo, the Second. Nimor thought it likely that Matron Mother Tlabbar harbored great aspirations for her House. Del’Armgo, the Second House, was strong but with few allies. Baenre, the strongest, was as weak as it had been in centuries. Houses such as Faen Tlabbar gazed on the Baenre and remembered centuries of absolute arrogance, humiliating condescension, and they wondered whether the time had come for several lesser Houses to band together and end Baenre’s dominance once and for all.

“That would be a merry game to watch,” Nimor mused.

He suspected that in such a scenario Baenre might prove stronger than their resentful rivals guessed, but the bloodletting would be spectacular. Several great Houses would fall, for Baenre would not go alone into the gentle night. Of course, that would go a long way toward advancing the schemes of the Anointed Blade of the Jaezred Chaulssin.

That would be a play for another day, though. Nimor meant to strike a deep and grievous blow at Faen Tlabbar, not incite them against House Baenre. Ghenni Tlabbar, Matron of the Third House, would die beneath his blade. Her blood would purchase treason on a grand scale, and place into the assassin’s hand the stiletto Nimor meant to drive into Menzoberranzan’s heart.

A scrabbling sound and the clink of mail caught Nimor’s notice. He withdrew softly into the shadows and waited patiently as a squad of Tlabbar warriors mounted on great riding lizards climbed along a small, unworked stalactite nearby. The pallid reptiles possessed large, sticky pads on their clawed feet that allowed them to cling to the sheerest of surfaces, and many of Menzoberranzan’s noble Houses used the creatures for patrolling the high places of the city’s vast cavern. Faen Tlabbar was renowned for its squadrons of lizard cavalry. The assassin had studied the Tlabbar patrols from his precarious perch for more than an hour, carefully timing their sweeps.

Right on time, Nimor observed. You’ve allowed yourselves to become predictable, lads.

The riders carried crossbows and lances at the ready, scurrying along in single file as they looped around the smaller stalactite and scanned the cavern ceiling. As Nimor expected, the leader turned to the left and followed the curve of the stone pinnacle down and out of sight.

“You would do well to vary your routine, Captain,” Nimor whispered to the departing squad. “An intrepid fellow such as myself might be deterred by the possibility of your unexpected return.”

With a single silent spring, Nimor launched himself out into the vast darkness, plunging through the eternal night.

By an accident of cavern formation, House Tlabbar held little of the city’s roof and overcaverns. One large column and a pair of small stalactites linked Tlabbar to the ceiling, which meant that Tlabbar had something of a blind spot directly over its palace roof. This was the weakness Nimor intended to exploit. His black cloak streamed behind him, and cold air rushed past his face. Nimor bared his teeth in a savage grin, delighting in the long seconds of his great leap. His body burned with the dark fires of his heritage, and he longed to shed his rakish guise, but this was not the time.

While he fell, he mouthed the words to a spell that made him invisible, and as the spearlike pinnacle of Faen Tlabbar’s central palace rushed up at him, he quickly halted his fall by employing his power of levitation. Less than six heartbeats from the moment he’d leaped from the abandoned stalactite overhead, Nimor alighted on the knifelike ridge of a steep hall, invisible and undetected. He listened for any sign that he had been detected, then he glided toward the hall’s juncture with the castle proper, his steps as silent as death.

The dark elves of Faen Tlabbar were not unaware of their vulnerability to assault from above, and vigilant sentries manned battlements and cupolas atop the palace, watching for intruders. Nimor avoided them carefully. Those who were able to see invisible foes—and there were more than a few—were not in the habit of watching for an invisible foe who also glided from shadow to shadow with the stealth of a master assassin. Nimor was more concerned with the various magical barriers shielding the house. He habitually protected himself with spells designed to counter and confuse various forms of magical detection, but they were not foolproof.

Green and gold radiance glimmered around him as he crept along the steep, tiled roof of a square tower. The Faen Tlabbar, like many other Houses, used magic to illuminate and decorate the baroque spires and balconies of their home. Nimor lowered himself to his belly and edged down even farther, headfirst, listening carefully. Below him he expected to find a guard post, and an entrance leading into the manor itself. Over the decades the Jaezred Chaulssin had used magic to scry what they could of the layout and defenses of many great Houses in more than one drow city, and the slender assassin had carefully studied his brotherhood’s notes and drawings on House Tlabbar. The information was, of course, incomplete and out of date, as parts of the castle were blocked from all scrying, and the Jaezred Chaulssin had not studied the Houses of Menzoberranzan in a very long time. Nimor would have preferred to update his information through the bribery or capture of a Tlabbar guard, but he simply did not have the time to arrange such a thing and keep the rest of his timetable intact.

He heard the soft sounds of movement on the balcony below the eave of the roof he lay on. Two, he guessed, at least one wearing chain mail. He would have to be swift—a single outcry could spell the end of his single-handed assault on the castle. With calculating patience, Nimor edged out even more and found himself looking down on a curving gallery beneath the overhanging eave. To his left, the walkway became a walled stair leading down to the lower battlements, while to his right it simply ended at a black doorway. The door itself stood open. Directly beneath him stood a drow male in armor, gazing out over a lower courtyard.

Nimor studied the fellow for a full thirty heartbeats, planning his strike as he quietly slipped his dagger from its sheath. It was a blade of green-black enchanted steel that glistened wetly in the glimmering faerielight. Then, still invisible, he rolled himself off the roof and dropped down behind the Tlabbar guard.

The assassin’s feet thudded softly to the flagstones. The guard started to turn and opened his mouth to cry out, but with one remorseless movement, Nimor clapped a hand over the fellow’s face and punched his dagger deep into the base of the skull. The blade grated on bone, and the Tlabbar guard simply sagged into Nimor’s arms, dead on his feet.

Nimor let the nerveless body slump to the floor and looked up at the other sentry in the guard post, a fellow in the black robes of a wizard. The Tlabbar mage glanced over at the rustle of sound, just in time to see his watch mate fold up and collapse for no apparent cause—for Nimor was still invisible.

“Zilzmaer?” he said sharply. “What is it?”

Nimor bounded forward and rammed his bloody knife up under the wizard’s chin, nailing his jaws closed and transfixing the Tlabbar’s brain. The mage jerked two or three times, violently, then shuddered and died.

“Shh,” the assassin hissed. “It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”

He laid the wizard alongside his companion, and turned to the dark archway leading into the castle proper.

Knife in hand, he stalked through—only to be halted by an invisible, intangible barrier that blocked the archway as surely as a wall of masonry. Nimor frowned, summoned up his willpower, and tried the archway again, only to find his passage barred in mid-step.

“Damnation,” he muttered. “A forbidding.”

The Tlabbar castle, or its interior anyway, was warded by a great fixed spell that utterly prevented an enemy from setting foot within. Nimor could elude or undo some magical traps, but the forbidding was simply beyond his ability to penetrate.

That explains the open door, he thought. The Tlabbars are confident in their magical defenses. Now what?

Nimor sheathed his knife and studied the archway. A spell of forbidding could be crafted to defend a building or area in one of several ways, but if the Tlabbars wanted to move about their own castle, they would have had to make a forbidding through which one could pass without too much difficulty—perhaps with a token of some kind, or maybe with a password. Nimor quickly searched the bodies of the two Tlabbar guards he’d slain, but found nothing that seemed like it might serve as a token to pass the forbidding.

It might be anything, he thought. A cloak clasp, an enchanted coin in a purse, an earring or a necklace …

He decided he didn’t have time to experiment. With one hand he picked up the dead wizard and tucked the fellow under his arm, then he strode back to the archway and steeled himself to step through. This time, he passed through without resistance, as if the ward was simply gone.