And he found, too, his targets, and so he beckoned them, then compelled them.
Many, many heartbeats later, Gromph opened his amber eyes to find that he was back in the summoning room of Sorcere. No longer was it a quiet place of meditation, however. The very stones of the walls shook with the sound of the thrumming wings of several large, hovering demons. They looked like gigantic flies, fully eight feet from the tip of their horn-like proboscis to the stinger that protruded from the back of their abdomens. Their faces were humanlike, save the nose, a curious facet of this particular manifestation of chaos that had led many demonologists to believe that these demons, chasme by name, were created by some vile bonding of demon spirit and wayward soul.
However they came to be, and whatever they were, summing a chasme was no small feat, and summoning a handful, as Gromph had just done, might, as far as the archmage knew, prove unprecedented.
He could hear their telepathic calls in his head, begging for instructions, and he knew that he controlled them.
He could feel it. They would obey his every command.
“Kill that one,” he instructed the others, pointing to what appeared to be the most aggressive of the group, and without hesitation, the other four fell over the targeted creature, bearing it to the floor with a tumbling crash.
They tore it apart, appendage by appendage, leaving a smoking, melting husk on the floor.
Gromph felt almost godlike, and he couldn’t suppress his grin as he considered the melding of psionics and arcane powers.
He understood the mind flayers much better at that moment, and understood Kimmuriel as well, and wondered how his brother Jarlaxle could possibly control the psionicist of House Oblodra.
This was true power, undeniable and unstoppable.
“Go and watch over the city,” Gromph instructed his chasme patrol. “Partake of no murder and no battle. You are spies, nothing more. Engage no one, not even those of your own wretched Abyss, without my permission.”
The four began to bob and weave all around each other, and Gromph could feel their mounting excitement and agitation. He sensed that they weren’t very happy about his commands, but he felt keenly that neither would they dare to defy him.
“Report to me whenever the height of Narbondel’s illumination gains or diminishes a full notch,” he instructed. “Every hour.”
The archmage began casting once more, and launched a spell into the midst of the magical circle that held the hovering, buzzing chasme, opening a gate that would take them out of tower’s low room and into the open air of the city.
Then Gromph sat back and took a deep breath, overwrought from his exertion, and from the realization of the sheer power he had realized in bringing in the group. He spent a long while quieting his thoughts, and compartmentalizing them, for he wanted no probing telepaths, not Methil, surely, and not even Kimmuriel, to recognize the gains in power he was making by mating the magic of the Weave with the strange mind power of psionics.
He gathered up his tomes and scrolls and retired to his room, and once there, put his face right into the black-bound examination of the Abyss. He would fight demon with demon, he decided, but Quenthel’s demons, or those brought in by the beasts she had loosed upon the city, would not be in her control.
While his own, like the chasme, like the balors he expected to soon realize, would adhere to his every command.
Lolth had spurned him-he was a mere male after all. Lolth had used him to bring insight and power to Matron Mother Quenthel.
But soon Gromph would help Yvonnel, his daughter, ascend to the position of matron mother, and he would be the power that put her there, and so controlled her.
A power beyond Quenthel.
A power beyond the demons she had set as a plague on the city.
A power beyond Lolth herself?
“I allowed him to defeat me as you instructed,” Bilwhr’s bellowing voice informed the Spider Queen and the balor Errtu.
Lolth chuckled at that, and Errtu snickered, a most horrid and shiverinducing sound, something akin to steel scraping against teeth.
“ ‘Allowed him’?” Errtu said incredulously. “You ‘allowed’ the Archmage of Menzoberranzan to defeat you?”
“You doubt my power?” Bilwhr retorted with a threatening growl. But then again, everything Bilwhr said was accompanied by a threatening growl.
“You were obliterated,” Errtu said plainly. “Perhaps you meant to follow Lolth’s demands and ‘allow’ it, but by the time you even realized that you were supposed to do so, Gromph Baenre had already blown your corporeal form to pieces.”
“My spies were about,” Lady Lolth said calmly before the volatile Bilwhr could argue.
“You said that if I was banished by the archmage, I need not serve a century,” Bilwhr replied.
“Patience,” said Lolth. “I assured you, of course. Patience.”
Bilwhr grumbled and growled, but followed Lolth’s waving hand and meandered off into the stinky mists.
“Two,” Errtu said. “Marilith and Bilwhr. And three if you count me.”
“Why would I count you?” Lolth asked. “What have you done to earn my favor?”
A look of panic crossed the balor’s face. “The slave, K’yorl. .” the great fiery beast sputtered in protest.
Lolth laughed at him and waved at him to put him at ease. “You will find your way to the Underdark, perhaps even the surface of Toril, in time,” she promised.
“When?”
“Gromph will reach out to the Faerzress with a full demand before the turn to the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant,” she said.
Errtu had to spend a moment considering that. They were now in the sixth month of the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls, 1486 by Dalereckoning.
“By the end of this very year?” the balor asked eagerly.
Lolth smiled and nodded. “The archmage is finding his way there as we speak. The first summoning has been completed. Next will be a major demon, a glabrezu likely, and when he is confident that he can fully command the beast. .”
“One which you have ordered to appear fully under his command, no doubt.”
The Spider Queen didn’t bother to answer. “From there, he will reach higher. A nalfeshnee, a marilith, a. .”
“A balor,” Errtu growled.
“He will call for Errtu,” Lolth explained. “But you will not answer that call.”
Errtu winced.
“He will believe that he has called for Errtu,” Lolth explained. “In his arrogance and cravenness, Archmage Gromph will reach much deeper. Too deep. Patience, my loyal friend. Patience.”
CHAPTER 7
Longsaddle,” Doum’wielle said in answer to Tiago’s question. “You have been here before?”
The elf woman shook her head. “I have heard of the place, whose reputation is larger than such a hamlet would expect. It is the home of a family of wizards, some powerful but all, by the tales, inept.” Tiago looked at her incredulously. “Inept and powerful?”
“A dangerous combination,” Doum’wielle agreed. “The recklessness of the Harpells who rule Longsaddle is the talk far and wide, and has been for centuries.”
“Yet the dwarves march to this place?”
“The Harpells are long allies of Mithral Hall,” she replied. “They were there, beside the dwarves, when your people attacked. The dwarves still sing silly songs about them, about one in particular-I believe his name was Harkle. I heard these songs often as a child, though I could never decipher most of the words in that heavy Dwarvish accent-some references to his head being where his arse used to be, or some other nonsensical thing.”
Tiago looked back to the west, to the mansion on the hill in the distant village, and Doum’wielle followed his lead. Even from here, they could see the line of dwarves running from the gates in front of that house, down the main road of the town, and out to the south, where the rest of the dwarven force had settled in a tight encampment. It looked like a river, Doum’wielle thought, running from the mansion to a living lake of dwarves.