Выбрать главу

Ryld made Tzirik pay by darting forward to strike out with a full double-handed slash across the torso that spun the priest half around, but the cleric’s plate armor held against the blow. In response, Tzirik leaped in close to Ryld, inside the fighter’s reach, and rained down a barrage of wicked blows with the spiked mace, driving the weapons master back.

Ryld gathered himself for another assault, but at that moment Quenthel hurled herself through the blades as well. One sliced her calf deeply and sent her stumbling when she passed through, and she went to one knee with a gasp of pain, blocking Ryld. Tzirik stepped back out of reach of the Baenre’s whip, and quickly called out a spell. Ryld froze in place as the cleric ensnared him, freezing his will and paralyzing his muscles.

Quick as a snake, Tzirik turned on Quenthel and hammered her to the ground even as she tried to stand on her injured leg. Avoiding the hissing serpent heads, Tzirik kicked her whip back outside the curtain of blades, and turned to crush Ryld’s skull while the weapons master was helpless before him. The bronze mace drew back for the lethal blow—and Tzirik was sent reeling away from his intended victim, battered by a powerful blast of sound.

Halisstra, standing just on the other side of the blades, followed with a second bae’qeshel song and scoured the cleric again. She would not fight for Lolth again, but she would fight for her companions, Ryld in particular.

“Do not kill the priest,” she called to her companions. “We need him to bring us home!”

“What do you suggest, then?” Danifae snapped from beside her. “He seems intent on destroying us!”

“Indeed,” said Tzirik.

The Jaelre priest recovered from Halisstra’s spells and lashed out with one of his own, calling down from the black skies above a column of crawling purple fire that blasted Halisstra and Danifae. The cleric wheeled to confront Quenthel, who was just gathering herself to leap at his back. He hefted his mace.

“I take great pleasure in slaying clerics of the Spider Queen,” Tzirik said.

“When you awake in Minauthkeep, I’ll slay you again there.”

He advanced on her, his cruel eyes alight as Quenthel hobbled awkwardly, seeking to dodge the inevitable blow.

Tzirik’s breastplate simply vanished. The cleric halted in consternation, and glanced down. All other pieces of his full plate armor remained in place, but then—slowly—his arming coat vanished as well, revealing the smooth black flesh of his torso and chest.

“What in the Masked Lord’s name?” he muttered, and glanced up just in time to turn away from Danifae, who shot a bolt at his heart that instead caught the cleric’s shield. His mystification turned abruptly and instantly to pure terror.

“No!” he screamed. “N—”

Some unseen force ripped open Tzirik’s bare chest and began to pluck the gory ribs one by one out of his jerking torso. Blood and bits of bone splattered all around, yet the cleric impossibly kept to his feet as he was flensed alive before the astonished Menzoberranyr.

Halisstra, who had seen many terrible things at Lolth’s altars, recoiled in horror. With a cold, distant part of her mind, she noted that the flesh and bone torn out of Tzirik simply faded away, just as his armor had.

It’s not happening here, she realized. Tzirik is being murdered, but back in Minauthkeep.

One final obscene blow seized the contents of Tzirik’s chest cavity and literally strewed them abroad. The Jaelre priest sank to his knees as his eyes rolled up in his head. From some immense distance a shining silver cord appeared, tethered to the priest’s back. It recoiled sharply into his astral body with a psychic force that plucked at Halisstra’s very soul, and Tzirik was gone, as if he had never existed.

“Gods ...” Valas managed to say, then he grunted in shock.

All of them felt it at the same instant—a violent wrenching of their psyches that rent the stone plain and the black temple into a thousand silvery shards. Halisstra opened her mouth, a scream of terror welling up inside her, but before she could draw another breath she was yanked away into oblivion.

Halisstra awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright from the musty old divan in Tzirik’s hidden chamber. It took her a moment to understand that she was alive. The experience of having her soul wrenched from the Demonweb Pits back to Faerûn in an instant by Tzirik’s destruction was not something she cared to repeat. It took her a moment longer than that to understand that she was no longer in any physical pain.

Where she did ache, though, was in her heart. A great, hot hurt throbbed in the center of her being, a grief so keen and vast that Halisstra could not imagine anything that could swallow it.

She pressed her hand to her chest as if to smooth out the ache beneath her breastbone, and slowly looked around. The others in the company were rising, too, all variously dazed or groggy from their experience. To her right, Tzirik lay still on his couch, his body torn apart. Blood splattered the walls of the chamber, and awful pieces of the Jaelre cleric lay discarded on the floor. Beside the priest’s ruined corpse squatted Jeggred, licking blood from his white fur. A pair of Jaelre warriors lay close at hand, their throats torn out.

“Mistress?” the draegloth asked Quenthel. “What happened? What did you learn?”

Quenthel’s eyes fell on Tzirik’s corpse and the dead Jaelre guards nearby, and she scowled.

“What in the goddess’s name were you thinking?” she asked the draegloth. “Why did you slay him?”

“The guards? They seemed likely to object to my work on the heretic,” answered Jeggred.

“No, not them,” the priestess said, “Tzirik!”

Jeggred’s eyes narrowed, and a low growl began in his throat. The half-demon straightened and paced around the couches toward Pharaun, clenching his claws.

“Wizard, if you caused me to fail in my duty to—”

“Pharaun . . .” Quenthel said, frowning as she struggled to collect her thoughts. It didn’t take her long. Recollection dawned in her eyes, and she wheeled to glare at the Master of Sorcere. “You abandoned us in the middle of the Demonweb Pits, when we needed you the most. Explain yourself!”

“I deemed it necessary,” Pharaun said. “We were in mortal danger, but we could not flee without Tzirik’s complicity, and it seemed clear to me that Tzirik had no intention of going anywhere. The best method for escape I could contrive was to direct a sending to Jeggred, and instruct him to slay Tzirik’s material body. As the priest is the one who cast the spell of astral travel, his death ended it for all of us—rather more abruptly than I would have liked, but I could think of no other options. I told Jeggred you ordered it, since I was not certain he would kill the cleric simply because I asked him to.”

“Your cowardice ripped us away from the one place we had a hope of winning our answers,” Quenthel growled.

“No,” said Halisstra. “Pharaun’s prudence engineered our escape from an impossible situation, in the one manner that had any hope of working.”

“What is the point of escaping, when we failed to complete our quest?” the Baenre demanded.

“Answers? There were no answers to be had, Quenthel,” Halisstra said. “We could have abased ourselves before her until the end of time, and the Spider Queen could not have cared less. The quest was pointless—and it was a quest you were never certain of anyway. Or were there storehouses to raid in the Abyss?”

“I let your blasphemy and pridefulness pass in the Demonweb Pits, girl, but I will not do so again,” Quenthel said. “If you speak to me again in such a manner, I will have your tongue torn out at the roots. You will be punished for your lack of faith, Halisstra Melarn. The Spider Queen will visit unimaginable torments upon you for your lack of respect.”