“Magic, yes,” Valindra cooed, her hand waving over the arm of the throne. Then, suddenly, the lich slapped her hand down and grabbed the throne.
Her eyes went wide and she issued a hiss of protest. It was clear that she was struggling mightily to hold onto the throne, as if it was trying to throw her aside. Stubbornly, the lich growled and fought back, then she turned and sat down on the throne, grasping the arms with both hands.
She growled and snarled, thrashing about, hissing, and sputtering a stream of curses. Her back arched as if some unseen force lifted her free, and she growled again and uttered a curse at some dwarf king and forced herself back down. To the onlookers, the three before the throne and many others about the room, she seemed like a halfling trying to hold back the charge of an umber hulk.
The struggle intensified. Flashes of lightning, blue-white and black, shot from the chair, and Dor’crae and the Ashmadai commanders fell back.
The throne of Gauntlgrym was clearly and violently rejecting Valindra, but the lich would not accept that.
But at last, with a rumble that shook the chamber, and indeed reverberated deep into the complex of Gauntlgrym, the throne expelled her, hurling Valindra through the air. She magically caught herself in mid-descent, and came down gently to her normal stance, floating just a few inches above the floor.
“Valindra?” Dor’crae asked, but the lich didn’t hear him.
She swept back in at the throne, hands extended like killing claws. With a wicked hiss, she shot fingers of lightning from her hands. When the bolts merely disappeared into the magical throne, the outraged Valindra summoned instead a pea of fire, which she threw onto the seat.
“Run!” the Ashmadai commander yelled, and the warriors scrambled all over each other to get away from the throne.
Valindra’s fireball engulfed the throne, the dais, and a good portion of the floor around it. The angry flames reached right up to the lich herself, who seemed not to care. None of the Ashmadai were caught in the blast, though one found his weathercloak aflame and had to roll about frantically on the floor to douse it.
When the flames and smoke cleared, there sat the throne, unbothered, unmarred, impervious.
Valindra shrieked and hissed and charged it, again throwing bolts of lightning into it as she rushed in, then clawed at it and punched it.
“She is powerful, no doubt,” the Ashmadai leader whispered as he walked up beside Dor’crae. “But I fear her presence here.”
“Sylora Salm decided that she should come,” Dor’crae reminded him. “That is not without reason, and it is not your place to question.”
“Of course,” the man said, lowering his gaze.
Dor’crae glared at him a bit longer, making sure he knew his place. They couldn’t afford such intemperate and mutinous whispers, not with powerful enemies just ahead. Truthfully, though, when Dor’crae looked back at the throne and the thrashing, insane Valindra, he found it hard to disagree with the zealot’s words.
They couldn’t begin to control the lich, and he knew without a doubt that if she saw a target for a fireball and the entire squad of Ashmadai happened to be in the blast area, she wouldn’t even care.
The tremor grumbled through the stone floor, giving all five a bit of a shake. It seemed nothing too much to Drizzt, but when he looked at Bruenor, the drow had second thoughts.
“What do you know?” Jarlaxle asked Bruenor before Drizzt could.
“Bah, the beast belched, and nothin’ more,” said Athrogate, but Bruenor’s expression told a different story.
“Weren’t the beast,” he said, shaking his head. “Our enemies have entered behind us. They fight the ancient ones.”
“The ancient ones?” Drizzt and Dahlia asked together, and they looked at each other in surprise.
“The dwarves of Gauntlgrym,” Jarlaxle explained.
“The throne,” Bruenor corrected. “They struck at the throne.
“To what end?
Bruenor shook his head, his expression revealing confidence that the throne was in no real danger. He glanced all around then, however, and added, “The ghosts’re gone.”
The others all looked around as well, and sure enough, they saw no ghosts in the wide corridor, though there had been some there only a few moments earlier.
“Gone back to fight for the throne o’ Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor explained.
“And what now for us?” Drizzt asked.
Jarlaxle seemed as if he was about to answer, but like all the others, he deferred to Bruenor.
“We go on,” Bruenor said, and marched ahead, Athrogate hustling to keep beside him.
“He seems very sure of himself,” Dahlia remarked to Drizzt and Jarlaxle as the dwarves stomped off. “With every turn and every side passage.”
It was true enough, and while Drizzt held faith in his friend-and really, what choice did they have?-he was more than a bit concerned. Near to the audience chamber, the passages had been clear and undamaged-or no more so than Jarlaxle, Athrogate, and Dahlia had remembered them-but soon after the five companions had descended the first long stairwell, they had found more ruin and rubble. Corridors had twisted and cracked apart, and the second stair Bruenor had led them to had proven impassable.
But the dwarf remained undaunted and took them off on an alternate route.
Drizzt didn’t know what magic might have been in that throne, but he hoped it truly was a memory of Gauntlgrym, not some deception placed in his mind by their enemies-as had been done to Athrogate.
Jarlaxle moved ahead to watch over the dwarves.
“You fought well in that canyon,” Drizzt remarked quietly.
Dahlia arched her eyebrow at him. “I always fight well. It is why I am alive.”
“You fight often, then,” Drizzt said with a slight smirk.
“When I have to.”
“Perhaps you’re not as charming as you believe.”
“I don’t have to be,” Dahlia replied without missing a beat. “I fight well.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“With yourself as the evidence, I am sure,” Dahlia replied.
She pressed on faster, leaving an amused Drizzt in her wake.
“Every tunnel!” the Ashmadai commander cried as the whole of his group shrank back toward the entrance that had brought them into the room. The colorless forms of ghost dwarves flooded into the circular hall from every one of the exits in front of them, forming ranks with all the discipline of a living army.
“Can they touch us? Can they hurt us?” one woman asked, her teeth chattering, for indeed the room became very cold.
“They can tear you apart,” Dor’crae assured them.
“Then we fight!” the commander cried, and all around him gave a rousing battle cheer.
All except for Dor’crae, who was thinking that it might be time for him to take the form of a bat and fly away. And except for Valindra, who began to laugh wildly, loudly, and so hysterically that the cheering died away bit by bit, each Ashmadai voice going silent as a new set of eyes fell upon the lich.
“Fight them?” Valindra asked when at last she commanded the attention of all. She began to cackle again, uncontrollably it seemed. She brought forth her emaciated hand, palm up, closed her eyes, and her laughter became a chant.
The Ashmadai circled behind her, ready to run away, having seen the destructive power of her magic.
But no fireball filled the room. Instead, a scepter appeared in her hand. At a cursory glance, it looked much like those carried by the Ashmadai, and that brought more cheers. But as each of them came to view Valindra’s scepter more closely, those cheers turned to gasps.
The Ashmadai scepters, their staff-spears, were red in color when first presented, but that hue wore away with time and use, and most held weapons of uneven hue, more pink than red. But not the scepter Valindra held. It was ruby, and not just in color. It seemed to have been carved of one giant gemstone, rich red, its color so fluid and deep that several of the nearby Ashmadai held forth their arms, as if they meant to sink their fingers right into it.
Valindra grasped it powerfully and thrust it horizontally above her head, and its ends flared with a powerful red light.