And the dying woman screamed, and gurgled, and choked on the sensation of spiders crawling down her throat.
Sweet music to Kiriy Xorlarrin’s ears.
Entreri turned a doubtful look to Drizzt, who could only shrug, equally at a loss. “Matron Mother Shakti?” he asked doubtfully. “A woman?”
Jarlaxle motioned to the mirror, which now showed the image of Shakti Hunzrin superimposed over his own reflection.
“You are insane.”
“Let your thoughts align the images,” Jarlaxle explained.
Entreri looked to Drizzt.
“Dawdle and we will be caught, and your dear Dahlia will be quite dead, I assure you!” Jarlaxle cried.
Entreri looked more deeply into the looking glass and offered a profound and resigned sigh. Agatha’s Mask turned back to a simple white stage mask for just a moment. Then it began to shift, and so, too, did Entreri’s face and body, the illusion of Shakti Hunzrin coming to life before Drizzt’s astonished eyes.
“Now what?” Entreri asked when the transformation was complete-and even his voice had changed.
Jarlaxle pulled forth a wand, held its tip up to his temple, spoke a command word, and he, too, became a woman, a priestess of Lolth. He looked at Drizzt and reminded him, “You are a mere male and these are fanatical Melarni. Two steps back and head bowed.” Then he led the way to the webbed front of the Melarn compound.
As they neared, Jarlaxle stepped behind Entreri-let all the detection magic focus on the Matron Mother of House Hunzrin, and so fail against the powerful magic of Agatha’s Mask.
“Just glare at them,” he whispered to Entreri as the trio neared the House guards.
Entreri did-and few in the world could freeze a target with a look as fully as Artemis Entreri.
In any form.
“Oh, brilliant!” Yvonnel exclaimed as she and K’yorl watched Jarlaxle’s group outside of House Melarn. “He sorted through the webbing and strikes from behind.”
“It pleases you when one House attacks another?” K’yorl said, the interruption shocking Yvonnel so profoundly she nearly pulled her hands from the stoup. K’yorl rarely spoke, other than to answer direct questions, and never before had she found the courage to interrupt Yvonnel, particularly not when they were in this melded state, their joined consciousness far from the room that held their corporeal forms.
“Jarlaxle is of no House. Nor are his companions.”
“But there is a war. You approve.”
Yvonnel opened her eyes, and looked again back in the Room of Divination, staring across the water that showed Jarlaxle and his friends in their disguises nearing House Melarn.
She stared at K’yorl for a moment, then glanced into the stoup to regard the scene. On a sudden impulse and a sudden fear, she closed her eyes, and then breathed a sigh of relief to find herself looking through the eyes of Artemis Entreri. So she was in two places at once, she thought, but then corrected herself. She could be in either of the places, here in her corporeal form, or out there with the disembodied consciousness, but not in both. She opened her eyes again to regard K’yorl, who grinned.
That grin came as a warning to Yvonnel, for while she could be in one place or the other, she only then realized that her prisoner was truly in both, simultaneously.
I approve that the aggressor House Melarn will not ruin my plans, she telepathically told K’yorl, and Yvonnel went back to the distant place, inside the eyes of Artemis Entreri.
“They are fanatical disciples of the Spider Queen,” she both heard and felt K’yorl reply.
So Yvonnel tried the same. She forced her mouth to speak her response, but kept her eyes and sensibilities out there, approaching House Melarn. “As are we all,” she said and thought, and she heard her voice in the background, and she sensed that her sudden mastery of this dual-experience had caught K’yorl off her guard. “Yet some will win, and some will lose. Too often do we attribute such outcomes to the favor of Lady Lolth.”
“You do not believe in such a thing?”
“I believe that Lady Lolth favors those who are most expedient and clever among us. You should hope for that truth, K’yorl Odran. In it, you might find your salvation.”
Whatever threat she had sensed from K’yorl was gone then, vanished in the possibility of redemption, of salvation.
She put her focus back to the situation at House Melarn, where Jarlaxle, Drizzt, and Entreri were approaching some wary House guards.
Using K’yorl’s powers, her psionic bow, Yvonnel imparted suggestions of uneasiness and fear into those guards, who were clearly already intimidated-and why not, with Matron Mother Shakti fast approaching?
“To Matron Mother Zhindia, at once!” Jarlaxle ordered the intimidated Melarni guards.
“We will announce …” one soldier started to reply, but Jarlaxle was ready for that, and even as the warrior started talking, Jarlaxle started casting through a ring he wore on his left hand. He gestured and the guard melted into a slug on the ground at the base of the webbing.
“To Matron Mother Zhindia!” Jarlaxle told the remaining soldier, and the mercenary squashed the slug with a grinding heel.
Drizzt tried not to wince. He understood the stakes, of course, but the sheer brutality of Menzoberranzan had caught him off guard.
And the deaths were only just beginning.
Drizzt scrambled to keep up, the surviving guard leading them quickly along the swinging web bridges. As they went, Jarlaxle emphatically and repeatedly signed to him, and to Entreri: Do not hesitate!
Near the top of the webbed front, high from the cavern floor, the group went into the complex, which was organized much like a conch shell, with circling corridors winding tighter to the center, surrounded by small chambers all the way.
Many dark elves noted their passage, with several dropping into polite bows at the sight of the Matron Mother of House Hunzrin.
Jarlaxle had guessed right, Drizzt realized. Shakti had been here before, likely recently, and much was afoot now regarding the joint attack on House Do’Urden-how else to explain the deference being shown here, and the hustle to the audience chamber of the Melarn compound?
At last, down one last side passage, they came to a pair of large bronze doors, decorated with jewels and detailed sculptures of Lolth and driders and spiderwebs.
“It is heavily warded,” the leading Melarni guard explained, pausing, but Jarlaxle had an orb in hand-whence it came, Drizzt did not know-and pushed right past the guard. He hurled the orb into the door, where it exploded into a puff of spinning, shining bits of some silvery material, all of which seemed attracted to the door. It settled there and began to pop with tiny explosions.
And Jarlaxle, still appearing as a Hunzrin priestess, just stormed ahead, and pushed right through the doors.
Entreri, as Matron Mother Shakti, went with him. The guard started to protest, but only started. Drizzt took him down by slamming Twinkle’s pommel into the back of the man’s neck, dropping him to the floor.
Beyond the doors, the room’s curving walls formed an oval, longer than it was wide. A second identical set of doors stood closed directly across from them. Torches burned along the curving side walls, the flickering lights dancing across tapestries depicting the many glories of the Spider Queen.
A circular table supported by eight external spider-like legs stood in the middle of the floor, a priestess standing in each gap between the appendages. A large decorated golden bowl was set in the middle of the table, still water reflecting the torchlight.
A scrying bowl, Drizzt realized, and in the instant he considered it, he could guess easily enough that these priestesses were looking at House Do’Urden.
It didn’t, couldn’t, hold his attention for more than that instant, however. As he crossed the threshold into the room, Jarlaxle raised his clenched fist and enacted some magic, and the doors swung shut behind Drizzt with a resounding slam.