“Would I not be justified?”
“You would not be able to, but that is beside the point. Are you angry with me, or at yourself for your own weakness and infidelity, because you know in your heart that you liked what you imagined?”
“It was an attack,” Catti-brie insisted. “Without consent!”
“So you must tell yourself.”
“That is the only way you could ever have me, Gromph Baenre. Without my willingness, and thus, you will never have my heart or my soul.”
“I have already proven that thinking errant, woman!” the archmage replied. He sat up straight, and as Guenhwyvar beside him growled, he snapped his fingers in the air and the panther exploded into a cloud of gray mist, swirling and dissipating back to her Astral home.
“I have been in your mind,” he went on. “And I see now that you have witnessed our lovemaking as surely as any physical lover you might ever have known.”
“Without consent!”
“Does it matter?”
“You’ll not get back into my thoughts, Archmage. I see you now. I know you now.”
“And I know you, in the most intimate of ways.”
“You know nothing,” Catti-brie retorted. “You are a rapist and nothing more.”
“You hide behind a label and false claim,” he replied through a wide smile. “What you felt, you felt alone-oh, would that it were different!” His laughter mocked her outrage. “So deny me now, and go and hide from me. But can you hide from yourself?”
“You have no power over my free will, and that is the measure of intimacy,” Catti-brie pressed on against his sheer awfulness. “You’ll not get back into my thoughts, nor will you ever get beneath my robes.”
“Truly?” Gromph asked slyly. “Dear human, you will be amazed by the things I can accomplish, particularly when a woman tells me that I cannot.”
“And you will be amazed at what I might do. Do you actually believe that you needed to invite me in so that I would not be destroyed by your glyphs and wards? Then what of Guenhwyvar, who crawled in under the back flap of your tent without a magical whistle of warning? Oh yes, mighty Gromph, I dispelled your defenses long before you knew I was near to your abode.”
Gromph held up his hands and sighed, as if in some sort of perverse salute. “You are impressive, I must say, and in so many ways,” he admitted. “I find it truly lamentable that you are wound up in your nonsensical notions of fidelity, and to a pathetic warrior no less! And I am disappointed that one of your accomplishments-a chosen priestess, I am told, and a wizard of no small measure-clings to some ridiculous peasant superstition of entwining honor and sex.”
“I don’t even bother to pity you,” Catti-brie replied, coolly and confidently. “You are merely revolting.”
Gromph shrugged as if it did not matter, then waved his hand and magically sent his robes up and over his shoulders, dressing fully though he didn’t even sit up, as if it, too, no longer mattered.
“I will let you be gone from this place,” he said, and he sighed once more and looked over his shoulder plaintively at his bed. “Ah, pretty Catti-brie,” he said, and turned back.
But the woman was already long out of there, had simply vanished.
Gromph spent a long while sitting in that place, replaying that unexpected and, he had to admit, troubling encounter. This woman was clever, and very powerful. She had unwound his psionic intrusions, though there was little chance that she had ever trained in, or even experienced, such things as that before. And surely, given the strength and intensity of his suggestions, her mind had ruled above her flesh-no small feat for anyone.
And on a more pragmatic level, she had almost won out fully-Gromph knew that he must not ever allow that to happen again. If he had not, coincidentally and for another purpose, memorized a spell for dispelling magic that night, the sensations upon his delicate flesh would have been delivered not by Catti-brie, but by the claws and teeth of that terrible panther.
She had dispelled his wards. Few matron mothers could do such a thing.
Catti-brie was, he feared, more powerful than she knew.
That was often a dangerous thing.
She rocked back and forth, lost in the roiling current of half-finished thoughts that dived over bottomless waterfalls and hurled her into unrelated internal conversations. This was the essence of Dahlia’s life, with lucid moments being the rarest event of all.
She clutched Kozah’s Needle between her knees, her hands holding the four bars tightly together. The feel of that powerful magical weapon sometimes gave Dahlia a focus to break free of the wildly running rivers of her thoughts. Her most lucid moments in her time in Menzoberranzan had been in battle, when the demons had come. The intensity of those moments, the rush of excitement, the surrender to instinct, all of it, forced clarity and focus.
But not now. Not sitting on her bed in her empty room, in her empty life. In these moments, as her mind wandered in and out, she often took up Kozah’s Needle, hoping against hope that she might find a lifeline to clarity.
She was just rocking now, thoughts careening and meandering, with no rationality or reason or purpose.
The river of her thoughts slowed then, as if a mental dam was being constructed right in front of them. Fluid notions coalesced and circled, suddenly stagnant and rolling back in on themselves. Even in her ongoing bewilderment, Dahlia sensed the change, and from somewhere in the far recesses of her mind, from some memory of a similar mental weight, she understood it to be an attack.
Only then did she realize that there was another person in the room-she could smell the perfume. A priestess, no doubt, and so she knew the dam being constructed in her mind was a magical spell of holding, to freeze her and render her helpless.
She felt Kozah’s Needle. Tangible. Focal.
She heard a whisper, but the words would not yet register fully.
She felt a blade against her right side, just under her armpit. The tip bit into her, the poison burned.
Back rolled Dahlia, her right arm snapping out from under her bent legs, wrist twisting to crack the flail out hard, striking the priestess against the shoulder. The drow woman spun away, her dagger flying from her grasp.
Dahlia leaped up to stand on her bed and put her twin weapons into a gracefully spinning routine, the muscle memory forcing her focus, the imminent danger and incoming battle bringing her fully into the present moment.
She saw the priestess-she did not recognize this one-fall back farther and regain her balance, her other arm, and one of those terrible snake-headed whips, coming up in front of her. And she began to cast another spell.
Dahlia leaped from the bed, flipping a somersault sidelong, and not at the priestess. Not yet. It would bring her too close to those biting serpents, and she wanted nothing to do with them. The ribs on her right side burned and she felt the dullness of the drow sleeping poison.
She slapped her flails together repeatedly, sparks flying with each metallic clang. Both arms rolled out wide, then came crashing back together, inner palm to inner palm, the collision resealing the ends of the flail together, combining the two weapons into one.
Dahlia leaped again, diving off to the side and only narrowly avoiding a magical hammer that appeared in the air and struck at her.
The priestess was casting again, and coming forward, the four snakes of her whip writhing and hissing, eager to bite.
Kozah’s Needle, now in its staff form again, kept the snakes and the priestess at bay, but, to Dahlia’s dismay, this one, like all the drow, was quite skilled at martial combat. She couldn’t get close enough to score a solid hit.
And the spell seemed nearly complete.
Dahlia didn’t want to do it. She knew the charge in her weapon wasn’t strong enough, but she had to interrupt that spell, so she stamped Kozah’s needle on the floor, releasing the lightning energy.
The priestess lifted off the floor and flew backward, her white hair dancing wildly, her spell scrambled and lost. But she wasn’t hurt, not badly at least, and she was right back to her feet, in a defensive crouch, and with another spell on her lips.