The mercenary in Inthracis started to overcome his fear. He saw opportunity and took it.
"And for me, Masked Lord?" he asked, with the proper amount of deference.
Vhaeraun vanished from behind the lectern to appear beside him. Inthracis looked straight ahead, not daring to face the god.
Whorls of shadows curled around them both, black snakes that slithered along Inthracis's leathery skin. Vhaeraun held his unwounded hand before Inthracis's face, and Inthracis saw that the arm was as incorporeal as a shadow up to the elbow. With a smile, Vhaeraun reached into
Inthracis's body and clutched one of his three hearts. It stopped cold.
Agony raced through Inthracis; his breath caught, and his muscles spasmed. He arched his back, gritted his teeth, but dared not move farther or protest.
"For you?" Vhaeraun whispered in his ear. "For you this: my gratitude, something that is beyond price."
Vhaeraun clutched Inthracis's second heart, stopping it.
Inthracis's vision went blurry. He struggled to draw breath.
"Oh," Vhaeraun said, "and also the destruction of Kexxon and your ascendance to the position of Oinoloth and Archgeneral."
Hearing those words, Inthracis could not contain a grin.
Despite the agony, he managed to hiss, "You are most gracious, Masked Lord."
Still wearing the same smile, Vhaeraun set Inthracis's hearts again to beating with two flicks of his forefinger and withdrew his arm, which became instantly corporeal. Inthracis inhaled sharply, sagged, and kept his feet only through sheer pride.
After he had recovered himself, Inthracis located Vhaeraun-across the room at the desk again-
and asked, "What size force is appropriate, my lord?"
"An army," replied Vhaeraun with a derisive wave. "Muster on the new Demonweb Pits, on the Ereilir Vor, the Plains of Soulfire. My mother is not yet sensate enough to muster her own forces to stop you."
Inthracis debated with himself before asking, "And what of Selvetarm, Masked Lord?"
Vhaeraun's face twisted in anger, and he said, "He will not trouble you. My mother has removed the Pits to their own location in the multiverse and sealed them against entry by the divine-any divine. Events there are beyond the reach of other gods, now. I cannot enter to destroy her, but neither can Selvetarm enter to protect her. Unless he has guessed at my ploy-"
Vhaeraun's contemptuous tone indicated that he did not think Selvetarm could guess the sum of two and two-"you will face the mortals alone."
Inthracis dared one more question: "What will occur if the Yor'thae reaches the Spider
Queen?"
Vhaeraun's eyes narrowed. "Because they will not reach her," he replied, "the answer is irrelevant."
Inthracis said nothing but took Vhaeraun's reply to mean that even the god did not know what would occur. That did not bode well.
He bowed and said, "It is my pleas-"
Vhaeraun vanished without further words.
The red light of the Blood Rift refilled the room. Inthracis took several deep breaths. Even the corpses in the wall seemed relieved. All that remained of Vhaeraun's presence in the room was a smear of blood on the basalt table and lectern. Inthracis summoned an invisible servant armed with a cloth, caused it to absorb the blood, and teleported the cloth to his laboratory. He was certain he could use divine blood as a component for one spell or another. The exercise helped calm him.
He gathered himself and prepared to send word to his generals to sound a muster. Vhaeraun had said to assemble an army. Inthracis would use his best shock troops, the Black Horn
Regiment.
Despite the underlying fear of what might occur should he fail Vhaeraun, the ultroloth felt a certain exhilaration. If he was successful, and if Vhaeraun kept his word-a large if-Kexxon would be destroyed and Inthracis would unseat him as the Archgeneral of the Blood Rift.
Even as those seductive thoughts coursed through his mind, a more sober voice advised caution. It occurred to him that all of Vhaeraun's scheming might have been in accordance with
Lolth's plan. The Masked God had said that Lolth was testing her priestesses as she called them toward the Pits. Perhaps Inthracis and Vhaeraun would be doing nothing more than creating another challenge for the Yor'thae to overcome? Or perhaps Vhaeraun was mistaken and none of the three priestesses was to be the Yor'thae at all?
Perhaps, Inthracis thought and sighed.
Caught between one god and another, though, he knew he had no choice but to obey. He would do as Vhaeraun had demanded because to do otherwise would result in certain death. Or worse.
Outside, the wind howled its message.
Chapter Two
An unbroken line of drow souls extended before and behind Halisstra as far as she could see,
a ribbon of Lolth's dead stretching across the infinite, featureless gray aether of the Astral Plane.
With Lolth's power apparently returned, the souls were at last free to float toward the Spider
Queen's plane, where they would spend eternity.
One after another the souls streamed along in a procession as straight as that of marching soldiers. The orderliness of the line struck Halisstra as strangely incongruous for souls heading into the arms of a goddess who embodied chaos.
Formerly as drab as the gray aether in which they floated, Lolth's reawakening had sent a surge of power through the line of souls, through the Astral Plane, and perhaps through all of the other planes as well. The Spider Queen's stirring had painted the dead in hues reminiscent or life,
had reawakened the souls even as Lolth had herself reawakened from her Silence. By reinfusing them with color and purpose, Lolth had marked each of the souls as irrevocably and irretrievably hers.
The words bobbed uncomfortably in Halisstra's consciousness: Irrevocably and irretrievably
Lolth's. .
Floating in the same gray aether, as anchorless as the souls drifting past, Halisstra looked at her slim black hands. On them, she saw the blood of the countless screaming victims she had sacrificed in Lolth's name. Did not their blood mark Halisstra as irretrievably Lolth's, the same as the souls around her? Wasn't her soul too colored, stained crimson?
She clenched her fists, and looked past the souls and out into the gray nothingness. The same hands that had murdered in Lolth's name were to wield the Crescent Blade of Eilistraee. With it,
Halisstra was to kill Lolth.
Kill Lolth. The thought excited her, repulsed her.
Halisstra saw her course clear before her, a path as straight as the line of souls, but she still felt lost. She was marked by a goddess, by two goddesses, and at the moment she was not certain whose mark she preferred.
The feeling shamed her.
She felt both Lolth and Eilistraee pulling at her, tugging her in opposite directions, stretching her as thin as parchment. Lolth's reawakening had roused in Halisstra something she had meant to leave for dead in the silver moonlight of the World Above, when she had given herself to the
Dancing Goddess.
But it had not died, not really. Could it ever? Lolth's inexplicable pull on Halisstra remained, a troublesome, seductive memory of power, blood, and authority. Halisstra had only her infant faith in Eilistraee with which to shield herself from a lifetime of indoctrination. She did not know if it would be enough. She did not know if she wanted it to be enough.
She had spent her life in service to the Spider Queen-killing, ruling-and had turned her back on all of it in less than a fortnight. How could that have been a genuine conversion? She had been
Houseless, her city destroyed, everything she knew gone. Turning to Eilistraee had been an impulse, almost flippant, and driven by fear of an uncertain future.