Flecks of jet flew and the golem backed off, pedipalps waving menacingly. Gromph regained his feet and backed off a bit too.
Breathing heavily, Gromph knew that he could not waste time. Soon, the golem would be able to use its acid breath again. Soon, Yasraena and her wizards would find a way into the temple.
The vein of the master ward stuck out of the spider's abdomen like some grotesque entrail. At the end of it, Gromph knew, within the golem's body, was the phylactery. He had to press the attack.
He backed off toward the altar, axe held defensively. The spider followed, clambering over broken and acid-scarred pews.
Gromph feigned a stumble and the spider pounced. The archmage dived aside, regained his feet in an instant, and unleashed a vicious downward slash that severed one of the golem's legs at the shoulder.
The golem struck at Gromph with another leg as it tried to turn to face him-the blow opened the archmage's thigh-but Gromph bounded between two of its remaining legs and chopped furiously. Chunks of the golem flew into the air as it clambered around.
Another blow struck Gromph, cracking ribs and driving the breath from his lungs, but he dared not stop his attack. His ankle caught under the golem and snapped.
Stars exploded in his vision. Agony raced up his leg. Shouting, spraying spit, he continued his onslaught. His axe rose and fell, rose and fell. Pieces of the golem lay scattered about the temple like so much Darklake flotsam.
After an indeterminate time, Gromph became aware that the spider golem was not moving.
Fueled with spell-induced ferocity, he chopped at it several more times before he was sated.
When he came back to himself, the pain nearly caused him to lose consciousness. The bulk of the golem lay before him, cracked and broken. Its bulk pinned his leg. Pieces of it lay all around,
scattered amidst the broken benches.
Another boom sounded against the temple's double doors, fairly shaking the whole of the structure. Yasraena and her wizards had not yet been able to breach Gromph's holding spell.
They would try the windows next.
Gently, hissing at the pain, he pried up the golem's body with the duergar axe and slid his foot free. Bone ground against bone, and the pain caused Gromph to vomit the mushrooms he had eaten in his office earlier. He did not look at the break. His ring was working to heal his wounds,
but too slowly. He reached into his robe-its magic had protected it from the acidic breath of the golem-and extracted two healing potions, both ordinarily serving as material components to his spells. He tore their seal with his teeth and drank the warm fluid down, one after the other.
His ankle reknit and the gash in his thigh and shoulder closed. Even most of the acid burns healed.
He sighed, tested his ankle, found it fine, and climbed atop the golem's body. There, he found his footing and straddled the point at which the rope of the master ward vanished into the golem's body. He raised the axe high and started to chop.
With each swing he grew more and more eager and the light from the phylactery's dweomer grew brighter and brighter in his sight.
After half-a-score swings, the axe blows revealed a hollow within the spider golem's thorax.
Gromph stopped, sweating, and stared.
There, floating in the air, intertwined with the vein of the master ward, was a shimmering,
fist-sized sphere of red.
The sphere turned yellow. Then green. Then violet.
Gromph watched the globe cycle through seven colors before beginning the sequence anew.
In a distant way, he knew the globe for what it was-a prismatic sphere. The colors lay atop each other, alternating spheres within spheres, like the layers of a flakefungus. The lichdrow must have found a way to make a prismatic sphere permanent. He had placed his phylactery within it and placed the whole within a specially constructed golem.
Gromph knew how to bring down a prismatic sphere. Certain spells defeated certain colors.
Touching certain colors without dispelling them resulted in harm or death. He would have to defeat all of the colors to get at the phylactery within.
It would take time. Time he did not have. Besides, he had another problem.
The transformative spell that had turned him into a warrior had temporarily modified his mind, closing the door on that part of him that interacted with and drew on the Weave. He knew that he could cast spells, but the knowledge that allowed him to link with the Weave was gone,
temporarily crowded out by the knowledge imparted to him by the transmutation spell.
He could not end the spell early. It had to run its course. Only after it had would he be able to bring down the sphere.
Above him, a portion of the conjured stone wall before one of the temple's windows shattered,
destroyed by some spell cast by one of Yasraena's wizards. The stone rained down on the temple floor.
Gromph had only the wall of force between him and the forces of House Dyrr.
He was almost out of time.
A scrabbling sound turned him around. What he saw caused a pit to form in his stomach.
Each of the pieces he had chopped from the golem-the legs, the chunk of thorax, the claw, the piece of abdomen-cracked and split. Eight legs of jet sprouted from the cracks, a pair of mandibles. The threescore chunks of golem that Gromph had left scattered around the temple had been reanimated as buds of the main golem. The battle was not over.
For the tenth time in the last hour, Gromph cursed the lichdrow.
Danifae looked through the tiny, unglassed window of her garret in the Braeryn. Narbondel glowed red two-thirds of the way up its shaft. It was late in the day.
Danifae had lost track of time. For her, one day seemed much like another, one hour bled into the next.
She found it easier to measure time not with Narbondel but with corpses. It had been thirty-
seven corpses since Lolth had selected her-Danifae could not so much as think her name-as
Yor'thae.
Though Danifae had never been to Menzoberranzan before Lolth had selected her Yor'thae,
she had come to know it well since. And to hate it.
To her right, far across Menzoberranzan's cavern Danifae eyed the mammoth steps of the great stairway that led up to Tier Breche. She could see it at such a distance only because of its enormous size and the violet faerie fires that illumined its steps. On the high plateau beyond the stairs-invisible to her at that distance-stood Lolth's grandest temple, Arach-Tinilith, the heart of the Spider Queen's faith. Danifae had never set foot within it and never would.
Within Arach-Tinilith presided the bitch, Lolth's Yor'thae.
Anger still boiled in Danifae, hate without end for the Yor'thae. She vented it on the males who came to her.
Danifae had created her own temple to Lolth, her own Arach-Tinilith: a tiny, stinking garret deep in the Braeryn. There, she spun her web and fed on her prey in Lolth's name.
She leaned out of the window-her holy symbol still dangled from her neck, the amber smudged with grease and soot-and looked down to the street below. Addicts haunted the alleys like sunken-eyed, dazed ghosts. Fellow whores loitered in the doorways below her, soliciting anyone and anything that passed them by.
Groups of filthy orcs and bugbears leered at the fallen drow females. Danifae could see that the whores had sold their dignity along with their flesh. Not her. She served the Spider Queen still and ever would, despite the Yor'thae.
A thick sludge of sewage and trash coated the street. "The Stenchstreets," they were called,
and rightly. Danifae could not but think of the whole of the Braeryn as an open sewer that she could not escape.
She would not let Danifae escape.
The odor of freshly emptied chamber pots carried up to the window and made Danifae wrinkle her nose. The expression felt awkward around the stiff scars that marred the left side of her face. Thinking of her disfigurement brought another flash of anger. She willed hate through the air and across the cavern to Tier Breche.