Before she began, she risked a glance at Zollgarza. He’d not moved from his own seat, but his book lay discarded before the hearth. He stared into the fire, his face frozen in that same stony mask. She wondered what he could be thinking. For a moment, Icelin felt a swell of pity for him, but she quickly banished the feeling. He didn’t want her pity, and it was dangerous to feel sorry for the drow. She would have to tread carefully around him.
For now, she had information in front of her, the opportunity to learn more than she ever had about the Arcane Script Sphere. Ruen would want her to take advantage of that, to do everything she could to get the sphere. Even though he’d made it clear there was no future for them together afterward.
This was what she wanted.
Wasn’t it?
Icelin closed her eyes briefly as fresh pain and doubt welled up inside her. She took another deep breath and waited for the ache to pass before she began reading.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE HALL OF LOST VOICES
24 UKTAR
Ruen fell on his knees, gasping, and waited for the pain to pass.
It didn’t.
A second wave of dark energy slammed into him from behind. He rolled behind a rock, where a pair of dwarves and Garn had stacked stones on three sides to form a protective trench. Barbs of pain rippled along his skin, the most intense concentration focused on his left hand, where he wore a silver ring on his middle finger. Pain cramped his muscles. He clutched his hand, tried and failed to close it into a fist.
Garn saw his contorted features and knelt beside him. Streams of blood ran down the side of the runepriest’s face, but the runes tattooed into his skin glowed with a faint, white light, shining thorough the blood. He looked like a phantom, an avenging spirit.
“Take the ring off,” Garn told Ruen, but Ruen couldn’t reply, could only writhe on the floor. The dwarf grabbed his hand, trying to wrench the silver band off Ruen’s finger. Ruen stifled a scream. Gods, the pain. “What does it do?” Garn shouted next to his ear.
“Strengthens … bolsters anything that touches it.” Ruen could say no more. Deafening echoes, the sounds of close fighting, rang in the cavern. Goblins, bugbears, and the drow commanding them swarmed the Hall of Lost Voices.
Lying on his side, Ruen had a strange view of the chamber’s dominating feature. Carved dwarf faces-six of them-stared down at him from the far wall. Each carving was at least ten feet tall and five feet wide, the mouths in each face slightly open, as if they were great generals issuing commands to their troops. The Hall of Lost Voices was named for the smiths these likenesses were based on, according to Garn. He’d been able to tell Ruen a bit of the place’s history before the drow attacked.
Another wave of pain shuddered through Ruen. Garn cursed and tore the ring from his finger.
Almost immediately, the pain ebbed, and it no longer hurt to draw breath. Ruen sat up slowly, using the wall of the trench as a prop. Not ten feet away, a dwarf pelted across the chamber, chased by a web of blue-black lightning. Ruen lifted a hand feebly, as if he could will the dwarf to run faster, but he couldn’t.
The spell slammed into the dwarf, driving him to the ground. Ruen heard the warrior’s skull crack when he hit, but he was dead before that. The black lightning crawled sickly along his skin, opening up small cracks in his flesh. The air sizzled and reeked. Blood and poisonous spiders poured forth from the wounds, dozens of the creatures covered in gore.
“Godsdamn killing blasts!” Garn shouted. “Kreldorn, we’ve got another one!”
One of the other dwarves in the trench turned and muttered a short prayer. Ruen recognized it and knew to put his head down as a hail of stones appeared from nowhere, showering the dead dwarf’s mutilated body. The spiders ran from the hail of pellets, but they weren’t fast enough. The rocks crushed them. After a moment, nothing recognizable remained of the soldier’s body. The dwarves had been reduced to mutilating their own dead in order to drive back the spiders.
“Can you stand?” Garn shouted at Ruen. “We’re falling back. We’ve got to draw more of the drow into the chamber.”
Ruen dragged himself to his feet. Garn tossed him the silver ring. “Don’t put it back on yet,” he advised, “unless you want some more of that bowels-emptying pain.”
“What was it?” Ruen helped Garn and Kreldorn lift an unconscious dwarf and carry him quickly across the chamber. A hail of crossbow quarrels followed them as they took cover behind one stone outcrop after another.
“We call it the Lash,” Kreldorn growled. He was a gray-bearded dwarf with scars crisscrossing the left side of his face. “Drow spells turn all your own magic into pain.”
“Yours is worse, if that ring amplifies magic,” Garn said. “Don’t put it back on until the battle is over.”
Ruen could see no such end in sight. Dwarf and goblin corpses tangled their feet as they fell back to a more fortified position beneath the carvings on the wall. Ruen tripped over a bugbear corpse and scraped his knee against the ground. He had to push off the creature’s body to lever himself to his feet.
His hands traced rough, scarred flesh. Ruen glanced down and saw a livid mark carved into the dead creature’s flesh. He thought it might have been a slave mark, indicating which House the bugbear belonged to, but the carving ran in intricate lines and whorls all across the slave’s back. The drow would not be so elaborate in marking their property. He didn’t have time to ponder it further, though. The drow were mustering for another assault. They gave the unconscious dwarf over to the clerics for healing and dived for cover.
Spell glows illuminated the stone faces in eerie white light. Ruen blinked, realizing that at least some of the spells cast in advance of the army were aimed at the carvings. A breath later, he understood why.
Spiders erupted from the mouth holes, the noses, and the eyes of the carved faces. Summoned from some dark, undisturbed hole by drow magic, Ruen thought, but then he remembered the rings, their ability to conjure illusory spiders. These must be similar spells, designed to create the illusion of a spider swarm and an impossible number of targets the dwarves couldn’t hope to eradicate. All of it carefully calculated to destroy the defenders’ morale.
“They’re coming! Beat them back! They’ll eat us alive!”
The scream came from a dwarf feebly crawling among the rocks on the battlefield. An axe slash had ripped open her thigh. She held the torn flesh together with one hand and dragged herself across the floor with the other.
Ruen cursed. In the quickness of their retreat, they hadn’t been able to collect all the wounded. Dozens of dwarf and drow corpses littered the battlefield, and now the spiders swarmed among them, covering their bodies. It didn’t matter whether they were real or not, not to the wounded and dying soldiers who imagined their flesh covered with swarms of hairy bodies.
The cavern they’d been fighting in was a mile long at this point but not so wide, with intermittent stalactites and stalagmites, many of which had been smashed by drow magic or the sheer pressure of so many bodies fighting together in the restricted space. The drow gathered at the opposite end of the chamber, near the widest tunnel, but only fifty or so slaves and their masters were visible. There was no way to tell how much of an army waited behind those front lines. If they tried to go back for the wounded, they’d be fodder for crossbow quarrels.
“No, get them off!” The screams of the wounded filled the chamber, and on their heels came the sound of delighted goblin squeals and the drow’s smoky laughter.