R. Salvatore - Archmage

“Report to me whenever the height of Narbondel’s illumination gains or diminishes a full notch,” he instructed. “Every hour.”

The archmage began casting once more, and launched a spell into the midst of the magical circle that held the hovering, buzzing chasme, opening a gate that would take them out of tower’s low room and into the open air of the city.

Then Gromph sat back and took a deep breath, overwrought from his exertion, and from the realization of the sheer power he had realized in bringing in the group. He spent a long while quieting his thoughts, and compartmentalizing them, for he wanted no probing telepaths, not Methil, surely, and not even Kimmuriel, to recognize the gains in power he was making by mating the magic of the Weave with the strange mind power of psionics.

He gathered up his tomes and scrolls and retired to his room, and once there, put his face right into the black-bound examination of the Abyss. He would fight demon with demon, he decided, but Quenthel’s demons, or those brought in by the beasts she had loosed upon the city, would not be in her control.

While his own, like the chasme, like the balors he expected to soon realize, would adhere to his every command.

Lolth had spurned him-he was a mere male after all. Lolth had used him to bring insight and power to Matron Mother Quenthel.

But soon Gromph would help Yvonnel, his daughter, ascend to the position of matron mother, and he would be the power that put her there, and so controlled her.

A power beyond Quenthel.

A power beyond the demons she had set as a plague on the city.

A power beyond Lolth herself?

“I allowed him to defeat me as you instructed,” Bilwhr’s bellowing voice informed the Spider Queen and the balor Errtu.

Lolth chuckled at that, and Errtu snickered, a most horrid and shiverinducing sound, something akin to steel scraping against teeth.

“ ‘Allowed him’?” Errtu said incredulously. “You ‘allowed’ the Archmage of Menzoberranzan to defeat you?”

“You doubt my power?” Bilwhr retorted with a threatening growl. But then again, everything Bilwhr said was accompanied by a threatening growl.

“You were obliterated,” Errtu said plainly. “Perhaps you meant to follow Lolth’s demands and ‘allow’ it, but by the time you even realized that you were supposed to do so, Gromph Baenre had already blown your corporeal form to pieces.”

“My spies were about,” Lady Lolth said calmly before the volatile Bilwhr could argue.

“You said that if I was banished by the archmage, I need not serve a century,” Bilwhr replied.

“Patience,” said Lolth. “I assured you, of course. Patience.”

Bilwhr grumbled and growled, but followed Lolth’s waving hand and meandered off into the stinky mists.

“Two,” Errtu said. “Marilith and Bilwhr. And three if you count me.”

“Why would I count you?” Lolth asked. “What have you done to earn my favor?”

A look of panic crossed the balor’s face. “The slave, K’yorl. .” the great fiery beast sputtered in protest.

Lolth laughed at him and waved at him to put him at ease. “You will find your way to the Underdark, perhaps even the surface of Toril, in time,” she promised.

“When?”

“Gromph will reach out to the Faerzress with a full demand before the turn to the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant,” she said.

Errtu had to spend a moment considering that. They were now in the sixth month of the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls, 1486 by Dalereckoning.

“By the end of this very year?” the balor asked eagerly.

Lolth smiled and nodded. “The archmage is finding his way there as we speak. The first summoning has been completed. Next will be a major demon, a glabrezu likely, and when he is confident that he can fully command the beast. .”

“One which you have ordered to appear fully under his command, no doubt.”

The Spider Queen didn’t bother to answer. “From there, he will reach higher. A nalfeshnee, a marilith, a. .”

“A balor,” Errtu growled.

“He will call for Errtu,” Lolth explained. “But you will not answer that call.”

Errtu winced.

“He will believe that he has called for Errtu,” Lolth explained. “In his arrogance and cravenness, Archmage Gromph will reach much deeper. Too deep. Patience, my loyal friend. Patience.”

Longsaddle,” Doum’wielle said in answer to Tiago’s question. “You have been here before?”

The elf woman shook her head. “I have heard of the place, whose reputation is larger than such a hamlet would expect. It is the home of a family of wizards, some powerful but all, by the tales, inept.” Tiago looked at her incredulously. “Inept and powerful?”

“A dangerous combination,” Doum’wielle agreed. “The recklessness of the Harpells who rule Longsaddle is the talk far and wide, and has been for centuries.”

“Yet the dwarves march to this place?”

“The Harpells are long allies of Mithral Hall,” she replied. “They were there, beside the dwarves, when your people attacked. The dwarves still sing silly songs about them, about one in particular-I believe his name was Harkle. I heard these songs often as a child, though I could never decipher most of the words in that heavy Dwarvish accent-some references to his head being where his arse used to be, or some other nonsensical thing.”

Tiago looked back to the west, to the mansion on the hill in the distant village, and Doum’wielle followed his lead. Even from here, they could see the line of dwarves running from the gates in front of that house, down the main road of the town, and out to the south, where the rest of the dwarven force had settled in a tight encampment. It looked like a river, Doum’wielle thought, running from the mansion to a living lake of dwarves.

A howl, the call of a wolf, turned the pair’s attention to the side, to the forest.

To arms! Khazid’hea screamed in Doum’wielle’s thoughts, but even with that telepathic prodding, Doum’wielle did not draw her weapon before her companion had his own in hand, Tiago’s magnificent Vidrinath coming up so quickly that the blade seemed to be an extension of the drow’s arm. Even so, Tiago found himself immediately hard-pressed, and Doum’wielle nearly run over, when a group of strange hybrid creatures, half-man, half-wolf-werewolves! — leaped out of the brush upon them.

Doum’wielle reflexively pushed her sword ahead, and the fine blade impaled the nearest charging creature, sliding so easily through the werewolf’s flesh and even into the bone. With almost any other sword, Doum’wielle’s reaction would have spelled her doom. The werewolf kept coming, so hungry for her blood that it simply ignored the wound, and worse, a second creature was even then sweeping in to the side of the first.

But this was Khazid’hea, the blade rightly called “Cutter.” Doum’wielle yelped and started to fall back, and started, too, to try to get her sword in line with the second creature, simply by angling it out to her right.

With this sword, that instinctive action proved to be enough. Cutter slashed right through the side of the impaled werewolf, nearly cutting the beast in half, and as Doum’wielle continued across, the vorpal blade gashed the second creature from hip to mid-thigh. Back came Doum’wielle’s arm desperately, Khazid’hea cutting as if through air, though again drawing a deep line on the second werewolf, and speeding across to lop the head from the first.

Doum’wielle drew the blade in close, turning the tip down. She hopped back and to her left to avoid the stumbling second creature, and brought the sword across, gashing it across the spine as it stumbled to the ground. And there it writhed, broken beyond repair.