R. Salvatore - Archmage

“Bregan D’aerthe might soon expect a command from the matron mother to clean up the streets,” Gromph told them when they entered his private chambers. “Of bodies, or rampaging demons?” Jarlaxle asked, seeming unamused. “Both, I would expect,” said the archmage.

“Bregan D’aerthe is not a-” Kimmuriel started to protest. “Bregan D’aerthe is whatever the matron mother tells you it is,”

Gromph interrupted. “Have we not already seen as much?” he added, looking to Jarlaxle. “House guards, perhaps?”

Jarlaxle remained unamused.

Gromph got a curious expression on his face then, seeming somewhat surprised. He reached down to his belt, putting a hand on the hilt of the Baenre sword he had just taken from Doum’wielle Armgo.

“It calls to me,” he explained, drawing the fine-edged blade and holding it up in front of his eyes.

“Are you its new wielder, then?” asked Jarlaxle, who of course was no stranger to Khazid’hea.

“Hmm,” Gromph mused. “Perhaps I am.” His expression turned skeptical, and quite amused then. “Or perhaps not, if the sword has any say in the matter.”

“Khazid’hea is not pleased to be held by a wizard,” Jarlaxle surmised. “The blade wants to taste blood.”

“What Khazid’hea wants is irrelevant,” Gromph replied.

The archmage started then, as if hit by some unseen force, wincing like someone who had been flicked by a finger under the nose, or some other stinging but harmless disrespect.

“It would seem that the sword does not agree,” put in Kimmuriel.

Jarlaxle looked at Kimmuriel and noted that he had his eyes closed. He was intercepting the telepathic protests the sword was launching at Gromph, Jarlaxle realized.

“Truly?” Gromph said with a snort, and he was clearly talking to the sword then, as he lifted it higher in front of his sparkling eyes. He studied the pommel, shaped so beautifully into the likeness of a curled and sleeping pegasus. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “That will not do.”

Gromph pressed the pommel against his forehead, closed his eyes and scrunched up his face.

Jarlaxle looked to Kimmuriel, who glanced back and nodded, clearly impressed-impressed by the psionic assault that Gromph was leveling at Khazid’hea.

And Jarlaxle, too, was impressed, as he watched the pommel of Khazid’hea shift and change, going black, then adding red speckles. Jarlaxle barely contained a laugh as he considered it more closely. Gromph had turned the pommel of mighty Khazid’hea into the likeness of a mushroom!

The archmage moved the sword back to arm’s length, gave a nod at his handiwork, and said, “Better.”

“Not very appropriate for a Baenre blade,” Kimmuriel remarked. “But a proper insult to such a crude instrument as a sword.”

“And so I doubt that Khazid’hea will try to impose its will upon you again,” Jarlaxle remarked.

“It is a minor item,” said Gromph. With a look from the sword to the mercenary leader, he casually tossed the sword to Jarlaxle, who caught it easily.

“It is a Baenre blade,” Gromph explained. “And you are a Baenre. And a Baenre warrior, at that. Fitting that you carry the sword, if you are strong enough of will to control it.”

Jarlaxle returned an amused, if somewhat bored stare at the open challenge. He could hear the frustration of Khazid’hea in his thoughts, but only if he concentrated on the very distant murmur, and blocking it out entirely was no more a challenge for him than it had been for Gromph. Even without his magical eye patch, which prevented psionic intrusions and commands, Jarlaxle held no fear whatsoever regarding the sword’s willpower and ego against his own.

He nodded to his brother, offering a look of appreciation-and one that was only half-feigned. Jarlaxle loved his magical toys and knew that he had a powerful one in hand with Khazid’hea.

“Where is the half-drow girl?” Jarlaxle asked, sliding the sword into his belt loop. “The daughter of Tos’un Armgo?”

“Why do you care?”

Jarlaxle shrugged. “Perhaps I do not, not excessively at least. It is my curiosity, nothing more.”

“I honestly do not know,” said Gromph. “Freezing to death on a cold mountainside. . somewhere. The Spine of the World, I expect, and likely somewhere near to the lair of Arauthator. Why do you wish to know? Do you intend to fetch her?”

Again Jarlaxle shrugged. “She might prove useful at some point.”

“If I ever lay eyes on that half iblith , half-Armgo creature again, I will transform her into a jelly and serve her at the next feast I attend,” Gromph said, and there wasn’t the slightest hint in his tone to suggest that he was exaggerating.

“Fortunately, I am in the possession of many things you will never see, then,” Jarlaxle replied with a tip of his great-brimmed hat. He turned to Kimmuriel. “To Luskan,” he instructed. “I have no desire to be discovered by the matron mother here in the city.”

“But the streets need cleaning, brother,” Gromph said.

“That is why the gods gave us magic, brother,” Jarlaxle replied in the same smug tone. “To perform the mundane tasks of life.”

Wisely, Kimmuriel didn’t hesitate, and a moment later, he and Jarlaxle stepped into the Bregan D’aerthe audience hall in Illusk, the undercity of Luskan.

She lifted her wet face, trying to regain her wits and strength after the spinning, flying ride through the archmage’s rough portal. She didn’t note the cold at first, not until she managed to pull open her eyes to realize that she was facedown in deep snow.

Doum’wielle knew the season, knew that the snows had not yet started to fall anywhere but in the high mountains.

She propped herself up on straight arms and slowly swiveled her head about, taking in the grandeur of the scene in front of her. Mountains, huge and tall, with dark rocky spurs prodding forth from the thick blanket of snow, loomed before her-she realized from her posture that her head was higher up the mountain than her feet.

To the left and right, the mountains went on beyond her sight. The Spine of the World, she realized. Though she didn’t recognize any specific peaks from this different perspective, she knew of no other mountain ranges in Faerûn of this magnitude and majesty.

She lay in the snow, the cold beginning to creep in.

The weight of her troubles only then began to creep in with it.

Doum’wielle looked around. She slapped at the snow desperately, shoving it aside, throwing it far from her. She jabbed her hands down through it, grabbing, grasping, looking for something to catch onto, and only after she began to tire did she take a heartbeat and remember that for which she was searching.

Her movements slowed then, and she was relieved to know that she still had all of her fingers, for if she had plunged her hand through the snow to strike against the impossibly sharp blade of Khazid’hea, then surely she would have left some fingers behind.

She pulled herself up to a kneeling position and took a different tack, calling out telepathically for her missing sword, pleading with Khazid’hea to guide her search.

She heard nothing.

Panic swept over her. She cried out audibly now, screaming “Cutter!” repeatedly. She forced herself to her feet and staggered about.

“Cutter!”

Her cries echoed back to her from the mountainsides, and those echoes brought her desperate, pathetic tone to her ears and mocked her. The vastness of the Spine of the World laughed at Little Doe.

The sun shined brilliantly upon her, bright in the snow, but the air was cold up here in the vast white sheets.

Doum’wielle had not often been in the mountains. Where could she go? How could she protect herself from the cold and the wet?