Ричард Бейкер - Condemnation

Of course. It never is.

Their eyes met across the small chamber. Halisstra was surprised to find Ryld’s face twisted in a curious expression of bitter resignation and wry amusement at the same time. She studied him carefully, trying to ascertain what motive he might have had for striking up a conversation.

He was very tall and strongly built for a male—for any dark elf, really—just as tall as she was herself. His close-cropped hair was an exotic affectation in drow society, a strangely ascetic austerity for a race that delighted in things of beauty and personal refinement. Drow were ruthlessly pragmatic in their dealings with one another, but not in their grooming. Most males in Halisstra’s experience preened themselves, affecting silken grace and deadly guile. Pharaun virtually epitomized the type. Ryld, she realized, was something very different.

You fight well, she offered—not an apology, not to a male, but still something. You could have let me die in Ched Nasad, yet you risked yourself to save me. Why?

We had an agreement. You led us to safety, and we helped you escape.

Yes, but I had discharged my end of the bargain by that time. There was no need to honor yours.

There was no need not to. Ryld offered a slight smile, and shifted to a soft whisper. “Besides, it seems that it was in my own interests to save you, as not an hour ago you saved my life in turn. We are indebted to each other.”

Halisstra laughed at that, so quietly that no one more than ten feet away would have noticed.

We are not a race given to honoring our debts, she signed.

That has been made clear to me more than once, the weapons master replied. A brief flicker of pain crossed his face, and Halisstra wondered exactly whom the Master of Melee-Magthere had trusted, and why he’d done something so foolish. Before she could ask, he continued, So tell me of the bae’qeshel. I do not know of them.

“By tradition,” she whispered, “our wizards, swordsmen, and clerics are trained in academies. This is true in most drow cities. The reason you do not know of the bae’qeshel is that the bardic training is not a public matter. We pass our secrets, one mistress to one student at a time.”

I thought the noble Houses had little use for common minstrels.

“The bae’qeshel are not common minstrels, weapons master,” Halisstra said in a low voice. “We are a proud and ancient sect, the bae’qeshel telphraezzar, the Whisperers of the Dark Queen. I am a priestess of Lolth, as are the other females of my House, but I was chosen to spend many long years as a girl studying the bae’qeshel lore. I revere the goddess not only with my service as her priestess, but with the gift of raising the ancient songs of our race, which are pleasing to her ears. House Melarn has always been proud to raise one bae’qeshel into the sisterhood of Lolth’s service in each generation.”

“If your songs are sacred to Lolth, why do they work while other spells fail?”

Ryld asked.

“Because the songs possess a power in and of themselves, like a wizard’s spells. We do not channel the divine power of the Queen of Spiders to wield our songs. Regrettably, my skill with such things is nothing compared to the divine might I could wield in Lolth’s name, if she would restore her favor to me.”

“An interesting talent, nonetheless,” he murmured. Ryld glanced back down the passageway toward the chamber where the others waited. “It seems quiet enough. We may have some time to wait yet. If I know Pharaun, he will need hours to regain his strength. Tell me, do you play sava?”

Nimor clung to the shadows of a gigantic stalactite, one of many such stone fangs reaching down from the ceiling of Menzoberranzan’s vast cavern. Old passages and precarious paths crisscrossed the city’s roof, and many of the stalactites were in fact carved into darkly beautiful castles and aeries all the more spectacular for their bold arrogance. Only drow would make homes out of fragile stone spears a thousand feet above the cavern floor. Highborn dark elves frequently possessed innate magic or enchanted trinkets that freed them of concern over heights, and gave little thought to dizzying overlooks that would terrify bats. Their slaves and servants were not so fortunate, and must have found life in a ceiling spire something peculiarly nerve-racking.

The more important ceiling spires were of course magically reinforced against the inevitable fall, and would not fail unless magic itself gave out—but more than one proud old palace stood dusty and abandoned at the top of the city, the House that claimed it too weak in the Art to maintain the spells that made the place tenable. It was in just such an empty place that Nimor crouched, leaning out over a dark abyss to study his target below.

House Faen Tlabbar, Third House of Menzoberranzan, lay below him and a short distance to his left. The castle sprawled over several towering stalagmites and columns, its elegant balustrades and soaring buttresses belying the underlying strength of the rambling towers and mighty bulwarks of dark stone. Faen Tlabbar’s compound was one of the largest and proudest of any in Menzoberranzan that did not sit on the high plateau of Qu’ellarz’orl, the most prestigious of the underground city’s noble districts. Instead House Tlabbar’s palace clambered up along the southern wall of Menzoberranzan’s great cavern, until its highest spires surmounted the plateau in whose shadow it sat, as if the matrons of the Third House wished to be able to peer over the plateau’s edge and gaze enviously upon the manors fortunate enough to be located alongside the exalted House Baenre.

It was an apt analogy for Faen Tlabbar’s political maneuverings. Only two Houses stood ahead of them in Menzoberranzan’s dark hierarchy: Baenre, the First, and Barrison Del’Armgo, the Second. Nimor thought it likely that Matron Mother Tlabbar harbored great aspirations for her House. Del’Armgo, the Second House, was strong but with few allies. Baenre, the strongest, was as weak as it had been in centuries. Houses such as Faen Tlabbar gazed on the Baenre and remembered centuries of absolute arrogance, humiliating condescension, and they wondered whether the time had come for several lesser Houses to band together and end Baenre’s dominance once and for all.

“That would be a merry game to watch,” Nimor mused.

He suspected that in such a scenario Baenre might prove stronger than their resentful rivals guessed, but the bloodletting would be spectacular. Several great Houses would fall, for Baenre would not go alone into the gentle night. Of course, that would go a long way toward advancing the schemes of the Anointed Blade of the Jaezred Chaulssin.

That would be a play for another day, though. Nimor meant to strike a deep and grievous blow at Faen Tlabbar, not incite them against House Baenre. Ghenni Tlabbar, Matron of the Third House, would die beneath his blade. Her blood would purchase treason on a grand scale, and place into the assassin’s hand the stiletto Nimor meant to drive into Menzoberranzan’s heart.

A scrabbling sound and the clink of mail caught Nimor’s notice. He withdrew softly into the shadows and waited patiently as a squad of Tlabbar warriors mounted on great riding lizards climbed along a small, unworked stalactite nearby. The pallid reptiles possessed large, sticky pads on their clawed feet that allowed them to cling to the sheerest of surfaces, and many of Menzoberranzan’s noble Houses used the creatures for patrolling the high places of the city’s vast cavern. Faen Tlabbar was renowned for its squadrons of lizard cavalry. The assassin had studied the Tlabbar patrols from his precarious perch for more than an hour, carefully timing their sweeps.

Right on time, Nimor observed. You’ve allowed yourselves to become predictable, lads.