Ричард Бейкер - Condemnation

Pharaun managed to break himself free of his indecision. He drifted close to Quenthel and seized her by the arm.

“What’s happening here?” the wizard shouted in her ear. “What is he doing?”

The Baenre ground her teeth in frustration.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “This is all wrong. It’s not the same. There are no souls here.”

“What souls?” the wizard asked. “Should we interfere?”

Both Ryld and Valas glanced up at that, their faces stricken.

“He’s a god,” Ryld managed to call out above the deafening clamor. “What do you propose we do?”

“Fine, then. Do we stay and watch, or do we leave? This doesn’t seem to be a safe place to be,” Pharaun replied.

Another shock wave lashed through the company, causing the wizard’s spell shield to flare brightly.

“I’m not sure we can leave, even if we want to,” Ryld said. He jerked his head at Tzirik, who watched the scene with an expression of dark joy behind his mask.

“Don’t we need him?”

“Should we leave, even to save ourselves?” Valas added. “We would seem to be culpable for—this.” The scout shielded his eyes from the sight of Vhaeraun’s efforts. “What happens when he breaches the temple? Mistress, what will happen? Is Lolth in there?”

Quenthel let out a shriek of despair.

Danifae fell at Quenthel’s feet and asked, “Mistress, have you been here? Have you been here before?”

“I don’t know!” the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith shouted.

She jerked her arm away from Pharaun and stormed over to Tzirik, weaving as the ground trembled underfoot. She spun him away from the facade of the temple, tearing him away from the dark adoration of his god, and gripped the breastplate of his armor with her hands.

“Why is he doing this?” she demanded. “What have you done, heretic?”

Tzirik blinked and shook his head, his eyes behind his mask still full of the glory of his epiphany.

“You do not know what you are witnessing, priestess of Lolth?” Tzirik said. He laughed deeply. “You have the rare good fortune to be present at the destruction of your goddess.” He disentangled Quenthel’s hands from his armor and took a step back, his voice rising in exultant glee. “You wish to know what is going on here, Lolthite? I will tell you. The Masked Lord is going to unseat your Spider Queen and overthrow her black tyranny forever! Our people will finally be freed of her venomous influence, and you and the rest of your parasitic kind will be swept away as well!”

Quenthel snarled in feral rage, “You will not live to see it!”

Her whip sprang into her hand, and she drew her arm back to flay the triumph from Tzirik’s face. Before she’d even started her lash, Vhaeraun—a bowshot distant, his back to the company as he chiseled and bludgeoned at the growing crack in the stone visage—waved his left hand without turning around. From beneath Quenthel’s feet a column of seething black magma exploded, hurling her dozens of feet into the air with bone-breaking force. Tzirik, standing almost within arm’s length, was untouched, but the rest of the company scattered to avoid the hot, stone-shattering impacts of great round blobs of the molten rock.

The god didn’t even break his hammerlike rhythm of blow after blow. He struck again and again, even as Quenthel plummeted back down to the flagstones of the plaza, screaming as gobs of the infernal rock clung to her flesh and burned. Valas and Ryld ran to her aid. Danifae cringed, but kept her eyes on the god engaged in his assault.

Pharaun studied the scene, and shook his head.

“This is insane,” he muttered.

He made a curious gesture with his hand and disappeared, teleporting away to some presumably safer locale. Halisstra saw him leave, and stood staring for one long moment before another impact of Vhaeraun’s sword threw her to the ground. She lay there, defeated, while Quenthel thrashed and shrieked in agony nearby.

“Ah,” breathed Vhaeraun. The god backed away from the face, which was split by a glowing green scar from the center of the forehead straight down the bridge of the nose and across the lips to the cleft of the chin. “Mother, have you nothing to say even now? Will you die in silence?”

The face remained impassive, the roiling light in the introspective eyes unchanged, but once again something seemed to tear the very fabric of the cosmos with a horrible ripping sound. A black gash appeared in the air near the face, and from it stepped another divine form.

Where Vhaeraun was lean and impossibly graceful, the newcomer was a thing of nightmare. Half spider and half drow, it clutched an armory of swords and maces in its six thickly muscled arms, and each of its chitinous legs ended in a vicious pincerlike claw. Its face, perversely enough, was that of a handsome drow male.

“Depart, Masked One,” the spider-god commanded in a tortured, burbling voice.

“It is forbidden for you to intrude here.”

“Do not presume to stand between me and my destiny, Selvetarm,” Vhaeraun snarled.

The monstrous spider-god Selvetarm waited no longer, but darted forward with blinding speed, weaving his sextuple blades in an irresistible assault that might have dismembered a dozen giants in the space of two heartbeats.

Vhaeraun whirled aside, dancing through the storm of steel as if he chased Selvetarm’s weapons instead of the other way around, parrying blows he found too inconvenient to elude and riposting with supernal grace. When the gods’ weapons met, thunderclaps shook the ground.

Halisstra pushed herself upright, gaping in amazement. She might have stood transfixed at the scene indefinitely, but Ryld appeared at her elbow.

“We need your healing songs,” he hissed. “Quenthel is badly burned.”

What does it matter? Halisstra wondered.

Still, she climbed to her feet and made her way over to the fallen priestess. Quenthel writhed on the ground, hissing between her teeth as she strove unsuccessfully to master her pain. Ignoring the impossible duel that raged back and forth between the two deities, Halisstra focused on the Baenre’s injuries and managed to begin the discordant threnody of a bae’qeshel song. She laid her hands on Quenthel’s burns and wove as best she could, finding a momentary calm in the exercise of her talents for a tangible and immediate end. Quenthel’s thrashings eased, and in a moment she opened her eyes. Her spells cast, Halisstra merely slumped down again and stared at the battling gods.

“What do we do?” she whispered. “What can we possibly do?”

“Endure,” Ryld replied. He gripped her arm with one iron hand and met her eyes.

“Wait and watch. Something will happen.”

He looked back toward Vhaeraun and Selvetarm, too.

Valas rose from Quenthel’s side and made his way over to Tzirik, crouching to keep his balance.

“Tzirik! What happens to this place, to us, if Vhaeraun defeats Selvetarm and destroys the face? Can you get us out of here?”

“What happens to us does not matter,” answered the priest.

“Maybe not to you, but it matters greatly to me,” Valas muttered. “Did you bring us here only to die, Tzirik?”

“I did not bring you here, mercenary, you brought me,” the priest replied, giving Valas only a fraction of his attention. “None but the Spider Queen’s priestesses could get this close to her temple, not even the Masked Lord. As to what happens when Vhaeraun defeats Selvetarm, well, we shall see.”

He turned his full attention back to the dueling gods.

The Masked Lord and the Champion of Lolth fought on furiously. Ichor oozed from several black wounds in the half-spider’s chitinous body, and dripping black shadow flowed from a handful of sword cuts that had kissed the graceful Vhaeraun. While the gods strove together in the realm of the physical, exchanging blows at a dizzying rate, they also confronted each other magically and psychically at the same time. Spells of terrible power blasted back and forth between them, deadlier even than Selvetarm’s six weaving weapons. Their eyes locked on each other with a tangible contest whose potency tugged at what was left of Halisstra’s reason, even from a hundred yards away. Missed blows and deflected spells caused terrible damage all around the two deities, gouging great craters in the walls of the temple and the flagstones of the plaza, and more than once coming perilously close to annihilating the mortal onlookers through sheer mischance.