R. Salvatore - Night of the Hunter

That image jolted her and her smile disappeared, replaced by a scowl that was not aimed at Entreri, but at herself. She felt overbalanced, overwhelmed, as if her true thoughts were a single worm in a pile of slithering nightcrawlers, all crowding in to gain supremacy in her thoughts.

“Dahlia?” Entreri asked in a voice that was too firm for one who had been left hanging for this long-but that was too fine a point for battered Dahlia to register.

“Have you gained their confidence, then?” Entreri asked, and motioned to Dahlia’s legs, neither of which was chained to a metal ball any longer.

But Dahlia had no idea what he might be referring to.

“They are not many now,” Entreri whispered.

“You believe you can escape?” Dahlia said back at him with a little smirk.

“We,” he corrected.

“No, we cannot,” she stated simply.

“It’s worth the chance,” he prodded. “Better they catch us and kill us than …” He paused and looked up, then leaned in tight, like dead weight pressing limply against the bars.

The mithral door leading to the primordial chamber opened and Priestess Berellip entered the Forge, her focus immediately falling on Dahlia, and thus, on him. She moved up to the drow craftsman at the Great Forge of Gauntlgrym and struck up a conversation, but she kept glancing over at Entreri and Dahlia.

“We have to try,” Entreri whispered to the elf woman, though he never changed his position.

But Dahlia shrugged, unable to wrap her thoughts around his suggestion, unable to even comprehend such a thing as leaving.

She understood what he was saying, and one worm among the pile of nightcrawlers in her mind thought his advice to be correct. That one worm became harder and harder to find in the teeming mass, though, as the intrusions of illithid conjured other memories, painted other images, and offered other temptations.

Dahlia laughed and simply turned away.

Sometime later, Berellip Xorlarrin and Yerrininae stood by the sacrificial altar in the primordial chamber-turned-chapel, their backs to the pit, staring at the wall before them, which was now so thick with flowing veils of webbing that the stones could no longer be seen.

To either side of that web-wall stood the large jade spiders, the web anchors, the sentries of the two exits, one beside the corridor to the Forge, the other beside the now-closed tunnel that would serve as Matron Zeerith’s private chambers.

The entry of that second tunnel could not even be seen now, so blocked was it by thick webbing.

Berellip glanced to her left, past Zeerith’s chamber, and to the walkway that had been rebuilt to the anteroom across the primordial pit. Water poured down around it from the continuing magic that secured the primordial, and steam rose up from below, so that she could only catch glimpses of the glistening metal.

The priestess turned a bit more, straining her neck, looking across the way to that anteroom where Methil El-Viddenvelp meditated and where a large water elemental guarded the lever-and likely guarded, too, the illithid, since both creatures were allied with Gromph Baenre.

“Ravel will soon turn for home,” Berellip told the drider, changing the subject in her thoughts because she didn’t want to remind herself too often that the conniving Baenres had such ready access to this most holy place.

“Successful in his hunt?”

Berellip’s pause had the angry drider narrowing his eyes threateningly. “Tiago Baenre’s obsession with the rogue has cost me greatly,” he reminded.

“This is not about you, aberration,” a strange voice, watery but undeniably female, answered, and both Berellip and Yerrininae turned fast at the unexpected sound to see the webs in front of Matron Zeerith’s chambers turning around as if unwinding, like Tiago’s rotating shield, except that their movement drew the circular strands together at the web’s perimeter, opening a portal through which walked a most beautiful and quite naked drow female.

“If you speak again, I will cast you into the primordial’s maw,” the drow woman warned.

And Yerrininae obeyed, because he knew, as did Berellip, that this was no mere drow but a handmaiden of Lolth, a yochlol come unbidden to their House chapel.

Berellip fell to her knees, dropped her face into her palms, and began to pray. The huge drider beside her squatted so that his bulbous spider body went flat to the floor, and he similarly lowered his gaze. He did not pray, though. Driders were not allowed to pray.

“Rise,” the handmaiden commanded Berellip, and she did, and quickly, and awkwardly and she felt quite the fool as she nearly pitched over the edge of the stone altar in front of her.

The handmaiden made no note of it, and wasn’t even looking at her, she realized as she noted the beautiful drow turning all about, nodding slowly and approvingly it seemed.

“Where is the staff?” she asked, turning back around to face the priestess.

Berellip looked at her in puzzlement.

“The darthiir ’s weapon,” the handmaiden clarified impatiently.

“I-in my chambers,” Berellip stammered, truly at a loss, for how could the handmaiden know about that curious quarterstaff?

The handmaiden nodded and slowly turned around in a movement that reminded Berellip that the creature’s true form more resembled a half-melted, legless candle than this exquisite woman standing before her. The handmaiden lifted one arm out toward the antechamber across the chasm, though it was not visible through the fog and raining water.

“It is time,” she said, her voice drifting around, filling the room, and she walked back to the tunnel-like room, through the opening in the web, which immediately began to rotate once more, the other way this time, sealing the entrance behind her.

Fetch , came the notion in Berellip’s head, and in the drider’s as well, and both knew what it meant, strangely, and both were moving, and swiftly, before the mind flayer had even crossed the bridge to the main chapel.

Dahlia thrashed in her sleep, groaning and tearing at the few clothes she still wore. Her shirt hung in tatters, the smooth and white skin of her legs showed in many places through the tears in her pants, and she had lost her boots-or her tormentors had taken them from her.

Entreri watched it all with true sympathy, sharing Dahlia’s pain-or trying to, for he could not imagine what horrors the dark elves might be inflicting upon her to elicit the distant and profound screams he had heard her cry.

He was going to have to leave her, he realized.

No, he was going to have to kill her, for her own sake. He had been given only meager scraps to eat, and his strength would not hold for much longer. He couldn’t wait, and he could not hope to get through to Dahlia. He would escape, that very day when the forges burned low.

He looked at Dahlia, realizing how hard it would be to take her life no matter the justification, no matter that it was for her benefit.

A loud banging sound drew his attention away from the sleeping elf woman, to the small door in the middle of the room, the entryway to the primordial chamber. A group of drow worked there, goblins rushing to and fro to their calls, putting the finishing touches on a new archway they had fashioned to further strengthen the mithral door.

One drow crafter, a priestess, Entreri believed, had sculpted a drider-like relief that was now being applied to the smooth door. The black adamantine stood out in stark contrast to the shining silvery mithral.

The mark of the drow on the home of the dwarves.

A moment later, the female and others rushed aside as the door banged open, and Entreri watched with hatred as the huge spidery legs of the great drider led Yerrininae’s way out of the tunnel. He came through stooped low, so tall was he and so out of place in a tunnel made for dwarves, and when he straightened up in the Forge, it seemed to Entreri like a demon raising up from the Abyss.