Robert Salvatore: Homeland

"Alert!" Dinin cried suddenly, eyes widening in feigned horror as he looked over his brother’s shoulder.

Nalfein reacted immediately, spinning to face the danger at his back, only to put the true danger at his back. For even as Nalfein realized the deception, Dinin’s sword slipped into his spine. Dinin put his head to his brother’s shoulder and pressed his cheek to Nalfein’s, watching the red sparkle of heat leave his brother’s eyes.

"Too quickly for anyone to take note." Dinin teased, echoing his brother’s earlier words.

He dropped the lifeless form to his feet. "Now Dinin is elderboy of House Do’Urden, and Nalfein be damned."

"Drizzt." breathed Matron Malice. "The child’s name is Drizzt!"

Briza tightened her grip on the knife and began the ritual.

"Queen of Spiders, take this babe." she began. She raised the dagger to strike. "Drizzt Do’Urden we give to you in payment for our glorious vic.."

"Wait!" called Maya from the side of the room. Her melding with her brother Nalfein had abruptly ceased. It could only mean one thing. "Nalfein is dead." she announced. "The baby is no longer the third living son."

Vierna glanced curiously at her sister. At the same instant that Maya had sensed Nalfein’s death, Vierna, melded with Dinin, had felt a strong emotive surge. Elation? Vierna brought a slender finger up to her pursed lips, wondering if Dinin had successfully pulled off the assassination. Briza still held the spider-shaped knife over the babe’s chest, wanting to give this one to Lolth.

"We promised the Spider Queen the third living son."

Maya warned. "And that has been given."

"But not in sacrifice." argued Briza.

Vierna shrugged, at a loss. "If Lolth accepted Nalfein, then he has been given. To give another might evoke the Spider Queen’s anger."

"But to not give what we have promised would be worse still!" Briza insisted.

"Then finish the deed," said Maya.

Briza clenched down tight on the dagger and began the ritual again.

"Stay your hand." Matron Malice commanded, propping herself up in the chair. "Lolth is content our victory is won. Welcome, then, your brother, the newest member of House Do’Urden."

"Just a male." Briza commented in obvious disgust, walking away from the idol and the child.

"Next time we shall do better." Matron Malice chuckled, though she wondered if there would be a next time. She approached the end of her fifth century of life, and drow elves, even young ones, were not a particularly fruitful lot. Briza had been born to Malice at the youthful age of one hundred, but in the almost four centuries since, Malice had produced only five other children. Even this baby, Drizzt, had come as a surprise, and Malice hardly expected that she would ever conceive again.

"Enough of such contemplations." Malice whispered to herself exhausted. "There will be ample time…" She sank back into her chair and fell into fitful, though wickedly pleasant, dreams of heightening power.

Zaknafein walked through the central pillar of the DeVir complex, his hood in his hand and his whip and sword comfortably replaced on his belt. Every now and then a ring of battle sounded, only to be quickly ended. House Do’Urden had rolled through to victory, the tenth house had taken the fourth, and now all that remained was to remove evidence and witnesses. One group of lesser female clerics marched through, tending to the wounded Do’Urdens and animating the corpses of those beyond their ability, so that the bodies could walk away from the crime scene. Back at the Do’Urden compound, those corpses not beyond repair would be resurrected and put back to work.

Zak turned away with a visible shudder as the clerics moved from room to room, the marching line of Do’Urden zombies growing ever longer at their backs.

As distasteful as Zaknafein found this troupe, the one that followed was even worse. The Do’Urden clerics led a contingent of soldiers through the structure, using detection spells to determine hiding places of surviving DeVirs. One stopped in the hallway just a few steps from Zak, her eyes turned inward as she felt the emanations of her spell. She held her fingers out in front of her, tracing a slow line, like some macabre divining rod, toward drow flesh.

"In there!" she declared, pointing to a panel at the base of the wall. The soldiers jumped to it like a pack of ravenous, wolves and tore through the secret door. Inside a hidden cubby huddled the children of House DeVir. These were nobles, not commoners, and could not be taken alive.

Zak quickened his pace to get beyond the scene, but he heard vividly the children’s helpless screams as the hungry Do’Urden soldiers finished their job. Zak found himself in a run now. He rushed around a bend in the hallway, nearly bowling over Dinin and Rizzen.

"Nalfein is dead." Rizzen declared impassively. Zak immediately turned a suspicious eye on the younger Do’Urden son.

"I killed the DeVir soldier who committed the deed." Dinin assured him, not even hiding his cocky smile.

Zak had been around for nearly four centuries, and he was certainly not ignorant of the ways of his ambitious race. The brother princes had come in defensively at the back of the lines, with a host of Do’Urden soldiers between them and the enemy. By the time they even encountered a drow that was not of their own house, the majority of the DeVirs’ surviving soldiers had already switched allegiance to House Do’Urden. Zak doubted that either of the Do’Urden brothers had even seen action against a DeVir.

"The description of the carnage in the prayer room has been spread throughout the ranks." Rizzen said to the weapon master. "You performed with your usual excellence as we have come to expect."

Zak shot the patron a glare of contempt and kept on his way, down though the structure’s main doors and out beyond the magical darkness and silence into Menzoberranzan’s dark dawn. Rizzen was Matron Malice’s present partner in a long line of partners, and no more. When Malice was finished with him, she would either relegate him back to the ranks of the common soldiery, stripping him of the name Do’Urden and all the rights that accompanied it, or she would dispose of him. Zak owed him no respect.

Zak moved out beyond the mushroom fence to the highest vantage point he could find, then fell to the ground. He watched, amazed, a few moments later, when the procession of the Do’Urden army, patron and son, soldiers and clerics, and the slow-moving line of two dozen drow zombies, made its way back home. They had lost, and left behind, nearly all of their slave fodder in the attack, but the line leaving the wreckage of House DeVir was longer than the line that had come in earlier that night. The slaves had been replaced twofold by captured DeVir slaves, and fifty or more of the DeVir common troops, showing typical drow loyalty, had willingly joined the attackers. These traitorous drow would be interrogated―magically interrogated―by the Do’Urden clerics to ensure their sincerity.

They would pass the test to a one, Zak knew. Drow elves were creatures of survival, not of principle. The soldiers would be given new identities and would be kept within the privacy of the Do’Urden compound for a few months, until the fall of House DeVir became an old and forgotten tale.

Zak did not follow immediately. Rather, he cut through the rows of mushroom trees and found a secluded dell, where he plopped down on a patch of mossy carpet and raised his gaze to the eternal darkness of the cavern’s ceiling and the eternal darkness of his existence.

It would have been prudent for him to remain silent at that time; he was an invader to the most powerful section of the vast city. He thought of the possible witnesses to his words, the same dark elves who had watched the fall of House DeVir, who had wholeheartedly enjoyed the spectacle. In the face of such behavior and such carnage as this night had seen, Zak could not contain his emotions. His lament came out as a plea to some god beyond his experience.