Ричард Байерс - Dissolution

She stared fiercely, obviously trying to pick out the real Valas from the false. It didn't help. When she swung, she struck at the image on his left. The illusion vanished on contact, and at the same instant, he sprang. She couldn't come back on guard in time to fend him off. He hooked a leg behind her and threw her to the ground, then kicked her repeatedly in the head until she went limp.

Laughter echoed through the candlelit corridors of Arach-Tinilith. Quenthel frowned. She'd been expecting something to happen, eagerly anticipating it, in fact. What she wasn't expecting was an explosion of mirth, and she couldn't guess what it meant. She strode forward, and her patrol followed behind. They seemed edgy, but not quite as reluctant as they had the night before. The fate of Drisinil, Molvayas, and the rest of the plotters had convinced the survivors that Quenthel still enjoyed the favor of Lolth, at least to the same dubious extent as the rest of the stricken clergy. The laughter rang on and on until at last the searchers found the source. Hunched over, her shoulders shaking, a novice knelt before one of the smaller altars of the goddess. Steady despite the paroxysms of glee, her index finger painted lines of graceful calligraphy on the floor. Quenthel couldn't make out what the girl was using for pigment until she lifted her hand to her face like an artist dipping a brush in a paint pot. She'd gouged her eyes out, another seeming handicap that didn't impair her writing. The mistress stepped close enough to inspect the lines of blood. For all her erudition, she couldn't read the characters, hut she could feel the power in them. They pulled at her and repelled her at the same time, as if they might yank her spirit, or a piece of it, out of her body. She wrenched her eyes away from the symbols and swung her whip. The vipers cracked into the eyeless female's back, their venomous fangs tore into her, and she collapsed, dead or merely insensible. Quenthel didn't particularly care which. «What was she writing, Mistress?» Jyslin asked. «I don't know,» Quenthel admitted, smearing the glyphs with her toe, «something in one of the secret tongues of the Abyss. Scribing it may have been a way of casting a spell, so I made sure she wouldn't finish.» «What was wrong with her?» Minolin asked. Quenthel was still surprised that the Fey-Branche had not, as expected, turned out to be one of the traitors. «I don't know that, either,» said the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith. She actually did have an idea, but wasn't sure of it yet. «Let's move on.» Fifteen minutes later, a runner, dispatched from a squad stationed in the third leg of the spider, found Quenthel to report that one of her comrades had gone mad. Quenthel went to see for herself, half expecting more gouged eyes and bloody writing. But the new dementia took a somewhat different form. The victim had taken shelter, if that was the right word for it, in a small library devoted, for the most part, to musty treatises on warfare in all its aspects. She sat on the floor in the corner defined by two tall sandstone bookshelves, rocking and whimpering to herself. Quenthel stooped, jammed her fist under the girl's chin and forced up her head. «Rilrae Zolond! What ails you? What happened?»

Rilrae's face was blank and seemingly devoid of comprehension. Tears flowed down her checks. She smelled of mucus, and the breath snuffled in her nose. She didn't answer Quenthel's question, just made a feeble, ineffectual effort to turn her face away. The mistress sighed and let her go. She'd seen cases like Rilrae before, generally in some dungeon or torture chamber. The junior priestess had experienced something sufficiently unpleasant to drive her deep inside her own mind. Had Quenthel still possessed her Lolth-granted powers, or been carrying the proper equipment, she might have been able to shake Rilrae out of her delirium, but as matters stood, the useless creature wouldn't be providing any information. Annoyed, the mistress nearly vented her frustration by giving Rilrae a stroke from her whip, but she didn't want to appear rattled or upset in the eyes of her followers. She led the patrol on and eventually found a suicide sprawled in the corridor with froth on her lips and an empty poison bottle still clutched in her hand. One of the second-year students reeled from a doorway a few yards farther down. Glaring and twitching, she unrolled a parchment, possibly one Quenthel herself had dispensed from the temple armory, and began shouting the words. The Baenre recognized the trigger phrase of a spell intended to summon a certain type of plague demon. She snatched out her hand crossbow and pulled the trigger. Others did the same. The flurry of poisoned darts punctured the scroll and the novice as well. She fell onto her back, cracking her head against the calcite floor. The spell, still a syllable or two from activation, dissipated its power in a harmless sizzle of red light.

Quenthel reflected that a pattern was becoming clear. Some power struck a female and more or less drove her mad. She then separated herself from her companions, either making an excuse or just running off, the better to manifest her lunacy in one bizarre behavior or another. It was odd that the girls' companions never even noticed the attack occurring, odd, too, that the demon assaulted only one member of a group and not all—or that it attacked any, given that the previous intruders had only attacked those lesser priestesses who attempted to hinder them. The unseen demon's search pattern was equally peculiar. The location and sequences of its attacks seemed to indicate that the being was bouncing erratically around from one end of the temple to the other. «Mistress,» said Yngoth, «I know what's happening.» «As do I,» Quenthel said. «I've merely been confirming it.» She turned to Minolin. «Fey-Branche.» «Yes?» Minolin asked. «You're in command of these others. You will all evacuate the temple. Get the sane people out, and the mad ones, too, but only if you can do it quickly.» The Fey-Branche princess blinked. «Mistress, we believe in your authority,» she said. «We're not afraid to stand with you.» «I'm touched,» Quenthel sneered, «but this isn't a test. I want you to go.»

«Exalted Mother,» Jyslin said, «what's happening? Which demon invaded the temple tonight? The assassin? Did it poison our sisters to make them go insane?» «No,» the Baenre said, «not in the way you mean.» «Then—» «Go!» Quenthel raged. «Minolin, I told you to take them out of here.» «Yes, Mistress!» The Fey-Branche hastily formed them up and led them away. The corridor seemed very quiet once they'd disappeared. «Mistress,» said Hsiv, «was it wise to send them away?» «You question my judgment?» Quenthel asked. The viper flinched. «No!» «You sought to protect me, so I'll let it go. This time. I dismissed the girls because they can't help me, and I'd like to have some underlings left when this nonsense is over.» «They might have guarded you from another would-be mortal killer.» «We can hope that if Minolin gets everyone out, there won't be any more. Besides, why in the name of the Demonweb did I create you?» Greenish candlelight rippling on black scales, Yngoth reared and twisted around to look Quenthel in the face. «Mistress,» the viper hissed, «we are rebuked. We'll keep watch. What will you do?» «Wait, and prepare myself.» She found a classroom possessed of a reasonably comfortable instructor's chair, the high limestone back carved into the stylized shape of a stubby-legged spider. She sat down, laid the whip at her feet, removed a thin shaft of polished white bone from her pouch, and set it in her lap, holding it at either end.

Closing her eyes, she commenced a breathing exercise. Within a heartbeat or two, she slipped into a meditative trance. She thought she would need the utmost clarity to contend with the night's demon, because Jyslin had guessed wrong. The intruder didn't encapsulate the art of the assassin, nor the spirit of the drow race, for that matter. It embodied the concept of evil. The traitor elves of the World Above professed to hate evil. In reality, Quenthel thought, they feared what they didn't understand. Thanks to the tutelage of Lolth, the drow did, and having understood it, they embraced it.