Annihilation (41 page)

There’s nothing you can do to torment me, demon
, the shade said into Aliisza’s mind,
so move on and let me be dead in peace
.

Aliisza hissed and almost reached out to grab the female by her throat then realized that her hands would pass through the priestess. The dead female would have no physical form again until she arrived at her final destination. The Astral Plane was only a way to get from one universe to another. There, the dead drow were incorporeal ghosts.

“I’m not here to torment you, bitch,” Aliisza said, “but I will if you don’t answer a question or two.”

Lolth has turned her back on us
, the priestess replied.
What worse could you do?

“I could leave you in the Astral forever,” Aliisza replied—a
hollow threat, but the ghost didn’t need to know that.

What do you want?
the drow replied.

“Who are you,” she asked, “and how long have you been here, awaiting Lolth’s grace?”

I am Greyanna Mizzrym
, the ghost replied—and Aliisza thought something about the name was oddly familiar.
I have no idea how long I’ve been here, but I can feel myself moving. That only just started. Is Lolth ready to take us in? Has she sent you?

“Can you feel her?” Aliisza asked, ignoring he dark elf’s questions. “Does she call you?”

The priestess looked away, as if listening for something, then she shook her head.

I’m moving toward something
, Greyanna said.
I can feel it, but I do not hear Lolth
.

Aliisza turned to look in the direction the line of drow souls were moving. At the end of the very long line was a whirlpool of red and black—a gateway to the outer planes that was drawing the souls in.

“That’s not the Abyss,” Aliisza said.

It’s home
, whispered the bodiless soul of Greyanna Mizzrym.
I can feel it. It is. It’s the Demonweb Pits
.

Aliisza’s heart raced.

“The Demonweb Pits,” the alu-fiend repeated, “but not the Abyss.”

Aliisza stopped herself and hung in the gray expanse off to one side of the procession of dead drow.

“Well,” Aliisza whispered to an unhearing Lolth, “moving up in the world, aren’t we?”

The alu-fiend closed her eyes and concentrated on Kaanyr Vhok. She let her consciousness travel through the Astral and back to the cold, hard Underdark. There she found her lover’s mind and dropped a message into it.

Something is happening with the Demonweb Pits
, she sent.
It’s a plane unto itself now, and the gates are open. Lolth welcomes home the dead. She lives
.

That was all she could say, and she hoped it would be warning enough. Aliisza could have shifted back to the Underdark in an instant and been by her lover’s side, but she didn’t. She wanted to stay where she was, though she didn’t know why.

Nimor had given up trying to claw Gromph. Instead, he started to work on forcing the archmage to attack him, but the drow wouldn’t oblige. The feeling Nimor had that Gromph somehow knew what he was thinking—maybe before he even thought it—grew stronger and stronger and made Nimor start to second-guess himself. It was no way to fight.

Nimor stepped back and so did Gromph. The assassin could see Dyrr slowly circling them both from a safe—some would say cowardly—distance. The assassin was about to speak when a familiar nettling buzzed in his skull.

Aliisza is in the Demonweb Pits
, the voice of Kaanyr Vhok sounded in his head.
Something is happening, and it will be bad for us all. I’m not waiting to find out how bad
.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Nimor’s blood ran cold.

Gromph twitched, almost gasped, and Nimor couldn’t help but look at him. Their eyes locked, and an instant of understanding passed between them. Nimor stepped back, and Gromph nodded. The archmage still kept the ghostly battle-axe in front of him but didn’t advance. He breathed heavily, sweat running down the sides of his face and matting his snow-white hair to his forehead.

Again, Nimor was about to speak, and again he was interrupted.

“What are you doing?” the lichdrow demanded. “Kill him!”

Nimor let a long, steady breath hiss out through clenched teeth. It was bad enough that a key component of his alliance was abandoning the cause, worse still that Lolth was somehow, for some reason he might never understand, choosing that moment to finally return—or do something that scared Kaanyr Vhok, anyway, and the cambion wasn’t the type to scare easily. All that, an opponent he should have been able to dispatch with nary a thought but who was able to outthink and outfight him at every turn, and the damned lich was barking orders at him.

Dyrr began shouting again, but Nimor didn’t understand what he was saying.

“I can’t—” the Anointed Blade started to say then stopped when he realized that the lich was casting a spell.

Gromph heard him too. With one hand still holding the axe in front of him, the archmage tapped his staff on the pockmarked floor of the smoldering Bazaar and was instantly enveloped in a globe of shimmering energy. No sooner did the globe appear than Dyrr finished his muttering, and the sound of the lich’s voice was replaced by a low, echoing buzz.

Nimor, eyes still locked on Gromph’s, blinked. The archmage glanced over at the lich, and one side of his mouth curled up into the beginning of a smile. Nimor had to look, and he knew that Gromph had no intention of attacking him anyway.

The buzzing sound grew louder, escalating to an almost deafening roar. Nimor saw what looked like a cloud of black smoke winding through the air at him, and it was a few seconds before he realized it wasn’t smoke. The cloud wasn’t a cloud at all, but a swarm of tiny insects—perhaps tens, even hundreds of millions of them.

The swarm descended over Gromph, but they didn’t penetrate
the globe that surrounded the archmage. Nimor had to assume they were being directed by Dyrr, so when the insects turned on him, he took it personally.

Before the first of them could land on him, sting him, bite him, or do whatever they were meant to do to him, Nimor stepped into the Shadow Fringe. The act was second nature to him. He was there in the Bazaar, then he wasn’t. The swarm became a shadow, the Bazaar a dull world, barely corporeal, drenched in blackness.

Nimor looked at his claws. His mind was strangely blank, his mood impossibly serene.

“Is that it?” he said aloud into the unhearing shadows. “Have I lost?”

He closed his eyes and thought of the lich … and stepped back into the solid world right behind him.

Nimor grabbed the spindly undead mage from behind and beat his wings hard to pull him up and away from the floor of the Bazaar. The lich stiffened and drew in a breath—perhaps to cast a spell—but was wise enough to stop when Nimor pressed one razor-sharp talon into the lich’s desiccated throat.

“You might not bleed, lich,” Nimor whispered into the lichdrow’s ear, “but if your head comes away from your neck …”

“What are you doing?” Dyrr asked, his voice a thin, reedy hiss. “You could kill him. Our moment is at hand, and you turn on me?
Me?”

“You?” Nimor sneered. “Yes, you. I should kill you now, but then you’re already dead, aren’t you, lich? All you did was waste my time, and now the Spider Queen is rattling in her cage, and our time together is spent.”

“What?” Dyrr asked, honestly confused. “What are you saying?”

“Not that you deserve to know it before I let Gromph Baenre kill you,” Nimor replied, “but it’s over.”

“No!” the lich shouted.

Nimor grunted when something pushed hard against his chest His hand came away from the lich’s throat, and he was forced backward, driven through the air by some unfathomable force. Despite any attempt to fly, Nimor was repulsed.

The assassin spared a glance down at Gromph, who had put away his stolen duergar battle-axe and was looking up at them, laughing.

Nimor laughed too. Why not?

“We failed, lich,” Nimor called to Dyrr, “but at least for me there will be another chance.”

“We failed?” the lich wailed. “We? No, you wretched son of a wyrm,
you
failed. You’ll go back to the Shadow with your dragon’s tail between your legs, repeating your feeble excuses to yourself over and over again. Blame me if you wish, Nimor, but I’m still here. Live or die, I’ll still be here, in Menzoberranzan, fighting.”

“Perhaps,” Nimor said, the first waves of a profound exhaustion beginning to soften his tired muscles, “but not for long.”

The lich screamed his name, but Nimor didn’t hear the first echo before he drifted into the Shadow Fringe and was gone from Menzoberranzan forever.

Inside the temple walls was a city twenty times the size of Menzoberranzan. Like the walls and the surrounding plazas, the city was a battered, war-ravaged ruin that looked to Pharaun as if it had been abandoned for a thousand years or more.

The architecture throughout mimicked all manner of dark elven dwellings, from the calcified webs of Ched Nasad to the hollowed-out stalagmites of Menzoberranzan. The only thing the structures had in common was that they were all at least partially collapsed and they were devoid of life.

Valas appeared behind the mage as he always did, as if by magic. Pharaun didn’t bother trying to pretend the scout’s sudden appearance hadn’t startled him. The time for keeping up appearances and jockeying for position in the party had come and gone.

Valas nodded once to the Master of Sorcere and said, “There’s more metal the deeper in we go.”

Pharaun found himself shaking his head, unsure at first what the scout was trying to tell him. He looked around more closely and saw that Valas was right. Though they had seen jagged, twisted chunks of rusted iron and scorched steel in the plaza outside, the deeper into the temple they walked, the more they all had to step around larger and larger pieces.

Valas stopped and reached out to touch a gently curving wall of steel three times the scout’s height.

“It looks like it was ripped off of a larger piece,” the scout said. “I’ve never seen this much steel.”

Pharaun nodded, examining the relic from a distance.

“It looks like a piece of a giant’s suit of armor,” the wizard commented, “a giant bigger than any you might find on the World Above, but this is the Abyss, Valas. There could be such a creature here.”

“Or a god,” the scout replied.

“Selvetarm was that big,” Danifae said. Both the males turned to look at her, surprised that she’d stopped to join the conversation. The former battle-captive had been walking in silence with the draegloth never far from her side, apparently unfazed by her surroundings. “So was Vhaeraun.”

Valas nodded and said, “There are other pieces, though, and there are things that don’t look like armor.”

“The mechanical bits,” Pharaun interjected. “I’ve noticed those too.”

“Mechanical bits?” the young priestess asked.

Pharaun continued walking as he said, “The odd moving part. I’ve seen hinges and things that seem to act almost like a joint, like a shoulder or knee joint in a drow’s body but with wires or other contraptions in place of muscles.”

“Now that you mention it,” Valas said, “some of them did look like legs or arms.”

“Who cares?” the draegloth grumbled. “Are you two really wasting your time examining the garbage? Do you have no understanding of what’s happened here?”

“I think we have at least a rudimentary understanding of what’s gone on here, Jeggred, yes,” Pharaun said. “By ‘examining the garbage,’ as you so eloquently put it, we might gain some understanding beyond the point where it can still be described as rudimentary. Alas, that’s not a state of mind with which you tend to be familiar with yourself, but those of us with higher—”

The air was forced out of Pharaun’s lungs in a single painful grunt. The draegloth was on top of him, smashing him into a crumbling pile of bricks that had once been part of a soaring cathedral. The wizard brought to mind a spell that didn’t require speech but stopped himself from casting it when Danifae’s voice echoed across the temple grounds.

“Jeggred,” she commanded, “leave it.”