The Glass Prison (34 page)

It did, and Qilué stepped forward through some space of magical darkness into a dimly lit, curving passage whose inside wall was seamed with many closed cupboard doors, warning radiances flickering around their locks and catches. What she sought was just ahead: a tall, narrow cupboard or closet door.

There it was. A touch here should open it, and—

The moment she touched the panel, a sickening, tingling feeling told Qilué that something was wrong. The lock spells must have been changed. She stepped hastily back and away from the panel—but the flock of guardian hands bursting out of the outer wall of the passage swerved unerringly toward her, snatching and grabbing with their usual icy accuracy.

With three quick slaps the drow priestess kept them clear of her face and throat, then Qilué simply hunched down, gasping at the pain, and endured their cruel grasps all over the rest of her body. Oh, would she have bruises.

She could try to pry off each of the flying obsidian hands and shatter them before they began their numbing, ultimately paralyzing washes of electricity, but she needed to see Laeral anyway, and a little lockpicking would attract immediate attention from the duty apprentice seeing to the wards.

Struggling against the rigid holds of the gripping hands, Qilué plucked the dangling dagger ornament from her crotch, twisted it to its full length, and shielded it in her palm from any guardian hand strikes or clawings. Khelben’s one failing was to purchase all of his locks, before he laid spells upon them, from the same dwarven crafter whose work,
sold in Skullport to the few who could afford it, was familiar to Qilué. Their maker had shown her the one way to force them open. It required a lockpick of just the right angle … like this one.

A sudden movement, a twist, a click, and the panel sighed open. Qilué got her nails under the edge, hauled it open with a strength that surprised the being who was watching her by then, and sprang onward, straight to the next door.

The duty apprentice was attentive. As Qilué moved, the hands began to crawl up her body with bruising force, seeking joints to jam themselves in, and her throat to strangle. Qilué snarled her defiance at them as she picked the next door, rushed up a short flight of steps, then threw herself out of the way of the huge iron fist that slammed down across the passage.

The iron golem it belonged to emerged into the narrow way with ponderous care, and by then she was through the door beyond and into a room where spheres of flickering radiance drifted toward her from all sides in menacing, purposeful silence.

“Khelben!” she snapped to the empty air, as magic missiles burst from her hands to destroy these guardians, “Laeral! Call off your watchwolves! I’ve no wish to destroy them!”

Numbing lightnings were leaping from the hands on her body, now, playing across her skin until she hissed at the pain and stumbled like a drunken dockhand under their punishment. The next door was there, but could she reach it?

Grimly Qilué staggered on, gesturing rudely at a crystal sphere that descended from the dimness near the ceiling. Its depths held a voice that said, “She called on the lord and lady master. We’d best open the doors.”

It also held the frightened face of a young man sitting at a glowing table, who stared out of the sphere at the struggling intruder and gasped, “But she’s a drow!”

“Get Laeral!” Qilué roared. “Bring her to me, or I’ll start
really
destroying things.” In sudden fury she tore a crawling guardian hand from her breast, waved it at the sphere, and hurled it to the floor, bounding onto it with all her strength and ignoring the lightnings it spat around her boots as it died. “Are you deaf, duty apprentice?”

“You hear? She knows our duties. She must be—”

“Half Waterdeep has heard of the defenses of Blackstaff Tower,” the young man said scornfully. “She’s a dark elf, and
I’m
not letting any dark elf into this room with us.”

“But—”

“But nothing. You’ve always been too soft, Araeralee! You’d let Szass Tam of Thay in here, if he put on the body of a beautiful maid and whimpered at the door. How do we know that isn’t him now? Or Manshoon of the Zhentarim, up to another of his tricks?”

“Well, I’m rousing Lady Laeral to decide for herself.”

“Araeralee, don’t you
dare
! This is my duty watch, and—dark gods take you, wench! You’ve done it! You’ve burning well gone and done it! It’ll be the lash of spells for you, once I tell Khelben. Now I’m going to have to rouse all the apprentices … don’t you know we’re supposed to do that first, before bothering the masters?
Drown
you!”

“Drown you, enthusiastic young idiot,” Qilué snarled at the sphere as she forced the lock of the next door and came out into a large, many-pillared chamber that by rights shouldn’t have fit within the
tower walls, but which was probably on some other plane or fold of spellspace … a chamber rapidly filling with barefoot, sleepy-eyed apprentices.

“A drow!” one of them gasped, and others quickly took up the cry. Young faces frowned in fear and determination, and young hands moved in a weaver’s nightmare of complicated gestures.

*  *  *  *  *

In the chamber whose domed ceiling winked with glimmering stars, Laeral stirred, lifting her head from Khelben’s bare, hairy shoulder. The chiming came again, and the Lord Mage of Waterdeep answered it with a louder, barking snore. Laeral’s lips twisted in wry amusement. Of course.

She sat up, her silvery hair stirring around her bare shoulders, and sighed. The books they’d been studying lay spread open around them on the bed, abandoned for slumber, and Laeral carefully lifted her long legs over them as she rolled off the bed, plucked up a robe, and went to see what was wrong.

She was still padding down the tower stairs with a crystal sphere of stored spells winking ready in her hand when she heard shouts from below, the whoosh of released magic, then a blast that shook the entire tower.

She lurched against the wall, cradling the sphere to keep it from a shattering fall—and was promptly flung across the stair by another, even more powerful blast.

“
True
trouble,” she murmured to the world at large and launched herself down the stairs in a long glide that called on the stairway enchantments to let her fly—and not crash on her face.

The tower shuddered and shook under another blast before she hit the bottom, and a long, racing crack opened in the wall beside her. Laeral lifted her eyebrows at it as she plunged through an archway where dust was drifting down, headlong into the battle raging below.

*  *  *  *  *

“Gods above!” Dauntless murmured, as the door he’d seen the drow slip through banged open in front of his nose, and dust swirled out. There was a dull, rolling boom, and doors and windows creaked and slammed all over the tower. “I must be crazed to leap into this,” he murmured, touched the silver harp badge pinned to the inside throat of his jacket for luck—and trotted into the booming darkness. Not far away, in the shadow of another building, a cloaked and hooded figure the Harper hadn’t noticed nodded to itself and turned away.

The passages inside were an inferno of whirling spell energies, swirling dust, and shouts—but he could follow their fury up and on, stumbling in the gloom, until he came out into a room whose floor was cracked and tilted crazily, where dust-cloaked figures knelt and scrambled and waved their arms in spellcasting.

In their midst, standing alone in a ring of fires in the center of the room, was his beautiful Lady of Mystery, shards of black glass all around her, something that looked like silver smoke boiling away from her sweat-bedewed body, and fury blazing out of her dark face. He almost cowered back at the sight of it—and in his moment of hesitation, a white-faced young man in flapping robes
bounded out from behind a pillar with a long, bared sword in his hand, green-glowing runes shimmering up and down its heavy blade, and charged at the drow.

Spells slammed into her from three sides as he ran, almost tripping over the embroidered edge of his robe, but she was staggering helplessly in their grip when he skidded to a halt, grimly aimed his blade—and with both hands thrust it through her flat belly.

The Lady of Mystery coughed silver fire almost into the duty apprentice’s face, and he reeled back as the sword shattered with a wild shrieking, spat bright shards away in all directions, and slumped into dust around the convulsed dark elf. The young wizard hurled himself away in real horror as silver fire scorched his cheek and he realized who—or rather,
what
—this intruder must be. A cold, bright golden glow cracked across the chamber, Dauntless found himself slammed back against its wall in the company of all of the dusty robed figures, and a furious Lady Mage of Waterdeep strode barefooted into the center of the room, snarling, “Is
this
the hospitality of Blackstaff Tower?”

In the utter silence that followed her shout, Laeral set down a crystal sphere she’d been carrying and strode toward the drow who was standing upright again, silver fire blazing up around her in an unearthly nimbus of glowing smoke.

Laeral’s unbound hair swirled around her as she stretched forth her hands, like a mother desiring a daughter’s embrace, and asked in a voice not far from tears, “Sister—too long unseen—what troubles you?”

“My own ineptitude,” Qilué replied, and burst into tears. She swayed amid silver flames, weeping, for a long moment, then, with a sob, rushed into Laeral’s waiting arms.

About the Author

Monte Cook is a senior game designer at TSR. He and his wife Sue live in the Northwest in their house full of books with a grumpy rabbit named Wilbur. In his spare time, he enjoys games of all sorts (particularly role playing games), music, and reading strange and obscure books about parapsychology, UFO’s, and conspiracies.