Dissolution (War of the Spider Queen #1)

Dissolution (War of the Spider Queen #1) Page 5

The Silken Rack was not, as visitors to Menzoberranzan sometimes assumed, a fine cloth emporium. It was, technically, a massage parlor, but only a vulgarian would call it that. Rather,it was a palace of delight, wherethe most skilled body servants in the Underdark provided what many dark elves considered to be most exquisite of all pleasures.

Waerva Baenre was herself of that opinion. She had already soaked her pampered, voluptuous form in warm, scented oil, and she would have liked nothing better to lose herself utterly in the touch of her masseur.

But that, alas, was not possible. She'd come to this shrine of the senses on business, business that could be conducted far more safely and discreetly there than in the Baenre citadel or the ambassador's residence in West Wall. That was why she, by nature gregarious, had hired a cozy private room containing only two contoured couches and a pair of hulking deaf-mute human masseurs in preference to her supremely girted Tluth.

Happily, the tongueless slave she'd chosen for herself was also highly competent. He kneaded her neck muscles in a way that was pain and bliss at the same time, wringing a groan of sweet release out of her. Naturally, it was at this somewhat undignified moment that Umrae came though the door.

Not that Waerva's momentary discomposure made Umrae smile. The Baenre couldn't imagine what it would take to accomplish that. A rather gaunt, homely female, her skin the unhealthy dull gray-black color of charcoal, the cut of her nondescript garments subtly divergent from the styles of Menzoberranzan, Umrae always arrived at these clandestine meetings stiff and awkward with nervous tension. Waerva supposed that was the difference between commoners and nobles. No matter how perilous the situation, an aristocrat always managed a certain grace.

"She's looking at maps!" declared Umrae. Her voice matched her appearance. There was no music in it.

"I'm not surprised," Waerva replied. "Your mistress is reasonably clever. I never thought she would remain complacent forever." The body servant dug his fingertips into Waerva's upper back, and she shivered. "We'll talk about it, but first, please, set my mind at ease. Tell me that no one who matters saw you enter this particular room."

Umrae scowled, apparently irked by the very suggestion. "No, of course not."

"Then for pity's sake, take off your clothes. You supposedly came here for a deepstroke, and you want to look as if you've had one when you get back home. Besides, these fellows are worth the rent."

Still frowning as if she suspected Waerva was perpetrating some sort of joke at her expense, Umrae gestured brusquely to the human, slightly smaller and less muscular than his compatriot, whom the Baenre had left for her use. Careful not to make eye contact, the slave began to undress her and hang her garments on the hooks set in the wall.

"So what are we going to do?" the commoner asked. "She's guarded. Even with the resource you gave me, I'm not sure I could kill her and escape, but surely you have skilled assassins at your disposal."

"Of course." Waerva had to close her slanted ruby eyes as her body servant squeezed and rubbed another clenched muscle into warm, limp submission. It was remarkable how she didn't even realize they

were tight until the masseur got his hands on them. "Murder would have its advantages. It would take her off thesava board for good and all."

"Then we're agreed?" Umrae asked as she lay down on her couch. Her body servant gently spread her mane of coarse white hair to expose the flesh beneath.

Waerva grinned. "You sound so eager."

"I admit I'm not fond of her." Umrae's human opened a white porcelain bottle of unguent, and a sweet scent tinged the air. "That's not the point. The point is to shield us all for as long as we need it."

"I quite agree," said Waerva, "and my concern is that an assassination could prove counterproductive. Might it not call attention to your mistress's suspicions? Might it not lend weight to them? Does she not have a deputy of like mind ready to take over in the event of her demise?"

Umrae scowled, pondering the questions, plainly not enjoying it much. Her slave spread a thin coat of amber oil onto her back.

From elsewhere in the building echoed the faint, distorted sounds of shouting, laughter, and splashing. Waerva guessed it must be males amusing themselves in one of the bathing pools. The females of the city were scarcely in the mood for boisterous horseplay.

At last Umrae said, "All right, what do you want to do?"

"Counter the threat in a subtler way. She can't injure us if she's never afforded the chance to confirm her suspicions."

"How will you ensure that?" Umrae's voice quavered as her thrall began to lightly pummel her gleaming back with the bottoms of his fists.

Good luck loosening up those petrified limbs, Waerva thought. "I am a priestess of the Baenre, am I not?"

"The least of them."

"How insolent of you to say so." Waerva tensed with annoyance until her masseur's hands rebuked her.

"I only meant - "

"I know what you meant, and I don't deny it. It's why I'm here, after all. Yet consider this: My aunt Triel has always depended on the advice of two people, Gromph and Quenthel. She can't really talk to Gromph anymore because she's keeping him in the dark with the rest of the males. I doubt she'll see much of Quenthel for a while, either. The tiny she-demon will stay busy contending with her own problems. She's endured some sort of mishap up on Tier Breche."

Umrae twisted her head around to look at her sister conspirator and said, "I've heard rumors about that. What actually happened?"

"I don't know - " Though I wish to the goddess I did, she thought -  "but whatever it was, it works to our advantage. We want Triel to suffer a dearth of counselors."

"What about her magical new son? They say he accompanies her everywhere."

Waerva smiled. "Jeggred's not a factor. He's a magnificent specimen but scarcely a font of sage advice. I assure you poor, uncertain Triel will be absolutely frantic for plausible insights from other Baenre priestesses, even the lowlier ones like me. I will buy our friends the time they need to work free of outside interference."

"You will if Triel trusts you."

"In this, she will. We Baenre are proud. It will be inconceivable to Triel that one of our females would wish to abandon the First House in favor of a new life elsewhere. Of course, she wasn't born at the absolute bottom of the internal hierarchy, was she, with dozens of older sisters and cousins taking precedence over her and holding all the important offices. Even if I started recklessly trying to pick them off whenever one lowers her guard even slightly, it could still take me centuries to ascend to a position of genuine power within the family."

"All right, that makes sense. What will you tell her?"

"The obvious." Waerva sighed shakily as her human went to work on her sacroiliac. "For all we know, it may even be the truth."

"I suppose."

Umrae lapsed into a sullen silence. Her body servant's hands made slapping and sucking sounds as they played about her slick, moist, bony back.

"By the six hundred and sixty-six layers of the Abyss," said Waerva, "what ails you? If you're having seconds thoughts, the time for that is well past."

"I'm not. I want to be something better than milady's secretary. I want a surname. I want to be a high priestess and a noble."

"And you will. When your cabal crushes the established order, they'll reward me for my help by making me matron mother of a new but exalted House, whereupon I will adopt you as my daughter. Why, then, do you appear so morose?"

"I just wonder. This silence ... is it really a boon for us, or a calamity? Are we seizing a great opportunity or madly rushing to our doom?"

How much better I'd rest if only I knew, thought Waerva.

"Let me ask a question," the Baenre priestess said. "Deep down in your heart of hearts, did you serve out of reverence or fear?"

"I served for power."

"Come to think of it," said Waerva, "I did, too. So let us seize the power that still sparkles within our reach."

"I - " Umrae moaned and curled her toes as her human finally managed to send a thrill of pleasure singing along her nerves.

Waerva thought it was a good sign.

Pharaundrank in the spectacle of the Bazaar. Born and raised a Menzoberranyr, he had of course visited this bustling place countless times before, but after several tendays of house arrest spent wondering if his life was at an end, it seemed rather wonderful to him.

Many of the stalls shone with light, be it phosphorescent fungus positioned to flatter the vendor's wares, magical illumination cast for the same purpose, or merely the incidental fallout of some other enchantment. The gleaming was never so fierce as to offend a dark elf's eyes, though. The citizens of the city wended their way through the aisles in the nurturing darkness that was their natural habitat, and what an interesting lot those citizens were.

A high priestess, from House Fey-Branche judging from the livery of her retainers, emerged from her curtained litter to inspect riding lizards with an eye as knowledgeable and a hand as steady as any groom's. A somewhat seedy looking boy, perhaps a disfavored son from one of the lesser Houses, engaged a cobbler in conversation while a confederate opened his voluminous mantle to slip an expensive pair of snakeskin boots inside. Male commoners, obliged to lower their eyes to every female and step aside for every noble of either gender, compensated by sneering and swaggering their way among the creatures less exalted than any drow. These latter were a motley assortment of beings - gray dwarves, the goggle-eyed fish-men called kuo-toas, and even a huge, horned ogre mage from the World Above - bold enough to trade or even dwell in a dark elf city. Lowliest of all, at least as numerous as the free but in their utter insignificance far easier to overlook, were the slaves. Orc, gnoll, and bugbear warriors guarded their masters and mistresses, harried, starveling goblins fetched and carried for the merchants, and little reptilian kobolds collected litter and hauled it away.

Pharaun knew from occasional errands there that if this hub of commerce had existed in one of the lands that saw the sky, it would have been exceptionally noisy. But the Menzoberranyr, to keep their cavern from roaring with a constant echoing clamor, had laid subtle enchantments about the smooth stone floor. Sounds close at hand were as audible as was natural, but those farther away faded and blended to the faint drone he and Ryld had heard while sitting on the brink of Tier Breche.

In the Bazaar, several of the magical buffers operated in close proximity to one another. To newcomers, the effect could be a little disconcerting as a single step sufficed to carry them from whispering quiet to raucous noise, the full volume of an auctioneer's shout or a piper's skirling.

Happily, no such enchantments existed to suppress the smells of the marketplace, a glorious olfactory tapestry redolent of spice, exotic produce imported from the surface world and, alas, a little past its prime, mulled wine, leather, burned frying oil, rothe dung, freshly spilled blood, and a thousand other things. Pharaun closed his eyes and breathed in the scent.

"This is always grand, isn't it?"

"I suppose," answered Ryld.

For his excursion away from Tier Breche, Ryld had tossed apiwafwi around his burly shoulders. The cloak covered his dwarf-made armor and short sword, and its cowl obscured his features, but no garment could have hidden the enormous weapon sheathed across his back. Ryld called the greatsword

Splitter, and while Pharaun deplored the name as ugly and prosaic, he had to admit that it was apt. In his friend's capable hands, the enchanted weapon could with a single swing cleave almost anything in two.

Ryld looked entirely relaxed, but the wizard knew the appearance was in one sense deceptive. The Master of Melee-Magthere was reflexively scrutinizing their surroundings for signs of danger with a facility that even Pharaun, who regarded himself as considerably more observant than most, could never match.

"You suppose," Pharaun repeated. "Is that just your usual glumness speaking, or do you find something lacking?"

"I do," said Ryld. He waved his hand in a gesture that took in the diverse throng, the stalls, and the maze of paths snaking among them. "I think the Bazaar could use some order."

Pharaun grinned and said, "Careful, or I'll have to report you for blasphemy. It's chaos that made us, and made us what we are."

"Right. Chaos is life. Chaos is creativity. Chaos makes us strong. I remember the creed, but as a practical matter, don't you see that all this confusion could serve as a mask for the city's enemies? They could use it to smuggle their spies and assassins in and to smuggle stolen secrets and treasure out."

"I'm sure they do. That's certainly the way our agents operate in marketplaces elsewhere in the Underdark."

An orc female came scurrying through the crowd with her head down and a parchment clutched in her hand. Perhaps her master had threatened her with a whipping if she didn't deliver a message quickly. She tried to dodge through the narrow space between Pharaun and another pedestrian, misstepped, and bumped into the wizard.

The pig-faced slave looked up and saw that she'd just jostled an elegantly and expensively dressed dark elf. Her mouth with its prominent lower canines fell open in terror. With a flick of his fingers, Pharaun bade her begone. She turned and ran.

"Then the Council should control the Bazaar properly," said Ryld. "Don't just send the occasional patrol marching through to discourage thievery. License the merchants. Conduct routine searches of their pack animals, tents, and kiosks."

"From what I understand," said Pharaun, "it's been tried, and every time it was, the Bazaar became less profitable and wound up pouring fewer coins into the coffers of the matron mothers. I daresay the same thing would happen today. Regulation would also inconvenience all the Houses who are themselves running illicit operations hereabouts. I assure you, a goodly number of them do."

Pharaun should know. Before his exile from his own family, he and Sabal had played a substantial role in House Mizzrym's covert and highly illegal trade with the deep gnomes, or svirfneblin, arguably the deadliest of the dark elves' many foes.

"If you say so," said Ryld. "Not being a noble, I wouldn't know about things like that."

The wizard sighed. It was true, his friend was about as humbly born as a dark elf couldbe, but during his climb to his present eminence, he had perforce become fully acquainted with the ways of the aristocracy. It was just that at odd moments he took an obscure satisfaction in pretending to a peasantlike ignorance.

"Well, I rejoice that you remain so close to your roots," Pharaun said. "I'm counting on your familiarity with the slums to see me safely through my encounters with the lower orders."

"I've been wondering when that's going to happen. Shouldn't we have gone to Eastmyr or the Braeryn straightaway?"

"No point going there blind if we can acquire some intelligence first."

Pharaun supposed that in fact, they'd better collect it quickly, but it was a pity. He could have used some idle time drifting through emporia like, for instance, Daelein Shimmerdark's Decanter with its astonishing collection of wines, liquors, and, for those who knew how to ask, potions and poisons from all over the world. Perhaps it would clear his head.

Or maybe it would only give him another enigma to ponder, for though there was still plenty to buy, it seemed to him the Bazaar as a whole was offering fewer goods than usual. Why was that? Could it possibly have anything to do with the runaway males?

And what about the demon spider that had materialized above him and Ryld on the plateau and proceeded to break into Arach-Tinilith? Did that tie in, or was it simply a gambit in one of Menzoberranzan's innumerable secret feuds that had nothing at all to do with his concerns?

He had to grin. He knew so little, and what little he had gleaned was scarcely a source of reassurance.

"There it is," said Ryld.

"Indeed."

Carved from a long, relatively low protrusion of stone, the Jewel Box sat just inches beyond what custom decreed to be the limits of the Bazaar, where all traders were required to shift their stalls to a different spot every sixty-six days. Despite its lack of a signboard or other external advertisement, the establishment had always attracted a steady trickle of shoppers and merchants, and when the two masters descended the stair that ran from street level to the limestone door, Pharaun could hear considerably more sounds of revelry that usual. There was laughter, animated conversation, and a longhorn, yarting, and hand-drum trio playing a lively tune. The third string of the yarting was a little flat.

Ryld knocked with the brass knocker, whereupon a little panel slid open in the center of the door. A pair of eyes peered out, then disappeared. The portal swung open.

Pharaun grinned. In all his visits there, he had never seen anyone turned away, and he suspected the business with the peephole was just an agreeable bit of nonsense intended to make a visit to the Jewel Box seem even more piquantly criminal. Perhaps the doorman actually would attempt to dissuade a female if one had sought admittance.

The low-ceilinged room beyond the threshold smelled of a sweet and mildly intoxicating incense. The three musicians had crowded themselves onto a tiny platform against the west wall. A few of the patrons were attending to the performance, but most had elected to focus on other pleasures. At one table, half a dozen disheveled fellows tossed back their liquor simultaneously in what appeared to be a drinking contest. Other males threw daggers at the target on the wall with a blithe disregard for the safety of those standing in the immediate vicinity of their mark. Dice clattered, cards rustled and slapped, and coins scraped across tabletops as the luckier gamblers raked in their winnings.

Ryld studied his surroundings with his customary unobtrusive vigilance, surreptitiously cataloging every potential threat. Still, Pharaun was amused to see that his friend's eyes lingered on the web-shapedsava boards for an instant, which was likely all the time he required to analyze the four contests in progress.

Savawas an intricate game representing a war between two noble Houses - at least that was what it currently represented. Pharaun had seen an antique set that recapitulated in miniature the drow's eternal struggle with another race, but such pieces had gone out of fashion long before his birth, probably because no player had wanted to be the dwarves.

With its gridlike board regulating movement and its playing pieces of varying capacities,sava resembled games devised by many cultures, but celebrating the chaos in their blood the drow had found a way to introduce an element of randomness into what would otherwise unfold with a mechanical precision. Once per game, each player could forgo his normal move to throw thesavadice. If the spider came up on each, he could move one of his opponent's pieces to eliminate any man of its own color within its normal reach, a rule that acknowledged the dark elves' propensity for doing down their kin even in the face of a serious external threat.

Pharaun, who privately considered himself cleverer than Ryld, had always been a little chagrinned that he couldn't defeat the weapons master atsava., but alas, his friend wielded mother, priestess, wizard, warrior, orc slave soldier, and dice as brilliantly as he did a sword. Indeed, he claimed that fighting and sava were the same thing, though Pharaun had never quite understood what the assertion meant.

The wizard clapped Ryld on the shoulder and said, "Play. Amuse yourself. Win their gold. Just remember to make conversation while you're at it. See what you can learn. Meanwhile, I'll try my luck in the cellar."

Ryld nodded.

Pharaun navigated his way across the crowded room to the bar. Behind it on a stool sat wizened, one-legged Nym, an elderly male who for sheer surly, unwavering misanthropy rivaled any demon the Master of Sorcere had ever conjured. The old retired battle mage was happily engaged in snarling threats, obscenities, and orders at the goblin thralls pouring drinks, but he grudgingly suspended the harassment long enough to accept a handful of gold. In return, he tendered a worn, numbered leather tab with several keys attached.

Thus equipped, Pharaun walked through the arch beside the bar and down another flight of steps. At the bottom waited the real business of the Jewel Box and the reason Nym had not seen fit to hang a placard outside.

In Menzoberranzan, where a goddess and her priestesses reigned supreme, few female dark elves ever found it necessary to sell their bodies. Only a handful of the sick and infirm, dwelling in the most abject need, had ever stooped to such a degradation. Accordingly, one might assume that any male wishing to purchase intimate companionship would find his choice limited to these rare unappealing specimens or the females of one of the inferior species.

But that wasn't quite the case, at least not if a male had aheavy purse.

The reason was that, while they generally devoted their military efforts to fighting cloakers, svirfneblin, and other competing civilizations of the Underdark, drow cities on rare occasions waged war on one another. Once in a while, such conflicts yielded female prisoners.

The prudent, legitimate thing to do with such potentially dangerous captives was interrogate, torture, and kill them. That fact notwithstanding, Nym had on several occasions managed to bribe officers to give him their prisoners, whom he then smuggled into Menzoberranzan and down to the cellar of the Jewel Box.

Nym had gone to all this trouble based on the shrewd and well-proven assumption that a goodly number of Menzoberranyr males would pay handsomely for the privilege of dominating a female, and in his establishment, one could do anything one wanted with a captive. Nym would even provide a customer with a bastinado, a brazier of coals, thumbscrews . . . his only stipulation being that one must pay a surcharge if one left a permanent mark.

Since the brothel's existence was an open secret, Pharaun wasn't sure why the matron mothers hadn't shut it down. On the face of it, it certainly seemed to encourage disrespect for the ruling gender. Perhaps they felt that if a male had a refuge in which to act out his resentments, it would make him all the more deferential to the females in his home. More likely, Nym was slipping them a substantial portion of the take.

At any rate, the Jewel Box seemed a reasonable place to seek information concerning rogue males, especially if one had a spy in place. Pharaun wasn't confident that he did anymore, but one never knew.

The stairs emptied into a hallway of numbered doors. Moans of passions and grunts of pain sounded faintly from behind several of them. It was busier than usual.

The mage strolled down the passage until he found number fourteen. He hesitated for an instant, then scowled and turned the largest of his keys in the lock. The door swung open.

Seated on the bed, shackles clutching her wrists and ankles, Pellanistra looked much as he remembered, the same powerful, shapely limbs and heart-shaped face, with only a few more scars where one or another of her visitors had pressed down too hard, as well as a split lip and closed, puffy eye where a more recent caller had beaten her.

She lifted her face, saw him, and charged with her long-nailed hands outstretched. Then she staggered as one of her governing enchantments riddled her body with pain, and an instant later hit the end of the chains securing her to the wall. She lost her balance and fell on her rump.

"Hello, Pellanistra," Pharaun said.

She spat at him, then screwed up her face at another flare of punishment. The gobbet of saliva fell well short of the wizard's soft, high boots.

"Much as I dislike descending to the obvious," Pharaun said, "I feel compelled to observe that you're only hurting yourself." He stepped forward and extended his hand. "Come on, let's sit and have a talk, just like in the old days. I'll even remove the shackles if you wish."

"We had a bargain!" she said.

"I refuse to have an extended conversation with someone sitting on the floor. It compromises my dignity as much as it does yours. Come on, be sensible. Take my hand."

She didn't do that, but, chains clinking, she did clamber to her bare feet unassisted. He caught a whiff of some flowery scent that Nym had forced her to wear.

"Now, isn't that better?" he asked. "Do you want the manacles off?"

"We had a compact, and I was holding up my end."

"I wish you'd invite me to sit down."

"You abandoned me!"

Pharaun spread his slender, long-fingered hands and said, "All right, priestess. If you think it necessary, we'll belabor the self-evident a bit longer. Yes, I recruited you into my service. Yes, you were doing splendidly - well on your way to earning your liberation - but my circumstances changed. Surely you heard something about it."

"Yes. You backed the wrong sister, and Greyanna made a fool of you. She killed her twin, and you were powerless to stop it. If you hadn't turned tail and run away to Sorcere, she would have slain you, too."

Pharaun smiled crookedly. "I don't think I'll encourage the bards to put it quite that way when they compose the epic story of my life."

"But after you established yourself up on Tier Breche, after you were free to come and go as you pleased, you could have returned here."

"I have, on occasion, just not to call on you. I thought it might be a little awkward."

"I could have helped you the same as before."

"Alas, no. After my withdrawal fromHouse Mizzrym, I no longer had a stake in the power struggles within my family or among the noble Houses, either. I no longer needed intelligence about such matters. The only rivalry that concerned me was the one among wizards, and even if you number the foremost practitioners of my art among your guests, I doubt they whisper the esoteric of their newly invented spells in your ears. When it comes to our discoveries, we wizards are a closemouthed breed."

"You don't know what it was like for me . . .is like for me, abused and degraded by my inferiors, constrained in body, mind, and soul, unable to commune with Lolth. . . ."

Pharaun raised his hand. "Please, you're embarrassing yourself. You sound like a whining human, or one of our foul cousins in the World Above. Cease this tirade, take a breath, and think, then you will realize, enemy of Menzoberranzan, that my concern for your well-being has always been, at best, limited. How could it be otherwise? Sentiment certainly wasn't strong enough to make me spend a fortune buying you free of Nym, or, if he and I couldn't strike a deal, break you out of here. Not when you hadn't fulfilled the terms of our covenant. As you no doubt recall, you were supposed to provide me useful information over the full course of twenty years. I admit it wasn't your fault that you couldn't, but still, that's just the way things fell out."

"Fine," she gritted. "You're right, I'm being ridiculous. In forsaking me, you simply behaved as any sensible drow would. Now what in the name of the Demonweb do you want?"

He nodded at the other end of the room and said, "May we ... ?"

She gave a curt nod, and they seated themselves, she on the mattress of her wide octagonal bed and he on a cushioned granite chair.

"This is much nicer," he said. "Would you like me to send for some wine?"

"Just get on with it."

"Very well. I imagine my plight will amuse you. After the goddess knows how many years breathing the rarefied and dispassionate air of scholarship, imparting knowledge to eager young minds, advancing the frontiers of the mystic arts - "

"Murdering other wizards for their talismans and grimoires."

He grinned. "Well, that was implied, of course. Anyway, after all that, I find myself again embroiled in the more mundane aspects of life in our noble metropolis. There's a puzzle I must solve on pain of the archmage's severe displeasure, and I will be grateful unto death and beyond if you help me unravel it."

"How would I do that?"

"Don't be disingenuous. It doesn't suit you. The same way as always. I assume foolish boys still sometimes gossip and boast to their hired females, even though if they stopped to think about it, they'd remember you loathe them and wish them only ill. I likewise imagine that you still sometimes find yourself obliged to entertain at gatherings where such idiots, unmindful of your presence, discuss their most secret affairs with one another."

"In other words, you wish to resume our old arrangement. Which still had four years to run. If I assist you with your current problem, will you continue to concern yourself with 'mundane' affairs, or will you lock yourself away in your toweronce more?"

He considered lying, but his instincts told him she'd see through it.

"I'm not entirely sure what will become of me," he said. "As far as I know, if I'm successful, I ought to wind up reestablished in Sorcere with all my transgressions forgiven, but for some murky reason, I wonder. I'm caught up in something I don't yet understand,and only the dark powers know where it will lead."

"Then if you want my help, you'll have to set me free . . .today."

"Impossible, I don't have the requisite funds on my person, nor the leisure to dicker with Nym, for that matter. You know he'd stretch any negotiation out for days, just to be annoying. Nor do I have time to arrange an escape."

She only stared at him, and he understood.

"All," he said.

"Is it a bargain?"

"It is if you actually give me some help. My problem is this: An unusual number of males have run away from home of late."

"That's your errand? To find some rogues? What makes it important enough to send a Master of Sorcere?"

He smiled. "I have no idea. Do you know anything about it?"

She shook her head. "Not much."

"Frankly, any crumb of genuine information will put me ahead of where I am now."

"Well, I've heard only the vaguest hints, but they suggest this isn't just a case of an unusual number of males deciding independently to elope. They all ran to the same place for the same reason, whatever that reason may be."

"I thought as much," said Pharaun. "Otherwise, why would Gromph be interested? But it's reassuring to hear that your own agile mind has arrived at the same conclusion."

She sneered.

Pharaun absently ran his fingertip along one of the swirling lines woven into his robe.

"I doubt a threat would suffice to draw so many boys away from home," he said. "Some would have the courage to defy the threatener or the sense to appeal to their kin for protection. Nor would a hypnotic charm do the trick. Aside from the natural resistance to such effects that all we dark elves possess, some of the males would have carried wards in the form of amulets and such. No, I think we have to assume the rogues sneaked away of their own volition to accomplish some positive end. But what?"

"They're organizing a new merchant clan?"

"I thought of that, but Gromph says no, and I'm sure he's correct. For if that were the case, then why the secrecy? Since trade is important toall Menzoberranzan, people don't generally object when a male becomes a merchant. It's one of the two or three legitimate ways to distance oneself from Mother's harsh and arbitrary hand." He grinned. "No offense. I'm sure that in happier times, the males under your authority had no reason to complain of you."

"You can bet I would give them reason now."

"Given your more recent experiences, that's understandable. So, if the rogues aren't putting together a caravan, what are they doing? Preparing to flee Menzoberranzan for good and all? Or, goddess forbid, have they slipped away already?"

"I don't think so. I can't tell you precisely where they are, but I believe they're still somewhere in the city proper, the Mantle, or conceivably our in the Bauthwaf."

"Now that truly is good news. I wasn't keen on a hunt through the wilds of the Underdark. Not only is there a general lack of amenities, the wine-makers are uncorking the new vintages the tenday after next."

Pellanistra shook her head. "You haven't changed."

"Thank you, I'll take that as a compliment. Now, let's get down to the crux of the matter, shall we? I require names. Which of your visitors dropped these 'vaguest hints' which you have so sagaciously interpreted?"

She gave him a smile radiant with spite. "Alton Vandree and Vuzlyn Freth."

"Who themselves subsequently disappeared and are thus unavailable for questioning. It makes sense, I suppose, but it's unfortunate all the same."

"I've given you everything I have," she said. "Now fulfill your end of the deal."

The wizardfrowned and said, "My dear collaborator, it would devastate me to disappoint you. Yet I stipulated that you'd have to offer me information of some significance, and frankly, I'm not sure you've delivered. I really know little more than I did before."

"Do it, or I'll tell every soul who comes into this cell that you're looking for the runaways. Perhaps that will have some 'significance' for your mission. I assume it is supposed to be a secret. Things usually are where you're involved, and you haven't mentioned a legion of assistants following you about."

Pharaun laughed. "Well played. I surrender. How shall we do this?"

"I don't care. Burn me with your magic. Stick a dagger in me. Break my neck with those long, clever fingers."

"Interesting suggestions all, but I'd just as soon that Nym didn't bill me for your demise. If we can make it look as if your heart just stopped of its own accord sometime after I look my leave, I'll have a chance."

He cast about, noticed the thick, fluffy pillow on the bed, picked it up, and experimentally gripped it at both ends. It felt good in his hands.

"This ought to work," he said. "Perhaps you could oblige me by lying down?"