But the vrock was too strong to be yanked to its back, and the magical garrotes barely slowed it. Nor would they choke it—demons didn’t need to draw breath.
Regis realized his error, cried out, and continued to retreat—he wouldn’t go into the pool, though, and leave Entreri alone.
He realized to his horror that he couldn’t get there anyway.
Dagger and rapier in hand, he set himself, taking heart when a second arrow crashed into the demon, lurching it to the side.
Thinking it distracted, Regis started forward, but fell back as a black wall appeared in front of him, between him and the demon. He didn’t sort it out until Artemis Entreri rushed in front of him and leaped through the ashen, opaque barrier.
Regis could see furious movement behind the cloud, and the shrieks of the vulture demon echoed deafeningly about the cave walls.
The halfling ran around to the side, not daring to go blindly into the furious fight, and by the time he came in sight of the combatants, the vrock was down. It leaned on one arm, trying to get up while Entreri battered it with his mighty sword and the twin specters behind it yanked at their garrotes.
The demon finally went down and Entreri fell back, blades pointed at the specters. “What have you done?” he asked.
Regis calmly walked over and poked the ghostly figures, one then the other, and they winked out of existence. He held up his now single-bladed dirk and shrugged.
Entreri nodded. “I need to go find another goblin.”
Regis started to argue, but the assassin’s voice cut him short. “Cover the glass.”
Entreri returned almost immediately after Regis had set the cloak, prodding a goblin in front of him.
A few moments later, that goblin went into the looking glass, and another goblin appeared in its place.
“Look in the mirror!” Entreri ordered the thing, Taulmaril set to blow it out of existence.
“No, please!” the creature pleaded.
“Your only chance at living,” Entreri warned. “Look in the mirror!” He lowered the bow and shot a lightning arrow between the feet of the shying creature—and had another one set before the goblin recovered from the shock.
“Now!” Entreri demanded.
The goblin disappeared into the looking glass.
And out came Wulfgar.
CHAPTER 27
God and Life
DON’T TURN AROUND!” ENTRERI YELLED AT WULFGAR, NOT AS A threat but as a warning.
“The mirror is behind you!” Regis explained, and he tried to throw his cape over it once more, partially covering it, at least. “If you look into it, you’ll be caught once more.”
“Where am I? What is this place?” Wulfgar demanded.
“Go to him,” Entreri ordered Regis, and he hoisted the mirror off the wall and started to the side.
“What are you doing?” the halfling asked.
“Artemis Entreri?” asked Wulfgar, and his voice changed when he looked past the man, who was heading for the pool. “Drizzt!”
He swept up Regis in his wake as he sprinted to the back wall and the prostrate drow, who appeared lifeless. Wulfgar slid to his knees and cradled Drizzt’s head in his hands.
“What is this?” he said desperately.
“The demon …” Regis started to explain, but he lost his voice when he saw Entreri throw the mirror into the pool.
“Damn her and her vile toys,” the assassin answered to the incredulous expressions of Regis and Wulfgar.
Regis shook his head, each movement growing more frantic.
Wulfgar, though, went right back to Drizzt, holding his friend close. There was no strength there, and he rightly feared a profound, mortal wound.
“Not in there,” Regis said to Entreri, standing, forcing Wulfgar’s attention once more. “No no no.”
“What?” asked Entreri, tossing the cape the halfling’s way.
“There are fish in there,” Regis stammered. “Living fish.”
Entreri paused, Wulfgar looked up.
And as if on cue, the water began to bubble and a huge shadow appeared under the rippling water.
Steam wafted off the water.
“Run,” Entreri said, stepping back.
Wulfgar scooped up Drizzt and slung him over one shoulder then followed Regis for the door.
A red hydra head appeared above the water, blowing fire back into the pool, the liquid hissing and steaming in protest.
“Oh, run!” Entreri said more emphatically.
Regis got to the door first, and fumbled to open it—and fumbled more when he looked back, to see the hydra and the creature the hydra was apparently battling.
It floated out of the pool then, a giant eyeball, it seemed, but with a toothy maw full of long teeth, and many stalks of smaller eyes atop it.
Regis spun and tried to exit, but he hadn’t pulled the door far enough open and he just slammed into it, pushing it closed.
Wulfgar shoved him aside, threw the door open, and rushed out of the room, Regis under one arm, Drizzt over the other shoulder.
“Put the little one down and ready your hammer,” Entreri told the barbarian, sprinting past him up the corridor.
Behind them, the corridor shook, lightning boomed, fire crackled, water sizzled, and there came a screech more profound than the hydra’s, more dragon-like, and they knew a third combatant perhaps worse than the other two had joined the battle.
“Just run,” Regis kept saying and he tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to stop looking back over his shoulder.
Following Entreri, they turned many corners and traversed many corridors, almost all too narrow for the hydra or a dragon, at least. That brought little comfort, though, and less still when they came into a wider passageway, a main artery to the upper tunnels, and found a giant demonic humanoid billowing smoke and wielding a wave-shaped greatsword.
“Does it never end?” Entreri asked, and then he realized that the behemoth was not alone, that a familiar woman stood beside it, and he thought that the succubus had returned.
But there came a command to hold and Yvonnel rushed out from the shadows to the side. She shoved the giant to the side, or tried to. When she couldn’t move him, she just told him to get out of the way.
“I found you,” she said with relief. “This is Queen Concettina, truly. Malcanthet is gone, but we should leave this …”
Her gaze fell over Drizzt.
As Wulfgar gently placed him upon the floor, she fell over the broken drow. “Oh no,” she wailed.
“The demon’s whip struck him,” Entreri explained.
“Help him!” Regis demanded.
Yvonnel hadn’t found the power to begin to heal Pikel’s wounds, and Drizzt’s seemed far more profound.
“Oh no,” she said again. She closed her eyes to concentrate, whispered a spell and cast it. A minor wave of healing washed over the fallen ranger.
And she opened her eyes and realized that she had done nothing of consequence.
“Oh, the Hunzrins,” she said, and silently cursed herself for dismissing them too quickly. “We must catch …” she started to say, but a slight gasp from Drizzt stopped her, turned her to him.
From the memories of Yvonnel the Eternal, this Yvonnel knew well the final rattles in the breathing of a dying person. They could not catch Charri Hunzrin and the others in time.
Yvonnel stood and paced, slapping her hands over her eyes and crying out to the Spider Queen.
“Lolth, hear me!” she begged, casting a spell of communion. “I know you care for him!”
You know nothing, child, she heard in her head, and to her horror, Yvonnel recognized Yiccardaria’s voice.
She knew then that she was doomed, that they were all doomed.
Yvonnel went to Drizzt, shoving the others aside, and cradled his head. “Would you let him die like this?”
“Would you give yourself for him?” came a disembodied and gurgling, watery voice, filling the corridor.
Wulfgar, Reg
is, and Entreri formed a triangle, shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back, around the terrified Concettina. The three had their weapons out, though all sensed how futile such implements would likely prove.
“Would you give yourself for him?” the voice, Yiccardaria’s voice, said again, and then Yvonnel heard in her head, Summon me if you wish him to live.
“You ask me to die …” Yvonnel whispered.
I did not say you would die.
“You did not say I would not!” Yvonnel answered.
No, I did not, the magical voice agreed. Choose now.
Yvonnel looked to Drizzt, then to the others, and said, “Run. For your lives, be as far away as you can.”
“I’m not leaving him,” Regis said, moving behind Drizzt.
The others joined him, forming a line across the hall, and Concettina, clearly at a loss, fell in behind them.
“I have no time for …” Yvonnel started to reply.
“Do as you would,” Entreri told her. “We are not leaving him.”
With a sigh, Yvonnel rushed back up the tunnel a bit and began spellcasting, a mighty dweomer to open a gate to the Abyss.
She fell back and held her breath as the black gate flickered and filled, and Yiccardaria came through, in her natural and grotesque form, a pile of mud waving tentacles.
The handmaiden stopped there and gestured back at the portal, adding her own magic, and the black gate flickered and filled again.
And something else came through.
And she was beautiful beyond compare, mocking the trembling drow woman in front of her, who gulped and gasped and fell to her knees.
And the drow woman became a giant drider then, just for a moment, just so that the other witnesses would understand the truth and be afraid.
“We’re dead,” Entreri whispered.
Concettina fell to her knees and wept.
Regis’s dagger fell to the floor, his hand too weak to hold it. The tip of his rapier, too, scraped the stone.
“You surprise me, child,” said the Spider Queen. She seemed amused.
“I … I …”
Lolth laughed at her, then hissed and waved a hand in front of Yvonnel’s face.
Something roiled within the daughter of Gromph, rising like bile. At the very last moment, she recognized it for what it was and she spun to face Drizzt and verily vomited a spell at him, a mighty spell that washed into him and physically moved him with its sheer magical energy.
He rolled over, coughed, and leaped up—awake, healed, and facing Entreri, Regis, Wulfgar, and the sobbing woman beside him. Their expressions clued him into turning around.
Then Drizzt nearly fell over again.
“As you asked,” Lolth said to Yvonnel.
“Take me,” Yvonnel whispered.
Lolth snorted and Yvonnel was magically thrown aside, toyed with by a mere thought from the mighty Queen of the Demonweb Pits, and slammed into the wall, where she cowered.
“At long last, Drizzt Do’Urden,” the Spider Queen said.
Drizzt stood straight at her and did not blink.
“Are you not afraid?”
He didn’t blink.
“Perhaps I tire of your insolence,” Lolth said. “I demand your fealty.”
“I cannot give you that.”
“Denounce Mielikki!”
“She is not mine to denounce,” Drizzt admitted, and a crack in Lolth’s omnipotence appeared then when a cloud of confusion briefly colored her face.
“I can destroy all that you love,” Lolth warned.
“So I have come to expect,” said Drizzt.
“Do you know the pain I could give you?”
“I do,” Drizzt answered before she even finished.
“Good,” she purred.
Drizzt squared his shoulders.
“And you can avoid that, all of it,” Lolth said. “And your friends will be spared, even your precious Catti-brie.”
Drizzt winced at the mention of his beloved wife. But as soon as he swallowed that shock, he understood that anything and everything she promised or threatened was irrelevant to anything and everything he might do. Lolth was too far above him in every way. She would do as she pleased, whatever his course, and he could no more influence her actions than he could lift Faerûn out of the oceans.
“Kneel to me!” she demanded, and it carried magical weight that shoved Drizzt to his knees.
“And how dare you look upon me without my permission!” she cried, and a second blast of magic forced his gaze to the floor.
But in there, against the magical suggestion, Drizzt Do’Urden saw a single light, a candle in his memory.
He looked up at Lolth.
He moved through the magic and stood.
“So much can I take from you,” she warned. “Worship me!”
“What you ask is not mine to give,” he explained.
Lolth sneered and waved her hand, and the corridor behind Drizzt filled with thick webs, lifting his three friends and Concettina from the floor, catching them fully and holding them fast.
Drizzt glanced back at their gasps, unable to resist, and he saw them, trapped and helpless, and saw, too, the thousands of small spiders gathering on the ceiling.
“Worship me,” Lolth calmly demanded.
“How?” Drizzt asked innocently. “I cannot control that which is in my heart, and that which is in my heart is not aligned with the way of Lolth.”
Lolth growled, a most feral sound, and behind Drizzt, the clatter of spider legs increased.
And his friends began to cry out in pain, voices muffled by webs, agony obvious.
They were being eaten, every one, by tiny spiders.
“I will have you, Drizzt Do’Urden,” a grinning Lolth promised.
“No,” Drizzt said simply.
Behind him, Entreri managed to mutter between grimaces and groans, “Not what she wanted to hear,” but Drizzt barely registered it.
He found the candle in his thoughts, dropped into his meditative pose, and there found peace, removed from the scene.
Because there was nothing he could do, nothing he could even pretend to do. Long ago had Drizzt Do’Urden come to understand the truth of this “worship,” that it was not strained, that it was not even given, that, truly, it was not even accepted.
It just was, a way of heart and belief and shared joy.
It could not be created.
It could not be coerced.
It could not be altered.
It just was.
Drizzt removed himself from the pain around him, went away with his thoughts to a place where he could not hear the cries. He felt a twinge of regret, a momentary wave of guilt, but he fast suppressed it.
There was nothing he could do. This was Lolth, a goddess. Drizzt could pull Taulmaril from his belt and shoot her in the face and the arrow would not come close to hitting her—or of hurting her if it did. This was no dragon in front of him, no normal demon, not even Demogorgon. This was something all together different, something all together greater and beyond.
So Drizzt went away, and so removed from the scene was he that he was genuinely surprised when he was grabbed by the tunic and hoisted up into the air with horrifying strength and frightening ease.
The sounds behind him had greatly diminished, not a cry of agony, not a scuffling spider leg. He wasn’t sure how long he’d gone away, and he feared they were all dead behind him.
The soft sobbing of a woman—Concettina—gave him a tiny flicker of hope.
“I am not just pain,” Lolth said to him, her face very near his, and in a voice very different. “I am pleasure.”
And she kissed him, urgently, passionately, and a thousand fires of tickling electricity coursed through him, teasing him, tempting him.
She pulled him back and smiled alluringly. “On a word, it is all yours.”
But Drizzt shrugged and shook his head.
Lolth dropped him to his feet and he fell back as if struck. For a moment, in the a
ngry eyes of Lolth, Drizzt imagined a horrible death flying for him.
But she calmed, and laughed.
“I do not just take away, Drizzt Do’Urden,” she said. “I can give as well. Call to your panther.”
Drizzt hesitated.
Lolth held out her hand and he followed the motion to look behind him. There was a pouch on the ground there, right in front of the webbing and his trapped, but very much alive, friends. His pouch, he realized, which held the onyx figurine.
“I can bring her myself,” Lolth promised, and Drizzt didn’t doubt it.
He called to Guenhwyvar and watched the mist form and coalesce. And the panther was there, and Drizzt felt his heart fall.
Guenhwyvar flopped pitifully, her body not answering her demands. She whimpered and fell over and tried to right herself, but to no avail.
Drizzt could hardly stand the sight. He thought to pull Taulmaril, not to shoot Lolth but to put Guenhwyvar out of this misery.
“Guen, be gone!” he begged.
“No,” said Lolth, and the panther did not disappear. “I’ll not allow that.”
Drizzt turned to regard her, then began to fall into his crouch once more, to go away.
But Lolth cast a spell past him, and he turned to see Guenhwyvar restored.
The panther crouched and issued a growl.
Lolth laughed at her and waved her hand, throwing Guenhwyvar back into the web, where she, too, was caught fast.
“See?” she asked when Drizzt turned back to her. “I am not without my gifts. I am much more than simple pain and torment.”
Drizzt conceded the point with a slight nod.
“Worship me,” she said. “Know my love.”
“No. I cannot, and you know I cannot.”
Lolth licked her lips, the slight wetness shining alluringly. “I can give him back to you,” she said.
Drizzt swallowed hard, suddenly afraid.
“You know that I can.”
“Zaknafein denied you,” Drizzt said, simply because he had to hear it spoken aloud. “He is not with you.”
“Would that matter?” she asked, not denying his retort. “I can give him back to you. You know that I can.”