“Sylora Salm decided that she should come,” Dor’crae reminded him. “That is not without reason, and it is not your place to question.”
“Of course,” the man said, lowering his gaze.
Dor’crae glared at him a bit longer, making sure he knew his place. They couldn’t afford such intemperate and mutinous whispers, not with powerful enemies just ahead. Truthfully, though, when Dor’crae looked back at the throne and the thrashing, insane Valindra, he found it hard to disagree with the zealot’s words.
They couldn’t begin to control the lich, and he knew without a doubt that if she saw a target for a fireball and the entire squad of Ashmadai happened to be in the blast area, she wouldn’t even care.
The tremor grumbled through the stone floor, giving all five a bit of a shake. It seemed nothing too much to Drizzt, but when he looked at Bruenor, the drow had second thoughts.
“What do you know?” Jarlaxle asked Bruenor before Drizzt could.
“Bah, the beast belched, and nothin’ more,” said Athrogate, but Bruenor’s expression told a different story.
“Weren’t the beast,” he said, shaking his head. “Our enemies have entered behind us. They fight the ancient ones.”
“The ancient ones?” Drizzt and Dahlia asked together, and they looked at each other in surprise.
“The dwarves of Gauntlgrym,” Jarlaxle explained.
“The throne,” Bruenor corrected. “They struck at the throne.
“To what end?
Bruenor shook his head, his expression revealing confidence that the throne was in no real danger. He glanced all around then, however, and added, “The ghosts’re gone.”
The others all looked around as well, and sure enough, they saw no ghosts in the wide corridor, though there had been some there only a few moments earlier.
“Gone back to fight for the throne o’ Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor explained.
“And what now for us?” Drizzt asked.
Jarlaxle seemed as if he was about to answer, but like all the others, he deferred to Bruenor.
“We go on,” Bruenor said, and marched ahead, Athrogate hustling to keep beside him.
“He seems very sure of himself,” Dahlia remarked to Drizzt and Jarlaxle as the dwarves stomped off. “With every turn and every side passage.”
It was true enough, and while Drizzt held faith in his friend—and really, what choice did they have?—he was more than a bit concerned. Near to the audience chamber, the passages had been clear and undamaged—or no more so than Jarlaxle, Athrogate, and Dahlia had remembered them—but soon after the five companions had descended the first long stairwell, they had found more ruin and rubble. Corridors had twisted and cracked apart, and the second stair Bruenor had led them to had proven impassable.
But the dwarf remained undaunted and took them off on an alternate route.
Drizzt didn’t know what magic might have been in that throne, but he hoped it truly was a memory of Gauntlgrym, not some deception placed in his mind by their enemies—as had been done to Athrogate.
Jarlaxle moved ahead to watch over the dwarves.
“You fought well in that canyon,” Drizzt remarked quietly.
Dahlia arched her eyebrow at him. “I always fight well. It is why I am alive.”
“You fight often, then,” Drizzt said with a slight smirk.
“When I have to.”
“Perhaps you’re not as charming as you believe.”
“I don’t have to be,” Dahlia replied without missing a beat. “I fight well.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“With yourself as the evidence, I am sure,” Dahlia replied.
She pressed on faster, leaving an amused Drizzt in her wake.
“Every tunnel!” the Ashmadai commander cried as the whole of his group shrank back toward the entrance that had brought them into the room. The colorless forms of ghost dwarves flooded into the circular hall from every one of the exits in front of them, forming ranks with all the discipline of a living army.
“Can they touch us? Can they hurt us?” one woman asked, her teeth chattering, for indeed the room became very cold.
“They can tear you apart,” Dor’crae assured them.
“Then we fight!” the commander cried, and all around him gave a rousing battle cheer.
All except for Dor’crae, who was thinking that it might be time for him to take the form of a bat and fly away. And except for Valindra, who began to laugh wildly, loudly, and so hysterically that the cheering died away bit by bit, each Ashmadai voice going silent as a new set of eyes fell upon the lich.
“Fight them?” Valindra asked when at last she commanded the attention of all. She began to cackle again, uncontrollably it seemed. She brought forth her emaciated hand, palm up, closed her eyes, and her laughter became a chant.
The Ashmadai circled behind her, ready to run away, having seen the destructive power of her magic.
But no fireball filled the room. Instead, a scepter appeared in her hand. At a cursory glance, it looked much like those carried by the Ashmadai, and that brought more cheers. But as each of them came to view Valindra’s scepter more closely, those cheers turned to gasps.
The Ashmadai scepters, their staff-spears, were red in color when first presented, but that hue wore away with time and use, and most held weapons of uneven hue, more pink than red. But not the scepter Valindra held. It was ruby, and not just in color. It seemed to have been carved of one giant gemstone, rich red, its color so fluid and deep that several of the nearby Ashmadai held forth their arms, as if they meant to sink their fingers right into it.
Valindra grasped it powerfully and thrust it horizontally above her head, and its ends flared with a powerful red light.
“Who is your master?” she cried.
Confused, the Ashmadai glanced around at each other, some mouthing “Asmodeus,” others quietly and questioningly asking, “Valindra?”
“Who is your master!” Valindra yelled, her voice magically magnified to fill the chamber and echo about the stones, the ends of the scepter flaring again in response to her cry.
“Asmodeus!” the commander yelled back, and the others followed his lead.
“Pray to him!” Valindra ordered.
The fanatics scrambled to form a kneeling circle around the lich, and each looped his right arm over the shoulders of the person to his right, left arms reaching high for the amazing scepter. They began to chant, and their circle began to slowly rotate to the left as they crawled on the hard stone.
From a few steps back, Dor’crae watched it all with blank amazement. He knew that scepter. Szass Tam had kept it back in Thay, knowing well that it was the most treasured artifact of the Ashmadai. Dor’crae had suspected all along that Sylora Salm had brought it west with her, given that almost the entire cult of Ashmadai had come to Neverwinter Wood, and given their complete obedience to her. When Valindra had joined their ranks those years ago, Sylora’s power over the lich had only confirmed that suspicion.
Dor’crae could hardly believe that Sylora had given the scepter to Valindra, to that unstable and powerful undead creature.
Dor’crae shook those thoughts away. It was not the time. His warriors were on their knees, and the dwarves fast approached.
“Valindra!” he called to warn her, but she, too, was deep into her chanting and she seemed not to hear.
“Valindra, they come!” the vampire yelled, but again, the lich made no sign that she heard him.
The nearest ghosts took on a reddish hue as they came within the wide glow of the ruby scepter, and Dor’crae noted that they seemed to hesitate there, their faces twitching with discomfort, pain even. Smoke began to pour from the scepter’s ends, circling between Valindra and the closest dwarves, swirling across the stone floor, and sinking lower, as if reaching into the rock itself. The stone melted, liquefied, red bubbles forming and popping, releasing acrid yellow smoke into the air.
As one, the ghosts stopped and threw up their hands, shielding their eyes.
Through the floor it came, as if standing up in a shallow pond. The large head appeared first, spiked and crested with rows of jagged red bone. Hooked black horns reached out to either side and curved upward and over, where they narrowed into points facing each other. Wide eyes showed no pupils—pits of fire and nothing more, the eyes of an angry devil. A wide mouth curled back in a perpetual hiss, revealing huge canines and rows of teeth that could tear flesh from bone with ease. Taller it climbed as if scaling a ladder in the molten floor, its glorious, naked body coming forth from the lava with not a scratch or burn, its red, leathery wings spreading wide as they came free of the hole.
The whole of the creature was red, hot like the fires of all Nine Hells, its skin stretched over corded muscles and rows of bone. Black spikes lined its back in a sharp ridge narrowing at the base of its spine, where they gave way to a flashing red tail, barbed in a black tip and dripping lethal venom. The long claws of its hands, too, shone black, like polished obsidian. In its right hand, it held a gigantic mace, obsidian black and with a four-bladed head, each side a cleaver in and of itself. Smoke wafted from that weapon, and an occasional lick of flame appeared along its angry head.
Finally the fiend stepped from the bubbling pool, a huge, clawed foot scraping down upon solid stone, black claws screeching.
The beast wore only a green loincloth set with an iron skull in front, black leathery bracers tied tight around its muscular forearms, and macabre jewelry: a necklace of skulls, human sized but seeming smaller on the eight-foot-tall devil, and more skulls tied around its thrashing tail.
The Ashmadai wailed and prostrated themselves, face down, not daring to look upon the glorious devil.
It was not Asmodeus, of course, for to dare to even try to summon that one would have brought ruin upon them all. But Dor’crae’s estimation of Valindra jumped mightily at that terrible, glorious moment, and truly he felt the fool for ever doubting Sylora Salm. With the scepter, Valindra had called deep into the Nine Hells, and she had been heard.
Dor’crae was no student of devil-kin, but like anyone else who had spent time with dark wizards, he knew the primary beings of the lower planes. Valindra had been heard indeed, and she had been granted, for her efforts, the services of a pit fiend, one of the personal servants of the devil god, a duke of the Nine Hells, answerable only to the unspeakable archdevils themselves.
The beast surveyed its ghostly enemies, then half-turned to regard Valindra and the groveling Ashmadai. It reached out with its long arm toward the scepter, clawed fingers grasping for the item.
And again Dor’crae thought it was surely time for him to leave, but the pit fiend didn’t take the scepter from Valindra. Instead, it seemed to lend her its powers, to be funneled through the item.
The scepter glowed more brightly, and Dor’crae had to turn his shoulder and throw his elbow up high, bringing his cloak up to shield his face. He, too, was an undead thing. So many times had the vampire dominated unsuspecting humans, the weak willed who would give in to his demands. But he realized in that moment the horror of his former victims.
Despite himself, he was on his knees. He found that he could not look upon the pit fiend any longer, and he buried his face in his hands and bent to kiss the floor. Trembling, helpless, he could only die again right then and there. There was no escape. There was no hope.
