He bowed and said, "It is my pleas-"
Vhaeraun vanished without further words.
The red light of the Blood Rift refilled the room. Inthracis took several deep breaths. Even the corpses in the wall seemed relieved. All that remained of Vhaeraun's presence in the room was a smear of blood on the basalt table and lectern. Inthracis summoned an invisible servant armed with a cloth, caused it to absorb the blood, and teleported the cloth to his laboratory. He was certain he could use divine blood as a component for one spell or another. The exercise helped calm him.
He gathered himself and prepared to send word to his generals to sound a muster. Vhaeraun had said to assemble an army. Inthracis would use his best shock troops, the Black Horn
Regiment.
Despite the underlying fear of what might occur should he fail Vhaeraun, the ultroloth felt a certain exhilaration. If he was successful, and if Vhaeraun kept his word-a large if-Kexxon would be destroyed and Inthracis would unseat him as the Archgeneral of the Blood Rift.
Even as those seductive thoughts coursed through his mind, a more sober voice advised caution. It occurred to him that all of Vhaeraun's scheming might have been in accordance with
Lolth's plan. The Masked God had said that Lolth was testing her priestesses as she called them toward the Pits. Perhaps Inthracis and Vhaeraun would be doing nothing more than creating another challenge for the Yor'thae to overcome? Or perhaps Vhaeraun was mistaken and none of the three priestesses was to be the Yor'thae at all?
Perhaps, Inthracis thought and sighed.
Caught between one god and another, though, he knew he had no choice but to obey. He would do as Vhaeraun had demanded because to do otherwise would result in certain death. Or worse.
Outside, the wind howled its message.
Chapter Two
An unbroken line of drow souls extended before and behind Halisstra as far as she could see,
a ribbon of Lolth's dead stretching across the infinite, featureless gray aether of the Astral Plane.
With Lolth's power apparently returned, the souls were at last free to float toward the Spider
Queen's plane, where they would spend eternity.
One after another the souls streamed along in a procession as straight as that of marching soldiers. The orderliness of the line struck Halisstra as strangely incongruous for souls heading into the arms of a goddess who embodied chaos.
Formerly as drab as the gray aether in which they floated, Lolth's reawakening had sent a surge of power through the line of souls, through the Astral Plane, and perhaps through all of the other planes as well. The Spider Queen's stirring had painted the dead in hues reminiscent or life,
had reawakened the souls even as Lolth had herself reawakened from her Silence. By reinfusing them with color and purpose, Lolth had marked each of the souls as irrevocably and irretrievably hers.
The words bobbed uncomfortably in Halisstra's consciousness: Irrevocably and irretrievably
Lolth's. .
Floating in the same gray aether, as anchorless as the souls drifting past, Halisstra looked at her slim black hands. On them, she saw the blood of the countless screaming victims she had sacrificed in Lolth's name. Did not their blood mark Halisstra as irretrievably Lolth's, the same as the souls around her? Wasn't her soul too colored, stained crimson?
She clenched her fists, and looked past the souls and out into the gray nothingness. The same hands that had murdered in Lolth's name were to wield the Crescent Blade of Eilistraee. With it,
Halisstra was to kill Lolth.
Kill Lolth. The thought excited her, repulsed her.
Halisstra saw her course clear before her, a path as straight as the line of souls, but she still felt lost. She was marked by a goddess, by two goddesses, and at the moment she was not certain whose mark she preferred.
The feeling shamed her.
She felt both Lolth and Eilistraee pulling at her, tugging her in opposite directions, stretching her as thin as parchment. Lolth's reawakening had roused in Halisstra something she had meant to leave for dead in the silver moonlight of the World Above, when she had given herself to the
Dancing Goddess.
But it had not died, not really. Could it ever? Lolth's inexplicable pull on Halisstra remained, a troublesome, seductive memory of power, blood, and authority. Halisstra had only her infant faith in Eilistraee with which to shield herself from a lifetime of indoctrination. She did not know if it would be enough. She did not know if she wanted it to be enough.
She had spent her life in service to the Spider Queen-killing, ruling-and had turned her back on all of it in less than a fortnight. How could that have been a genuine conversion? She had been
Houseless, her city destroyed, everything she knew gone. Turning to Eilistraee had been an impulse, almost flippant, and driven by fear of an uncertain future.
Hadn't it?
She did not know, and the uncertainty shook her.
Even while Eilistraeen prayers filled Halisstra's mind, she found herself looking longingly at the manifestations of Lolth's reawakened power that surged through the endless gray of the
Astral.
After the Spider Queen's power had traversed the line of souls and revivified them, the Astral
Plane itself had exploded in chaos. Maelstroms of colored energy formed here and there in the aether, churning vortexes of violence that spun rapid circles for a few heartbeats or a few hours and dissipated into glorious, acrid showers of sparks. Jagged bolts of black and red energy several leagues in length intermittently knifed across the void, ripped it into pieces for a moment,
and raised the hairs on Halisstra's arms and head. Lolth's power fairly saturated the plane.
And it felt different than Halisstra remembered-more vital, but also somehow incomplete.
Halisstra found the flashing storms of power a tantalizing suggestion of the Spider Queen's might, a seductive reminder of different prayers, of a different kind of worship. Lolth's power was everywhere around her. Lolth herself seemed everywhere around her, knowing her, tempting her, whispering to her.
And always the whispers were the same: Yor'thae.
The word was promise, threat, and imprecation all at once.
Halisstra did not know whether to smile or cry each time she heard the word sigh across the
Astral winds. As a bae'qeshel, she was trained in lost lore and knew what the word meant. Its etymology came from two words in High Drow: Yorn, meaning "servant of the goddess"; and
Orthae, meaning "sacred." The Yor'thae was Lolth's Chosen, her sacred servant, the vessel through which Lolth would … do something.