He eyed the complex and saw nothing out of the ordinary except that two putative male drow officers were actually polymorphed demons. Gromph’s magical lens showed their actual form, that of towering, muscular, bipedal, vulturelike creatures with hateful red eyes and large feathered wings.
Vrocks, Gromph knew. Yasraena must have bought the services of a pair of the fiends.
Gromph pocketed the ocular and softly spoke the words to a spell that modified his magic sensing vision so that it excluded from its effect the anti-scrying wards and the spells that offered House Dyrr structural reinforcement. For his purposes, those spells were irrelevant. He was interested only in those wards that would prevent his physical intrusion into the complex and those that would kill or capture him once he was within.
When the modification took effect, perhaps half of the lines of power vanished, though the fortress still glowed brightly, encased in a net of red lines. Spell traps lurked within the network, killing spells that would be triggered by the breach or inartful dispelling of a ward. For a time, Gromph used a series of divining spells to examine the intricate lattice of spells visible from where he sat. He wanted to understand the interconnections between the wards before he tried to penetrate them.
Gromph would have to peel the wards back, spherical layer by layer, as though flensing a slave to the bone.
He pulled out his eye-capped wands and with their more pointed divining spells deepened his analysis. Among the multitude of spell traps set within the network he discovered the tell-tale traces of magical symbols—one of pain, two of death. He confirmed the presence of glyphs that emitted fire and lightning, forcecages to trap him, contingency spells to bind his soul, barriers that forbade passage in any physical or incorporeal form.
And he saw something else. Knifing through the entire network was the thin, almost unnoticeable line of a ward that tied all of the other wards together and that augmented them all—a master ward.
Gromph had no doubt that the lichdrow had cast it.
Essentially, Dyrr had tied a knot around a knot, lacing his master ward through the interstices of the other wards until all of them were irretrievably intertwined. As a result, the ordinary protections put in place over the years by the various Agrach Dyrr matron mothers would, upon being triggered, become all the more deadly from an influx of power from the lichdrow’s spell.
Gromph studied the line of the master ward more closely. He pulled out another wand and used it to carefully analyze the ward’s dweomer. Its complexity suggested that it did more than simply augment the other wards, but Gromph’s spells could not divine anything more, at least not from where he sat. He would have to get within the ward network itself before he could do a more detailed analysis from another angle.
He sheathed his wand and frowned. His ignorance of the master ward’s full purpose gave him pause but he knew there was nothing for it. He could not turn back, and delay was his enemy.
He floated to his feet and faced his first challenge, a simple detection spell that would alert the caster if anyone, in any form, crossed the adamantine bridge. Gromph looked along the ward’s bulky, glowing lines, saw no spell trap connected to it, and dispelled it with a whispered counterspell.
He flew across the adamantine bridge. Blood stained it in several places. From atop the walls, Dyrr soldiers and the two demons looked through and past him. To them, he did not exist. He was alone with the wards.
Hovering before the gate, he studied the lines of magic crisscrossing its surface. The lines not only prevented physical passage, their pattern formed two magical symbols that would kill anyone whose flesh touched the doors without first speaking the password, having the appropriate item on their person, or the right blood in their veins. A further analysis with one of his wands showed Gromph that the symbols were permanent. They did not vanish upon a single discharge. Instead, they would continue to reset and kill unless they were eliminated.
He spoke the words to a counterspell and focused the magic of the spell into his forefinger.
Gently, he ran his shadowy fingertip over the lines of the first symbol. Though his finger was incorporeal, the magic reached into the physical world. Where his finger touched, his spell erased the symbol. Soon, it was effaced.
Gromph cast another counterspell and repeated the process with the second symbol. It proved more stubborn than the first. Gromph’s magic met the magic of the symbol and did nothing. His counterspell had no effect. Biting back his frustration, he prepared another spell, a more powerful, focused version of the counter.
Sudden motion from above drew his eye. A swarm of crossbow bolts rained down at something behind him. Gromph turned to see a half-score of giant trolls charging across the bridge. They wore piecemeal armor strapped haphazardly to their gray-green, warty hides. The smallest stood three times as tall as Gromph, with over-long limbs, a mouthful of fangs, finger length claws, and rippling muscles. In their huge hands, the giant trolls held a mammoth stalagmite, shaped by magic into a fearsome battering ram. Gromph’s magic-detecting vision told him that the ram had been powerfully enspelled.
Green disks of magical energy hovered over the huge creatures—cast by distant Xorlarrin wizards—protecting the trolls from the rain of bolts that poured from the walls. In ten strides, the giant trolls had crossed half the bridge.
From the Xorlarrin lines behind them, a platoon of orog crossbow-men and their shield bearers ran up to the edge of the moat-chasm and fired a volley of arrows at the defenders on the wall. An answering volley streaked down at them. Fire and lightning fired from Dyrr wands exploded in the midst of the orogs, and several of the bestial creatures burst into flames or exploded into pieces.
Drow soldiers stood lined and ready fifty paces behind the orogs, ready to charge forward should the giant trolls penetrate the doors.
The huge creatures lumbered forward, the bridge vibrating under their weight. Fire exploded in their midst but did not divert their charge.
A wall of conjured ice, taller than the giant trolls and an arm’s span thick, formed before the creatures, blocking their rush across the bridge. They did not even slow. In stride, they swung the magical stalagmite ram into the wall, and the ice exploded in a blast of shards. They charged onward.
Cursing, Gromph started to fly upward. Though incorporeal, magical energies could still harm him, as could appropriately enchanted weapons. He did not want to get caught in any crossfire.
A cloud of vapor—poisonous vapor, Gromph assumed—formed before the doors. The giant trolls gulped clean air and charged in, swinging the huge ram as they did—right at Gromph.
He dodged aside but his incorporeal flight was cumbersome and slow. The magical ram clipped his shoulder, and its enchantments reached through realities to affect his insubstantial body. Agony exploded in his brain. The impact spun him in a circle and knocked him toward the gate and the killing symbol.
He struggled to right himself and contorted his body to avoid contact with the magically charged gates. Gromph regained control a heartbeat before careening into the gate, and he flew upward and off to the side of the bridge, hovering over the moat chasm. His entire right side flared with pain, but his ring began immediately to repair the wound.
Still holding their breath, the giant trolls reared the ram back and slammed it again into the doors. Sparks flew from its tip, flecks of stone showered the bridge, but the adamantine doors showed not even a scratch. More and more crossbow bolts poured down on the trolls, some getting through the magical shields and finding flesh. One of the creatures, struck in the cheek by a bolt, exclaimed in pain and inadvertently drew a breath of poisonous air. He fell writhing to the bridge and was dead in moments.