Vhok pulled the magical wad of cloth from his pack, picked as level a spot as he could find on the tunnel floor, and cast it to the ground, uttering a command word in a harsh, forgotten language.
The cloth unfolded itself time and again until finally it sprung up into the pennoned, red-and-
gold command tent that Nimor knew well. Vhok gestured him in, his breastplate shining in the torchlight. He kept one hand on his blade.
Nimor furled his wings and entered. Within, he found the tent fully furnished with a fine wooden table, a luxurious divan, and a plush couch. The decanter of what Nimor assumed to be brandy-one of Vhok's indulgences-sat on the table with two empty glasses beside it.
"Furnished and stocked," Nimor said, turning a circle. "An excellent magic item, Kaanyr. You need only dancing girls. Speaking of which, where is your little winged sweetmeat?"
Vhok snorted derisively, but Nimor heard the affectation in it.
"Gone," Vhok said. "At least for now."
"Ah, fickle women," Nimor said, and decided not to press further. "May I sit?" he asked.
Vhok indicated the couch. Nimor crossed the tent and collapsed onto it.
"We did not have to lose this fight, Kaanyr," he said.
"Only one of us actually fought this fight," Vhok answered. "The other fled when things got difficult."
Nimor struggled to retain his smile.
From outside the tent, near the flap, Nimor's keen hearing betrayed the quiet scrape of a boot on stone-Rorgak, no doubt.
Only when he had full control of his tone of voice did Nimor say, "Lolth's return alone saved
Menzoberranzan. That and an unfortunate choice in allies."
Vhok looked at him sharply.
"Not you," Nimor said. "The duergar."
Vhok's expression relaxed and he nodded. "True, that," he said.
To Nimor's surprise, the cambion poured two small chalices of the liquor from the decanter and offered one to Nimor.
Nimor took it, but he did not drink. Vhok remained standing.
"Our little princeling is dead," Nimor said, swirling the brandy in his goblet.
Vhok raised an eyebrow. "You?"
Nimor nodded. When Vhok sipped from his brandy, Nimor did the same. The liquor had traveled well.
"Serves the little fool right," the cambion said. "Duergar are useless creatures."
"We are in agreement on that at least, Kaanyr," Nimor said. "The gray dwarves are a race of imbeciles." After a pause, he added, "I tracked you down to thank you for warning me of Lolth's return during my battle with the Archmage."
Vhok smiled around his goblet and said, "We were allies."
"Indeed. And as far as I'm concerned, we still are."
When Vhok did not reply, Nimor filled the silence by raising his glass in a toast and saying,
"To grand undertakings."
Vhok raised his own glass half-heartedly and took a sip, eyeing Nimor over the rim.
Afterward, he asked, "Is there something else, drowling? Or did you return only to express your gratitude and drink my brandy?"
Nimor decided to take Vhok's obnoxiousness as a jest and laughed it off.
He leaned forward to refill his chalice. As he poured, he said,
"There will be other battles, Kaanyr. Perhaps not tomorrow or the next day, but someday. As I
said, I still regard you as an ally. We were effective together and would have triumphed but for some unanticipated contingencies."
" 'Unanticipated contingencies'?" Vhok said with a snort. "That's what you call Lolth's return?"
Nimor shrugged, sat back, and took another gulp of brandy. "Call it what you will," he answered. "Do you deny that we made an effective team?"
Vhok considered it while he drank.
"I don't deny it," said the cambion, "but at this moment, I wish we'd never met and that I'd never seen that cursed drow hive."
Nimor nodded as though in understanding.
"But feelings change with time and distance," Vhok said. "And I am always open to a future opportunity. Provided it involves no duergar."
He laughed and Nimor joined him.
That was the answer Nimor had wanted to hear. Vhok could be a valuable ally in his quest to regain his status as Anointed Blade.
"I know how to find you," Nimor said.
Vhok set down his chalice and stared at Nimor, his smile hard.
"A threat?" Vhok asked.
Again the shuffle from outside the tent.
"An observation," Nimor replied. "We'll see each other again, Vhok. I have no doubt of it."
With that, Nimor activated his ring, slipped back into the Shadow Fringe, and left
Menzoberranzan and its environs far behind.
Prath and Nauzhror watched, their eyes fixed on the image in the scrying crystal as Gromph began his attack on the wards of House Agrach Dyrr.
Gromph whispered the incantations to a few preparatory spells meant to augment his magical sight, then began.
He found it surprisingly easy to breach the outer network of wards that surrounded the fortress. Without disrupting the grid, without breaking any of the interconnected lines of power,
he gently bent a few aside, created a conceptual opening in the layers of the net, and slipped his scrying eye through.
"Well done, Archmage," said Nauzhror, exhaling loudly. Prath only smiled.
A second layer of interconnected wards awaited him-stiffer magic that he couldn't bend without triggering alarms. After a few moments of study, he opted for a different approach. But he would need to work quickly.
Conscious that he was sweating, Gromph cast two spells in such rapid succession that they might as well have been a single incantation. First, he sealed off a tiny section of the network.
With his next breath, he rapidly dispelled the sealed section, opening a hole in the net, and sent the scrying eye through. He turned his perspective and held his breath as he released his first spell.
He watched in alarm as the entire network quivered, the interconnected flow of magic momentarily disrupted by the tiny hole he had fashioned.
He allowed himself to exhale slowly as the magic redirected itself around the hole and flowed anew. It had self-corrected. Gromph had succeeded. He was in.
"Daring," Nauzhror breathed.
Gromph moved the scrying eye to ground level, within the walls of House Agrach Dyrr. He took a moment to gather himself.
He knew that he would face only pockets of wards of varying power, sub-networks guarding this or that room or building. Most of them were unconnected to the larger grid of defenses.
He held onto the image while he took one hand from the crystal and drained the rest of his mushroom wine. Prath looked around the office, found the bottle on a nearby table. He retrieved it, returned, and refilled the chalice.
Gromph moved through and around each of the wards in turn. He could have dispelled them easily enough, but eventually that would have been discovered. For those he could not work through, he dispelled them, but after examining the building or room to his satisfaction, he replaced the ward with a similar one of his own casting.
"No tracks," Prath said.
"No tracks," Gromph agreed. Not yet, anyway.
Presumably, the magic shielding the lichdrow's phylactery was masked from his scrying eye.
He would «see» it only when he bumped up against it. Accordingly, he could locate the phylactery only through the process of elimination-eventually, he would attempt to view an area that appeared open to scrying but which he would not, in fact, be able to scry. That would be where the phylactery was located.
Of course it was also possible that the phylactery was not in the stalagmite fortress at all. If so, Gromph would never locate it before the lichdrow reincorporated. The thought gave him pause. He put it out of his mind.