Methodically, he moved his scrying eye through each of the buildings of House Agrach Dyrr,
one room at a time.
Nauzhror crowded his head closer over the image until a look from Gromph backed him off.
"Apologies, Archmage," Nauzhror muttered.
Gromph moved the image through dining halls, shrines, training rooms, bedrooms,
laboratories, slave quarters, kitchens, amphitheatres, always seeking an invisible wall that would block his scrying eye. Troops, mages, and priestesses hurried through the halls. He could not hear them, though their expressions showed their agitation. He did not let his scrying eye linger long on any one person, lest they sense the divination.
Sweat from his forehead dripped onto the scrying crystal, blurring the image. Prath wiped it away with the sleeve of his piwafwi.
Gromph moved the image down another hallway, past another group of-
"Larikal," he said, recognizing the short-haired, uncomely Third Daughter of House Agrach
Dyrr. She led a group of three male mages that Gromph recognized as graduates of Sorcere. He let the image linger on the group for a time. His spell showed that each of them bore a variety of magical items: wands, rings, cloak pins, brooches, a staff in Larikal's hand.
"Geremis, Viis, and Araag," Nauzhror said, naming the wizards. "Sub par students, the lot of them."
Gromph nodded and kept the scrying eye with them, keeping a mental count in his head; he moved the image off of each person before he reached twenty.
Larikal barked orders, but Gromph could not read their lips. The mages moved from room to room, hallway to hallway, casting spells and concentrating for a time. Gromph kept the scrying eye just above and behind them, each in turn. Though he could not hear the words uttered by the mages, he studied their gestures.
"What are they doing?" Prath asked.
"Casting divinations," Gromph said, a fraction of a heartbeat before Nauzhror said the same thing.
"Powerful divinations," Nauzhror added, watching as Geremis finished his gesticulating and put a hand to his brow in concentration.
Realization struck Gromph. "They are looking for the phylactery," he said. "They must be."
All of them understood the implication: Yasraena did not have the phylactery in her possession, and she too thought it was hidden somewhere in the House.
"A good sign," Nauzhror said.
Gromph nodded. He needed to hurry.
Seeing nothing else of import, he moved the scrying eye away from Larikal and her pet wizards and continued to move through the Agrach Dyrr complex. The process was time-
consuming but he endured. He took the time to study each room with care, to cast additional divinations designed to root out the lichdrow's masking spells. Again and again he found nothing,
nothing but a desperate drow House under siege and fighting for its life.
"Could the phylactery not be in the fortress?" Nauzhror finally asked, after hours of fruitless searching.
Gromph didn't even bother to look up. "Silence," he commanded.
It had to be there. The lichdrow would not have allowed the phylactery to be far from him.
The risk was too great.
Gromph continued the search. He scoured each building thoroughly. In an isolated portion of the complex, he found the lichdrow's alchemical laboratory, library, and quarters. Shimmering gem golems carved in the shape of drow wizards stood rigid guard at every door.
"His laboratory," Prath said, eyeing the uncountable number of beakers, braziers, chemicals,
and components. The room was disordered, as though someone had searched it roughly.
Thinking that the lichdrow's laboratory or quarters were a likely hiding place for the phylactery, Gromph moved carefully through the lichdrow's wards and pored over the rooms. His frustration mounted when he found nothing. He went over it again, certain that somewhere was the telltale spoor of a masking spell. Again he found nothing.
He was exhausting his spells, exhausting his body. Between his spell duel with the lichdrow and his scrying of the fortress, he had spent fully half of his repertory. If he did not find the phylactery soon, he would have to rest, restudy his spellbooks, re-memorize the incantations that slipped from his fatigued mind one by one as he cast them. By then, Yasraena might have located the phylactery herself.
He sighed, mopped his forehead, and moved on. He had only the temple to Lolth and a few other structures remaining.
The temple first.
With minimal effort, he slipped past the elaborate wards that protected the temple of Lolth.
No doubt Yasraena herself had cast them. Gromph thought her spellcraft paltry. Her wards were no match for him.
The interior of the temple appeared much the same as the temples to Lolth maintained by other great Houses. A sacrificial altar, limned in violet faerie fire and dotted with candles, sat in the apse at one end of the large, oval nave. Behind the altar towered the enormous sculpture of a spider, carved in lifelike detail from smooth basalt or perhaps jet.
Gromph knew it to be a guardian golem that would animate should anyone enter the temple without authorization.
High-backed, ornate stone benches lined the nave, facing the apse. Transparent gossamer curtains, made to look like spiderwebs, hung across the temple's faerie fire limned windows.
Spider motifs appeared on everything, from the black altar cloth to the carved door jambs to the armrests of the benches. Spiderwebs hung in every corner, the silvery threads and their small black creators regarded as blessings from Lolth.
A depiction of the Spider Queen in her hybrid form-a beautiful drow female head and torso jutting from the bloated body of a giant black widow-decorated the underside of the temple's domed ceiling. Gromph wondered in passing whether Lolth appeared the same since her return,
whether Lolth was the same.
Almost the whole of the temple glowed in Gromph's sight, alight with enhancements and protections cast by Lolth's priestesses. Otherwise, the nave was empty.
Gromph blew out a frustrated sigh and prepared to move on, but something rankled him. He kept the scrying eye on the temple, looking, thinking.
"What is it, Archmage?" asked Prath, excitement in his voice. "Have you found it?"
"Silence," Nauzhror admonished the apprentice, though the Master's voice too betrayed a certain eagerness.
Gromph shook his head. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but. .
The spider golem!
His scrying eye did not show it as magical, yet it should have detected as such-strongly-unless the Agrach Dyrr priestesses had replaced the former golem with a normal statue. He deemed that unlikely.
An excited charge ran through him. He caused the scrying eye to draw nearer to the golem until its image filled the viewing crystal. He pored over it, inch by inch. Was it standing atop a secret panel in the floor? He cast another series of divinations, attempting to get even an inkling of whether or not the golem's magic was being masked.
At first he met with no success, but he persisted.
Finally, and for only an instant, he caught a flash of a faint red glow, like light squeezed from under a closed door. In that single instant, the golem flared in his sight, as befitted the latent magic that would animate it, but a still brighter glow flared from within the golem.
Nauzhror smiled, Prath gasped, and Gromph could not contain a chuckle.
"The golem," Nauzhror breathed.
The Master of Sorcere sounded as exhausted as Gromph, though he had done nothing other than observe.
"The golem is masked," Gromph said, nodding. He could not believe the lichdrow's temerity.