Quenthel Baenre was there, she knew. So was Danifae.
Her heart began to race.
The souls swirled around the demons as they descended toward a hole in the mountains that could only be the Pass of the Soulreaver.
Halisstra and her fellow priestesses sped onward, slowly gaining.
Flying in shadow form near Menzoberranzan's stalactite-dotted ceiling, Gromph reached
House Agrach Dyrr. Looking down, he saw that little had changed from when he had scried the fortress an hour or so before.
Agrach Dyrr's defenders still paced the tall, stalagmite walls, peering down through their fortifications at the attackers. The violet-plumed helms of the officers and the blades of the soldiers' polearms and swords bobbed along behind the crenellations. Banners with House
Agrach Dyrr's heraldry festooned the walls, charred but largely whole. Scores of orc and bugbear crossbowmen bolstered the drow forces.
Gromph could not smell the battlefield due to his incorporeality, but he could see the clouds of black smoke gathered near the cavern's roof and could imagine the stink.
On the plateau before the stalagmite castle gathered the massed forces of House Xorlarrin.
The army numbered perhaps eight hundred all told and encircled the complex at a distance of a long crossbow shot from the moat-filled chasm. Gromph noted the makeup of the Xorlarrin soldiery: half a score drow wizards, a few hundred drow warriors, two score war-spiders, and numerous platoons of lesser creatures, all of whom stood assembled and ready. Several siege engines fashioned of magically hardened crystal and iron stood amidst the ranks.
All was quiet. The Xorlarrin appeared willing to wait for reinforcements before making another attempt on Agrach Dyrr. Gromph was mildly surprised. He knew Matron Mother Zeerith to be as ambitious for her House as any matron mother. He would have expected her to hoard the glory of Dyrr's capture all to herself. Yasraena must have been mounting an impressive defense to so temper Xorlarrin ambition.
Gromph floated down and saw scores of bodies and body parts floating in the water-filled chasm that surrounded the manse's walls. A few toothy reptiles-giant aquatic lizards, no doubt-
swam in the moat and fed on the remains. Gromph saw that the dead ogres and their battering ram, which he had seen while scrying the House, no longer lay before the adamantine doors. No doubt some Agrach Dyrr necromancer had animated their corpses and turned them back against the Xorlarrin.
Until he had evaluated the fortress's network of wards up close, Gromph dared go no closer than the line delineated by the moat. With a minor effort of will, he activated the permanent dweomer on his eyes that allowed him to see magical emanations.
House Agrach Dyrr lit up like the sun of the Green Fields, the ridiculous "halfling heaven" to where the lichdrow had banished him during their spell duel. Gromph had expected as much, but seeing the wards of House Agrach Dyrr through the muted lens of his scrying glass had been something different than seeing the blazing spiderweb of defenses in person. Unlike the rest of the physical world, which appeared to his transformed eyes only in shades of gray, the wards blazed red and blue. Their power reached across the planes and would affect even incorporeal creatures.
More out of pride than necessity, Gromph decided that he would walk through the front doors, just to spite Yasraena. In truth, it did not matter where he made his assault. The wards and defenses were shaped as spheres, concentric circles of power, not walls. They covered every avenue of approach. He would face everything that protected the House whether he attempted the adamantine doors or the lizard stable wall.
He sat cross-legged on a large rock, near the far end of the adamantine bridge. He was perched almost exactly halfway between House Agrach Dyrr and the besieging Xorlarrin army.
He was pleased to see that his presence went unnoted by both the Dyrr and Xorlarrin forces. He knew that the mages among them would have various divinations in effect, including some that would allow them to see invisible creatures. Gromph's nondetection ward must have thwarted them. The victory still brought him only small pleasure.
As a preliminary measure, he withdrew his ocular and held the milky gem to his eye. Though incorporeal, the magic of the ocular continued to work. Looking through the lens of the gem,
Gromph saw things as they truly were-undisguised by illusion, disguise, or shapeshifting magic.
The ocular's power could have been thwarted by spells like those which protected Gromph, but such protections were atypical.
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.