Extinction - Lisa Smedman [103]
All of the other males Halisstra had lain with had been eager, yes, but an undercurrent of fear ran just beneath the surface of their lust. Perhaps it was because they knew they were being taken by a priestess of Lolth and feared that Halisstra, like the spiders she held sacred, might casually kill them and cast them aside. When she had first started kissing Ryld, Halisstra had seen a fleeting trace of that fear in him, but then it had disappeared. At some point during their lovemaking, he had surrendered-not to fear, or even to Halisstra, but to something larger. It was not so much that she had taken him. Instead he had given himself.
That realization acquired, Halisstra's mind drifted on to other recent memories. One of them, harsh and insistent, rose to the fore: Seyll. Or rather, her death at Halisstra's hands. Strangely, that image was garbled. Halisstra's memory of Seyll, dying, blood leaking from her side into the stream in which she lay had somehow become confused with that of Seyll in the moment just before she died, when the priestess had turned and was reaching out with both hands, preparing to help Halisstra cross the stream. In that false recollection, Seyll was reaching up toward Halisstra and speaking-whereas in truth, Seyll had actually been lying so still that Halisstra had thought her already dead. And the words were wrong-they were not the words of hope that Seyll had offered after Halisstra had dragged her "body" from the stream and begun stripping it of its weapons and armor. Instead they seemed to be a message, and an urgent one.
Halisstra, still deep in Reverie, leaned forward to hear it.
You will need the sword, Seyll whispered.
Halisstra, her eyes still closed, patted the floor beside her and her fingers came to rest upon the broken-tipped songsword, nested in its scabbard.
"I have it," she whispered aloud.
In the dream-memory, Seyll shook her head.
Not that one. Blood bubbled from her lips as she spoke. Only with the Crescent Blade can you defeat her.
"Defeat who?" Halisstra asked. "I don't-"
It was lost on the Cold Field, Seyll interrupted, her voice gurgling as her breathing became ragged. She was close to death, almost unable to speak. The priestess was carrying it… and was slain. The… worm has it now.
Halisstra puzzled over that one: was it "worm" Seyll had said-or "wyrm?" She decided it must have been wyrm. Dragons were known to covet treasure-especially magical weapons. And judging by the reverential way in which Seyll had said the words "Crescent Blade," magical was exactly what the sword was.
Seyll was still speaking-so faintly chat Halisstra could barely hear her.
Find the Crescent Blade… and use it… to defeat her.
"Defeat who?" Halisstra cried.
From beside her came a swift, rustling noise. Her Reverie broken, Halisstra opened her eyes and saw Ryld in a ready crouch, Splitter in hand. He glanced swiftly around the darkened room, then at Halisstra, eyebrows raised in a silent question.
"It was nothing," she answered. "I was in Reverie. It was just a dream."
Ryld relaxed and slid the greatsword back into its sheath. His eyes lingered on her, and Halisstra remembered that she was still naked. He did not look respectfully away, as was the custom for a drow male. Instead his eyebrows raised a second time, and a fire danced in his eyes.
Halisstra shook her head.
"Later," she told him. "I need to speak to Uluyara about something."
Leaping to her feet, she hurriedly clothed herself, then slipped out into the night.
Chapter Twenty-six
Gromph strode up to the captain who stood surveying the silent battlefield, arms folded across his blackened mithral plate mail. Andzrel's eyes held a satisfied glint as he took in the shattered mushroom forest and the tanarukk corpses that littered the ground like felled stems.
"Drag the bodies back to the corrals," the Baenre weapons