Sacrifice of the Widow_ Lady Penitent - Lisa Smedman [106]
“Abyss take him!” he howled. Rising to his feet, he strode toward the traitor and gave his body a savage kick. Then he turned away, his hands balled into fists.
As Malvag raged in silence, Valdar kneeled beside the traitor’s body and removed the mask, revealing a male with a nose that canted to one side: a break, long since healed. He fingered the mask, spoke a prayer of detection, then nodded to himself.
“What are you doing?” Malvag snarled.
Valdar nodded at the body. “Looking for something that will tell us who he really was.” He pointed at the mask. “That’s no holy symbol, even though it does seem to hold a trapped soul.” He tilted his head, musing aloud. “Is he one of Lolth’s minions, perhaps?”
“What does it matter?” Malvag screamed. “He’s ruined everything. Without Urz, we can’t proceed. High magic requires a minimum of three clerics, working together, to cast it.”
Valdar shrugged. He continued searching the body. His sleeves quickly became dark with blood. He pulled two rings out of a blood-wet shirt pocket and held them on the palm of one hand, poking at them with a fingertip. “Do we need three clerics to open the gate?” he asked slowly. “Or three spellcasters?”
“What does it matter?” Malvag paced back and forth, trying to contain his fury. Unlike Valdar, he hadn’t bothered to heal his wounds yet. His skin still felt hot and tight where the lightning bolts had struck his chest. It hurt to breathe.
Valdar jingled the rings together on his palm. “These are master and slave rings,” he said. He pointed at the body. “And he’s a wizard. If it’s three spellcasters that are needed to conjure the gate, we can force him to participate.” He jingled the rings again. “With these.”
Malvag halted abruptly and whirled in place. His eyes met Valdar’s. “Slave rings,” he whispered.
Valdar’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “Yes.”
Malvag glanced at the drift disc where the prayer scroll waited. What Valdar was suggesting would be extremely difficult. Malvag would have to control the wizard’s mouth while speaking the words of the prayer himself at the same time, but perhaps it could be done. He’d read the spell in silence enough times that he could have recited it aloud from rote.
“Raise him from the dead,” he told Valdar. “The instant the gate is open, and Vhaeraun passes through it, we’ll kill the infiltrator. Permanently, this time.”
Qilué grasped the edges of her scrying font, staring down with intense concentration into the holy water that filled it. The wide alabaster bowl glowed like a harvest moon from the light that filled the room in which it stood—the silver fire that poured off Qilué’s body like light from a torch. Qilué was barely aware of Jasmir, the moon elf priestess standing behind her. The scenes unfolding in the holy water that served as her window on the world beyond were deeply disturbing.
“Send another six priestesses and two score warriors to the Chondalwood,” Qilué commanded.
The pale-skinned Jasmir whispered a sending, relaying the command. She was fully dressed for battle in leather armor whose spiral patterns matched the tattoos on her forearms. Her long white hair was in two braids, tightly bound into a bun at the back of her neck.
Qilué stared into the scrying bowl, tense with anticipation. It was focused on the shrine in the Chondalwood, far to the southeast. There Eilistraee’s priestesses fought a bloody battle against driders who had boiled up out of the Underdark without warning—just as they had in the Misty Forest last month. Even as Qilué watched, a drider knocked a priestess to the ground with a web and landed on her back, opening its spider fangs wide to bite.
Qilué stabbed a finger down into the water and sang a note that was strident and shrill. The drider shook his head, disoriented. As it did, a sword came dancing through the air, slashing the monster nearly in half. A priestess ran into view behind