Sacrifice of the Widow_ Lady Penitent - Lisa Smedman [6]
Sensing Qilué scrying her, Lolth’s priestess stared a challenge at her observer. Wild laughter, joyous and cruel, bubbled from the font as she began a magical attack.
Qilué had seen enough. She ended the scrying.
One of the priestesses of Eilistraee who had waited with Qilué rose to her feet. “Lady Qilué?” she asked. She sounded nervous, uncertain. “Is something wrong?”
The other priestesses also rose, some whispering tense prayers, others silent with dread anticipation.
Qilué closed her eyes. Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “Halisstra has failed,” she told them. “Lolth lives. Her Silence is broken.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Month of Uktar, the Year of Risen Elfkin (1375 DR)
Q’arlynd stood, hands laced together behind his back, at the broken lip of what had once been a broad street of calcified webbing. Across the wide chasm he could see a jagged protrusion, the spot where the street had anchored to the far wall. Similar protrusions dotted the walls above and below him. The city that had filled the vast cavern had been more than a hundred layers deep. This once-intricate stone web lay in a shattered heap far below, together with fragments of the noble Houses, temples, and academies that had hung from it like glowing pendants. The magical glow that had suffused the stone was all but extinguished, hidden under the scab of mold and fungi that had grown in the three years since the city’s fall.
He shivered. The air was cool and moist, humidified by the constant trickle of water that dampened the cavern walls. He’d grown up in Ched Nasad, but a century of life there still hadn’t inured him to the climate. He could feel the chill deep in his bones.
Ched Nasad had once been home to nearly thirty thousand drow. Perhaps one-tenth of that number remained, scrabbling out an existence in the ruins while trying to salvage whatever the duergar stonefire bombs hadn’t burned. And fighting. Always fighting. Only a handful of the hundred or so noble Houses had survived the fall of the city—Houses of no consequence whose strongholds had been at the less desirable, outer edges of the web, against the damp cavern walls. They squabbled amongst themselves still, unable to come together in an alliance that might rid what remained of the city of its Jaezred Chaulssin masters.
Somewhere under that dark jumble of stone lay the ruins of House Melarn. It had been the first of the noble Houses to fall, and it had taken a good chunk of the city down with it, which was fitting, since House Melarn’s matron—Q’arlynd’s mother—had been murdered by those below her. That murder had set the other eleven noble Houses squabbling with one another, rendering them unable to meet the duergar threat.
“Divided we fall,” Q’arlynd murmured.
He lifted his left arm and stared at the House insignia he wore on a wide leather band around his wrist. Carved into the adamantine oval was House Melarn’s symbol, a glyph vaguely reminiscent of a stick-figure person, arms bent and one leg raised as if dancing. The insignia counted for little now. Q’arlynd was the only one of his House to survive, and he was male. Since inheritance and title passed through the female line, he could make no claim on any of the property that had been salvaged from the ruins of his former home. He’d had to watch, powerless, as it was looted by others.
Lowering his hand, he leaned forward to stare down at the bulge, low on the opposite wall, that was the domicile of House Teh’Kinrellz—the House he had reluctantly offered his services to after the city’s fall. Below it was a depression in the rubble: the salvage excavation. The uncovered stones glowed faintly with faerie fire, a jumble of lavender, indigo, and crimson that looked like an iridescent puddle from above. A platform slowly rose over the hole as it was winched up from a high ledge. The dozen dark shapes slumped on it would be the slaves, exhausted from a cycle of digging.
The effort