Tangled webs - Elaine Cunningham [159]
But now she made her way to Ulf's cottage to once again enchant the amulet with stored magic. She admonished the shaman's family to leave her to her privacy, but this was hardly a needed precaution. News of Dagmar's treachery and the girl's subsequent imprisonment had bowed all of Ulf's household under a heavy weight of shame, grief, and helpless frustration. Even Sanja's scolding tongue was stilled as she struggled to accept that y graine-the daughter most favored and long presumed dead-lived in horrible captivity, and that the quiet and biddable Dagmar could harbor such deadly ambitions.
Alone in the silence of the loft, Liriel took the Windwalker from its hiding place and opened the book of rune lore to a spell she had used previously to capture the magic of the Underdark in the amulet. Hours passed as she studied anew the difficult spell, adding to it the changes that would store, if temporarily, a very different type of magic. When at last all was ready, Liriel removed the tiny chisel from the sheath. As she chanted the words of the spell, she carefully poured a drop of Fyodor's jhuild-the firewine used in the rituals that brought the battle frenzy upon Rashemen's berserkers-into the sheath.
Once before she had considered this spell. In an attempt to save Fyodor from a killing frenzy, Liriel had been willing to empty the Windwalker of her Underdark magic so his berserker wrath might be contained within. But she and Fyodor had fallen under attack before she could cast the spell. When he'd recovered from his battle wounds and learned what she had nearly done, he'd exacted a promise from her that she would never sacrifice her drow powers for him. And there the matter had remained.
Until now. Liriel's quest for power had been answered at the foot ofY ggsdrasil's Child, and she no longer needed the Windwalker to hold her innate drow magic. It was hers to command for as long as she might live. But she dared not carry the power of Fyodor's berserker magic with her to her next battle, for fear it might be wrested from her hands. The spellcasting and the ritual took most of the night, but at last Liriel held the enchanted Windwalker in her hands, taking comfort from the captured power thrumming through the ancient gold. She tucked the amulet back into its hiding place-she could not give it to Fyodor just yet, for fear of alerting him to her purpose-and then she crept silently from the sleeping cottage.
The drow made her way along the shore and then climbed the steep bluff that led to the ruins of inthar. The ancient keep loomed overhead, secret and forbidding. As Liriel walked through the ruins, she murmured the words of a clerical prayer, one of the most powerful and deadly spells in a priestess's arsenal. It was a prayer seldom granted, for few were the drow who were powerful enough to withstand it. It was a portal of a different sort, one that opened the priestess to the pure power of Lloth.
it was the offer of her body and mind as avatar to the Queen of Chaos.
This was a desperate measure, but Liriel saw no other choice. She had faced the banshee before, and she understood that only two things could defeat its restless spirit: a magic that could dispel evil, or an evil power greater than that of the undead drow. As a priestess ofLloth, she did not dare to dispel evil; all that was left for her to do was to channel it.
And so the young drow sank ever deeper into the source ofher darkest power. The Spider Queen looked kindly upon the prayer ofher young priestess, for it pleased the goddess to reclaim the spirit of the ancient drow who had, in banshee form, eluded fate for many centuries. Through Liriel, Lloth would wrest the banshee from the portal and spirit it