His spell showed that each of them bore a variety of magical items: wands, rings, cloak pins, brooches, a staff in Larikal's hand.
"Geremis, Viis, and Araag," Nauzhror said, naming the wizards. "Sub par students, the lot of them."
Gromph nodded and kept the scrying eye with them, keeping a mental count in his head; he moved the image off of each person before he reached twenty.
Larikal barked orders, but Gromph could not read their lips. The mages moved from room to room, hallway to hallway, casting spells and concentrating for a time. Gromph kept the scrying eye just above and behind them, each in turn. Though he could not hear the words uttered by the mages, he studied their gestures.
"What are they doing?" Prath asked.
"Casting divinations," Gromph said, a fraction of a heartbeat before Nauzhror said the same thing.
"Powerful divinations," Nauzhror added, watching as Geremis finished his gesticulating and put a hand to his brow in concentration.
Realization struck Gromph. "They are looking for the phylactery," he said. "They must be."
All of them understood the implication: Yasraena did not have the phylactery in her possession, and she too thought it was hidden somewhere in the House.
"A good sign," Nauzhror said.
Gromph nodded. He needed to hurry.
Seeing nothing else of import, he moved the scrying eye away from Larikal and her pet wizards and continued to move through the Agrach Dyrr complex. The process was time-
consuming but he endured. He took the time to study each room with care, to cast additional divinations designed to root out the lichdrow's masking spells. Again and again he found nothing,
nothing but a desperate drow House under siege and fighting for its life.
"Could the phylactery not be in the fortress?" Nauzhror finally asked, after hours of fruitless searching.
Gromph didn't even bother to look up. "Silence," he commanded.
It had to be there. The lichdrow would not have allowed the phylactery to be far from him.
The risk was too great.
Gromph continued the search. He scoured each building thoroughly. In an isolated portion of the complex, he found the lichdrow's alchemical laboratory, library, and quarters. Shimmering gem golems carved in the shape of drow wizards stood rigid guard at every door.
"His laboratory," Prath said, eyeing the uncountable number of beakers, braziers, chemicals,
and components. The room was disordered, as though someone had searched it roughly.
Thinking that the lichdrow's laboratory or quarters were a likely hiding place for the phylactery, Gromph moved carefully through the lichdrow's wards and pored over the rooms. His frustration mounted when he found nothing. He went over it again, certain that somewhere was the telltale spoor of a masking spell. Again he found nothing.
He was exhausting his spells, exhausting his body. Between his spell duel with the lichdrow and his scrying of the fortress, he had spent fully half of his repertory. If he did not find the phylactery soon, he would have to rest, restudy his spellbooks, re-memorize the incantations that slipped from his fatigued mind one by one as he cast them. By then, Yasraena might have located the phylactery herself.
He sighed, mopped his forehead, and moved on. He had only the temple to Lolth and a few other structures remaining.
The temple first.
With minimal effort, he slipped past the elaborate wards that protected the temple of Lolth.
No doubt Yasraena herself had cast them. Gromph thought her spellcraft paltry. Her wards were no match for him.
The interior of the temple appeared much the same as the temples to Lolth maintained by other great Houses. A sacrificial altar, limned in violet faerie fire and dotted with candles, sat in the apse at one end of the large, oval nave. Behind the altar towered the enormous sculpture of a spider, carved in lifelike detail from smooth basalt or perhaps jet.
Gromph knew it to be a guardian golem that would animate should anyone enter the temple without authorization.
High-backed, ornate stone benches lined the nave, facing the apse. Transparent gossamer curtains, made to look like spiderwebs, hung across the temple's faerie fire limned windows.
Spider motifs appeared on everything, from the black altar cloth to the carved door jambs to the armrests of the benches. Spiderwebs hung in every corner, the silvery threads and their small black creators regarded as blessings from Lolth.
A depiction of the Spider Queen in her hybrid form-a beautiful drow female head and torso jutting from the bloated body of a giant black widow-decorated the underside of the temple's domed ceiling. Gromph wondered in passing whether Lolth appeared the same since her return,
whether Lolth was the same.
Almost the whole of the temple glowed in Gromph's sight, alight with enhancements and protections cast by Lolth's priestesses. Otherwise, the nave was empty.
Gromph blew out a frustrated sigh and prepared to move on, but something rankled him. He kept the scrying eye on the temple, looking, thinking.
"What is it, Archmage?" asked Prath, excitement in his voice. "Have you found it?"
"Silence," Nauzhror admonished the apprentice, though the Master's voice too betrayed a certain eagerness.
Gromph shook his head. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but. .
The spider golem!
His scrying eye did not show it as magical, yet it should have detected as such-strongly-unless the Agrach Dyrr priestesses had replaced the former golem with a normal statue. He deemed that unlikely.
An excited charge ran through him. He caused the scrying eye to draw nearer to the golem until its image filled the viewing crystal. He pored over it, inch by inch. Was it standing atop a secret panel in the floor? He cast another series of divinations, attempting to get even an inkling of whether or not the golem's magic was being masked.
At first he met with no success, but he persisted.
Finally, and for only an instant, he caught a flash of a faint red glow, like light squeezed from under a closed door. In that single instant, the golem flared in his sight, as befitted the latent magic that would animate it, but a still brighter glow flared from within the golem.
Nauzhror smiled, Prath gasped, and Gromph could not contain a chuckle.
"The golem," Nauzhror breathed.
The Master of Sorcere sounded as exhausted as Gromph, though he had done nothing other than observe.
"The golem is masked," Gromph said, nodding. He could not believe the lichdrow's temerity.
"The golem is the phylactery?" Prath asked.
Gromph studied the construct for a while longer, confirming his suspicion with a series of spells.
When he finished, he said, "No, but the phylactery is embedded within it.
"
Despite the evidence they had seen in the crystal, Prath and Nauzhror's faces showed disbelief.
"Within the temple's guardian golem?" Prath said. "It is heresy."
"It is ingenious," Nauzhror countered.
Gromph agreed. The lichdrow, a male, had not only hidden his phylactery within House
Dyrr's temple of Lolth, he had hidden it within the body of the temple's most powerful guardian.
Gromph had located it only because he had known the spider sculpture to be a golem that should have glowed in his magic-detecting sight. That it had not had caused him to look more closely,
and he still had almost missed it.
With a slight exertion of will, Gromph let the image in the scrying crystal fade. It moved to gray, then to black.
The archmage leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head. His entire body ached, his temples pounded, and sweat soaked him. Unfortunately, he could not take time to recover. Getting through the anti-scrying wards and finding the phylactery had been the easier of his two tasks. Next he had to get himself physically into House Agrach Dyrr, into Lolth's temple,
and destroy first the golem, then the phylactery.
"You should rest first, Archmage," Nauzhror said, reading his expression and knowing what would come next.
Gromph picked up his chalice and gulped another mouthful of wine. Enough. He did not want a light head when he assaulted House Agrach Dyrr.
"There is no time," he said. "Yasraena or her daughters may happen upon the phylactery. It will be easier to take out of the golem than it will be to take from Matron Mother Dyrr's hands."
Nauzhror could not help but nod agreement with that. He asked, "When, then?"
"Within the hour," Gromph replied and blew out a tired sigh.
Prath and Nauzhror digested that. Gromph closed his eyes and tried to still the pounding in his head.
"The wards will be challenging," Prath said at last.
Nauzhror backhanded Prath across his mouth and snapped, "The archmage is aware of the challenges, apprentice."
The rebuke drew blood. Prath sank back in his chair, daubing his broken lip. His eyes burned,
but he said nothing. Gromph was pleased to see the anger in Prath's face.
Gromph was aware of the challenges. He had just seen them; they all had.
An intricate network of wards, an altogether different layer of protections at least as complex as those he had just bypassed, would attempt to prevent his physical entrance into the fortress.
The combined power of all of the mages of House Xorlarrin had so far been unable to breach those wards. Gromph was no mere Xorlarrin wizard, of course, but neither was the second layer of wards likely to prove as easy to bypass as the anti-scrying protections.
And triggering a ward while he was physically present put him at risk for injury and death,
not merely detection. He remembered well the glaring red glow of the spell traps.
"Shall I accompany you, Archmage?" asked Nauzhror.
"No," Gromph replied, and massaged his temples. "I have other plans for you two. You,
Nauzhror, are to stay within my offices and help me attempt to scry House Agrach Dyrr."
Nauzhror's fat face pinched in a question. "Help you scry? You did exactly that. What do you mean?"
Gromph eyed Prath, who also looked confused.
"I mean," Gromph said, "that I will be in two places at once, Master Nauzhror."
Gromph let his words hang in the air without further explanation.
After only a moment, realization showed on Nauzhror's face.
"Prath will remain here in your guise," the Master of Sorcere said.
"Yes," Gromph affirmed. "And I in his, at least for a time. You will remain here too,
Nauzhror, as though assisting me with my divinations."
Prath's expression showed understanding but also a question. "Why the ruse, Archmage?" he asked. "Yasraena and her mages cannot scry into your office. No one can."
"No," Gromph agreed, "but no doubt she is trying. She knows I must move against her House,
and she will want to know when I am coming. We will mislead her. You and I will change forms to appear as the other. I will decrease the power of the wards around my office enough to allow
Yasraena and her wizards to finally get through. When she does, she will see Gromph and
Nauzhror attempting to scry House Agrach Dyrr, as though in preparation for an attack yet to come. The actual attack, however, will already have begun."
Nauzhror smiled.
"Very clever, Archmage," he said. "Might it not be easier, however, for me to take your form?"
Gromph had expected as much from Nauzhror. He eyed the master coolly and said, "I think not. And be careful, Nauzhror, lest I find your eagerness to sit in my chair unseemly."
Nauzhror's eyes found the floor. "I meant no presumption, Archmage," he explained. "I
merely thought that I might be better able to mimic you than would an apprentice."
Gromph decided to let the matter rest. He had made his point to Nauzhror. "Prath will serve.
Besides, having you, a Master of Sorcere, assisting me will further the deception."
Nauzhror accepted that with a submissive nod.
The archmage rose from his chair and said, "Time is short. Let us begin."
With that, Gromph removed his magical robes and the most well-known of his magical trinkets, including the ring worn only by the Archmage of Menzoberranzan. Nauzhror watched the ring slip from Gromph's finger with poorly disguised hunger.
Prath too rose and stripped himself of clothes and gear.
Presently, Gromph stood in the overlarge piwafwi, robes, and other accoutrements of an apprentice wizard, and Prath was in those of the Archmage of Menzoberranzan.
"They may fit you someday," he said to Prath.
The apprentice blanched. "Mine do not fit you," he said, embarrassed.
Gromph almost laughed, thinking of how he must look. He had not been so humbly attired in centuries.
He looked to Nauzhror, indicated Prath, and said, "Master Nauzhror."
Nauzhror nodded and spoke the words to a minor glamor. When he finished the incantation,
an illusionary image of Prath took shape beside the actual apprentice, a magical portrait to serve as a frame of reference.
"An excellent likeness," Prath observed.
Gromph agreed. He opened a lower drawer of his desk and withdrew a scroll scribed with one of his most powerful spells. To Prath, he said, "Apprentice, should you err in the casting of this spell, it could have most unfortunate results."
The archmage would have cast the spell on Prath himself, but the magic could affect only the caster. Prath would have to do it himself.
Gromph continued, "After completing the incantation, look upon me and will yourself to take my form.