realized that the tower-tops were holed and that more than one of the flying buttresses linking the outlying towers to the main body of the keep had collapsed with the years. Green vines knotted their roots in the riven stone, covering the ruins in a living blanket.
"Ruins," Jeggred growled in disgust. "Your insipid spells have failed you, wizard - or you have deliberately led us astray. Are you in league with our treacherous scout, perhaps?"
"My spells do not fail," Pharaun replied. "This is the place. The Jaelre are here."
"Then where are they?" the draegloth snarled. "If you - "
"Silence, both of you!" Valas snapped. He moved a few steps away from the gate, his footfalls as soft as those of a stalking leopard, an arrow lying across his bow. "This place is not as abandoned as it looks."
Ryld moved over to take shelter by a tottering old column of masonry, setting one hand on Splitter's hilt. Danifae and Pharaun did the same on the other side of the road, staring hard at the ruined keep. Quenthel, how-ever, chose not to move at all.
Instead she stood confidently in the center of the path and called out, "You of House Jaelre! We wish to speak with your leaders at once!"
From a dozen places of concealment, stealthy shapes in dark cloaks that deceived the eye by mimicking the wearer's surroundings slowly stood, bows and wandspointed at the Menzoberranyr. One of the figures, a female carrying a double-ended sword, pushed back her hood and eyed the company with cold contempt.
"You are miserable spider-kissers," she hissed. "What do you have that the lords of House Jaelre could possibly want, other than your corpses feathered with our arrows?"
Quenthel bridled and allowed one hand to fall to her whip. The weapon writhed slowly, the serpent heads snapping their fangs in agitation.
"I am Quenthel Baenre, Mistress of Arach-Tinilith, and I do not bicker on doorsteps with common gate guards. Announce our arrival to your masters, so that we can get in out of this damnable rain."
The Jaelre captain narrowed her eyes and motioned to her soldiers, who shifted position and made ready to fire. Valas shook his head and low-ered his bow, stepping forward quickly with one hand in the air.
"Wait," he said. "If Tzirik the priest is still among you, tell him that Valas Hune is here. We have a proposition for him."
"I doubt our high priest will have much use for any proposal of yours," the guard captain said.
"If nothing else, he'll find out why we came a thousand miles from Menzoberranzan to speak to him," Valas replied.
The captain glared at Quenthel, then said, "Lower your weapons and wait there. Do not move, or my soldiers will fire, and there are more of us than you think."
Valas nodded once, and set his bow down on the ground. He glanced at the others, and took a seat on the edge of a crumbling old fountain. The rest followed suit, though Quenthel didn't demean herself by taking a seat. Instead she folded her arms and waited with imperious displeasure. Ryld glanced around the courtyard full of hostile warriors, and rubbed his head with a sigh.
Quenthel knows how to make an impression, eh? Pharaun gestured discretely.
Females,Ryld replied, just as discretely.
He carefully reached into his cloak and withdrew the brandy flask again.
Chapter FOURTEEN
The most doleful torment of incarceration, reflected Halisstra, was bore-dom, pure and simple. Like most of her extraordinarily long-lived kind, the priestess hardly noticed the passing of hours, days, even tendays when her mind was engaged. Yet, despite the wisdom and patience of her more than two hundred years, a few hours' confinement in a featureless stone cell seemed more onerous than months of the harsh discipline she endured in her youth.
The endless hours of the day crept by, a day in which her body longed to rest despite the painful glare of sunlight streaming in through that one cursed window. Meanwhile her thoughts veered wildly from praying for her comrades to return and rescue her to fomenting the most hideous and ago-nizing tortures she could imagine for each one for abandoning her to capture.
Eventually, she fell into Reverie, her mind empty of new schemes or old memories, and her awareness so dim and distant that she might have been sleeping in truth. Exhaustion had finally caught up with her, not just the sheer physical exhaustion of the long tendays of travel and peril through desert, shadow, Underdark, and forest, but a kind of mental fatigue rooted deeply