extracted two healing potions, both ordinarily serving as material components to his spells. He tore their seal with his teeth and drank the warm fluid down, one after the other.
His ankle reknit and the gash in his thigh and shoulder closed. Even most of the acid burns healed. He sighed, tested his ankle, found it fine, and climbed atop the golem's body. There, he found his footing and straddled the point at which the rope of the master ward vanished into the golem's body. He raised the axe high and started to chop.
With each swing he grew more and more eager and the light from the phylactery's dweomer grew brighter and brighter in his sight.
After half-a-score swings, the axe blows revealed a hollow within the spider golem's thorax. Gromph stopped, sweating, and stared.
There, floating in the air, intertwined with the vein of the master ward, was a shimmering, fist-sized sphere of red.
The sphere turned yellow. Then green. Then violet.
Gromph watched the globe cycle through seven colors before beginning the sequence anew. In a distant way, he knew the globe for what it wasa prismatic sphere. The colors lay atop each other, alternating spheres within spheres, like the layers of a flakefungus. The lichdrow must have found a way to make a prismatic sphere permanent. He had placed his phylactery within it and placed the whole within a specially constructed golem.
Gromph knew how to bring down a prismatic sphere. Certain spells defeated certain colors. Touching certaincolors without dispelling them resulted in harm or death. He would have to defeat all of the colors to get at the phylactery within.
It would take time. Time he did not have. Besides, he had another problem.
The transformative spell that had turned him into a warrior had temporarily modified his mind, closing the door on that part of him that interacted with and drew on the Weave. He knew that he could cast spells, but the knowledge that allowed him to link with the Weave was gone, temporarily crowded out by the knowledge imparted to him by the transmutation spell.
He could not end the spell early. It had to run its course. Only after it had would he be able to bring down the sphere.
Above him, a portion of the conjured stone wall before one of the temple's windows shattered, destroyed by some spell cast by one of Yasraena's wizards. The stone rained down on the temple floor. Gromph had only the wall of force between him and the forces of House Dyrr.
He was almost out of time.
A scrabbling sound turned him around. What he saw caused a pit to form in his stomach.
Each of the pieces he had chopped from the golemthe legs, the chunk of thorax, the claw, the piece of abdomencracked and split. Eight legs of jet sprouted from the cracks, a pair of mandibles. The threescore chunks of golem that Gromph had left scattered around the temple had been reanimated as buds of the main golem. The battle was not over.
For the tenth time in the last hour, Gromph cursed the lichdrow.
Danifae looked through the tiny, unglassed window of her garret in the Braeryn. Narbondel glowed red two-thirds of the way up its shaft. It was late in the day.
Danifae had lost track of time. For her, one day seemed much like another, one hour bled into the next. She found it easier to measure time not with Narbondel but with corpses. It had been thirty-seven corpses since Lolth had selected herDanifae could not so much as think her nameas Yor'thae.
Though Danifae had never been to Menzoberranzan before Lolth had selected her Yor'thae, she had come to know it well since. And to hate it.
To her right, far across Menzoberranzan's cavern Danifae eyed the mammoth steps of the great stairway that led up to Tier Breche. She could see it at such a distance only because of its enormous size and the violet faerie fires that illumined its steps. On the high plateau beyond the stairsinvisible to her at that distancestood Lolth's grandest temple, Arach-Tinilith, the heart of the Spider Queen's faith. Danifae had never set foot within it and never would.
Within Arach-Tinilith presided the bitch, Lolth's Yor'thae.
Anger still boiled in Danifae, hate without end for the Yor'thae. She vented it on the males who came to her.
Danifae had created her own temple to Lolth, her own Arach-Tinilith a tiny, stinking garret deep in the Braeryn. There, she spun her web and fed on her prey in Lolth's name.
She leaned out of