Errtu chuckled, a grating, terrible sound. Lloth's red-glowing gaze fell over him scornfully.
"Why would such an event displease you, Lady of Chaos?" the fiend asked.
"This trouble will be beyond me," Lloth explained, deadly serious, "beyond us all. I will enjoy watching the fools of the pantheon jostled about, stripped of their false pride, some perhaps even slain, but any worshipped being who is not cautious will find herself caught in the trouble."
"Lloth was never known for caution," Errtu put in dryly.
"Lloth was never a fool," the Spider Queen quickly replied.
Errtu nodded but sat quietly for a moment on his mushroom throne, digesting it all. "What has this to do with me?" he asked finally, for tanar'ri were not worshipped, and, thus, Errtu did not draw his powers from the prayers of any faithful.
"Menzoberranzan," Lloth replied, naming the fabled city of drow, the largest base of her worshippers in all the Realms.
Errtu cocked his grotesque head.
"The city is in chaos already," Lloth explained.
"As you would have it," Errtu put in, and he snickered. "As you have arranged it."
Lloth didn't refute that. "But there is danger," the beautiful drow went on. "If I am caught in the troubles of the pantheon, the prayers of my priestesses will go unanswered."
"Am I expected to answer them?" Errtu asked incredulously.
"The faithful will need protection."
"I cannot go to Menzoberranzan!" Errtu roared suddenly, his outrage, the outrage of years of banishment, spilling over. Menzoberranzan was a city of Faerun's Underdark, the great labyrinth beneath the world's surface. But, though it was separated from the region of sunlight by miles of thick rock, it was still a place of the Material Plane. Years ago, Errtu had been on that plane, at the call of a minor wizard, and had stayed there in search of Crenshinibon, the Crystal Shard, a mighty artifact, relic of a past and greater age of sorcery. The great tanar'ri had been so close to the relic! He had entered the tower it had created in its image, and had worked with its possessor, a pitiful human who would have died soon enough, leaving the fiend to his coveted treasure. But then Errtu had met a dark elf, a renegade from Lloth's own flock, from Menzoberranzan, the city she now apparently wanted him to protect!
Drizzt Do'Urden had defeated Errtu and, to a tanar'ri, a defeat on the Material Plane meant a hundred years of banishment in the Abyss.
Now Errtu trembled visibly with rage, and Lloth took a step backward, preparing herself in case the beast attacked before she could explain her offer. "You cannot go," she agreed, "but your minions can. I will see that a gate is kept open, if all the priestesses of my domain must tend it continually."
Errtu's thunderous roar drowned out the words.
Lloth understood the source of that agony; a fiend's greatest pleasure was to walk loose on the Material Plane, to challenge the weak souls and weaker bodies of the various races. Lloth understood, but she did not sympathize. Evil Lloth never sympathized with any creature.
"I cannot deny you!" Errtu admitted, and his great, bulbous, bloodshot eyes narrowed wickedly.
His statement was true enough. Lloth could enlist his aid simply by offering him his very existence in return. The Spider Queen was smarter than that, however. If she enslaved Errtu and was, indeed, as she expected, caught up in the coming storm, Errtu might escape her capture or, worse, find a way to strike back at her. Lloth was malicious and merciless in the extreme, but she was, above all else, intelligent. She had in her possession honey for this fly.
"This is no threat," she said honestly to the fiend. "This is an offer."
Errtu did not interrupt, still, the bored and outraged fiend trembled on the edge of catastrophe.
"I have a gift, Errtu," she purred, "a gift that will allow you to end the banishment Drizzt Do'Urden has placed on you."
The tanar'ri did not seem convinced. "No gift," he rumbled. "No magic can break the terms of banishment. Only he who banished me can end the indenture."
Lloth nodded her agreement; not even a goddess had the power to go against that rule. "But that is exactly the point!" the Spider Queen exclaimed. "This gift will make Drizzt Do'Urden want you back on his plane of existence, back within his reach."
Errtu did not seem convinced.
In response, Lloth lifted one arm and clamped her fist tightly, and a signal, a burst of multicolored sparks and a rocking