Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(33)

So focused was the large mutant that he nearly passed through a remarkable juncture in the otherwise unremarkable corridor.

Yerrininae skidded to a stop, his eight legs clacking and scraping on the stone. Behind him, several driders pulled up fast, frantic to avoid a collision with their merciless leader.

“What is it, my commander?” one dared ask, as the others wandered around in confusion.

Yerrininae continued to look to the wall instead of the open corridor ahead. He moved over slowly, almost reverently, and eased his great spear out wide with his left hand, the other reaching tentatively for a peculiar crease in the wall. A smile widened upon his face as the drider ran his fingers along that peculiar groove.

“My commander?” the other drider asked again.

“This is no natural crease in the stone,” Yerrininae explained. “This is a worked juncture—once, long ago, likely a portal . . . a door of some sort.”

The other drider dared move up, and on Yerrininae’s bidding, lifted his hand to also feel the straight lines of the worked stone. “What does it mean?” he asked.

Yerrininae straightened and looked all around, considering the caverns and corridors they had traversed that day. “It means that this was the outer waypoint.”

“Of?”

Yerrininae looked at the drider and grinned.

A shriek stole the moment, echoing off the stones, bouncing all around them as if a hundred drider warriors were suddenly under great duress. Yerrininae leaped sidelong down the corridor, legs working perfectly to spin him as he landed in full stride, charging along, spear at the ready.

Only a few bends later, they found their scouts, though the driders were only barely visible beneath a mound of flailing semi-translucent ghostly dwarves.

No, not ghostly, but actual spirits, Yerrininae realized, and he commanded his charges forward, into the morass.

The large drider led the way. Yerrininae was never one to view a battle from afar. He crashed into a small horde of the ghosts, his fine drow great spear stabbing and slashing every which way.

But to little effect, for these creatures were only partially bound to the material plane. He could barely hit them, with weapon or with appendage. Similarly, their reciprocating swings did not connect solidly.

When a dozen other ghosts leaped away from one of the unfortunate scouts to charge his direction, though, Yerrininae understood that those seemingly insubstantial attacks could surely combine to great effect, for that drider scout from which they had crawled slumped right to the floor, its face a ghastly mask of missing eyes and torn lips, its head all twisted around as if it had been squeezed between heavy stones. The creature lolled around, propped by the symmetry of its eight legs, but hardly alive.

“Close ranks!” the drider leader demanded.

As the valuable drider warriors fell back, Jearth ordered his shock troops past them and into the enemy.

Goblins, orcs, and bugbears surged forward along the corridor and into the wider cavern beyond, fighting every instinct in them which told them to turn around and flee—for those who did so, those who even hesitated slightly, felt the bite of a drow crossbow bolt.

“Dwarf ghosts!” Ravel said happily from the back. “Gauntlgrym! It must be! Right before us. We have found the dwarven city.”

“We cannot be certain,” Berellip said beside him.

“I can feel the power of the place,” Ravel argued. “Primordial power.” He wasn’t bluffing, nor was he imagining anything due to the appearance of dwarf ghosts. The sense of bound magic was powerful and primal. He could feel it under his feet. Ravel had done a lot of work with elementals during his tenure in Sorcere. Gromph Baenre was quite fond of summoning them by the dozen, all different types, merely to torment them.

He thought to confer with his brother Brack’thal, who had reputedly been supremely skilled in the elemental arts in the years before the Spellplague. Only briefly, though, for he did not want to give Brack’thal the satisfaction.

Even without that confirmation, Ravel knew the feeling of elemental magic, and such was the tingling energy he felt in the floors and walls now, a deep resonance of the purest energy.

Along the wall to the left came Tiago Baenre, charging his lizard above the heads of the many drow crowding the area.

“The goblinkin will be of little effect,” he told Ravel and the others. “These ghostly defenders are quite beyond them.”

“Shall you throw a lightning net upon them, dear brother?” Berellip remarked, and behind her, Saribel giggled.

“It might prove quite potent,” Ravel replied, ignoring the sarcasm.

Berellip gave an exasperated sigh and moved past him, Saribel and the other priestesses of Lolth in tow.

As soon as they had moved past Tiago, the young Baenre signaled to Ravel, Shall I gather your wizards that you can enact a second lightning net?

The question caught Ravel off guard, so much so that he balked and even moved back a step. He stared at Tiago for a few moments, ensuring that the warrior was serious. He glanced down the corridor; the sounds alone convinced him that his goblinkin fodder were indeed being slaughtered.

Ravel nodded. He wouldn’t give his sisters the satisfaction of being saviors.

“They are a stubborn bunch,” Berellip admitted to Saribel. They had hit the dwarves with a vast repertoire of spells, from shining beams of unholy light to waves of biting flames. They had used their allegiance to Lolth to compel the ghosts away and had even tried to harness the spirits to their will, to dominate them and turn some against the others.