Homeland (The Legend of Drizzt #1)(3)

No pity found its way into Dinin’s callous heart, but House Do’Urden needed the wizard. “You will get your salve,” Dinin promised calmly, “when Alton DeVir is dead.”

“Of course,” the wizard agreed. “This night?”

Dinin crossed his arms and considered the question. Matron Malice had instructed him that Alton DeVir should die even as their families’ battle commenced. That scenario now seemed too clean, too easy, to Dinin. The Faceless One did not miss the sparkle that suddenly brightened the scarlet glow in the young Do’Urden’s heat sensing eyes.

“Wait for Narbondel’s light to approach its zenith,” Dinin replied, his hands working through the signals excitedly and his grimace seeming more of a twisted grin.

“Should the doomed boy know of his house’s fate before he dies?” the wizard asked, guessing the wicked intentions behind Dinin’s instructions.

“As the killing blow falls,” answered Dinin. “Let Alton DeVir die without hope.”

Dinin retrieved his mount and sped off down the empty corridors, finding an intersecting route that would take him in through a different entrance to the city proper. He came in along the eastern end of the great cavern, Menzoberranzan’s produce section, where no drow families would see that he had been outside the city limits and where only a few unremarkable stalagmite pillars rose up from the flat stone. Dinin spurred his mount along the banks of Donigarten, the city’s small pond with its moss-covered island that housed a fair-sized herd of cattlelike creatures called rothe. A hundred goblins and orcs looked up from their herding and fishing duties to mark the drow soldier’sswift passage.

Knowing their restrictions as slaves, they took care not to look Dinin in the eye.

Dinin would have paid them no heed anyway. He was too consumed by the urgency of the moment. He kicked his lizard to even greater speeds when he again was on the flat and curving avenues between the glowing drow castles. He moved toward the south-central region of the city, toward the grove of giant mushrooms that marked the section of the finest houses in Menzoberranzan.

As he came around one blind turn, he nearly ran over a group of four wandering bugbears. The giant hairy goblin things paused a moment to consider the drow, then moved slowly but purposefully out of his way.

The bugbears recognized him as a member of House Do’Urden, Dinin knew. He was a noble, a son of a high priestess, and his surname, Do’Urden, was the name of his house. Of the twenty thousand dark elves in Menzoberranzan, only a thousand or so were nobles, actually the children of the sixty-seven recognized families of the city. The rest were common soldiers.

Bugbears were not stupid creatures.

They knew a noble from a commoner, and though drow elves did not carry their family insignia in plain view, the pointed and tailed cut of Dinin’s stark white hair and the distinctive pattern of purple a nd red lines in his black piwafwi told them well enough who he was.

The mission’s urgency pressed upon Dinin, but he could not ignore the bugbears’ slight. How fast would they have scampered away if he had been a member of House Baenre or one of the other seven ruling houses? he wondered.

“You will learn respect of House Do’Urden soon enough!” the dark elf whispered under his breath, as he turned and charged his lizard at the group. The bugbears broke into a run, turning down an alley strewn with stones and debris.

Dinin found his satisfaction by calling on the innate powers of his race. He summoned a globe of darkness impervious to both infravision and normal sight in the fleeing creatures’ path. He supposed that it was unwise to call such attention to himself, but a moment later, when he heard crashing and sputtered curses as the bugbears stumbled blindly over the stones, he felt it was worth the risk.

His anger sated, he moved off again, picking a more careful route through the heat shadows. As a member of the tenth house of the city, Dinin could go as he pleased within the giant cavern without question, but Matron Malice had made it clear that no one connected to House Do’Urden was to be caught anywhere near the mushroom grove.

Matron Malice, Dinin’s mother, was not to be crossed, but it was only a rule, after all. In Menzoberranzan, one rule, took precedence over all of the petty others, Don’t get caught.

At the mushroom grove’s southern end, the impetuous drow found what he was looking for: a cluster of ive huge floor-to-ceiling pillars that were hollowed into a network of chambers and connected with metal and stone parapets and bridges. Red-glowing gargoyles, the standard of the house, glared down from a hundred perches like silent sentries. This was House DeVir, Fourth House of Menzoberranzan.

A stockade of tall mushrooms ringed the place, every fifth one a shrieker, a sentient fungus named (and favored as guardians) for the shrill cries of alarm it emitted whenever a living being passed it by. Dinin kept a cautious distance, not wanting to set off one of the shriekers and knowing also that other, more deadly wards protected the fortress. Matron Malice would see to those.

An expectant hush permeated the air of this city section. It was general knowledge hroughout Menzoberranzan that Matron Ginafae of House DeVir had fallen out of favor with Loth, the Spider Queen deity to all drow and the true source of every house’s strength. Such circumstances were never openly discussed among the drow, but everyone who knew fully expected that some family lower in the city hierarchy soon would strike out against the crippled House DeVir.