“Was it worth it to you, Braelin Janquay of Bregan D’aerthe?” Matron Zhindia whispered to the prisoner as they stood in the highest levels of House Melarn. Above them were the doors and stairway that ascended to the cells, the dungeons of this house that was built among the stalactites of Menzoberranzan’s cavern roof.
“Was what worth it?” the battered man replied.
“Your embrace of the heretics. Did it bring you joy?”
Braelin shrugged. “I have sided with no one. I am merely a scout informing my superiors, who, to my knowledge, have professed no side-taking in this conflict.”
Zhindia’s voice grew shrill. “You murdered a Hunzrin priestess and a Vandree nobleman!”
“I defended myself—would not any drow in the service of Lolth do the same? Does Lolth encourage submission to those who attack—”
His sentence was cut short by a stinging slap from Matron Zhindia, one that had Braelin seeing spots before his eyes.
“I have witnesses who say you began the fight,” she told him.
Braelin shrugged and shook his head. “If I had started the fight, do you think I would have been stupid enough to allow the Hunzrin priestess to summon a glabrezu to her side? Or if she already had the demon beside her, do you think I would have been stupid enough to—”
Another slap.
“Yes,” she said, “I think you are that stupid. Perhaps you will realize this when your legs are being quartered and your drider body bloats with rot and stench.”
“You are choosing sides for Jarlaxle,” Braelin warned.
Zhindia laughed at him and nodded to the guards.
“Jarlaxle will not forgive you twice,” Braelin quipped, drawing another slap.
A crank was turned to the side of the room and the heavy trapdoor above Braelin pulled up and into the chamber built into the ceiling. A pair of guards grabbed the bound man roughly by the arms and enacted the magic of their house emblems, levitating up and taking the prisoner with them.
They were beating Braelin before the trapdoor even swung closed once more.
Stripped to nothing but a loincloth, lying in mud and his own feces, his many open wounds festering, and with little more than the roaches he could catch to eat, Dinin Do’Urden wanted nothing more than to end his life and to deprive his merciless captors of their pleasure in torturing him.
They wouldn’t allow that.
He tightened up as he heard the outer doors of this miserable place open, then relaxed when the guards came into view, dragging another poor prisoner by the ankles, stopping every couple of steps to kick him.
Good, Dinin thought as he considered the newcomer. There were only a dozen miserable captives remaining in this prison—in this wing, at least (though it wouldn’t have surprised the captured Dinin to learn that Matron Zhindia, who took such delight in doling out torture, had many more prison wings). Three of the cells in this prison were smaller and double secure, most notably the one holding Dinin at the end of the row and facing the doors. Similar cells flanked his on either side, their barred doors facing each other just outside his own. The small cell to his right held a pair of women, the one on his left contained a single woman warrior, rumored to be of the Blaspheme and taken in the same raid that had cost him his liberty. He had tried to call out to her once, but that had earned him a beating that both swelled his mouth and drove home that such interactions would not be allowed.
Beyond that cell, down the hall to the left of his door, was the play area, where the guards and some occasional visitors took the prisoners for the most exquisite games of agony and mutilation.
One of Dinin’s fingers and three of his toes were there.
Across from that area was the largest cell, a communal cage full of rogues from the Stenchstreets, even a couple of iblith, or non-drow. There had been at least twenty in there at one point, but simple attrition from the eagerness of the torturers had whittled that number, and no fewer than four drow had been taken for the Curse of Abomination as Matron Zhindia continued to build a drider army.
Thus, Dinin was glad to see an addition, and happier still when he realized that it was another drow. His odds of being next to suffer the ultimate curse had lessened, if, as he feared, Zhindia’s bargain with him was simply a taunt to make him even more miserable when she gave him to Lolth as a drider. How could he not fear that, after all, given the torture and mutilation he was now receiving? Whatever sympathy he might feel for the new prisoner couldn’t matter.
Anything to delay that most terrible fate.
“This one’s important,” said the man on the left who was dragging in the newcomer. “Gets his own cell, says Matron Zhindia.”
“All three small ones are full,” the other replied.
“Fix that,” said the first, and his partner dropped the prisoner’s leg and started for the rear of the prison.
Dinin held his breath again, for being relocated would certainly mean another round of torture, if not a visit to the priestesses making driders.
But no, the guard went for the woman to Dinin’s left. He unlocked the cell door and walked in.
Her cries of pain began almost immediately.
The guard dragged her out by the hair, and every time she reached up to try to grab his arm and alleviate the pain, he paused, turned, and slugged her in the face. He moved as if to put her in the next cell down the line, which was now holding only another single Blaspheme warrior, but changed his mind and took her to the play area instead—practically shrugging as if to say Why not? Dinin could hear the chains and shackles, and could picture her hanging from the ceiling or attached to one of their nefarious devices, and chained by her wrists and ankles.
The newcomer was thrown into the now empty cell and spared, temporarily at least, from a beating, as the two guards went to the chained prisoner in the play area.
Dinin tried to block out her screams.
He failed miserably.
Braelin tried to call upon his many years of training, looking for some way to strike back there and then. He knew that his situation would not likely improve and that any chance he might have of escape would have to be now, before they got one of his wrists chained.
He had practiced a clever move that might steal the sword of the man chaining him, and a quick trip would leave that man stumbling, giving him a free lane to the second guard, who was still over at the play area torturing a prisoner.
A clever move, but one not possible in his current state. His tormentors had handled him perfectly, those snake-headed scourges filling him with poison that made his arms seem as if wrapped in a weighty metal. He couldn’t move fast enough.
He thought to try anyway—perhaps a quick death would be the best he could hope for.
But no, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, couldn’t bring himself to abandon all hope, however logical that course seemed. He needed to live, to help Azleah, who was in dire trouble.
Or perhaps she wasn’t, and that made him angry and fearful in an entirely different way.
He didn’t want to die not knowing the truth, as much as he feared it.
“I will stay alive for her,” he heard himself whisper as the bracelet clicked shut about his wrist.
“For who?” the guard asked him, then slapped him when he didn’t immediately answer.
“For Lolth,” Braelin lied. “She knows the truth and will not be pleased—”
He ended with a grunt as the guard kneed him in the gut. “Matron Zhindia is Lolth’s voice in Menzoberranzan, heretic,” he said. “You would do well to remember that.”
“For the short time you have left to live,” said the man out beyond the cell door.
“Don’t worry about the hardness of the floor,” the first added, slugging him across the face and stepping back. “You will fill it thick with your fresh, soft offal soon enough.”
Braelin slumped to the floor, his arm stretching up above him. He watched the guard close the door and paid attention as the key went into the lock. He listened carefully, trying to determine how many tumblers the lock had.
He could not begin to decipher it, and even if he had, he could only hope to reach the door with one hand, and that just barely. He’d never be able to pick any but the most basic of locks in that position.
And he doubted that House Melarn, so practiced with prisoners, would use a basic lock. The one on the door, at least, was a keyhole. The one holding his wrist was magical, attuned to a metal bar the guard had used to secure it—and one needed to open it, likely. There was nothing on this smooth bracelet to pick.
He was caught and he was doomed, he knew, unless Jarlaxle or someone else—perhaps Azleah, he dared to hope, for it was too much for him to bear in that dark moment to think that this woman he loved had betrayed him—found some way to free him. She had been overwhelmed, surely, given that there were three succubi. Three! Likely she was also charmed—he had almost fallen for their supernatural allure, himself.
Azleah was as cunning as any drow he knew, even including Jarlaxle. She would understand the concept of temporary sacrifice for ultimate victory. Braelin had to hope that any victory she had in mind would include him!
Around the corner, he heard a jail cell open, then close, and a moment later, the second guard joined the first outside his cell door. Braelin noticed then that this one’s gear was not as fine as the first’s. He had no idea whether that might matter down the line, but he had been taught by the best in the business that no detail was too small to note.
“Are we betting or not?” the second guard asked.
“With no odds?”
“Of course with odds! It would be a fool’s bet to wager that this newcomer would be sent to the Curse of Abomination after that one. Matron Zhindia will take her time and make a spectacle of turning the brother of Drizzt Do’Urden into a drider.”
Braelin’s ears perked up at that.
“Aye, but this one is Bregan D’aerthe,” said the guard who had chained Braelin. “Quite a message it will send when he is made into a drider, but possibly not one Matron Zhindia is yet ready to send.”
“Has Jarlaxle declared a side?” asked the second guard.
“This one did it for him by murdering a couple of allied nobles, including a priestess. So what odds are you offering?”
“Three chances to one that Dinin Do’Urden is the first of the two to be given to Lolth.”
“Four.”
“Three, and if that is not enough for you, Preego, then you wager on this Bregan D’aerthe heretic,” said the second guard.
“Good enough, then. Fifty silver and drinks for a month on . . .” The first man paused and looked at Braelin. “What is your name again?”
Braelin hesitated.
“Speak now or I will come in there and make you tell me.” He rattled his key chain—two distinct keys, Braelin noted, along with the empowered magical rod that had sealed the bracelet restraint.
Braelin thought to lie, but to what end? Zhindia knew his name and had spoken it in her court. It was no secret. “Braelin,” he said. “Braelin Janquay of Bregan D’aerthe.”
“Did you see that, friend?” the guard named Preego asked the other. “He speaks it with pride, as if it means something important.”
“Does that change the odds of the bet?”
“No.”
“Then my coins are on Braelin.”
“Braelin Janquay of Bregan D’aerthe,” Preego tauntingly corrected, staring straight at the prisoner as he spoke.
“Such fancy words for a man chained and lying in someone else’s filth,” the other guard said.
“We should teach him that we’re not impressed . . .”
The guard took out the key again and put it in the lock, and Braelin realized he had made a mistake, a point that was driven home to him repeatedly and quite emphatically in the play area of the dungeon.
He didn’t remember being put back in his cell.
“You must be important,” Braelin heard distantly, the voice coaxing him back to consciousness.
“You have Preego Melarn as your jailer,” the voice—the one they had named as Dinin Do’Urden, he thought—went on. “Preego is the best of the torturers, you see. He will inflict exquisite pain, as you’ve already felt, but he’ll not accidentally kill you. Only those Matron Zhindia wishes for her own purposes are afforded the courtesy of Preego Melarn’s attention.”
“Like the brother of Drizzt?” Braelin asked before he could reconsider. He hadn’t quite sorted through that information as of yet. What did it really mean for Zhindia and the Lolthians, and more important, for Jarlaxle and Bregan D’aerthe, to have the brother of Drizzt in her clutches?
“So it would seem.”
“Then you are who they say? Dinin Do’Urden, brother of Drizzt Do’Urden?”
“I am. Returned from serving the Spider Queen in the Abyss for a century and more as a drider.”
“Sounds like a fine life.”
“I am too beaten to laugh, my friend.”
“I have heard of you,” Braelin said. “Jarlaxle has spoken of you.”
“He rescued me when my house fell from grace. A temporary reprieve, but one I’ll not ever forget. How fares Jarlaxle and Bregan D’aerthe?”
“Some of the Bregan D’aerthe aren’t doing so well,” he noted, the irony heavy from his prison cell. The joke was a delaying tactic as much as anything, as Dinin’s question had the ever-cautious Braelin on alert. “As well as any, I expect. This war has brought great tumult to the drow.”
“And great promise.”
“We shall see. I know that Jarlaxle would wish to remain neutral, of course, as is his, and Bregan D’aerthe’s, way.”
“That appears to not be working so well,” Dinin replied. “With you in Matron Zhindia’s prison.”
“A misunderstanding.”
“Is that not always the case?”
They both laughed at that, and both groaned a bit in pain from the effort.
“Tell me of this Preego.”
“He is everything one might expect from an ambitious relative of Zhindia Melarn. He enjoys his work, but is very careful.”
“As I just learned.”
“Count your fingers and your toes,” Dinin said. “Ten of each? How about your ears? If all of those remain, then no, my unfortunate friend, you have learned nothing of Preego Melarn as of yet.”
Braelin just sighed and slumped back against the wall, his right hand, like Dinin’s, high up above as he settled onto the floor. He had always feared that it would end like this for him—as was true with most drow, particularly male drow, and even more particularly for those houseless males who had no Lolth-loving matron to protect them.
“If you discover a way in which you might kill yourself with these clever bindings we have, please do tell before you attempt it,” said Dinin, and Braelin’s mood grew even darker.
He managed to fall into a deep reverie, escaping the tumult and desperation for just a bit before a harsh voice growled, “You stay back!”
He opened his eyes to find a spear tip right in front of his face, and reflexively crushed back against the wall.
“And stay down!” the guard Preego yelled at him. “Whenever I am coming with your food, you stay back and stay down. The first time you do not, your meal will be dumped upon the floor, where you can lick it out of your own waste. Do you understand?”
Braelin stared at him blankly—he hadn’t moved an inch.
That did not seem to matter. The long spear prodded forward, tearing his cheek.
“I understand,” he said with all the strength he could manage, which wasn’t much.
Preego retracted the spear, then lifted his keychain from his belt, selecting the one for Braelin’s cell and unlocking the barred entry. Eyeing Braelin slyly, the Melarni torturer then laid his spear in the corridor beyond the cell and placed the key ring atop it, before pushing in the door and stepping into the cell, where he dropped a bowl of some rotten-looking stew onto the floor, where it bounced and spilled all about.
Braelin reached for it, but Preego slammed his foot down on the prisoner’s hand. “Did I give you permission to eat?”
“No,” Braelin gasped, wondering how many bones had been shattered, and knowing the number to be greater than one.
The man kicked Braelin in the face for good measure, then spat in his food bowl and went back outside, closing and locking the gate.
“Now, eat,” he ordered. “And sleep. I want you wide awake when I’ve time to play.”
Braelin learned a couple of hours later that it was not an idle threat.
Braelin nine-toes.
He lost all sense of time, for there were no periods of reverie and alertness, just hours, days, of darkness, and foulness, and torture. He and Dinin rarely spoke, though both took comfort in the conversations, even if neither had the strength to keep a discussion going for any length of time.
What proved even worse for Braelin was that he did not become numb to any of it, not the wretched, rotten food, the vomiting, nor the smells, the sores, the festering wounds. And certainly not the beatings, for Preego Melarn was indeed an expert in inflicting pain.
He grew weaker hour by hour, and kept hoping he would just die, always aware that they would never let that happen.
He began trembling every time he heard the click of the outer dungeon door—or maybe it was the clang of the trapdoor out beyond the dungeon and leading up to the main complex being shut. Did it even matter? He almost wondered if his captors had a wizard eye in the room, for they seemed to arrive at the exact moment when he had found some small bit of respite in his reverie.
Most of the time when the main door to the complex banged open, it wasn’t Preego, but some lesser guard torturing some lesser prisoner, or, on two occasions, taking a prisoner away.
To be made into a drider.
When it was Preego, and not simply delivering food, Braelin understood that he had less than an equal chance of avoiding torture, for Preego would take Dinin half the time, yes, but more than once, he then took Braelin to the play area when he was finished with the Do’Urden captive.
This time he was startled from his sleep by the clank, and heard the footsteps approaching.
It was Preego.
“Please take him,” Braelin whispered under his breath, and he felt bad for wishing such ill on Dinin.
No such luck this time, though. Preego Melarn stopped at his cell door, and he was not holding a bowl.
“To the wall!” he ordered, sounding angrier than usual.
Braelin was already huddling back, pressing himself so tightly against the wall that it seemed as if he were trying to meld with the stone. There was nowhere else to go, and he worried that Preego would find his lack of retreat as an indication of defiance. He watched every movement of the guard in terror, like a dream where he could not run fast enough from the monster.
Preego removed his key ring from the hook on his belt and placed the key in the lock, then turned it.
The click rang out painfully in Braelin’s ears, as did the squeak of the metal hinges as the door opened, just a bit.
Just a bit.
And still, heartbeats later, just a bit.
Braelin peeked out from under the arm he had used to shield himself, looking skeptically, incredulously, at Preego Melarn, who just stood there at the slightly open door, staring back at him.
No, not staring at him, Braelin realized after some time, but rather, just staring.
Blankly.
Unblinkingly.
The rogue uncurled himself and edged closer to the door. He called to Preego softly, heard the person across the hall and Dinin over in the cell to his right both make sounds of surprise.
“Huh?”
“Hmm?”
Braelin uncurled further and stood up—aware that with these actions he was risking brutal retribution if his instincts were off—then slowly edged out from the back wall of the cell, inch by inch, until he reached the limit of the shackle holding his wrist. Still slowly, so very slowly and cautiously, he lifted his free arm out and turned his shoulders, leaning as hard as he could against the pull, stretching as far as he could for the cell door and the immobile Melarn guard.
Who still didn’t blink.
Braelin heard a soft whisper down to the left, near the play area, and he curled back, anticipating the worst.
Instead, he felt waves of warmth—wonderful, healing warmth!—flowing through him.
He didn’t know what to think. Jarlaxle? Or was this, perhaps, some twist to the Melarni torture techniques, offering hope and pain relief before snatching it all away once more?
Still, Preego Melarn didn’t move, and Braelin realized that it was no act by the man, for no one could not blink for this length of time.
He uncurled again, stretching, stretching, but the door, though a bit open into his cell, was still beyond his reach.
“What is happening?” he heard Dinin whisper, but he ignored it. Mostly because he wasn’t quite sure.
He turned himself about and stretched away from the wall again as far as he possibly could, then planted his foot firmly on the ground and bent to the side back toward the wall, lifting his other leg straight out toward the door and inching his way even further.
Another wave of healing magic came flowing through him.
He heard Dinin gasp. “What do you want?” the Do’Urden said, and he wasn’t talking to Braelin.
Thinking the whole thing a trap and a tease didn’t deter Braelin, though. Quite the opposite, it spurred him on. He thrust his leg to its limit and managed to hook his toes around the frontmost bar of the gated door, and pulled it back as hard as he could, though his foot slipped off the door in the process.
But he had the door further opened, and thus its edge closer, with Preego’s arm now fully extended, and more, with the guard leaning forward, and magically paralyzed still, with no way to counterbalance the sudden tilt.
The torturer fell against the door, swinging it in, and leaving him to tumble to the floor of Braelin’s cell, facedown and hard. He was close enough for Braelin to grab his shoulder and roll him aside to get the key ring, yanking it from the man’s hand.
He fumbled only a moment before reaching up with the enchanted bar to unlock the clasp about his wrist.
A voice stopped him.
“You tell Jarlaxle,” a woman said.
Braelin froze and glanced back, then sucked in his breath when he saw the speaker, wearing the robes of a high priestess of Lolth, standing outside his cell and looking right at him.
“You tell Jarlaxle,” she said again, and when Braelin just continued to stare at her in confusion, added, “Do you know who I am?”
“You look familiar . . .” he started, but shook his head.
“I am Kyrnill.”
“First Priestess Kyrnill Melarn,” Braelin blurted.
“No,” she said. “I am Kyrnill Kenafin. You tell Jarlaxle and you tell High Priestess Yvonnel Baenre and the Matron Mother that I did not intend to double-cross them. That I, too, was deceived.”
“What?”
“They will understand.”
“Let me out,” said a woman in the cell across the hall. “I will tell them.”
Kyrnill ignored her.
“Let me out, or I will tell the guards that you—” the woman reiterated desperately, but Kyrnill swung about and silenced her with a glare.
“Will you, now?” the First Priestess of House Melarn said.
“I . . . I . . .”
Kyrnill held her hand out before her, palm up, and cast a spell, magically summoning a red-and-black spider into her hand. She blew at it, and it already had a web strand up, for it floated off her palm and across the way, gently down to the floor before the opposite cell door.
When it landed, one spider became two, then four, then eight, then double that and double again, and all the spiders began skittering for the bars, now with Kyrnill casting new spells upon them all, so that they continued to enlarge, and by the time they reached the cell, they barely fit through those bars.
The screaming began immediately.
“You tell them,” Kyrnill said one last time to Braelin, and she waved her hand in a circle before her face, spoke a word of recall, and was gone.
Braelin tapped the clasp, which fell open.
He went to Preego, pulling his dagger from its sheath on his belt, then stumbled over the man, who offered not a movement or a groan in response, and out into the hall.
“Kill him!” Dinin said, rushing as far as his own chain would allow toward the front of his own cell. “Let me out!” Each command was equally as frantic.
Braelin glanced across the way, to see the two poor women prisoners slapping at the spiders, which were now as big as a drow’s head.
Braelin’s thoughts spun as he considered his options. He played through the sequence that best served him. His strength was mostly back from the unexpected spells of healing, so he leaped back into his cell and dragged Preego Melarn in after him, hauling the man to the back wall, where he meant to strip him and chain him in his stead.
All the while, Dinin was calling to be let out and for Braelin to kill the Melarni.
But Braelin ignored him and ignored the sounds, the sobbing and shrieking from across the hall where the spiders feasted on the two women, the tumult from the other prisoners farther down toward the main door begging to be released. He blocked it all out and methodically went about his task. He had Preego sitting propped against the wall when the man gave a little groan and began to come out of the spell.
Preego opened his eyes just in time to see Braelin’s open palm coming in fast to strike him in the face, driving his head hard against the stone.
Then a second time, and a third, and then a knee came in with great force, bringing the sharp sound of a cracking skull, and Preego’s head lolled to the side.
Braelin pulled off the man’s armored vest and shirt, stripping him to the waist before clamping his wrist in the wall shackle. He stripped him fully and quickly donned the outfit, then looked down at the one weapon, the knife, that Preego had been carrying.
Preego wasn’t dead. The escape could be justified as a matter of simple survival, and if he left Preego Melarn alive, perhaps that would keep some measure of politesse alive between Jarlaxle and Matron Zhindia.
But how he wanted to kill this man!
He stumbled out into the hall, pulling the door closed and locking it.
Across the way, the magically summoned spiders seemed to be gone, leaving one of the women lying limp on the floor, the other curled up against the wall and crying softly.
Braelin didn’t have that key—there was nothing he could do for them.
He did have the key to Dinin’s cell, however, and that brought an entirely different set of conundrums swirling in his mind. Freeing this one, the brother of Drizzt, would be an act beyond Matron Zhindia’s forgiveness, surely, and would almost certainly declare Bregan D’aerthe as siding with the heretics.
But how could he leave him? How could he go to Jarlaxle—to Drizzt!—and tell them that he had left Dinin here to suffer?
He went into Dinin’s cell and released the man, who was still weak from hunger and from the beatings. Braelin began to reconsider his choice as he helped Dinin out of the cell—how could he hope to escape with one so battered beside him?
Dinin pulled away suddenly, stumbling, falling against the again-locked door of Braelin’s cell.
“Go to the play area,” Dinin bade him. “They have salves there, and perhaps other items to aid us.”
Braelin nodded and rushed down, coming to an abrupt halt when he heard a cell door open back behind him. Reflexively he reached for his belt, for Preego’s belt, only to find that the key ring was gone. He spun to look back into the dungeon to see that Dinin was not in the corridor. The door of Braelin’s cell slammed shut.
He rushed back to it. “No, do not!” he called to Dinin, who was slapping Preego across the face, ordering him to wake up.
The Melarni guard coughed and shook his head, looking up at Dinin just as Dinin grabbed him by the hair at the sides of his head, yanked his head forward, then rammed it back into the wall, again, and again, and again.
Preego’s unchained hand came up to grab and slap at his attacker, but Dinin would not be stopped or even slowed.
The back of Preego’s head hit the stone a dozen times and more, until a soft crunching sound came with every impact.
Finally, Dinin let go and fell back.
“No, too easy!” Dinin said. He fumbled about for the key ring, which was on the ground beside him, then sorted one key and grasped it tightly in his fist, the end pointing out.
He drove it through Preego’s left eye, twisting and turning, then tugging it back to pop the eye out with it.
Braelin looked away. Preego had offered no resistance, but he wasn’t sure if the man was dead, or just far, far from consciousness.
He hoped the man was already dead.
Bloodied, Dinin came to the door and unlocked it, joining his rescuer.
“Now we can leave,” he informed Braelin, tossing him the key ring.
Braelin locked the cell door. He glanced across the way at the two women, offering a sympathetic but helpless glance to the one still upright, and went down the hall to join Dinin at the torture area, where the Do’Urden had indeed found some salves and was rubbing them over his many wounds.
He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake helping this one.