I will speak with you after the gathering, Gromph heard whispered into his thoughts after expressing his pleasant surprise to see Catti-brie attending the meeting beside Penelope Harpell.
They called it the Seven Scholars, but there were only five permanent members, including Gromph, Caecilia, Penelope Harpell, Lady Avelyere, and Kimmuriel, who, though not a wizard in the conventional sense, could provide answers to questions far beyond the capability of the others because of his familiarity with the illithid hive mind. The other two seats were reserved for Catti-brie and Yvonnel Baenre, infrequent attendees both.
He looked at Catti-brie, catching her stare, and gave a slight wink and nod in response to her telepathic message.
Gromph then lifted a small bell and rang it, signaling the ghostly waiters to deliver the feast.
“Shall we wait until after the meal to begin our discussion this evening?” asked Lady Avelyere, who was always a stickler for etiquette.
“Have we much to discuss?” Caecilia the cloud giantess asked.
“That would depend on how much progress we each have made in our respective quests,” Gromph answered. “And yes, I think we should begin at once, for I expect a long and exquisite meal this night.” He looked to Catti-brie. “Penelope has explained to you the subject of this discourse?”
“I did not know she was coming until I found her waiting for me at the fiery teleport here in the basement of this very tower,” Penelope answered. “A pleasant surprise.”
“Nor did I expect to be here until shortly before that point,” Catti-brie added. “I was with King Bruenor after seeing my daughter away to the monastery with Ilnezhara and Grandmaster Savahn. As it was an easy path here to Luskan, I decided to accept the invitation and partake of good food and better discussion.”
“I think you will find the discussion very interesting and quite relevant,” Gromph replied. “We five—now four with Kimmuriel off to Menzoberranzan—have been trying to craft a new spell of great utility and power, one involving the schools of divination and conjuration, and even a bit of chronurgy.”
Catti-brie tried to appear appropriately interested. She took a glass of wine from one of the waiters and started to thank the server before remembering that this waiter was no more than a conjured magical specter.
“You have heard of the vortex warp?” Gromph asked.
Catti-brie shook her head.
“A short-distance teleport,” said Caecilia.
“A dimensional door, then,” Catti-brie said.
“Well, no—not quite. It is for other targets and not simply the caster. Allies or enemies, even monsters, can be thrown, and they need not be willing. Quite a handy dweomer—I will share it with you when next we meet.”
Catti-brie lifted her glass in toast to the giantess.
“Think of all the creatures we can summon,” Gromph said, then paused as the plates were brought in by a line of waiters, who set them down.
“Do begin,” he told his guests.
“We can summon demons and shadowspawn, devils, animals for our nature-minded fellow casters. All sorts of beasts and elementals . . .”
“To say nothing of the nonliving possibilities,” Caecilia added. “Bonfires, servants, a radiance to light a room . . .”
“What is missing from that list?” Gromph asked Catti-brie.
She replied with a shrug, not quite sure where all of this was going.
“People,” Gromph answered. “We can teleport others beside us. Right now we can recall our companions along with us to our home. But we cannot—as yet—summon others to us.”
“Is that not a matter of expressed free will?”
“We bend the will of demons and devils to make them do our bidding,” Caecilia pointed out.
“But yes,” Penelope said to Catti-brie, “it is a matter of ethics and free will. This is why such a dweomer is more complicated. If we intend it as a tool for gathering friends, or even as a manner of rescuing companions, it would involve more than mere conjuration.”
Catti-brie offered a little wry grin aimed at Gromph, to not so subtly remind him of how much his life away from Menzoberranzan had changed him. That he was even allowing the ethical implications of fashioning a new spell at his table was something the Gromph Baenre she had first met would never begin to consider.
He returned a scowl, of course.
“So,” she continued, “it requires divination magic to let the intended target know of the coming spell and gain their willingness?”
“Yes,” answered Avelyere. “As with most spells, we must first look at all the potential problems . . .”
“What could go wrong with a fireball, after all?” Gromph said dryly, and when Catti-brie looked at him, she saw that he was staring her way.
He was trying to show her that he was still that hard-hearted and merciless grand wizard from Menzoberranzan, she recognized, and she thought it rather . . .
Cute? Or pathetic?
No matter, she realized. Gromph’s ego bristled at any thoughts of emotional softness.
She turned back to the matter at hand, this notion of a conjuration and divination spell that would bring forth specific individuals. How she wished such a dweomer had existed when Drizzt had departed for Menzoberranzan!
Or even now, even when all of this was settled, how much easier would it be to bring Breezy back and forth between the Monastery of the Yellow Rose and the Ivy Mansion in Longsaddle!
Why hadn’t this spell been created before? she wondered.
But as she considered it, she began to understand the potential danger here. An infiltrating wizard could bring in an army! Would any walls protect cities, or places like Gauntlgrym?
She looked around at the gathering and listened to their continued points and discussions, and for all the potential benefits, she wasn’t sure she wanted their efforts to prove fruitful. She did appreciate their thoughtfulness and care, however.
Catti-brie thought that perhaps she should attend more of these meetings, if only to understand the lengths these wizards were willing to go—and the moral questions that came up.
If at all.
Then she remembered why she had come to this place, and it had little to do with magical research. She was here to see Gromph Baenre, and wondered if this present meeting would be her only chance to sit in on any.
She turned her thoughts away from the conversation, then, and on the grim task before her, and on her daughter—of course, on her daughter. She had sent Breezy away with Savahn earlier that day, perhaps for the last time.
The words of the others could not land on the distracted woman, then, even such alarming warnings that included terms like “trap the soul” and “magic jar,” and other sorts of comments regarding phylacteries where they might store a piece of the intended target’s spirit.
Yes, Catti-brie was glad that they were thinking all of this through, but at that moment, it seemed more a theoretical exercise, and nothing nearly as pressing as the very real choices and dilemmas now sitting before her.
As good as the food and drink were, she hardly touched them through the remainder of the meal and the discussion, and was only partially aware when the ghostly servants began clearing the plates—she waved away the one that came for her food, though again she didn’t know why she had bothered with that—and when Gromph began saying his goodbyes to his fellow scholars.
“The food seems to have interested you less even than our discussion,” Gromph said, and he was very near to her, which surprised her and took her from her contemplation.
“I have enough in my belly and a lot on my mind—too much, I fear, for such weighty conversations regarding the ethics of a dweomer that may never even become a reality.”
“You did not come for my good food and better company?” Gromph asked, and Catti-brie started to respond, almost took him seriously, before realizing his sarcasm.
She was off her usual perceptiveness, and that, she knew, could not hold.
“I came because—”
She stopped when Gromph tossed something beside her plate on the table.
It looked like a plain white stage mask used by performers in the traveling troupes that crisscrossed the Realms.
But Catti-brie knew this item, and knew that it was anything but plain.
Agatha’s Mask, it was called, and donning it could make someone appear exactly as any different person, even a member of a different humanoid species.
Undetectably.
It was the perfect disguise, and it was, as far as she knew, unique.
“I cannot replicate it as Jarlaxle asked,” Gromph said, as if reading her thoughts. She remembered his work with the psionicist Kimmuriel and glared at him, suspecting that very thing.
“What?” he asked innocently—and he was innocent of reading her mind, Catti-brie realized as she considered it more closely, and his comment just a coincidence.
“He asked me many months ago, perhaps foreseeing the very events that now surround us,” Gromph explained. “But no, it cannot be replicated by any magic of which I am aware.”
“Perhaps such an endeavor would be a better use of the time of the Seven Scholars.”
Gromph shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “For all the potential troubles of the spell we are now discussing, this mask holds promises more nefarious by far.”
“You say as you toss it to me.”
“I know why you are here and I know that you need it. You are traveling to Menzoberranzan to fight beside your husband.”
“And you approve of my choice?”
“It is not my place to approve or disapprove. I know that you are going, and since you are going, this mask is your best chance to survive. I could polymorph you into a drow, I suppose, and place a dweomer of permanency upon it, but I fear that Drizzt prefers the look of a human for his pleasures.”
Catti-brie replied with a scowl, “Every word you speak points to differences, and not in celebration of those differences.”
“I just said that he . . .”
The woman’s scowl deepened and Gromph said no more.
“Well, there you are, as you wish,” he said. “Do you intend to walk the tunnels to Menzoberranzan alone?”
“I have done so before, and that was before I found my calling as a priestess of Mielikki and as a wizard.”
“A very powerful wizard,” Gromph said, the seemingly sincere compliment catching her off guard.
“But no, good lady, you will not be walking alone,” he added. “And will not be walking nearly as far as you might think.”
Whatever remnants of the scowl Catti-brie might have had on her face were wiped away as she considered that statement. “You’re coming to Menzoberranzan?”
“That is my place. For all I hate of this war, I have come, at long last, to understand that I cannot avoid it. This is my fight, too.”
Catti-brie nodded, thinking that they two would be a formidable pair indeed. She doubted there were many wizards across Faerun, and surely no one in Menzoberranzan, who could come close to matching his terrible powers. And, as he pointed out, she was no slouch herself.
“And I hope that one more will join us,” Gromph said. “And you, dear Catti-brie, might be just the person to persuade him.”
At his prompting, she followed Gromph through a series of corridors and rooms, coming to a door,
“I will join you presently,” Gromph told her. “I have promised to show an associate about this mansion I have created. I am sure you will understand.”
Catti-brie nodded and gave it not another thought. She turned to the door and pushed through, coming into a lavish sitting area with big, comfortable-looking divans and couches, overstuffed chairs, a bar covered in fancy bottles full of liquids, with crystal glasses nearby and a ghostly bartender waiting for commands.
She spotted the bare feet of a man hanging over an arm of a couch, and recognized the sword belt, or more particularly, the skeletal hilt of the sword sticking up from it as it leaned against the couch.
She found herself unsurprised.
“You seem quite comfortable,” she told Entreri, walking over.
He opened a sleepy eye. “Weary from the road.”
“I should be surprised to see you here, as I heard you were traveling to Waterdeep and then south, but I am not.”
“I am not here by choice, or not for any choice you might understand. Why are you here?”
She held up Agatha’s Mask.
“I already told Jarlaxle I didn’t want it,” Entreri said with a snort.
“It is not for you.”
“Then who—ah, you? You are going to Menzoberranzan?”
“I am, with the archmage. This fight matters.”
“Not to me.”
“I know you better than that,” Catti-brie said.
“You think too much of me.”
“I think very little of you,” she flatly stated. That got his attention and he pulled himself up to a sitting position, reaching for his boots, but never blinking as he stared with obvious surprise at Catti-brie.
He didn’t put the boots on, just had them ready nearby, and continued to stare, his puzzlement clearly undiminishing.
“For all the time circumstance has put us together, does it occur to you how little we have spoken?” Catti-brie asked.
“We have fought together, and well, and for common cause.”
“And we have fought against each other, for opposing cause.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“I remember still when we first met. Do you?” Catti-brie asked.
“Like it was an hour ago.”
“I have forgiven you, but I have not forgotten.”
“I struggle still to forgive myself, but nor have I forgotten.”
“The dwarves . . .”
“Fender Mallot and Grollo,” Entreri said and when Catti-brie’s eyes widened with surprise, he added, “I told you. I have not forgotten.”
“But have you forgiven yourself?”
Entreri shrugged.
“I understand,” Catti-brie said quietly.
“We have all killed, aye?”
“Sydney,” Catti-brie said, lowering her gaze. “Her name was Sydney.”
“The wizard?”
“Dendybar the Mottled’s assistant. I still feel the warmth of her blood on my arm. I still hear her final gasp, the last air leaving her lungs. I was barely a woman then.”
“I was still very much a boy when I made my first kill,” Entreri replied and he shrugged when Catti-brie looked at him.
“I had to,” the woman said.
“So did I, over and over again. It became easier—too easy. It became more than a matter of survival, and more a way of life.”
“Do you remember them all?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“But you remember the two dwarves—or was this recently mentioned to you?”
“I remember that day vividly and always have, as you remember Dendybar’s assistant.”
“That was my first, and I hated it. And I still do.”
Entreri shrugged and nodded.
“So why do you remember them, Fender and Grollo? Because it was murder?”
“I only said that I remember the day. I only learned their names much later. A century later.”
“Why?”
“I thought it important.”
“For them or for you?”
He shrugged again. “Did you come here to berate me?”
“I’m not berating you.”
“To speak of old times, then? And if that, then why focus on such grim moments? I thought that we were all past that—forgiven, yes, if not forgotten.”
“We are,” Catti-brie admitted. “Perhaps it is just your unwillingness to continue on your journey that has irritated me. Your friends need you and you have abandoned them.”
“An old friend needs me more.” That caught her short, wondering who he meant. He continued, “And what of you? You let your beloved walk into darkness without you.”
Catti-brie closed her eyes and realized that her tactics in trying to shame Artemis Entreri into going might have been a mistake. Seeing him lounging in such comfort, that undeniably formidable and even less deniably vile sword leaning on the couch, had been such a discordant image that she had gone down this path before thinking it through.
“Which is why I go now!”
“And where are Wulfgar and Regis? Where are the famed Companions of the Hall when Drizzt needs them? Or King Bruenor, who could summon several dwarven armies and march to Menzoberranzan—”
“Enough!” she interrupted. “Please?” She patted her hands in the air and took some time before opening her eyes. Entreri sat there on the couch, looking up at her, but there was no judgment in his eyes, just empathy.
“It’s a complicated world,” Entreri offered. “Which is why Gromph asked you to convince me to go.”
“He did, but I know not why.”
“Because I know House Melarn. I was with Jarlaxle and Drizzt when we overwhelmed the place. I know it well, and”—he reached down and produced his jeweled dagger—“this dagger terrifies Zhindia Melarn.”
“You think he means to use that against her? To terrify her into surrender?”
“Perhaps. I expect that he has little desire for a prolonged fight and intends to decapitate the Lolthians quickly. Perhaps this is the executioner’s tool he believes will accomplish the task.”
Catti-brie considered it for a few moments. “I wonder, though, why he would ask both of us along. If I mean to use the mask . . .”
“I don’t need it,” Entreri assured her.
“Then you are coming?”
“I haven’t decided. I find myself needed in two different places.”
“Menzoberranzan and elsewhere?”
“Yes—as well as in my heart and in my head. I know you are no friend of Dahlia Sin’dalay—or Dahlia Sin’felle, as you probably knew her. But she needs me, needs someone, and though we parted ways not as friends, I cannot let that call go unanswered.”
“If she is indeed still alive.”
Entreri nodded.
“Have you learned anything?
“Only that her twisted son is still a foul creature.”
Catti-brie raised her eyebrows at that.
“He doesn’t care,” Entreri explained. “But no, I have little information regarding Dahlia’s path. She was in Waterdeep more than a year ago, and one woman told me that she went to Baldur’s Gate, though I doubt the truth of that rumor.”
“Baldur’s Gate would make sense if she wound up with pirates.”
“So would Luskan. Or half the cities on the Sword Coast. Or on a ship out to sea, for that matter.”
Catti-brie couldn’t disagree, though if Dahlia had gone through Luskan, she doubted that Jarlaxle would have been oblivious to it.
“I offer a deal,” Entreri said. “I will go with you and Gromph, and let us cut the head off this Lolthian beast, and if you and I return alive, or even if you alone return alive, the hunt for Dahlia resumes. You will help me, on your word. Further, you will seek to find and aid her, if she needs it, on your own if I am . . . unavailable.”
“You know my history with Dahlia,” Catti-brie protested. “You know Dahlia’s history with Drizzt.”
“So do not ever forget it. But forgive it. That is what we do, is it not?”
Catti-brie really didn’t have an answer for that. But it didn’t matter. “You have a deal,” she told Entreri.
“Marvelous,” said Gromph Baenre, materializing beside the two of them.
“I knew you were there,” Entreri remarked, and Catti-brie didn’t doubt him.
“Rest up, make your preparations,” Gromph instructed. “Our road will be shorter than that of others as soon as I can determine where to begin it.”
“Can’t you put us right into House Baenre?” Catti-brie asked.
“I could, but in that case, our road from there might be determined by the designs of others. My plan is more . . . direct. And our arrival might be noted by those who secretly work against our cause.”
He looked at Entreri as he said it, Catti-brie noted, and given what the man had just told her, it made sense.
“You don’t trust the Matron Mother?” Catti-brie asked.
“I am drow, and a male, so of course I don’t. More, I have several sisters and a bevy of nieces, all who once and perhaps still pledge themselves to the Spider Queen. We would all be fools to expect that everyone in House Baenre, or everyone who claims to side with House Baenre, truly is an ally.”